Oxford Art Online - Grove Art Online is composed of signed, scholarly encyclopedia entries on all aspects of global art, design and architecture. Individual articles are updated periodically, and new articles reflecting contemporary developments in the arts are added on a regular basis.
Benezit Dictionary of Artists is a standard reference collection of artists' biographies. It is international in scope, and covers all periods and styles. In addition to biographies, many entries include bibliographies, auction sales data, and images of signatures, monograms, or other marks of identification.
The Metropolitan Museum's Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History presents the museum's collection via a chronological, geographical, and thematic exploration of global art history. It comprises hundreds of timelines and accompanying essays and thousands of objects, as well as a robust index. It is is regularly updated to provide new insights on the collection.
Art & Architecture Source is an essential research database for peer-reviewed, full-text art and architecture journals with coverage dating back to 1914. Subjects include fine, decorative, and commercial art, as well as architecture, landscape, urban planning, and architectural design. With strong international coverage, including periodicals published in French, Italian, German, Spanish, and Dutch, it offers hundreds of full-text art journals, magazines, and books, plus detailed indexing and abstracts, and thousands of images. It also includes the contents of Art Index Retrospective (1929-1984), formerly called Art Source.
ARTbibliographies Modern provides indexing to art, architecture and design journals, essays, books, exhibition catalogs and dissertations. Publications indexed date from approximately 1973 through the present, while the subject focus is late 19th-century to the present.
ARTstor is a repository of images of art, architecture, and design. The images are sourced from museums, libraries, archives, and photographers. ARTstor includes a suite of software tools to view, present, and manage images for research and teaching. ARTstor is supplemented by additional content, including publicly available image collections and locally-produced NYU collections.
***Announcement: On August 1, 2024, Artstor will merge with JSTOR. Moving forward, JSTOR will serve as a search platform for the images that were once hosted on Artstor along with the usual JSTOR content. Contact Giana Ricci, Librarian for the Fine Arts, giana.ricci@nyu.edu with questions.***
In order to download images, users must create an ARTstor account. Faculty members may request privileges that allow the creation of image groups, personal collections, and more.
The Smithsonian Collections Search Center is an online catalog containing most of the major collections from the Smithsonian museums, archives, libraries, and research units.
Europeana works with thousands of European archives, libraries and museums to share cultural heritage for enjoyment, education, and research. Europeana provides access to millions of books, music, artworks and more.
In addition to specialized databases and access to the Getty's research library catalogue, users visiting this site can search and explore tens of thousands of free images of artwork.
Beginning with nearly 650 titles published from 1964 to the present, this resource will continue to expand and could eventually offer access to nearly all books, Bulletins, and Journals published by the Metropolitan Museum since the Met's founding in 1870. It will also include online publications.
UbuWeb is a completely independent resource dedicated to all strains of the avant-garde, ethnopoetics, and outsider arts. Users may search text, sound, and film archives.
Focused on comic books and graphic novels for adult readers from the 1960s to the works of modern sequential artists, contains comics and graphic novels, along with interviews, criticism, and journal articles that document the continual growth and evolution of this art-form.
A joint catalog of the libraries of the Brooklyn Museum, the Frick Collection (Frick Art Reference Library), and the Museum of Modern Art, the three institutions that form NYARC and whose holdings range from ancient Egypt to the contemporary period. Resources include monographs and periodicals, exhibition catalogs, auction catalogs, artists' books, rare books, artist files, archives, digital resources, and specialized databases. Users can also visit each institution's individual library catalogs. (See below.)
This database searches the holdings of the archives of the Foundation of the Venice Biennale, including audiovisual media, photography, as well as posters and other historical art sources. The database also searches specific exhibits in architecture, visual arts, cinema, dance, music, and theater.
The online catalog to the Library at the Frick Collection, including records for the extensive Photoarchive. (Items in the Photoarchive can also be consulted online in the Frick Digital Collections.)
The International Center of Photography Library is the only library in New York City dedicated to photography. It houses an extensive collection of photobooks, periodicals, artist files, and digital resources.
The online catalog for the Met's main research collection, with its more than one million volumes, extensive digital collections, and online resources, reflects the museum's global and encyclopedic nature and represents all fields covered by the museum.
Art Institutions in NYC
A short list of some of New York's most prominent cultural institutions devoted to the study of art, whose libraries and archival collections are available to researchers.
The Museum Libraries and Archives are a special non-circulating library developed to educate visitors about the Brooklyn Museum, its history, objects, and exhibitions, as well as the broader areas of art and cultural history from antiquity to the present.
The Frick Art Reference Library’s book and photograph research collections relate chiefly to paintings, drawings, sculpture, and prints from the fourth to the mid-twentieth centuries by European and American artists and artists from other parts of the world working in Western styles.
The Guggenheim's library and archives house primary and secondary research resources that inform the museum’s exhibitions and acquisitions as well as document its history. Select collections are open to qualified scholars and researchers by advance appointment.
The Met's libraries contain books, periodicals, photographs, manuscripts, and other scholarly resources in print and electronic formats, as well as several specialized study centers with images, documentation, and actual objects on display or on reserve for examination by researchers.
The library, Museum Archives, and Study Centers work in concert. For general research about modern art, including catalogs from past Museum exhibitions, contact the library. For primary source materials, especially those concerning The Museum of Modern Art as an institution, contact the Museum Archives. For materials related to individual works in the Museum’s collections, including films and videos, consult the relevant Study Center.
The New Museum Digital Archive contains documentation of the New Museum's program and institutional history in the form of images, video, audio, publications and printed matter.
