History of Art

A Student's Handbook

Marcia Pointon

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781136186134
• Edition: 5
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: History of Art

This fully revised edition of the History of Art: A Student's Handbook introduces students to the kinds of practices, challenges, questions and writings they will encounter in studying the history of art.

Marcia Pointon conveys the excitement of Art History as a multi-faceted discipline addressing all aspects of the study of media, communication and representation. She describes and analyses different methods and approaches to the discipline, explaining their history and their effects on the day-to-day learning process. She also discusses the relationship of Art History to related disciplines including film, literature, design history and anthropology.

The fifth edition of this classic text includes:

• • information on why Art History is important and relevant in today's world
• guidance on choosing a degree course
• case studies of careers pursued by Art History graduates
• advice on study skills and reading methods
• a bibliography and further reading
• detailed up to date advice on electronic resources and links to essential websites

History of Art covers academic, training and vocational aspects of Art History, providing a wealth of information on the characteristics of courses available and on the relationship between Art History and the world of museums and heritage.

1 Engaging with art

Those of us who live in Western-style societies inhabit a world of visual communications: our eyes are focused on screens large and small, we absorb film and television, advertisements, traffic signs, signals alerting us in both rural and urban environments, graffiti on buildings and railway carriages, photographs on travel passes and passports, images in newspapers, paintings in galleries, serial strips and cartoons, the packaging on what we buy. Some of what we are looking at is ephemeral (here today and gone tomorrow) but much of it is long lasting. None of these forms of visual communication – the temporary or the seemingly permanent – is outside history; all are determined by how we live and interact with our environment, how big business and government (national or local) decides is the best way to attract our attention, and by what happened in the past. We may choose to be aware of what we see, or we may think we are just getting on with our daily lives, but, even if this is the case, it will impact upon us, forming memories and shaping expectations. All this seen and looked-at experience can be summed up under the term Visual Culture. You might reasonably ask: ‘Well, what about nature and landscape?’ Although we tend to be thinking mainly of a world made by humans when we speak of Visual Culture, it is also true that all the landscape that most of us are ever likely to see bears visible traces of human intervention, and some of it draws us precisely because that intervention – topiary, garden statues, planted avenues of beeches, flower beds – makes what we are looking at remarkable.

Art History – literally the study of the history of art – overlaps with the concerns of Visual Culture Studies. This book does not seek to define what art is; definitions of art vary over time and from one society to another, and much of what we now study as art (medieval manuscript illumination, for example) was not considered art at the time it was made. Art History is by no means exclusively concerned with Art with a capital ‘A’ (what we might expect to find in an art gallery). That is to say, it does not address only high culture or things that are made to be beautiful and non-functional. Titian’s painting Perseus and Andromeda (ca. 1550–62) in the Wallace Collection in London (Figure 1.1) seems like a miraculous object – a thing of inestimable visual allure – but Art History’s remit stretches far beyond this – for example, to poster art from the past and present and, not inconceivably, the pictorial design of digital war games.

Figure 1.1 Titian (Tiziano Vecellio), Perseus and Andromeda, oil on canvas, Wallace Collection London. Reproduced by kind permission of the Trustees of The Wallace Collection.

Art historians are interested not only in objects but also in processes. To put this in a more recognizable historical framework, art historians concern themselves with visual communication whatever its intended audiences or consumers. Thus sixteenth-century German woodcuts, which probably cost less than a plate of herrings at the time they were produced (Figure 1.2), are of equal (though different) interest to, for example, the painting now known as the Mona Lisa, which is fixed to the wall of a gallery in the Louvre Museum, Paris, behind layers of protective glass. A further case might be a plastic toy invented by a Hungarian, the so-called Rubik’s Cube (Figure 1.3), which became a major craze in the West in the early 1980s and was eventually exhibited at the New York Museum of Modern Art. Its bright colours and corresponding squares struck a chord with people familiar with the work of the artist Piet Mondrian and with the use of primary colours by Pop artists in the USA and Britain in the 1960s.

Figure 1.2 Anon., Battle for the Trousers, woodcut frontispiece to Hans Sachs’s play The Evil Smoke, Stadtgeschichtliche Museen, Nuremberg.

Figure 1.3 Rubik’s Cube (designed by Ernő Rubik), 1985, plastic, moulded, Victoria and Albert Museum. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

Because Art History, as an area of scholarship and learning, exists in a relationship with other professions, such as those concerned with the display and sale of artworks (whether contemporary or historical) and those concerned with publishing and marketing attractive picture books, the practice of art historians is often misrepresented and misunderstood. Art History remains, at some level, the history of works of art and how they were made; the perceived gap between what artists do and the matters that preoccupy art historians has not infrequently been a source of amusement. But Art History is not only about artists and their works, it also takes (or should take) responsibility for trying to understand how and why the work of some producers gets discussed while the work of others does not, and why artists and their work signify, or produce meanings for people, in certain ways at certain periods in certain places. Art History addresses not only how a work by Leonardo came to be made and how it was received at the time it was produced, but why we think of Leonardo as Art and an advertisement in a magazine as Not Art.

