ABSTRACT
In the following pages I shall try, without smoothing over the differences and complexities, to build on the points made in the previous chapter by introducing readers in greater detail to some of the different methods and approaches currently practised by art historians. In this book, ‘Art History’ is the term employed to denote the discipline that examines the history of art and artefacts. So History of Art is what is studied and Art History is the cluster of means by which it is studied. To complicate matters, those who want to be precise about their use of language – recognizing that the words and phrases we use are not neutral and suggest the relative importance and values we attach to the things of which we speak – talk not of History of Art but of histories of art. Losing the capital letters and replacing the singular by the plural thus enables writers or speakers to distance themselves from the notion that there is, by something like a process of natural selection, one unquestioned and universally accepted view of what constitutes history. Whose history, and art by whose definitions? These would be the kinds of questions posed to challenge magisterial accounts such as Sir Ernst Gombrich’s The Story of Art. First published in 1950, Gombrich’s best-seller was relaunched in 1995 with a cover (which all subsequent reprintings have retained) replicating a stone tablet on which the author’s name and the title appear as incised letters, an effect calculated to suggest the authority of Old Testament law. This marketing strategy plays on the idea of a singular authority; it is precisely this notion, along with the idea that art has one easily accessible story to tell, that is challenged in works with titles such as Women, Art, and Society by Whitney Chadwick (published in 1990 and revised in 1996) or Painting for Money: The Visual Arts and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century England by David Solkin (published in 1993).
