Art history

Clare Haynes

Art history is the historical discipline that deals largely, but not exclusively, with material objects. Traditionally, this has meant paintings, sculptures and buildings. Its work is centred on charting the history of the making of those objects across time and space, and, put loosely, doing history with them. The phrases 'history of art' and 'art history' are sometimes used to signal these two distinguishable but overlapping endeavours, but they are often used interchangeably. Sensibly, art history can be used as the umbrella term encompassing both activities.(1)

While we are on the subject of terminology, we should also address the term 'art' (the complexity of 'history', and the variety of practice that it signals, is attended to in the rest of Making History). What constitutes the category art has been, and continues to be a matter for debate within the field of art history. For example, in the last 30 years, an ever-increasing diversity of objects and spaces, visual experiences and practices has been explored by art historians, including new media, ritual and the city. This has put pressure on the term 'art' in the discipline's name, leading some to prefer using 'visual culture' to describe what they investigate. However art is a term that is still useful, in that it signals a phenomenon that is not completely reducible to the historical conditions of its making, that is in some measure both autonomous and transcendent. The exploration of these qualities in particular cases, and in general, is still an important aspect of art historical enquiry. (2)

In recent years it has also become clear that art history will have to adapt if it is to integrate the study of cultures outside the Western tradition that do not have a concept of 'art' anything like that which has, however tendentiously, anchored the discipline (with its associations of canon and commodity). Indeed, it has been argued that almost no word in the standard art-historical lexicon is sustainable if a truly global perspective is to be achieved.(3) Nevertheless, the core skills and methods deployed by an art historian – of visual attentiveness, formal and iconographical analysis, comparison and so on – are being used to further understanding of the visual repertoires of other cultures. This is something we will return to.

Art history's emergence as a discipline is usually traced to Hegel, although Winckelmann's The History of the Art of Antiquity (1764), can be seen as a beginning too.(4) Hegel was of course a philosopher and art history's debt and connections to philosophy, and to German scholarship, continue to mark out the discipline. This is due primarily to the powerful influence of a group of émigré scholars who left Germany for Britain in the 1930s. Led by Aby Warburg whose library in Hamburg the institute had been formed around, the Warburg Institute as it was known in Britain, became part of the University of London in 1944 (it is now one of 10 postgraduate research institutes which constitute the School of Advanced Study founded by the University in 1994). Warburg, with his colleagues and their students, including F. Saxl, E. H. Gombrich, E. Cassirer, F. A. Yates and M. Baxandall, have dominated art-historical practice in Britain ever since. In addition, many have made significant contributions to other disciplines, including the history of ideas and philosophy.

Since its beginnings then, art history has both been a discipline, and an inter-discipline. Such an intellectual pedigree is in marked contrast to popular views of the subject as either a soft touch, or a haven for those with 'sensitive' aesthetic judgement. Connoisseurship (which can be described as the stylistic analysis of individual works of art with an aim of attribution) has a fundamental role in the discipline, of course, in answering the essential who, when and where questions; and an attuned attention to the visual, and a well-stocked and efficient visual memory, are important skills for an art historian to develop. They do not constitute the discipline, however.

The largest institution for the study of art history in Britain, the Courtauld Institute, was founded in 1931 by a group of self-made men who were also avid collectors.(5) The intention was to provide professional training for postgraduates wishing to enter the art business; an education in attribution was intended. However, it was the same founding fathers of the Courtauld who invited the Warburg scholars to England and enabled them to establish themselves in London in 1933. Gradually, the Courtauld came under Warburgian influence and enjoyed, most notably under the leadership of Anthony Blunt, a widening of its sense of the discipline, in terms of its ambitions, approaches and its materials of study. One of the outstanding scholars to emerge from the Courtauld was T.J. Clark whose Marxist agenda for a social history of art, articulated in two books published in 1973, marked a turning point in the history of the discipline.(6)

Today the Courtauld Institute continues to play a prominent, if less dominant role. From the 1960s, art history underwent an enormous expansion, especially within the academy, as, for example, art history departments were established at the new universities (including the Universities of East Anglia, Essex and Sussex), at polytechnics (such as Middlesex) and other institutions of higher and further education. It was also taught in some secondary schools. These new venues for art history, which often promoted interdisciplinarity, have left their mark on the discipline.

