Art history

Image of a horse from the Lascaux caves.

Art history is the study of objects of art in their historical development and stylistic contexts, i.e. genre, design, format, and style. This includes the "major" arts of painting, sculpture, and architecture as well as the "minor" arts of ceramics, furniture, and other decorative objects.

Quotes

• Attempts to juggle domestic responsibilities with artistic production have often resulted in smaller bodies of work, and often works smaller in scale, than those produced by male contemporaries. Yet art history continues to privilege prodigious output and monumental scale or conception over the selective and the intimate.
  • Whitney Chadwick Women, Art, and Society: Fourth Edition (2007) ISBN 0-500-20393-8

• Edward G. Robinson: Who knows, the woman who posed for the Mona Lisa might have been the evilest woman in the world.
  • Batman (TV series) Batman's Satisfaction written by Charles Hoffman

• Throughout history, most artists created paintings, sculptures, and other objects for specific patrons and settings and to fulfill a specific purpose, even if today no one knows the original contexts of those artworks. Museum visitors can appreciate the visual and tactile qualities of these objects, but they cannot understand why they were made or why they appear as they do without knowing the circumstances of their creation. Art appreciation does not require knowledge of the historical context of an artwork (or a building). Art history does.
  • Fred S. Kleiner, Gardner's Art Through the Ages: A Global History (14th ed., 2012), p. 1

• The history of art can be a history of artists and their works, of styles and stylistic change, of materials and techniques, of images and themes and their meanings, and of contexts and cultures and patrons. The best art historians analyze artworks from many viewpoints. But no art historian (or scholar in any other field), no matter how broad-minded in approach and no matter how experienced, can be truly objective. As were the artists who made the works illustrated and discussed in this book, art historians are members of a society, participants in its culture. How can scholars (and museum visitors and travelers to foreign locales) comprehend cultures unlike their own? They can try to reconstruct the original cultural contexts of artworks, but they are limited by their distance from the thought patterns of the cultures they study and by the obstructions to understanding—the assumptions, presuppositions, and prejudices peculiar to their own culture—their own thought patterns raise. Art historians may reconstruct a distorted picture of the past because of culture-bound blindness.
  • Fred S. Kleiner, Gardner's Art Through the Ages: A Global History (14th ed., 2012), p. 13

• It's a tour of the gay art history of the Vatican, so it's telling the backstory of a lot of the artists who did happen to be gay and talking a little bit about the eroticism of the art, which is very prevalent and very obvious but left out in the typical, kind of staid and, let's be honest, boring standard Vatican tour.
  • Jo Piazza (managing editor of Yahoo Travel) [1]

• Abstract art as it is conceived at present is a game bequeathed to painting and sculpture by art history. One who accepts its premises must consent to limit his imagination to a depressing casuistry regarding the formal requirements of modernism.
  • Harold Rosenberg Art on the Edge, (1975) p. 71, "Lester Johnson's Abstract Men"

• One cannot, however, avoid saying a few words about individuals who lay down the law to art in the name of art history. Art criticism today is beset by art historians turned inside out to function as prophets of so-called inevitable trends. A determinism similar to that projected into the evolution of past styles is clamped upon art in the making. In this parody of art history, value judgments are deduced from a presumed logic of development, and an ultimatum is issued to artists either to accommodate themselves to these values or be banned from the art of the future.
  • Harold Rosenberg Art on the Edge, (1975) p. 147, "Criticism and Its Premises"

• The new attitude of the critic toward the artist has been rationalized for me by a leading European art historian who is also an influential critic of current art. It is based on a theory of division of labor in making art history. The historian, he contends, knows art history and, in fact, creates it; the artist knows only how to do things. Left to himself, the artist is almost certain to do the wrong thing — to deviate from the line of art history and thus to plunge into oblivion. The critic's role is to steer him in the proper direction and advise changes in his technique and subject matter that will coordinate his efforts with the forces of development. Better still, critics should formulate historically valid projects for artists to carry out. That not all critics have the same expectations of the future of art does not, I realize, weaken the cogency of my colleague's argument. The surviving artist would be one who has been lucky enough to pick the winning critic. My own view that art should be left to artists seemed to my mentor both out-of-date and irresponsible.
  • Harold Rosenberg Art on the Edge, (1975) p. 147, "Criticism and Its Premises" p. 249, "Thoughts in Off-Season"

• I guess a school of thought would be you don’t have to see anything of the past to express yourself artistically, to write a novel or to write a play or to make films but I think if you make it available, I think one studies or one becomes aware of the older work that came before. Of the older masters - easy if you want to reject it, which is part of the process, to be angry to say “That’s impossible, it’s no good at all look at this, this is wonderful here.” And then come back to realizing maybe I’m a little too harsh twenty years later or thirty years later, I’m a little too harsh on certain people when I was younger.
• But I do think it’s important to make younger people aware of what came before in every aspect of every art form. And it’s exciting too, and as you do that very often if you’re working with young people and working with students. I use mentoring, the idea is you do get a lot out of it. I do get a kind of regeneration of that, to see that excitement sometimes, to show, let’s say The Magic Box or Yojimbo - it’s part of being alive.
  • Martin Scorsese [2]