I’ve been an art historian for 24 years and I have been teaching the subject for almost 21 years. So, I am aware of broader society’s perceptions of art history because it is part of my job to advocate for its cultural value.
I often encounter varying perceptions of art history. Firstly, it is seen as a useless, money-waster of a degree. Second, it is an area of study for the elite classes. Lastly, it is an optional leisure pursuit.
Depending on your perspective, all of the above may be true. But, I can say that as a working-class person, my degree in art history has allowed me to have a relatively stable career for nearly a quarter of a century and many of my students, from a variety of backgrounds, have gone on to successful careers as artists, art educators, art therapists, social media managers, curators and teachers, but I digress because career paths are not why art history matters.
So why does Art history matter?
Art history matters because it is the study of human history through the objects humans have made. History is not one fixed monolith to be memorised; it is a subject that shifts and changes as the human race shifts and changes according to time and place.
Art Accumulates History
These cresting waves rendered by Hokusai are about to crash in front of Mt Fuji, which sits in the distance. Tiny people in boats, heads down, are bracing in anticipation of receiving the full strength of the water. The artwork is an interpretation of the awesome force of nature. Made nearly 200 years ago, the Great Wave off Kanagawa is specific to its time, Edo, Japan (1603-1868) when art that depicted the fleeting nature of human existence was the most popular subject.
Today, it is one of the most recognisable images in the world, renowned for its beauty as much as it is for its familiarity.
For Hokusai, the artwork was a realisation of his devotion to Nichiren Buddhism, a branch of Buddhism that believes the purity of the human mind is reflected in the purity of the land that humans inhabit.
In our contemporary context, we might relate this artwork to our experience of climate change or our current relationship to the flow of forceful waters.
On a more basic level, we might also think about the image in the form of tea towels, mugs and other mass reproductions that museums sell. All of these aspects constitute the history of Hokusai, the person, the artist and this artwork.
The history of art is also the study of the history that an artist or artwork accumulates. Hokusai is fixed; he lived in a specific time and place. However, his history is vast and varied. Art history studies the fixed and mutable.
Art is Human Experience
This gets to the heart of why art history matters: art history is the process of understanding human experience through the art humans have created.
Although a work of art is a singular thing, human experience cannot be contained by a singular definition. A work of art represents a discrete moment in time, but because it is an object, it accumulates meaning over time too.
Experience is impacted by time-period, geography, class status, the details of individual life, etc. Because of this, each viewer adds to a work of art. If that viewer is an historian, their interpretation has longstanding power to shape the meaning of a work of art.
Therefore, there is not one single history or perspective to memorise in order to understand the whole of art, which is why some people find it to be useless. In a world of information, the undefined feels uncomfortable. But studying history is intentionally (and to me thrillingly) humbling because it teaches us that there is only so much one person can know.
In art history we study people who have come before us – their lives, their stories, their imaginations, their impact. It is, also, in a way, a study of ourselves, our individual and collective experience of being human. It helps us think about the patterns of human experience, the things that connect us to our ancestors.
These handprints were made over thousands of years in the caves in prehistoric Patagonia. Some historians explain the prints as human impulse to say ‘I was here.’ Others believe it was part of shamanistic ritual. While others believe we will never know for sure so we shouldn’t even try to define them.
Regardless of their meaning, the prints show that making images is as old as humanity itself.
Art history is the process of understanding human experience through the art humans have created.
Shared Humanity
Because art history is also the study of creativity it may, in turn, help us develop our own creativity. Faith Ringgold was inspired by her childhood summer on ‘Tar Beach’, the name she gave to the roof of the apartment building where she lived in Harlem, New York City.
Summer nights spent stretched out with family telling stories in the starlight inspired Ringgold to make images. And what these images tell us about her childhood might allow us to be inspired by our own. Through the work of art, its time and place we might come to understand our lives from a new perspective.
Art history, like all of the humanities, gets us to think critically about our shared histories. This is vital in a world that is so divisive.
As the art critic Jon Berger explained in his highly influential Ways of Seeing (1972) ‘a people or a class which is cut off from its own past is far less free to choose and to act as a people or a class than one that has been able to situate itself in history'. With a sense of history, we can understand how we have come to be who we are as a society, as a culture.
This sensitive drawing by Rembrandt is one of many that tenderly depicts his wife Saskia, bedridden with tuberculosis.
In one of the artist’s most successful works, Christ Healing the Sick, Rembrandt includes a woman lying at the foot of Christ, who is too ill to move. Her form resembles Saskia, who had died six years before. It is touching to think of the grieving Rembrandt making an image of the sick being healed, including his wife who was unable to be healed. Of course, this is only one of a thousand interpretations of this artwork, but I chose it to show how humanising history can be.
To study art history is to see how others have felt about human experience – love, fear, power, grief. From this perspective, art history is not a luxury, it is sustenance to know that our pain or our joy is not only ours. We are able to see what we have in common with others rather than just our stark differences.
Art history is an essential area of study that creates and preserves the stories of people who have existed before us. That matters, greatly, and it is what I am most proud to do in my art history classes at City Lit. It is transformative to be able to place ourselves, however briefly, in the time and place of another human being. To me, that is why art history matters.
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