Close
Close
This guide provides information on resources in the Fine Art and History of Art subject areas.
Find out more about print and online books and journals, audio visual databases, special collections of artists' books and magazines, how-to videos, and details of further training available through LibrarySkills@UCL.
Getting started: new to UCL? Try our online library induction to find out how to use our libraries and access all the resources you will need for your course.
Image: Jitterbugs (II), William H. Johnson, ca. 1941. Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Mrs. Douglas E. Younger
In The Human in Bits, Kris Cohen examines black abstractionist painting to demonstrate how race and computation are intimately entangled with the personal computer's graphic user interface. He shows how the personal computer and the graphical field of its screen meant to transform the human by transforming what environments humans were to labor in. It also provided the means for whiteness to tie itself to notions of colorblind meritocracy. Cohen focuses on the post-1960s experiments of black abstractionists Alma Thomas, Jack Whitten, Charles Gaines, and Julie Mehretu, who developed a nonrepresentational approach to blackness that was oriented more toward constraint than human expression.
These striking studio portraits, curated and brought together following ten years of research championed by Autograph, constitute the most comprehensive collection of nineteenth-century photography depicting the Black subject in the Victorian era, including some of the earliest known images of Black people photographed in Britain. The historically marginalized lives of both ordinary and prominent Black figures of African, Afro-Caribbean, South Asian, and mixed heritage are seen through a prism of curatorial advocacy and experimental scholarly assemblage. Black Chronicles features high quality reproductions of plate negatives, cartes de visite, and cabinet cards, many of which were buried deep in various private and public archives including the Hulton Archive's remarkable London Stereoscopic Company collection, unseen for decades. These photographs are linked with imperial and colonial narratives through newly commissioned essays and rare lecture transcripts, in-conversation and text interventions.
Thinking Women represents state-of-the-art feminist scholarship in the field of eighteenth-century French and British art and visual culture. Topics range from women and their activities in art and science, to gendered representations of childhood and animals to fashion, femininity and temporality. Some chapters center on individual genres like hunting portraits, or on specific paintings, such as David Martin's Portrait of Dido Elizabeth Belle and Lady Elizabeth Murray (ca. 1780) or Marie Guillemine Benoist's Portrait of a Young Black Woman (Madeleine) (1800). Others make contributions on the work of familiar actors like Jean-Siméon Chardin or Élisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun. The volume also brings to the fore lesser-known figures including Marie-Thérèse Reboul, Madeleine Basseporte, Marguerite Le Comte, and Gabrielle Capet.
The first retrospective monograph for a legendary feminist artist and pedagogue who taught generations of artists at CalArts Accompanying the first retrospective exhibition showcasing three decades of work from Millie Wilson (born 1948), this publication delves into the influential, yet under-recognized, artist and educator whose work has deftly examined feminism, queerness and their historical erasure from art institutions. Her work joins 1980s postmodernism with the personally and politically charged conceptualism of the 1990s, reflecting a particularly unruly conception of queerness that emerged in California during these decades.
Contemporaneous with the Pop art movement, Chicago Imagism can be characterized as warm and wacky--a stark contrast to the cooler, more aloof styles in New York and London. The Imagist movement (a term coined by art historian Franz Schulze in 1972) was propelled by a core group of artists--all graduates of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago--that exhibited their work together as The Hairy Who between 1966 and 1968 at the Hyde Park Art Center on Chicago's South Side. Though each artist had their own fiercely unique style, they shared a similar interest in popular culture, comics and material objects.
In A Reprise, David Alekhuogie remixes Walker Evans's photographs of African art, provoking timely questions about authorship and authenticity. A Reprise, David Alekhuogie's first monograph, confronts the intriguing legacy of narrative and authorship behind Western presentations of African art, and poses timely questions about how Black aesthetics are circulated, accessed, valued, and interpreted today. In 1935, Walker Evans was commissioned by the Museum of Modern Art, New York, to photograph hundreds of African sculptures for the exhibition African Negro Art. Nearly ninety years later, Alekhuogie began investigating Evans's images, provocatively remixing them into his own vibrant and multilayered photographic collages.
For four decades, the legendary painter Wayne Thiebaud taught, passionately, at the University of California Davis, until retiring aged 70. As a teacher, Thiebaud had introduced thousands of undergraduates to the delights of great art and art making. Thiebaud still refers to exercises he would assign his students when explaining the dynamics of his own works. Here, collected for the first time, are student records of Thiebaud's famous lectures, which include Beginning Drawing, Descriptive Drawing, Life Drawing, Beginning Painting, Printmaking, and Theory and Criticism. These lecture notes are, apart from everything else, delightful and vibrant.
