Fundamentals of Art History

Anne D'Alleva, Michael Cothren

• Publisher: Laurence King Publishing
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781529423198
• Topic: Kunst
• Subtopic: Kunsttheorie & -kritik

This invaluable guide enables students to get the most from their art history course. Written in an accessible style, the book introduces two basic art historical methods - formal analysis and contextual analysis. In this new edition revising author Michael Cothren has extended the discussion on iconography and iconology, as well as adding discussions on the effects of the market and museums on art. Greater emphasis is placed on the global and multicultural aspects of art creation and analysis with new images and more case studies. There is more step-by-step guidance on how to use these methods to prepare for exams and write papers.

Chapter 1

Making art history

This chapter will introduce you to the academic discipline of art history, touching on its own history and the multifaced approaches associated with its practice. We will also attempt to answer two questions that are more complicated than they first appear: What is art? and What is art history?

What do art historians do?

Art historians do art, but they do not make art. They study art in order to make it a part of history. In other words, they make art history, in both senses of the phrase: first, providing arguments that make works of art into historical and cultural artifacts, and second, accomplishing this by constructing the sort of reasoned arguments that we call “art history.” Art historians try to understand what artists are expressing in their works, and what the original viewers saw in those works. They endeavor to explain why something we call art was made at the particular time it was made, how it represented the part of the world in which it was made, and how it represented and affected its cultural context. Art historians talk about individual artists and their goals and intentions, but also about patrons (the people who commission and pay for artworks), about various sorts of viewers, and about the kinds of institutions, places, and social groups in which art is made and circulated—whether that is an art school, a temple, a government agency, or a private studio. When they do this, they make art history.

Wait—what is “art”?

“Art” is one of those words that, even though people use it all the time, is tricky and difficult to define. All sorts of cultural and political values determine what is included or not included under this term, which makes it difficult for people to agree on precisely what art is. However, since the study of art is our concern, we must make an attempt as a first (well, maybe a second) step to discussing what art history, as a discipline, actually does.

Defining art is complicated for two reasons. First, “art” is a relatively recent term in the history of Western culture. Much of what we consider art today was actually made before people began to use this term to label it as such. Second, there is rarely an exactly corresponding term in other cultures. In Europe, the term “art” as we commonly understand it today emerged in the Renaissance—earlier periods had no direct equivalent for it. The Greek philosopher Plato (c.428–c.348 BCE), for example, used the term “mimesis,” which means imitation, to talk about painting and sculpture. In ancient Greek, demiourgos, “one who works for the people,” can refer to a cook as well as a sculptor or painter. Similarly, more than a thousand languages are spoken in Africa, and more than six hundred in Papua New Guinea, but none of them includes a precise translation for the term “art.”

To define this term, many people today start from an essentially post-Renaissance notion of art as a painting, sculpture, drawing, print, or building made with unusual skill and inspiration by a person with specialized training to produce such works. Most would still agree, according to this definition, that the frescos on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel by Michelangelo (1475–1564) are works of art. But what makes the cut to become part of this category of “art” shifts over time. It often happens that objects excluded from this category at one time, later easily qualify as art. In the nineteenth century, for example, people commonly excluded from art the sculpture, paintings, and architecture of Africa, the Pacific, and other regions of the world, because they regarded these arts as “primitive” or inferior to Western art, not simply different from Western art. Today, most people no longer hold this viewpoint, and these works are routinely collected by art museums, rather than ethnographic or natural-history museums.

One problem with this Renaissance definition of “art” is that it consistently leaves out a lot of other things that people make and do. For example, it excludes useful objects such as baskets, or ceramic pots, made by people with refined technical skills but with no professional training as artists. This kind of work is sometimes called “folk art” or “low art,” to distinguish it from “high art” like the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. From this perspective, the category “art” does not include many things historically made by women in Europe and North America, including embroidery, quilts, and hand-woven textiles. At the same time, people sometimes use this definition of “art” to exclude a lot of modern art, which they consider lacking in skill, seriousness, or conceptual complexity.

