Art History Read online

  The relationship between art and thought can be a complex one, and in Chapter 4 I discuss the impact various philosophical schools and psychoanalytic theory have had on the way in which we think about art history and the role, meaning, and interpretation of art. I introduce the ideas of such key thinkers as Hegel, Marx, Freud, Foucault, and Derrida in order to show how they have interacted with art history, not least in regard to the emergence of social histories of art and feminist art history. Chapter 5 goes on to discuss the idea of meaning in art, in particular of the quality and kinds of representation, and the use of iconography, or symbolism, in artworks throughout history. In Chapter 6 I look at the different media and techniques used to produce art.

  As well as introducing ways to think about art and its history, I hope this book will encourage and enable the enjoyment and understanding of artworks themselves, and I want at all times to reinforce the importance of the art object as our primary evidence, or starting point, for art history. To this end, the final chapter brings us back to the work itself. I draw attention to ways in which we might read the physicality of the object in terms of the technique and medium used to create it, as well as other methods we might employ for reading the visual.

  This book is intended to be of interest to the general reader, the gallery-goer, the A-level student, and as a grounding in aspects of visual culture for first-year undergraduates studying art history, archaeology, and cultural studies. I have aimed to write the text without using jargon, but there are a number of technical and specialist terms that are essential to use and to recognize. Mindful of this, and the introductory nature of this book, I have included a full glossary of terms and a list of website addresses for galleries and museums, which provide a starting point for individual enquiry into works of art and the collections in which they are held.

  It is my intention to give a clear, concise discussion of the complex debates within art history. I also want to equip the reader with the basic tools necessary for the study of the subject through a chronological and thematic coverage of a broad range of issues connected with the disipline. But, most importantly, this book is an attempt to convey how much we can learn from art and to suggest a diversity of ways in which we can enjoy looking at it, thinking about it, and understanding its relationship to ourselves.

  List of illustrations

  1 Rouen Cathedral: The Portal (in Sun), 1894, by Claude Monet

  © 2003 The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Theodore M. Davis Collection, Bequest of Theodore M. Davis, 1915 (30.95.250)

  2 Mayan cylindrical vessel decorated with dignitary wearing blossom headdress

  Private collection/Werner Forman Archive

  3 Mario of the Super Mario Brothers

  Courtesy of Nintendo of America Inc.

  4 The Cornfield, 1826, by John Constable

  © National Gallery Collection; by kind permission of the Trustees of the National Gallery, London/Corbis

  5 The Adoration of the Magi, 1423, by Gentile da Fabriano

  Uffizi Gallery/Archivi Alinari, Florence

  6 Las Meninas, c.1658–60, by Diego Velázquez

  All rights reserved. © Prado Museum, Madrid

  7 Apollo Belvedere, Vatican, Rome

  Hirmer Fotoarchiv, Munich

  8 The Dinner Party, 1979, by Judy Chicago

  © ARS, NY and DACS, London 2003/Judy Chicago 1979, Collection of the Brooklyn Museum of Art, Brooklyn, New York. Gift of the Elizabeth A. Sackler Foundation. Photo: Donald Woodman

  9 School of Athens, c.1509–11/12, by Raphael

  Vatican Museum

  10 Guitar, Céret (after 31 March, 1913), Pablo Picasso. Pasted paper, charcoal, ink, and chalk on blue paper, mounted on ragboard, 261/8" × 19½" (66.4 × 49.6 cm)

  © Succession Picasso DACS 2003. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Nelson A. Rockefeller Bequest. Photo: © 2002 The Museum of Modern Art/Scala, Florence

  11 Baule female figure, Ivory Coast, 19th century

  Private collection/Bridgeman Art Library

  12 Chinese camel in yellow-green jade, Tang or early Sung dynasty 8th–10th century

  The Art Archive/Victoria & Albert Museum/Sally Chappell

  13 Three Ladies Adorning a Term of Hymen (The Montgomery Sisters), 1773, by Sir Joshua Reynolds

  © Tate, London 2002

  14 Echo (Number 25, 1951), 1951, by Jackson Pollock. Enamel on unprimed canvas, 7′ 77/8" × 7" 2′ (233.4 × 218.4 cm)

  © ARS, NY and DACS, London 2003. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Acquired through the Lillie P. Bliss Bequest and the Mr. and Mrs. David Rockefeller Fund. Photo: © 2002 The Museum of Modern Art/Scala, Florence

  15 The Virgin and Child with St Anne and St John the Baptist, c. 1500, cartoon by Leonardo da Vinci

  © National Gallery Collection; by kind permission of the Trustees of the National Gallery, London/Corbis

