The Methodologies of Art History

Amanda Switzenberg

Artwork can be as perplexing as it is alluring, and it is, of course, human nature to question. Methodologies arose as means to explore artwork, with each emphasizing different points of importance. Throughout much of history there were prevailing methodologies that most historians of the time mimicked. The twentieth century was however, an entirely different scene in this respect.

As historical records allow, Pliny is the oldest source available exploring the semblance of a methodology. He developed literary portraits of the artists, which included their lives, personalities, and works. This is the Biographical method, and it is still used.

The Biographical method stresses the importance of authorship. It explores an artist’s life and personality in relation to their work. Social and economic factors play a role, but are secondary. Based on texts relating to the artist’s life, the artist’s presence can be identified within their artwork.

During the Renaissance, Alberti wrote treatises exploring art. With his talk of line, form, perspective, and so on, it seems that he perhaps sparked the beginnings of Formalism.

Formalism was truly the first construction of a methodology, and it set the standard for those to follow. It stresses the significance of form over content as the source of a work’s appeal.

The first major historian to develop Formalism was Immanual Kant, in the late eighteenth century. He believed in an essential ideal beauty that is distinct from both nature and art. Kant ^explored the aesthetic response from the human mind to this beauty, through discussion of unity, origin, context, and so on.

Formalism was carried over into the nineteenth century with the help of Roger Fry, who was the most influential Formalist critic in England. Further bracketing Kant’s ideology, Fry believed that art had no meaningful connection with either the artist or the culture it belongs to. He saw a difference between art and life, leading him to analyze works based on pure form. According to Vernon Hyde Minor, all abstract components on one hand carry emotional weight and on the other demonstrate that art does not need to imitate nature. A painting can look like something recognizable but does not have to.

The artist’s visual language consists of formal elements. These create the aesthetic effects, and include line, shape, space, color, light, and dark. The formal elements can be further specified to include balance, order, proportion, perspective, medium, pattern, and rhythm. Architecture and sculpture require added formal elements such as mass, volume, and texture. The final arrangement of these items is the composition, and each element contributes to the overall impression created by the work.

An example of the use of the formal element color can be seen in Picasso’s Blue Period painting called The Old Guitarist. According to Laurie Schneider Adams, color can often be the most visually striking of the elements. Simply from examining the ways color is used in our language, it is impossible to avoid its emotionally associative quality. This painting is monochromatic with the domination of blue, and thus a depressive overtone. Aesthetic appeal is said to exist partially in the relationship between mood created by the blue and the other formal elements of the painting. The figure is thin and bony, though without much sense of mass. He is composed mostly of downward curves, and seems stretched and worn. The silvery light reinforces an eerie quality.

Can you imagine what some future problems associated with Formalism might be?

Modernism to Post-Modernism

In the early twentieth century, modernism began to be seriously questioned. The assumptions about dominant male gender, white race, and bourgeois class character, were no longer deemed acceptable by many. From this, art historians arrived at approaches to looking at and studying art. New methodologies emerged and those that had been lurking on the fringes came forward with new support and refinement.

Iconography is a methodology involving examination of the subject matter of works of art. The focus is on content rather than form, and some art historians have chosen to ignore form entirely in their analyses. The members of the Warburg Institute are especially known for their iconographic approach. The leading member was Erwin Pankofsky.

Pankofsky divided Iconography into three levels. The first he called “pre-iconographic,” or the primary level of subject matter. At the second level, text underlies the image. These lead to the third, which provides the intrinsic meaning of the image, taking into account time and place where the image was made, prevailing cultural style or the style of a particular artist, and the wishes of the patron. This level should involve information from outside sources and texts.

To provide an iconographic reading of Te tamari no atua, by Paul Gauguin, the pre-iconographic reading would start with the woman lying on a bed with her eyes closed. A cat sleeps at her feet. Next to the bed another woman is holding a baby, and just behind her is a winged figure. Further into the background are animals under a shed.

The next step is recognizing the reference to the Nativity of Christ. This is verified knowing that Gauguin spent the last years of his life merging Christian scenes with his Tahitian subjects. Further exploration reveals the cat at the foot of the bed to be a likely reference to Manet’s Olympia, especially knowing that Gauguin kept a photograph of the painting in his hut. The presence of the cat then associates the women on the bed with prostitution. She was actually Gauguin’s mistress, described as “a slovenly, lazy young woman of dubious moral character,” by Gauguin’s art student in Tahiti.

Semiotics involves the application of the science of signs, or semiology. It has been divided into three art history methodologies, which include Structuralism, Post-Structuralism, and Deconstruction (will be discussed later). Semiotics assumes that all cultural expression is composed of signs.

Application to the visual arts began with the work of American philosopher Charles Sanders Pierce and Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries.

Structuralism took shape after 1950 in France, due to disillusionment with Marxism and existentialism. It involved an effort to identify universal mental structures as they manifest themselves in larger social structures. To search for these universals, it happened that the role of the author was minimized.

After the 1960s, Structuralism lost its central position among French intellectuals to Post-Structuralism. This methodology took the role of authorship to an even lower level of importance. This led to “death of the author.” Post-Structuralism also worked against any existing Structuralism through observation and analysis counter to the identification of universal structures.

There were many versions and different points of emphasis through Semiotics used by historians. Art historian Meyer Schapiro discussed Semiotics in terms of Iconographic significance. This slightly unique use of Semiotics involved the symbolic as a code, and exploration of the interplay of text, commentary, symbolism, and style of representation. Saussure included cultural signs from outside of the artwork and connected them back in ways he found to be significant to the work. Norman Bryson believed art is full of cultural signs that when understood, will reveal its role in society. He combined Formalism, that alone “denies or brackets out the semiotic discussion of the image,” with Iconology, that alone “tends to disregard the materiality of painting practice,” to provide for a more complete reading.

Bryson examined the Kiss of Judas by Giotto in the Arena Chapel in Padua, c. 1305, and the Kiss of Judas by Duccio in the Maestra Altarpiece, 1308-1311. He believes Giotto created fa more convincing realism, which he explains through his form of Semiotics. Giotto provides much information beyond Judas kissing Christ. Bryson found information in the profiles of Christ and Judas. In a Formal examination of the line, the edges of Christ’s forehead and nose are straight, which suggest associations with “right” and “rectitude.” Christ is higher up than Judas, with a strong and expansive neck. Judas’s head is tilted so that his neck is hidden below his garment. These are signs as to the moral superiority of Christ, who looks down on Judas and is more open, honest, and self-assured.

Deconstruction is a methodology formed to challenge modernist views. It attempts to take apart worldviews associated with modernism, such as “equality,” “liberty,” “God,” and “self,” claiming them to be intellectual constructions rather than naturally present. This is elaborated to include questions about the creators of the constructions, their motives, and their purpose.

This is certainly one of the more difficult methodologies to grasp. Jacques Derrida is most associated with its beginnings, and one can see evidence of this difficulty as he admits in his own words:

To be very schematic I would say that the difficulty of defining and therefore also of translating the word ‘deconstruction’ stems from the fact that all the predicates, all the defining concepts, all the lexical significations, and even the syntactic articulations, which seem at one moment to lend themselves to this definition or to that translation, are also deconstructed and deconstructible, directly or otherwise, etc. And that goes for the word, the very unity of the word deconstruction, as for every word.

Derrida makes an example of the painting Shoes, by Van Gogh, which had already been the subject of art historical discussion for some time. Derrida “deconstructed” the findings of these historians with a series of questions such as, “How do they [historians Schapiro and Heidegger] know they are a pair? And what is a pair?” In doing so he challenged a set of accepted standards used by the historians to come to their conclusions.

Marxism is the most recent methodology to consider the economic and social context of art. To a certain extent Marxism can be understood as a reaction against formalism. Marxism began with Karl Marx in the nineteenth century.

Marx believed that the exact cultural conditions an artwork was created in would have to be reproduced for an accurate analysis. He opposed the nineteenth century aesthetic of “art for art’s sake,” as well as formal approaches, since they failed to account for moral, social, and economic factors involved in the making and selling of art.

As for the production of art, Marx focused on the artist as working class, exploited by the ruling class. This he explored according to nineteenth century capitalism. Because of such treatment, the artist is said to become alienated from their own artwork as it stands as a commodity. So, they can feel they have lost contact with a part of themselves.

Some Marxist’s exploring art took a heightened and particularly active political position. From the Notebooks, 1935-39, of German playwright Bertolt Brecht, one finds he felt imagery had a moral obligation to convey a social message. He believed the “wolves” of his time were the only ones with money enough to buy paintings, however, in the future these paintings would still show what these men had been. And in that way they could contribute to future change.

One of the most significant Marxist art historians is Frederick Antal. He analyzed the Last Judgment scene in the Arena Chapel in Padua. The frescoes in the chapel were painted for Enrico Scrovegni, the town’s wealthiest man because of his father’s usury. His father had been consigned to hell by Dante for such behavior. So, Enrico used this commission to ensure his own salvation.

In the Last Judgment, Erico is present in the painting. He is known kneeling on the side of the saved as he presents a model of the chapel to three angels. Enrico’s gesture implies that he is presenting a gift.

Antal reads this scene as a reflection of the “rational humanism of the time.” This would explain why the chapel, also containing images of the Passion, would not include some of the more spiritual scenes, such as Agony in the Garden, the Temptation, and the Journey to Emmaus. Tension is externalized instead of showing inner spiritual conflicts.

It is suggested that the style of the artist, Giotto, whose figures are very solid and in obeyance of the laws of gravity, emphasize the rational, human, and psychological.

(Robert Doisineau, An Oblique Look)

Feminism has been one of the most effective methodologies practiced. It became a significant movement in the 1970s. Gender has become an essential element in the understanding of creation, content, and evaluation of art. Feminists have been interested in topics expanded beyond gender as well, finding kinship with aspects of Marxism and Semiotics that stress cultural context. According to Griselda Pollock, to be successful, Feminists need to be interested in revealing the biases of art history as a whole and not just concerning women.

Feminists have been instrumental in recovering information about contributions of women artists and patrons that have not received deserved attention by previous historians. They have discussed the ways women have been discriminated against as artists and art subjects. The question has been raised ‘Why have there been no great women artists?’ So to dismiss this question, it has been essential for Feminists to provide evidence of this discrimination as well as argue against the idea of inborn artistic genius. Linda Nochlin pointed out that many women artists came from artistic families or fathers who had trained them.

For much the same reason, Feminists believe crafts developed a status below ‘fine art’ because of their association with women. They stress that gender has influenced this interpretation of history, not for biological reasons, but those social and cultural.

With the beginning of the academy, with a very few exceptions, women were excluded. It was not acceptable for women to have access to nude models. So there could be no accurate anatomy study. And it is legitimate, based on writing from the artists themselves, to say that demands of the family ended many artistic endeavors.

Feminists argue that women as art subjects have either been shown as passive or negative figures. Titian’s Venus of Urbino is a perfect example of the objectification of women through the invite of a certain male gaze. The beautiful woman has also been shown as a threat and corruptor. Frau Welt on the exterior of Mainnz Cathedral in Germany is one such figure. She is beautiful from the front, but her back is covered with sores and ulcers, crowded with frogs and snakes.

On a more positive side, attention has been brought to patrons such as queen of France, Jeanne d’Evreux and noble woman Isabella d’Este. This attention also included artists such as medieval nuns who were illuminators, Renaissance and Baroque painters and sculptors, and Dutch still-life painters.

There has been much question of the traditional canons. Prior to the 1970s, women artists were excluded from major art history survey books. An example of the lessened seriousness and importance given to female artists is the Portrait of Mlle. Charlotte du Val d’Ognes. It is part of the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art collection, and was attributed to Jacques-Louis David. The painting was hailed by critics as a remarkable portrait. Later the work was re-attributed to artist Constance Marie Charpentier. It “suddenly acquired feminine attributes: ‘Its poetry, literary rather than plastic, its very evident charms, and cleverly concealed weakness, its ensemble made up from thousands of subtle attitudes, all seem to reveal the feminine spirit.’”

Do you see women’s art history books becoming unnecessary any time soon?

Article…..”Gauguin’s Tahitian Body,” Peter Brooks

Brooks creates a picture of the Tahitian woman as sexually liberated, which makes her quite different from European counterpart who has been victim to “sexual servitude” and “thoroughly adulterated by her enslavement to men.” It seems Gauguin desired to find route beyond the ever-popular Neoclassical, erotic, pin-up Venuses in Western art. From some of the images presented as examples, it seems obvious that gender of the viewer was expected to be male and the women were depicted suggesting they were offering themselves.

Manet’s Olympia seems to have offered Gauguin the beginnings of a new formula for the female nude. Olympia was different for her honest and confronting gaze. She was also offering herself, but it seemed to be very much her choice, which gave her a power lacking in the popular female nude. Gauguin even kept a photography of Olympia with him in Tahiti. It seems quite obvious from a number of his paintings that Gauguin often had this image in mind, and used it to enforce his own intentions.

Gauguin’s Tahitian women also seem to have strength in sexuality. This is perhaps because Gauguin has presented them in his manner of “primitivism,” making their sexuality seem very natural—and not a result forced upon them by patriarchal society.

It also seems that Gauguin was challenging the modern ideas of the “primitive.” This seems especially true when exploring his paintings involving Christian scenes.

Do you believe that Gauguin intended to de-objectify his Tahitian subjects? Is this form of the presentation of female eroticism intended to elevate the role of women? Or could it be that Gauguin was simply adding the “exotic” to the traditional Neoclassical nude?

Can the image of a nude woman ever be a representation of complete female empowerment and confidence?

Upon considering that this article is from a collection of what are supposed to be examples of Feminist views on art history, do you believe this article was an appropriate choice?

Can a man make for an effective Feminist writer?

Psychoanalysis is a complex methodology, which is fairly controversial to some for its ever-flexible elements and what some might call “fictive” results. However the appeal is also understandable, integrated with aspects of Iconographic methods, Feminism, Marxism, and Semiotics. It also deals with psychobiography, which examines an artist’s psychological development as it relates to their art. The underlying purpose of psychoanalysis is to deal with the unconscious significance of works of art. This involves discussion of the work of art, the artist, aesthetic response of the viewer, and the cultural context.

The appropriate historical beginning is with Freud. He was perfectly aware of the cultural aspects of his exploration of psychoanalysis, relating it to archaeology as early as 1896. As applied to works of art, imagery is the active and joining factor. Dreams, daydreams, fantasies, and neurotic symptoms all involve imagery, and psychoanalysis attempts interpretation.

Freud believed the artist’s reason for creation did not involve the seeking of beauty, form, or disinteredness. It was instead a desire for gratification. Art in this way was to serve as therapeutic, capable of offering both the artist and the spectator consolation and solace from a troubled reality. From the words of Freud:

…An artist is once more in rudiments an introvert, not far removed from neurosis. He is oppressed by excessively powerful instinctual needs. He desires to win honour, power, wealth, fame, and the love of women; but lacks the means for achieving these satisfactions. Consequently, like any other unsatisfied man, he turns away from reality and transfers all his interest, and his libido too, to the wishful constructions of his life of phantasy, when the path might lead to neurosis…he [the artist] understands how to work over his daydreams in such a way as to make them lose what is too personal about them and repels strangers, and to make it possible for others to share in the enjoyment of them…

Freud took an interest in Leonardo da Vinci and developed theories about him and his work in a book. He drew from documents telling of Leonardo’s childhood. His biological mother was a peasant, but his father married another woman who remained childless. After the age of five, Leonardo lived in his father’s household with his stepmother and paternal grandmother. Freud concluded that Leonard must have been kept from his biological mother by his stepmother. Because of this, Freud believed Leonardo formed as unusually desirous relationship to his biological mother.

Using these conclusions and information, Freud analyzed Leonardo’s painting Madonna, Child, and St. Anne. St. Anne is the representation of Leonardo’s biological mother, who is separated from the Christ child (Leonardo) by Mary (stepmother). St. Anne’s smile is envious of the stepmother and blissful at the same time, as she is near her child.

Freud goes further to explain that Leonardo as an adult remained abstinent, though latently homosexual, due to his sublimated desires. He did not have the strength to finish most of his paintings because his energy went to scientific investigation instead, which was a manner of seeking a lost love object.

