Stories of Art (2nd Edition) PDF - James Elkins

OceanofPDF.com Stories of Art A thoughtful, engaging, and intimate history of art that offers a critical analysis of the assumptions on which the entire discipline of art history depends. Concise and original, this accessible second edition continues to act as an antidote to the behemoth art history textbooks of the past. Cultures have their own stories – about themselves, about other cultures – and to hear them all is one way to hear the multiple stories that art tells. James Elkins persuasively demonstrates there can never be one story of art now that art historians are concerned with gender, diversity, inclusiveness, and decolonization. Stories of Art is an interactive, iconoclastic text, encouraging readers to imagine how they would present art history in an age of multiple narratives. Elkins discusses decolonizing the discipline, representing race and ethnicity, Eurocentrism, post-nationalism, and indigenous voices while examining histories of art written in China, Persia, Turkey, and India. This new edition features QR codes to 27 short videos that introduce challenging ideas about art and history in a clear and open way, encouraging active reading, and including ideas for writing exercises and class conversations. A must read for students and scholars interested in exploring the cultural function of art history. James Elkins is Professor of Art History, Theory, and Criticism at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, USA. He is the author and editor of many books on art and visual culture, including Visual Studies: A Skeptical Introduction (2003), Visual Literacy (2007), How to Use Your Eyes (2008), What Photography Is (2011), and What Painting Is, 2nd edition (2019). OceanofPDF.com Stories of Art Second Edition JAMES ELKINS OceanofPDF.com Designed cover image: Ratnakorn Piyasirisorost / Getty Images Second edition published 2025 by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 and by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2025 James Elkins The right of James Elkins to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. First edition published by Routledge 2002 Every effort has been made to contact copyright-holders. Please advise the publisher of any errors or omissions, and these will be corrected in subsequent editions. ISBN: 978-1-032-69607-2 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-032-69606-5 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-032-69609-6 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781032696096 Typeset in ITC New Baskerville by Newgen Publishing UK OceanofPDF.com To E.H. Gombrich, who missed seeing this book by one year. I was looking forward to his amiable irritation. OceanofPDF.com Contents List of Illustrations List of Videos How to Use the Videos Foreword One Intuitive Stories Two Old European Stories Three New European and American Stories Four Non-European Stories Five Fixing Things Six Seven Proposals Index OceanofPDF.com List of Illustrations While every effort has been made to trace copyright holders and obtain permission, this has not been possible in all cases. Any omissions brought to our attention will be remedied in future editions. 1.1 The history of art imagined as a field of stars. Author’s drawing. 1.2 The history of art imagined as a coastline. Author’s drawing. 1.3 The history of art imagined as a map. Redrawn by author. 1.4 An imaginary map by a beginning art history student, c.2010. Redrawn by author. 1.5 The history of art imagined as a landscape. Redrawn by author. 1.6 Alfred H. Barr, Jr., Diagram of the development of cubism and abstract art, 1890–1945. New York, Museum of Modern Art. Credit: Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY. 1.7 Mountain-Shaped Incense Burner (Boshan Xianglu). Han dynasty (206 BCE–ADE 220), 1st century BCE/ADE. The Art Institute of Chicago., Lucy Maud Buckingham Collection. 2.1 Giorgio Vasari’s portrait in his book Lives of the Eminent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, 1568. 2.2 Piero di Cosimo (1462–1522), The Return from the Hunt, ca.1494– 1500, detail. New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art. Gift of Robert Gordon, 1875. 2.3 Bellori, Lives of the Modern Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, 1672. 2.4 Van Mander, Book of Picturing, 1604. 3.1 E.H. Gombrich, Story of Art, 1953 edition. 3.2 The master narrative of (European) art history. Drawing: author. 3.3 The chaotic beginnings of the master narrative. 3.4 Janson’s History of Art, 4th edition, 1995. 3.5 Gardner, Art Through the Ages, 1st edition, 1926. 3.6 Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, Native American, born 1940. Trade (Gifts for Trading Land with White People), 1992. Oil and mixed media on canvas, 86 × 170 inches (218.4 × 431.8 cm). Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, VA. Museum purchase in memory of Trinkett Clark, Curator of American and Contemporary Art, 1989–96 93.2 © Jaune Quick-to-See Smith. 3.7 The standard history of Modernism (top) and the variant proposed by Robert Rosenblum (bottom). Graphics by author. 4.1 Ion Irimescu, Young Girl with Grapes. 1944. Bronze. Present location unknown. Photo from Alexandru Cebuc, Irimescu (Bucharest: Editura Meridane, 1983). Photograph by Radu Braun. 4.2 Burhan Toprak, Sanat Tarihi (1960). 4.3 Figure group. Cave 16. Gupta period, 475–510 CE. Ajanta Caves/Maharashtra/India. Borromeo / Art Resource, NY. 4.4 Amrita Sher Gil, Three Girls. Oil on canvas, 66.5 × 92.8 cm. New Delhi, National Gallery of Modern Art, Acc. No. 982. Credit: National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi. 4.5 Qāḍī Aḥmad ibn Mīr-Munshī, Calligraphers and Painters. 1959 translation. 4.6 Illustration of the Story of the Squinting Prince in Aḥmad ibn Mīr Munshī, al-Ḥusainī (1959). Calligraphers and Painters, v.3, no.2 (1959). Smithsonian Libraries and Archives. 4.7 The Citrasūra, part of the Visṇudharmottara Purāṇa, 2001 translation by Parul Dave Mukherji. 5.1 Weeks in the autumn and spring terms of the introductory art history class at the University College Cork, Ireland, 2005. 5.2 A plan for the autumn and spring terms of the introductory art history class at the University College Cork, Ireland, 2005. 5.3 Typical allocation of gallery space for art of the last 125 years. Graphics by author. 5.4 Typical allocation of teaching time for art of the last 125 years. Graphics by author. 5.5 Typical interests of art students in art of the last 125 years. Graphics by author. 5.6 An art student’s timeline of their own art, 2022. Redrawn by author. 5.7 An art student’s timeline of their own art, 2022. Redrawn by author. 6.1 Imaginary book of art history that tells the story of exactly 15 years on each page; excerpt from the page spanning 12,000 BCE to 11,895 BCE. Graphics by author. 6.2 Imaginary book of art story that tells the history of exactly 15 years on each page; excerpt from the page spanning 1650 to 1665 ACE. Graphics by author. 6.3 Iroquois Native American wearing a wooden carved False Face mask in front of a traditional Iroquois longhouse in the snow. Credit: Nathan Benn / GEO Image Collection / Art Resource, NY. 6.4 Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475–1564). David – frontal view, 1501– 1504. Marble. Erich Lessing / Art Resource, NY. 6.5 Village guardian, with a sacrificial dog, c.1905. Itelmen, Kamchatka Peninsula, Russia. Photo from Waldemar Jochelson, The Koryak, in the series Publications of the Jessup North Pacific Expedition, ed. by Franz Boas, vol. 6 (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1908), Plate IX, fig. 1. OceanofPDF.com List of Videos 1 Intuitive drawings of art history 2 Timelines of art history 3 Periods, megaperiods, and turning points 4 When did Postmodernism begin? 5 When did Modernism begin? 6 Art styles as pendulum swings 7 Art styles as life cycles 8 Is Postmodernism a period like every other? 9 Who wrote art history in the Renaissance? 10 Hegel’s influence on art history 11 E.H. Gombrich’s Story of Art 12 When did art begin? 13 The big North American art history textbooks 14 Theories of contemporary art 15 Who is art history for? 16 Art history textbooks in different countries 17 Premodern art history textbooks in China, India, and Persia 18 Planning art history so it includes everything 19 Avoiding Eurocentrism 20 Including women artists, including race and ethnicity 21 Looking at visual objects beyond fine art 22 Problems with formal analysis 23 Decolonizing art history 24 Indigenous methodologies 25 Nationalism and post-nationalism 26 Influences on contemporary art 27 Proposals for rethinking art history OceanofPDF.com How to Use the Videos This book is meant to be read along with the short videos that are linked throughout the text. If you’re a teacher, you can assign these videos, or show them in class. None is longer than about 20 minutes. The videos linked here are selections from a set of over 70 that were made between 2020 and 2023. The full series reflects my experience teaching introductory art history at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. They are intended to be engaging for first-year students, and they do not require any preparatory reading. In many cases assigning the videos is enough, and it won’t be necessary to also assign the text. If the text is optional reading, that can free up students’ time to read other assignments. The QR codes in this book will open in YouTube, which has the full set of 70 videos. Teachers might want to choose other videos as supplementary topics. All 70 are informal, with improvised voice-over. They’re designed to be inclusive and inviting, to start conversations rather than simply impart information. Each QR code in this book is accompanied by two teaching aids: Prompts are things for students to think about before they read or watch the videos. If they are assigned the week before the text and videos, students will arrive in class ready to talk about the ideas. In my own classes I usually ask for two hundred words (just short of a page) of writing. Students all write into a shared online document. That way they can see what other students are writing, and the online format makes it easy for them to add images to illustrate their points. Class conversations are things to discuss after students have done the reading or seen the videos. I find it useful to break the class into small groups of 3–5 students, and have each group consider one of the questions. After a period of conversation, say 15 minutes, one person in each group reports their findings. It’s a good way to get everyone involved without compelling students who would rather not speak in public. My own perspective on the problems treated in this book is that they’re unsolved. I have emphasized open problems and themes whenever possible, and I am agnostic about the question of how, and even whether, art history should be taught at all. Without skepticism about our hopes and allegiances, we don’t stand much chance of implementing really radical change. OceanofPDF.com Foreword In 1950, the art historian E.H. Gombrich wrote a book called The Story of Art. Since then, it has never been out of print. At times it has been the world’s most popular art book. Each edition is more lavish than the last, and the newest has some of the best-quality illustrations of any art book; but the text has remained essentially unchanged. It is still, for many people, the story of art. Meanwhile, the discipline of art history has grown in all sorts of new directions. There are calls to address the discipline’s history of nationalism, its complicity with racist and colonial ideals, its affinity with class interests, its dependence on the market, its implicit dedication to a certain sense of cultural literacy, its uncomfortable reliance on the structures of the university, its ongoing gender biases, and its well-intentioned but