Start With the Open Databases

The honest starting point is that no consolidated catalogue of Medi Wechsler Dinu's work exists online in the way it does for a Monet or a Modersohn-Becker. The work is dispersed across regional collections, private hands and occasional sales, and no institution has gathered it into one place. That means your search will be a patchwork. Three or four good sources will usually surface most of what is publicly visible, and an afternoon is a realistic time budget for the first pass.

Begin with Wikimedia Commons, which often holds reproductions of works now in the public domain or released under open licences. Then try Google Arts and Culture, which aggregates smaller institutional collections that would otherwise be invisible. If you want context on what the work depicts before you go hunting, the overview of the artist's most common painting subjects is a useful compass, because it tells you which images are representative and which are outliers.

Auction Archives and Sale Records

Auction databases are the least glamorous source and often the most productive. Sites such as Artprice, MutualArt and the sold-lots sections of major auction houses catalogue works with dates, dimensions and photographs. For artists with a modest published record, these archives are frequently the only place a given painting appears with verified documentation. Searching by the artist's name variants, including alternate spellings and transliterations, matters more here than anywhere else.

A caution worth stating plainly. An auction record is a sales document, not a scholarly attribution. Images are photographed under poor light, catalogue notes are brief, and attributions sometimes carry qualifiers. Treat what you find as a working picture of the oeuvre rather than a definitive one. If your goal is to decide which composition you might want on your wall, one useful shortcut is reading about how canvas prints and framed posters of the work compare, since sizing and format decisions often matter more to the eye than small differences between similar canvases.

Set aside an evening. Ten minutes will frustrate you.

Museum Databases and Offline Trails

Museum collection databases are inconsistent, but they reward patience. Many institutions have digitised their holdings and made them searchable even when the works are not on display. If biographical sources place the artist in a particular country or city during a given period, the regional museums there are the plausible holders, and their online collections are the logical place to look. Where you cannot find a work online, a courteous email to a registrar or collections team sometimes resolves the question.

For a buyer at the exploratory stage, this searching serves a purpose beyond curiosity. Seeing the range of the work, its palette and its scale, is what makes a reproduction decision sensible later. Once you know which compositions hold your attention, guides to living room sizing and to the most common subjects in the paintings will help you narrow a diffuse archive down to a single image worth hanging.

The archive is fragmentary. That is the finding, and it is not a reason to give up. It is a reason to search in layers, starting broad and ending specific, and to accept that what you assemble will be your own small catalogue rather than anybody's official one.