ABSTRACT
In the following pages I shall try, without smoothing over the differences and complexities, to point to possible ways into and around the discipline of Art History, and to introduce readers 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 we speak of - 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 question posed to challenge magisterial accounts like Sir Ernst Gombrich's The Story of Art. First published in 1950, Gombrich's bestseller was re-Iaunched in 1995 in a dust jacket 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 that is challenged in works with titles like Vision and Difference: Femininity, Feminism and the Histories of Art (by Griselda Pollock, published in 1988).