often ineffective attempts to expand the purview of artists, practices, and cultures that are included in seminars and exhibitions. Calls to decolonize art history, to rethink its professional organization, and to interrogate its structural racism are ongoing. Despite all these changes, at the level of introductory teaching and learning, versions of the “story of art” told in Gombrich’s book continue to provide the principal narrative, the common core, of art historical teaching even for subjects far distant from Europe. There’s a reason for this persistence. Gombrich’s book is a brilliant answer to a long-standing problem: how to unify the threads of history into one single compelling story. When art history got under way in the Renaissance it was a complicated mixture of biographies, off-the-cuff criticism, plain old descriptions, unreliable anecdotes, and dry stuff about the artists’ birthplaces and the people who employed them. It is as if the first art historian, the Italian Giorgio Vasari, was not quite sure how to write about art. He gossiped a little, documented a little, and spent a fair amount of time just praising the artists he admired. There was no precedent to show him how a history of art ought to be written, so he made a delightful mix of other kinds of books – family chronicles, Greek travel accounts, biographies – all bent to his project of documenting Italian art. Nearly five centuries later, things have only gotten more confused. Now art historians write about all kinds of objects, not just the painting, sculpture, and architecture that Vasari described, and they have their choice of all sorts of theories to help them interpret what they see. Some art historians follow feminism (in any of a half-dozen variants), often combined with psychoanalysis (in another half-dozen varieties). Other art historians subscribe to semiotics, deconstruction, postcolonial theory, decolonial theory, and even more abstruse doctrines. Art historians can find themselves spending nearly as much time puzzling over their theories and methods as they do looking at images. It wouldn’t be possible to describe all those theories in the space of such a short book, and it probably wouldn’t be helpful to try. There are many books out there that introduce theories, and some that explain them in excruciating detail. Nor could I tell the history of the discipline itself – its practitioners, its national schools, its conceptual development. That has also been done, and it takes a larger book than this to do it any sort of justice. And of course, it’s out of the question to recount the actual history of art, from the Paleolithic to the present, in any sensible fashion. Even Gombrich’s book has a hard time doing that, and it has over four hundred illustrations. Luckily there is a way to introduce the discipline that is both crucial to what art historians actually do and appropriate for an abbreviated format. In this book I’ll be looking at the shapes of art history that are presented in various texts – the plots, or the outlines, of the stories of art. Gombrich’s Story of Art has an especially clear shape: essentially it starts in ancient Egypt and ends mainly in England. Any book of world art you may pick up has its shape: the author chooses some artworks and excludes others, and tries to mold them all into a satisfying pattern. The discipline of art history may be thought of as a continuous reshaping of the past, an ongoing attempt to keep it relevant and infuse it with meaning and purpose. This is true of all books on art history, not just the massive ones that try to put the world into an eight-pound package. A book on a specialized subject – say a monograph on the 18th-century Italian painter Giambattista Tiepolo – may not offer any judgments about other artists, but it will be full of opinions about what counts as interesting 18th-century painting, about why Tiepolo deserves to be rethought, and about the many artists and movements who aren’t the subject of the book. That is simply the way value judgments work: it couldn’t be otherwise. The authors of a book called Tiepolo and the Pictorial Intelligence – if you’re looking for a first book of art history, it is as close to an exemplary volume as any I can think of – are full of judgments about the way viewers have misunderstood Tiepolo. The authors say their painter “satisfies neither a taste for what is loosely but confidently referred to as pictorial unity, nor a taste for narration.” They set out to restore the “truncated Tiepolo” who has been partly forgotten and misconstrued by people who didn’t look hard enough at what he painted. A reader emerges with a refreshed sense of a singular artist, “accessible and easy to like,” but also intellectual, “restless,” with a “tart after-taste.” The book concisely remakes an 18th-century painter for a late 20th-century audience, and in doing so it makes a small but distinct change in a reader’s sense of the shape of all European art history. In that fashion even the most specialized book gives shape and sense to history. It does not require advanced training to think about the shape of art history. Everyone who visits an art museum shapes history simply by walking through some galleries and avoiding others. I have seen people genuinely panicked because they had lost their way in the modern art galleries: they ask the guards how to get out, or how to get back to the Impressionists or the Rembrandt rooms. Other visitors are the opposite: they think of the old masters as mummies, preserved with misguided reverence long past the time they should have been forgotten. Those visitors would much rather spend their time “lost” in modern art galleries. Some viewers search for exotic art, rushing past the European paintings to the small side galleries that have strange jewelry or curious furniture. In the Art Institute of Chicago, where I work, we have a large collection of decorative glass paperweights and several dozen dollhouse miniature rooms made up in the styles of different centuries. A steady stream of visitors comes to the museum just to see those two nearly forgotten arts. So just by walking through a museum in a certain order, you build a sense of art history that seems acceptable, pleasurable, or coherent. The route you take is the precise analogue of the arrangement of chapters in a book like Gombrich’s: it’s a map of your interests, a strategy for experiencing the kind of cultural history that you prefer. It can be interesting to sit down and draw a little picture of the periods and artists you like best: such a picture would be your own table of contents to your sense of the past. In Chapter 1, I report on students and teachers who have made those intuitive drawings. Then, in Chapter 2, I compare those impromptu maps to some major books of art history written from the Renaissance to the 19th century. It turns out that many people’s informal sense of the shape of history corresponds very well to some of the influential books written in past centuries: in other words, the art history you imagine is your own has been invented and passed down to you largely without your knowledge. Chapter 3 brings things up to date by considering current textbooks written in Europe and North America, the kind that are assigned in high school and freshman courses on art history. Those books try to get around the biases of the earlier scholarship by including more or less everything that can be stuffed into a thousand-odd pages of fine print. They teach us, in effect, that the history of art is the story of all art: a strange claim, and one I think it is hard to live up to or believe in. After that I turn to books written outside Europe and America to see what art history has looked like to people who did not know or care about European art. Non-European books can be startling and refreshing, because they show just how restricted many western ideas about art still are. Even art historians who study non-western art continue to privilege the West by participating in the conventional structures of art history – the journals, conferences, and other professional obligations. Non-European books are an excellent tonic for lingering Eurocentrism. Even with the increasing interest in non-western art, the discipline of art history hasn’t yet produced a textbook with the reach, clarity, and persuasive power of Gombrich’s. In Chapter 5, “Fixing Things,” I imagine what such a perfect book of art history might look like. This is where I explore problems of avoiding Eurocentrism, including questions of race, class, gender, ethnicity, and indigenous voices. If those are your primary concerns you can skip Chapters 2, 3, and 4 – but please don’t skip Chapter 1, because it sets up everything that follows. For the last chapter I have invented some books, Borges-fashion, which could produce genuinely inclusive, equitably distributed, diverse and capacious histories of art. They are far from practical, as you’ll see – including the very last one, which is a project I think has real potential to make a radical, fundamental change in art history. I hope these Stories of Art can be a kind of guide, helping you to find the shape of art history that makes most sense for you. Your sense of the past should be yours alone, not something you have memorized from someone else’s book. That is the only way art history can become more than a series of fascinating but quaint facts about the past – the only way it can grow into a subject that you really love. References Svetlana Alpers and Michael Baxandall, Tiepolo and the Pictorial Intelligence (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994), 3, 166. E.H. Gombrich, The Story of Art (London: Phaidon, 1950). OceanofPDF.com 1 Intuitive Stories DOI: 10.4324/9781032696096-1 Sometimes the most difficult subjects need to begin with the simplest exercises. Einstein invented thought experiments to help him clear the thickets of equations in his new physics. His frequent antagonist Niels Bohr spent a great deal of time inventing and drawing thought experiments designed to overturn Einstein’s thought experiments. Even today physicists talk about “toy systems” when they can’t work with the full mathematics. Many complex enterprises begin with things so simple they seem laughable. Language textbooks are certainly like that: Ali meets Ella, and asks when they will go to the movies; they part without another word. Only after several hundred pages – and a thousand new vocabulary words – can Ali speak freely to Ella. Let me start, then, with a simple exercise to help think about the shape of art history. It is also a thought experiment: The idea is to draw or imagine a very free and informal map of art history as it appears to you. You’re to find the mental shape, the imaginative form of history, and do it by avoiding the usual straight time lines. In other words, the drawing must be a product of your own imagination, suited to your preferences, your knowledge, and your sense of the past. The map will be your working model, your “toy system.” As this book moves through the influential histories of art that have been written in the past, you may discover that your ideas have been posed and sometimes critiqued by previous generations of historians. You’ll also see, I hope, that your version of art history has a great deal to say about you: Who you are, when you were born, and even where you live. Video 1 Guidelines for doing your own intuitive drawing of art history, and a series of examples done by students in different countries. Prompt (for the week before this unit is assigned): Make a list of the kinds of art, “high” or “low,” that most interest you. If you look at a lot of anime or manga, list those. Same with videos and video games. If you watch a lot of streaming TV, or if you have favorite social media feeds, include those. Definitely add whatever conventional fine art you like, but