History of art
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
|
"There have been many general public history of art books. Chronologically, there is Pliny the Elder, Vasari, Winckelmann, Viardot, Ruskin, Lübke, Erskine, Pater, Wickhoff, