May 13, 1999
The Grove Dictionary, Through a User's Eye
By JUDITH H. DOBRZYNSKI
uddenly, I've gone academic. In the last two months, I have looked up more things about art and artists than I have in, say, the last two years of writing about the art world. Credit The Grove Dictionary of Art Online.
When I came back from a week in Spain intrigued by Benedetto Bonfigli's "Annunciation" in the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum there, I logged on to Grove to learn more about him.
When a colleague phoned to ask for help phrasing a line about Frederic Edwin Church, I kept him on the line while I searched for Church on Grove (a good thing, too -- I would have failed to mention that he was second-generation Hudson River School).
Even when I come across artists I do not need to know more about for my reporting, I have gone to Grove simply to see what's there.
Of course, it is the collection of images, not the pages of text, that is so alluring. Watching, for example, Raphael's "Aldobrandini Madonna" appear almost line by line, cascading like a theater curtain until the whole screen is filled, is almost magical. The experience will never replace seeing the real thing, but it still delivers a frisson of pleasure, and it's accessible with just a few clicks, rather than a trip to the National Gallery in London.
That is not what I expected when I learned about Grove Online. Although I use the Internet daily, the idea of electronic books seemed completely resistible. Grove is making me a convert to them, at least for reference books.
Aside from those images -- many of which, after all, can be found on museum, gallery and academic Web sites that charge no admission -- Grove has proved that books online can be easy to use and, more important, at your fingertips.
To use the dictionary, a paid subscriber goes to Grove's site (www.groveart.com) and logs in by name and password. Up pops a page with five choices: Introduction, Articles A to Z, Search, Index and Appendices.
Figuring that I needed no Introduction, I always went straight to Articles or Search -- and I rarely had a problem finding what I wanted. Plugging in artists' names worked fairly quickly; the search is aided by a vertical alphabetical listing of the first letter of the last name, then another vertical column for the second letter.
Once you find the text, you must click on Images to see which ones are available; the menu opens in a window on the right. Most of the images are available via links to museums and galleries (that will change on May 20, when Grove adds the first 30,000 images it is getting access to through a partnership with the Bridgeman Art Library).
Typing in the title of a work, however, did not always work because titles vary. While Samuel Sachs 2d, director of the Frick Collection, mentioned Watteau's "Embarkation to Cythera," for example, Grove has the work as "The Pilgrimage to Cythera." Better to go to Watteau, if you know he was the artist.
There were other disappointments. While I was happy learning more about Bonfigli's life, Grove provided only one image, a triptych in Perugia. As usual, some linked sites took ages to appear.
Some links were down when I clicked on them. Worse, some had changed, apparently without Grove's finding out. When, for example, I tried to call up Georgia O'Keeffe's "Evening Star III," which resides at the Museum of Modern Art, I got a page beginning: "The MOMA Web site has been reorganized to add more content. The page you requested could not be found."
Grove, which says it has been checking links manually and has updated them four times since November, knows that the problem needs fixing. It will soon change.
None of these quibbles were deal-breakers, though for me online books will always have one insurmountable hurdle that makes me print out anything of any length. How else can I underline?