there’s no need to emphasize it. Instead make sure your list is a good reflection of what you actually consume. Class conversations: This material is good for an extended in-class exercise. Once you’ve seen the video and read the text, it’s your turn to make your own intuitive map. Sometimes it helps to make basic decisions first: Will my drawing be a journey? A picture of my room? A scene in space? And will I put myself in the drawing? If so, where will I be? Label everything as you go, and be ready to explain your drawing. Maps of Art History For me one of the easiest pictures to draw is a constellation, where favorite artists and artworks are loosely arranged around some center (Figure 1.1). This is a drawing I made of the images that I was thinking about at the time. Naturally such a drawing is very personal and it isn’t likely to correspond to anyone else’s. One of the stars is the Taï plaque, a little prehistoric piece of bone inscribed with tiny lines; another is Duchamp, who always seems to be floating somewhere around; a third is the “Wrangel-Schrank,” a German Renaissance cabinet with bizarre pictures done in wood inlay. A star at the right of the moon stands for the paintings my wife made: They aren’t as well known as some of the other stars on the chart, but for me they are nearly as important. At the center is the moon, which I labeled “natural images: twigs, grass, stars, sand, moths’ wings.” I put those things at the center because at the time I was studying natural history as much as I was studying art. Down near the horizon, shining faintly, are the Dutch artist Philips de Koninck and the Czech artist Jan Zrzavý: The first invented landscapes with low horizons, like this one, and the other showed me just how eccentric a 20th- century artist can be. To most people this constellation would be fairly meaningless, or just quirky; but for me, it conjures the pattern of history that preoccupied me at the time, and it does so surprisingly strongly: As I look at it, I find myself being pulled back into that mindset. When I present this thought experiment to students, I show them a picture like this one to start off. A constellation is better than an old- fashioned time line, and it is a good way to begin to loosen the grip of your education and start looking for the pattern that history has for you. The star chart also has a drawback in that it doesn’t show the structure of history. It isn’t clear which artists and images are further from the center, so there is no way to tell what matters more, and what less. The stars in this picture don’t fall into any order, even though they seemed ordered at the time. Nor does the picture reveal which artists and works I thought were better, and which worse. Figure 1.1 The history of art imagined as a field of stars. Author’s drawing. Some of the most interesting mental maps of art history use landscapes. For example, imagine standing on a beach and looking out at the ocean, and say that looking out to sea is like looking into the past. The sand at your feet is whatever art you’re used to, and the shallow water is art of the recent past. Deep ocean water stands for art that seems very distant. What would your version of such a landscape look like? Which artists or periods would be nearby, and which would be sunk in the abyss? (One student who tried this exercise drew some strange creatures in the deep, and called them “bioluminescent non-Western art.”) My own version is shown in Figure 1.2; for me, the march of western painting seems to dip under water at some time in the 19th century and from there it just gets progressively deeper until art itself becomes invisible. I have studied the art of the Renaissance, the Middle Ages, and Rome; but for me they still seem somehow less accessible, less definitely present, less clear and familiar than more recent art. Other art historians would no doubt draw things very differently. Figure 1.2 The history of art imagined as a coastline. Author’s drawing. Erwin Panofsky, a 20th-century art historian, once remarked that everyone’s knowledge is like an archipelago – little islands drowned in a sea of ignorance. Even for Panofsky, the history of art wasn’t spread out like some geometrically level salt flat, ready to be divided up into years and centuries. Panofsky may have meant that if a person has enough time, they might eventually fill in the ocean and learn everything. But I’m not sure: There are times and places we are prohibited from ever understanding because our time, or place, or temperament make them in some degree inaccessible. I would rather say that the sea of ignorance cannot be drained. In my imaginary landscape, the ancient Middle East seems mysteriously more familiar than classical Greek art, so I drew it as a distant headland. These things don’t always make perfect sense: I can’t entirely account for the reason that Australian Aboriginal painting (on the right) and Mayan art (on the left) appear more solid than medieval painting; but I know that part of my task as an art historian is to try to explain why that should be so. I have a collection of intuitive maps drawn by students from all around the world. This isn’t an exercise for beginners! I’ve given the exercise to grad students, full professors, curators, and philosophers. Everyone has an intuitive map in their mind. An art history graduate student in Hangzhou, China drew a map showing five paths into the past (Figure 1.3). One road, leading to the upper left, goes past a selection of 19th- and 20th-century artists back to the Renaissance, the Middle Ages, and finally the distant hills of Greece and Rome, prehistoric Europe, and Mesopotamia. Notice her choice of western artists: Moore, Maillol, Gauguin, Van Gogh, and Matisse are commonly favored in Chinese art because the first generations of Chinese artists who visited France in the 1920s and 1930s studied mostly conservative works and avoided Cubism, Dada, and Surrealism. It’s an identifiably Chinese canon of western Modernism. From Rodin, another Chinese favorite, she jumps abruptly back to the Renaissance. She puts modern western art on an entirely separate path (at the upper right), and she sees it as a shining star that she can’t quite reach, even though she promises “I will try.” (She did. She got her PhD and now teaches in Korea.) This idea about modern art has also been a common perception among Chinese artists since the mid-1990s: Contemporary western art is an exotic challenge, one that demands an adventurous plunge into alien territory. Egyptian art is also isolated, off on a road of its own (lower left). Figure 1.3 The history of art imagined as a map. Redrawn by author. At the bottom and lower right, she draws two routes into her own Chinese past. One leads straight down, past the classic inkbrush painters to the ancient Chinese Dunhuang cave paintings (c.750 CE). This road is essentially the history of Chinese painting, with some venerable forefathers who are like Michelangelo and Leonardo, and also some moderns who are like Matisse and Van Gogh. Neither road quite reaches the present, and it is telling that there is no place on her map for contemporary Chinese art as there is for modern western art. That is partly because Chinese inkbrush painting is widely perceived to have gone into a decline in the two centuries or so, and partly because, for her, “modern art” includes modern Chinese art. A final road, at the lower right, leads directly to two other periods of Chinese art, one recent (the Qing dynasty, 1644–1912) and the other much older (the Han dynasty, 206 BCE –220 CE). In an ordinary, conventional art history, those two dynasties don’t belong together, but she felt they do. This is her way of pointing out another kind of Chinese tradition, which includes ceramics, bronzes, and sculpture; for her it is best captured by one very old period and one new period, the way a Westerner might pair Rome with the revival of Roman ideas in the Renaissance. The next image is a map done by a first-year student who had never studied art history. He draws himself on top of a planet, Little Prince style. To the right are things “nearby on the surface,” which he knows. Farther down on the underside of the planet are artworks he doesn’t know yet. And inside the planet are things he thinks he needs help with – Roman art, Greek art, and performance art, which he “cannot even start to know without a lot of tedious effort, heavy machinery, and government funding.” Figure 1.4 An imaginary map by a beginning art history student, c.2010. Redrawn by author. At first I thought it was surprising he put performance art alongside Roman and Greek art, but he was also a beginning art student, and many first-year art students have never contemplated performance art, minimalism, or conceptual art, and they can be intimidating when they first come up in art history or studio classes. (This is something many art historians don’t understand, because they are so familiar with Postmodernism.) I’ll reproduce one more map here to suggest the kinds of things you might draw if you try this yourself. Here is a very inventive drawing by an American undergraduate art student (Figure 1.5). He sees himself and his friends on a meandering path in the middle of a woods, like Dorothy on the way to Oz. The path isn’t labeled, but he told me it represents Surrealism because sometimes Surrealism seems “right there,” and other times it feels “far away and incomprehensible.” His intuition reflects a widespread feeling that the original French Surrealist movement, which began in the 1920s and petered out in the 1940s, is really still with us, but in unexpected forms. Art historians have developed the same idea. A book called Formless: A User’s Guide, published in 1997, tells the history of the original French movement and updates it, expanding on the founders’ ideas so they can be useful to contemporary artists and critics. Such a project, midway between art history and art criticism, makes sense for the same reason this student’s map makes sense: For many people Surrealism is at one and the same time a movement whose time has come and gone, as well as a living possibility for art. Figure 1.5 The history of art imagined as a landscape. Redrawn by author. The student draws himself standing at the base of a big pillar or tombstone haunted by frightening Abstract Expressionists. In the distance is a less threatening monument to Picasso and Cubism. He feels most at home with TV and “art of the ’80s,” especially Barbara Kruger’s media-savvy photography. Abstract Expressionism and Cubism are a different matter: They are big, serious history and not at all friendly or accessible. All around the student and his friends is a forest, which he calls the “beautiful background trees”: Painting that is well known but not really engaging. In the forest is a host of periods and styles, none of them too interesting and none too difficult or distant. This is a characteristically Postmodern sense of the past, where times as utterly different as the Renaissance, Hellenistic sculpture, and Postimpressionism are all equally available. Surrealism, a movement confined to the 20th century, meanders all over his mental map, but at the same time nearly three thousand years of art is clustered conveniently around him, scrambled up in no particular order. In the background are the Olympian mountains of Greece and Rome and the shining “dawn of Western realism.” Greece and Rome are solid but far away. Many western students and teachers who have made drawings for me do the same with Greece and Rome: It’s a reflection of the idea that Classical civilization is the indispensable foundation stone of the West. He told me that the sun is nothing other than the central theme of Gombrich’s Story of Art: The far-reaching invention of western-style realistic depiction. Gombrich wouldn’t have agreed with the jumbled forest or