Art History Read online

  In Britain, where civil unrest was feared (as a consequence of the French Revolution and also as a result of the poverty and deprivation that attended the Industrial Revolution), visits to art galleries by the working classes were encouraged as a means of keeping the peace, by encouraging feelings of patriotism for national collections. These collections were not always of indigenous artefacts, for instance the National Gallery in London was founded on the Angerstein Collection, which comprised mostly pictures from Renaissance Italy rather than works by British artists. Similarly, the British Museum housed mostly Graeco-Roman antiquities. But these were still seen as markers of national prestige. The Victoria and Albert Museum is an important example of this trend. Founded in 1857, it contained all manner of artefacts from crafts to mass-produced goods, which were presented to the general public to try to establish good standards of taste. Alongside this, the ever-expanding collection of high art – paintings and sculptures – from the British Empire was displayed as a reminder of the prowess of Britain and the extent to which it then ruled the world. In this way we can see how the art history of non-Western cultures was subsumed into a narrative about the importance of Britain. These objects’ only function was the part they played in the embellishment of the image of Britain. They had no history in their own right – an issue in art history that we have already discussed in Chapter 2.

  These London institutions were indicative of a Europe-wide phenomenon. In the latter half of the 19th century, in addition to these public institutions, world fairs became an important instrument in putting art and national identity on view. These were huge events where the art and artefacts of the world were represented in such a way that they became part of some larger narrative – perhaps endorsing the idea of empire or the notion of progress in the industrial age. This deliberate ordering of objects related to Hegel’s idea of history, where the spirit was manifest in art.

  My discussion so far of the ways in which art history has been presented has concentrated on European traditions. It is clear that there is a link between methods of displaying art, the kind of art in these displays, and national identity. We have also seen how American collections and art institutions were mapped onto this European model. It was only in the second half of the 20th century that American art began to emerge from its isolation and somewhat provincial position on to the world stage.

  The Federal Art Project (1935–43) was set up under President Roosevelt’s New Deal – a response to the Great Depression of the 1930s. This has some similarities with the academies that were established in Europe in the preceding centuries, as many artists gained vital experience and improved social status as a result of their involvement with the Project’s public artworks, including murals and work in public buildings. Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning both benefited from this scheme. At the same time, the growth of private galleries in New York – art dealers who sold the work of major European figures such as Salvador Dalí and Piet Mondrian – ensured there was plenty of stimulation for these American artists. Alongside this, public collections of modern art (mostly European) were accessible in the Museum of Modern Art in New York, which was founded in 1929. The national style promoted by the Project was initially rather like Soviet Socialist Realism, but the contact with the Surrealists encouraged Pollock to experiment with Abstract Expressionism – a European movement that denied the influence of canonical art through its painterly, non-figurative effects. Although this direct government funding of art ended in 1943, in the post-World War II era realism was seen as too left-wing. Instead, Abstract Expressionism – or an American version of it – was seen as the art of the free world and this continued to enjoy state support, albeit of a more covert nature. Jackson Pollock’s Echo (Number 25, 1951) hangs in the Museum of Modern Art in New York (Fig. 14). It is an example of Pollock’s drip paintings, for which paint was dripped from a brush or stick onto a canvas that was laid out on the floor. The movement of the painter’s arm created patterns over the picture’s surface. Although this is quite improvisatory, it also allowed Pollock control over the finished work. The technique was influenced by the Surrealist idea of ‘automatism’, a kind of spontaneous drawing that came straight from the artist’s subconscious. The description of this technique indicates the way in which the traditional academic reliance on reason and rationality was removed from the process of art. Instead, the canvas became a record of an artist’s own creative processes.

  14. Jackson Pollock’s drip painting, Echo (Number 25), 1951, is now in the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

  Museums and galleries have also played an influential role in the endorsement of or challenge to the canon of art history. In order to understand how this has come about, it is necessary to think more generally about the relationship of museums to the past. If we reflect that history is how we refer to the past as well as the process of studying it, we begin to see that museums and galleries can act as important mediators in the relationship between people and their history. Museum displays essentially take a set of objects in order to compose or reorder them for us as we see them in the present. Gallery spaces contain exhibits that are linked by systems we have set up – whether it be the artists, style, school – and not by connections that were relevant at the time of their production. This is a key point to understanding that the act of presenting art history in these spaces is about presenting a past that relates to the present. In this way, art is commemorated in a museum and we are able to read it as we would a book, as it has a beginning, middle, and end. This kind of rational, orderly piecing together of the past does in many ways act like a novel, with the story gradually unfolding. As a consequence, museums tend to endorse our social and cultural status quo by projecting how we are at this moment on to the presentation of the past.

