600+ Free Art Books Online

Hefty art books, with full-color reproductions on glossy pages, demand respect on any shelf or coffee table. But they can be expensive, take up space, and use up paper.

Three American art museums have gifted us all with free access to their collections of art books. Without committing to making a payment beyond our internet and phone charges, we can build our own online libraries of art books and exhibition catalogs, courtesy of the Guggenheim, Met, and Getty Museums. 

Below are links and instructions to get you started building your own online library.

The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum

The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum publishes books and catalogs to coincide with its exhibitions. The Guggenheim offers access to view 200+ of its published texts which accompanied shows, from 1936 – 2005, on their archive.org page. 

Just click on an image and you’ll get a pop-up screen with an online magazine style layout.

You can flip through the pages forwards and backwards with simple clicks on the right and left hand sides of the book. Information about the publication is listed beneath the text, and similar texts are listed beneath that information.

If you’d like to download the publication, just click on the search icon (magnifying glass in the upper right), and you’ll get a pop-up window with several format choices: .pdf, ePub, Plain Text, DAISY, and Kindle.

The Met Museum

New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art (The Met) offers 50 years’ worth of its publications on art history available to read and download for free. These 1,500+ publications are available on their MetPublications page.

They include books, online publications, Bulletins, and Journals, dating back as far as 1964.

“MetPublications includes a description and table of contents for most titles, as well as information about the authors, reviews, awards, and links to related Met titles by author and by theme. Current book titles that are in-print may be previewed and fully searched online, with a link to purchase the book. The full contents of almost all other book titles may be read online, searched, or downloaded as a PDF."

Use the search box on the left side to find a publication by Title, Author, Keyword, Publication type, Thematic category, Format, or Collection/Department:

"Many of these out-of-print books will be available for purchase, when rights permit, through print-on-demand capabilities in association with Yale University Press. For the Met's Bulletin, all but the most recent issue can be downloaded as a PDF. For the Met's Journal, all individual articles and entire volumes can be downloaded as a PDF.”  Met Publications

The Getty Museum

Getty Publications offers over 250 art books, free to browse and download, through their Virtual Library. The Virtual Library’s free-to-download books and texts come from several Getty institutions: the J. Paul Getty Museum, the Getty Conservation Institute, and the Getty Research Institute. 

All of the books are available in .pdf format.

Want to check out free photos from museums? In the past few years, many museums, libraries, and corporate collections have uploaded photo libraries online and made them available to the public. Some have even made their images open to public domain use, with free downloads.

If you'd like to explore further, see our articles Museum Collection Images, Craft Museums, and Digitized Knitting Magazines.

Collectible Art Books

If you love flipping through glossy pages of photo-rich specialty books, you'll find a great selection of art, design, fashion, and architecture books at the online stores The Met Musem Store and Taschen. [This post contains affiliate links. Please read my disclosure for more information.] You can find our curated art and craft book shop by clicking on any of the book covers below.