This seam between Art with a capital ‘A’ and other kinds of imagery has been creatively and subversively exploited by billboard artists such as Barbara Kruger in the USA and by the graffiti artist known only, despite his fame and notoriety, as Banksy. The latter produced a ‘conversation’ with Monet’s famous painting of his water-lily pond at Giverny but replaced the lilies with urban detritus, including a shopping trolley. From one point of view Banksy is a vandal defacing property that does not belong to him. From another he is a hugely creative visual artist who engages with the politics of picture-making. By its very nature his work is (or was until recently) not collectible (thus setting it against even the seemingly most daring of contemporary artists such as Damien Hirst), but the Victoria and Albert Museum has none the less managed to collect some of his stickers, one of which, entitled Americans Working Overhead (ca. 2004) (Figure 1.4), is designed like a danger sign and shows silhouetted individuals running as a helicopter hovers overhead. Art historians investigate the origins, the connections between ‘high’ and ‘low’, and the ways in which imagery such as this contributes to our understanding of a period of historical time, whether in the present or in the far distant past.

Figure 1.4 Banksy, Americans Working Overhead, digital print sticker, ca. 2004. Reproduced by kind permission of Pest Control. © Banksy, London, 2005.

We might observe therefore that the shelves of art books on individual artists (what we call monographs) that still predominate in bookshops from New York to Tokyo, and from London to Helsinki, or the kinds of art reviews that appear in, for example, the London Evening Standard, do not at all indicate what Art History these days is about. Moreover, the celebrity status of some contemporary artists – the photographs that appear of them in the company of dress designers and rock stars – as well as the kinds of review-writing in newspapers that tell us more about the reviewer than the works of art discussed, can offer a misleading picture of what it is to study Art History. Opinion is no substitute for scholarship, and the ‘history’ in Art History demands respect for facts and rigorous comparative research.

Having outlined the diversity of material that students might encounter in an Art History degree programme, it remains the case that much that is taught at undergraduate level in universities and colleges focuses on, or at least is based on, the traditional family of ‘flat art’ – that is, painting, print and photography, along with sculpture and architecture. People who enjoy paintings are sometimes reluctant to analyse them for fear of spoiling the richness and spontaneity of their experience. It has been suggested that some of the work done by sociologists or social historians of art, or by those whose concern is with theory rather than practice, ignores and indeed denies the aesthetic experience, the fundamental pleasure of looking as well as the very special act of artistic creativity. This view is a bit like the notion that knowing the ingredients of the recipe, recognizing the method of cooking and seeing the utensils employed detracts from the taste of the dish. But Art History does more than this; it seeks to explain why (to pursue the metaphor) certain foods are favoured in certain cultures – what the differences in cultural meaning are between, say, fast food eaten from a disposable carton, a picnic hamper prepared by Fortnum & Mason, or a cassoulet made according to a recipe by Elizabeth David and cooked in a Le Creuset cast-iron casserole.

Acknowledging the importance of enjoying something does not, of course, preclude a historical analysis of the object that is arousing pleasure. It might in fact be more pleasurable if we know more about the object we are viewing. Moreover, pleasure is not a simple matter. The arousal of our senses – and how we recognize and register it – is itself open to interrogation, as writers on the sublime in the eighteenth century recognized. Neuroscientists are interested in investigating this, but their approach is generally alien to Art History, focusing as it does on biology rather than on culture and history. The pleasure of looking is also historically located. Why we like particular characteristics of certain sorts of objects at any one time is not the result simply of our genes or our own particular personalities but is determined by values promoted within the society of which we are a part. So, while no one seeks to underestimate the importance of sensuous and instinctual responses to art objects, the notion that the sensuous is undermined by the intellectual is a legacy from a period in the past which promoted art as an alternative to thought and that split sensation from reason.

In fact we unknowingly engage all the time in forms of visual analysis that are not dissimilar to certain kinds of art-historical activity. Whenever we deliberately and consciously choose a style that we know to be of the past (a William Morris-type fabric, a 1930s-style tea cup or a 1950s tie) we are applying aesthetic and historical as well as functional criteria. We are motivated by an awareness of the symbolic as well as the utilitarian: a sports bag with a brand name emblazoned on it, a chrome towel rail instead of a pine one, a red mini Cooper roadster instead of a white Volkswagen Golf. Each time we stand for any length of time before a painting and find ourselves stimulated and provoked to think, to ask questions, we are engaged in criticism. Every time we look at a painting and then, moving to look at the one that is hanging adjacent to it, find ourselves noticing that it is different or similar in some way, we are involved in acts of discernment and discrimination (to use the word without its contemporary pejorative associations). Indeed, we are involved in analysis. Art criticism and art appreciation are near neighbours, and both are ways into Art History.

