Thieme-Becker is a German biographical dictionary of artists.

Thieme-Becker

The dictionary was begun under the editorship of

Ulrich Thieme Ulrich Thieme (31 January 1865 in Leipzig – 25 March 1922 in Leipzig) was a German art historian. He was the son of the industrialist and art collector Alfred Thieme (1830–1906), brother of the publisher Georg Thieme (1830–1906) and gr ...

(1865–1922) (volumes one to fifteen) and Felix Becker (1864–1928) (volumes one to four). It was completed under the editorship of Frederick Charles Willis (b. 1883) (volumes fourteen and fifteen) and

Hans Vollmer Hans Vollmer (16 November 1878 – 15 February 1969) was a German art historian. Life His father was the architect (1845-1920), his grandfather of the Hamburg marine painter and sculptor Adolph Friedrich Vollmer (1806–1875). He was the older ...

(1878–1969) (volumes sixteen to thirty-seven)."The Project: From Thieme-Becker to the Artists’ Database,"

Walter de Gruyter Walter de Gruyter GmbH, known as De Gruyter (), is a German scholarly publishing house specializing in academic literature. History The roots of the company go back to 1749 when Frederick the Great granted the Königliche Realschule in Be ...

GmbH.Heinz Ladendorf, "Das Allgemeine Lexikon der bildenden Künstler Thieme-Becker-Vollmer," in Magdalena George (ed.), ''Festschrift Hans Vollmer'' (Leipzig: E.A. Seemann Verlag, 1957), pp. 1–16. Its full title is ''Allgemeines Lexikon der bildenden Künstler von der Antike bis zur Gegenwart'' (English: ''General Dictionary of Artists from Antiquity to the Present''), and it was published in thirty-seven volumes between 1907 and 1950, the first four volumes by Verlag von

Wilhelm Engelmann Wilhelm EngelmannKarl Friedrich Pfau: Engelmann, Wilhelm. Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie 48(1904)378-9 was a German publisher and bookseller (August 1, 1808 in Lemgo – December 23, 1878 in Leipzig). Engelmann was the son of a bookseller in L ...

of Leipzig, and the remainder by Verlag E.A. Seemann, also of Leipzig.

Vollmer

Thieme-Becker was immediately supplemented by Vollmer's ''Allgemeines Lexikon der bildenden Künstler des XX. Jahrhunderts'' (English: ''General Dictionary of Artists of the 20th Century''), published in six volumes by E.A. Seemann between 1953 and 1962. The supplement is referred to as Vollmer, and the two works together as Thieme-Becker-Vollmer.

Scope and reputation

The first thirty-seven volumes contain 148,180 biographies written with the help of around 400 specialists worldwide. The six supplementary volumes contain a further 47,229 biographies written almost entirely by Hans Vollmer. The attention Thieme-Becker-Vollmer paid to non-Western artists, including those from Asia and the Islamic world, made it a "pioneering enterprise." It is still valued for its coverage of otherwise little-known artists, architects, and designers, and as a '' summa'' of art scholarship in the first half of the twentieth century. It "remains the most authoritative dictionary of artists" and the most widely consulted reference of its kind, even in English-speaking countries. The bibliographic sections are considered "outstanding" and "invaluable." Thieme-Becker-Vollmer has rarely been out of print. Anastatic and photomechanical facsimiles of the original volumes were published from the 1940s to the 1980s, and the entire forty-three-volume set has been reissued in trade paperback (1992), in a student edition (1999), and on CD-ROM (2008). The publication of a six-volume index as late as 1996–1997 was a measure of the work's enduring usefulness.

Allgemeines Künstlerlexikon

A complete overhaul of Thieme-Becker-Vollmer began in 1969 under the title ''Allgemeines Künstlerlexikon: Die bildenden Künstler aller Zeiten und Völker'', or ''AKL'' (English: literally ''General Dictionary of Artists: The Artists of All Times and Nations'', but marketed as ''Artists of the World''). Early progress was slow (three volumes 1983–1989), due partly to the project's isolation in

East Germany East Germany, officially the German Democratic Republic (GDR; german: Deutsche Demokratische Republik, , DDR, ), was a country that existed from its creation on 7 October 1949 until its dissolution on 3 October 1990. In these years the state ...

. The pace picked up in 1991, when it switched to "electronic data processing" and a new publisher, K.G. Saur Verlag of Munich. Since 2006, ''AKL'' has been published by

of Berlin, and by 2014 it had reached ''Volume 83: Lalix–Leibowitz''. There is also an online edition,
Allgemeines Künstlerlexikon: Internationale Künstlerdatenbank
', or ''AKL-IKD'', which by 2014 included 500,000 biographies (containing information on one million artists); it is continuously updated and about 3,500 new entries are added annually.''Allgemeines Künstlerlexikon: Internationale Künstlerdatenbank''
Walter de Gruyter GmbH. Accessed 17 June 2014. De Gruyter also publishes
compilation CD-ROM
under this name containing Thieme-Becker-Vollmer, biographies to date from the print edition of ''AKL'', and other material. The thirty-first edition appeared in 2009, (German interface) and (English interface).

References

{{Authority control Art and architecture dictionaries Encyclopedias of art German biographical dictionaries Biographies about artists