More than 250 images from the Norton and Nancy Dodge Collection at the Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, are now available on ARTstor. The collection of nonconformist art from the Soviet Union can be viewed through the ARTstor Digital Library at www.artstor.org. Among the artists included in this collection are Grisha Bruskin, Eric Bulatov, Ilya Kabakov, Vitaly Komar, Alexander Melamid, Irina Nakhova and Leonid Sokov.
The Dodge Collection is the largest and most comprehensive of its kind in the world. It documents the creative activities of underground artists in the Soviet Union who broke away from Socialist Realism, the official artistic style of the communist regime.
With works in all media, the collection spans the late 1950s to the late 1980s — from the initiation of the underground movement during Khrushchev’s cultural thaw to Gorbachev’s perestroika and the downfall of the Soviet Union.
The late Norton T. Dodge, an economist and Sovietologist, singlehandedly assembled the collection during two decades of travel to and from the Soviet Union during the 1950s and 1960s, in the process saving countless works from destruction.
In 1991, he and his wife Nancy Ruyle Dodge donated more than 20,000 works of art, by nearly a thousand artists, to the Zimmerli. ARTstor’s mission is to work with the international community to build an online image library and to use digital technology to enhance teaching and research. Initiated by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation in 2001, ARTstor has been an independent nonprofit organization since 2003 and a live service since July 2004.
The ARTstor Digital Library makes available more than 1.4 million images in the arts, architecture, humanities and sciences from museums, photo archives, photographers, scholars and artists.
The Zimmerli Art Museum is at 71 Hamilton St., New Brunswick. Hours are Tuesday through Friday from 10 a.m. to 4:30 p.m.; Saturday and Sunday from noon to 5 p.m.; and the first Wednesday of each month (except August) from 10 a.m. to 9 p.m. The museum is closed Mondays, major holidays and during August.
Admission is $6 for adults; $5 for people 65 and over; and free for museum members, children under 18, and Rutgers students, faculty and staff (with ID). Admission is free on the first Sunday of every month. For more information, call 848- 932-7237 or visit the museum’s website at www.zimmerlimuseum.rutgers.edu.