the preeminence of the Abstract Expressionists, TV culture, or the Yellow Brick Road of Surrealism. But he would have sympathized with the overwhelming western-ness of the picture. For this student, non-western art is literally alien: It appears as two UFOs, piloted by bug-eyed monsters. (The student who drew this apologized for his two aliens, which he said “aren’t very politically correct.” Yet they were honest, and that is what matters in this exercise.) Needless to say, drawings like these can’t fully describe the shape of history. They are too simple, and besides, most of us don’t normally think in diagrams. Drawings and diagrams are unfashionable in art history, because they are too neat to represent the real truth. Yet I risk showing them here because they are unguarded and informal, and that makes them tremendously valuable. The exercise is simple but it isn’t simpleminded: It can help dislodge the weight of things you have been taught and uncover a sense of art history that is closer to the way the past is imagined, felt, and used. I hope you are thinking of making a diagram for yourself – at least a mental one – because it will help you compare your ideas to other peoples’ as we go along through this book. Once you have made such a drawing, you can begin the refining and rearranging that leads in time to a coherent and independent sense of what has happened to art from prehistory to the present. What counts is not the drawing itself but the insight it provides into the necessity of thinking about the shape of your imagination. Otherwise, art history is just a parade, designed by other people, endlessly passing you by. Video 2 Time lines of art history, beginning with conventional ones and continuing with artists’ time lines, experimental non-chronological time lines, and collaborative time lines. Prompt: In addition to imaginary drawings, it’s also possible to visualize your own time line of art. If you imagine all the visual art you know, both ancient and contemporary, on a single time line, what would it look like? The subjects you’ll be studying in this class will be there, and whatever you’ve studied or discovered in the past. Most of the time line, however, would be contemporary art (television, movies, Instagram, anime). Make a sketch of what your time line would look like, using circles to represent kinds of art. Big circles mean there is a lot of material inside, and smaller circles means there is less. Class conversations: Once you’ve seen the video, decide which of the time lines is the best fit for you. Do you think of art as something that goes in a straight line, from the past to the present? Or do you think of art as something that moves along a swirling or winding path, or some years compressed and others expanded? Do you like the experimental time lines in the video, especially the ones that branch and divide? Be ready to explain your choices. Periods and Megaperiods Another way to think about art history is by considering how the periods of art should be ordered. European period names are the familiar litany of high school art history: Classical, Medieval, Renaissance, Baroque, Modern, Postmodern. There is no fixed number of periods, and I might as well have said Classical, Medieval, Renaissance, Baroque, Rococo, Romantic, Realist, Impressionist, Postimpressionist, Modern, Postmodern, or any number of other permutations. The more detailed the book or the course, the more periods there will be; Horst Janson’s History of Art, one of the modern textbooks we’ll be looking at in Chapter 3, has a folding time line several feet long. Video 3 Useful ideas for constructing your own outlines of periods: Megaperiods, monism, atomism, turning points, and outlines of world art. Prompt (for the week before this unit is assigned): Textbooks usually divide history into large units called “megaperiods” (“western,” “non- western,” “ancient,” “modern”) and then into periods (“Renaissance,” “Baroque,” “Tang Dynasty,” “Song Dynasty”). If you were teaching a world art history course, what periods and megaperiods would you use? If you don’t think of history in periods, how would you divide it? Remember to include all of world art, or whatever parts seem worth teaching. Class conversations: Break into groups, and decide on the basic outline for a book of world art history. Use megaperiods first – decide on the largest possible units of your history, like “Africa,” “Premodern,” or “Southeast Asian.” Then divide those into the most important periods. Be ready to explain your group’s choices. If you add modern “isms” to your list, you can make it as long as you like: Orphism, Luminism, Futurism, Constructivism, Neo-Plasticism, Purism … Around mid-century, at the height of international Modernism, it looked as if the 20th century was a cacophony of isms. Alfred Barr, who worked at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, has gone down in art history as a compulsive lister and codifier of isms; in all he counted several dozen, some of which he invented himself (Figure 1.6). As time passes, some isms coalesce into major movements, but it is not yet sensible to speak of the 20th century as a single movement with no subdivisions. Before the 19th century there are fewer isms but just as many periods: Ottonian, Carolingian, Romanesque, Gothic … and of course the names only multiply when the subject is non-western art: In Indian art, for instance, there is Vedic art, followed by Maurya, Andhra, Kushan, and Gupta. The curious thing about isms, both Barr’s and other people’s, is that they seem to only happen in modern art. The rest of art history seems to be structured differently, as if it were composed of political, social, or even archaeological units. Somehow isms seem to be suited to modernism. Figure 1.6 Alfred H. Barr, Jr., Diagram of the development of cubism and abstract art, 1890–1945. New York, Museum of Modern Art. Credit: Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY. It is possible to go to extremes, either listing names compulsively (as Barr did) or maintaining that all periods should be gathered under one or two big headings. If all of art is one thing to you, and periods do not really matter, then you are a monist: You believe that a cave painting is of a piece with a picture by Kara Walker and ultimately there is no sense distinguishing the two. (You might say that what counts is creativity, beauty, or genius, and in those cases periods, places, and times might not matter.) On the other hand, if every period name seems meaningful and each ism is worth recording, then you are an atomist. A fundamentalist atomist would say that isms and periods can also be divided, until art history is reduced to a sequence of individual artists. Ultimately even an artist’s oeuvre can be subdivided, because each artwork is different from every other. Michelangelo’s early sculpture Bacchus, with its precious antique looks, does not fit well with his later Florentine Pietà, a massive sculpture with nothing precious about it. In a sense every single artwork is a “period” unto itself. In the atomist mindset, art history disintegrates into its component atoms, and in a monist mindset, art history congeals into a single unworkable lump. Neither one of these extreme positions works as art history, because they both give up the possibility of talking about sequences of artworks, or changes through time. But they are both common attitudes among working artists: For some artists, every artwork is new and different (that’s fundamentalist atomism); and for others, art is something whole and timeless (that’s monism). Most art historians behave like atomists – they study individual artists and works – but teach like moderate monists, organizing art history into a reasonable number of large periods. There have been exceptions. Gombrich once remarked that he regretted never having written a monograph on an individual artist. His books tend to be on particular themes – there’s a book on fresco painting, and a famous one called Art and Illusion – or else they are collections of essays that move through different themes. His book Story of Art begins with the claim that there is no such thing as art history, only artists. (Arguably, the book contradicts that by telling a history of art, but he means that what counts are individual accomplishments.) Gombrich can also be thought of as monist in the sense that he is attracted by ideas and less so by individual artists and periods. The German art historian Wilhelm Pinder was drawn more to atomism: He wrote a book called Problem of Generations in European Art History (1926), proposing art be organized not by periods but according to contemporaries and near-contemporaries. Art since the Renaissance would then be a sequence of about one hundred generations rather than a half- dozen periods. If Pinder experimented with atomism, then the French art historian Pierre Daix was a specialist in subatomic particles: He made a special study of Picasso’s work from 1900 to 1906, dividing it into many subperiods by season and even by month. Barr’s unpublished sketches include even more artists’ names, because he was thinking initially of individuals – atomist fashion – and trying to order them as best he could – monist fashion. (Barr was roundly criticized for his diagram of Modern isms, and his approach helped provoke Postmodern scholarship, as we’ll see later.) The majority of art historians never gets as literal or inventive with the shapes of history as Pinder or Barr did: Each historian negotiates the treacherous middle ground between the joy of looking at a single work and letting it pose its own unique questions, and the very different happiness of stepping back and finding at least a provisional pattern in the chaos of history. Conversations about time spans among art historians usually have to do with particular periods and transitions between them. The border between modern art and Postmodern art is an especially contested case. Some art historians say Postmodernism began in the 1960s with Andy Warhol and Pop art. The philosopher Arthur Danto has argued that at some length, and Danto’s conclusion is implicit in work by art historians who do not stray far back before Pop art. Art critics have also weighed in on the question. Dave Hickey, a critic known for writing that conjures giddy mixtures of periods and styles (his concoctions are not unrelated to the student’s drawing of the grove of trees), places the beginning of Postmodernism in 1962, with the first Pop art exhibition. Thomas McEvilley, another critic very much engaged in questions of art history, put it in 1961. The art historian Leo Steinberg, who first introduced the word “postmodern” into art historical writing, also associated the movement with Pop art, and specifically with Rauschenberg’s collages. There is a myriad of other opinions: Rosalind Krauss and Yve-Alain Bois have argued that Postmodernism is less a period than an ongoing resistance to modernism; and historians such as the Belgian Thierry De Duve have found Postmodern elements in Duchamp and Dada, back nearly at the beginning of the century. The next video explores this in more depth. Video 4 Several different theories about when Postmodernism began. Prompt: For most people, Postmodernism started in the 1960s, and is associated with video art, minimalism, performance art, and political art. Postmodernism was a reaction against modernism, which was often perceived as oblivious about politics and overly concentrated on painting and sculpture. If you have access to a large museum, walk through it in chronological order. (If you’re not near a large museum, go to your library and check out a couple of books that survey art of the last hundred years.) Look through the art in chronological order, and note when you think the art begins to look postmodern. Give your reasons for your choice. Class conversations: After