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  Art History: A Very Short Introduction

  ‘arguably the most intelligent introduction to the study of the history of art available today. Accessibly and persuasively written, the author lucidly outlines the variety of interpretative strategies that currently animate the discipline . . . a lively as well as thoughtful introduction to this field.’

  Professor Keith Moxey

  Ann Whitney Olin Professor of Art History at Barnard College and Columbia University

  ‘an approachable and lucid overview, not of the history of art, but of the issues and debates within the discipline of art history. Arnold’s strategy is to wrap ideas around concrete examples. By directing us to look at particular works of art, she teaches us to see them with an art historian’s eyes.’

  Margaret Iversen, Professor of Art History and Theory, University of Essex

  * * *

  VERY SHORT INTRODUCTIONS are for anyone wanting a stimulating and accessible way in to a new subject. They are written by experts, and have been published in more than 25 languages worldwide.

  The series began in 1995, and now represents a wide variety of topics in history, philosophy, religion, science, and the humanities. Over the next few years it will grow to a library of around 200 volumes – a Very Short Introduction to everything from ancient Egypt and Indian philosophy to conceptual art and cosmology.

  * * *

  Very Short Introductions available now:

  ANCIENT PHILOSOPHY Julia Annas

  THE ANGLO-SAXON AGE John Blair

  ANIMAL RIGHTS David DeGrazia

  ARCHAEOLOGY Paul Bahn

  ARCHITECTURE Andrew Ballantyne

  ARISTOTLE Jonathan Barnes

  ART HISTORY Dana Arnold

  ART THEORY Cynthia Freeland

  THE HISTORY OF ASTRONOMY Michael Hoskin

  ATHEISM Julian Baggini

  AUGUSTINE Henry Chadwick

  BARTHES Jonathan Culler

  THE BIBLE John Riches

  BRITISH POLITICS Anthony Wright

  BUDDHA Michael Carrithers

  BUDDHISM Damien Keown

  CAPITALISM James Fulcher

  THE CELTS Barry Cunliffe

  CHOICE THEORY Michael Allingham

  CHRISTIAN ART Beth Williamson

  CLASSICS Mary Beard and John Henderson

  CLAUSEWITZ Michael Howard

  THE COLD WAR Robert McMahon

  CONTINENTAL PHILOSOPHY Simon Critchley

  COSMOLOGY Peter Coles

  CRYPTOGRAPHY Fred Piper and Sean Murphy

  DADA AND SURREALISM David Hopkins

  DARWIN Jonathan Howard

  DEMOCRACY Bernard Crick

  DESCARTES Tom Sorell

  DRUGS Leslie Iversen

  THE EARTH Martin Redfern

  EGYPTIAN MYTHOLOGY Geraldine Pinch

  EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY BRITAIN Paul Langford

  THE ELEMENTS Philip Ball

  EMOTION Dylan Evans

  EMPIRE Stephen Howe

  ENGELS Terrell Carver

  ETHICS Simon Blackburn

  THE EUROPEAN UNION John Pinder

  EVOLUTION Brian and Deborah Charlesworth

  FASCISM Kevin Passmore

  THE FRENCH REVOLUTION William Doyle

  FREUD Anthony Storr

  GALILEO Stillman Drake

  GANDHI Bhikhu Parekh

  GLOBALIZATION Manfred Steger

  HEGEL Peter Singer

  HEIDEGGER Michael Inwood

  HINDUISM Kim Knott

  HISTORY John H. Arnold

  HOBBES Richard Tuck

  HUME A. J. Ayer

  IDEOLOGY Michael Freeden

  INDIAN PHILOSOPHY Sue Hamilton

  INTELLIGENCE Ian J. Deary

  ISLAM Malise Ruthven

  JUDAISM Norman Solomon

  JUNG Anthony Stevens

  KANT Roger Scruton

  KIERKEGAARD Patrick Gardiner

  THE KORAN Michael Cook

  LINGUISTICS Peter Matthews

  LITERARY THEORY Jonathan Culler

  LOCKE John Dunn

  LOGIC Graham Priest

  MACHIAVELLI Quentin Skinner

  MARX Peter Singer

  MATHEMATICS Timothy Gowers

  MEDIEVAL BRITAIN John Gillingham and Ralph A. Griffiths

  MODERN IRELAND Senia Pasšeta

  MOLECULES Philip Ball

  MUSIC Nicholas Cook

  NIETZSCHE Michael Tanner