Combining representation and abstraction, Abney's vibrant works reference gender, sexuality and pop culture Committed to sharing social realities through fantastic, expansive forms, Nina Chanel Abney is an artist possessed of an iconic style and wit. Through stylized, cubistic and highly charged painterly symbols, she references radical traditions of graphic design and street art to communicate urgent political and cultural realities with immediacy to the largest possible audience. Abney's paintings and collages use dynamic color and form to draw viewers into complex narratives. Big Butch Energy/Synergy features Abney's recent exhibitions at ICA Miami and moCa Cleveland. In these works, Abney mines cinematic and media representations of student Greek life to explore how gender perception and performance is inspired by the legacies of social ritual and visual culture.
Reflections on the chords and discords inherent in the relationship between tradition and modernism. Written between the early 1960s and the mid-1970s, the articles and lectures collected in Moving Focus reflect on some of the major concerns of the practicing artist and scholar of modern Indian art: tradition and modernism, the question of the image, and the use of art criticism. The collection also includes essays on the work of Rabindranath Tagore, Abanindranath Tagore, Binodebehari Mukherjee, Ramkinker Baij, and Amrita Sher-Gil. Together, they deal with the focal changes taking place in the contemporary art situation--a period of great significance in terms of cultural development, just about a decade and a half after India's hard-won Independence--and seek to put them in perspective.
The visual narrative of the modern United States: from canonical photography by Robert Frank and Diane Arbus to vernacular picture postcards and magazine spreads Since its invention in 1839, photography has become deeply embedded in American society. American Photography captures this phenomenon through over 280 images, portraying American life through the lenses of renowned photographers such as Nan Goldin, Dawoud Bey and Paul Strand. The catalog begins with selected images from perhaps the most famous photo essay on American life, Robert Frank's The Americans (1958). It then moves beyond the classical canon to offer a striking selection of vernacular photography: vintage magazine advertisements for Coca-Cola and Cadillac; family albums; postcards; and album covers. These examples are integrated seamlessly among the more well-known images until any supposed distinction between "high art" and "low culture" is erased.
An exploration of queerness in visual and material culture with regard to the specific conditions of the making and experience of art in different cultural, sociopolitical, and historical contexts. ambivalent work*s presents case studies, close- and against-the-grain readings of artworks across different media and geographies, conversations on the epistemological and methodological frameworks of a queerly-informed art history, and artistic contributions. Together they revisit central aspects such as visibility, failure, transgression, and subversion in recent art production while at the same time providing valuable links for transhistorical explorations. Making a case for polyvalence and simultaneity, ambivalent work*s demonstrates how intersectional approaches extend the examination of queer capacities in art and art history beyond issues related solely to sexuality and gender. Scholarly and artistic articulations equally push the boundaries of the academic field of art history while giving shape to an (im)possible project of a "queer art history."
The astonishing debut monograph from contemporary abstract expressionist painter Genesis Tramaine Gimme Some Sugar is the much-anticipated first monograph from Genesis Tramaine, the renowned American artist whose star continues to rise in the international art world. Rooted in her 1980s New York City upbringing and strong spirituality, Tramaine imbues her abstract portraits of men and women with a transcendent emotion, devotion, and soundless musicality, borne from rhythmic brushstrokes and a visceral use of chromatic color. In her gestural style, she seeks, at once, to represent and universalize the humanness of the American Black face by obscuring the specificity of individual features, choosing instead to portray the inner turmoil and inner joy of one's mind and being. The book presents over 125 vibrant, full-color images of the artist's dynamic and enthralling portrait paintings, which are an inextricable homage to her deep faith, sense of self, and her Sunday mornings at church.
