For six decades starting from the 1880s the ‘Die Technischen Mitteilungen für Malerei’ (TMM) (Technical Journal for Painting) described the development of painting materials and techniques. The journal provides information about common paint and coating materials and clarifies problems and deficiencies in the paint industries. This German language journal gives insight into the history of the profession and is a valuable resource for conservators, restorers, art technologists, manufacturers, artists and craftsmen. An online version of the journal was published on April 2015 by Keimfarben AG and the Cultural Heritage Agency of the Netherlands (RCE). In addition to the volumes of TMM, which ran from 1884 to 1942, two volumes of its successor, the ‘Deutsche Zeitschrift für Maltechnik’ (German Magazine for Painting Technique) have been made available.
Each page of the journal can be accessed online and most pages are word-searchable, by using I) the Index or II) the text pages which were converted into text-searchable format using Optical Character Recognition (OCR).
Some early complete volumes were fully transcribed.
The quality of some of the pages and OCR is compromised at present due to the poor quality of the original microfiche copies of pages of the journal, collected in the 1980s by RCE’s predecessor, the Central Laboratory. We intend to form a Consortium of Users, who will use the database as a research tool and will be committed to seek funding for improving the database. We will also translate the texts in due time, in order to make these available to researchers who are not familiar with the German language.
If you have questions contact:
Cultural Heritage Agency of the Netherlands, Hobbemastraat 22, 1071 ZC Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
Academy of Fine Arts, Akademiestraße 2–4, 80799 München, Germany.
Director, KEIMFARBEN GmbH, 86420 Diedorf, Germany.
Reference
K. KINSEHER, “Womit sollen wir malen?” Farben-Streit und maltechnische Forschung in München. Ein Beitrag zum Wirken von Adolf Wilhelm Keim, München 2014.