Welcome to Benezit Dictionary of Artists
- A comprehensive and definitive resource for artists’ biographies, published since 1911
- Includes 149,000 biographies as well as auction records, exhibition histories, and over 11,000 images of artists’ signatures and stamps of sale
Featured
Irma Stern
South African artist Irma Stern mainly depicted black Africans as subjects in her portraits, and her still-lives combined objects from black and white cultures into a single composition. Once auctioned to help defray Nelson Mandela’s legal costs, her lost work Arab in Black (1939) was found in 2015, serving unobtrusively as a bulletin board in the kitchen of a London flat.
Featured
Helen Frankenthaler
A key figure in post-war American abstract painting, Helen Frankenthaler developed a unique method for staining canvas in which liquid colors were thrown or poured on to the surface of an unprimed canvas and allowed to spread naturally. Calling attention to both the material and the nature of the medium, her technique influenced other artists including Morris Louis, Kenneth Noland, and Jules Olitski.
In this update, Benezit publishes 6 updated biographies.
Letter from the Editor
Read a letter from Benezit’s Editor in Chief, Dr. Valerie Cassel Oliver, discussing her editorial approach and the work underway to expand Benezit’s coverage of emerging artists, varied media, and artists of diverse social and cultural backgrounds.
Collection Guides
Join Benezit on a tour of unique art collections around the world! Written by experts and curators, our Collection Guides present the history and highlights of museums and galleries. Follow links to related texts in Oxford Art Online and around the web to learn more about the artists in these outstanding collections.