you’ve seen the video, decide what counts as postmodern for you. You may not feel any big difference between modernism and Postmodernism. Some artists and scholars think of modernism as something that continued right up to contemporary international art. If you don’t sense any change between, say, Picasso and contemporary art, see if you can articulate the reasons they seem similar. The same kinds of conversation are going on with respect to the beginnings of modern art. According to one version, it got under way in the generation of Jacques-Louis David at the time of the French Revolution. The art historian Michael Fried locates some elements of modern art in David’s generation and others in Manet’s generation. Other art historians name Cézanne as the origin of modern art, and still others begin with Cubism. Like the discussions of Postmodernism, these aren’t just academic concerns. The way we imagine art and history depends on how we situate ourselves. If Modernism began with the French Revolution, then it is political and innovative in a particular way, and we’re part of that ongoing social experiment. If it began with Manet, it’s something different – we would be the inheritors of a more urban, art-oriented kind of Modernism. The next video describes five of the principal ideas about when Modernism began. Video 5 Five of the principal candidates for the moment when Modernism began. Prompt: If you’re near a large museum, walk through in chronological order from sometime around the Renaissance up to Postmodernism. (If you’re not near a museum, use a site like Smarthistory or the Heilbrunn Timeline, which is hosted by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.) Keep going, moving forward in time, until you find some art that looks modern to you. See if you can define the difference. Class conversations: After you’ve seen the video, choose between the five theories (or construct your own). When art seems premodern, what characteristics does it lack? What are the crucial innovations introduced in modern art? Do you think Modernism began several times? And if so, how were those beginnings different from one another? Debates of this sort also go on with respect to older periods. In the 1960s there was discussion about the span of Mannerism, a period in art just after the Renaissance and before the Baroque. The first art historians who wrote about Mannerism (in a sense they rediscovered it, as archaeologists find new cultures between known ones) pictured it as a time of tortured, existential passions. That fit their own generation, which was the period of German and Austrian expressionism. In the 1960s John Shearman wrote an influential book on the subject, redefining Mannerism as a lighter, more intellectual pursuit and moving it away from Florence and toward Rome. That, too, fit the tenor of his time, which was the decade of Pop art in America. Our experience of the present, and our place in history, color our interests in the past, and that negotiation only gets more complicated when movements, like Modernism and Postmodernism, may still be ongoing. These questions of the times and places of isms and movements are difficult to comprehend, especially when we are still inside them. Luckily there is another question that is easier to introduce and arguably even more fundamental: The overall sequences of all the periods. It makes a world of difference to your idea of Modernism if it begins with David, Manet, Cézanne, or Picasso; but pondering the sequence of periods that includes Modernism raises deeper questions about the relation between Modernism and art history as a whole. Erwin Panofsky, who named atomism and monism, has done some of the most useful thinking on this topic. If I look again at the list I made at first: Classical Medieval Renaissance Baroque Modern Postmodern It may occur to me to lump the first two and the last three, like this: Pre-Renaissance Classical Medieval Renaissance Post-Renaissance Baroque Modern Postmodern Panofsky called these new headings megaperiods: The largest groupings of periods short of all of art. If this list corresponded to my sense of history, then Pre-Renaissance, Renaissance, and Post-Renaissance would be my three megaperiods: I would not be able to imagine anything larger than them. A radical monist could take the last step, compressing the three megaperiods into one huge “period” called “art.” In so doing, the monist would also collapse the entire idea of history. That is why Panofsky’s megaperiods are so interesting: They are necessary to any sense of art history, and they are also just one step from irrationality. Arranging the major periods and megaperiods helps reveal the largest units of western art and it is also relevant to non-western art. Art historians tend to use words like “Baroque” and “Classical” to describe the art of many times and places. Such words are used, informally, to describe such things as Mayan stelae, Chinese porcelain, Medieval furniture, and Thai architecture. If I look at this incense burner (Figure 1.7), I may say it looks “Baroque” even though I know the term isn’t right. After all, the object was found in a Han Dynasty tomb dated 113 BCE, half a world away from Europe and a full 1,900 years before the Baroque. What I mean by calling it “Baroque” is that the burner shares some traits – superficially, coincidentally – with a movement that is otherwise distinct. Art historians tend to say such things offhandedly, without placing much emphasis on them, but they are ingrained in the discipline. The literature on non-western art is rife with passing references to “Classical,” “Baroque,” “Neoclassical,” “Rococo,” “Modern,” and “Postmodern.” Figure 1.7 Mountain-Shaped Incense Burner (Boshan Xianglu). Han dynasty (206 BCE–ADE 220), 1st century BCE/ADE. The Art Institute of Chicago, Lucy Maud Buckingham Collection. Art historians don’t apply non-western periods to western art: It wouldn’t occur to specialists in European art, for example, to try to shed light on a Baroque sculpture by Bernini by calling it “Han-like” or to elucidate Brunelleschi’s architecture by calling the earlier work “Maurya” or “Andhra” and the later “Kushan” or “Gupta.” That is partly a matter of familiarity, and to a Chinese or Indian art historian such comparisons might make more sense. But it is also a telltale sign of how deeply western the discipline of art history still remains: The majority of art historians think in terms of the major western periods and megaperiods. Even if I avoid calling the burner “Baroque” and call it “curvilinear” or “dynamic” instead, I am drawing on traits often assigned to the European Baroque. No art historical practice avoids this quandary. This is the first of several reasons we will encounter that the central sequence of western periods is relevant to the entirety of the history of art. The large periods and megaperiods are at the heart of any historical response to artworks, even when it seems they are far from the real European Renaissance or Baroque. Here’s another thought experiment that demonstrates that point. Imagine two vases, side by side on a table. Say they are in a style you have never seen before and you don’t know what culture produced them. They could be tourist art made in Cairo in 2023 or ceramics fired in China in 2023 BCE. Say one has straight lines running across it, in a simple black-and-white-stripe pattern, and the other has a gorgeous serpentine vine twirling around from the base up to the rim. Which one is older? Here you are on a par with even the most experienced art historian or archaeologist: Anyone would say that one is definitely older than the other. There is no telling who might pick which vessel: I might decide the vine shows greater skill and freedom, so it must have come later; you might say the stripes are expert abstractions, the sign of a sophisticated culture. For the purposes of this thought experiment, it doesn’t matter who is right: What matters is that each of us has automatically put the two vases in a chronological sequence. If I then add one more vase with horizontal red-and-white stripes, we would both put it in the same period as the black- and-white striped vase. We have automatically started arranging the unknown artifacts into periods, and those periods will almost always be influenced – even if only indirectly or subliminally – by western periods from the main sequence. Notice that both the judgments I’m imagining here are informed by sequences of periods in western art. If the striped vessel looks newer, it may be because it echoes modernist stripes, which superseded the skilled realism of older academic art. If the one with the vines seems newer, it may be because the striped one reminds me of schematic, geometric art like ancient Egyptian or early Greek art. Or maybe the one with the vines seems newer because it looks Baroque like the incense burner, and the stripes remind me of early Renaissance art. This kind of thinking was practiced from the beginnings of connoisseurship in the 17th century to early modern art historians such as the German Heinrich Wölfflin. Contemporary art historians call it style analysis and put no stock in it. Today an art historian would rather wait for some other evidence – dates, a chemical analysis, some written evidence of the vessels’ ages – but no viewer can resist arranging artworks into periods. The more highly trained the historian, the more confidently and quickly they will make the identification – and then begin to doubt it. But the damage is done in that first half-second. What, then, are the optimal ways of arranging the periods and megaperiods? In practice, several solutions have held sway over many possible alternatives. A person who thinks of the Renaissance as a turning point may put everything afterward in a subheading. (Megaperiods are in bold, and ordinary periods in roman typeface.) Ancient Classical Medieval Renaissance Baroque Neoclassical Modern Postmodern This scheme has been called an expanded Renaissance, because it implies that in some way the Renaissance made everything else possible. It’s a popular view among historians who specialize in the Renaissance, and there is strong evidence in favor of it. Art itself got under way in the Renaissance: In the Middle Ages paintings and sculptures were religious objects, not collectibles or objects of aesthetic appreciation. Along with the concept of art came a host of other terms we now find indispensable: The notion of the avant-garde, the idea that great artists are lonely geniuses, the practice of art criticism, the disciplines of aesthetics and art theory, the rise of secular art, and even the field of art history itself. In comparison to those changes, it could be argued that the shift from Modernism to Postmodernism is relatively superficial. Panofsky himself preferred four megaperiods with period subheadings: Classical Mycenean Hellenistic Medieval Carolingian Gothic Renaissance Early Renaissance High Renaissance Modern Panofsky’s outline is not one that many historians would adopt these days, just because it is so Eurocentric, and also because it doesn’t do much with Modernism. But there is a widespread tacit agreement among art historians that this sort of outline does describe how European art history might be ordered. If I were to add some period subheadings under “Modern,” such as Baroque, Romantic, Impressionist, and Postmodern, Panofsky’s list would correspond fairly well to the job descriptions that universities post when they need to hire additional faculty and also to the names of different sessions in art history conferences. Probably the largest divergence of opinion is between art historians who specialize in premodern art, who would subscribe to something like Panofsky’s outline, and those who teach Modern and Postmodern art, who might feel more at home with an outline like this: Premodern Ancient