Subject Guides: Art History: Reference

Oxford Art Online

Oxford Art Online This link opens in a new window A comprehensive and authoritative guide to the visual arts with extensive surveys and in-depth articles on the history of art; provides links to museums, galleries, art collections around the world, timelines of world art, and images. Available through this site are Grove Art Online, The Oxford Companion to Western Art, Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, and The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Art Terms, as well as many specially commissioned articles and bibliographies available exclusively online.

Online Dictionaries

AAVAD: African American Visual Artists Dictionary
The mission of the African American Visual Artists Database is to establish a free public access record of the historical and ongoing contribution of artists of African descent to the visual arts, and to provide a visual and textual informational resource for non-profit educational use with unrestricted free access to all members of the global community.
CLARA Database of Women Artists
Clara® is a unique interactive database containing authoritative information on 18,000 women visual artists of all time periods and nationalities. The information in Clara® is drawn from the materials in National Museum of Women in the Arts' extensive Archives on Women Artists.
Contemporary Artists Index (CAI)
The Contemporary Artists Index is a unique resource developed and maintained by the CIA Library staff. Look here for artists, artists groups, photographers, craftspeople, designers, and design firms whose work appears in select publications in the library's collection.
Dictionary of Art Historians
A biographical and methodological database intended as a beginning point to learning the background of major art historians of western art history. A free, copyrighted, scholarly database for the use of researchers, students and the public.
Getty Union List of Artists Names (ULAN)
Open access resource from the Getty. Structured vocabulary providing information on over 120,000 artists world-wide.

E-Reference Books

Contains the texts of more than 100 reference titles published by Oxford University Press as well as the Oxford Companions Series in a single cross-searchable resource.

Digital Library for the Decorative Arts and Material Culture

http://decorativearts.library.wisc.edu/index.html

Getty Research Portal

The Getty Research Portal is an online search platform providing global access to digitized art history texts in the public domain. Through this multilingual, multicultural union catalog, scholars can search and download complete digital copies of publications for the study of art, architecture, material culture, and related fields. The Portal is free to all users.