Step aside, Google; Yale University entered the chat.
Earlier this month, the university unveiled Lux, its new online platform which allows users to search among 17 million objects in its vast collections, which span the collections of the Yale University Art Gallery, Yale Center for British Art, Yale Peabody Museum and Yale University Library. The project was made possible by a grant from the Mellon Foundation, in addition to funding from the university.
As a research tool, Lux enables interdisciplinary exploration as well as discovery. In addition to showing objects along with their detailed descriptions, the platform aims to build and highlight all possible relationships between artifacts. For example, a search for John Trumbull’s The Declaration of Independence (1817-1818) will also call related objects of a gun the painter once had a treasure of his sketches and plans, which are kept in the YUAG library.
John Trumbull, The Declaration of Independence, July 4, 1776 (1817–18). Photo courtesy of Yale University Art Gallery.
“The power of Lux comes from its ability to enable users to uncover hidden relationships between objects, from shared concepts to famous people in Yale’s collections,” Robert Sanderson, Yale’s senior director of digital cultural heritage, said in a statement. communicated.
While not all objects in Yale’s collections have been digitized, said Susan Gibbons, vice provost for collections and scholarly communication, during a press preview, most have been. “There is no dead end at Lux,” she stressed.
Lux mirrors similar platforms such as Van Gogh around the world and the Duchamp Research Portal that enable cross-collection and relational explorations in a way that trumps a simple Google search. As Sanderson noted at the same press conference: “Nobody likes to search; everyone likes to find.
In the same vein, we took a spin on Lux to see what never-before-seen treasures might be uncovered in Yale’s vast collections. Here’s what we found.
An x-ray of JMW Turner Lake Avernus: Aeneas and the Sibyl of Cumae (1814–15)
An x-ray of JMW Turner, Lake Avernus: Aeneas and the Sibyl of Cumae (1814–15). Photo courtesy of Yale University Art Gallery.
One of Lux’s joys is seeing paintings photographed from all possible angles, including using X-rays. Turner’s mythical landscape, housed at the Yale Center for British Art, is just one work cataloged with high-definition images capturing its front and back (which, by the way, still bears a Christie’s sales tag from 1883), as well as an x-ray that provides an in-depth view down to the last nail of the frame.
Correspondence of Georgia O’Keeffe with Mabel Dodge Luhan (1925–52)
A letter from Georgia O’Keeffe to Mabel Dodge Luhan (1925–52). Photo courtesy of Beinecke Library, Yale University Library.
It was patron Mabel Dodge Luhan who in the late 1910s lured the first painter Georgia O’Keeffe to New Mexico, sparking the artist’s love affair with the Southwestern landscape and a decades-long correspondence between the two. Collected from the Yale Library, this treasure trove of letters, by turns prosaic and tender, documents O’Keeffe’s creative process, relationships, and daily life, as well as the eventual dissolution of his relationship with Luhan (allegedly because O’Keeffe was having an affair with Mabel’s husband, Tony Luhan).
The first Triceratops skull ever discovered (1889)
Triceratops prorsus in situ, Vertebrate Palaeontology Collection, Yale Peabody Museum. Photo: Courtesy of Yale Peabody Museum.
When paleontologist John Bell Hatcher unearthed the first complete skull of a female Triceratops in Wyoming, it heralded the discovery of an entirely new species of dinosaur. Its discovery was undertaken as part of the Yale Hatcher Cretaceous Expedition of 1889 and was sent to Othniel Marsh, then dean of dinosaur exploration at Yale, for further study. Lux logs other discoveries on the expedition, which includes a multitude of teeth, mandibles and vertebrae, all held by the Yale Peabody Museum.
This painting confiscated by the Nazis
Cornelis Engebrechtz, The Deposition (circa 1510-1520). Photo: courtesy of Yale University Art Gallery. Bequest of Dr. Herbert and Monika Schaefer.
In another boon for art historians, Lux’s artwork entries, where possible, detail the provenance of each object. by Cornelis Engebrechtsz The Deposition (c. 1510-1520), for example, is just one of many paintings looted by the Nazis, its extended provenance section on Lux describing its original Parisian owner, a Baron E. Etienne-Edmond-Martin de Beurnonville , its sale to a Berlin dealer, probably in the name of Hermann Göring, before its eventual donation to YUAG.
A photo of Katherine Dreier’s apartment, with works by Marcel Duchamp (circa 1918)
Katherine S. Dreier’s apartment at 135 Central Park West in New York with a view of Marcel Duchamp You me on Libraries (circa 1918), from the Collection: Dreier, Katherine S., 1877-1952. Photo courtesy of Yale University Library.
As well as being an accomplished (if under-recognized) painter, Katherine Dreier was a fervent champion of modern art, founding the Société Anonyme in 1920 with Man Ray and Marcel Duchamp to promote the emerging avant-garde. Her archives, which she donated to the Yale University Librarydocuments the activities of the organization from 1920 to 1951 in objects of artist files For leaflets For photographs.
An Old Babylonian Poem by the World’s First Known Author
Hymn to Inanna on clay tablet, lines 52-102 by Enheduanna. Photo courtesy of Yale Peabody Museum.
Enheduanna was a Mesopotamian priestess whose poetry, inscribed on clay and alabaster tablets first discovered in the 1920s, made his story the earliest known author. The enviable Yale Peabody Museum Babylonian Collection there Hymn to Innana, a passionate Enheduanna ode written 4,200 years ago to the Mesopotamian goddess. Alas, the entry does not contain a translation of the poemwhich proclaims: “You alone are majestic, you have fame, heaven and earth”.
Richard Brown Baker Art Collection
Robert Indiana, To like (1964), from the Richard Brown Baker Collection, BA 1935. Photo courtesy of Yale University Art Gallery.
During his lifetime, Baker amassed one of the largest collections of modern and contemporary art, his treasury numbering some 1,600 works by Jackson Pollock, Roy Lichtenstein, Jean-Michel Basquiat and Jean Dubuffet. “It would be useful and stimulating” he decided in the 1950s, “to buy the labor of the living, the young and the unestablished”. When he died in 2002, Baker donated three-quarters of his collection to Yale, his alma mater. Not all of his legacy is visible, but it can be found gathered on Lux, attesting to the extent of his collection efforts.
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