As an art historian, I spend countless hours doing research about art and architecture in order to write my articles and courses. The average art lover also has plenty of reasons to research art – such as wanting to learn more about something you saw in a museum, understand current art-world news, or prepare for an art-viewing trip. Maybe you even stumbled upon this article in the midst of an art research adventure already in progress.
No matter your reasons, I think you can benefit from my hard-won experience in this area. In this article, I give you advice about topics like choosing quality sources, thinking critically about what you read, and tackling hard-to-research topics. Plus, I outline the potential sources available to you and provide suggestions for expanding your research.
Important note: If you are researching art for a school project, make sure to carefully follow your professor’s guidelines, because the rules for what sources you can use will be stricter than what I’ve used here. If you’re researching artwork you own, please remember that art attribution and appraisal are not DIY activities. You should always speak to a professional, like an appraiser or art dealer, when making decisions (especially financial ones) about the future of any artwork. Please see my disclaimers for more information.
How to Choose Your Sources
The information you discover will only be as good as the sources it comes from. There’s no point in spending time and energy doing research if you can’t rely on the accuracy of what you learn. Ideally, a good source should have a few key qualities.
- It has to discuss your subject, which sounds obvious but is not always easy. If your topic is obscure enough, you may have so few options that this is the only consideration.
- It has to present the information in a way that’s accessible to you, meaning in your language and at your knowledge level. For example, you won’t want an academic text filled with jargon if you’re new to the field. Plus, you have to be able to access the source, either physically or digitally.
- Your sources need to line up with your goals. Specific queries require more specialized sources than general questions. For example, a survey book may give you a great overview of a style but probably won’t help you understand the symbolism in a particular artwork. A book that only mentions your specific artist once won’t be much help, either.
- Most importantly, you should evaluate your sources to make sure they are reliable and trustworthy. The best thing I can tell you is to trust professional art historians with relevant credentials and/or association with a respected museum, university, gallery, or publishing house – not enthusiastic amateurs. Although it’s not always necessary in casual research, having sources that cite their own sources (tell us where they got their information), either through footnotes or less formal means, is a huge plus.
Whenever possible, choose art-specific sources over more general ones. Art-focused books, articles, and websites written by knowledgeable art writers are more likely to give you useful information and get all the details correct. Plus, the art-related meaning of a term or concept may be slightly different from the general usage. Stay away from AI-generated content, which can’t distinguish good information from bad. And keep in mind that search engines don’t always prioritize the best and most reliable sources, either.
Sources Overview
Museums
Reputable, informative, and designed to be accessible to non-specialists, art museum websites are your best friends. Nobody knows more about an artwork than the museum who owns it, which is why museum websites should be your first stop on any quest to understand a specific object. Visit the tab called “art”, “collections’, or “explore”, and you’ll have the option to search for the artwork by name or filter by qualities (like culture or medium) to find the artwork you want. Don’t use the main website search bar, because that won’t always search the actual collection for you. This process should eventually take you to a page dedicated to the artwork in question. In addition to written information, you may also find links to more museum content mentioning this piece, such as blog posts, videos, and ebooks. If you don’t see any references to additional resources, maybe try putting the work’s title in the main website search bar.
Books
There are art books for all different topics, audiences, and purposes – from general overviews to highly sophisticated and specialized works. It takes more effort to get a book than to browse a website, but it’s worth it because you can learn so much more from them.
Exhibition catalogs are a special type of book, common in art history, that expand on the themes of museum exhibitions. While they are not always written in an engaging or beginner-friendly style, you can learn a lot from them. No matter how unusual your topic, there is probably an exhibition catalog that discusses it in detail. Unfortunately, it may not be easy to get your hands on if it’s old or obscure.
Libraries and secondhand booksellers often stock art books (the selection, though, is varied), and libraries can usually get you specific titles upon request. Some museums, such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, make some of their publications available for free to read online. Art books are easy to purchase online, though new copies of exhibition catalogs in particular are generally not cheap.
Websites
Auction house and art gallery websites publish high-quality yet accessible content about the works they offer for sale. Entries are generally on the shorter end but still sophisticated enough to satisfy savvy buyers. They can be especially helpful when researching artists not well represented in museums.
There are plenty of art, history, culture, or encyclopedia-type websites that will give you decent information. However, I wouldn’t go so far as to say they’re always totally accurate. It really depends on the particular website, article, and writer. For this reason, such websites are not my first choices as sources – with a few exceptions noted in the next two paragraphs – and I like to evaluate their credibility and information carefully.
SmartHistory is my favorite history reference. It’s a massive, totally free online textbook of global art history that includes both written and video content. Because SmartHistory is produced by art history professors and written by experts, I feel confident about the information I find there. The Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History, a free online art encyclopedia produced by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, is another go-to reference for me.
The Art Newspaper and Apollo are two of the most prominent and reputable art-specific periodicals out there. Both allow non-subscribers to read a few free articles per month online. While they certainly have their own points of view, I trust their content to be accurate and informed.
Other sources
Academic articles are written by scholars for scholars, which means they are not aimed at casual audiences. Because they are very specialized, however, you may be able to find topics mentioned in them that don’t appear much elsewhere. Sign up for a free account at Jstor, which will let you read 100 articles per month but not save or print them.
