Research Guides: Art and Design: General Art & Design Resources

How to Use This Research Guide

This guide is meant to assist you in getting started on your research or project.

Use the links below for more general information, or click on the green navigation tabs for more specific resources.

Below are some general art resources to get your started on your research...

General Art and Design Resources

Encyclopedias and Reference Manuals

Encyclopedias and reference manuals help you get started on your research. Here you can find general background information, definitions, and history on many art and design and concepts. Also use to find a topic for a paper or project.

Online Encyclopedias

Grove Art Online/Oxford Art Online This link opens in a new window
Premier online art reference sources searchable in one place: Grove Dictionary of Art, Oxford Companion to Western Art, Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, and the Concise Oxford Dictionary of Art Terms. Other features include: "images only" search; timelines of art; resources for educators; subject guides on visual art topics, and Benezit Dictionary of Artists search (we have the print set). Note: Access is limited to 3 simultaneous users. If you can't gain access, try again later.

Credo Reference
Search over 800 online reference books and image sources, including many Art History ones
Critical Terms for Art History
Offers a spirited reassessment of art history's methods and terminology.
The Thames and Hudson Dictionary of Art Terms
An essential reference work embracing the vast vocabulary of art in all its forms.

Print Encyclopedias

The Grove Encyclopedia of Classical Art and Architecture
Call Number: CFL Floor 3 Book Stacks N5610.G76 2007
The Encyclopedia includes all subject areas in the classical arts, including philosophers, rulers, writers and artists, architecture, ceramics, sculpture, and more.
The Grove Encyclopedia of Medieval Art and Architecture
Call Number: CFL Floor 3 Book Stacks N5965.G76 2012
Offers unparalleled coverage of all aspects of art and architecture from Medieval Western Europe, from the 6th century to the early 16th century.
The Grove Encyclopedia of Northern Renaissance Art
Call Number: CFL Floor 3 Book Stacks N6370.G76 2009
Deals with all aspects of Northern Renaissance art ranging from artists, architecture, and patrons to the cities and centres of production vital to the flourishing of art in this period.
The Grove Encyclopedia of Decorative Arts
Call Number: CFL Floor 3 Book Stacks NK28.G76 2006
Covers thousands of years of decorative arts production throughout western and non-western culture. This topical collection is a valuable resource for those interested in the history, practice, and mechanics of the decorative arts. Includes hundreds of entries on artists and craftsmen, the qualities and historic uses of materials, as well as concise definitions on art forms and style.
The Grove Encyclopedia of Materials and Techniques in Art
Call Number: CFL Floor 3 Book Stacks N8510.G76 2008
Coverage includes materials in art practice (e.g. ink, enamel, digital materials); materials in conservation (e.g. adhesives); classes of artifacts (e.g. wallpaper, mosaic, ceramic); techniques and methods (e.g. book binding, gilding, printing, weaving), terms (e.g. rustication), tools (e.g. easel, laser), theory (e.g. technical examination, conservation controversies), fakes & forgeries, and conservation theorists and practitioners.

Location of Art books in the library

General Collection (3rd floor)	Most in the "Ns" overlooking the 2nd floor reading room. Call no. ranges mostly subclass N (Fine Arts).
Oversize Books (1st floor)	Large "coffee table books" are full of images and include many catalogue raisonee Call no. ranges mostly subclass N (Fine Arts).
Print Journals (1st floor)	Most also available online.

Thanks to a generous donation from the Florence H. and Eugene E. Myers Trust, our library boasts a world-class collection of art resources.

Need to FIND A BOOK @ Chester Fritz Library?

Go to the Library's Web Site and start typing a topic or title in the Library Search box
Select "in Books+" from the drop-down options
To limit your search results to EBOOKS, under "Availability," select "Available online"
You can use the Advanced Search to limit by material type "Books" and search by "Subject"

Need to **FIND A BOOK NOT @ Chester Fritz Library?**

Use WorldCat - Available from QuickLinks. You can search books from anywhere in the country and request Chester Fritz Library borrow that book for you. If it turns out that the book is available from our library, you'll see . You can have our library borrow a book from another library (called an InterLibrary Loan) by registering and requesting the book here.

Search tips to highlight art aspects of topics:

exhibitions
in art

For example:

politics exhibitions
dogs in art

Finding Articles

Use databases to find academic articles to continue your research. Below are the most helpful databases for finding relevant articles for art and design topics.

Best Starting Database for Art

Art and Architecture Source This link opens in a new window
Covers a broad range of subjects in: fine, decorative and commercial art, design, as well as architecture. Access over 600 full-text journals and 220 full-text books; includes over 63,000 images.

Art & Architecture Source allows precise searching on an artist's name

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Other Databases to Try

JSTOR This link opens in a new window
An archive of important scholarly journals, eBooks and primary sources in 75 disciplines. Offers high-resolution, scanned images of journal issues and pages as originally published.
Project MUSE This link opens in a new window
Includes 400 scholarly journals in humanities, social sciences, and mathematics and over 50,000 ebooks primarily from university presses.

National Newspapers
Includes the New York Times from 1980 to current.
Newslibrary
An index only to our region's newspapers for local arts coverage.