  This is not just a dry and theoretical analysis of the museum. The changes there have been in the layout of displays in permanent collections are testament to the way in which museums and galleries act as barometers of current trends in thinking about artefacts and collections. One of the most notable recent examples of this are the new hangs at Tate Modern and Tate Britain. Here, instead of the chronological display of works according to period and school, we find works hung thematically. So, for instance, there is a room that shows images of the female nude as depicted by a range of artists from across a broad period of time. The only connection between these images is the subject matter and, of course, that they are in the Tate collection. These pictures were previously displayed as part of a different ‘narrative’, or presentation, of art history. This new presentation is not because art history has changed, but it shows a different negotiation between us, the present-day viewer, and the past. The means of doing this – the narrative thread, to continue the analogy of the novel – tells us something about our current preoccupations. We might say, for instance, that the thematic display is indicative of the fact that we are no longer so preoccupied with who painted the picture – the artist – and breaks with the tradition of seeing artworks being very closely linked to their makers. Similarly, we might also conclude that in this case the grouping together of female subjects re-examines the role women have played in the art world. Feminists have said that women had to be naked to get into an art gallery. So is this new kind of display perhaps an acknowledgement of the preoccupation with the female nude by male artists and patrons, and the concomitant absence of women artists from the historical narrative of art history?

  What I want to do now is to assemble, or if you prefer curate, a couple of ‘mini exhibitions’ to demonstrate the points made in this chapter.

  The first ‘mini exhibition’ addresses the theme of ‘woman’. This subject is common to art from all periods and cultures. I am selecting the following from the illustrations in this volume: Leonardo’s The Virgin and Child with St Anne and St John the Baptist (Fig. 15); Vermeer’s Maid with a Milk Jug (Fig. 16); Reynolds’ Three Ladies Adorning a Term of Hymen (Fig. 13); and finally a 19th-century female statue
tte in wood from the Ivory Coast (Fig. 11). The most striking thing about this selection is the various roles women can represent. In Leonardo’s image we see the maternal role of ‘woman’; Christ’s mother the Virgin Mary looks dotingly at her son whilst at the same time being watched by her own mother, St Anne (who is also Christ’s grandmother). Vermeer shows us ‘woman’ as a servant doing housework – a model of feminine ‘domesticity’. By contrast, Reynolds’ portrait of the three Montgomery sisters tells us about ‘woman’ as spinster, fiancée, and bride. The sister kneeling on the ground on the left of the picture is unmarried and picks flowers for the garland that is to adorn the term of Hymen (the classical sculpture representing the god of marriage). The sister in the middle, who seems to be moving up and towards the third sister and passing the garland to her, has recently become engaged (the painting was commissioned by her fiancé The Right Hon. Luke Gardiner), whilst the third sister on the right-hand side of the picture stands holding the garland above her head. This sister is already married; she stands on the other side of Hymen, indicating her fulfilled status as wife, and the lighting in the picture falls onto her breasts and abdomen, rather than her face, highlighting her sexuality. Our small exhibition concludes with the statuette from the Ivory Coast. We don’t know if this is a portrait or a representation of the idea or ideal of woman. In either case female sexuality is most certainly of paramount concern in this work.

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

  16. Maid with a Milk Jug (also known as The Milkmaid) was painted by Jan Vermeer around 1658–60.

  The second ‘mini exhibition’ is about ‘man’, once again assembled from illustrations in this book. I have selected the following images: a manuscript illustration of the Four Evangelists (Fig. 17); Raphael’s School of Athens (Fig. 9); Apollo Belvedere (Fig. 7); and sculptures from Easter Island (Fig. 18). The Evangelists, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, are the authors of the four gospels that appear in the New Testament of the Christian Bible. Their writings are fundamental touchstones of Christianity, and show us the importance of men as proactive makers of religion. In the School of Athens, we see a large number of philosophers and thinkers from ancient times, all of whom have been celebrated for their intellectual ability and contribution to human knowledge from antiquity to the present day – and all of whom are men. The Apollo Belvedere, as we have seen in Chapter 1, represents the paradigm of male beauty. The physical perfection, although nude in the Greek original, is shielded by a strategically placed fig leaf. Finally, although the Easter Island statues remain enigmatic, recent theories suggest they are of tribal chiefs, warrior leaders, or gods who represent authority.

  To sum up our two small exhibitions, ‘woman’ shows images of maternity, domesticity, matrimonial status, and sexuality. By contrast, ‘man’ includes images of the religious leader, thinker, secular leader, pagan deity, and warrior.

  17. This 9th-century manuscript illumination of the Four Evangelists – (anti-clockwise from top left) Matthew, Mark, Luke and John – is from a Carolingian gospel book in Aachen Cathedral, Germany.

  It is important to emphasize that this exercise is not confined or determined by the illustrations selected for this volume – or indeed the themes I chose to explore. This can easily be tested, as Internet access is possible to most of the major collections, many of which have excellent interactive websites (the web addresses of some of these museums and galleries appear at the end of this book). A search of these sites using a key word that is a theme for a possible exhibition, for instance ‘Greek mythology’ or ‘still life’, will yield a range of images. The connective tissue between these may not be anything to do with style, authorship, or the idea of the chronological progress of art.

