About

Museartis sells giclée prints of historical works that are in the public domain — made one at a time, from the digitisations the holding institutions publish themselves, with the collection and the accession number named on every product page.

Why the catalogue is small

Anyone can print a public-domain picture. What is hard is knowing which file to print, which impression of a sheet still holds its colour, how large a scan will honestly go, and what there is to say about the work once it is on a wall. That is the work here, and it is slow. A work enters the catalogue only when it has passed the five criteria, and most do not.

Nothing is upscaled, nothing is cropped to fill a format, and where the source runs out, the size stops. The reasoning behind all of that is in Paper and Printing.

The collector: Dr. Walther Fuchs

Walther Fuchs standing at a worktable beside a window, both hands on a large blank sheet of fine art paper, a steel rule and a loupe beside it — At the worktable, with a sheet of the paper these prints are made on. The picture is an illustration generated from a photograph.

Walther Fuchs is an art historian and publisher in Küsnacht on Lake Zurich. He studied art and architectural history in Bern and Zurich and took his doctorate at the University of Zurich in the history of science. He was a curator at the Swiss National Library and worked at the Institute of the History of Medicine at the University of Zurich, where he made the exhibition Paul Klee und die Medizin. He is a co-editor of Zwitscher-Maschine. Journal on Paul Klee, editor of the Küsnachter Jahrheft, president of the local history society of Küsnacht and a member of the Küsnacht Cultural Commission. He has run the publishing house Digiboo since 2011.

Museartis comes out of that work rather than out of a print business. The catalogue is chosen the way a small exhibition is chosen, and every sheet has a record behind it. Why he thinks a good reproduction needs no apology is set out in What a Reproduction Was For, which begins with a Rembrandt print that hung in a great-uncle's flat.

“Choose a good one and learn to tell the difference … And then do not apologise for it.”

— Walther Fuchs, What a Reproduction Was For

His publications and research: waltherfuchs.com.

The sister projects

Digiboo is the publishing house the rest of this grew out of: art history, cultural history, literature, philosophy and essays, published in Küsnacht since 2011.

Tazzarte puts the same historical works on mugs — the same files, the same care about which impression, on an object you use every morning rather than hang on a wall.

Sirinpress is the puzzle and games imprint.

How it is made

Twelve pigment inks on 200 gsm FSC-certified fine art paper, printed to order by a network of print houses in eight countries, so a print arrives in days rather than weeks. Prints for the United States are made in the United States and cross no border; prints for Switzerland are currently made in Germany, and we refund any Swiss import charges. Shipping is free to the United States and Switzerland, with no minimum order.

Browse the prints