Museums, Windows and Doors

On my OneDrive there is a folder for “work in progress”. It contains a to-do list and Word documents with drafts of articles and presentations. Sometimes there is synergy between tasks. Today was one such day when several projects worked together to make a beautiful whole.

Maybe I should take a few steps back and tell you, dear reader, what I am talking about.

A couple of weeks ago I decided to start my Monday Window challenge back up. I had started that years ago on the inspiration of Norm Frampton’s Thursday Doors, then had given up and let it sit.

There was also an old post on another blog I had let hibernate about photographing in museum. It was a useful article and I planned to update it and move it to another of my blogs.

I was also working on a presentation about style. I thought illustrations from the world of art would be helpful. The distinctive Impressionistic paintings by Degas and Monet would be “on key”, but I also thought of the Flemish and Dutch painters of the 17th century whose work shaped my own photography back in my college days in Cleveland.

That made me go look at the website of the Cleveland Museum of Art. I could look at their policy on photography for my museum photography update. There was an astonishing surprise there.

Open Access notice – Cleveland Museum of Art website

Here is that amazing text so even the search engines can read it:

Open Access

The Cleveland Museum of Art (CMA) was founded in 1916 “for the benefit of all the people forever.” The museum strives to help the broadest possible audience understand and engage with the world’s great art. The Cleveland Museum of Art is one of the most comprehensive art museums in the world and one of northeastern Ohio’s principal civic and cultural institutions.
The Cleveland Museum of Art announced on January 23, 2019, that it is an Open Access institution, using the Creative Commons Zero (CC0) designation for high-resolution images and data as related to its collection. At the Cleveland Museum of Art, Open Access means the public now has the ability to  share, collaborate, remix, and reuse images of many as 30,000 public- domain artworks from the CMA’s world-renowned collection of art for commercial and non-commercial purposes. In addition, portions of collections information (metadata) for more than 61,000 artworks, both in the public domain and those works with copyright or other restrictions, works are now available.

Indeed I found images of paintings suitable for my presentation on style, and more:

Do you see what it says on that webpage?

“Download and Share – This image is in the public domain. You can use it however you want. …”

Claude Monet’s “The Red Kerchief” is a wonderful subject for Monday Window and Thursday Doors. Another quote from the CMA webpage:

This painting depicts Monet’s first wife, Camille, outside on a snowy day passing by the French doors of their home at Argenteuil. Her face is rendered in a radically bold Impressionist technique of mere daubs of paint quickly applied, just as the snow and trees are defined by broad, broken strokes of pure white and green.

The Red Kerchief – c. 1868–73 – Claude Monet (French, 1840-1926)