A Passion for ArtA Passion for Art
As a booklover first, a technology enthusiast second, and a game meister not at all, I've long thought the "multimedia revolution" has all the excess hormonal energy of adolescence, without the promise of a fruitful maturity. Little that I have seen in the CD-ROM world has come close to rivaling the various, variable, and lasting pleasures of books. But now along comes A Passion for Art: Renoir, Cézanne, Matisse, and Dr. Barnes to make me rethink my absolutist position.
A Passion for Art offers electronic entree to one of the most astonishing, most inaccessible, and most idiosyncratically displayed collections of impressionist and post-impressionist paintings ever assembled--the Dr. Albert C. Barnes collection, housed at the Barnes Foundation outside of Philadelphia. Barnes was a cantankerous and highly opinionated millionaire who developed a passion for modern art in the early part of this century, wrote several influential books on how this new art should be seen, and espoused advanced ideas about equal education for African Americans and the poor. But for all his vigorous campaigning, Barnes was not able to convince the critics and curators of his day that the paintings of Renoir, Cézanne, Matisse, Picasso, and others were in fact great art. Stung by the rejection, Barnes restricted access to his collection, particularly barring writers and academics in the art establishment.
A little more than a half century later, that ban helped create one of several big challenges for Curtis Wong, whose brainchild this CD-ROM is. Wong is the general manager and executive producer at Corbis Productions, part of the publishing arm of a company owned by Bill Gates that is assembling a huge collection of high-quality digital imagery. Among those images are the 337 breathtaking representations of paintings from the Barnes collection reproduced here. Coupled with a zoom feature that allows close inspection of brush strokes and other details, these fine images alone might have made for a worthy if somewhat humdrum CD-ROM. But Wong had something more in mind.
"I had seen a number of art programs that didn't really help me understand the art," Wong said in a recent interview about the genesis of this project. "Just being able to click on something or find paintings by artist didn't really work. I didn't understand the context of what I was looking at. I felt that the whole visual context was really important, and I decided we needed some kind of background information to let people know who Dr. Barnes was, what's so special about his collection, and what they are looking at as they are wandering around his museum. What came to mind was the opportunity I once had to go through the Philadelphia Museum with a curator after hours. He took me around to different paintings and told me stories about the artists and gave me all this really interesting background material. That is what an art experience should be--one on one with an expert telling you stories about these paintings, and you being able to decide what you want to look at and what you want to hear."
A Passion for Art is structured around a virtual representation of the two-story Barnes Foundation gallery. You can move from room to room in this gallery to see the paintings in scale and according to their actual locations. Clicking on a painting will bring a full-screen view and access to biographical information about the painter and commentary about the painting. Barnes developed an extraordinary, "scientific" method for displaying paintings to achieve contrast and comparison that is unlike anything you'll see in another museum. In lieu of a visit to the real Foundation gallery, this is a must see.
The program also has four multimedia tours. Narrated by well-known art experts and very easy to join--or escape from--these tours tell stories of Barnes and his collection.
Other features include an archive section, with crisp reproductions of recently discovered historical documents and audio clips related to the Barnes art collection; a pictorial timeline, which places the works in the collection in chronological order and within a larger historical context; an index of paintings and painters that includes color thumbnails of each painting; and a slide show section--a feature that has brought me back to the program again and again--that allows users to create and view their own selections from the gallery in any order they want.
Finally, the program offers an excellent user interface, with a fine look and feel. While my copy of the newly released Macintosh version of the program (the Windows version has been out since spring) had some awkward hesitations during two of the tours, I found it exceptionally easy to move from one section to another on the spur of the moment.
According to Wong, ease of use "was the most important consideration in this product. I wanted to make the experience as seamless as possible." And that commitment led to a number of technical innovations that have made the installation process nearly transparent and allow the user to run the program directly from the CD-ROM without having to load it on the hard disk.
How does Corbis plan to follow up on the success of its first title? Wong will not say. But he promises that his next CD-ROM will meet and improve upon the standard set by A Passion for Art. And like A Passion for Art, it will have a strong story line, an interesting point of view, and will push the envelope in terms of ease of use and design." Which bodes well for booklovers like us.
