Art History Read online

  Alongside the permanent collections in museums and galleries, the special exhibition which often tours from country to country or across continents gives the general public access to an even wider range of art objects. Art history can be presented in quite a different way in these shows. Curators can pursue themes or ideas or the life of a particular artist as they can draw on the holdings in collections worldwide, provided the owner-institutions are willing to lend. These kinds of exhibitions are important ways in which art history can be presented, and they have affected the way in which we think about the subject. One of the most famous examples of the interaction between exhibitions and art history was the show organized in 1910–11 by the English art historian and critic Roger Fry, who returned to Britain after being Director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York for five years. The exhibition included works by Van Gogh, Gauguin, and Cézanne, all of whom worked in very different styles. Fry called the show ‘Manet and the Post-Impressionists’, thereby naming a ‘new’ artistic movement which remains today a very popular subject in art history. The new name, or category, was even adopted by the French and translated as le post-impressionnisme. Unlike Impressionism or Romanticism, Post-Impressionism does not principally refer to the stylistic similarities between artists; instead, Fry wanted to group together those who were interested in a more formal conception of art and who stressed the importance of the subject. ‘Manet and the Post-Impressionists’ caused a great deal of controversy, but the idea of the ‘blockbuster’ exhibition grew out of events like this. These kinds of travelling or one-off exhibitions are unique experiences. The coming together of artworks from across the world enables a presentation of art history in which the subject – our primary evidence – remains centre stage.

  Chapter 4

  Thinking about art history

  One of the most interesting aspects of art history is the way in which it enables us to think about the ideas of a range of writers and theorists and in turn how their work has interacted with the visual. I want here to show you briefly the ways in which art history can incorporate the richness of Western thought into the analysis of visual subjects. The term ‘Western thought’ is used purposefully only to prescribe the limitations of my discussion.

  In Chapter 1 I discussed what we mean by the term art history and I distinguished it from art appreciation and art criticism. One of my main points was that for art to have a history there has to be some kind of method or approach to the way in which the narrative or story of art history is put together. In other words, putting art objects in chronological order or in stylistic groups is not enough. The way in which a range of schools of thought and philosophical ideas have been used to put together these narratives of art is an important part of art history. I am not calling here for some slavish devotion to theory at the expense of the objects themselves – to do that is as meaningless as putting art in chronological order. In Chapter 1 I suggested that the work of art is our primary evidence, and it is the interaction between that evidence and our method of enquiry that is the substance of art history. This chapter builds on the discussion in Chapter 2 where the various traditions of writing art history were considered. Here the different ways of thinking about art history – its social, cultural, and aesthetic meaning – are the focal points of discussion. Clearly, these are related topics, but Chapter 2 concentrated on selected works and writers. Here we see how art history relates to and forms part of a broader discourse around the historical formulation of issues such as class and gender.

  We have already seen how writers such as Winckelmann helped found the discipline of art history. But at the time when he was writing, the status of visual experience was generally considered inferior to human thought. The fundamental problem with this paradox is that art history should rank second to other kinds of history or, perhaps more accurately here, other kinds of knowing. The rational scientific idea of knowledge that predominated in the 18th century was that thought was superior to sensory knowledge. It was an extension of Descartes’ notion of cogito ergo sum – I think therefore I am – humankind’s ability to reason made up the core of our being. By the mid-18th century this hierarchy of knowledge was being challenged and as a consequence ways of thinking about the importance of art history changed. One of the key developments was the appearance of the term ‘aesthetics’, a mode of thought that considers sensory perception as equal to rational or logical thought. Logic is based on verbal reasoning, whereas aesthetics is based on the senses, in our case sight. This goes back to one of the questions raised right at the beginning of this book about the problems of writing about visual experience – the art we experience through sight, but articulate using words. The language we use to describe art objects can be at odds with our experience of the objects we see.

  One of the first philosophers to think about these issues was Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten. He wrote a lengthy treatise in Latin on the subject, entitled Aesthetica (1750–58). This put art, for the first time, within a framework that did not have any hierarchies. Beauty equalled perfection, but here this was perceived and understood by the exercise of taste (in this context taste means a very clear sense of perception) rather than reason. This challenged the idea that the purpose of art is to imitate nature, which was fundamental to the system that had been set up by Winckelmann. Instead, art should create sensory knowledge by forming perfection out of indistinct images. The most important point to take from Baumgarten is the idea that an individual’s judgement or taste about aesthetics could have value and meaning to other people.

