DmG: Ravishing Revelations
Design museum Gent takes you on a discovery of Art Nouveau treasures in its storage, guided by two criteria: Partage Plus and ‘hidden’.
Partage Plus had the ambitious mission to significantly increase and enrich the amount of Art Nouveau content on Europeana. From 1 March 2012 until 30 April 2014 in total 25 cultural heritage institutions from 17 European countries worked hard to achieve this goal. Partage Plus was a digitisation and research project within the CIP-ICT PSP support programme of the European Union; Design museum Gent could rely on extra financial support from the Flemish Government. A few figures of Partage Plus: more than 75,000 objects and 2,000 3D images in Europeana, 3,269 creators and 1,303 manufactories, and 674 keywords in 14 languages. Discover the whole story on the internet via www.partage-plus.eu.
Culture lovers can search the new Art Nouveau data on the virtual European heritage portal www.europeana.eu. Design museum Gent has contributed its part by delivering 580 objects adorned with text and image. 260 objects got their brand new picture taken in-house by Anthony De Meyere. 137 of them were also scanned in 3D by project partner Steinbichler in June 2013. The results in pdf can be consulted via Europeana and via the museum’s website, where also reportage of the 3D scanning can be found.
To conclude the project Design museum Gent organises a collection presentation featuring a part of its Partage Plus selection, which shows how diverse the Art Nouveau movement in Europe was. The exhibited objects have not left the storage for decades; Partage Plus brought them to light again and stimulated broader research. This produced interesting information, which the museum wishes to share with the public through the first of a long series of collection presentations.