A close look at a portfolio of forty-six botanical drawings by Hilma af Klint, and the abstract diagrams the artist developed to express the interconnectedness of the natural and spiritual realms. "I have shown," wrote the Swedish artist Hilma af Klint, "that there is a connection between the plant world and the world of the soul." Her Nature Studies portfolio (1919-20), recently acquired by The Museum of Modern Art, New York, comprises 46 sheets of exquisitely rendered botanical drawings. Documenting each plant's particular qualities along with Latin names, Swedish common names, and dates of observation, af Klint follows the typical format of a botanical reference book, known as a Flora; however, hers is a Flora of the spirit, a mapping of the natural world in spiritual terms that would stand alongside any scientific resource. Carefully drawn and vividly colored plants, flowers, and lichen are juxtaposed with geometric forms: a blooming sunflower is echoed by three nested circles, a central dot, a solid red line, a ring of points; a white narcissus is set against a pinwheel of softened primary hues; a cluster of budding branches is accompanied by checkerboard boxes of dots and stroke.
The first major monograph on a multifaceted self-taught artist whose work ranges from painting and sculpture to performance and sound. Lonnie Holley's work has captivated audiences. "Lonnie Holley has held a cult status among the art cognoscenti for a long time as a visual artist and performer."--New York Times Lonnie Holley's widely admired practice spans painting, drawing, assemblage sculpture, and performance that combines experimental music and poetry. After decades of making art, he is now getting the recognition he richly deserves. The artist's first sculptures were carved tombstones for his nieces who perished in a house fire in 1979. Over the following years, he devoted himself to making sculptures that populated his property near Birmingham, a large all-encompassing outdoor installation that was eventually destroyed in 1997. The artist's work continued unabated as he began to gain recognition and exhibit his work in the South and throughout the US.
A vibrant contemporary art anthology that explores the complex ties between race, climate crisis and colonialism by 100 leading artists of African diasporic, Latin American and Native American identity. Black Earth Rising presents works by artists of African diasporic, Latin American and Native American identity that address vital questions of land, presence, climate crisis, and social and environmental justice against the historical backdrop of European settlement of the New World. Supported by an exhibition at the Baltimore Museum of Art curated by the author, this timely publication invites us to trace and make the connections between race, the climate crisis and colonialism. Works by 100 contemporary artists are presented in three thematic sections.
How practices that enact the art of constructing open secrets in markets can be mobilized to unfold magic making. What is magic? And what can it do? In this book, Jessica Backsell interrogates the magic of the art world and culture's stubborn habit of foregrounding art as representative of an alternative value system. Through the empirical example of the freeport-luxury warehouses where valuable art is stored for preservation and taxation purposes-Backsell explores the implications of understanding the art world through contingent entanglements and practices.
The collected writings of artist Marc Camille Chaimowicz, along with the stories behind them told by Alexis Vaillant. Marc Camille Chaimowicz (1946-2024) was an acclaimed visual artist known for his performances, installations and curatorial flair. He was also a writer. This volume, the first comprehensive collection of writings by the artist, includes seminal interviews, chitchats, jokes, performance reports, insightful statements and letters in essay form, as well as rare documents, such as early surviving leaflets, typewriter handouts and hard-to-find articles. Spanning 1971-2023, the book unlocks the work of an artist considered to be a refreshing role model for a new generation of culture mavens and style savants.
An essay-length argument for the autonomy of art in the present. Over recent decades, a post-critical theoretical and methodological paradigm has become increasingly dominant in the human sciences. Proponents of this approach have come to dismiss the idea-central to all modern aesthetics-of the autonomy of art. Written by critic and researcher Kim West, this book is a defence of art's autonomy and addresses some of the major arguments against it in recent post-critical writings. West critiques three key positions- first, that the concept of art's autonomy equals a myth of objective independence; second, that it is inextricably tied to traditions of formalist elitism; and third, that the ideal of autonomy reinforces the illusion of the inherently free and rational subject.
The most comprehensive survey to date of contemporary video and moving-image art from the last decade Video has never been more prevalent in contemporary art than it is today. At a time when moving images have saturated daily life, artists continue to draw new possibilities from the medium. From live-action documentation to hand-drawn animation, participatory video-game technologies, and computer-generated imagery,Vitamin V: Video and the Moving Image in Contemporary Art presents over 850 images from more than 100 artists. Discover recent work by established names as well as rising stars in the contemporary art world, all nominated by a global panel of high-profile art-world figures. Richly illustrated with multiple examples of works by each artist, including stills and installation views,Vitamin V is the first book in Phaidon's celebrated Vitamin series to focus on the moving image. An insightful essay by renowned scholar Erika Balsom surveys the history of video art from the 1960s until today.
