Art History

by Dana Arnold

  It is really only in the 20th century that we see any break with these two principal preoccupations with author (artist) and form (style). We have seen how the art of antiquity dominated artistic thinking and practice, and how the very term ‘classic’ came to denote both an historical period and a favourable value-judgement on the production of that time. Later art historians were almost apologetic, convinced that the art of their own time did not match up to that of the ancients. The work of Gombrich and his contemporaries, such as Rudolf Wittkower and Fritz Saxl, is a rich melange of philosophy, history, and theology that gives us a Kulturgeschichte, or a cultural history of art – but this is primarily concerned with the art of the Renaissance and its derivatives.

  New ways of writing about art did emerge in the 20th century, when historians focused far more on the art of their own time, rather than concentrating on its relationship, favourable or otherwise, to that from the past. So far in this book I have talked mainly about art as being a representation of the world we think we see. And this chapter has shown us that art history developed partly out of a concern to order art according to its competence as a means of representation, whether realistic, naturalistic, or idealized. At the beginning of the 20th century a tradition of non-figurative art emerged – that is to say, art that does not portray the world as we think we see it.

  Judy Chicago’s installation is a useful stepping stone into this kind of art, which some find off-putting or unappealing – ‘but is it art?’ is a frequently asked question. When we looked carefully at The Dinner Party (Fig. 8) in the previous chapter, I was discussing the idea of biography – not just of the artist but also women’s lives represented through place settings and text – and I spent some time explaining the concept behind the work. My point here is to show that The Dinner Party is about an idea – a sociopolitical statement about women. In this way it is quite different from the other works I discuss in Chapter 1. Chicago’s installation comes out of the shift in attitude in the 20th century to what art can do and how it can do it. It was no longer bound by the forces of the Hegelian spirit or the cyclical peaks of Vasari’s classical age, which came to prominence again in the Renaissance. The emergence of Modernism at the beginning of the 20th century made art historians think for the first time about a movement that was not the result of years of evolution and repetitive tradition. Instead, Modernism burst onto the scene and presented a completely different set of values and aesthetics that demanded new responses.

  From the end of the Second World War up until the late 1960s, Clement Greenberg was one of the foremost critics of modern art. Greenberg dispensed with the need to consider the social determinants of art – both its production and interpretation (of history). The Avant-Garde – what we might now call the Modern Movement – was the focus of Greenberg’s enquiries. This had emerged in France in the mid-19th century as part of an increasingly autonomous tradition in the production and interpretation of art, and this carried through into the 20th century with the work of abstract artists such as Pablo Picasso, Piet Mondrian, and Joan Miró. Greenberg believed that this kind of ‘avant-garde’ art was necessary to keep culture alive. His firmly held socialist beliefs underpinned his ideas that a new culture was needed that would replace that of the past.

  Later, Greenberg’s position developed into the view that visual art must concern itself only with what is given in visual expression and not, therefore, make any reference to any other kinds of experience. His insistence on the autonomy of art was understood as a shift in his thinking towards a political point of view that supported rather than challenged the status quo. Instead of calling for a fundamental shift in art practice and appreciation, Greenberg now worked to exclude from the privileged domain of high art – the canon by another name – the work of women artists, minority groups, and elements of popular culture. Partly through Greenberg’s efforts, Modernism became a bastion of male conservative values produced by and for white men to the exclusion of other groups.

  According to Greenberg, the essence of art lay in its purity and self-definition and the necessity for it to be true to its medium (as opposed to being expressed through other means, such as the verbal). As such, Modernism must exclude any element of representation and instead provide an abstract optical experience. This is evident, for instance, in Picasso’s 1913 Cubist collage Guitar (Fig. 10). We can make out fragments or suggestions of a guitar, but the image is really a set of abstract forms and shapes with different materials to give variations in texture. These abstractions provide a set of references to the scene Picasso may have been looking at – including the guitar, the wallpaper, which we see has a heavy pattern, and a newspaper. Greenberg does offer a way of viewing this piece of abstract art, but it is only one way of thinking about Cubist collage – we might also want to consider the way space is flattened and reconfigured in an attempt to show more than one view of the object. This is not quite the way Greenberg would want to write about art, as the ‘abstraction’ is related back to the subject matter of Picasso’s work. The Greenbergian model of writing about art history and art practice stood in complete opposition to what Chicago was trying to do in The Dinner Party. Chicago’s handmade installation using ‘feminine crafts and techniques’ directly confronted the boundaries of art as defined by Modernism.

