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Art review

Mark Mackay

We review Art. It’s an iPhone application that’s like carrying a decade’s worth of Master’s exhibitions in your pocket

Art teaches you about the masterpieces of the world

Published on Feb 14, 2010

Anyone that’s into art will appreciate the genius behind figures such as Leonardo De Vinci or Salvador Dali.

Those that are more into art than others will be able to real of names of a hundred equally brilliant painters that have lived over the years.

Viewing the work of such folk is a great source of education and inspiration for any aspiring artist. You could browse the internet for such work, but you not always have a PC to hand and doing so on the iPhone can be fiddly with all those search boxes to fill and fields to fill out. Art books are often bulky and always expensive. Thankfully, the App Store now has an answer for this too.

The application we’re looking at today is called Art. Initially, the downsides of app are glaring, so we’ll get through those first. Straight off the bat, ‘art’ is something of a generalisation. Art comes in many shapes and sizes but the artworks that permeate this particular app are in face paintings and drawings. Don’t expect to see any photography, photographs of sculptures or obscure works such as those of Damien Hurst and other Turner Prize winners.

Another characterising feature of the artists that have found their way into Art is that they are all dead. The most recent artist in the list – which can be viewed either alphabetically or by date of birth – is Andy Warhol. With our eyes agleam at the prospect of seeing some cans of Campbell’s soup and pictures of Marilyn Monroe, we were disappointed to get a message telling us that there was no pictures added for this category yet.

The lists denote that there are 187 artists in total, but this is something of a fib as there are several that don’t yet have any pictures. The images are loaded from the net as you’re browsing through them so if you’ve no signal, you won’t be able to view them.

For all its imperfections though, Art is a very endearing app. The artwork contained within the well-made interface of Art is incredible. Browsing through the engineering sketches of De Vinci is a real joy. You can view paintings by thumbnail or in a picture reel, save images to your photo album individually or by artist and read biographies of the painters themselves.

The app appears to be getting updated all the time too. It would already be a great resource for anyone studying art history or fine art and with new stuff being added all the time, would be even more so in future.