Basic Art History referenceBasic research can help find topics for papers and presentations by providing additional search terms and ideas for more specific research.
Books
The traditional art history textbooks are a good way to put artists and movements in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries into context. All three of these books are available for checkout in the Emporia Library.
- H. W. Janson's History of Art
- Marilyn Stokstad's Art History
- Gardner's Art Through the Ages
Online databases
An excellent general art reference resource can also be accessed online through the Emporia Library databases if you look under the subject Arts and Humanities databases. Oxford Art Online database includes
This database includes biographies of artists and timelines of art movements and styles. Most of the articles have extensive bibliographies and links to other sources that can help you with research topics. (All three of the Oxford Art Online resources mentioned above are also available in book form in the library.)
This is an another good reference database which is a compendium of full-text online reference works that includes encyclopedias and dictionaries. It also appears under the General Reference section of the Emporia databases, but has extensive material on art movements and artists. A helpful feature is that once you open an article found during your search, Credo provides links to other databases and sources that are related to the topic. For instance, JSTOR (which provides full-text access to hundreds of academic journals) appears as a link to the left of the article in Credo; when clicked, articles relating to that search will be listed. Credo has a feature that will create a dynamic "concept map" of the search term used.
Reference books for library use only in the reference area of the Emporia Library
The Oxford Companion to Western Art
Grove Dictionary of Art appears in several volumes in the reference area, including
- From Monet to Cézanne: late 19th-century French artists
- From expressionism to post modernism: styles and movements in 20th-century Western art
- A History of Modern Art: Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture
- Modern Art: Impressionism to Post-Modernism
- A Dictionary of Modern and Contemporary Art
- contains essays about modern artists (famous and unsung), collectors, and critics, and explanations of art movements and styles. Most entries include references for further reading.