  NINETEENTH-CENTURY BRITAIN Christopher Harvie and H. C. G. Matthew

  NORTHERN IRELAND Marc Mulholland

  PAUL E. P. Sanders

  PHILOSOPHY Edward Craig

  PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE Samir Okasha

  PLATO Julia Annas

  POLITICS Kenneth Minogue

  POSTCOLONIALISM Robert Young

  POSTMODERNISM Christopher Butler

  POSTSTRUCTURALISM Catherine Belsey

  PREHISTORY Chris Gosden

  PRESOCRATIC PHILOSOPHY Catherine Osborne

  PSYCHOLOGY Gillian Butler and Freda McManus

  QUANTUM THEORY John Polkinghorne

  ROMAN BRITAIN Peter Salway

  ROUSSEAU Robert Wokler

  RUSSELL A. C. Grayling

  RUSSIAN LITERATURE Catriona Kelly

  THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION S. A. Smith

  SCHIZOPHRENIA Chris Frith and Eve Johnstone

  SCHOPENHAUER Christopher Janaway

  SHAKESPEARE Germaine Greer

  SOCIAL AND CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY John Monaghan and Peter Just

  SOCIOLOGY Steve Bruce

  SOCRATES C. C. W. Taylor

  SPINOZA Roger Scruton

  STUART BRITAIN John Morrill

  TERRORISM Charles Townshend

  THEOLOGY David F. Ford

  Available soon:

  THE TUDORS John Guy

  TWENTIETH-CENTURY BRITAIN Kenneth O. Morgan

  WITTGENSTEIN A. C. Grayling

  WORLD MUSIC Philip Bohlman

  AFRICAN HISTORY John Parker and Richard Rathbone

  ANCIENT EGYPT Ian Shaw

  THE BRAIN Michael O’Shea

  BUDDHIST ETHICS Damien Keown

  CHAOS Leonard Smith

  CHRISTIANITY Linda Woodhead

  CITIZENSHIP Richard Bellamy

  CLASSICAL ARCHITECTURE Robert Tavernor

  CLONING Arlene Judith Klotzko

  CONTEMPORARY ART Julian Stallabrass

  THE CRUSADES Christopher Tyerman

  DERRIDA Simon Glendinning

  DESIGN John Heskett

  DINOSAURS David Norman

  DREAMING J. Allan Hobson

  ECONOMICS Partha Dasgupta

  THE END OF THE WORLD Bill McGuire

  EXISTENTIALISM Thomas Flynn

  THE FIRST WORLD WAR Michael Howard

  FREE WILL Thomas Pink

  FUNDAMENTALISM Malise Ruthven

  HABERMAS Gordon Finlayson

  HIEROGLYPHS Penelope Wilson

  HIROSHIMA B. R. Tomlinson

  HUMAN EVOLUTION Bernard Wood

  INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS Paul Wilkinson

  JAZZ Brian Morton

  MANDELA Tom Lodge

  MEDICAL ETHICS Tony Hope

  THE MIND Martin Davies

  MYTH Robert Segal

  NATIONALISM Steven Grosby

  PERCEPTION Richard Gregory

  PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION Jack Copeland and Diane Proudfoot

  PHOTOGRAPHY Steve Edwards

  THE RAJ Denis Judd

  THE RENAISSANCE Jerry Brotton

  RENAISSANCE ART Geraldine Johnson

  SARTRE Christina Howells

  THE SPANISH CIVIL WAR Helen Graham

  TRAGEDY Adrian Poole

  THE TWENTIETH
CENTURY Martin Conway

  For more information visit our web site

  www.oup.co.uk/vsi

  Dana Arnold

  ART HISTORY

  A Very Short Introduction

  Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX2 6DP

  Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide in

  Oxford New York

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  Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries

  Published in the United States

  by Oxford University Press Inc., New York

  © Dana Arnold 2004

  The moral rights of the author have been asserted

  Database right Oxford University Press (maker)

  First published as a Very Short Introduction 2004

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organizations. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above

  You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

  Data available

  Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

  Arnold, Dana.

  Art History: a very short introduction/Dana Arnold.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  1. Art. 2. Art history. I. Title.

