How to Research an Artist: Internet Resources

A comprehensive database of artists and their works. Users can search the website by an artist’s name, the name of an artistic work, or for a particular art museum.

Search the world's most comprehensive index of full-text books.

​Features the world’s leading galleries, museum collections, foundations, artist estates, art fairs, and benefit auctions, all in one place.

Contains articles on artists, movements, and times periods that were central to modern art.​

Photographers’ Identities Catalog (PIC) is an experimental interface to a collection of biographical data describing photographers, studios, manufacturers, and others involved in the production of photographic images. Consisting of names, nationalities, dates, locations and more, PIC is a vast and growing resource for the historian, student, genealogist, or any lover of photography's history. The information has been culled from trusted biographical dictionaries, catalogs and databases, and from extensive original research by NYPL Photography Collection staff.

Explore over 8,000 Documents of 20th and 21st⁠-⁠century art in Latin America, the Caribbean, and among US Latino communities.

The Latin American and Caribbean Contemporary Art Web Archive is a collection developed by the Ivy Plus Libraries Confederation's Art & Architecture Librarians, and is an extension of an existing effort focused on collecting publications in all formats that document contemporary art and artists of Latin America and the Caribbean. The agreement defines contemporary art as it refers to 'developments in the visual arts from 1975 to the present,' with material sought 'for the entire career of artists who have been active at any time since 1975.' This archive aims to preserve for researchers the personal and official websites belonging to notable contemporary Latin American and Caribbean artists, artists’ collectives, artists’ groups, galleries, museums, and related entities in order to assure the continuing availability of the important content they contain.

​The Archives of American Art is the world’s preeminent and most widely used research center dedicated to collecting, preserving, and providing access to primary sources that document the history of the visual arts in America.

The Getty provides access to the Bibliography of the History of Art (BHA) and to the Répertoire international de la littérature de l'art (RILA) for no charge on its website. These citation databases, searchable together, cover material published between 1975 and 2007. For material published after 2007 see the International Bibliography of Art (IBA).

The Getty Research Portal is an online platform providing global access to digitized art history texts. The Portal is comprised of catalog records that link to full, digitized texts hosted by the contributing institutions or their service providers.

The Met presents over 5,000 years of art from around the world for everyone to experience and enjoy.

Pairs essays and works of art with chronologies, telling the story of art and global culture through the Museum’s collection.

Via archive.org: Digitized Highlights from the Collections of Hilla Rebay and Juliana Force - A Collaborative Project Between the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and the Whitney Museum of American Art. This collection contains digitized versions of key selections from the personal libraries of two women who helped shape the mid-century New York art world— Hilla Rebay at the Guggenheim (then the Museum of Non-Objective Painting) and Juliana Force at the Whitney.