7 of the best digital contemporary art collections

There is an opinion that you need to look at a work of art live, as this allows you to experience deeper aesthetic experiences. However, this is not always possible. Modern technologies, on the other hand, allow you to get a special experience of familiarizing with art - from anywhere in the world. You can even browse digital collections while in a traffic jam or queuing at the post office. And it's absolutely free.

1. New York Museum of Modern Art

One of the main museums of contemporary art in the world, founded with the assistance of the Rockefeller family. It is here that Van Gogh's Starry Night, Matisse's Dance and Salvador Dali's Persistence of Memory are kept. Even if you are not going to Manhattan in the near future, you can get acquainted with the exposition online.

The electronic catalog of the main collection contains more than 65,000 paintings. The earliest of them date back to the middle of the 19th century, there are also modern works. The digital archive of exhibitions contains materials from temporary exhibitions that once thundered throughout the art world. For example, shortly after the opening of the museum, an epoch-making exhibition of post-impressionists was held, and then Andy Warhol loudly declared himself here.

2. Metropolitan Museum

The fourth most visited art museum in the world (on the first - the Louvre). And although the New York Museum of Modern Art, founded in 1929, has seriously pushed the Metropolitan, it continues to acquire cutting-edge works.

The site of the museum presents not only artists of the classical era, but also famous modernists, surrealists, conceptualists and representatives of many other movements. Here you can find works by Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dali, Marcel Duchamp, Joseph Kossuth. All works are provided with an English-language description with a history of exhibiting and links to publications.

3. Guggenheim Museum

Solomon Guggenheim was a renowned philanthropist and collector who created a foundation to support contemporary art. In particular, he encouraged abstract painting, so paintings by Kandinsky and Mondrian became honorary exhibits of the museum. There are over 1,700 works in the online collection and digitization is still in progress.

The site has a filter by artist, date, direction, and under each work there is a short story with a description and technical characteristics. And no musty museum spirit. The collection constantly includes modern works. Here's something completely new - a work by Hong Kong artist Wong Ping, created in 2018.

4. Tate Gallery

The gallery unites as many as four museums: the old one, which has existed since the 19th century, the modern one and two regional ones, in Liverpool and Cornwall. Together they own the world's largest collection of British art from 1500 to the present day. Some of this wealth has been digitized and posted on the Web.

The online archive includes rare exhibits that were not previously widely available - sketches, letters, photographs, newspaper clippings related to the life and work of artists of the 20th and 21st centuries. Here you can see, for example, sketches by Felicia Barun or try to read the letters of Francis Bacon.

5. Google Arts & Culture

Google's premier cultural project is a huge catalog that allows you to search for works of art that are stored in various museums around the world and in private collections. Of course, not only contemporary paintings are presented here. If you wish, you can look at, say, Chinese antiquities or decorative and applied treasures from the times of Marie Antoinette.

A flexible filter system allows you to customize your search by the era or direction of interest. For example, you can choose Cubism, Constructivism, or Color Field Painting. Or refer to thematic collections and study, say, the history of street art.

6. Garage Museum

The Garage website contains archives with letters, photographs and slides related to the work of contemporary Russian artists. As noted on the museum's website, "the main task of the collection is to create an academic base that makes it possible to comprehend the experience of contemporary Russian art in an international context."

7. Institute of Russian Realistic Art

The media library of the Institute of Russian Realistic Art presents more than 500 works by Russian and Soviet masters. The foundation is based on the private collection of businessman Alexei Ananyev, which became the basis for the museum and exhibition complex.