The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum has expanded its digital publications resources, offering greater access to a range of content from Guggenheim publications, including the first exhibition catalogue to be published by a museum in an e-book format. A newly digitized selection of essays and historical materials dating back to the 1937 founding of the museum are also now available at guggenheim.org/publications.
Museum publications currently offered for purchase as e-books include the catalogue for the current exhibition Maurizio Cattelan: All and the recently reintroduced 1970 children's book I'd Like The Goo-gen-heim. A number of essays on a wide variety of art historical topics are also now available as e-book singles. With selections such as Robert Rosenblum's "From Realism to Symbolism, 1860-1900," from the 2005 exhibition catalogue Russia!, essays are being digitally converted in order to make out-of-print titles available again, particularly to meet the needs of students and educators.
In addition to content for purchase, selections from key museum titles dating back to the founding of the Guggenheim in 1937 are now freely accessible to the public. Over 60 catalogues were scanned in their entirety with the help of the Internet Archive project and can now be read online. Visitors can flip through pages of classic titles such as Alexander Calder: A Retrospective Exhibition, published in 1964; Lawrence Alloway's groundbreaking 1963 catalogue Six Painters and the Object; or the Solomon R. Guggenheim Collection of Non-Objective Paintings, one of the museum's first publications.
As a point of entry to guide visitors through the historic materials, a regularly updated area of the museum's website titled the Syllabus highlights key themes, topics, and trends found in the Guggenheim archives. An entry on the designer Herbert Matter, for example, explains how Matter's innovations in typography and photomontage elevated many of the Guggenheim's catalogues in the 1950s and 1960s. The Syllabus also offers suggestions for additional readings as well as links for further exploration.