Digital Mockups for the Old Masters Installation
October 9th, 2008Back in May, I posted a blog about Installing Art Electronically - where I described working with curators to design the Pulitzer’s upcoming Old Masters exhibition by hanging electronic paintings on electronic versions of the Pulitzer’s gallery spaces. The images that I posted in that blog were nondescript, only showing gray squares where artwork should have been. Since that post we have gone through many different gallery mockup scenarios, which were determined by a constant flow of ideas but also by the availability of works from the St. Louis Art Museum and Harvard.Well, for those of you that were frustrated by the lack of details from my previous posting, I am here to show you light and color! I have permission to share with everyone the next step in that digital process. Using pictures taken of the Pulitzer galleries, I inserted the Old Master paintings onto the walls to give the curators an even better view of how these paintings will look when hung.
One of the challenges in this process was, on top of getting the dimensions and scale correct, to get the perspectives right. We employed the good old (as in Italian Renaissance old) system of the vantage point. We took the top and bottom line of the wall in question and continued to draw the lines of the walls until the two lines met together. That is the vantage point. So in this process, the top and the bottom line of the paintings have to converge on the same vantage point. Then, a lot of guess work has to be made, as the foreshortening of the paintings is easier guessed than calculated. Another aspect of the exhibition, the tilting of some of the larger paintings, wasn’t factored in, as that was too complicated to do for our purposes.
I appreciate the digital mockups for the Old Masters Installation & the exhibit itself. However, I would like to know why? It seems rather anti-Pulitzer to mount an Old Master’s exhibit at an art museum where the building itself is a masterpiece of modern architecture. I am an art professional, have taught many students about modern and contemporary art and have a background in western arh. We see references to, merges with and criticism about Old Master art works, but I cannot recall placing OM in Modernity & Post-Modernity- one complementing the other, juxtaposing, or offering a fresh, new view on OM. This upcoming exhibit does not seem to complement nor extend past Pulitzer exhibits. Please explain. Thanks.
Hi Tanya,
Thank you for your response! This is an excellent question, and one that I think a lot of visitors will be wondering as well. I’ve asked our director to respond and I’ll be turning this into a follow-up blog post. Stay tuned!
Thanks again,
Rachel