  N7425.A646 2004

  709—dc22 2004041451

  ISBN 13: 978–0–19–280181–4

  ISBN 10: 0–19–280181–3

  3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4

  Typeset by RefineCatch Ltd, Bungay, Suffolk

  Printed in Great Britain by

  TJ International Ltd., Padstow, Cornwall

  Contents

  Acknowledgements

  Preface

  List of illustrations

  1 What is art history?

  2 Writing art history

  3 Presenting art history

  4 Thinking about art history

  5 Reading art

  6 Looking at art

  References

  Further information

  Glossary

  Index

  Acknowledgements

  The opportunity to write this Very Short Introduction came as my term as editor of the journal Art History was coming to a close. Writing an introduction to the discipline that I had been so closely involved with in all its complexities, and which spreads beyond the purview of this volume, seemed to be a most appropriate way of summing up some of the ways in which art history has developed in recent years as well as identifying new directions in the study of art. This brief volume covers the broadest possible spectrum of the art we might expect to see in galleries and museums. As such the choices I had to make in terms of the approach, material covered and which illustrations to use were the most enjoyable and difficult parts of writing this book. I was fortunate to be inspired and encouraged by many in the preparation of this volume and, although any omissions or errors are my own, I would like to thank Adrian Rifkin, my co-editor of Art History, for providing such a stimulating and collegial working environment during our editorship. I am also indebted to Kate Nicholson, Yvonne Young, Hannah Young McHugh and Ken Haynes for their comments and suggestions on my choice of illustrations and to Julie Schlarman for compiling the index. The final draft of this VSI was written during my tenure as a Visiting Scholar at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles and I would like to thank the Getty staff, my research assistant Emily Scott and my fellow scholars for providing such a welcoming academic environment in which to finish the text.

  Dana Arnold

  London, 2003

  Preface

  This book is intended as an introduction to the issues and debates that make up the discipline of art history and that arise from art history’s central concerns – identifying, categorizing, interpreting, describing, and thinking about works of art. The ways in which art history has approached these tasks has changed over time. These shifting attitudes towards the parameters of art history, and how histories can interrogate visual subject matter, have raised questions about the presentation of the history of visual art in written form and the limits verbal language has placed on our ability to do this. In recent years the relative importance of the role of the artist, the subject, and the viewer in the artistic enterprise have also been re-evaluated. These issues in turn raise questions to do with our preoccupation with authorship, authenticity, and chronologically defined linear progression, all of which have informed the traditional canon of art history, which may be only one way of looking at, analysing, and historicizing art.

  Thus, traditional histories of art emphasize periods and styles, and focus on Western artistic production, and this can obscure other approaches, for instance the grouping of artworks according to their subject matter, or influence the way in which arts from non-Western cultures are discussed. This book challenges such traditional ways of seeing and writing about art. I have, therefore, chosen examples from different historical moments and cultures to illustrate questions that I see as fundamental to the subject. This being a Very Short Introduction, I have been selective in my choice of illustrations, and the images I use are meant only to be indicative of the issues I discuss in relation to them. As a whole, the illustrations are representative of ‘high art’, that is to say the art we expect to find in museums and galleries. This material enables us to investigate a range of social and cultural issues covered by art history.

  I begin with a consideration of the fundamental question ‘what is art history?’ This enables me to draw distinctions between art history and art appreciation and art criticism, and to consider a range of artefacts included in the discipline and how these have changed over time. Although art is a visual subject, we learn about it through reading and we convey our ideas about it mostly in writing. This sets off an interplay between the verbal and the visual which I explore in Chapter 2. Here, I look at how histories of art have been written and the effect that this has had on the object itself and on the subjects of art history. Examples from a broad time span are used, including Pliny, Vasari, and Winckelmann, together with more recent writings by Gombrich, Greenberg, Nochlin, and Pollock. A discussion of these writers introduces the expectations we have of art history as a chronological story about great Western male artists. The bias in this interpretation of the subject opens up the questions of the importance of the canon in art history and how we view non-figurative, primitive, and naïve art.

  The importance of the gallery or museum – or more generally of ways of presenting art history – is covered in Chapter 3, which maps out the development of collections from cabinet of curiosities to the private and corporate sponsor and collector of today. Alongside this, I discuss the impact the amassing of objects has had on their perceived value and on the histories of art, and how writing about objects can affect their ‘value’. The question of the canon of art history returns in this chapter in relation to the ability of the gallery or museum either to endorse or to challenge it. I look at this with special reference to the importance of the identity of the artist in gallery display and in answer to the question ‘what difference does it make to the presentation of art history if art is presented to the public as a thematic exploration of a subject or as a chronological sequence?’ This also informs my consideration of how
‘blockbuster’ exhibitions have changed the direction of art history, for instance the Post-Impressionism exhibition of 1912 that gave that art movement its name.