About:

The Henry and Rose Pearlman Foundation’s dazzling Post-Impressionist collection includes masterpieces by Vincent Van Gogh, Paul Cézanne, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Amedeo Modigliani, Chaim Soutine, and other lesser-known artists. Since the mid-1970s, the Pearlman Collection has been on long-term loan to the Princeton University Art Museum, where it continues to be a favorite with visitors to the Museum.

The Pearlman Foundation asked Bluespark to build a simple, elegant and intuitive interface for making the Pearlman Collection accessible, in the highest quality, to audiences both wide and deep—ranging from scholars and art historians to students and the general public.

BSP Solution:

Bluespark worked closely with the Pearlman Foundation to develop a bolder online presence than most public institutions—or private institutions with more cautious decision processes—are able to do. By leveraging the robust capabilities of Drupal’s CMS (Content Management System), the Pearlman Collection website employs rich metadata and high-resolution images to deliver innovative ways of experiencing art in the digital realm.

Interesting Features

The site offers many ways of experiencing the Pearlman Collection, starting with the home page, which features a CoverFlow-style image carousel for intuitively and efficiently viewing the complete works of the collection.

The ‘Create Your Own Gallery’ page lets users shape their own exhibition experience by selecting and arranging works from the collection in any order they choose. This feature empowers a broad range of users—whether scholars, students or enthusiasts—to explore such things as relationships between works in the collection, the evolution of an artist’s style, etc.

The site also supports in-depth scholarly research into the Pearlman Collection’s artists and art works, with background information, critical perspectives, and links to related resources for every work in the collection.