Dear DoME-User,

Thank you very much for your interest – We hope you enjoy navigating the database!

CONTENT

The database covers – as comprehensively as possible – catalogues of exhibitions of modern art by European artists between 1905 and 1915, but only in relation to paintings and drawings (including watercolours and monotypes). Sculptures, prints, applied / decorative / graphic art, etc. are not included (these entries are listed uniformly as “other medium”, they have no link to an artist record and no further information has been entered on them). The database contains approx. 1,300 exhibitions, 13,000 artists and 200,000 catalogue entries.

1. Which catalogues have been entered?

             1.1 Exhibitions in Gordon’s book Modern Art Exhibitions 1900-1916

Our starting point were the catalogues listed in Donald E. Gordon, Modern Art Exhibitions 1900-1916, Munich 1974 that fell in our timeframe (1905-1915). Gordon selected 426 artists he considered ‘modern’ and listed their works if mentioned in exhibition catalogues in a total of 851 exhibitions. In contrast to Gordon, we not only included the entries of these 426 but of all the artists who took part in these exhibitions. We have not been able to locate all the catalogues for the exhibitions listed by Donald E. Gordon. The status of these exhibitions is marked as “pending” and they display a note which states “No Catalogue available”.

             1.2 Additional exhibitions 

We tried to include all exhibitions held in any of the institutions who seemed to be important for modern artists in our time frame: e.g. galleries such as Durand-Ruel, Bernheim-Jeune, Paul Cassirer, Der Sturm, and artist associations such as the Secessions of Berlin, Munich and Vienna, the Hagenbund, der Moderne Bund, Neue Secession Berlin, and New English Art Club. The aim here was to include as many specimens as possible. However, the claim to completeness can of course neither be achieved nor would it be meaningful.

2. Incomplete Exhibitions and Exhibitions without catalogue entries

Verifiable exhibitions for which either no catalogue is traceable or for which we were not able to obtain a catalogue are also shown in the database. They will appear in the lists of exhibitions as any other but will not have any information to view. Their status is marked as “pending”. We are always thankful for information on where to obtain catalogues we are missing and should you have access to or be privy to the location of a catalogue we are missing, please contact us at contact.exhibitions@univie.ac.at.

For a few exhibitions, data entry is incomplete – e.g. due to missing catalogue pages. Also, especially for the Salons de la Société des Artistes Indépendants and the Salons de la Société du Salon d’Automne (both in Paris) data are generally missing. Due to their size, data entry for these exhibitions exceeded the capacity available in the project, and we decided to give priority to smaller and less well-known exhibitions over the very large and well-known ones. These exhibitions are marked as “This exhibition has not yet been completely entered” and their status is either “pending” or “in progress”.

3. How information was transferred

The database contains three different types of fields:
a. Fields named “as in catalogue”: Text is an exact transcription from the source material. Added text is shown in square brackets “[]”.
b. Fields named “according to catalogue”: The information value has been transferred from the source, but standardized in order to make working with the data easier.
c. Open fields (e.g. General Notes): Text which is transcribed directly from the source is presented in quotation marks.

Detailed Guidelines to our data entry can be found here.

4. Biographical information about artists

We linked every creator (=artist) to Getty ULAN and/or the GND (whenever no matching artist could be found, a new profile was created). This enables a normed search despite different spellings of artist names, and it allows for inclusion of additional biographical data not included in the catalogues (i.e. for filtering within searches in the database).

5. Catalogue reproductions

Due to copyright regulations, we regret to not have been able to include reproductions of the exhibition catalogues and/or of artworks. Since this decision was only made in the course of the project, any remaining references to reproductions are to be ignored.

DISCLAIMER – To handle with care:

• Fulltext search: Please note that the results of a search via the fulltext search bar contain data not only from exhibition titles, artist names, catalogue entries, organizing bodies or venues, but also texts such as prefaces. Therefore, this search can be overwhelmingly broad in some cases. For a more precise search, we recommend using the filters within the Advanced Search.
• Organizing bodies: Information on persons and/or institutions involved in the organization of exhibitions have been compiled according to the information in the catalogues. Therefore they might be incomplete or erroneous.
• Be aware that adresses of venues, organizing bodies and artists given in the database are historical addresses (with the exception of addresses of catalogue holding institutions). Therefore, all pins on maps are only accurate to the city level, not the street level, as locations are likely to have changed since the 1905-1915 period. In order to avoid confusion as much as possible, a zoom limit has been applied to the maps so as not to show a specific location on the map. Maps cannot be downloaded. If using screenshots of the maps, please remember to include the map’s quotation (lower right hand corner).

In the case of malfunctions, please do not hesitate to report any bugs under contact.exhibitions@univie.ac.at – we are grateful for every contribution that helps to improve this research tool.

We hope you enjoy navigating the database!