This lecture will: introduce ways to think about art and its history and help you to understand how art historians go about their practice   look at some of the issues and debates that make up the disciple of Art History   offer some reconsiderations of art history consider the importance of the gallery and museum

1. How Art Works:
Week 1
The ‘unruly
discipline’
What do art
historians do?

2. The way in which modern American and European art is studied is in
large part due to the work and life of Alfred H. Barr (1902-1981)

3. This lecture will:
• introduce ways to think about art
and its history and help you to
understand how art historians go
about their practice
•
• look at some of the issues and
debates that make up the disciple
of Art History
•
• offer some reconsiderations of art
history
• consider the importance of the
gallery and museum

4. What is art history?
• Art historical thinking has shaped
our experiences of art
• Art history is a specialist
academic discipline
• Art history as distinct from art
appreciation and art criticism

5. Art history:
• Is a framework for thinking about the past
• Is presented as a sequence or progression
• has a preoccupation with marking out stylistic
changes
• is a way of looking at the culture and society of
different epochs and seeing how we think about
these periods and how attitudes have changed
across time

6. Art Appreciation
The important thing to note
about this kind of art
appreciation is that it requires no
knowledge of art history. In this
way, art appreciation requires no
knowledge of the context of art.

7. Connoisseurship and Taste
This implies something far
more elitist than just
enjoying looking at art.
This kind of art appreciation
is linked to the art market
and involves being able to
recognize the work of
individual artists as this has
a direct effect on the work’s
monetary value.

8. Cubism
(1907-14)
Pablo Picasso
Les Demoiselles D’Avignon,
(1907, oil on canvas,
MOMA, New York)
What do art historians do?
• The first job of the art historian is to
slot a work of art into its proper place
in time
• The index of the artist and the period,
style is crucial to the chronological
basis of the discipline
• The term style refers to the
resemblance works of art have to one
another

9. Expressionism
(c.1890-1934)
Edvard Munch
The Scream, (1893, oil
tempera and pastel on
cardboard, National
Gallery Oslo)
What do Art Historians do?
Sensory Properties - shape, line, texture, value, colour,
space, and scale
Formal Properties - how sensory properties are
organized to achieve a sense of unity, balance,
movement, and dominance
Technical Properties - appearances of shapes, values,
colours, etc., that are due to the use of particular
materials and techniques.
Expressive Properties - how a work's subject, for
instance, a turbulent seascape or youthful portrait,
combined with the other "properties" contribute to
evoking: (a) feelings such as fear, loneliness or joy, or a
sense of tension or tranquillity, and/or (b) ideas and
ideals associated with, for example, the power of
nature or the innocence of youth.

10. Fauvism
(1900-20)
Henri Matisse
The Dance
(1909 MOMA, New York, oil on canvas)
What do Art
Historians do?
Style
A work of art will reflect the
time period and the
geographic area in which it
was produced, and/or the
particular way its creator
utilizes and organizes its
properties

11. Art Nouveau
1890-1905
Gustave Klimt
The Kiss
(1907-08,oil and gold leaf on canvas,
Osterreichische Galerie, Vienna)
What do Art Historians do?
Identifying the style of
works of art and the
meanings associated with
their subjects, themes
and symbols are tasks for
the art historian.

12. Pointillism/Neo-Impressionism
(1886-c1900)
Georges Seurat
La Grande Jatte,
1884-86, oil on canvas, The Art Institute,
Chicago.)
What do Art Historians do?
How OLD is it?
What is its STYLE?
What is its SUBJECT?
Who MADE it?
Who PAID for it?

13. Connoisseurship,
symbolism, aesthetic,
theory, structuralism,
as art history matured,
the extremism of each
approach was
necessarily modified.

14. Vasari placed the emphasis
on the genius and
achievements of individual
artists and this had a
resounding effect on art
history
He was one of the first
historians to make
qualitative judgements
about art in order to create
a canon of great artists and
works by them
Vasari’s ‘Lives’ is really a
history of artists rather
that art history

15. Post-Impressionism
(c.1880-1905)
Van Gogh
Starry Night
(1889, MOMA New York, oil on
canvas)
The traditional canon
of art history has been
defined by authorship,
authenticity, and a
chronologically
defined linear
progression.
The art canon

16. Art history timelines – beginning with Egyptian Pyramids and Greek marble sculptures,
a large section on pre-history that includes African masks and Incan clay pots.
Once pre-history gives way on the timeline to
history, the line becomes straight and western,
focusing on the individual geniuses who
created great works of art and made up the
major art movements
Monet, Van Gogh, Picasso, Pollock,
and even a few women artists like
O’Keefe.

17. Impressionism
1870s-90s
Claude Monet
Poppies
(c.1876, Musee D’Orsay Paris, oil
on canvas)
The linear timeline of art history is an
invention, created by art historians to
give shape and impose an
organization on artists working in
similar spaces and time periods.
Expectation of art history as a
chronological story about great
Western male artists, there is bias in
this interpretation that raises
questions of the importance of the
canon of art history and how we
works and cultures that don't fit into
this narrative
The art canon

18. Realism
1830s-50s
Millet
The Angelus (1857-59
oil on canvas, Musee D’Orsay Paris)
Eurocentric Progression
This continuum of art history,
which exists alongside official
history in general, places Europe
at the world’s centre, places the
art of non-Western cultures in
relation to the West and on the
periphery of the official art
timeline.