This fascinating catalogue explores the work of Franco-Belgian poet and visual artist Henri Michaux and an experience that transformed his artistic life: trying the psychedelic drug mescaline. In 1955 the Franco-Belgian poet and visual artist Henri Michaux (1899--1984) tried the psychedelic drug mescaline, an experience that transformed his artistic life and provoked an outpouring of writings and distinctive drawings. Accompanying an exhibition at the Courtauld Gallery, this fascinating catalogue celebrates these unique drawings. This catalogue and exhibition celebrate the unique Mescaline Drawings by the Franco- Belgian poet and visual artist Henri Michaux (1899-1984). In January 1955, as part of an experiment prompted by his publisher, Michaux, who was then 56 years old, tried the psychedelic drug mescaline, a product derived from the Mexican peyote cactus. The aim of the experiment was to investigate the effect of this type of non-addictive drug on the creative act. Michaux considered these experiences to be a portal into the inner workings of the mind. The investigation transformed Michaux's artistic life and provoked an outpouring of writings and distinctive drawings during the 1950s and 1960s, the latter being at the centre of this exhibition.
A landmark work charting how acts of resistance have shaped Britain and the powerful role of photography as a catalyst for change, across the twentieth century, curated by acclaimed artist and filmmaker Steve McQueen. Resistance presents a century of activism, from the radical suffrage movement in 1903 through key moments including the Battle of Cable Street, the Black People’s Day of Action, Greenham Common Women's Peace Camp and the Miners’ Strike; onto protests against environmental destruction, struggles for LGBTQ+ and disability rights; culminating with the largest protest in Britain’s history: the march against the War in Iraq in 2003.
Straddling her native Iran and her adopted Germany, Shahroudi weaves the language of dissent and exile through her politically charged installations Artist Farkhondeh Shahroudi (born 1962) sees each of her works as a three-dimensional poem. From deconstructed "Oriental" rugs to guns made of string, her sculptures, installations and performances allude to her revolutionary activities in Iran and her life as an exile in Germany.
In Ecologies of Artistic Practice, Ashley Lee Wong explores the economic relationships of artists working at the nexus of art and technology as they negotiate a means to make art in a neoliberal creative economy. Wong looks at the diverse ways in which artworks circulate, both online and offline, in galleries, on digital platforms, and on media facades, and investigates some of the mechanisms that enable artists to create works, including selling artworks and NFTs, grants, licensing, commissions, and artist residencies. The book also looks at the ways in which artists collaborate with corporations and develop practices as commercial entities themselves.
The overlapping artistic motifs of East Germany and its "sister" countries across the world Assessing the extent of the Soviet Union's "international solidarity," Revolutionary Romances? looks at East Germany's relations with its socialist "sister" countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America through concurrent artistic interventions.
"I WORK BETWEEN THE CRACKS, WHERE THE VOICE STARTS DANCING" To say that Meredith Monk is an outstanding singer, com poser, choreographer and filmmaker says a lot and yet too little. Monk works seamlessly across disciplines-pushing the boundaries of music, theater, dance, video, and installation, and is considered a pioneer of site-specific perfor mance. At the center of her oeuvre is the suggestive power of the human voice: the body becomes a resonating space for a universal language for which there are no words. Monk was the first artist to create a performance for the rotunda of the Guggenheim Museum, she performed in public car parks and on opera stages. This catalogue presents the first career encompassing, in-depth analysis of her work.
herman de vries' eschenau summer press creates unique artist's books blending art, nature, and collaboration. Featuring objects like gold, leaves and earth. Two essays contextualise their significance. Once described as 'small explosions of intelligence and sensation, the seeds of wonder' by poet Thomas A. Clark, the eschenau summer press publications stretch the definition of 'artist's book' as far as it will go. Since 1974, from his home in Eschenau, Germany, renowned artist herman de vries (1931) sends out leaves of gold, the dust of some roads, the forbidden down of thistles. A longtime key figure in the book-as-art himself, most of these publications are the result of an open invitation from de vries to artist friends like James Lee Byars, Marinus Boezem and Melanie Bonajo, but also to poets and musicians - even to a keeper of bumble bees. This book facilitates our reception of all 77 of these shared objects through full illustrations and written clarification. Two essays connect the series to the international context of the artist's book.