  10. Pablo Picasso’s Cubist collage, Guitar, was created in 1913.

  Gendered art histories

  I now want to consider the bias in writing art history towards a male interpretation of the subject – even though many patrons and subjects were/are female. Complementary to this is the impact of the writing of women art historians such as Griselda Pollock and Linda Nochlin. It is now over a generation ago that the first feminist writings began to appear, mapping out a different way of seeing and understanding cultural production and the social relationships expressed therein. Griselda Pollock and Rozsika Parker identify the crucial paradox about attitudes to women in the writing of histories, specifically here those concerned with creativity:

  Women are represented negatively, as lacking in creativity, with nothing significant to contribute, and as having no influence on the course of art. Paradoxically, to negate them women have to be acknowledged; they are mentioned in order to be categorised, set apart and marginalised. [This is] one of the major elements in the construction of the hegemony of men in cultural practices in art.

  Griselda Pollock and Rozsika Parker, Old Mistresses (1981)

  Alongside Pollock and Parker, Linda Nochlin has made a significant contribution to our understanding of this issue and her essay ‘Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?’ remains a standard text on the question even though it was written in 1971. It is worth remembering that Nochlin was writing at the time that the women’s liberation movement was at its peak – around the same time as Judy Chicago produced The Dinner Party. Nochlin’s essay relies on a set of assumptions about what ‘great art’ is and the historical and gendered assumptions behind the idea of the artist. Nochlin argues that art is not an autonomous activity of a ‘super-endowed’ individual. Instead, ‘art-making’ occurs in a social situation and is an integral element of that social structure mediated by things like art academies, systems of patronage, and the artist as ‘he-man’ or outcast. In other words, society creates its own myths around the idea of art and the artist that endorse the status quo within that society. Art history, up until the interventions by feminists, was part of that myth, or what we might call discourse. By asking different questions about the conditions for production of art we may well come up with a new set of ideas about the nature of art, artistic practice, and ‘great artists’.

  Although principally concerned with women, feminist art history has brought attention to issues of difference whether it be sexual, social, or cultural. And as a result we now look at and write about artworks and their modes of representation from different historical and aesthetic perspectives. There is no doubt about the tendency to accept whatever is seen as natural, whether i
n regard to academic enquiry or our social systems. But feminist art history made us think, for the first time, about the canon of art history and provided the means for us to think about artworks in different ways. I pick up this issue again in Chapter 4.

  In recent years a number of studies have broadened the question of the control of visual material to include not only the relationship between men and women but also the relationship of homosexuality to art, sometimes called ‘queer theory’, and the relationship between colonizer and colonized in a post-colonial world. This opening up or questioning of the different power relationships existing between art and its users and producers is an essential part of the discipline.

  The place of non-Western art in history

  The 1960s and 1970s were certainly the decades during which the way we write about art was re-evaluated. We have already seen how Linda Nochlin and Clement Greenberg presented completely different views on this subject. And it is clear that writing art history is as much a process of exclusion as inclusion, and these choices are usually formulated on the canon of Western art. I want to stay with the idea of exclusion and think about how, alongside women, artists and art from other cultures or groups have been omitted from art history. How can their work be placed within the field of enquiry?

  But perhaps I am asking the wrong question. For instance, both African and Chinese art have histories that go back around 5,000 years – far longer than the art of the West. Western narratives usually begin with the ancient Greek world so, although reference is sometimes made to ancient Egypt and earlier periods, the main focus is on the last 2,500 years. But do we think of the art of China or of Africa as having a history in the same way as Western art? I am afraid not, as centuries of misconceptions about the sophisticated nature of African art show – African art is often described as ‘primitive’ or ‘naïve’, especially in relation to canonical art. We tend to forget that Egypt is part of the African continent, as the art of ancient Egypt is usually discussed in isolation. Sub-Saharan Africa has strong indigenous traditions that continue to the present day – the carved female figure from the Ivory Coast dates from the 19th century (Fig. 11). And it is important not only to acknowledge the appeal of African art, but also to restore it to its original social and historical context. This helps us understand more about the ways in which this art was produced, used, and received. In other words, we need to write (and think) about it in quite a different way.

  The art of China includes an enormous variety of images, objects, and materials – jade objects (Fig. 12), painted silk handscrolls and fans, ink and lacquer painting, porcelain, sculptures, and calligraphy. Here again, our Western prejudices are brought to bear on surveys and histories of Chinese art. We tend to give prominence to sculpture at the expense of other art forms. And it is hard not to be impressed by the vast ‘terracotta army’ with its 7,000 or so life-size figures, recently unearthed. Equally, the delicacy of a piece of carved jade, in terms of the artist’s skill and the quality of the material, can capture our attention. But it is important to take into account traditional Chinese definitions of what art is. Perhaps appropriately for a chapter on writing about art history, the Chinese consider calligraphy as one of the most important art forms.