Note: If you are looking for collections or databases of images, take a look at the Finding Images guide (follow hyperlink or find the green tab to the left). This will take you to the Images guide. Once on the guide, click the "Image Databases" tab. The first box you will see, "Art Images Databases" contains links to collections of various high-quality/high-definition images from museums and galleries around the world.

Good Starting Journals for Art

The following are links to specific academic journals which are published and peer-reviewed by experts in the field. If you want to narrow your search to a specific time period or genre, finding a journal that publishes in that area can help.

Art History
Art History is an international forum for peer-reviewed scholarship and innovative research. Founded in 1978, the journal publishes essays, critical reviews, and special issues that engage with path-breaking new developments and critical debate in current art-historical practice. Art History covers all kinds of art and visual culture across all time periods and geographical areas. The journal welcomes contributions from the full spectrum of methodological perspectives, and is a forum for a wide range of historical, critical, historiographical and theoretical forms of writing.
Art in America
Features articles on major achievements & events throughout the art world, particularly in painting, sculpture, photography and prints.
The Oxford Art Journal
The Oxford Art Journal has an international reputation for publishing innovative critical work in art history, and has played a major role in recent rethinking of the discipline. It is committed to the political analysis of visual art and material representation from a variety of theoretical perspectives, and has carried work addressing themes from Antiquity to contemporary art practice. In addition it carries extended review of major contributions to the field.

Historical Resources

These online and print resources covering various topics on art and art history can help you understand art and its times.

Online

Grove Art Online: Timelines of World Art
Review significant moments in art history from all over the globe. For each of the six regions below there are three or four timelines, each covering a specific era. The timelines feature brief summaries of important events in the visual arts; many of the summaries are accompanied by an image, and all link to articles in Grove Art Online for further reading.
If the Paintings Could Talk
Reveals the hidden histories of paintings in the National Gallery, London. With a treasury of fascinating facts, discoveries, and tales, this book describes the flight a work took down a mountainside and the portrait that appeared in a James Bond film, among many other entertaining events and stories.
Timeline of Art History from the Met
Essays, Works of Art and Chronologies based on the collections at the Metropolitan Museum of Art

Print

Art in Time by Robert Shane; Sarah Symmons; Monica Kjellman-Chapin; Matthew McKelway; Gauvin Alexander Bailey; Alistair Rider; Phaidon Press Editors
Call Number: CFL Floor 3 Book Stacks N5303.A755 2014
Art in Time is the first book to embed art movements within the larger context of politics and history. Global in scope and featuring an innovative present‐to‐past arrangement, the book’s accessible text looks back on the most significant art styles and movements, from the present day to antiquity.
Art Across Time by Laurie Schneider Adams
Call Number: CFL Floor 3 Book Stacks N5300.A3 2007
Art across Time seeks to inspire students in their study of art through a combination of large-scale reproductions, extensive use of color photographs, and effective incorporation of contextual material. Large format illustrations, 80 per cent in color, allow students to appreciate delicacies of technique and detail that are lost in smaller or black and white representations. Similarly, the writing emphasizes the motivations and environment of the artists to give students a sense of the intent or purpose of work. The arts of cultures beyond the West are presented thematically and at points of cross-cultural contact - Japan and the Impressionists, and Africa and the European Avant-Garde - in Windows on the World sections. In all, Art across Time, presents the history of art as a dynamic narrative grounded in scholarship, a narrative that is a dialogue between modern viewers and the past.
30,000 Years of Art by Amanda Renshaw; John Powner (Designed by); Phaidon Editors
Call Number: CFL Floor 3 Book Stacks N5300.A14 2015
An accessible introduction to the whole of art history, from prehistoric times to the present day - now revised and expanded. This updated edition includes over 25 new entries that expand the scope of the book further into the 21st century. Features 600 of the world's greatest works of art across all media (painting, sculpture, textiles, metalwork, ceramics), ranging from seminal masterworks to lesser known pieces in both the fine and decorative arts. Texts are written by 35 of the world's leading museum curators, academics and archaeologists and the easy-to-use chronological format featuring illustrated timelines, and a glossary of terms, schools and movements.
A History of Pictures by David Hockney; Martin Gayford
Call Number: CFL Floor 3 Book Stacks ND50.H628 2016
The making of pictures has a history going back perhaps 100,000 years to an African shell used as a paint palette. Two-thirds of it is irrevocably lost, since the earliest images. They privilege no medium, or period, or style, but instead, in 16 chapters, discuss how and why pictures have been made, and insistently link 'art' to human skills and human needs. Each chapter addresses an important question: What happens when we try to express reality in two dimensions? Why is the 'Mona Lisa' beautiful and why are shadows so rarely found in Chinese, Japanese and Persian painting? Why are optical projections always going to be more beautiful than HD television can ever be? How have the makers of images depicted movement? What makes marks on a flat surface interesting? Energized by two lifetimes of looking at pictures, combined with a great artist's 70-year experience of experimentation as he makes them, this profoundly moving and enlightening volume will be the art book of the decade.
Visual History of Type
Call Number: CFL Floor 1 East - Oversize Books Z250.A2 M36 2017