Primary sources are writings dating from the artist’s lifetime, like newspaper articles, letters, and exhibition reviews. Some have been published in books or archived online. While they wouldn’t be my first choice for casual research, primary sources can be useful when secondary (more recent) sources haven’t been sufficient.
I’m not a fan of using mainstream news sources for art research. (Remember my advice to prioritize art-specific sources.) However, newspapers, magazines, and websites with arts sections written by art-specialized authors and critics are much more reliable. Examples include The New York Times and The Guardian. I believe most of their art content is online-only these days.
Wikipedia is not a quality source, but the footnotes and other links at the bottom of each page can point you towards more reliable references. I typically use this when my go-to sources are failing me.
Be a Thinking Reader
In art history like in anything else, don’t be a passive reader. Think critically about the information you uncover. The best way to do that is to use more than one source in order to get multiple perspectives. For each one, ask yourself:
- Who is this author and why should I believe them? (Meaning: do they have expertise in this area?)
- Are their arguments convincing, and how do they back them up? (This is when articles citing their sources becomes especially important.)
- Does this author paint the subject in broad strokes, or do they acknowledge the complexities within art history? Because it studies the products of human intellect and creativity, art history is full of nuance. While generalization definitely has its benefits, it don’t give us the full picture. (All puns in this paragraph are not intended but fully acknowledged.)
- How old is this source? Are there newer ones I could use instead? Some older texts are still gold standards, while others have been superseded. Unfortunately, there’s no easy way to tell which is which.
- What audience is this source written for and what does it aim to provide them? Do these answers line up with you and your interests? For example, an article designed to introduce an artist’s dramatic life story to those who’ve never heard of her isn’t the best source for someone already knows her work but want to clarify a few points about her technique.
- Does anything I’m reading here disagree with something I’ve read before?
Art history is subjective. Methodologies differ, and scholarly understanding is always changing; thus, it’s inevitable that sources won’t always totally agree. One isn’t necessarily “wrong” or untrustworthy. In this situation, you can think carefully and decide which arguments are more convincing to you, or you can choose to simply acknowledge that there’s uncertainty. Just don’t fall into the trap of assuming that whatever you read first is most correct.
It’s particularly important to be a discerning reader of information you’ve found online, where everybody wants to weigh in on subjects they don’t fully understand. This is especially true when an event like a major auction result, new attribution, or controversy captures the attention of the wider world. Also, be suspicious when you see the same “fact” repeated over and over again online without any indication of where it originated. You may be seeing the results of the snowball effect that can occur when enough people don’t do their homework and just repeat the same questionable fact because it comes up first in their web search.
Expanding Your Research
While your goal may be to explore a particular artwork, you’ll always learn more by going beyond that. After all, this is exactly what most art history courses do – use individual artworks to teach bigger ideas. Plus, not every artwork has a lot written about it, so you’ll have to expand your search to related ideas in order to discover much of substance.
If you can find a solid entry for the artwork on a museum, gallery, or auction house website or in an exhibition catalog, it will usually provide you with plenty of information to fuel further exploration. Look for things like:
- The artist
- The time period and place of the artwork’s creation
- What categories, styles, or movements the artwork fits into
- The subject matter
- The materials and techniques used
- The artwork’s original function
- Other related people and ideas
- Any keywords or tags used in association with this artwork
Additionally, such entries often provide lists of exhibitions an artwork has been in and a bibliography of books and articles discussing it. See if you can access any of the texts, and search for websites, videos, and reviews pertaining to these exhibitions. These are really valuable leads. When you’re researching an artist or artwork who isn’t well known, finding even one or two of these references can be a real lifeline.
Hard to Research Topics
Some topics are easier to research than others. Artists and styles with worldwide acclaim will garner seemingly endless search results, while lesser-known topics may hardly get any hits at all. The latter can be frustrating and challenging, but it doesn’t have to be totally hopeless.
For one thing, it’s best to start at the source. In most categories, you’ll usually find the largest concentration of artworks in museums within the style’s region of origin. And this is even more true with types of art that don’t have major international appeal. Thus, you’ll want to concentrate your initial efforts on websites from museums in the geographic areas where this art originates. I absolutely recognize that sometimes a region’s most important treasures reside elsewhere, often because of the colonial past. However, I still maintain that there’s huge value in going to the source to learn about these artworks.
Exhibition catalogs are good possibilities, too. It’s not at all uncommon for museums to host loan exhibitions relating to areas of art not well-represented in their own collections. Also, look to book series like Thames & Hudson World of Art or Oxford History of Art (see my post on art history books for more about these titles), as well as Smarthistory and the Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. All of them cover a wider than usual range of topics.
For lesser-known artists, the challenge is often that most of their works are in private collections, so they aren’t well represented in museums and their websites. In these cases, the websites of galleries and auction houses might give better results if they have sold the artist’s works. Primary sources may also be good options, but you might have to take whatever random blog posts you can get. Sometimes, there’s just not a lot of good information out there, and all you can do is accept what you find.
Happy researching and good luck!
Featured image: Rembrandt van Rijn, Woman Reading. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. (Public Domain/CC0)
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