Art History

by Dana Arnold

  The ideas of 18th-century aesthetic philosophers such as Kant, who was interested in the aesthetic and in cognition, found their reprise in the latter half of the 20th century in the work of the French philosopher Jacques Derrida, who is generally referred to as a deconstructionist. Derrida is perhaps best known for his work on the practice of ‘reading’, where we are compelled to explore the ways in which things that may appear unified are also a series of contradictions. The implications of this practice of deconstruction for art history are quite far-reaching, and Derrida’s first writings on the visual arts, The Truth in Painting, which appeared in 1978, sums up his ideas. Like his 18th-century predecessors, Derrida was concerned with the question of whether aesthetic objects (paintings, sculpture, and the like) could be considered as autonomous, possessing their own ‘code’. This ‘code’, in Derrida’s view, is like other ways of thinking about art as having a meaning, just as we might think about the social or cultural context of art. It is really an issue of where the boundaries of a work of art lie. This enables us to think about the ‘inside’ and the ‘outside’ of a work of art, which can be a very helpful technique.

  19. The Hand of God, 1896, by the sculptor Auguste Rodin. Rodin’s marble works were carved by his workshops using his original bronze casts as models.

  In The Truth in Painting, Derrida calls into question every aspect of a work of art. The notion of the ‘outside’ of a work includes, for instance, the frame of a painting or the signature of an artist on their work. But these categories go beyond the work itself to cover museums, archives, and the way in which art is bought and sold as a commodity on the open market. For Derrida all these impinge on the ‘inside’ of the work – the fundamental nature or aesthetic of the work, which is always modified by these external factors. As a result, Derrida sees the inside and outside as merging – both being forms of writing or graphic notation that can be read. In this way Derrida returns to Kant’s ideas about cognition of an autonomous aesthetic that is distinct from pure reasoning. Like Kant, Derrida’s argument for this distinction is an important touchstone for art and its history – that is to say art history as a discipline in its own right in which the aesthetic is a legitimate field of enquiry based on sensation rather than reason. If we look at Monet’s Rouen Cathedral, 1894 (Fig. 1), we can begin to think about the consequences of what Derrida is saying, albeit in a rather simplistic way. The ‘inside’ aesthetic of the painting relies very much on sensation – the subject matter is self-evident and the work evokes the fall of light on the cathedral in full sun. The ‘outside’ of the picture is very much to do with the high market value on works by Monet, our preoccupation with him as an artist, and his prime position in many public collections. All of these ‘outside’ elements inflect on the way in which we see the ‘inside’.

  The 20th century – especially the opening decades – witnessed a growing interest in the human mind, and this facilitated ways of thinking about art in a completely different way. Psychoanalysis is the study of the unconscious mind and was championed by Viennese psychiatrist Sigmund Freud. He used methods such as free association (the generation of a series of related ideas without focused thought) and dreams as a means of exploring the human mind. His ideas are now quite familiar to us – a slip of the tongue that reveals the speaker’s hidden or repressed thoughts is often called a Freudian slip – and so it is hard for us to imagine how new and revolutionary Freud’s ideas must have seemed at the time. Freud described the human self as comprising the id, that is the unconscious mind, and the ego, the conscious mind, the term with which we are perhaps most accustomed. He also proposed the idea of the Oedipal nature of relationships between children and their mother and, as we shall see, this has been a touchstone of different ways of thinking about art. To demonstrate what he meant, Freud used Leonardo da Vinci’s The Virgin and Child with St Anne and St John the Baptist (Fig. 15). The appearance of the two women, Mary sitting on her mother’s lap, was, according to Freud, the result of Leonardo’s feelings of insecurity about the fact that he was illegitimate.

  Psychoanalysis allows us to think about meanings in art that run parallel to those the artist intended when the work was made. This is important as it is a process through which we can separate the art from the maker. You might recall that the strong relationship between artist and art is a hallmark of a more connoisseurial approach to art history. Hegelian and Marxist ways of thinking about art instead place emphasis on context. Here, the processes and practice of art are seen to be an internal process of the artist’s unconscious mind. We have already seen how Jackson Pollock’s technique of painting was meant to connect the unconscious mind to artistic practice.

  In this brief introduction to these ideas, my aim has been to try to provide some sense of how the visual can be a subject in its own right, the different ways in which we can think about it, and the close relationship between visual and verbal forms of communication. All of this underscores how we think about art history and what the subject can bring to our understanding of culture and society, as well as ourselves.

  The result of these various ways of thinking about art history is a range of schools of thought or approaches to visual subjects – each has a particular focus and invites us to think about the visual in a nuanced way. This can be very important for breaking down barriers between us, the viewer, and art that can at first appear inaccessible. Also, these approaches have been and remain very effective as a means of breaking down the dominance of the canon of art history.

