Olympic Museum in Lausanne 1st Swiss museum to join Google Art Project

Renovated Musée d'Orsay in Paris during filming for Google's Art Project

LAUSANNE, SWITZERLAND – The Olympic Museum in Lausanne has provided the Google Art Project with 104 artworks by 33 artists, from its collection.

The museum is one of 155 worldwide to share part of their collection online and it is the first in Switzerland to do so.

Art Project now includes Hans Erni’s 1983 “Basketball” sculpture and paintings series, Dennis Openheim’s “Olympic Centennial Newton Discovering Gravity” and a series of Rosa Serra’s elegant black sports figures sculptures.

The project started a year ago, with 17 museums and 1,000 artworks, but as Google points out, it was “almost all paintings from Western masters.

Today, the Art Project includes more than 30,000 high-resolution artworks, with Street View images for 46 museums, with more on the way. In other words, the Art Project is no longer just about the Indian student wanting to visit the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

It is now also about the American student wanting to visit the National Gallery of Modern Art in Delhi.”

The collection houses an extraordinary variety, and some of the partner sampler pages are fun, such as a moving (in every sense) video visit to the White House in the US.

The expanded gallery, which Google presented in Paris Tuesday 3 April, has several new features. Among them:

• Street View images are now displayed in finer quality. A specially designed Street View trolley took 360-degree images of the interior of selected galleries which were then stitched together, enabling smooth navigation of more than 385 rooms within the museums. You can also explore the gallery interiors directly from within Street View in Google Maps.
• 46 artworks are available with Gogle’s gigapixel photo-capturing technology, “photographed in extraordinary detail using super high resolution so you can study details of the brushwork and patina that would be impossible to see with the naked eye.”
• A bonus for students and teachers in particular is a new My Gallery feature that lets viewers make their own collections, add comments to each painting and share the whole collection.

How to use Google Art Project video