BLOOMSBURY ART MARKETS
Protagonists, Networks, Provenances
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What is Bloomsbury Art Markets?
The consensus is growing that the market has played a major role in art history. Expanding research areas such as art market studies, the history of collecting, art historiography, and provenance research highlight the need for a specific reference tool on the market, in which information and historical narratives work together to illustrate how the market operated, who was in it, and when.
Bloomsbury Art Markets (BAM), formerly known as the Art Market Dictionary (AMD), is the first encompassing reference work on the art market, covering Europe, Russia, and North America since 1900. It provides information on auction houses, art fairs, commercial galleries, art dealers, and more. It forms an essential resource for scholars, art world professionals, journalists, and collectors.
What information does it provide?
In each entry, Bloomsbury Art Markets supplies basic factual information followed by a brief historical or biographical narrative illustrating a company’s or person’s role in the art market. The assembled facts, names, and places are searchable in the online database. They summarize central data: years, addresses, staff, specializations, etc. They also indicate principal activities through lists of major exhibitions and, where possible, regular partners or clients.
Entries also aim to list artists whose work was on offer. Selected bibliographies facilitate further research, as do information on archival material and its whereabouts. By assembling this pool of data, Bloomsbury Art Markets enables scholars to locate specific information and its sources as well as allowing for an examination of the relationships, economics, and significant trends that have shaped the art world.
What topics does it cover?
A title list is available here.