Acquiring an aptitude and a skill in looking critically at the artefacts of the past and the present that surround us is not necessarily easy. But learning to look in a conscious and self-conscious way is enjoyable. We might be looking at a piece of modern sculpture situated in one of those tiny gardens in the midst of towering skyscrapers where New York office workers enjoy a lunchtime sandwich; or at one of the now almost obsolete red British telephone boxes preserved in a ‘sensitive’ rural location that attracts our attention; or at an object whose original function was part of an African tribal rite but which now is to be seen in a glass case in a museum such as the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford. Many of us are able to say with conviction and sincerity that we like art but would find it extremely difficult to say precisely what we like and why we like it. Even when we plan to visit a museum or gallery, we find ourselves confused, unable to fit things together, though we may be aware that there is a tantalizing pattern that we cannot identify, and, above all, we find it impossible to express adequately in words what our experience of looking has been like.

I referred earlier to ‘Visual Culture’ as a descriptive term for a terrain of objects of looking, a terrain to which Art History connects but by which it is not defined. A comparable relationship exists with ‘Material Culture’, a term that used to be used most commonly by anthropologists (examining, for example, cooking vessels alongside oral testimonies of the society they were investigating) or archaeologists (looking at bronze dress ornaments alongside the traces of living accommodation from the far distant past). During the past two decades ‘Material Culture’ has crept into use by art historians; its virtue as a term is that it avoids the evaluative connotations of ‘art’. So, for example, someone researching eighteenth-century French court culture during the time of Louis XIV might consider jewellery, porcelain and textiles, alongside portraits, as material evidence, with paintings not being taken in any way as more important historically than these other ‘used’ artefacts from the past. Whatever the objects of our study – courtly or vernacular, three- or two-dimensional – the discipline of looking, and in some circumstances of touching, is paramount.

As children, we learn to draw before we can write, but very soon literacy and numeracy become, through school, the criteria of our achievement. Only when we look into the children’s dental clinic and see the walls covered with posters of crocodiles with bright, gleaming teeth and rabbits nibbling nuts, or when confronted with a photograph showing a starving child in a famine-stricken region of Africa, do we recognize that, in some cases, the pictorial image is more powerful than words to convey to us a complex mass of information and ideas. Art History requires us, at some level, to regain and cultivate our ability to respond to all forms of visual expression in whatever medium or shape they may appear.

If you think looking and seeing are simple and straightforward matters that are instinctive to everyone, try looking at a picture and describing what you see. Or, even better, look hard at a picture, a building, or any kind of manufactured or crafted object and then go away and try to remember precisely what was before you and what it meant to you when you looked at it. Thurber’s witty cartoon (Figure 1.5) is a clever inversion of the usual ‘I don’t know anything about art but I know what I like’, the layperson’s defence against the ‘expert’. Just as liking is a vital part of knowing, so knowing is essential to liking. It is the relationship, and the developed, cultivated balance between the two, that is difficult to achieve. In Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen’s heroine Elizabeth Bennett visits a great historic English mansion. She knows that the apartments are full of ‘good’ pictures, but she walks past them in search of something with which she can identify on a personal level. The terms ‘good’ and ‘bad’ are problematic for art historians, who are concerned more with whether artworks fulfil and satisfy the purposes for which they were created than with whether they are estimable according to an assumed universal standard.

Figure 1.5 James Thurber cartoon, ‘He knows all about art, but he doesn’t know what he likes.’ © 1939 by Rosemary A. Thurber. Reprinted by arrangement with Rosemary A. Thurber and The Barbara Hogenson Agency. All rights reserved.

Powerful constituencies in every society construct a notion of what is best. This is called a canon, and it is like a football team; its members may be promoted or demoted, it may be relegated to a different division, and it is controlled as much by international finance as by individual or collective merit. Scholars and ‘experts’ (the name the art trade prefers to describe the people who authenticate works intended for sale) often disagree, with one generation cancelling out the findings of another. The most notorious example of this is the Rembrandt Research Project (RRP). Rembrandt was such a popular painter in his own time and...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgements
• Preface to the Fifth Edition
• 1 Engaging with art
• 2 How art historians work: training and practice
• 3 Art History as a discipline
• 4 The language of Art History
• 5 Reading Art History
• 6 And what are you going to do now?
• Bibliography and further reading
• Index