Art history

Art history is the study of objects of art in their historical and stylistic contexts.

This discipline is distinguished from art criticism, which is concerned with placing a relative artistic "value" on individual works with respect to others of generally comparable style, or giving sanction to an entire style or movement; and art theory, which is concerned with the fundamental nature of art and is related more to aesthetics and determination of the essence of beauty and artistic appeal.

Art history is technically not these things. Art history answers the questions, "How did the artist come to create his or her work?" "Who were his or her patrons? His or her teachers? His or her disciples?" "What historical forces shaped the artist's oeuvre, and how did he or she and his or her creation in turn affect the course of events, artistic, political and social?"

Art history (also called history of art) is a term which encompasses several different methods of studying the visual arts; in its most common usage it refers to the academic study of works of art and architecture. The definition is, however, wide-ranging, and some aspects of the discipline overlap with art criticism and art theory, as noted above, and as is demonstrated by Ernst Gombrich's observation that "the field of art history [is] much like Caesar's Gaul, divided into three parts inhabited by three different, though not necessarily hostile tribes: the connoisseurs, the critics and the academic art historians".^[1] Works of criticism or of theory have frequently been the pivots around which the understanding of art history has turned.

Definition

Art history is a relatively new academic enterprise. Whereas the analysis of historical trends in, for example, politics, literature, and the sciences, benefits from the clarity and portability of the written word, a true art history relies on faithful reproductions of artworks as a springboard of discussion and study. Advances in photographic reproduction and printing techniques after World War II made this possible. Nevertheless the appreciation and study of the visual arts has intrigued man for millennia. The definition of art history reflects the dichotomy within art; i.e., art as history and in anthropological context; and art as a study in forms.

The study of visual art can be approached through the following broad categories:

Contextualism is the approach whereby a work of art is examined in the context of its time; in a manner which respects its creator's motivations and imperatives; with consideration of the desires and prejudices of its patrons and sponsors; with a comparative analysis of themes and approaches of the creator's colleagues and teachers; and consideration of religious iconography and temporal symbolism. In short, this approach examines the work of art in the context of the world within which it was created.

In contrast, formalism, as the term suggests, approaches the artwork through an analysis of its form; that is, the creator's use of line, shape, color, texture, and composition. This approach examines how the artist uses a two-dimensional picture plane (or the three dimensions of sculptural or architectural space) to create his or her art. A formal analysis can further describe art as representational or non-representational; which answers the question, is the artist imitating an object or image found in nature? If so, it is representational. The closer the art hews to perfect imitation, the more the art is realistic. If the art is less imitation and more symbolism, or in an important way strives to capture nature's essence, rather than imitate it directly, the art is abstract. Impressionism is an example of a representational style that was not directly imitative, but strove to create an "impression" of nature. Of course, realism and abstraction exist on a continuum. If the work is not representational of nature, but an expression of the artist's feelings, longings and aspirations, or his or her search for ideals of beauty and form, the work is non-representational or a work of expressionism.^[2]

Historical development

The ancient world

The earliest surviving writing on art that can be classified as art history are the passages in Pliny the Elder's Natural History concerning the development of Greek sculpture and painting. From them it is possible to trace the ideas of Xenokrates of Sicyon, a Greek sculptor who was perhaps the first art historian. As a result, Pliny's work, while mainly an encyclopaedia of the sciences, were disproportionately influential with respect to art from the Renaissance onwards, particularly the passages about the techniques used by the painter Apelles. Similar, though independent, developments occurred in 6th century China, where a canon of worthy artists was established by writers in the scholar-official class (who, being necessarily proficient in calligraphy, were artists themselves), and the Six Principles of Painting were formulated by Xie He.

The beginnings of modern art history

While personal reminiscences of art and artists have long been written and read (see Lorenzo Ghiberti for the best early example), it was Giorgio Vasari, the Tuscan painter, sculptor and author of "Lives of the Painters," who ushered in the era of the story of art as history, with emphasis on art's progression and development, a milestone in this field. His was a personal and a historical account, featuring biographies of individual Italian artists, many of whom were his contemporaries and personal acquaintances. The most renowned of these was Michelangelo, and Vasari's account is enlightening. Vasari's ideas about art held sway until the 18th century, when criticism was leveled at his peculiar style of history as the personal. Scholars such as Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717-1768), criticised Vasari's "cult" of artistic personality, and argued that the real emphasis in the study of art belonged on the views of the learned beholder and not the unique viewpoint of the charismatic artist. Winckelmann's writings thus were the beginnings of art criticism. Winckelmann was famous for his critique of the artistic excesses of the Baroque and Rococo forms, and subsequently instrumental in reforming taste in favor of the more sober Neoclassicism, in a return to elemental Renaissance thinking. Jacob Burckhardt (1818 - 1843), one of the founders of art history, noted that Winckelmann was 'the first to distinguish between the periods of ancient art and to link the history of style with world history'. Incidentally, from Winckelmann until the early 20th century, the field of art history was dominated by German-speaking academics.

