Research Guides: #Art, Art History, & Art Appreciation: Overviews &amp; Starting Points

Background Info: Browse Around

These sources are not scholarly.

They're good enough for casual exploration and to give you ideas and search terms to take into deeper research.

Smarthistory
Videos and essays which cover art that ranges from the paleolithic to the present.
Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History
Use this timeline from the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City to learn about art in different geographical regions and time periods.
ARTnews
ARTnews reports on the art, people, issues, trends, and events shaping the international art world.
The Art Story
Provides summary pages for artists, movements, and concepts.

Oxford Art Online This link opens in a new window
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Full-text art reference (including Grove Art, but not Benezit Dictionary of Artists) covering all visual arts from prehistory to present. Many images included along with articles providing overviews of artists, movements, periods, and places.
Contains links to 5,000 images the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA), Art Images for College Teaching (AICT), and the Artists Rights Society and text from Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, The Oxford Companion to Western Art, and The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Art Terms.
Credo Reference This link opens in a new window
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Useful when you're starting out on a research project. Do simple searches to find topic introductions in a variety of subjects. The mind map tool will help you discover related ideas and terms.

Thames and Hudson Dictionary of Art Terms by Edward Lucie-Smith
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Collection: Credo Reference (unlimited access)
Published: 2013
Covers painting, sculpture, architecture, photography, the decorative, applied and graphic arts from all periods throughout the world up to the present day: there is even a table of the dynasties of Ancient Greece, Ancient Egypt, China, India and Japan.
Critical Terms for Art History by Robert S. Nelson (Editor); Richard Shiff (Editor)
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Collection: Credo Reference (unlimited users)
This edition consists of essays that cover a wide variety of "loaded" terms in the history of art, from sign to meaning, ritual to commodity. Each essay explains and comments on a single term, discussing the issues the term raises and putting the term into practice as an interpretive framework for a specific work of art.
Universal Principles of Art: 100 Key Concepts for Understanding, Analyzing, and Practicing Art by John A. Parks
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Collection: Ebook Central (unlimited users)
ISBN: 9781631590306
Published: 2014
A comprehensive reference for all artists, covering principles that involve both techniques and concepts in art-making, covering everything from the idea of beauty to glazing techniques to geometric ideas in composition to minimalist ideology.