Art history is, however, distinctive in a number of ways. Of these, three might usefully be brought out here. First, and most obviously, while art history is an academic discipline, taught and researched in universities, a great deal of art history is also done in museums and galleries, as well as in auction houses and commercial galleries (largely in relation to attribution and matters of provenance).(7) The diverse nature of the places in which art history gets practised and communicated means that the literature of art history is very diverse too. Major exhibitions, for example, in addressing the public, nevertheless often present the very latest and best scholarship on a particular artist or theme. It is communicated and framed not by the single-author monograph, but by the collaborative practices of exhibition curatorship, the spaces of public architecture, as well as the traditions and decorum of catalogue and display.

The second distinctive quality of art history is its reliance on reproductive media for the communication of knowledge. There are two key problems here: while seeing objects in the flesh, as it were, is a priority, art historians frequently have to rely subsequently on two-dimensional reproductions of their objects of study. Thereby the size, volume and mass of an object are lost, and the reproduction of colour and tone is often imprecise. Given that accurate representation of sources is a fundamental historical discipline, and that the object's material qualities are frequently significant, this is not a minor problem. Second, in addition to being unreliable, colour print reproduction is expensive. Thus, the technology of reproduction may influence, even limit the arguments art historians can make, whilst, of course, making art history possible.(8) Vivid description, the ancient rhetorical exercise of ekphrasis, is still a vital skill in the practice of art history.

The final factor that I want to mention here, which makes art history distinctive, is the diversity of approaches it uses to investigate its materials. This is not just a product of recent developments in cultural studies, but a characteristic of the discipline since its inception in the 19th century.(9) Philosophy has already been mentioned, but anthropology, for example, has also been important to art history's formation. Appadurai and Gell are just two of the latest in a long line of anthropologists whose work has been welcomed by, and into, art history.(10) This permeability or openness has sometimes been seen as a threat to the discipline, but it can also be viewed as a strength. A discipline with many tools at its disposal can ask many different kinds of questions.

For example, Marxism demanded, and presented new frameworks for, a social history of art and the interventions of feminism, most particularly, revealed to the discipline some of its most cherished and false assumptions, particularly in relation to the canon.(11) Both of these approaches brought new methods and new objects to art history. Psychoanalysis, semiotics and most recently post-colonialism have similarly each revealed aspects of the discipline to itself, opening up new avenues of enquiry, while offering possibilities for new insights into works of art, past and present.(12) Some of these approaches, adopted since the 1970s, have been identified as forms of 'New Art History'.(13) While the newness of the concerns raised and of the questions asked by these approaches has sometimes been overstated, there is no doubt that the discipline has become a more various and perhaps a more diffuse one in the last 30 years.(14)

The vigour and variety of art history can be glimpsed by perusing the pages of the leading journals. The Burlington Magazine, which was founded in 1903 by a group of self-avowed connoisseurs, including Roger Fry and Bernard Berenson, is the longest running art-historical journal published in Britain and it is perhaps still the principal journal of record, publishing for the first time new documents or attributions, as well as new interpretations of already established works of art. The contents of The Burlington Magazine present a narrow and rather conventional view of the discipline. Art History, founded in 1978, under the auspices of the Association of Art Historians, represents a much broader constituency and it can be considered alongside Art Bulletin, the journal of the American College Art Association, founded in 1913. Other journals published in Britain include the Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes and Architectural History.

Art historians with a commitment to critical theory are more likely to turn to journals such as the Oxford Art Journal and October, or the two leading inter-disciplinary journals, Representations and Critical Inquiry. There are many other journals dealing with specific kinds of ideas and objects, time periods and places, and art historians frequently publish in journals framed by other disciplines. This variety and vigour is not matched, however, in the public face of art history, which in the hands of critics, TV presenters or journalists very rarely rises above the banal, as the same old stories get told, in much the same old ways. This remains a challenge to the discipline, but it is one to which exhibition curators, in particular, are developing increasingly sophisticated responses.