19. Art history – the art canon
• The canon plays an
important role in the
institutionalization of art,
as new works become
judged against it.
• It is a way of imposing
hierarchical relationships
• This usually favours the
individual genius and the
idea of the masterpiece

20. Vincent van Gogh
Self Portrait with Bandaged Ear
(1889)
This myth of the artists as
an eccentric genius living in
isolation in a leaky garret
and painting masterpieces,
tormented and
misunderstood one that is
proliferated through
biographies and biopics.
These constructed
narratives also set up a
model of sexual difference
where the artist is the
creator and the woman is
his model or muse in these
accounts.

21. Pollock epitomized the
artist as Romantic
visionary hero.

22. The canon
The canon is considered
to be the prime object of
the art historian, while art
history helps to legitimise
the canon.

23. Challenging
the canon
The answer to this question of
why there have been no great
women artists, lies in
institutional boundaries, as
opposed to individual
limitations, that hindered
women for centuries from
having access to the same
opportunities as men, keeping
them from being deemed to
be “great.”

24. The authors aim to
examine how and why
women’s significant
contributions to the history
of art have been
consistently
misrepresented, devalued,
or ignored. The discipline
and institutions of art
history have been
instrumental in the
ideological operations that
have resulted in this state
of affairs

25. Intervention into art history by feminism questioned the
conditions for the production of art and challenged the canon
of art history.
The canon is a structural condition for art history. Accounts of art like
those offered by feminist or post-colonial thinkers are shaped and
even made possible by the existence of the canon and its values.

26. Official Art History and
Underrepresented Narratives
Alongside women artists,
art from other cultures or
groups have been omitted
from art history
the Americas, Africa,
India, China, Japan, Korea,
and Australia and the
Pacific Islands
This implies that the
canonical tradition is based
on processes of active
selection and repression.

27. Primitivism and
Primitive
Primitivism is a style of
art that refers to the re-
use and re-
interpretations of non-
Western forms by
Western artists
Primitive is a value
judgement applied to
non-Western art, which
can be seen to be
pejorative

29. Stages of Human ‘Progress’
Based on his ‘empirical’ evidence’, Morgan divided human
cultures into three main stages of development:
1. Savagery (‘animal-like’ → child-like → close to
nature → hunters gatherers → invention of tools to
hunt animals → ‘primitive’ art).
2. Barbarism (further development of technology like
pottery →domestication of animals →domestication
of plants →metallurgy → more sophisticated art)
3. Civilisation (Absolute control over nature → trade
and industry → monumental architecture and
‘proper’ high art → (the Nation State).

30. ‘Purity’ of ‘Native’ Vision
Colonial
Appropriation
Western views on the
primitive have come
from both artists and
art historians, for
example, Gauguin,
Matisse, Picasso,
Roger Fry

31. Paul Gauguin
Nave, Nave Moe (Miraculous Source) (1894)
Gauguin: Maker of Myth
Reinforcing the idealism of his view of ‘the Other’

32. Authenticity, art and the
‘Romance of the Primitive’
Picasso – directly quotes non-
Western art

33. Picasso's African-influenced
Period - 1907 to 1909
Primitivism
Picasso
Head of a
Woman
(1907)
Dan Mask

34. Art gallery/Museum
Chronology is one of the
principle tools in organising
the display of works of art as
well as being the principle
method of writing art
history.
How collections were
formed shows the ways in
which art objects were
historicised as a result of the
activities of the patrons and
collectors

35. Cabinets of Curiosity
Typically referred to as
the ‘precursors’ to modern
museums, the Wunderkammer
or Cabinets of Curiosities
were collections of what were
considered to be ‘exotic’,
‘strange’ and/or ‘wonderous’
objects, often kept in special
rooms or literally, specially
made cabinets, by aristocratic
and upper-class ‘gentlemen’
during the Renaissance.

36. Kunst und Wunderkammer

37. The Academy
The idea of the Academy is
important to art history
because it was one of the
first places where art was
presented to a select public.
Museums and galleries have
also played an influential
role in the endorsement or
challenge to the canon of art
history

38. Construction of History
The major museums of the
West act as repositories of the
canon.
Gallery spaces contain exhibits
that are linked by systems we
have set up – artists, style,
school – and not by connections
that were relevant at the time
of their productions

39. Canon and commodity
Art history and the art market
The canon also promotes the idea
that certain cultural objects or styles
of art have more value that others,
both historical and monetary, than
others.
The art market is founded on the
idea that a high market value is
based on individuality and genius.

40. New Art History
Questions the term art history
and considers works beyond
their role in the narrative of
great artists or styles of art, to
bring out its social, cultural and
historical meaning.
What Belting means by "the
end of the history of art" is not
the death of the discipline, but
the end of a particular
conception of artistic
development as a meaningful,
progressive historical
sequence.