  By now Marxist historical, political, and social theory will be familiar – in name at least. Similarly, I have already mentioned at numerous points through this volume that feminism has influenced how we think about the visual, in terms of the way art has been used as a means of endorsing – and indeed challenging – a patriarchal society. Feminism has also made us think about ways in which women are placed and represented within society. I think it is becoming clear how these two ways of thinking about art history are related. Both rely on the notion of ideology and the sets of social relationships that this represents. In the case of Marxist art history, we have seen that the principal concern is class struggle, or at least the relationships between social groups. Feminism is concerned with the same kinds of principles, but with reference to the relationship between the sexes. Recently ‘queer theory’ has questioned gender as a socially constructed artifice rather than the biological destiny of the male and female sexes. This sheds a different light on social relationships and the ideology of art – indeed the two mini exhibitions I ‘curated’ in Chapter 3 demonstrate how gender can be constructed or determined through art.

  In addition to these ways of thinking about art history we also find approaches that are based on notions other than the dogmas of the philosophy of history. An important element here is psychoanalytical theory – how these modes of thinking are used to analyse the visual in order to construct social and sexual identity. We have seen this to some extent in Freud’s analysis of Leonardo. Alongside this, we have the semiotic (also referred to as semiological) concepts which, along with structuralist methods of analysis, concentrate on art as being a sign that has to be decoded to reveal its meaning. The last two ways of thinking about art history are in part a process of disassociating art from its immediate historical context and play more on the meaning and interpretation of art. These are still valid practices within the discipline of art history – although some would argue against it. The visual is a rich topic that can be questioned in many ways. And these methods add to the expanding discourse of art history, rather than replace other ways of thinking about art.

  There remains however, in all of these ways of thinking about art, one problem. How do we think about the aesthetic? This is a recurring theme to which I have returned at several points in this book, and to my mind it is one of the mainstays of art history. Without it, art just becomes another stepping stone or gateway into the past, a visual means through which we explore the social, political
, psychological, or semiotic circumstances of the past (or indeed the present). But we run the risk of throwing the baby out with the bathwater if, as art historians, we try to deny that there is a category of the aesthetic and that to many there is such a thing as great art – however that is defined.

  So what do we mean by the aesthetic? We have already discussed this in rather abstract Kantian terms. But a lay person’s definition might include some recognition of the existence of beauty in art. Alongside this we might recognize the merit in making judgements in order to identify qualitative difference between different artists and their work. In addition would we also perhaps want to include the idea that looking at art can be a pleasurable experience. For those of you who are ‘new’ to art history, this may well be your prime motivation in reading this book. Do we want to accept art is another ideology and its aesthetic just a part of it? I am aware of the very powerful arguments for this to be the case. Impressionist pictures, or works by Picasso or Van Gogh, sell for huge sums of money – is this not an example of the pleasure principle of the aesthetic at work? Or is it part of the process of buying into a social caste, just as the Grand Tourists did in 18th-century Britain? Are the paintings that sell for such huge sums and hang in company vaults as investments not just examples of the excesses of a capitalistic society? For most of us the chance of owning an expensive artwork is remote. We might instead enjoy a print, mouse mat, or screen saver of it.

  In the next chapter of this book I want to introduce some ways in which artworks themselves can be the starting point for how we read art history. A combination of different ways of writing, presenting, and thinking about art history converge on the works themselves to show how important it is to not lose sight of these objects and how art can indeed have a history.

  Chapter 5

  Reading art

  We have already seen throughout this book that there are many questions we need to ask when we look at a painting or sculpture. Here I want to think about how we answer the question ‘what is the meaning of this picture?’, in other words to explore the levels of meaning we can find in an artwork and the ways in which we can begin to understand it. Throughout this chapter I use the term ‘read’ as the interplay between the verbal and the visual. It is important to remember that art – a visual phenomenon – is described, historicized, and appreciated using words. The visual translates into the verbal and the meanings revealed become part of art history. In bringing the discussion back to the artworks themselves, the emphasis shifts to what we can read from the objects rather than what we can read around or into them. These latter ideas have informed the discussion in the previous chapters in this volume and they are helpful here as they provide intellectual contexts for art history. In this way we come back to the objects themselves to see how subject matter, materials, and methods combine in the process of reading art.

  Artworks can be read on a range of levels that can be derived from the objects themselves, and it is helpful to outline these. Perhaps the most obvious starting point is the notion of the representational meaning of art. The idea of representation in relation to art is often connected with the perception of an image of the world we think we see. Mindful of this, this chapter focuses on figurative art – that is to say work that represents something we think we see rather than an abstract image. There is no doubt that abstract or conceptual art has the same kind of representative qualities discussed here and that it can be read in a variety of ways. But in order to introduce these ideas, I am limiting my discussion to one kind of figurative representation – the human form. And it is true that certain periods appear more preoccupied with the representation of reality or nature of the human form than others. For instance, 17th-century Dutch art as seen in the paintings of Vermeer is considered to be realistic in its use of perspective and close attention to detail. Similarly, the interest in naturalism of Italian Renaissance art is evident in the treatment of the human body as well as of landscape – both of which were drawn from life.

  But art is an illusion – paint on canvas, carved marble, or chalk on paper – it is what the viewer brings to it that makes it ‘represent’. Clearly this act of reading is culturally determined – the reader or viewer’s own cultural and social circumstances are inextricable from this process. We have already seen how this affects the presentation and interpretation of art objects in a global context in the opening chapters of this book. Here, I want to give some select examples to show that reading art is a necessary practice across all time periods. In other words it is our ability to read art that gives it its meaning, and this becomes an essential part of art history.