Art history's claims to usefulness have always been based (albeit in different ways) on the fundamental assumption that art can reveal attitudes, ideologies, even facts about the culture in which it was made. For Riegl, Wlfflin and Panofsky this seemed surely to be the case.(15) Subsequently this claim has looked less and less secure, although it is still a compelling and perhaps even a correct one. However, the realisation that definitive answers to the kinds of questions we ask of works of art are likely to evade us has, in certain lights, seemed to spell disaster for the discipline.

Similar doubts have, of course, been offered about other kinds of historical evidence (literary, and textual evidence more generally): art history's dilemmas in this regard are no different. Consensus on such issues is unlikely and it continues to exercise historiographers, as well as practitioners in the course of their everyday work. Meanwhile, there are other large questions demanding attention. For example, how the discipline should respond to visual-culture, material-culture and visual studies is still being debated.(16) Another open question is how it might be possible to consider art in a global or world perspective – is world art history a possibility, or even desirable? This question is being raised for a number of reasons, not least because of the increasingly global market for art.(17)

Thus, art history seems tangled in doubts about procedures and ethics. However, away from the cut and thrust of these debates, art history is still being written confidently and with purpose, using the tools that are available. Art history's role in enabling us to engage imaginatively with the past remains an important one, and its scholarly investigation and celebration of the visual materials that societies use and value has perhaps, as we come to terms with globalisation, never been more vital.

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1. Art history should be distinguished from other kinds of writing about art, such as art criticism.
2. M. Podro, The Critical Historians of Art (New Haven & London, 1982).
3. See D. Summers, Real Spaces: World Art History and the Rise of Western Modernism (London, 2003), for an influential attempt to develop an alternative conceptual and semantic framework for art history.
4. As Francis Haskell reminds us, 'seeing can itself be learned only by complex stages'. His magisterial History and its Images: Art and the Interpretation of the Past (New Haven & London, 1993) describes how history came to use art as historical evidence, from the first uses of coins in the 15th century, through Michelet and Hegel, to Huizinga.
5. Courtauld Institute website <http://www.courtauld.ac.uk/about/history.shtml> [accessed 1 July 2008].
6. T. J. Clark, The Absolute Bourgeois: Artists and Politics in France, 1848–1851 (London, 1973); and Image of the People: Gustave Courbet and the Second French Republic, 1848–1851 (London, 1973).
7. The relations between art history and commerce have been explored in many different ways. See, for example, I. Gaskell, 'Tradesmen as scholars: interdependencies in the study and exchange of art', in Art History and its Institutions: Foundations of a Discipline, ed. E. Mansfield (London & New York, 2002), pp. 146–62; and C. Steiner, African Art in Transit (Cambridge, 1994).
8. See B. E. Savedoff, 'Looking at art through photographs', Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 51 (1993), 455–62.
9. The wide-ranging interests and practice of Sir Ernst Gombrich provide a good example of this characteristic of the discipline.
10. A. Appadurai, The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective (Cambridge, 1986); and A. Gell, Art and Agency: an Anthropological Theory (Oxford, 1998).
11. The two foundational texts are L. Nochlin, 'Why have there been no great women artists?', in Art and Sexual Politics, ed. T. B. Hess and E. C. Barker (New York, 1973), pp. 1–39; and G. Pollock and R. Parker, Old Mistresses: Women, Art and Ideology (London, 1981).
12. For a concise demonstration of these different methods at work, see 'A variety of interpretations', in Art History: a Critical Introduction to its Methods, ed. M. Hatt and C. Klonk (Manchester, 2006), pp. 11–20. This is a useful introductory text to art-historical theory and methods.
13. This was a term coined as the title of a now famous conference held at Middlesex Polytechnic in 1982. The organisers of the conference were also involved in publishing the highly influential journal Block.
14. The New Art History, ed. A. L. Rees and F. Borzello (London, 1986).
15. See Hatt and Klonk, Art History.
16. See Art: History: Visual: Culture, ed. D. Cherry (Oxford, 2005).
17. A highly stimulating and wide-ranging discussion of these issues can be found in Is Art History Global?, ed. J. Elkins (London & New York, 2007).

Dr Clare Haynes is Lecturer in the History of Art, University of Edinburgh.

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