LibGuides: Art: Finding Background Information

Finding Background Information

The following resources provide background information on artists and art terms. They are a great place to start your research and will help you explore and focus possible topics.

Online Resources

Oxford Art Online
Provides online access to Grove Art Online, The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Art Terms, Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, and The Oxford Companion to Western Art. This resource contains information on the visual arts world, from prehistory to the present day. Full text articles, images and charts, and links to web material.
Bloomsbury Design Library
Good for: Researching design and crafts worldwide.
Contains: Images, encyclopedias, and e-books.
Dates covered: 1500 BCE-present.

The Thames & Hudson Dictionary of Art Terms
Call Number: Online Resource

An essential reference work embracing the vast vocabulary of art in all its forms. Covers painting, sculpture, architecture, photography, the decorative, applied and graphic arts from all periods throughout the world up to the present day.
Aesthetics A-Z
Call Number: Online Resource

Covers the key concepts, arguments, problems and figures in aesthetics and the philosophy of art.
Critical Terms for Art History
Call Number: Online Resource

Offers a spirited reassessment of art history's methods and terminology.
Dictionary of Visual Discourse: A Dialectical Lexicon of Terms
Call Number: Online Resource

This dictionary explores the languages and cultures of visual studies. It provides the basis for understanding the foundations and motivations of current theoretical and academic discourse, as well as the different forms of visual culture that have come to organize everyday life.

Print Resources

Dictionary of subjects and symbols in art by James Hall
Call Number: N7560 .H34 2008

Publication Date: 2008

Combined here in a single volume are religious, classical, and historical themes, figures of moral allegory, and characters from romantic poetry that appeared throughout paintings and sculpture in Western art before and after the Renaissance.
The Yale dictionary of art and artists by Erika Langmuir and Norbert Lynton
Call Number: N33 .L353 2000

Publication Date: 2000

This reference work deals with all aspects of Western art from 1300 to the present day. It provides information on painters, sculptors, and graphic artists, technical processes, terminology, theory, schools, movements, patrons and collecting, and much more.
Encyclopedia of World Art
Call Number: N31 .E4833

Publication Date: 1987

Library has volumes 1-17

Art

Finding Background Information

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