Art history: beginning research

Last Updated: 2-Mar-2015

As with any specialized discipline, art history bears its own literature, its own writing and publishing conventions, its own methodologies, and its own theoretical trends. This guide is meant to serve as an introduction for students who are new to the field. Standard sources for researching works of art in the Cantor Arts Center and Anderson Collection begin this guide. What follows includes lists of survey texts, basic texts treating specific topics within art history (Modern art, Asian art, etc.), and writing and style guides. It also includes an introduction to the various literature types: exhibition catalogs, catalogues raisonné, collection catalogs, monographs, artists' books and ephemera. The last section of this guide provides tips for researching a work of art and concludes with a list of art databases.

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Peter P Blank

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Art & Architecture Library

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Cantor Arts Center

Cantor collections database

Anderson Collection

Cantor and Anderson collections

In doing research for objects in the Cantor Arts Center, begin with a search in the Cantor Collections Database . Many object records include bibliographical references which will lead to more information about your object.
For the Anderson Collection, these two collection catalogs will help you get started:

Call numbers

Subject headings

The Stanford University Libraries--like most libraries in the U.S. and even globally--use Library of Congress Subject Headings as their means of categorizing books according to subject in a standardized way (referred to as "controlled vocabulary"). Catalogers assign these headings using prescribed rules for format, but their actual choices of headings are based on their personal understanding of a book's subject. What this means is that searching on a single subject heading will almost never retrieve all of the books a library owns on that subject. Therefore it's often good to experiment and see what other related headings exist and to look at the headings that have been assigned to a book you want to find more like. The Library of Congress provides a discussion of subject headings here.

Tips for searching SearchWorks using subject headings:

If you are reviewing a record in SearchWorks and find one of its subject headings useful, simply use it as a hyperlink. But keep in mind: catalogers often augment subject headings by adding subheadings that make them more specific--e.g., a geographical term, a time period, a format. Where you click on a subject heading's link will determine how much of the compound term is included in your new search.

Try it: Architecture > Composition, proportion, etc. > Textbooks.

If you don't know the specific subject you're looking for but have a general idea of what it might be, start by restricting your search to the Subject field. Then pick some terms that you think might appear in the subject heading of an item you'd be interested in.

Try it: If you're looking for books about the depiction of women in Medieval art, simply try typing the keywords "women," "Medieval," and "art" into the Subject search box. Here is the result. Open a few records and look at the subject headings. Notice that often one keyword belongs to one heading, while a second keyword belongs to another. Subject headings tend to work well in combination, since books' topics can be quite complex.

Literature types

Monographs

A monograph is a text that is dedicated to a specific subject. In art history this might be an artist or a segment of an artist's career, a genre, a location, or a theme. Monographs are usually of significant length and based upon extensive research; because of this, they are often a good source of in-depth, focused discussion. They can have a single author or multiple authors; they can be a single text or an edited anthology. Their bibliographies and works cited lists are also valuable, as they provide sources for further or related reading.

Examples at the Library:

Collections of essays and interviews

Books dedicated to specific subjects, themes, or artists need not be written by one person. It is very common for editors to solicit and/or anthologize essays by various authors and publish them in a group. This is true, too, for interviews or statements by an artist(s): editors may compile materials created over a period of time into a single volume.

Examples at the Library:

Catalogues raisonnés

A catalogue raisonné is a collection of every work in an artist's œuvre, or of every work by an artist in one specific medium. In addition to ample illustrations, catalogues raisonnés typically contain each work's dates, media and dimenions, provenance (sales and ownership history), and reproduction/publication history. To search for these works in Stanford's online catalog, search the artist's name as a subject (last name first). Catalogues raisonnés are often (though not always) specified by their own subheading, e.g.: "O'Keeffe, Georgia, 1887-1986--Catalogues raisonnés." Other times, unfortunately, they may "hide" in the online catalog under the less accurate subheading "Catalogs."