The critical tradition

Winckelmann's work marked the entry of art history into the high-philosophical discourse of German culture. Winckelmann was read avidly by Goethe and Schiller, both of whom began to write on the history of art, and his account of the Laocoon occasioned a response by Lessing. The emergence of art as a major subject of philosophical speculation was solidified by the appearance of Kant's Critique of Judgment in 1790, and was furthered by Hegel's Lectures on Aesthetics. Hegel's philosophy served as the direct inspiration for Karl Schnaase's work. Schnaase's Niederländische Briefe established the theoretical foundations for art history as an autonomous discipline, and his Geschichte der bildenden Künste, one of the first historical surveys of the history of art from antiquity to the Renaissance, faciliated the teaching of art history in German-speaking universities. Schnaase's survey was published contemporaneously with a similar work by Franz Theodor Kugler.

Wölfflin

Most acknowledge Heinrich Wölfflin (1864-1945), who studied under Burckhardt in Basel, as the father of modern art history. Wölfflin certainly made the first formal analysis of the field. He introduced a scientific approach to the history of art, turning on three concepts. Firstly, he attempted to study art using psychology, particularly the work of Willhelm Wundt, one of the founders of scientific psychology. A principal, if strained, scientific conception was that of the artistic ideal of corporeal correspondence; i.e. that art and architecture are good if they resemble the human body. For example, houses were good if their façades looked like faces. Secondly, he introduced the idea of studying art through comparison. Hence by comparing individual paintings to each other, one were able to make distinctions of style. His book Renaissance and Baroque developed this idea, and was the first to show how these stylistic periods differed from one another. In contrast to Giorgio Vasari, Wölfflin was uninterested in the biographies of artists. In fact he proposed the creation of an "art history without names." Finally, he studied art based on ideas of nationhood. He was particularly interested in whether there was an inherently "Italian" and an inherently "German" style. This last interest was most fully articulated in his monograph on the German artist Albrecht Dürer.

He used a comparison - contrast type of analysis, and believed that both Renaissance and Baroque architecture "spoke" the same language - that of classical Greek and Rome - though with different dialects.

Wölfflin taught at the universities of Berlin, Basel, Munich, and Zurich. A number of students went on to distinguished careers in art history, including Jakob Rosenberg and Frida Schottmuller.

The Vienna School

Contemporaneous with Wölfflin's career, a major school of art-historical thought developed at the University of Vienna. The first generation of the Vienna School was dominated by Alois Riegl and Franz Wickhoff, both students of Moritz Thausing, and was characterized by a tendency to reassess neglected or disparaged periods in the history of art. Riegl and Wickhoff both wrote extensively on the art of late antiquity, which before them had been considered as a period of decline from the classical ideal. Riegl also contributed to the revaluation of the Baroque.

The next generation of professors at Vienna included Max Dvořák, Julius von Schlosser, Hans Tietze, Karl Maria Swoboda, and Josef Strzygowski. A number of the most important twentieth-century art historians, including Ernst Gombrich, received their degrees at Vienna at this time.

However, the term "Second Vienna School" (or "New Vienna School") is usually reserved for the following generation of Viennese scholars, including Hans Sedlmayr, Otto Pächt, and Guido Kaschnitz von Weinberg. These scholars began in the 1930s to return to the work of the first generation, particularly to Riegl and his concept of Kunstwollen, and attempted to develop it into a full-blown art-historical methodology. Sedlmayr, in particular, rejected the minute study of iconography, patronage, and other approaches grounded in historical context, preferring instead to concentrate on the aesthetic qualities of a work of art. As a result, the Second Vienna School gained a reputation for unrestratined and irresponsible formalism, and was furthermore colored by Sedlmayr's overt racism and membership in the Nazi party. This latter tendency was, however, by no means shared by all members of the school; Pächt, for example, was himself Jewish, and was forced to leave Vienna in the 1930s.

Panofsky and iconography

The opposite tendency, focusing more, although not exclusively, on iconography, was developed by a loose group of scholars who gathered in Hamburg in the 1920s. The most prominent among them were Erwin Panofsky, Aby Warburg, and Fritz Saxl. Panofsky, in his early work, also developed the theories of Riegl, but became eventually more preoccupied with iconography, and in particular with the transmission of themes related to classical antiquity in the Middle Ages and Renaissance. In this respect his interests coincided with those of Warburg, the son of a wealthy family who had assembled an impressive library in Hamburg devoted to the study of the classical tradition in post-classical art and culture. Under Saxl's auspices, this library was developed into a research institute, affiliated with the University of Hamburg, where Panofsky taught.

Warburg died in 1929, and in the 1930s Saxl and Panofsky, both Jewish, were forced to leave Hamburg. Saxl settled in London, bringing Warburg's library with him and establishing the Warburg Institute. Panofsky settled in Princeton at the Institute for Advanced Study. In this respect they were part of an extraordinary influx of German art historians into the English-speaking academy in the 1930s (the so-called "emigré scholars"), which also included Ernst Kitzinger, Richard Krautheimer, Otto Brendel, and Rudolf Wittkower. These scholars were largely responsible for establishing art history as a legitimate field of study in the English-speaking world, and the influence of Panofsky's methodology, in particular, determined the course of American art history for at least a generation.