In celebration of the centenary of artist, poet and landscape designer Ian Hamilton Finlay's birth, Fragments draws together 100 of his artworks. With each piece accompanied by a short text, either by the artist or by a noted writer on Finlay's work, this book accompanies a series of eight exhibitions taking place in Basel, Brescia, Edinburgh, Hamburg, Palma de Mallorca, London, New York and Vienna in May 2025. Best known for his Little Sparta - a seven-acre site at Stonypath farm in Scotland that has attained almost-mythical status - and for his installed guillotines, A View to the Temple, at Documenta Kassel 1987, Finlay's large body of work can be found in museums, parks and gardens worldwide. His artistic creations also incorporate short stories, poems and concrete poetry, many of which have been published by his own publishing house Wild Hawthorn Press, and which, with a mixture of wit and beauty, engage with the relationship between violence and civilization.
Essays exploring the intersections of gender and religion in postsecular knowledge production and visual culture. During the last three decades, religious practices have gained increased visibility on a global scale, while the concept of secularity-and its relationship to religion-has become an object of intense interdisciplinary debates internationally. While the secular and the religious previously had marginalized positions within the academic field of gender studies, we can now observe a growing interest in religion and spirituality within this area of study, as well as gender-based activism. This publication features essays by scholars in gender and religious studies that collectively reflect upon and develop interdisciplinary and transregional ideas about the intricate dynamics of secularity, religiosity, and gender.
Open-source tools and ideas for creating, activating and experiencing art Based on an idea by Hélio Oiticica and brought to life by Lieven De Boeck, Breaking Free offers a dynamic fusion of artmaking tools, including stitching, painting and performing, to explore queer identity.
Edited by Marvin Heiferman, Race Stories: Essays on the Power of Images examines the transformational role photography plays in shaping ideas and attitudes about race and how photographic images have been instrumental in both perpetuating and combating racial stereotypes. Written between 2012 and 2019 and first presented as a monthly feature on the New York Times Lens blog, Berger's incisive essays help readers see a bigger picture about race through storytelling. By directing attention to the most revealing aspects of images, Berger makes complex issues comprehensible, vivid, and engaging. The essays illuminate a range of images, issues, and events: the modern civil rights movement; African American-, Latinx-, Asian American-, and Native American photography; and pivotal moments in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries when race, photography, and visual culture intersected.
You can access a wide variety of print and electronic books to support your research. Find your module reading list to see what key readings you can access electronically or search Explore to find more books and e-books.
We subscribe to a number of subject focused and interdisciplinary databases that will be relevant when researching the History of Art and Fine Art practice. Use the databases to find a range of material including journal articles, films for streaming and more.
Full-text archive of art and architecture magazines, dating from the late-nineteenth century to the twenty-first. Subjects covered include fine art, decorative arts, architecture, interior design, industrial design, and photography. Accessibility statement for Art & Architecture Archive, 1895-2015.
This collection includes the specialist indexes ARTbibliographies Modern (covering modern and contemporary art), Design and Applied Arts Index (for all aspects of design and crafts) and the International Bibliography of Art (covering scholarship on Western art history), together with a complementary collection of current full-text journals, Arts and Humanities database.
Access for UCL students and staff only. Access to BoB is only permitted within the United Kingdom. Requires login with UCL username and password. BoB is Learning on Screen’s on demand TV and radio service for education allowing users to record programmes from over 75 free-to-air channels, access over 2.2 million broadcasts dating back to the 1970s, create playlists, clips and clip compilations; search programme transcripts and subtitles; embed content in VLEs and share on social media
Archive of important scholarly journals. Core resource. Accessibility statement for JSTOR.
Best streamed on Chrome, Safari, or Edge. Providing video streaming to over 26,000 films including thousands of award-winning documentaries, training films and theatrical releases. The collection includes a number of leading producers, such as the Criterion Collection, PBS, Kino Lorber, New Day Films, The Great Courses, California Newsreel, BBC and hundreds more. Accessibility statement for Kanopy.
For training and support with Library resources and research, book an appointment using my live bookings calendar.
UCL Library collections have been developed over 200 years. Some material reflects historic and structural inequalities in the university and in society. Today, as we work on ensuring our current collecting policy and practice supports and reflects a fully inclusive range of voices and perspectives, we still, on occasion, acquire material which is required for teaching and research that may be considered harmful or offensive. Find out more on our Inclusive Collections webpages.
Generative AI (GenAI) is increasingly being used as source of information, translation tool, text editor and much more. The information in this box provides links to guidance on using GenAI for academic research, including strengths and limitations.
Other UCL resources include:
You can choose to study in any of UCL's Libraries and study spaces, including bookable study and group work spaces. There are also areas for postgraduate use only.
