3 Museums Offering 2000 Art Books

Learn about free use of art books to awaken your creativity

If you are looking for inspiring content on fine art, art criticism, theory, or art history, the following resources will interest you.
Three museums are letting you download and read thousands of books covering all of the above areas, as well as monographic studies on schools of thought, movements, and artists of all different eras and regions.

Find out about the collections available in three large New York museums and some of their most significant treasures free to consult right now.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art

The Met has collected around 1,700 art books from across the world. You will be able to consult the contents table to check if any particular book has what you need to research. Each book also indicates any award or press review received and includes links to related work and areas of interest. You can download the books for you to keep or read them online here.

Not to be missed: Regarding Warhol: Sixty Artists, Fifty Years, by Rebecca Lowery

This book explores Andy Warhol’s influence on contemporary art and is divided into five themes: consumer culture, the cult of celebrity, sexual identity, artistic practice, and the role of collaboration. It includes a critical essay on Warhol’s work and examines the ‘Warhol effect’.

Guggenheim Museum

This museum holds a collection of over 200 books on modern art available in PDF or ePub format. It’s a digital collection of all the catalogs of their exhibitions, as well as theory publications. You can search by time, author, and discipline. Consult the free collection here.

Not to be missed: On the Spiritual in Art, by Wassily Kandinsky

The first English edition of the classic 1946 text by Kandinsky, this publication details the artist’s vision and ideas on painting, color theory, and aesthetics in general. It includes reproductions of work by the artist.

Getty Museum

The virtual library of this museum includes more than 300 free books, divided into exhibition catalogs, books on art conservation, and academic papers from the museum’s conservation and research institutes.
You can search by category, author, school of thought, or movement. It comprises a table of contents and press reviews. Each book can be consulted online or downloaded in PDF format here.

Not to be missed: The Topkapi Scroll: Geometry and Ornaments in Islamic Architecture, by Gulru Necipoglu

This book explores the architectural conceptualization of Islamic art between the 10th and 16th centuries. It compares Islamic geometry with Western Medieval art and covers more recent theories on architectural semiotics.

You may also be interested in:

- 7 Key Works on Graphic Design
- Sketchbook: 5 Great Masters Who Sketched
- Four Initiatives to Get Your Creative Juices Flowing
- 20 Museums You Can Visit Online