Psychoanalytic art history

Heinrich Wölfflin was not the only scholar to invoke psychological theories in the study of art. Psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud wrote a book on the artist Leonardo da Vinci, in which Freud used Leonardo's paintings to interrogate the artist's psyche and sexual orientation. Freud inferred from his analysis that Leonardo was probably homosexual. The use of posthumous material to perform psychoanalysis is controversial; furthermore, the sexual mores of Leonardo's time and Freud's are different.

After Freud, several other scholars have applied psychoanalytic theory to art. One of the most well know of which is Laurie Schnieder Adams, who wrote a popular textbook Art Across Time.

Prominent critical art historians

Since Heinrich Wolfflin's time, art history has embraced social history by using critical approaches. The goal of these approaches is to show how art interacts with power structures in society. The first critical approach that art historians used was Marxism. Marxist art history attempted to show how art was tied to specific classes, how images contain information about the economy, and how images can make the status quo seem natural (ideology).

Marxist art historians

Even Marxism has figured in the interpretation of art. Meyer Schapiro was the first art historian to take Marxism seriously. While he wrote about numerous time periods and themes in art, he is best remembered for his commentary on sculpture from the late Middle Ages and early Renaissance, at which time he saw evidence of capitalism emerging and feudalism declining.

Arnold Hauser wrote the first marxist survey of Western Art, titled "The Social History of Art." In this book he attempted to show how class consciousness was reflected in major art periods. His book was very controversial when it was published during the 1950s because it makes gross generalizations about entire eras. However, it remains in print as a classic art historical text.

T.J. Clark was the first art historian writing from a Marxist perspective to abandon vulgar Marxism per se. He wrote Marxist art histories of several impressionist and realist artists, including Gustav Courbet and Eduard Manet. These books focused closely on the political and economic climates in which the art was created.

Divisions by period

The field of Art History is traditionally divided into specializations or concentrations based on eras and regions. Such divisions typically include:

Prehistoric
Ancient
Medieval
Renaissance
Baroque
19th Century
20th Century/Contemporary
Africa
Pre-Columbian or Ancient Americas
Asia

A number of sub-fields are included under each specialization. For example, the Ancient Near East, Greece, Rome, and Egypt are all typically considered special concentrations of Ancient art. In some cases, these specializations may be closely allied (as Greece and Rome, for example), while in others such alliances are far less natural (Indian art versus Korean art, for example).

Non-Western art is a relative newcomer to the Art Historical canon. Recent revisions of the semantic division between art and artifact have recast objects created in non-Western cultures in more aesthetic terms. Relative to those studying Ancient Rome or the Italian Renaissance, scholars specializing in Africa, the Ancient Americas and Asia are a growing minority.

Methodologies

Art historians employ a number of methods in their research into the qualities, nature and history of objects.

A formal analysis is one which focuses on the form of the object in question. Elements of form include line, shape, color, composition, rhythm, etc. At its simplest, such an analysis is simply exegesis, but it relies heavily on the art historian's ability to think critically and visually.

A stylistic analysis is one which focuses on the particular combination of formal elements into a coherent style. Often, a stylistic analysis makes reference to movements or trends in art as a means of drawing out the impact and import of a particular object.

An iconographical analysis is one which focuses on particular design elements of an object. Through a close reading of such elements, it is possible to trace their lineage, and with it draw conclusions regarding the origins and trajectory of these motifs. In turn, it is possible to make any number of observations regarding the social, cultural, economic, and/or aesthetic values of those responsible for producing the object.

Finally, many art historians use theory to frame their inquiries into objects. Theory is most often used when dealing with more recent objects, those from the late 19th century onward. A somewhat vague term, theoretical approaches to art can range quite broadly, from psychological analysis to aesthetics to Marxist critique and more.

Notes

^ Ernst Gombrich (1996). The Essential Gombrich, p. 7. London: Phaidon Press
^ Marilyn Stokstad. Art History (2d Ed.) 2004

External links

General

Art and Artist Files in the Smithsonian Libraries Collections (2005) Smithsonian Digital Libraries
Artists on Tape: List of Audio Tapes at The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture garden (2003) Anna Brooke Smithsonian Digital Libraries
In-depth directory of web links, divided by period
Art History Underground - club at Columbia University
Virtual Catalogue for Art History (VKK) - Catalog of periodicals, conference papers, festschriften, exhibition catalogues, etc.

Timelines

NYC Metropolitan Museum of Art Timeline of Art History
Art History timeline at historyexplorer.net

Images

Hundreds of Images from the History of Art, ordered from the earliest to the most modern.

Podcasts

smARThistory

Art historians

Biographical Dictionary of Art Historians (free access, full text)

[1] Ernst Gombrich (1996). The Essential Gombrich, p. 7. London: Phaidon Press

[2] Marilyn Stokstad. Art History (2d Ed.) 2004

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