  11. A Baule female figure from the Ivory Coast. This is a 19th-century artwork.

  12. The Chinese camel in yellow-green jade dates from the Tang or early Sung dynasty (8th to 10th century CE).

  As in Western cultures, art in China had a variety of functions in society to do with death, court life, and religion, as well as being a signifier of wealth and pre-eminence and a tradable commodity. The essential thing to remember here is that the values that we may place on a certain object may be different from those applied by the society that produced it. The same is true for the hierarchy of importance we might accord certain media over others.

  This leads me on to my third area of consideration in this chapter. I want to think about the canon and its influence on writing art history. The idea of the canon has already been mentioned in our consideration of feminist and non-Western art history, particularly in terms of the prejudices and preferences we are inclined to bring to these art forms. My focus here is on how we write about what is described as primitive or naïve art. There are two main ways to look at and write about ‘primitive’ art. The first is Primitivism as a style of art that refers to the re-use and re-interpretation of non-Western forms by Western artists. We can trace the historical evolution of the notion of ‘primitive’ and the associated Primitivist phenomena from their first appearance in Western art as early as the 18th century right up to the present day. The second is ‘primitive’ as a value judgement applied to non-Western art, which can be seen as pejorative. In response to this, we can try to establish a theoretical definition of primitive art, conceived as an autonomous manifestation of art not linked to Western cultural constructs. I am interested here in the contradictions implicit in the imposition of our values onto non-Western art when these art forms have longer-standing traditions. In fact, the art of China or Africa shows us that there are histories of art that exist independently of the Western canon.

  Western views on the primitive have come from both artists and historians. Perhaps most famous amongst these are Matisse, Picasso, and Roger Fry, who did much to promote Primitivism as an artistic style in the early part of the 20th century. The encounter between Western artists and writers and what has historically been called primitive art – the traditional, indigenous arts of Africa, Oceania, and North America – began with the ‘discovery’ of that art by European artists and writers early in the 20th century. These art forms were a vital catalyst that made artists rethink their relationship to the world. We can compare it to the discovery of perspective in the Renaissance, when artists developed the technical ability to accurately represent space. It is hard to overestimate the profound effect of primitive art. But we must remember that there was an intrinsic interest in primitivizing representations in modern art itself, as artists sought to break with the academic, canonical norms of artistic practice. There are many reasons why works by non-Western artists attracted modern painters and sculptors. And it is important to identify the different strands within Primitivism. First there is the romanticism of Paul Gauguin, whose images of life on Tahiti present a vision of an idyllic non-industrial society. There is also what might be termed emotional primitivism, exemplified by the Brücke and Blaue Reiter groups in Germany, in which abstract forms are used to express mood. By contrast, the primitivism of Picasso and Modigliani draws on direct quotations from non-Western art. In his Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907), which is often seen as the beginning of modern art, Picasso paints the faces of the demoiselles as African masks. Finally, there is the idea of the primitivism of the subconscious that we see in Surrealism. Here, basic human impulses are associated with the notion of our primitive selves, reinforcing my point about the pejorative connotations of the term.

  Primitivism is, then, a notion crucial to 20th-century art and modern thinking rather than a specific movement or group of artists. But is Primitivism one more example of Western colonial appropriation – or is there evidence of cross-cultural influence? It is true that the encounter between the West and primitive art took place at the height of Western colonialism. As a result, we must be aware that a number of racial and political questions come into play, either overtly or implicitly, in writings about both the art and the people who produced it. Recently, the notion of primitivism in the arts has troubled art historians, who have begun to question the formal, anthropological, political, and historical issues that have influenced the study of the arts of Oceania, Africa, and North and South America. But this does not necessarily result in a group of societies stripped of meaning; instead the interactions between these cultures and Western traditions have created entirely new identities.

  Until recently, the tendency in the West has been to view the art of Oceania as primitive. But it is important to consider the meanin
g and significance of art for the people of the Pacific. These art forms are part of the social rituals and cultural practices of these peoples, for instance the ancestral carvings of Maori and Sepik ceremonial houses, or body art in Polynesia; and women’s art forms, such as bark cloth. And here we see the close connection between art history and anthropology – indeed some anthropologists see the word ‘art’ as too much of a Western term.