AskART for Artist Information

AskART ( http://www.askart.com/ ) is a database about American artists spanning the 16th to the 21st centuries. The front page has a two-box search engine allowing one to input the last name (or part of the last name) and the first name (optional) of the artist you're looking for.

I tried finding Stanton Macdonald-Wright. I had some trouble with that hyphenated last name -- I finally found him through searching for Macdonald. Once found though, I had even more trouble.

The site returns a page of information on the artist, including birth and death dates, a sample painting, whether or not there is a biography available, etc, image gallery information, etc. The thing is, when I clicked on any of the the links to get to the promised information, I got an "information not found" error message.

I'm really, really good at picking the one breakable entry in the database -- natural talent, I s'pose -- so I backed up and tried again, this time with Howard Terpning. I had the same problem. This time, though, I backed out, activated cookies for this site, reloaded the pages, and tried again. Worked like a charm.

(The moral of the story: if at first it doesn't work, try cookies. If it still doesn't work, change browsers. If it STILL doesn't work, pitch a fit.)

Anyway, the artist page provides a variety of information, including periodicals (magazine name, date, article title, author, and whether or not it's in color), museums which contain the artists' work (Terpning had three museums listed, which I don't think is complete -- I could have sworn that he had some stuff at the Eiteljorg in Indianapolis), current exhibits (one listed -- at the Eiteljorg. Bonk!), and an image gallery (you can narrow down the items shown by medium, auction, or price, or simply show everything. Pictures are not shown in thumbnail, but in enough detail to offer good pictures and make a slow-loading page.)

If you're like me and you know nothing about American artists, you can also browse alphabetically through the artists available at the site via the alphabet links at the bottom of the home page. Plenty of stuff here. You will browse a lot. Worth a look.

Posted to Aesthetics-Art-Artists