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Thousands of Pablo Picasso’s works in a new online archive (smithsonianmag.com)
202 points by bookofjoe 10 months ago | hide | past | favorite | 33 comments



https://cep.museepicassoparis.fr/

Great resource, terrible site.

Why can't any serious museum create a good, simple image gallery? Low resolution, missing images, curatorial cruft, bad UI, dead ends.

Just show me the work. It shouldn't be so hard to use.


Why can't any serious museum create a good, simple image gallery?

I like this one: https://www.vangoghmuseum.nl/en/collection?q=&Artist=Vincent...


Does someone know where to find the photos of his art on the archive? (https://cep.museepicassoparis.fr/) I can't find it there...


Try the explorer [1] where you will come across great and truthful works like Massacre in Korea [2].

[1] https://cep.museepicassoparis.fr/explorer

[2] https://cep.museepicassoparis.fr/explorer/massacre-en-coree-...



If I spoke French, this might be easier. I wouldn’t be surprised if there was a translation built in, but I can’t find it.


Firefox's translation function, which is on-device[1], worked well for me.

You can explore the collection here[2] it seems.

[1]: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/features/translate/

[2]: https://cep.museepicassoparis.fr/explorer/auteur/91977?field...


> Firefox's translation function, which is on-device[1], worked well for me.

Unfortunately, it isn't available on all Android devices, which includes my S24U.

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/android-translation#w_w...


When I manually edited the url,

https://cep.museepicassoparis.fr/explorer/auteur/91977?field...

worked for me. The URL otherwise doesn't get updated correctly.


Thank you for the link!


There is a language toggle button in the bottom right corner, but at least on my mobile device it is entirely obscured by the cookie disclosure button. And worse, the search seems entirely broken if you switch the site to English- I got no results searching eg. for everything in the "Painting" category.


Wonder how much work it would be to download it all


It took about 30 minutes in total: https://archive.org/details/works-of-pablo-picasso Resolution is the best I could find, most images are max 1000px height / width.


Would you like a tar or zip?


Extremely easy.

But the resolution of the images are absolutely horrible...


Honestly the image are absolute crap. You'll probably find better using image search ...

Like: https://cep.museepicassoparis.fr/explorer/figure-mp1990-16 vs https://www.museedegrenoble.fr/oeuvre/43/1922-figure.htm



Interesting this post appears in the same week as Paramount pulling the content of much of their archived cable TV content. The internet giveth and the internet taketh away.


Sad how they intentionally make it difficult to directly access the poor resolution images.


Sorry to be that guy, but this site is terrible to navigate as a non-French speaker. I'm not sure it would be that great as a French speaker. I've seen online archives from other Museums that do a far better job of making their exhibits more accessible.


The ENG button on the bottom left only seems to translate basic boilerplate, not any description or other content. Browsers do a decent job of translation.

But the only thing you can do is search for stuff, there is no way to browse at all that is obvious to me. I prefer looking at Google Arts & Culture which is often well designed and photographed.

I am sure some poorly paid contractor built this site.


As a French guy. It mostly works for French speakers.

It's developed by an under-financed public service. Also, as a client, they are artists with no knowledge of accessibility and no clear view of what they need.


I would'be hoped for spanish at least. Given who the author was. I understand the circumstances are a bit meh, but still, it's a museum.


[flagged]


You can't post like this here. We've banned the account.

If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.


Just awesome!


[flagged]


Ok, but please don't post unsubstantive comments to Hacker News.


Yeah fair enough. Just really really don’t like the dude. Visceral reaction. I apologize.


[flagged]


It's a tragedy we put all this wealth of knowledge and entertainment humanity produced into some novel, transformative use that will enrich generations to come. That's not how you use human creativity! Why would anyone tolerate making permanent value of what's meant for transient consumption filling the pockets of intellectual property owners?


Good, finally we can scrape these to feed into an engine to make soulless versions of Picasso


I was just thinking about that, and wondering when we’re going to start seeing art galleries that collect your phone on the way in and display stuff that’s never been photographed.


I'm sick of Picasso and modern art, but I have to admit he was a genius.


Sick of modernist art or like modernist, pomo and contemporary art? I couldn’t imagine being sick of such broad genres. For me it would be like being sick of music from the 1900s.


Yeah I'm sick of both of them. I'm not saying that nothing good ever comes of them, but that I regret the overall change and genre as a whole. I can appreciate individual pieces, and as I said I think Picasso was a genius, but I also believe he was attacking a culture I cared about and that his crew won this war and I believe society's worse off for it. I know this is an unpopular comment and am not surprised at the downvotes, I make it anyway for the sanity of people like me.




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