Exploring the Tate Art Collection (1950–1955)

For my Digital Humanities midterm I chose to explore artwork from the Tate Gallerys collection between 1950 and 1955. I wanted to see which types of artwork were most common during this period and which artists had the pieces represented in the dataset. I used Flourish to create three graphs that allowed me to examine the Tate Gallery collection from different perspectives. My goal was to identify patterns in the artwork data and see how digital tools could make a large collection of artwork easier to understand.

Sources

I used the Tate Gallery collection dataset through GitHub. The dataset I worked with contained 703 artwork entries dated between 1950 and 1955 including information about artists, titles, dates and artistic mediums. Before creating the graphs I grouped the mediums into categories such as painting, sculpture, drawing, printmaking, photography and other or mixed media. I also sorted the artists by how artwork entries they had in the dataset and identified the ten most represented artists. This made the artwork information easier to work with and compare.

Processes

I used Flourish to create the graphs because Flourish allowed me to turn the spreadsheet data into visualizations. I started by looking at the distribution of artwork categories to see which types of artwork appeared most frequently.

Looking at the overall categories painting was the most represented medium, followed by printmaking. I found this interesting because it showed how unevenly different artistic mediums were represented in the Tate Gallery collection. It also gave me an understanding of the artwork dataset before looking more closely at individual artists.

Next I wanted to see which artists had the most artwork entries represented in the Tate Gallery collection. I organized the data by artist. Created a bar chart showing the ten artists with the highest number of artwork entries.

Naum Gabo had the artwork entries represented with 41 followed by Andy Warhol with 21 and Eduardo Paolozzi with 19. I found this interesting because certain artists had more artwork entries in the dataset than others. It made me wonder how museum collections influence which artists are more visible when studying a period.

After looking at the ten artists I wanted to understand what types of artwork made up their totals. I created a stacked bar chart that separated each artists artwork entries into the medium categories.

This graph helped me see that some artists were represented mostly through one type of artwork while others had artwork entries across categories. I found this graph useful because it connected the previous two graphs and gave me a more detailed understanding of the artists in the dataset.

Presentation

For the presentation I created a webpage to display the three graphs alongside the explanations. I wanted the website to be simple and easy to follow so I organized the graphs from the Tate Gallery collection to individual artists and then to their specific artistic mediums. I chose bar charts because bar charts make comparisons to understand and I used different colors in the stacked bar chart to separate the categories. Embedding the graphs also makes the webpage more interactive and allows viewers to explore the artwork data themselves.

Significance

This project showed me how useful data visualization can be when studying art history. Of looking through hundreds of individual artwork entries I was able to organize the artwork information and identify patterns in the Tate Gallery collection. One thing that stood out was how differently certain artists were represented across mediums. I also realized that the Tate Gallery collection does not necessarily represent all the artwork being created between 1950 and 1955 but the artwork entries included in this particular dataset. This relates to Digital Arts and Humanities because it shows how digital tools can be used to study collections discover patterns and ask new questions, about how artwork and history are represented.