  16 Maid with a Milk Jug, c.1658–60, by Jan Vermeer

  Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

  17 The Four Evangelists, 9th century, MS illumination from a Carolingian gospel book in Aachen Cathedral

  AKG London

  18 Ahu Akivi, Easter Island

  © D. F. Head/Ancient Art & Architecture Collection

  19 The Hand of God, 1896, by Auguste Rodin, marble, 95.5 × 75 × 56.5 cm

  © Musée Rodin, Paris. Photo: Erik & Petra Hesmerg

  20 Virgin and Child, 14th century, School of Venice

  © Arte & Immagini srl/Corbis

  21 Marilyn Monroe, 1962, screen print by Andy Warhol

  © The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. ARS, NY and DACS, London 2003. Private collection

  22 Le Violon d’Ingres, 1924, gelatin silver print by Man Ray

  © Man Ray Trust/ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2003. The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles

  The publisher and the author apologize for any errors or omissions in the above list. If contacted they will be pleased to rectify these at the earliest opportunity.

  To P.H.A.

  Chapter 1

  What is art history?

  A thing of beauty is a joy forever

  Keats

  Can art have a history? We think about art as being timeless, the ‘beauty’ of its appearance having meaning, significance, and appeal to humankind across the ages. At least this usually applies to our ideas about ‘high’, or fine, art, in other words painting and sculpture. This kind of visual material can have an autonomous existence – we can enjoy looking at it for its own sake, independent of any knowledge of its context, although of course viewers from different time periods or cultures may see the same object in contrasting ways.

  Art appreciation and criticism

  When we look at a painting or sculpture, we often ask the following questions: who made it?; what is the subject?; when was it completed? These are quite valid questions that are often anticipated and answered in, for example, the captions to illustrations in art books and the labels to works displayed in museums and galleries. For many of us these pieces of information are sufficient. Our curiosity about the who, what, and when of art is satisfied and we can get on with appreciating the artwork, or just enjoying looking at it. For those of us also interested in how, information on the technique used – for instance, oil or tempera (see Chapter 6) – might help us to appreciate further the skill of the artist. The important thing to note about this kind of art appreciation is that it requires no knowledge of art history. The history of an individual work is contained within itself and can be found in the answers to the questions who, what, when, and how. These are the kinds of details that appear in catalogues of museum and gallery collections or those produced for art sales, where perhaps information about the original patron (if relevant) might also answer the question why. Auction houses, museums, and galleries also place emphasis on the provenance of a work of art. This is the history of who has owned it and in which collections it has been held. This acts as a kind of pedigree for the work and might be used to help prove that i
t is an authentic work by a given artist. All this information is important in determining the monetary value of a painting or sculpture but need not necessarily be important for art history.

  In this way, art appreciation requires no knowledge of the context of art; the ‘I know what I like and I like what I see’ approach to gallery-going is sufficient. And this is absolutely fine. We can enjoy looking at something just for what it is and art can become absorbed into what might be called popular culture.

  Art appreciation can also involve the more demanding process of criticizing the art object on the basis of its aesthetic merits. Usually aspects such as style, composition, and colour are referred to, and more broadly reference is made to the artist’s other work, if known, or to other artists working at the same time or within the same movement or style.

  Connoisseurship

  Art appreciation and criticism are also linked to connoisseurship. By its very name this implies something far more elitist than just enjoying looking at art. A connoisseur is someone who has a specialist knowledge or training in a particular field of the fine or decorative arts. The specialist connoisseur may work for an auction house – we have all seen how on television programmes such as the Antiques Roadshow experts are able to identify and value all manner of objects, not just paintings, on the basis of looking at them closely and asking only very few questions of the owner. This kind of art appreciation is linked to the art market and involves being able to recognize the work of individual artists as this has a direct effect on the work’s monetary value.

  Another aspect of connoisseurship is its relationship to our understanding of taste. A connoisseur’s taste in relation to art is considered to be refined and discriminating. Our concept of taste in relation to art is quite complicated, and inevitably it is bound up in our ideas about social class. Let me take a little time to explore this more fully. I have already discussed the practice of art appreciation – art available for all and seen and enjoyed by all. By contrast, connoisseurship imposes a kind of hierarchy of taste. The meaning of taste here is a combination of two definitions of the word: our faculty of making discerning judgements in aesthetic matters, and our sense of what is proper and socially acceptable. But by these definitions taste is both culturally and socially determined, so that what is considered aesthetically ‘good’ and socially ‘acceptable’ differs from one culture or society to another. The fact that our taste is culturally determined is something of which we have to be aware, and this crops up throughout this book. Here, though, it is important to think about the social dimension of taste as having more to do with art as a process of social exclusion – we are meant to feel intimidated if we don’t know who the artist is, or worse still if we don’t feel emotionally moved through the ‘exquisiteness’ of the work. We have all read or heard the unmistakable utterances of these connoisseurs. But luckily their world does not belong to art history. Instead, art history is an open subject available to everyone with an interest in looking at, thinking about, and understanding the visual. It is my intention in this book to describe how we can engage with art in these ways.

