Photographs of the sculptor Jacob Epstein at work, intimate letters from the painter Paul Nash and an illustrated new year’s card sent to the artists Ben Nicholson and Barbara Hepworth are among the artifacts that Tate has made publicly available in its online archive, the organization announced.
It placed about 6,000 primary resources from 20th-century British artists’ lives online — the first step in an effort to digitize around 52,000 of the archive’s more than one million items. About 70,000 works from Tate’s art collection are already available online. One goal of the archive project is to enhance information that visitors can learn about artists when they visit the Tate’s website, supplementing images of artwork with documents from artists’ lives, a spokeswoman said. The archive’s curators chose which items to highlight, with a particular focus on showcasing artists from different regions of Britain. The project, supported by a grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund, aims to have all 52,000 chosen archive materials only by next summer.
Tate’s Archive is part of Tate, a vast organization that includes the four museums Tate Britain, Tate Modern, Tate Liverpool and Tate St Ives. Other notable materials that the archive released online include Ms. Hepworth’s notes and photographs on her own sculptures; and sketches by artists including Josef Herman and David Jones (some of whose childhood drawings are now online).