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Art and Art History Subject Guide: ART HISTORY RESEARCH DATABASES

Articles from Interdisciplinary Resource

All of these sources include significant scholarly material on art and art history. Other indexes and databases are listed alphabetically on our Databases A-Z Page.

To get started use Academic Search Complete.

A scholarly, multi-disciplinary database providing indexing and abstracts for thousands of journals and other publications. Academic Search Complete includes full-text access to peer-reviewed journals, as well as indexing and abstracts for magazines, monographs, reports, and conference proceedings. The database features some PDF content going back as far as 1867, with the majority of full text titles in (searchable) PDF format.

Art and Humanities Databases

JSTOR   historic archive of scholarly journals that includes the arts and humanities.  At present, it includes 170 art and art history titles. Since it is searching the full text, be sure to use the Advanced Search function to narrow down results as much as possible. It is not uncommon to get search results of many thousands of hits in JSTOR. 

 

 

Project Muse is a full-text collection of recently published journal articles in the social sciences and humanities. Covers recent issues of many journals that may not appear in JSTOR.   Click here to Browse by Research Area: Art and Architecture.

 

 

Humanities Full-text provide articles from the fields of archaeology and classical studies, art and photography, history, and much more.  A wide variety of  art history journals is provided in Academic Search Complete. Full-text is available for many of the publications.

America: History & Life
A bibliographic reference to the history of the United States and Canada from prehistory to the present. In addition to articles, it includes citations of book and media reviews from a selection of over one hundred key journals in US and Canadian history and related fields. The database also includes citations to abstracts of dissertations published in these areas.

Specialized Databases of Art History

Grove - Oxford Art Online
Types of articles include artist biographies, surveys of art by location, artistic styles, schools and movements; art patronage, and materials and techniques. Articles are peer reviewed. There are multiple ways to search (artist, subject, digital images). The online Dictionary is updated frequently.  Corresponds to and updates the 34-volume Dictionary of Art published in 1996.  The multi-volume set is located at Reference 703 D581, Smith Library Center.

Click here for a Guided Tour of Oxford Art Online.  

 

Spanish painter Diego de Silva y Velázquez (1599-1660) was one of the most renowned artists of the Baroque era.  

Spanish Artists from the Fourth to the Twentieth Century: A Critical Dictionary
Provided by the Frick Art Reference Library: A dictionary providing essential bibliographic information on more than 5,000 Spanish artists, including comprehensive lists of alternate forms of artist surnames. Since its first publication in 1996, it has been widely acclaimed not only as a valuable reference tool but also as a thorough review of scholarly opinion regarding the artistic identities of numerous anonymous masters.  A list of sources  (references) you can use when researching your artists.  

The Dictionary links to WorldCat, allowing researchers to locate items held at Southwestern or worldwide related to a particular artists.  Free access.

 

Art & Art History Resource : ArtSTOR

The ArtStor Digital Library is a resource containing over 2 million images from the world's museums, archives, libraries, scholars, and artists. Use Artstor to find images for papers, presentations, and study in the humanities. There's also a set of tools for sharing images, curating groups of images, downloading them directly into powerpoint presentations, and comparing and contrasting images.  Click here for further information.

Library Catalogs

Frank  Smith Library Center  WorldCat Library Search
Use WorldCat to locate materials outside of Southwestern, in almost any area of study, or to locate items in specific libraries and research collections. Numerous records of books and other materials held in thousands of  academic, public, special and national libraries around the world. Be sure to use the Advanced Search to narrow down results.

 

 

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.