Although some people are perfectly happy to exclude anything from the category “art” that does not fit their own fairly narrow definition, this is an unproductive attitude for a scholar and student to take. Excluding things from a category is often a way to devalue them, to justify not engaging with them in a serious way. As we see it, “art” should be a flexible, inclusive category. It should be a term—an idea— that encourages us to look at things seriously, so we begin thinking critically about all the different kinds of things people make and do creatively, things that are treasured not only by them but by those who lived around them and those who come after them.

A working definition of art

For the purposes of this book, we will define art as potentially any material or visual thing that is made by a person, or persons, and that is invested with social, political, spiritual, and/or aesthetic value by the creator, user, viewer, and/or patron. This definition of art includes the Sistine Chapel ceiling, but it also includes such things as a wood figure from Papua New Guinea, an American crazy quilt, an Ottoman ceramic pitcher, and a Sioux cradle board encrusted with dyed porcupine quills. It includes ephemeral (non-permanent) things, such as a masquerade costume made from leaves by the Bwa people of Burkina Faso in West Africa. Using the word “thing” here does not imply that a work of art has to be a concrete object, like a marble sculpture— a film or a performance can also be art in this sense. All of the above things are made with special skills and with great care, although most would be excluded from the traditional category of “high art.” In our definition, art may have economic value but not economic value alone. A pile of pine logs on a flatbed truck has economic value but it does not fit into our definition of art—unless, of course, the loggers had deliberately arranged the logs in a certain way that carries social/political/spiritual/aesthetic meaning.

In this book, we are not using the term “art” because it represents a universal value inherent to the objects of our study, nor because we want to create hierarchies or make value judgements. Many artists and art historians today reject the idea that a work of art is, by definition, an inherently privileged type of object. Rather, we use a broader definition of art because regarding things as “art”—putting them in that category—helps us ask better questions and opens up certain ways of thinking about them.

Art takes many shapes and uses many materials

When many people think about art, what first comes to mind is a framed rectangular painting. The priority of this type of art in our imagination can be traced back to the Renaissance when pictures were conceived as fictive windows into an imagined world. For the purposes of this book, we will think about art as potentially taking many shapes—both flat and three-dimensional—and being created from any of a vast variety of materials, or a combination. This sort of diversity usually characterizes the works of art that will be studied in an introductory art-history course. Below are some examples of types of art, along with a list of the sorts of questions art historians might initially ask about them. Consider this a warm-up for your first art-history class.

Painting, prints, photography

A number of questions address the specific qualities of two-dimensional works of art—that is, works characterized by length and height, such as a painting, but of limited depth (or three-dimensional form).

How is color used? Are colors saturated (meaning intense, rather than subdued)? Where are the richest colors? The darkest colors? The lightest colors? Is there a wide range of colors or a narrow range of colors? Do the colors create a sense of calm or a sense of drama and excitement? Are they used to emphasize certain forms or elements in the work?

Is there a strong contrast between areas of light and dark (especially significant in pictures that do not use color)? Does this help to create the illusion of three-dimensional forms existing in space? Or do the elements of the painting remain flat, emphasizing the picture plane (the plane occupied by the actual surface of the canvas, board, wall, or sheet of paper)?

Can you see the marks of the tools used by the artist—pencil, pen, brush, knife, burin? Does the work seem highly finished or rough and unfinished? Painstaking or spontaneous? How do these qualities contribute to the overall effect of the work?

Does the artist try to create an illusion of depth beyond the surface of the painting, or do they use techniques to focus the viewer on the flatness of the picture plane?

How are forms defined—through line or shading?

We can explore some of these questions about color, surface, and form in one example: Marilyn (from the Vanitas series) by Audrey Flack (Figure 1.1). Flack used a mechanical airbrush, rather than a conventional bristle brush, to...