Library Guides: Art (Contemporary): Biographical Dictionaries

Short Bios on an Artist or Designer – Top Pick

Oxford Art Online
Try this first. This huge electronic encyclopedia of art contains thousands of authoritative and well-documented biographies of artists, architects, and designers of all eras and cultures. Often links to illustrations.

Oxford Art Online combines several key encyclopedias and dictionaries important for the history of art and architecture. Together these provide the largest and most authoritative list of biographies of artists in English, as well as an excellent collection of scholarly encyclopedia articles on important topics in the visual arts. Included are Grove Art Online, the Benezit Dictionary of Artists, the Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, and others.

Search Engines

Of course you can often find short bios by entering an artist’s name in a search engine and these can work fine if you examine them carefully. In general, the biographies posted by major museums, art galleries, and artists themselves, are of a higher quality than those provided by the many commercial sites such as Artcyclopedia, AskArt, Artnet, etc. Accuracy varies. Web bios for historic figures are frequently copied from public domain (pre-1923) sources.

Indexes to Biographical Dictionaries

Since there are so many biographical dictionaries to choose from, indexes have been designed to show you exactly which dictionary will contain a biography of your artist. There are 2 indexes that cover arts people.

Try them in this order:

Biography and Genealogy Master Index
Type someone’s name and get the name of a paper biographical dictionary. Then check Advanced LionSearch to see if we have that particular biographical dictionary.

An index (not full text resource) to biographical information about influential people worldwide, both living and historical. Lists the contents of readily available current reference books as well as major reference works from the past. It currently has over 10 million references, with about 450,000 new ones added annually. See the Gale Web site for additional information and copyright statement. Coverage: Current edition. Updates: Continuous.

Artists of the World: Bio-Bibliographical Index A-Z
Works like the Biography and Genealogy Master Index (above) but entirely on paper. Biggest list of names of historic artists & designers ever. (Find a painting in your attic? Check the name here.) Decode the abbreviations in the front of each volume.

Special Types of Art People

Art Writers:

Dictionary of Art Historians
Bios and bibliography on the most famous historians of art and architecture. (Open access!)

Art: Key Contemporary Thinkers
90 important theorists
Key Writers on Art
Historians and critics

Curators, Educators, Gallerists, Critics, etc.

The most recent volumes of these are not covered in indexes and must be checked separately: