Writing Art History Research Articles

Polyphony

This special issue explores the concept of polyphony in writing art history, using it as a methodological lens to examine diverse voices, along with their intricate interactions and contradictions, archival practices, and the collective creation of knowledge. Ranging from dialogic and experimental approaches to academic styles in writing, the authors embrace a spectrum of narratives in their writing to challenge canonical art history. Exploration of themes such as otherness, cross-cultural encounters, and relational aesthetics are also central, enriching the discourse with varied perspectives. Relational approaches to art history writing exemplify efforts in some of the articles to transcend conventional academic boundaries, offering writing nearby artistic practices and merging written with oral narratives. The issue also examines the role of archives, reflecting on racial and gender-based power dynamics and the concepts of living archive and archival rewriting. Several articles explore the implications of this approach, highlighting the need for a multi-dimensional narrative that acknowledges the complexities of the interactions between local and global discourses, transnational, transcultural, and diasporic identities. In summary, this special issue invites the reader to reconsider the traditional frameworks of art history and to embrace a more inclusive, resonant, and interconnected understanding of the field.

ГОРИЗОНТАЛЬНА ІСТОРІЯ МИСТЕЦТВА: ПРОБЛЕМИ І ПЕРСПЕКТИВИ КОНЦЕПЦІЇ ПЬОТРА ПЬОТРОВСЬКОГО

In the article, the author examines the approach to writing art history - horizontal history, proposed and practiced by Piotr Piotrovsky since 1998. Horizontal art history is another paradigm for writing the art history of Central and Eastern Europe, according to which the art of this region is not analyzed in a center-periphery hierarchy/vertical. The methods applied by Western theory to the study of the art of this region must also be reexamined. Piotrovsky criticizes the inclusion of the art history of Central and Eastern Europe in the universal (in fact Western) canon. The 2022 book Horizontal «Horizontal art History and Beyond: Revisiting peripheral critical practices» consists of four chapters that address the practice of horizontality (democracy, localization), challenges and internal contradictions of the concept, and alternatives to horizontal history. The author of the review does not focus on the description of the chapters of the book, but analyzes the horizontal history according to the topics raised by the authors of the collection in various essays, without taking the place of the essay in the structure of the book as the main criterion. Borrowing some positions from postcolonial theory, horizontal history approaches the decolonial turn, because according to it, a different paradigm for the production of knowledge about the art of Central-Eastern Europe should be developed. Nationalism and national history are considered as the main obstacles to horizontality. The author grouped the alternatives of horizontal history (material analysis as a method of horizontal art history, laterality and a digital approach to art history) and the possibilities of using horizontal history in other disciplines proposed by the researchers of the book. The application of the horizontal art history approach has the potential to liberate the history of Ukrainian art from the dominance of the center (the West, Russia) and develop a different paradigm for writing the art history of Eastern Europe.

The outcast space of Perugino

When I was a boy in St. Louis, Missouri, I grew up across the street from the house of Norris K. Smith, an art historian who taught at Washington University. As I have gotten older, I associate this experience with a picture in Smith’s last book–a book about Renaissance perspective and a kind of career summation he published in 1994 called Here I Stand: Perspective from Another Point of View. The picture, painted by the artist Robert Jordan, shows the vantage from the far distance of Perugino’s Sistine fresco, the Christ Giving the Keys of the Church to St Peter. Perugino shows the protagonists front and center, with smaller and inconsequential figures populating the mid ground and distance. But in Jordan’s picture we see Peter and his entourage as tiny figures in the far distance, beheld from over the shoulder of a faraway ball-player in Perugino’s original. Thinking of this image in Smith’s book, recalling the reversed perspectives of life on either side of Cornell Avenue in St. Louis, and considering my difference from Smith, I speculate on the meanings of the words world and space as they relate to Perugino’s painting and to the act of writing art history.

Collaboration and Correction: Re-examining the Writings of Lucy Olcott Perkins, ‘a lady resident in Siena’

In the first years of the twentieth century, Lucy May Olcott (1877–1922) was an established authority on Sienese art. Her collaboration with historian William Heywood (1857–1919), with whom she authored their Guide to Siena: History and Art (1903), her marriage to Italian art scholar Frederick Mason Perkins (1872–1955), and her residence in Siena placed her, briefly, at the centre of a network of researchers and connoisseurs writing on Sienese art and history, undertaking collaborative research with unparalleled access to historic sites. Following the breakdown of her marriage, however, Olcott lost access to both her research subjects and her networks. Working from the United States, she sought out new platforms to continue her work, and her later writing indicates her continuing dedication to make lesser-known artworks better known to scholars and students alike. This article seeks to re-examine Olcott’s contribution by exploring the two different phases of her writing career. It embraces the networks and collaborations that brought such rigour to her research, while also exploring the tastes, instincts, and circumstances that made her writing valuable for its ‘directness and simplicity’. It thus raises further questions about the nature of husband and wife collaborations, and the privileges and limitations that such partnerships could bring to women writing art history in the early decades of the twentieth century.

Art History Is Dead; Long Live Art History!

The # RhodesMustFall campaign that began at the University of Cape Town in early 2015, called for the decolonisation of South African university curricula, among other transformations. As a result, many South African academics are questioning the epistemologies that underpin their disciplines. What does the decolonisation of university curricula imply for disciplines in the humanities, art history among them, which were born at the time of colonial expansion and the categorising of knowledge that came with the enlightenment? In this paper I explore some implications of the decolonisation of art history for the ways in which we practise and write art history today. I begin by briefly exploring the origins of the discipline, in order to create a platform from which to consider contemporary art history writing. I then consider the ways in which the decolonisation of the discipline could be understood as the end of art history. A reflection of some of the affordances and limitations of the postcolonial rhetoric in which calls for decolonisation are framed, leads me to consider methods of writing art history that could be construed as acts of decolonisation. I conclude by suggesting that one way to decolonise the discipline is to foreground the author’s subjective voice when writing arts histories.

On Tempera and Temperament: Women, Art, and Feeling at the <i>Fin de Siècle</i>

In her recent book Women Writing Art History in the Nineteenth Century, Hilary Fraser observes that Nathaniel Hawthorne’s account of Hilda’s womanly sensibility in The Marble Faun subsumes her visual agency into the vision of the master painter. Hilda is widely regarded as being modelled on his wife, the painter and illustrator Sophia Peabody Hawthorne. Hawthorne’s reference to a ‘woman’s sympathy’ prompts a wider consideration of the gendering of aesthetic response. Indeed, The Marble Faun is one of numerous texts, most famously Ruskin’s Sesame and Lilies, which set out artistic roles for women in the Victorian period. How were women visitors to art museums and exhibitions represented visually? There are in fact numerous images of women in museums and galleries from this period. I begin with an exploration of some examples of these, and with recent scholarship that addresses how women ‘looked’ in museums, as a way of thinking about women ‘feeling through a picture’, whether by ‘intellectual effort’ or otherwise. How did these images relate to the association of the female viewer with a ‘woman’s sympathy’? Some of the women featured in museum spaces were at work copying the paintings visible on the walls. These women copyists echoed Hilda’s transformation at the end of Hawthorne’s chapter: ‘All that she would henceforth attempt — and that, most reverentially, not to say, religiously — was to catch and reflect some of the glory which had been shed upon canvas from the immortal pencils of old. So Hilda became a copyist.’ Were the women artists and viewers depicted in museum spaces similarly intent on utilizing their feminine ‘sympathy’ to admire the glory of Old Master paintings? The first section of this article argues that, on the contrary, it is possible to locate examples of a more engaged visual agency in female viewers. The second section asks how notions of Victorian temperament intersected with the modern revival of tempera painting. I pursue the question of female temperament through case studies of three women viewers who were writers and artists. Here, I examine the writings of Alice Meynell alongside the work of the artist Marianne Stokes, before moving on to briefly consider the artist and writer Christiana Herringham, who also published at the fin de siecle. For these women artists, copying and studying early Renaissance paintings was crucial to their artistic practice. Did these artists then fulfil, like Hilda, the role of the woman copyist? Stokes was, like Hilda, intent on studying canvases ‘of old’, but, as Meynell argued, this careful study was undertaken in order to produce her own reverential paintings through tempera, rather than to reflect on the ‘glory’ of Renaissance artists. Herringham similarly took up tempera painting, but as a method of examining and authentically reproducing ‘old’ paintings. The work of Meynell, Stokes, and Herringham can be mapped onto a point where contemporary and historical fine art collide or even collude. Will the revival of tempera instigate revival of ‘feeling’ in art? What will become clear is that their engagement with ‘feeling’ and ‘sentiment’ was not straightforward. Nor were they necessarily unified in their approach. While alert to the new possibilities the medium may offer, they were engaging with it in relation to spiritual, aesthetic, and intellectual judgement. In short, these women art critics felt ambivalent about feeling.

Spiritual Art and Hybridity: Mixed Discourse in the History of Art


 The article proposes a methodological experiment in writing art history, namely the incorporation of the study of mixed discourse into the area of art history. The term mixed discourse was defined by Ricoeur in his analysis of Freud’s writings. It refers to a mixed discourse of everyday and scientific language that is manifested in verbal and visual productions. A mix of epistemological modes is represented in products of mixed discourse that disturbs consumers. In the art history of the fin-de-siècle, the popular register of mixed discourse is usually overlooked. The article surveys what happens if this blind spot becomes the subject of scrutiny.

Out of The Shadow of Vasari: Towards A New Model of The ‘Artist’ in Colonial Latin America

Within shifts affecting colonial studies, a ‘life-work model’ employed in colonial art history has been left unexamined. Developed by a contemporary of Michelangelo, Giorgio Vasari (Italy, 1511–1574), this methodology was grounded in particular European social conditions that allowed the creation of the ‘artist’ whose ‘artwork’ was the inalienable product of a single mind and hand. Following the art historical paths laid by Vasari in the viceroyalties leads to dead ends: indigenous artists who efface their individuality; painters who exist with little social or historical context; and artworks whose conservation denies finding the traces of the hands that made them. Because artworks were and are the connective tissue of complex social networks, reconfiguring concepts of ‘artist’ and ‘artwork’ and recasting them in accordance with social practices within Latin America, gains us purchase on how colonial subjects, in their engagement with their material worlds, came to be constructed.Resemblance to European prototypes is an essential historical reality of colonial artworks: much artwork, particularly the painting, of colonial Latin America ‘looks’ like that of early modern Europe and thus has generated a foundational expectation, laid out in purest form by Manuel Toussaint (Mexico, 1890–1955), that Latin American art history might also look like Europe's. We argue that a mismatch with Europe and its methodologies means that certain, foundational historiographic assumptions about writing art history for Latin America need to be reassessed, in particular the ‘artist’ and ‘artwork.’

Women writing art history in the nineteenth century: looking like a woman

This book sets out to correct received accounts of the emergence of art history as a masculine field. It investigates the importance of female writers from Anna Jameson, Elizabeth Eastlake and George Eliot to Alice Meynell, Vernon Lee and Michael Field in developing a discourse of art notable for its complexity and cultural power, its increasing professionalism and reach, and its integration with other discourses of modernity. Proposing a more flexible and inclusive model of what constitutes art historical writing, including fiction, poetry and travel literature, this book offers a radically revisionist account of the genealogy of a discipline and a profession. It shows how women experienced forms of professional exclusion that, whilst detrimental to their careers, could be aesthetically formative; how working from the margins of established institutional structures gave women the freedom to be audaciously experimental in their writing about art in ways that resonate with modern readers.

Sites That Have Mattered: Svetlana Alpers in Conversation with Stephen Melville

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Additional informationNotes on contributorsStephen MelvilleStephen Melville is professor emeritus of the history of art at the Ohio State University and more recently visiting professor of philosophy at Bard College. He has written widely on contemporary art and art history, including Philosophy beside Itself (1986), Seams (1996), and, with Margaret Iversen, Writing Art History (2010) [swmelville@mac.com].

Whitney Davis. Review of "Writing Art History: Disciplinary Departures" by Margaret Iversen and Stephen Melville.

Whitney Davis. Review of "Writing Art History: Disciplinary Departures" by Margaret Iversen and Stephen Melville.

WRITING ART HISTORY IN CONTEMPORARY INDIA by Tapati Guha‐Thakurta

WRITING ART HISTORY IN CONTEMPORARY INDIA by Tapati Guha‐Thakurta

On Writing Art History in Australia

In this article, presented as the Second Annual Thesis Eleven Centre Lecture in 2003, Bernard Smith discusses the practice of writing art history in, and about, Australia and Europe. Smith defends periodization, and argues for the necessity of henceforth viewing what is typically called modernism as what he calls the formalesque. Further discussion includes problems of classification, the role of theory, and the place of Aboriginal art in white art history. The article thus surveys the condition of art history in Australia, its emergence and consolidation as a discipline, and its present situation as part of contemporary world culture.

The Preference for the Primitive and on writing art history in Australia

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes Ernst H Gombrich, The Preference for the Primitive, Phaidon Press, London, 2002, p 273. ibid p 269. ibid. p 271. Ibid, p 16. Ibid. p. 265. p. 29. Bernard Smith, Modernism's History: A Study in Twentieth‐Century Art and Ideas, Yale University Press, 1998, p 29. Hermann Ranke, The Art of Ancient Egypt: Architecture, Sculpture, Painting, Applied Art, Phaidon Press, Vienna, 1936, p 21. Arnold Toynbee, A Study of History, Oxford University Press, New York, London, Humphery Milford, 1939, Vol. VI, pp. 61, 62.

The State of Research in Italian Renaissance Art

In the Renaissance, writers on art could work in the comforting security of knowing that neither they nor their readers seriously questioned their competence. Joined with the further notions that the artist's enterprise was fundamentally moral and that his achievement could be assessed against an empirical canon of excellence, this knowledge subsumed disagreements and allowed real debate. But unlike their predecessors, modern writers on Renaissance art may no longer bundle themselves in gemutlich self-confidence. The wide variety of viewpoints relative to artistic intention, methods of interpretation, and even the purposes of writing art history makes it obvious that Renaissance art historians do not stand on a ground of common discourse.

‘New Art History’ vs. ‘Old History’: writing art history

Readers of the judicious paper by John Haldon on ‘“Jargon” vs. “the Facts”?’ Byzantine History-Writing and Contemporary Debates’ will have looked in vain for comment on the status of visual evidence. It is not that art is entirely unmentioned — a reference is made to the history of art and of cultural production in general as belonging to the history of the human past. But no consideration is given to the role of the visual as communication in Byzantine society or as a particular kind of ‘unwritten’ figural evidence which might form a characteristic arena of expression separate from the discourses of texts. Yet it is clear that one outcome of the current theoretical debates on how to read texts and images has been a new questioning of the meanings of visual evidence and of its value in history writing. Contrary to the belief of some historians, methodological changes in history writing have a direct impact on art history writing too. The most obvious result has been an increasing emphasis on ways of understanding how images worked in Byzantine society in preference to an exclusive concentration on the categorization and arrangement of art in line with modern and often anachronistic notions. The inevitable outcome is that the study of art can no longer be considered the preserve of the traditional art historian.