Michael Hafftka Catalog Raisonné Chronicles 50 Years of Art

By vramkickedin | | 2 min read
1970s inspired abstract artwork featuring various painted colors.

The Michael Hafftka Catalog Raisonné is a new open dataset containing approximately 3,800 artworks by a single artist spanning five decades. The collection covers work from the 1970s through 2025 and includes full metadata such as titles, years, mediums, dimensions, and collection information.

Michael Hafftka, a figurative painter based in New York, created and published this dataset himself. His work is held in major museum collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, MoMA, SFMOMA, and the British Museum.

A unique single-artist collection

  • Approximately 3,800 digitized artworks from a single artist's archive.
  • Covers 50 years of artistic development from the 1970s to present.
  • Includes works held by major institutions like MoMA and the Met.
  • Structured metadata with title, year, medium, dimensions, and collection details.
  • Multiple image views including details and alternate perspectives.
  • Released under CC-BY-NC-4.0 license for non-commercial use.

Researchers studying artistic evolution over time will find this dataset valuable for tracking stylistic changes across decades. Developers training LoRA models or building image retrieval systems can use the structured metadata to filter and search the collection efficiently.

Notes from the Artist

The dataset creator is clear about his role.

'I am not a developer. I am the artist,'

Hafftka writes in the project description. He adds,

'I would genuinely love to see what Stable Diffusion generates when trained on fifty years of figurative painting by a single hand.'

The collection has already seen over 2,500 downloads in its first week.

Users should note that metadata completeness varies across the dataset. Earlier works are more likely to have missing fields such as medium and dimensions, reflecting the challenges of long-term archival documentation. Image quality also varies because the works were photographed and scanned using different methods over several decades.

You can find the Catalog Raisonné on Hugging Face.