ART 1213/1143: Drawing I: Evaluating Images

MOMA, the Museum of Modern Art, in New York City has one of the existing prints of Picasso's etching of Minotauromachy. Looking at the reproduction on the MOMA website, you can tell that the images we looked at were only a small portion of the whole work. That's why the images we looked at are referred to as a "detail."

We would expect a museum like MOMA to provide high quality reproductions of artists' work on their website, wouldn't we?  Yes, if a well known museum provides images of works from their museum on their website, we can expect those reproductions to be quite accurate. Which of the two images we looked at in Exercise 1 is closest in reproduction quality to the reproduction on the MOMA website? The first one, or the second one?  Answer the poll below.

What can we conclude from this exercise?

If you were assigned to create an art project of your own based on this work by Picasso, wouldn't your own work turn out very differently depending on which image, Image 1 or Image 2, you chose to use? If you were trying to pattern your work after the work of Picasso, you would want to use Image 2 as your example, since it is closest to the reproduction on the MOMA website (a reliable source).

Clearly, we need to be careful and make sure we choose the better quality reproduction. (By “better quality,” we mean the image that is the closest reproduction of the artist’s original work if we could see that work in person at the museum or art gallery where it "lives." We are not discussing personal preferences.)