To be relevant as an artist, you need to understand your place in history.
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The County Election, 1852, George Caleb Bingham, courtesy St. Louis Art Museum.
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Art history is an extension of straight-up human history. The little I
learned in school, I learned in history class. Most of what I know, however, is
self-taught, through reading and visiting museums and galleries. Over the
years, I’ve gotten pretty good at it.
I think it’s possible to understand most of history by just looking at
the pictures. Art, after all, is an expression of the cultural values of the
society it was created in.
Consider The County
Election, by Missouri artist George Caleb Bingham, above. Starting in the
late 1840s, he began a series on American democracy. He critiqued the political
process as he saw it. That in itself is historically interesting. But looking
back on it through almost two centuries of history, we first notice the lack of
women or minorities in 19th century democracy. By being true to his
time, Bingham is able to talk to us today.
American public high schools offer no concentration in art history, although
it’s possible to take an AP exam in the subject. In Britain, one can do an
A-level in art history (the exam was nearly
scrapped in 2016). That puts us at a disadvantage to our British cousins,
right?
Not entirely. Bendor Grosvenor is
an art dealer and BBC presenter who recently guest-lectured to a group of
graduating art history majors at an unnamed university. “[W]hen I put an image of a well-known Titian
on the screen, only one of them (of around 40) could identify the artist,” he wrote.
“I asked what they had all been doing for the past few years; ‘reading’ came
the unenthusiastic answer. I had been invited to discuss art-historical
careers, and my advice was therefore simple: stop reading about art, and go and
look at some.”
I’ve had an American art history major hanging around for
several years now, and I know that she’s been schooled in attribution. She had
to take a comprehensive examination in it to get her undergraduate degree. Luckily,
we had amazing resources available, including the Met’s online database of 451,685
records. She quizzed herself on attribution until she had the western canon down cold.
Her alma mater estimates that the cost of attending is now $62,882
a year, or just about twice the annual real median personal income of $31,099
in the United States. Her education was fantastic, but that is an absurd price
tag. It pretty much excludes anyone but the wealthy from pursuing it. (Full
disclosure: she attended community college first so that she could breathe the
ether for only two years.)
Every large museum now has a database of its collection online—even the
notoriously recondite Barnes
Foundation has finally caved. These are a priceless resource. Then there’s SmartHistory, which I wrote about here.
On Monday, I said that anyone serious about painting should get their
hands on a copy of Josef
Albers’s Interaction
of Color. I also believe that anyone serious about painting should know
art history. The good news is that it won’t cost you a dime, and you can study
from your laptop or tablet.