  This is the cornerstone of Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Judgement, published in 1790. Kant analysed our ability to make individual judgements about aesthetics, and described the way in which he perceived that these judgements underpinned the concept of ‘genius’. A judgement about the quality of an artwork would be made in terms of its beauty and purpose. Kant’s notion that there could be a range of aesthetic tastes, in contrast to Winckelmann’s hierarchical system, also encouraged the view that beautiful objects arouse our sensations in the same way as moral judgements do. In this way, aesthetics and ethics become intertwined and the concepts of genius and taste are intrinsically linked with the moral character of the artist or viewer. Kant’s ideas squarely challenged the supremacy of the classical ideal championed by Winckelmann.

  Kant’s idea of the aesthetic was refuted by that most influential thinker about history and in turn art history – the early 19th-century German philosopher G. W. F. Hegel. Hegel is sometimes referred to as an idealist or metaphysical thinker because he believed that all events are part of a process that leads towards a self-knowing divine spirit. For Hegel, this spirit was the inner nature of the world, which expressed itself through the spirit of the nation, or Volksgeist as it is known in German. The spirit is also manifest in the spirit of the age, or Zeitgeist, as discussed in Chapter 2. These two elements constitute the always-moving dynamic of history. Hegel wanted to understand the entirety of history as both a system and an ongoing process. Although he saw sensory experience as a debased representation of knowledge, art remained for him one of the most important means of seeing and understanding history as the spirit. The history of the spirit can be broken up into three periods – the symbolic, the classical, and the romantic. These three periods relate very neatly to the way in which art history has traditionally been divided up – first there is non-Western and early art; second there is the Graeco-Roman tradition, which we sometimes also call classical art; and finally there is the art of Christianity and German Romanticism, coming to the fore at the time at which Hegel was writing. This period, as far as Hegel was concerned, was the end of art, as this epoch would be absorbed into the spirituality of Christianity. Despite the strong religious underpinning in Hegel’s thought, Graeco-Roman art remains the central plank of a Hegelian view of art. And like many other writers, including Winckelmann, he uses Greek art as a means of defining beauty. In each of Hegel’s three periods there is a beginning, midd
le, and end, at which time art reaches perfection and then goes into decay. In the case of the art of Graeco-Roman times, perfection could be found in the early beginnings, referred to as the Archaic period – as seen for instance in the stillness and serenity of the figures on the Parthenon frieze, and went into decline with the decadence of the Hellenistic period, when the human figure was shown in a much more emotional state of movement. Although Hegel places great emphasis on the bigger picture of art history, he also thought it important to look very carefully at the objects themselves in order to understand them fully. That said, he did not think that art history was all about connoisseurial values. Instead, art objects were, in his view, very much a part of a larger historical process.

  Hegel has been extremely influential on the way we think about art history as a systematic enquiry into historical knowledge. Although his concept of the spirit or divine was rooted in Protestant Christianity, his ideas paved the way for historians to pay less attention to religious art, which was a mainstay of artistic production in the West, and think instead about the idea of progress and how society is represented in the art forms it produces. In other words, how art operates as part of the Hegelian ‘spirit of the age’, which is his explanation of history. If we think about this in relation to Reynolds’ Three Ladies Adorning a Term of Hymen (1773), which has already been discussed in Chapter 3, we can think about this painting in terms of the later 18th-century preoccupation with antiquity and how the values of that society were adopted and used as a model for their own. This spirit was also manifest in the architecture, literature, music, and other cultural outputs of a society that considered itself equal to that of the ancients.

  Karl Marx, perhaps one of the most important thinkers of recent times, was also significantly influenced by his 19th-century contemporary Hegel. Marx’s analysis or approach to history largely followed the model developed by Hegel. Cultural forms – including art – change throughout history and the manifestations of the spirit. But for Marx the spirit was not some real entity or ideal, it was instead the economic basis for society. This relationship between the economic base and the product or superstructure (in this case art) is known as historical materialism. Marx argued that everything around us is determined by our social class, and that as a result there are many historical ‘truths’ depending on your class or cultural viewpoint. Leading on from this, Marx introduced the notion of ‘ideology’ to examine our relationship to art. Ideology is all to do with the manipulation of power, and for Marx there are always two social groups: the exploited and the exploiters. For Marx, then, art was about the dynamics of power operating between these two groups. Art is part of this concept of ideology as it influences the relationship between us and our context. It makes us think about ourselves in a certain way. This can be explained in more detail, and to demonstrate the connection between Marx and Hegel I will use the same example of Reynolds’ Three Ladies Adorning a Term of Hymen, 1773 (Fig. 13). If you think back to the discussion of the Grand Tour in Chapter 3, I talked about how collections of artefacts of ancient Greece and Rome became part of the must-have items for the elite and how this trend helped to promote the popularity of the classical revival in art. The interest in antiquity can be identified as part of the ‘spirit of the age’ in 18th-century Britain. This ‘spirit’ is manifest across all forms of cultural production. For instance, many of the country houses in this period were designed using architectural elements copied from ancient Roman buildings. In this way these objects were part of the ideology of a certain class, and this relates to Marx’s idea of a belief or value system. If you appreciated them, understood them, and best of all owned some of them, you were part of this social group. Here, membership of this group is based on wealth; certainly the artefacts from antiquity were expensive, and so money underpinned this cultural activity.

  For Marx there is an essential relationship between economic structures and the culture of a society. It is the social production and consumption of art that matters rather than the individual artist or patron. One further example is helpful here. In Chapter 1 I talked about John Constable’s The Cornfield (1826), an idyllic representation of the English countryside that has enjoyed enduring popularity. But this depends on who is looking at it. For those members of early 19th-century society who had been displaced from their rural communities as a result of the Acts of Enclosure and the Industrial Revolution, this image must have seemed remote from their everyday experience. The Cornfield presented the ideology of a rural idyll – but it was land owned by the elite. The notion of ideology as a basis for power has been an important tool in the way art history has been written in the last few decades and I present some examples of this later in this chapter.

  Hegel and Marx show us how in the 19th century there was great interest in the idea of history in both meanings of the word – the events that happened in the past and the study of them. Both their ways of thinking about art are important as they enable us to see art outside of the context of individual artists and patrons; instead it is more of a barometer of social, cultural, and political forces – in other words external pressures and influences. And as we have seen in Chapter 3, the 19th century was an important period in the formation of museums and galleries. The attitudes of these institutions towards history and aesthetics when presenting art history ran parallel to and intersected with these ways of thinking about art history.

  The divergence between the formalist or aesthetic critique of Kant and the contextualizing frame provided by Hegel and Marx has remained a mainstay of art history through to the present day. This is particularly evident in relation to our preoccupation with the meaning of objects and how this meaning is conveyed. These concerns converge around the idea of a semiology of art. Semiotics is a long-established strand of philosophical enquiry that was initially concerned with language and communication. Its beginnings in art history are seen in the work of scholars such as Erwin Panofsky and Aby Warburg, as well as Ernst Gombrich, whom we discussed in Chapter 2. For these art historians, semiotics was seen as commensurate with iconology, and was concerned with the analysis of content rather than form. I discuss this in more detail in Chapter 5. In the first half of the 20th century, iconology was a distinct way of thinking about art that concentrated on connecting visual imagery with other kinds of cultural outputs. In more recent times, it has become a looser practice that is more to do with thinking about the meaning of the subject matter of a work of art rather than its style or broader context.

  Semiotics has become part of what is now generally referred to as critical theory – the academic theory of criticism. Critical theory is a collective term for structuralism, post-structuralism, deconstruction, psychoanalysis, and post-colonialism, to name but a few strands. These schools of thought are concerned (respectively) with the challenging of the notion of absolute truth and reality, the study of the human subconscious, and cultural production and thought in a world where the colonial imperative no longer has the sovereign status it once enjoyed. I have briefly mentioned New Art History, which is seen to be the champion in using critical analysis to think about the visual. I want to highlight a few of the important ways critical theory has influenced how we think about art history.

  One of the most important texts in recent decades is Michel Foucault’s What Is an Author? An innocuous enough question that really gets to the heart of our enduring preoccupation with the artist as a genius. Foucault is considered both a structuralist and post-structuralist – both are schools of thought that look at systems and organization in culture and then use these systems to analyse those cultures. Foucault’s argument is directed at our concerns about authenticity and authorship in relation to value and quality. Not only does this help us to separate out the meaning of a work from its author, but it also allows us to see anonymous objects as equally important signifiers of social and cultural practices. Art history is more than part of the personal biography of an artist. We do not know, for instance, who carved the Easter
Island statues (Fig. 18), nor do we know who painted the manuscript illustration of the Evangelists (Fig. 17), but this does not necessarily impinge on our analysis of them. This should also be possible where the artist is known. For instance, if it were proved that Leonardo da Vinci did not paint the Mona Lisa, there would be no material change to the work. And if our analysis of its artistic and cultural significance is valid, surely these arguments would remain intact despite the work’s anonymity. We also have to bear in mind that many artists ran large studios and used assistants or apprentices in their work. And, in the case of sculpture, some artists did not carve or cast their own work. For instance, Rodin’s marble sculptures (Fig. 19) were carved by his workshop using his original bronze casts as models.