Art History - The History of Art

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Art history series
Pre-historic art
Ancient art history
Western art history
Eastern art history
Islamic art history
Contemporary art

The history of art usually refers to the history of the visual arts, such as painting, sculpture and architecture. The term also encompasses theory of the visual arts. It is not usually taken or intended to refer to the performing arts or literary arts. The history of art attempts an objective survey of art throughout human history, classifying cultures and periods and noting their distinguishing features and influences.

The field of "art history" was developed in the West, and originally dealt exclusively with Western art history, with the High Renaissance (and its Greek precedent) as the defining standard. Gradually, with the onset of Modernism, a wider vision of history has developed, seeking to place other societies in a global overview by analysing their artifacts in terms of their own cultural values. Thus, the subject is now seen to encompass all visual art, from the megaliths of Western Europe to the paintings of the Tang Dynasty in China.

1 Study of art history
2 Earliest known art
3 Ancient art
4 Post-ancient Western art
5 Post-ancient Eastern art
6 Contemporary art
7 See also
8 References
9 Further reading
10 External links

Study of art history

Main article: Historical development of art history

Study of the history of art is a relatively recent phenomenon; prior to the Renaissance, the modern concept of "art" did not exist, and art was used to refer to workmanship by generally anonymous tradesmen.

The viewpoint of the art historian is a significant input into the defining parameters which are employed. For example, during the early Victorian era, the quattrocento artists were considered inferior to those of the High Renaissance—a notion subsequently challenged by the Pre-Raphaelite movement. There has since been a trend, dominant in most modern art history, to see all cultures and periods from a neutral point of view, with a tendency to shy away from value judgements. Thus, for example, Australian Aboriginal art would not be deemed better or worse than Michelangelo by typical Modernist art historians—just different.

Analysis has also evolved into studying the "political" use of art, rather than reserving analysis to the superficial aesthetic appreciation of its craftsmanship or beauty. It is believed there is always an intent and a philosophy behind art, and an effect achieved by it. Thus, for example, the considerable employment by the Eastern Orthodox Church in the Middle Ages can be contrasted or compared with "Soviet propaganda", the manifestation of social structure through 19th-century portraiture, an anarcho-religious vision exemplified by Van Gogh, etc. What may once have been viewed simply as a masterpiece is now deconstructed into an economic, social, philosophical, and cultural manifestation of the artist's world-view, philosophy, intentions and background.

There are different ways of structuring a history of art. The following is one which is commonly used, based primarily on time, but within that creating subdivisions based on place and culture.

Earliest known art

Main article: Pre-historic art

Venus of Willendorf

The oldest surviving art forms include small sculptures and paintings on rocks and in caves. There are very few known examples of art that date earlier than 40,000 years ago, the beginning of the Upper Paleolithic period. People often rubbed smaller rocks against larger rocks and boulders to paint pictures of their everyday life, such as hunting wild game.

The so-called Venus of Willendorf is a sculpture from the paleolithic era, which depicts an obviously pregnant woman. This sculpture, carved from stone, is remarkable in its roundness instead of a flat or low-relief depiction.

Prehistoric art objects are rare, and the context of such early art is difficult to determine. Prehistoric, by definition, refers to those cultures which have left no written records of their society. The art historian judges early pieces of art as objects in their own right, with few opportunities for comparison between contemporaneous pieces. Interpretation of such early art must be done primarily in the context of aesthetics tempered by what is known of various tribal societies still in existence.

Ancient art

Main article: Arts of the ancient world

The period of ancient art begun when ancient civilizations developed a form of writing language. The earliest examples of ancient art originated from Mesopotamia and Egypt.

The great traditions in art have a foundation in the art of one of the six great ancient civilizations: Ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, Greece, Rome, India, or China. Each of these centers of early civilization developed a unique and characteristic style in their art. Because of their size and duration these civilizations, more of their art works have survived and more of their influence has been transmitted to other cultures and later times. They have also provided us with the first records of how artists worked.

The period of Greek art saw a veneration of the human physical form and the development of equivalent skills to show musculature, poise, beauty and anatomically correct proportions. Ancient Roman art depicted gods as idealized humans, shown with characteristic distinguishing features (i.e. Zeus' thunderbolt).

Post-ancient Western art

Main article: Western art history

In Byzantine and Gothic art of the Middle Ages, the dominance of the church insisted on the expression of biblical and not material truths. There was no need to depict the reality of the material world, in which man was born in a "state of sin", so the skill of doing so was marginalised in favour of methods which would show the higher unseen glory of a heavenly world, especially through the extensive use of gold in paintings, which also presented figures in idealised, patterned (i.e. "flat" forms).

The Renaissance is the return yet again to valuation of the material world, and this paradigm shift is reflected in art forms, which show the corporeality of the human body, and the three dimensional reality of landscape.

Post-ancient Eastern art

Main article: Eastern art history

Eastern art has generally worked in a style akin to Western medieval art, namely a concentration on surface patterning and local colour (meaning the plain colour of an object, such as basic red for a red robe, rather than the modulations of that colour brought about by light, shade and reflection). A characteristic of this style is that the local colour is often defined by an outline (a contemporary equivalent is the cartoon). This is evident in, for example, the art of India, Tibet and Japan.

Religious Islamic art forbids iconography, and expresses religious ideas through geometry instead.

Contemporary art

Main article: Contemporary art

The physical and rational certainties of the clockwork universe depicted by the 19th-century Enlightenment were shattered not only by new discoveries of relativity by Einstein [1] and of unseen psychology by Freud,[2] but also by unprecedented technological development accelerated by the implosion of civilisation in two world wars. The history of twentieth century art is a narrative of endless possibilities and the search for new standards, each being torn down in succession by the next. Thus the parameters of Impressionism, Expressionism, Fauvism, Cubism, Dadaism, Surrealism etc cannot be maintained very much beyond the time of their invention. Increasing global interaction during this time saw an equivalent influence of other cultures into Western art, such as Pablo Picasso being influenced by African sculpture. Japanese woodblock prints (which had themselves been influenced by Western Renaissance draftsmanship) had an immense influence on Impressionism and subsequent development. Then African fetish sculptures were taken up by Picasso and to some extent by Matisse.

Modernism, the idealistic search for truth, gave way in the latter half of the 20th century to a realisation of its unattainability. Relativity was accepted as an unavoidable truth, which led to the Postmodern period, where cultures of the world and of history are seen as changing forms, which can be appreciated and drawn from only with irony. Furthermore the separation of cultures is increasingly blurred and it is now more appropriate to think in terms of a global culture, rather than regional cultures.

References

Ed. Frank Milner (2004), "The Stuckists Punk Victorian" National Museums Liverpool, ISBN 1-902700-27-9.

(Online: The Condensed One Thousand Years of Art to The Last One Hundred Years of Art)

History of art