  History as progression

  For art to have a history we expect not only a timeless quality but also some kind of sequence or progression, as this is what history leads us to expect. Our history books are full of events in the past that are presented as part of either the continual movement towards improvement, or as stories about great men, or as epochs of time that stand out from others – for instance, the Italian Renaissance or the Enlightenment. In regard to these kinds of frameworks for thinking about the past, the history of art does not disappoint. In the coming together of these two separate strands, we see how history reorders visual experience, making it take a range of forms. The most popular of these include writing about the history of art from the point of view of artists – usually ‘great men’. Alternatively, we find art historians have sought to define the great stylistic epochs in the history of art, for example the Renaissance, Baroque, or Post-Impressionism. Each of these traditions can be written about independently of the others and they have provided a backbone for histories of art. Here I use the plural since the results of each of these ways of writing about the history of art are different, placing different emphasis on what is important – in some cases the artist, in others the work or the movement to which the work belongs.

  The problem with concentrating on formal elements such as style is that style itself becomes the subject of discussion rather than the works of art. As we become preoccupied with marking out stylistic changes, we have to use our knowledge of what came after the work under discussion. The benefit of hindsight is essential here – how else could we know that the beginnings of an interest in nature and naturalism in the art of Early Renaissance Italy prefigured the consummate achievements of artists of the High Renaissance in this regard? Working backwards from the present imposes a line of development of which the outcome is already known. In this way, tracks or routes through the art of the past can favour certain styles – this is certainly the case with classical art and its reinterpretations.

  Also, histories of art that focus solely on style can easily neglect other aspects of an artwork such as its subject matter or its function. It is possible to narrate a history of artistic style using representations of the male and female body. This might begin with the representation of physical perfection achieved in ancient times by the Greeks. By the Middle Ages, however, there was little interest in the naturalistic depiction of the human form. But by the Renaissance period increased knowledge of human anatomy and nature meant that art had become more ‘life-like’. But this kind of history could also be told using representations of cats and dogs, although most would agree that domestic pets have not been a principal focus for artists over the last two millennia.

  Yet style has played a significant role in the formulation of histories of art, and it is only in recent years that the notion of stylistic progress in Western art has been reassessed. Indeed, the emphasis on style leads us to expect the notion of progression and constant development in art. If we want art to represent the world we think we see, then we can impose an expectation of a continual move towards naturalism. But how do we then think about art that is not interested in naturalistic representation? This kind of abstract or conceptual art can be sidelined and deemed of secondary importance – sometimes it is labelled ‘primitive’ or ‘naïve’ art, with a pejorative air. In many ways modern art confronts this prejudice, but often provokes cries of ‘is it art?’.

  In the case of biographical histories, we look for evidence of youth, maturity, and old age in the work of an artist. This works quite well if the artist lived for a long time, but an untimely death does not lend itself to this kind of narrative arch. Claude Monet’s (1840–1926) early work The Poppy Field (1873) differs from the cycles of pictures of the same object at various times of day he produced in the 1880s and 1890s, as seen in his views of Rouen Cathedral (1894; Fig. 1) or Haystacks (1891). But although we can see similar preoccupations in the interest in light, shade, and colour as a way of modelling form, these phases of Monet’s career stand distinct from his late works, such as the large-scale paintings of the lily ponds at his Japanese-style garden at Giverny. This kind of biographical approach isolates the artist from their historical context. We often forget that Monet’s late works were painted in the early 20th century – at the same time as Picasso was experimenting with Cubism.

  1. Rouen Cathedral: The Portal (in Sun) by Claude Monet (1894).

  Is there then a distinction to be made between the interaction of art and history, and art history? That is to say that histories of art can have a single focus on style or the work in relation to the biography of the artist, where our expectations of a progressive history are inflicted on the visual. What I am suggesting here is that we turn the question on its head and put art in the driving seat, so to speak. By using art as our starting point we can see the complex and intertwined strands that make up
art history. This implies that art history is a subject or academic field of enquiry in its own right, rather than the result of the rules of one discipline being applied to another. I return to this point on a regular basis in this book. I aim to set out how histories of art have been constructed, to describe the ways in which we have been encouraged to think about art as a result, and also to introduce other ways of thinking about the visual in terms of its history.

  Evidence and analysis in art history

  It is important to discuss what kind of archive art history can draw upon, as the range of material used to construct these histories extends well beyond the works themselves. For instance, history has its documents, written records of the past; archaeology focuses on the material record, physical remains of the past; whilst anthropology looks to social rituals and cultural practices as a way of understanding past and present peoples. Art history can draw upon all these archives in addition to the primary archive of the artwork. In this way, art history is the stepping stone into various ways of interpreting and understanding the past.