Examples:

Exhibition catalogs

Exhibition catalogs are texts that accompany the exhibition of an artist's, or artists', works at a museum or gallery. They vary widely in their contents and structure: some contain extensive critical texts and plentiful reproductions, others simply a list of the works on display. These catalogs can be useful for finding extensive information about specific artworks, for gaining an understanding of an artist's critical reception at a particular point in his or her artistic development, and for obtaining a sense of the prevalence of current themes in art historical research. It is through exhibitions and their catalogs that much of the most in-depth and/or innovative art historical thought is presented. Often the only difference between an exhibition catalog and a monograph is that the former relates to a physical presentation of work while the latter does not.

Examples:

Collection catalogs

Museums, foundations, and collectors often publish volumes that list and describe some or all of their holdings (an artist, era, or theme being a common focus). These works, referred to as collection catalogs, tend to contain information similar to that in a catalogue raisonné: medium, dimensions, provenance, and reproduction/publication history. Images, descriptive text, and critical discussion typically accompany entries or groups of entries. It is not uncommon for collection catalogs to take the form of exhibition catalogs.

Examples:

Essays and articles

As with most academic disciplines, the literature of art history is published not only in books, but also in shorter articles. These articles can address similar topics as those covered in monographs and catalog essays; the main differences are their length, the speed with which they are published, and the methods through which they can be discovered. Whereas books are discoverable in a library catalog (SearchWorks), individual articles must be searched in databases dedicated to periodical literature. Journal names, or the titles of books of collected essays, can be searched in a library catalog; the individual articles within a journal or book usually cannot.

Examples at the Library:

Artists' books and ephemera

Since the nineteenth century many artists have been creating what one might call "artists' books," books created as artworks in themselves, the forms and formats being integral to the works' meanings. These are not books about artists, but, as primary sources, tools for understanding artists' working methods at a particular time. The term "ephemera" is broad, but in the current context it can refer particularly to such items as exhibition posters and postcards.

Examples:

Introductory surveys

In addition to individual annotations, the following provides a summary of three main introductory surveys. The Gardner surveys are more textbook-like than Janson. The 14th edition of the Gardner Global History book provides a lot of information in a readily accessible form. Both Gardner and Janson include supplemental information on material and technique, include timelines and lengthy bibliographies. Janson includes snippets of primary source texts and a methodology feature called The Art Historian’s Lens. One might characterize Janson as the more “scholarly” and Gardner as more yeoman-like. Stokstad is geared for the undergraduate student without any previous knowledge of art history.

Eighth edition, rewritten and reorganized. Includes a chapter on Islamic art and its relationship to Western art. Focus is on the object and on its creator. This edition maintains an organization along the lines established by Janson, with separate chapters on the Northern European Renaissance, Italian Renaissance, High Renaissance, and Baroque art, with broad stylistic divisions for the modern era, e.g. The Age of Positivism: Realism, Impressionism, and the Pre-Raphaelites, 1848-1885. Chapters include short features entitled The Art Historian’s Lens to provide an understanding of art historical methods. Lengthy bibliography.

Subject-specific surveys

Writing about art

Less a how-to guide for the writer than a pocket size philosophy of art history. Useful for students who want to better understand the field: its history, its questions, its objects, its writers. The book raises and addresses the following questions: What is Art History, Who were its foundational writers and what did they say, How is art displayed and why does this matter, What have philosophers said about art, How does a work produce meaning. In the process, the book exposes and seeks to remedy art history as 'western art as seen through the male gaze' (i.e. a diverse selection of images).

This guide is more advanced than Sayre's in that it provides a larger conceptual vocabulary to write about art--explaining how to do not only formal analysis (color, line, space, etc) but also contextual anaylsis (how to cosnider the role of museums, culture). Like Sayre, D'Alleva provides a step by step guide to beginning, researching (and finishing!) an art history essay but also a unique chapter on how to do well on art history exams and a chapter on the history of art history itself. The excerpts of art historical writing included in each chapter are particularly instructive.

Often the assigned guide for AAH courses at Stanford, this all-inclusive book explains just about everything for the beginning writer in Art History: from what it means to interpret a work of art to how to include an image in an essay, how to avoid eurocentric language and how to pursue research on the web. It also defines and models theoretical approaches to bring to a work of art and explains how to write other genres in the field (exhibition catalog entry, review of an exhibition..). Barnet's inclusion of student writing throughout the guide are particularly helpful for illustrating points. While a bit tough to read because there's so much on each page, this books does seem to have it all.

