The Cleveland Museum of Art / Cleveland
A table asks to be walked around. An alabaster figure turns cloth into volume. A painted portrait holds a person still. Here, start with the shape of a presence.
Browse 804 selected works →Have five minutes? / An Artologium looking sequence
Three works, three pauses. These questions invite close looking; they do not propose a historical connection between the objects.
Look at the curved supports beneath the tabletop. Follow one line downward and notice where its structural role becomes difficult to separate from its shape.
01 / Circle
Trace the outline before reading the materials. Where does support become ornament?
Look closely & read the record →
02 / Fold
Follow a fold from the hood to the feet. How much of a body can you sense without seeing it?
Look closely & read the record →
03 / Pause
Look from the face to the hands. Which gesture gives the portrait its sense of a person?
Look closely & read the record →Into the Afterlives lab
A work can lead to a question about transmission. The connection below tells you precisely how this museum enters each investigation.
A work elsewhere in this selection
Cleveland’s Millet drawing appears as a comparison version. The dossier does not identify it as the exact sheet photographed for Van Gogh.
Interactive passage · Sources and claim limits inside
Museum record used in research
Cleveland’s Square Shawl record helps locate a particular object within the investigation. This source link does not claim that the three works above influenced one another.
Visual essay · Sources and claim limits inside
What is here / 804 selected works
The largest of our current museum selections spans paintings, prints, sculpture, textiles and designed objects. Its size reflects the records admitted by our sourcing process; it does not measure the museum’s importance or the breadth of its full collection.
Across collections / 03
Two figures from Rodin’s Burghers of Calais monument—one a full-length plaster study in Chicago, one a heroic bronze head in Cleveland—show how two mediums record the same civic commission differently.
The Art Institute of Chicago1893.187
The Cleveland Museum of Art1920.120
Every selected image links to its museum record and CC0 dedication. The image’s source control includes its accession, original file and credit.