photo of stacks (lower floor)

Visual Arts


Dictionaties & Encyclopedias

A Dictionary of Modern and Contemporary Art
Includes entries on all aspects of modern and contemporary art: movements, styles, techniques, artists, critics, dealers, schools, and galleries. There are biographical entries for artists worldwide from the beginning of the twentieth century through to today.

Oxford Companion to Western Art
Biographies of artists, historians, theorists, and patrons as well as entries on institutions, cities and museums, styles, movements, and art historical theory and methodology.

Also available in print in the reference collection.

Oxford Bibliographies Online: Art History
A bibliography is a list of the books of an author or publisher, or on a specific subject. Oxford Bibliographies, compiled by scholars and librarians, contain extensive lists of annotated titles on many topics within the study of art history. It is a great way to find authoritative sources on your topic.

Each subject contains an extensive introduction (which provides an overview of the topic) as well as a list of annotated titles of books, arranged by category.

Grove Art Online
Contains articles on all aspects of the visual arts including biographies of artists, collectors, dealers, writers, and scholars. Thousands of art images are included with the articles.

Periodical Indexes

Art Full Text
A major database for art information. Art Abstracts covers fine, decorative and commercial art, photography, folk art, film and architecture. A unique feature of the database is the indexing of art reproductions to help researchers focus on a single artist or find individual works.

International Bibliography of Art
An index that includes more than five hundred journals, plus monographs, essay collections, conference proceedings and exhibition catalogues.

ARTbibliographies Modern
A database that covers journal articles, books, essays, exhibition catalogues, dissertations, and exhibition reviews.

Digital Collections

ARTstor
A fully searchable resource providing more than one million digital images in the arts, architecture, humanities, and sciences with an accessible suite of software tools for teaching and research.

The community-built collections comprise contributions from international museums, photographers, libraries, scholars, photo archives, and artists and artists’ estates.

created by: Colin Deinhardt & Agatha Barc | updated: 26 September 2019