How to Find Information on a Specific Artist or Work of Art
Looking for information on an artist: Some hints
- Look up your artist’s name in one of the reference books.
- Artspoke: a guide to modern ideas, movements, and buzzwords, 1848-1944 (N6447 A85)
- Dictionary of art terms and techniques (N33 M36)
- Encyclopedia of World Art 16v (N31 E533)
- Larousse encyclopedia of Byzantine and medieval art (N5970 H813)
- Larousse encyclopedia of prehistoric and ancient art; art and mankind (N5300 H953)
- McGraw-Hill Dictionary of Art 5v (N33 M23)
- Oxford Companion to Western Art (N33 O923)
- The Penguin concise dictionary of art history (N5300 F64)
- In the library catalog, search for your artist as a keyword. You will get a list of
books as well as dvd’s and videos - In the general databases, do a search for your artist. If you get too many hits, you may restrict to scholarly sources only.
Looking for information on a work of art: Some hints
Looking for information on a specific work of art can be difficult. You may need to
look for something less specific. For information about Manet’s Luncheon on the
Grass, for example, you may need to look at books and articles about Manet
generally, rather than using only the title of the work as a subject. (Remember to look
also at the name of the work in its original language, if not English.)
For Manet’s painting, you may try the following:
- Use Advanced Google and restrict the domain to .edu
- Look up Manet in the library catalog, retrieve those books and search for that
painting in the index. - Look up either the name of the work of art or the artist or both in large general
reference books, such as the Encyclopedia of World Art (N31 E533)or McGraw-Hill
Dictionary of Art (N33 M23). - Do a search in the general databases. You may choose to
use Central Search which searches multiple databases simultaneously.
