Picasso: Nearly 7,000 Images Online

October 2, 2003 3:55 AM

The On-Line Picasso Project offers 6,893 works for your ogling pleasure, plus an obsessively documented chronological bio. I'm stunned. (please read the user's manual, inside.)
posted by taz (12 comments total)

Here's the deal, though: On the image pages that have a small "framed" thumbnail, you can click the thumbnail to get a larger view; however, many of the works windows don't offer a link to a larger view. I've found that what you need to do to see the "bigger picture" is go straight to the graphics directory and find the image you are interested in. Here's how to do that: if you put http://www.tamu.edu/mocl/picasso/graphics into your browser's address line, you'll find the main image directory, with subdirectories by year; click on the year, and you get a directory of all the big .jpgs for that year.

Let's say you are looking at this image, from 1935, which doesn't offer a larger view. You can go to http://www.tamu.edu/mocl/picasso/graphics/1935 and find the corresponding image (opp35-48.jpg) among the larger-format images there, which means you can then see this.
posted by taz at 3:58 AM on October 2, 2003

I'm pleasantly surprised and absolutely flabbergasted. Considering how prolific Picasso was, this most certainly was a labour of love.
posted by lunadust at 4:20 AM on October 2, 2003

Well some people try to pick up girls
And get called assholes
This never happened to Pablo Picasso
He could walk down your street
And girls could not resist his stare and
So Pablo Picasso was never called an asshole
Well the girls would turn the color
Of the avacado when he would drive
Down their street in his El Dorado
He could walk down you street
And girls could not resist his stare
Pablo Picasso never got called an asshole...

Pablo Picasso by The Modern Lovers
posted by jpburns at 4:48 AM on October 2, 2003

jpburns, I Kiss You! I lurve that song.
posted by taz at 4:58 AM on October 2, 2003

Damn! I should have posted this years ago. I'm pretty sure it was one of the first things I ever put in a "links page". I had forgotten it even existed though. Cheers taz.
posted by walrus at 5:41 AM on October 2, 2003

taz, in this day and age, what you propose amounts to malicious hacking
posted by magullo at 5:45 AM on October 2, 2003

WOW, this is great.
On a high school trip to Madrid I fell in love with El Pintor y la Modelo in the Queen Sofia Museum. This is going right into the bookmarks.

I assume the site creator got copyright permission from the estate? I wonder how he/she went about doing that, as not enough contemporary artwork is online in high resolution.
posted by PrinceValium at 7:26 AM on October 2, 2003

this is good
posted by rhapsodie at 12:06 PM on October 2, 2003

Excellent link, taz. Like walrus, I had it in my bookmark file from some time ago, but hadn't visited the site in ages - it has really expanded! Plus, your handy guide to the high res images is much appreciated.

The Picasso Museum is well worth a visit for any who find themselves in Paris. The building itself is wonderful, a former palace, and touring his works in chronological order with some biographical context is great. The museum of his studio in Antibes is also quite fabulous.
posted by madamjujujive at 8:04 PM on October 2, 2003

"Would you tell Picasso to sell his guitars?"

taz, thanks for the detailed instructions. I don't find them malicious.
posted by soyjoy at 9:27 PM on October 2, 2003

[this is good]
posted by plep at 7:56 AM on October 3, 2003

PV: funny you should ask. They have a page about that.

International copyright laws strictly prohibit the download of any graphic material from the On-Line Picasso Project .

Damn you to hell! What's that on my screen then? I am off to hand myself in to the nearest representative of the copyright police forthwith.
posted by walrus at 8:38 AM on October 3, 2003