Medieval Renaissance Baroque Romanticism Realism Modern Postimpressionism Cubism Abstraction Surrealism Abstract Expressionism Postmodernism Art historians who work primarily with 20th-century material tend to use less of the deeper past than historians who work with some period of premodern history. In conferences and in the day-to-day life of art history departments, modernists and specialists in contemporary art are less engaged with the whole range of history than premodernists are interested in recent art. You can tell where your own teacher falls on this spectrum just by noticing how often they mention art outside their time period. If your teacher is a specialist in modern art, for example, they may not ever mention anything from the Renaissance. That’s not necessarily because they don’t know about Renaissance art: It’s because they don’t find it necessary to look any farther back in time to explain things that happen in modern art. The same goes for books. If you’re reading an assignment on modern art, check the footnotes: If you don’t see references to any art before Modernism, then it’s a good bet that the scholar who wrote the text doesn’t think Modernism is connected to premodern art. There is also the question of non-western art, which will loom larger later in this book. A specialist in non-western art might put all the western periods and megaperiods under the heading “Western,” making the West just one culture among many. A specialist in African art might think of history this way: African Art Saharan Rock Art Egyptian Nok Djenné Ife and Benin Colonial Postcolonial European Art Asian Art American Art (The African cultures and periods might still follow the logic of the sequence Classical-Medieval-Renaissance-Baroque, but that’s another question.) And finally, among contemporary artists, I find the working sense of art history is more centered on late capitalist America and Europe, and that the rest of history gets telescoped in a fairly drastic manner, like this: Non-Western Art Western Art Premodern art Modern art International Postmodern Art Some museums also organize their collections this way, putting non- western art in one place, “European Art” in another, and “Twentieth- Century Art” in another. Often enough those divisions also correspond to different departments in museums, each with its own budget, specialists, and subculture. If you feel the most affinity with this last list, you are siding with the current art scene and with the globalization of art and the compression of older history into a single premodern past. In Postmodern art appropriation is the name given to the practice of taking advertisements and photos by other artists and presenting them as new art. By extension, many artists pick and choose at will from any period or culture, because history itself seems to have fallen in ruins at their feet. This idea can be captured in an intuitive map like the ones in Figures 1.1 to 1.5. One artist drew a picture for me showing himself on a desert island, with all of history like a treasure trove (or a garbage pile) all around him. Nothing, he said, was more than an arm’s length away. His list of periods and megaperiods might have looked like this: Art History (No subdivisions) The Present Psychologically, such a radically collapsed sense of history is a great relief for people burdened by a nagging sense of the importance of history. Suddenly, all art is possible, and nothing needs to be studied. This is called presentism: The conviction that history doesn’t matter, or it has collapsed, and we can find the full range of references we need right in the present. Conservative critics like to complain about the presentism of the current generation. “They don’t know history,” “The don’t care,” “They don’t know what we know.” But there have been presentists in many generations and cultures. Artists are often presentists: They’re focused on their work, and they don’t want to feel anxious about some supposedly important past they haven’t studied. If you ever hear someone complaining about today’s lack of historical knowledge, ask yourself two things: Is the person who is complaining an artist? And how old are they? Oscillating History The outline lists I’ve given so far are the commonest models, but they are not the only ones. The art historian Heinrich Wölfflin (pronounced Vr-fleen) claimed there are far-reaching affinities between “Baroque” or “Classical” moments in different times and places, and he supported his contention by making elaborate analyses of the styles of selected artworks, entirely avoiding mention of their surrounding cultural contexts. (Wölfflin might have been more at ease than I would be calling the Han dynasty incense burner “Baroque.”) Art history students are taught about Wölfflin in part to help them avoid his analysis that reduces all art to its style. Even with that precaution, the simple fact that he continues to be taught is testimony to the seductive nature of his theories. Maybe there is something Baroque about the twirling smoky shapes in the incense burner; perhaps the human eye does return to the same possibilities over and over in different cultures. It’s an idea that has to be taken seriously simply because it will not go away. If I were a dyed-in-the-wool Wölffiinian, I might rewrite my initial sequence of periods like this: Classical Medieval (= Baroque) Renaissance (= Classical) Baroque Modern (= Classical) Postmodern (= Baroque) Or, in simplest terms: Classical Baroque Classical Baroque Classical Baroque and so on without end. No art historian would subscribe to such a list, and Wölfflin himself avoided being so explicit, but there is something Baroque about Medieval art, and there is something austere, intellectual, and Classical about Modern art. Video 6 A history of the idea that styles oscillate through time, swinging like a pendulum from one extreme to another. Prompt and class conversation: Sometimes it seems art goes through periods when it is more developed, and other periods when it is less developed. Some cultures began with simple or unrealistic sculpted and drawn figures, and then later produced sensitive and skilled naturalistic art. Gombrich pointed out that modern artists sometimes deliberately turned their backs on naturalistic skills that had been developed since the Greeks. In that way his “story of art” oscillates from unskilled to skilled and back again. Can you think of any recent examples? Early Godzilla movies (from Honda studios) were awkward-looking, with actors in rubber suits. Later movies about Godzilla were more elaborate, but some recent Honda studios productions have kept the old look. Cartoon art is said to have gone through a “golden age.” Can you find any examples of art that is “worse” now than it was in the past? If Wölfflin’s sense of alternating periods is taken seriously, history swings back and forth like a pendulum instead of moving forward or spreading through an imaginary landscape. There are some viable models of oscillating history, and one of the most influential concerns the nature of German art. Writing about Albrecht Dürer, Germany’s preeminent Renaissance artist, Panofsky said that: [T]‌he evolution of high and post-medieval art in Western Europe might be compared to a great fugue in which the leading theme was taken up, with variations, by the different countries. The Gothic style was created in France; the Renaissance and Baroque originated in Italy and were perfected in co-operation with the Netherlands; Rococo and nineteenth century Impressionism are French; and eighteenth century Classicism and Romanticism are basically English. In this great fugue the voice of Germany is missing. She has never brought forth one of the universally accepted styles the names of which serve as headings for the chapters of the History of Art. The problem was widely debated in Germany. Has Germany produced a characteristic kind of visual art, one that was a “leading theme” at some point in western history? Or is it preeminently a country of composers and poets? The question is vexed for many reasons; after the Second World War, discussion of the Germanness of visual art was anathema. As the German art historian Hans Belting points out, Germany did not even exist as such after the war: Half of it (East Germany) was inaccessible to scholars in the West, and it wasn’t even possible to write about the Germanic culture of northwest Poland. Nothing to do with national art could be raised, and German critics and scholars were relieved to be able to speak about “Occidental” or “European” art, and even global art, rather than have to think about the Germanness of German art. Into that vacuum stepped several generations of German artists: First Joseph Beuys, who tried to recapture a viable sense of the German past by reaching back into hoary Germanic prehistory; and then Gerhard Richter and Anselm Kiefer, who are both seriously involved with issues of German history and frustratingly evasive. These days Panofsky’s concerns seem old-fashioned – after all, the art world has become global, and “Germany’s voice” is both problematic and multiple – but the questions persist. Panofsky does not propose that Dürer is Germany’s contribution to the “fugue” of European art; rather he says that Dürer, like many German artists after him, fell prey to the impossible allure of Italian art without ever fully incorporating it into a German style. Dürer visited Italy twice to learn secrets of Italian art theory, and he complained about the lack of theoretical training among German artists. Yet he never synthesized Italian and German art. From the art north of the Alps, Dürer inherited the Germanic qualities of attention to detail and “inwardness” (Innerlichkeit); from the south, he learned the Italian concern with unified, balanced, and theoretically informed pictures. Many of Dürer’s pictures make use of both sources, but none, according to Panofsky, remakes them into something new. Dürer’s style oscillated but did not move forward to something fundamentally new. Oscillation is a possibility for many artists. If you’re an artist you may feel yourself divided by two tendencies, or attracted to two possibilities. Maybe part of you is romantic, and another part activist and political. Sometimes it’s possible to fuse the two, but in other cases they remain distinct, and your work oscillates between them with no moment of synthesis. Traditionally artists’ careers are divided into periods or phases on the model of human life, so that there is an early period, a mature period, and a late period. If the artist is lucky, they will achieve a late style, usually conceived as a crowning synthesis. Panofsky says Dürer’s oscillation prevented him from following this sequence. It is possible to tell Dürer’s earlier works from his later ones, but there are no essential differences, and he never achieved a late style. (Panofsky says he only had a last style, meaning the style he happened to be working in when he died.) Panofsky thinks there was “an innate conflict” in Dürer’s mind, a principle of “tension” galvanizing all of his ideas and achievements. Dürer spent a few years working in an Italianate manner, then a few in a German mode, and so forth, so that his work: is governed by a principle of oscillation which leads to a cycle of what may be called short periods: and the alternation of the short periods overlaps the sequence of the customary three phases. The constant struggle … was bound to produce a certain rhythm comparable to the succession of tension, action and regression in all natural life, or to the effect of two interfering waves of light or sound in physics. Panofsky’s analysis, proposed in 1955, is one of the most lucid statements of an oscillating model of art history. He means it to apply to Dürer, but it resonates, unavoidably, with the larger question of German art. Even though Germany is