Index to Art Periodicals

The reference set Index to Art Periodicals is a reprinting of a card catalog from the Ryerson Library at The Art Institute of Chicago. The cards, reproduced over 9,635 pages across eleven volumes each 14 inches tall, index nearly 300 periodicals from the early twentieth century through 1960.

This publication is strictly a subject index. There are subject cards for people, artistic subjects, names of artworks, countries, cultures, cities and institutions.  The index includes both fine arts and crafts.

I enjoy consulting indexes to see what kind of coverage they bring to our city, San Francisco.  The image above shows three entries.  The first two entries are from non-art publications -- Harper's and Life -- which would not surface in an art database search.  The third publication is kept in storage at the Library.  Photo-Era magazine of November 1923 has an article by Charlotte H. Mackintosh entitled "San Francisco, My City Beautiful" that shows photographs City scenes taken by members of the California Camera Club.

The top entry above indexes a photograph in Scribner's Magazine of February 1910.  Searching the caption text in Google books brings a scan of the magazine and places the photograph within the context of an article by Henry T. Finck entitled "The Progressive Pacific Coast."

We can access the second publication -- Brush and Pencil -- through the JStor database.  JStor is a fantastic resource, but this article would be very far down the lists of results in a search of this database. A search for the terms art earthquake san francisco 1906 in JStor pulls in over 1400 results, but "Details of the Art Loss in San Francisco" appears very far down in the search results.

The article from Horizon by Allan Temko, the long-time the long-time architecture critic for the San Francisco Chronicle.  This article is a beautifully illustrated nearly 20 page color spread on the arts scene in San Francisco in the late 1950s in a general periodical.

When researching there is a danger of assuming that everything can be found on the internet or in databases.  The information may be there, but it may not be readily accessed.  Do not searching in older print indexes and bibliographis that provide other access points that can pull in fruitful results.