Do you find Freud’s process of interpretation to be effective? If not in this case, can you think of ways it may still be a useful activity?

Freud is also known for his exploration of the Oedipus complex. This can be explained as a child’s love attachment to the mother, in this case a boy age three to five. He desires exclusive attachment to his mother and feels jealousy toward the father who possesses her. At the same time, the boy is afraid of the father’s retaliation, which later takes the form of a castration complex. Another version of the Oedipus complex is possible when boys identify with the mother and wish to be the passive love object of the father.

An example of the Oedipus complex is Caravaggio’s David with the Head of Goliath, as provided by Laurie Schneider Adams, author of the book Art and Psychoanalysis. Dealing first with Caravaggio’s past, documents tell he was repeatedly in trouble with the law, being arrested numerous times for acts of violence. Eventually he was exiled from Rome for killing a man. This taste for violence seems to have been transferred to this painting. This is only emphasized knowing that the decapitated head, which seems wholly alive and dead all at once, is Caravaggio’s self-portrait. Adding an increased complexity to this image is the identification of David as Caravaggio’s young lover. Caravaggio identifies himself as the victim, as defeated by homosexual love. This places him in dependency on the younger man, with his head literally in the figure’s hands. As later explained, Goliath is a father figure, so this scene also displays the dangers of identification with his father. Caravaggio is older, decapitated, and symbolically castrated.

In this context, it is perhaps worth noting that the story of David and Goliath has been given an oedipal reading itself. King Saul becomes a father-figure to David. The king offers his riches and his daughter to the man who kills his enemy Goliath. David takes the challenge and uses a slingshot to fall Goliath and decapitate him with his own sword. In oedipal interpretation, David is a boy who eliminates the father to win a woman and riches. There are three father figures, which include the king, Goliath who represents the dangerous aspect of the father, and David’s biological father. The decapitation is read as an unconscious castration. The story of David’s life continues with more such interpretations.

Psychoanalysis has been taken up by many art historians since Freud. One such man was the leading English Object Relations psychoanalyst, Winnicott. He is significant for relating his knowledge of transitional objects to art. Transitional objects are those adopted by children between the age of four and twelve months, used as a stand-in for their mother.

Winnicott finds the phenomena of transitional objects to be a cultural basis for later pursuits of creativity. In other words, transitional objects can form the foundation and later desire for people to create transition in other areas of life.

Funerary art is one of these areas. The Etruscans, for example, desired to form a bridge over the chasm between life and death with these objects. Therefore, cinerary urns sometimes resembled houses, lids of sarcophagi often represented living couples, and children were buried with their toys.

Introductory Chapter of “After the End of Art,” Arthur C. Danto

Danto argues that art without theme, narrative, or obvious intention, is not really “art”. He believes that “art should be extremely vigorous and show no signs whatever of internal exhaustion.” After all, one movement must end for another to begin. However, the minimalist visions of reductions to pure white or black or simple striping, or pop artist Andy Warhol’s statement that art, including soup cans and detergent boxes, could be anything, may have taken the narrative to its pinnacle. Art, Danto believed, was over when this philosophical take-over ended Modernism.

There can be infinite variations on all past artistic trends, but that in no way means that it would be a vigorous creation, as Danto sees it. At moments in history, historians will focus on the contemporary movement or seem relatively unmoved by it and only revisit the past. Of course it may take twenty or thirty years for these realizations to come forward.

Danto also believes that art needs to have a sort of single and collective direction in order for it to be “art.” He finds the 1970s to be “a period in its own way as dark as the tenth century.” In this way, the last twenty-five or so years were filled with experimentation without the establishment of a norm.

Do you believe that it takes a collective movement to make art “art?”

Do you agree that extreme minimalism and the notion that art can be anything ended something artist’s have been in search of?

Do you believe it to be the art historians duty to record their beliefs about contemporary art? Is this being done? Or is it suitable or accurate to look back and comment on it many years later?

Realizing that these methodologies exist can change your sensitivity to text and your readiness to believe the written word. In a way, and especially when dealing with history, not much one can call fact exists, as it is colored by human experience.