the most prominent model for this particular historical quandary, there are many other countries and regions that have been similarly divided between two (or more) influences. Bulgarian art in the 20th century has shifted between Soviet Socialist Realism and French Impressionism, Postimpressionism, and Surrealism. Like artists in other small countries, Bulgarian modernists tried to define the Bulgarian qualities of their work; they were aware that their art was mainly a mixture of Soviet and French models. Just as the Germany of Dürer’s time was polarized between north and south, Bulgarian modern art was polarized between east and west. (This is an overview, of course: In practice Bulgarian artists distinguished German, French, and Italian influences, as well as Russian and other Balkan influences.) And as in the case of postwar Germany, postwar Bulgarian artists have largely suspended those questions, turning instead to the new international art market. Oscillating models of history permeate the discipline. Another example is Netherlandish art of the 15th through 17th centuries, which has been described as a kind of inverse or shadow of Italian art. Just as Dürer said German art lacked Italian theory, so Dutch painters have been described as lacking Italian traits. The art historian Svetlana Alpers proposed a model of Netherlandish painting that was intended to free it of its traditional dependence on Italy by putting the northern achievement in positive terms. She saw Dutch painting as an “art of describing” in which Italian optical models are supplanted by a more direct, materially based way of seeing the world. Books like Alpers’s are art history’s best chance of escaping its traditional polarities; but some oscillations – perhaps including Germany’s – have been around so long, and been tacitly accepted by so many writers, that they are built into the fabric of our understanding. These examples (Germany, Bulgaria, the Netherlands) are all local ones, within Europe. The largest oscillations aren’t north-south or east-west: They are the huge swings that non-western countries can feel between their own art and the art of the West. That kind of polarity can be crippling, dividing a country’s sense of itself right down the middle. Life History Each of these models of history has its own history. Oscillating history may be a Renaissance invention, because the Renaissance itself was a renascence, a rebirth of Classical art, and therefore a revival – in other words, the beginning of an oscillation. There’s also the fact that oscillations and cycles were theorized shortly after the end of the Renaissance by the historian Giambattista Vico. The divisions of history into periods and megaperiods has its origin in the universal histories of the 18th century, which were arrangements of all nations according to their genealogical links to Noah and his sons. By the early 19th century art historians were applying the same organizational methods to their more limited materials, and the notion of periods and groups of periods was routine in textbooks from the late 19th century onward. A third model of history is more ancient than either oscillations or outlines: It is the organic model, the notion that the periods of a culture are like the periods of a person’s life or the life of an animal or plant. The organic model was known to the Greeks, and it became a stock in trade of Roman historiography. Video 7 A history of the idea that art is like a life cycle, with examples from several cultures. Prompt: One of the ways that people have imagined how art changes through the ages is by thinking of styles as human lives: Like a life, a style supposedly begins simply or awkwardly, and then, as artists develop it, the style reaches a maturity, when it is at its strongest and most beautiful. After that, the style declines, becomes decadent, elaborate, or weak, and finally the style is abandoned (it dies). Find a sequence of works in a single style (like expressionism), or a sequence of works by a single artist (try Rembrandt, Dorothea Tanning, Georgia O’Keeffe), and be ready to describe what counts as “young,” “mature,” and “older” phases. Class conversations: Break into groups. Have a look at the works of Picasso. Try searching “Picasso 1898,” then 1902, 1907, 1910, 1914, 1922, 1936, 1955, 1965, 1970. See if you can find a “life cycle” in his work. Is there a late style? And if so, when does it begin? If your group doesn’t think there’s evidence of a life cycle of styles, decide how you would organize his work. The fundamental notion is that each culture, nation, or style goes through a life cycle: First comes the rough, unstable beginnings, when the culture is “young” and no rules have been fixed. In the 20th century, a period that has been thought of that way is Archaic Greek art (600–480 BCE); under the influence of Cubism and other modern art, Archaic vase paintings and sculptures came to be seen as the raw but honest beginnings of Greek art. Another such period, also more widely appreciated in the early 20th century than before, is 14th-century Italian painting from Giotto onward. That century, before Masaccio and the discovery of perspective, includes the first jumbled attempts to make naturalistic depictions of the world, and it appealed to 20th-century tastes accustomed to modern art. In the organic model, the next stage sees the end of adolescence and the beginning of maturity. In Greek sculpture that would be the Early Classical period (480–450 BCE) and in Italian painting, the 15th century. Those periods were more fully appreciated earlier than the 20th century; the early 19th-century German art historian Carl Friedrich Rumohr wrote as enthusiastically about 15th-century Italian art as he did about the High Renaissance. Then follows the period of full adulthood. The 18th-century antiquarian Johann Joachim Winckelmann described Greek archaic art but preferred the perfection of Athenian art of the 5th and 4th centuries BCE. That period, the “apogee” of Greek art, came to be known as the High Classical period. In Italian painting, the period of full maturity is the High Renaissance (beginning of the 16th century). After the peak of life has passed, a person gets older, passing through middle age and beginning the slow decline toward death. In Greek art, that would be from the century before Alexander the Great, through Hellenistic art, to the rise of Rome in the 1st century BCE. Winckelmann wrote heartfelt pages on the decadence of Hellenistic art, which he saw as a model for declines in other cultures. In Italy, the decline would begin with Mannerism and academic art in the later 16th century, and end sometime in the 17th or 18th centuries. Of course, not all cultures die – Greek and Italian cultures are still producing art – and so the final period tends to be inconclusive. Sometimes the life-history model can become an oscillating model, as if the culture’s “life” were reincarnated. Italian art was considered to have been partly revived by the 19th-century landscape tradition called the Macchiaioli and then decisively by the Futurists. In other cases, the decline continued for centuries. The slow death of late Roman art is a well-known example. Greek art after the 1st century BCE was also moribund. In one sense the culture changed when it became Byzantine, but in another sense modern Greece continues a nearly unimaginably long decline that began before Alexander’s lifetime. These days art historians have learned not to judge so harshly, and the “decadent” late periods are studied as seriously as classical ones. Yet these questions lurk in the background of much that is written about Greek and Italian art. Winckelmann’s quandary was even greater, because he invested so much in a culture that had no connection with Germany except that German scholars studied it and collected its masterpieces. It is as if he were trying to recapture a full history of Greece for Germany, with all its pathos and greatness. The schema of the life cycle was codified in ancient texts into a set sequence – infantia, adulescentia, maturitas, senectus (childhood, adolescence, maturity, old age). Occasionally there are five stages, and sometimes only three. Sometimes, too, the metaphors are taken from botany and not from human life, and writers speak of the “seeds” of a culture, its “blossoming,” and its “withering” or “decline.” Anyway, it’s cut, the life- history model has one fatal flaw: It has to die in the end. Paradoxical History For many purposes these four models are sufficient (maps, periods, oscillations, life histories). They cover a large percentage of viewers’ intuitive concepts of history and a surprising percentage of the serious scholarship. I will mention just one more model, much less influential and conceptually more difficult. It is possible to imagine an art history that would work against chronology altogether. Artistic influence is normally traced from one generation to the next, so that artists in a tradition are linked by the concerns each feels about their past. Yet it is not entirely nonsensical to speak of influence extending backward in time, so that Picasso “influences” Rubens, or Winckelmann’s 18th-century German classicism “influences” ancient Greece. That apparently paradoxical result is really only an image of the way that history builds meanings: As I look back past Picasso to see Rubens, Rubens begins to seem clunkier, more extravagant, and more unintentionally humorous than he could possibly have appeared in his own time. I see him through Picassoid glasses, as it were, tinted with the colors of Postimpressionism and Cubism. The Dutch art historian Mieke Bal has written a book about Caravaggio that says essentially the same thing: We can see Caravaggio only through the works of recent artists influenced by him – “preposterous history,” she calls it. In a similar way, German scholarship in the 18th century did much to give us our sense of the timeless beauty of High Classical Greece. Even though Winckelmann’s ideals are largely abandoned, there is still a real lingering feeling that Greece is perfect and timeless the ways German scholars and poets hoped it was. Paradoxical history isn’t really paradoxical at all – in fact it is inescapable. How could I see Rubens or Caravaggio, except with the 20th century in the back of my mind? Good scholarship suppresses the more egregious anachronisms, but it can never erase them entirely. If you are more an artist than a student of art history, then you may naturally think of art in these terms and even have a backwards time line: Postmodernism Modernism Renaissance Middle Ages Classical Greece Prehistory A few art historians other than Bal have investigated paradoxical history. At least three universities have experimented with teaching art history backwards. (Apparently it doesn’t work: Influence always also goes forward, and students become confused.) A book on Marcel Duchamp tells the story of his life starting with January 1, and under that heading the authors put whatever is known about Duchamp’s activities on the first of January for every year he lived. Then they go on to January 2. When they have recounted all 365 days of the year, their “chronology” ends. It’s entirely nonsensical – no one experiences their own life that way – but it is intended to capture something real and historically true about Duchamp: His penchant for illogic and whimsy. Literary theorists have already toyed with the fabric of history in this fashion and produced results that are not at all counterintuitive. Perhaps in the future more art historians will also try their hand at such things. Posthistory At the end of history there is the problem of the present. If Postmodernism is our current period – and that’s an assertion that is far from generally accepted – then what happens when it ends? If Postmodernism sticks as a label for the latter