Title

Index to European & American oeuvre cataloges online.

Author

Australian Prints.

Source

[Not applicable]

Details

10/05/01.

Publication date

10 May 2001

Type

News

Language

English

Country of context

Australia

Full text

Index to European & American oeuvre catalogues online.
byLauren B. Hewes

Dear Colleague: This email is to inform you that the Print Council of America has completed its on-line database of oeuvre catalogues of European and American printmakers.  The Index to Print Catalogues Raisonné (IPCR) is available free of charge via the Internet and can be searched by pointing your browser to www.printcouncil.org and selecting “Search Oeuvre Catalogues.”

IPCR contains information and bibliographic citations on over 13,000 printmakers and their work. More than 5,000 publications, ranging in date from the eighteenth century to 2001, were examined and indexed for inclusion in the database. IPCR includes material compiled by Timothy Riggs and published in 1983 as The Print Council Index to Oeuvre-Catalogues of Prints by European and American Artists as well as supplemental information on print catalogues raisonné published since the completion of Riggs. Because of the supplemental material, the information in IPCR adds a new dimension to the familiar brown and gold reference volume used in many print rooms and art libraries. For example, the artist William Blake (1757–1827) was listed in Riggs with six citations, but now has eleven.  New artist names and their relevant publications have also been added. The artist Henri Matisse (1869–1954) and his three citations (all published after 1982) will be found in IPCR even though Matisse is not listed in the bound version of Riggs. 

Additionally, we have updated and corrected artists' birth and death dates, added nationality information, and introduced searchable variations on artist-name spellings. Much scholarly work on American printmakers and on twentieth-century artists has been completed in recent decades. IPCR contains numerous entries for artists in these two research areas and should prove useful to a whole set of scholars previously unfamiliar with the Riggs bibliography. In addition, several post-1980 multi-artist compilations, such as the New Hollstein series, The Illustrated Bartsch, and portions of the Bibliothèque Nationale's Inventaire du fonds français, have been indexed into IPCR. The Print Council has plans to add future publications to IPCR in annual research cycles, keeping the database as current and up-to-date as possible. The possibility of broadening the parameters of the database to include geographical regions beyond the Americas and Europe is also being considered.

One caveat, in closing, a few links in the "Notes" and "Help" section of the website are still under construction. We expect to have all links fully operational shortly and apologize for any inconvenience. We hope that IPCR will prove to be a useful resource to the field and will greatly assist scholars and students. I look forward to hearing any feedback you may have on the database.

Sincerely, Lauren B. Hewes, Project Bibliographer, Oeuvre Catalogue Project, Print Council of America

Last Updated

25 Sep 2020