InfoGuides: Art History: Find Books & Exhibition Catalogs

Scholarly books and catalogs are the primary form of scholarship and writing in art history.

Scholarly monograph: books on a single subject published by university presses
Catalogs: overviews of a body of work (an exhibition) or all the known works of an artist (catalogues raisonnées)

Find Books & Book Reviews

Mason Libraries Search
Search for books, articles, films, music, and more, available at Mason.
TIP: change your search from "Mason Articles + More" to "WRLC Catalogs" in order to search for & borrow books from libraries beyond Mason.

WorldCat Discovery
If you're struggling to find materials through Mason Libraries or WRLC, you can search in Worldcat to identify books on a topic (available at other libraries), then use interlibrary loan to request those books.
HathiTrust
HathiTrust provides access to millions of historic and public domain materials, scanned from the collections of research libraries. This is an excellent source for finding copies of pre-20th century books and journals.
Historical Abstracts
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Provides English language abstracts of scholarly literature from 1955 to present (journal articles, articles in collections, dissertations, book reviews) on world history from 1450, excluding North America. Note: with full-text links to 420,000 journals on JSTOR.
View a tutorial on this database here.

Find Exhibition Catalogs & Artist Catalogs

What are catalogs?
How to find catalogs

When doing research in the arts, you may encounter and rely on the use of various kinds of catalogs. These publications serve different purposes, and can include:

Exhibition Catalogs: include images and essays from specific exhibitions. Exhibitions might focus on a particular topic/subject or artist, and these catalogs can help you to understand in what context artworks have been shown and discussed by curators and scholars.
Catalogues raisonnés: Catalogues raisonnés are the collected works of an individual artist or studio, and might be organized by medium (e.g. drawing, painting), subject/theme, or time period.

To search for exhibition or artist catalogs at Mason, use the library's Advanced Search features:

Select "Mason Catalog" at the top (this limits the results to only books/ebooks in the library)
Change "Any Field" to "Subject", and enter your artist's name.
On the next line, enter the kind of catalog you want to find (e.g., "exhibition catalogs," "catalogues raisonnes", or just "catalogs")
- Example: ai weiwei "exhibition catalogs"
- Example: artemisia gentileschi "catalogue raisonne"

Screenshot of Mason Libraries catalog search, example of search for "judy chicago" and "catalogs"