portion of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st, sooner or later Postmodernism will start to appear as a period like any other. At the moment, however, it seems more like the name of something in process than a discrete period like the Baroque, with an agreed-upon beginning and end. For some, postmodernity is a condition or a mode of living rather than a period. In the 1980s art critics began speaking of the endgame, a term borrowed from chess and applied to the workings of historical periods. In a chess endgame, only a few pieces remain on the board, and it may not be clear whether one player can force a win or whether play will continue indefinitely. Endgame problems are especially intractable, slow moving, and repetitive, and chess experts have written books on the subject. In visual theory, endgame art is a postmodern condition in which little remains to be done, and yet it is unclear whether the “game” of art can actually be ended. Endgame artists make minimal moves, trying to finesse the dying mechanisms of art a few more incremental steps. Video 8 A survey of some of the principal positions in the debate about whether Postmodernism is a period or a condition – perhaps even one with no end. Prompt: Assume, for this exercise, that the period of art we’re in now is Postmodernism. It includes all the superstar artists in museums and galleries and the sky-high prices. There are lots of international art exhibitions, and artists work in a wide range of styles and media, from conceptual art to performance. Does this seem like a period, like the periods of past art, or is it something completely new – a kind of period after the ordinary periods of art history, somehow ultimately different from them? Class conversations (after the video is shown): What do you think of Lyotard’s idea that we are in a “condition” that may not have an ending? What kind of event, or what sort of new art, could end this condition? Does the chess metaphor make sense to you? Would another game be a better metaphor? If endgame theory captures some of the mood of Postmodernism in art history, then Postmodernism itself may not be a period with a normal ending. Instead it may continue indefinitely, until the players in the art world (the artists, their critics and historians, and the gallerists and curators) in effect agree to call a draw and start a new game. All of art history would have decisively broken with the advent of Postmodernism, because Postmodernism would be the first “period” with no determinate length. Like a course of psychoanalysis, it might continue interminably. Alternately, the game of western art may have already ended, and Postmodernism may be a new kind of game that starts after art. That theory, endorsed by Arthur Danto, holds that art ended when Andy Warhol made his Brillo Boxes. (Technically, they’re handmade counterfeits of ordinary wholesale cardboard boxes holding retail Brillo boxes.) Some art historians say the same about Duchamp’s Fountain (a porcelain urinal he bought and submitted to an art exhibition). If either account of the end of art becomes generally accepted – again, a far from certain outcome – then Postmodernism could be the name of something after art, just as the Middle Ages was something before art: Before Art Prehistory Classical Greece and Rome Middle Ages Art Renaissance Baroque Modernism After Art Postmodernism Some help in thinking about Postmodernism might come from China, because Chinese art history has also had a period with “Postmodern” qualities. From the Qing dynasty onward, Chinese painters continuously simplified their past art history, telescoping different movements into single schools. Like western artists, they had to try ever harder to be noticed, resulting in pictures with exaggerations and eccentricities (several groups of Chinese painters are known as “eccentrics”). As in the West, artists began to develop signature styles and personal quirks that would make them instantly recognizable, like Damien Hirst’s cows in formaldehyde or Barbara Kruger’s National Enquirer-style photographs. Later Chinese painting evolved in a pluralist atmosphere filled with heterogeneous styles, short-lived schools, idiosyncratic works, and artists distinguished by single hypertrophied traits or monomaniacally repeated tricks – all typical traits of contemporary western art. Art in Qing dynasty China has only superficial similarities to art in the West, but it is intriguing that Chinese “Postmodernism” began about two hundred fifty years ago and showed no signs of ending when it was partly swept away in the revolution. If the parallel has any merit – and such parallels tend to fall apart as quickly as they are made – it does not bode well for our notion that Postmodernism is a period like any other. Rather it implies that Postmodernism is not a period but a state, like a coma, that might go on indefinitely. Perhaps Yve-Alain Bois said it best when he imagined the endgame as an act of mourning, in which painting slowly recognizes that its hopes for a future are not going to come true, and turns to the business of “working through the end of painting.” If so, then art history doesn’t have a neat tabular structure like the ones I’ve been proposing. Instead it “ends” with suspension points, leading away toward an indefinite future: Normal Periods Classical Medieval Renaissance Baroque Modern Abnormal Periods Postmodern References Atomism, monism, and megaperiods: Erwin Panofsky, Renaissance and Renascences in Western Art (New York: Icon, 1972). Panofsky on Dürer: The Life and Art of Albrecht Dürer (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1971 ), 3, 12, 14; Hans Belting, The Germans and Their Art: A Vexed Relationship, trans. by Scott Kleager (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998 ); the English edition has a lengthy introduction absent from the German edition. Duchamp catalog: Marcel Duchamp, Work and Life, ed. Pontus Hulten, texts Jennifer Gough-Cooper and Jacques Caumont (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993). Yve-Alain Bois on the endgame: Bois, Painting as a Model (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990); and the review by Akira Mizuta Lippit, MLN 106, no. 5 (December 1991): 1074–1078. Further Reading Piere Daix, Picasso 1900–1906: Catalogue raisonné de l’oeuvre peint (Neuchâtel, Switzerland: Éditions Ides et Calendes, 1988). Yve-Alain Bois and Rosalind Krauss, Formless: A User’s Guide (New York: Zone Books, 1997). Definitions of Postmodernism: See Bois and Krauss, Formless; also Thomas McEvilley, “History, Quality, Globalism,” in Roger Denson and Thomas McEvilley, Capacity: History, the World, and the Self in Contemporary Art and Criticism (New York: Gordon and Breach, 1996), 119–133. Michael Fried, Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1980). Mannerism: John Shearman, Mannerism (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1967); Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann, The School of Prague: Painting at the Court of Rudolf II (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1988). Periods formed instantly by styles: My Our Beautiful, Dry, and Distant Texts: Art History as Writing (University Park, PA: Penn State Press, 1997), 183–188. Wilhelm Pinder, Das Problem der Generationen in der Kunstgeschichte Europas (Munich: F. Bruckmann, 1961). For the concept of style, see Donald Preziosi, The Art of Art History: A Critical Anthology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 109–164, and my “Style,” Grove Dictionary of Art (New York, Grove Dictionaries, 1996). German critics: Werckmeister, Linke Ikonen: Benjamin, Eisenstein, Picasso nach dem Fall des Kommunismus (Munich: C. Hanser, 1997); Art and Ideology, ed. Benjamin Buchloh (New York: New Museum of Contemporary Art, 1984). Panofsky’s analysis of Dürer: My Our Beautiful, Dry, and Distant Texts, op. cit., 272–297; and Joan Hart, “Heinrich Wöllflin: An Intellectual Biography,” PhD dissertation, Berkeley, CA 1981 (University Microfilms, 1981), chap. 4. Bulgarian art: Steven Mansbach, Modern Art in Eastern Europe: From the Baltic to the Balkans, ca. 1890–1939 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). Giambattista Vico, The New Science of Giambattista Vico, trans. Thomas Goddard Bergin and Max Harold Fisch (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1948). Johann Joachim Winckelmann, Writings on Art, selected by David Irwin (London: Phaidon, 1972); there are also selections in The Art of Art History: A Critical Anthology, ed. Donald Preziosi (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 31–39, and see Whitney Davis’s essay in ibid., 40–51. “Paradoxical history”: Michel Serres, The Parasite, trans. Lawrence Schehr (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982); Jacques Derrida, The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1987); Mieke Bal, Reading “Rembrandt”: Beyond the Word-Image Opposition (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991). Theories of Postmodernism: Arthur Danto, Beyond the Brillo Box: The Visual Arts in Post-Historical Perspective (New York: Farra Straus Giroux, 1992); Rosalind Krauss and Yve-Alain Bois, Formless, op. cit.; Thierry de Duve, Kant after Duchamp (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996). The endgame: Yve-Alain Bois, in Endgame: Reference and Simulation in Recent Painting and Sculpture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986); René Démoris, Les fins de la peinture (Paris: Editions Desjonquières, 1990), reviewed by Jacques Berne, “Comment parler de la peinture aujourd’hui?” Critique 47, no. 534 (November 1991): 874–881. OceanofPDF.com 2 Old European Stories DOI: 10.4324/9781032696096-2 I let the first chapter run away a little, to give the flavor of art history’s open-ended issues. Everything in that chapter is a matter for you to decide. Somewhere among the lists and maps and timelines there may have been a picture that fits your intuitive sense of art history, or something close to it. In this chapter and the next, I turn back to the history of the discipline and consider what some art historians have said about the shape of art history. If you haven’t found your mental map in Chapter 1, you may well find it in this chapter or the next. Giorgio Vasari When the Renaissance painter Giorgio Vasari sat down in his dark-paneled study to write the Lives of the Eminent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects – the book that eventually became a foundation stone of art history – he was not sure exactly where to begin. How did art get started? Who first made good art, and how did they know how to do it? Why did art get worse after the fall of Rome? (Why should art ever get worse once it’s good?) In effect, Vasari says, art started with God, because God made wild nature, the human form, and all the colors. It is not entirely clear how painting and sculpture got started, and Vasari makes some strange guesses. God gave people “a bright flesh color,” he says, and that could have inspired artists to find the same colors in the earth and use them to paint. Figure 2.1 Giorgio Vasari’s portrait in his book Lives of the Eminent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, 1568. Vasari acknowledges that his theory is not “absolutely certain” and he wonders who might have made the first artworks. He knows from the Bible that the son of Nimrod made a statue just two hundred years after the flood, and so he surmises that people had been making sculptures from the earliest times. No prehistoric sculptures were known when Vasari was writing, and he had only a sketchy notion of the period between the Flood and ancient Rome. He recalls that the Greeks said the Ethiopians invented sculpture, and the Egyptians imitated the Ethiopians. But the Bible mentions idolatrous sculptures made by

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