The Olympic Museum has become the first Swiss partner of the Google Art Project, and is displaying over 100 of its objects on the site www.googleartproject.com, thereby offering art lovers and Olympic enthusiasts all over the world a virtual visit spanning more than a century of the history of the modern Olympic Games.
The objects featured in this virtual visit include The American Athlete, the sculpture by Auguste Rodin, and the works in the Centennial Olympic Suite by 50 leading artists, such as Saul, Oppenheim, Barry, Berrocal, Kacere and Carybé, who contributed their talents to celebrate the IOC’s one hundredth anniversary.
There are also emblematic objects from the Olympic Games, such as the torch for the 1992 Games in Albertville designed by Philippe Starck, the winners’ medals produced by Lalique and the Turin 2006 torch designed by Pininfarina.
Each of the images on the Google Art Project platform contains around 7 billion pixels, which enables users to study details of each work to a level well beyond what is visible to the naked eye.
A year after the launch of the first version, the Google Art Project has grown exponentially, with more than 150 partners from 40 countries allowing users to discover 30,000 works in high resolution, compared with 1,000 items from 17 museums last year.
Institutions and museums have included major artworks in this new version of the Art Project. Art lovers are thus just a mouse click away from not only paintings but also sculptures, urban art and photographs. Thousands of works from numerous different cultures and civilisations are represented.
With a total of over 10,000 objects in its collections, The Olympic Museum is pleased to be able to show some of these on the Google platform. After welcoming more than 3.3 million visitors since it was opened in 1993, The Olympic Museum is currently closed for renovation, and will be welcoming visitors once more as of October 2013.