Chicago and MLA style guides

Many instructors require the Chicago Manual of Style for your citations, specifically the bibliography style, commonly used in the humanities. The clearest explanation of the Chicago bibliography style is Kate Turabian's A Manual for Writers of Research Papers, Theses, and Dissertations.

1. Finding citation style references in SearchWorks: Once you have retrieved a search result and are examining individual records in SearchWorks (click on the title within a results listing to get to that record), note that there is a "Cite this" link above the title. Click on the link to see the proper Chicago or MLA bibliography style for that title. Similarly, if you use the "Select" box to save records, when you click on the "Selected Items" link to see the titles you've marked, a "Cite items" link appears above your saved items and shows the proper citation style for the works you've saved.

2. Finding citation style references in databases: Both the EBSCO Host (Art Full Text, Art Retrospective, AnthropologyPlus) and ProQuest (Artbibliographies Modern, International Bibliography of Art) interfaces have similar "Cite" links.

3. Additional examples of how to cite art literature using Chicago: The Duke University Art Library has created a guide, Style Examples in Every Format for Art History on how to cite various types of art literature using the Chicago style, giving the citations in both bibliography and footnote form.

4. Purdue University's guide, Purdue OWL: MLA Style, provides examples for both the bibiography and footnote form, as well as a more general introduction to MLA style.

Researching a work of art

While you might assume that most works of art have been extensively researched and published, in fact the opposite is true. Famous works, such as Edward Hopper's Nighthawks (1942; Art Institute of Chicago), Picasso's Guernica (1937; Museo Reina Sofia), or Ansel Adams's "Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico" (1941) are well documented in the literature of art history. But lesser known works are often not published at all, thus requiring you to engage in original research--not a simple task. The following tips will help you find pull all of the above-mentioned literature types together in order to research a work of art.

Generally speaking, books are not written on works of art, but on artists. In SearchWorks, search on your artist's name, not the work of art. Within the book, look for references on works similar to the one you are writing on, from the same time period, with similar subject matter, and so on. Using the information you've found on these related works, begin writing your own narrative about the work you are focusing on. If your artist is famous and you retrieve too many results, you may also want to limit your search results to titles in English using the Language facet in the left column in the SearchWorks display.

When looking for books in SearchWorks, pay special attention if the book is an exhibition catalog, which is the publication that accompanies a museum or art gallery exhibition of the artist's work. You especially want to look for large museum exhibition catalogs which cover an artist's entire career (aka, a "retrospective" exhibition catalog), or which focus on the specific period your art work is from. Look in the SearchWorks record for specific information on the book. "Retrospective" is sometimes used in the subtitle of the catalog, which may be 200+ or 300+ pages.

If there are no books on your artist, look for books on the artistic school your artist is associated with, or your artist's time period. To discover this information, go to Oxford Art Online, an excellent art encyclopedia. Search on your artist's name, and based on the contextual information you find on your artist, go back to SearchWorks and try another round of searches.

Generally speaking, articles or essays are more likely to be written about specific works, or specific periods. Use the "Art databases" listing below to search for journal articles and essays on your artist. You might want to search on your artist's name and a keyword from the title of the work. If that yields no results, just search on the artist's name. As in SearchWorks, you can limit your search results to writings in English.

If you find yourself discovering too much in your searches (hundreds and hundreds of results), focus your search by adding another search keyword. If you are finding too few (none???), you may have entered too many search terms. Also, try variations on your search terms -- tulips, flowers, blooms, etc.

If you continue to have difficulty with your research, please come see one of the Art librarians shown at the right. Just walk into the Art & Architecture Library (preferably Monday-Friday, 9-5) and ask for assistance.

Art databases

This list of databases will lead you to articles, essays in collected works, exhibition catalogs, etc., in the literature of art history. The first title listed is an online art encyclopedia that may provide general information about your artist, the artist's time period or school, or the theme or subject of your art work.

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Art history: beginning research

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Cantor and Anderson collections

Call numbers

Subject headings