  First there is the representational function of art where what we see can be connected with a larger narrative. This is exemplified, for instance, by the Apollo Belvedere (Fig. 7). At first glance this sculpture represents an athletic male nude, but we can connect this with Apollo as we understand the representational conventions being used – especially the laurel crown, which is associated with the god. In this way the representational meaning of a work will always remain general at some level as the sculpture gives the all-purpose idea of the idealized male nude which can be narrowed down to a more specific reference to Apollo. Sculpture is a useful starting point to think about this because the physicality of the object delimits its representational meaning in several obvious ways.

  Firstly, sculpture cannot signify any size beyond its own. By this I mean that the Apollo Belvedere is larger than human life-size, but we do not know if the artist intended to represent a giant – he is, after all, a god. The large scale could just as well be due to the original purpose of the work – perhaps to fill a large niche or stand up high. Secondly, the work does not represent space and has no ‘setting’ other than its immediate surroundings, whatever they may be. There is also an absence of colour and commensurate with this modelling of flesh and drapery. Clearly these limitations do not apply to all sculpture. Space can be represented in sculpture as seen, for instance, in the ‘hole’ that appears in many of the works by Henry Moore or in the spaces of the installation works of Mona Hartoum or, as we have seen, Judy Chicago (Fig. 8). Moreover, the use of a diverse range of materials by artists, particularly in the 20th century, both simplifies the question of representation, as the actual material can be used to represent itself, for example fabric, and makes the issue more complex as a range of materials can be used to represent an image as well as ideas about space and vision, as we have seen in Cubist collage for instance. My point here is to show that the problem of representation is a common one in art and not confined to specific periods such as the Renaissance or 17th-century Dutch painting where the apparent preoccupation with ‘naturalism’ or ‘realism’ can be misleading in this regard. The relationship between form and content is far more complicated than simply being able to recognize the world we think we see.

  Secondly, it is important to think about how artworks can be the illustration of ideas or narratives, which are often based on textual sources. These sources can be illustrated in a variety of ways as verbal descriptions are usually much looser than a visual image. Illustrations of textual sources are far more specific or particular. The verbal descriptions of Apollo, or any other mythical figure from the literature of antiquity, have been illustrated in a great variety of ways – the holdings of most major galleries and museums contain innumerable examples of this. We are able to identify these literary figures through certain attributes that provide a link between text and image – in this case Apollo’s laurel crown. If the viewer had never heard of Apollo, or did not know how to identify him, the statue would remain only partially read – and some of its meaning would remain undiscovered.

  Two things emerge from the relationship between verbal and visual descriptions. The first is that the diversity of ways of illustrating textual sources means that the text cannot be wholly reconstructed from the images of it. So although illustrations are more particular in terms of the image they present, they do not stand indepe
ndent of their textual sources. In other words we need to know the text to read the image. Secondly, this impacts on the meaning of these illustrations as surely this cannot be fixed, but rather is influenced by the viewer and the knowledge they have (or not) of the textual sources. And we must not forget that the particularity of the image comes from the artist’s own imagination. All of this establishes the artwork as a document or archive that has a complex relationship with text, history, and the culturally conditioned viewer.

  I have not discussed the artist’s intentions here as psychoanalytic models, as discussed in Chapter 4, have shown us that the meaning of a work can extend beyond its maker’s intentions – if indeed these are known. The volatility of the meaning of images is a fascinating element of art history. But if we accept that art is a vehicle through which ideas can be communicated, there has to be some stability. And there is a common language or set of symbolic conventions that can be used by artists to fix the meaning of artworks on one level or another. This introduces us to iconography – the study of subjects in art, and their deeper meaning – an important focal point for my discussion of reading art.

  In the age of computers we are all familiar with the term icon. But the word has a complex history and this leads me right to the beginning of my consideration of iconography. I want to begin with the juxtaposition of three very different icons: a Byzantine image of the Virgin and Child (Fig. 20); Andy Warhol’s portrait of the actress Marilyn Monroe (1962; Fig. 21); and Mario from The Super Mario Brothers game (Fig. 3). In the Byzantine image of the Virgin and Child the relationship between text and image is strong. We need to know of the Christian Bible before we see the image of a woman and child as having religious significance. We might identify certain attributes – for instance the Virgin’s blue cape or mantel or the fact that the Christ child is holding a scroll, which is a symbol or prefiguration of his death. But how do we know that this image is not just a representation of motherhood or a female figure and child from mythology? In Warhol’s Marilyn Monroe we see a repeated image of one of Hollywood’s best-known stars. This representation of Marilyn Monroe has become so familiar to us, and is so frequently quoted in other artworks, that it has gained an ‘iconic’ status that is commensurate with the actress herself. Mario, from The Super Mario Brothers, speaks to the temporal nature of icons – I am assured that he is more easily recognizable than the Mona Lisa to the generations whose interests centre on computer games and virtual reality.