Value of Art as an Academic Subject

Abstract

The study of the history of art in American colleges and universities has usually branched off from the department of classics, or from classical archaeology or even : from the historical and modern language courses. The necessity of completing the classical student's idea of Greek and Roman genius has often led to the establishment of a course in Greek sculpture or Greek architecture, out of which often a fuller curriculum in art history has grown. Sometimes this development has been preceded by the formation of a department of classical archaeology; elsewhere, it has been the department of modern languages or of history that has put forth the shoot. In any case the history of art has always had affiliations with one of the older disciplines, and from this arises both its strength and its weakness: its strength, because it has been able to base its methods of research upon the older and established methods of philology and archaeology; its weakness, because being a branch of older disciplines, it has sometimes been regarded as the trimming of the curriculum, an embroidery of decorative but not intrinsic usefulness, something which if time allowed might be consumed as a dessert after the solid pabulum of the classics, mathematics, history, science and the modern languages.