  18. Ahu Akivi, Easter Island, with its seven statues. The figures may represent tribal chiefs, warriors, or perhaps gods.

  Alongside this function of the presentation of art history as representing the concerns of the present, we can also see how the museum functions as a way of legitimizing new art into the canon of the Western tradition. Tied in with this is the idea of progress – that each generation continues the process that works towards endorsing the current status quo. In this way, we can begin to identify the moment when art becomes art history and the role of the museum in effecting and presenting this. Sir John Summerson, usually associated with architectural history, gave an inaugural lecture when he became Ferens Professor of Fine Art at the University of Hull in 1960. His remarks are very helpful to us in thinking about this point:

  new art is observed as history the very moment it is seen to possess the quality of uniqueness (look at the bibliographies on Picasso and Henry Moore) and this gives the impression that art is constantly receding from modern life – is never possessed by it. It is receding, it seems, into a gigantic landscape – the landscape of ART . . . which we see through the window of an observation car, which is so like the vitrine of a museum. Art is behind glass – the history of glass.

  This is an important issue as it is about the transition of an art object from a newly created work at the cutting edge of contemporary culture to something that begins to be part of the history of contemporary culture – no matter how recent. This also relates to the idea of art criticism as discussed in the opening chapter of this book. Contemporary art practice can be dominated by art criticism as the principal means of discussing it and evaluating its worth – in artistic and monetary terms. But once works by artists like Damien Hirst or Tracy Emin become part of an art collection, be that public or private, they transgress the boundary between art and art history.

  We tend to accept that if an object has been purchased or donated to a large museum it is conferred with an aura of authority and status. The institution acts on behalf of society to recognize art or interpret the work as art and to then present it to the public. This might not always be a straightforward process. Controversies over the purchase of artworks are frequent. The minimalist artist Carl Andre is a case in point. In 1967 Andre, a sculptor, filled the Dwan Gallery in Los Angeles with a layer of concrete blocks and then removed rectangles, so leaving ‘negative’ shapes. His sculpture was defined by this cut space, which related to the gallery. This exploration of the relationship between object and gallery was furthered by Andre in 1976 in a series of eight sculptures Equivalent I-VIII made out of fire bricks. The shape of these works related to the negative shapes Andre had made in Los Angeles. The Tate Gallery, as it then was, purchased Equivalent VIII. The public outcry over the use of funds to purchase 120 previously made, standard bricks was loud and long-lasting. In addition, the fact that the sculpture was long and low to the ground – easily missed on first glance – gave it little immediate aesthetic appeal. But Andre was making a statement about the traditional expectation of sculpture to be vertical and figurative. Moreover, his work takes its form from the spaces of the gallery, and the display of Equivalent VIII in the Tate confers to it the status of art.

  The relationship of the museum to its public is, then, really quite complex. On the one hand museum curators and directors might expect only those who ‘know’ about art to attend their institutions. But can they then be called public museums? Other directors argue that the visitor needs no prior knowledge of art to understand and appreciate artworks – it is an aesthetic pastime that anyone can enjoy who likes to look at artworks. These are the two opposing opinions, and there are plenty of points of view in between. But what are the consequences of these attitudes? If a museum or gallery is to try to broaden its appeal, what strategies should it undertake?

  I have already talked about the way in which the display of objects according to style or school, usually represented in chronological order, can enforce the kind of teleological systems that have dominated art history. But there is a popularist element to this: for instance when the Musée d’Orsay opened in Paris in 1986 an historical mode of display was chosen as it was thought this would have the widest pos
sible appeal. But this is more easily achieved where there is a distinct historical narrative of progression – in the case of Orsay from French Academic painting of the mid-19th century through to Manet and the Impressionists, and then to the Neo-Impressionists and Post-Impressionists. It all works rather well as a neat, tidy bundle, and the museum building itself is a converted former 19th-century railway station, so adding to the ‘authentic’ historical experience of the art of that time.

  Art from the later 20th century onwards sometimes creates issues that have to be dealt with as regards accessibility for the general public and the way in which works are displayed. Displays of what I shall call here ‘modern’ art in museums have broken away from the traditional formula seen in the Orsay, the National Gallery in London, and a host of other large institutions, some of which I have mentioned. From about the 1980s, museums of modern art have devoted whole rooms or spaces to the work of a single artist and have broken away from linear arrangements of works to try to create a gallery experience that is primarily visual. It’s possible to recognize here a distinct similarity between the methods of displaying modern art and the way in which its histories are written. In Chapter 2 I talked about Clement Greenberg and his ideas about the status of avant-garde work; here we have that kind of ‘hero’ worship in action in the gallery. The individual artist, who may be alive and still producing work, may find him- or herself in a gallery space where they feel their work is part of that space.