GENEVA.- Thanks to a significant effort to document and index its art collections, the Fondation Gandur pour l’Art has just launched a website, www.fg-art.org, which makes part of its archaeology, fine arts and decorative arts collections available to the public online.

The Foundation’s mission includes making its collections available to museums, scholars and the general public, as part of its philosophy of “Education through art”. This reflects the conviction of its founder and chairman, Jean Claude Gandur, that culture should be accessible to all.

“Within the next two years, the complete collections of the Foundation should be indexed and online, in other words almost 2,000 works”, indicated Jean Claude Gandur. “Although the Foundation aims to physically exhibit its collections, it is equally important that art historians and specialists, students and the general public have easy access to the Foundations artworks”, he added. On today’s launch, the website provides online access to just over 10% of the Foundation’s collections.

Created in 2010, the Foundation aims to preserve, enrich and exhibit the art collections developed by Jean Claude Gandur and his family over the years. Loan exhibitions from the collections have been organized with Geneva’s Art and History Museum (Les musées d’art et d’histoire de la Ville de Genève - MAH), in Switzerland and abroad (Reflections of the divine – Pharaonic and classical antiquities from a private collection at Geneva’s Art and History Musuem 2001-2002; Subjects of Abstraction: non-figurative paintings from the Second School of Paris 1946-1962, shown at the Rath Museum in Geneva, and subsequently at the Fabre Museum in Montpellier, France, in 2011 – 2012; and the exhibition Ancient Egypt – Art and Magic: Treasures from the Fondation Gandur pour l’Art, at the Fine Arts Museum, in St. Petersburg, Florida, USA, also in 2011 – 2012). Works from the collections are also regularly loaned, on request from museums and non-profit foundations, to enrich temporary exhibitions.

A reference website
The Fondation Gandur pour l’Art joins a small circle of private foundations which make their works available online. “We consider that the Foundation’s mission includes ensuring public access to its collections”, underlines Jean Claude Gandur, who readily recognises the size of the task. The Foundation’s website, www.fg-art.org, offers permanent access for the first time to parts of its collections, and to information on the exhibitions organized, the loans granted and published catalogues. The site is available in English and French.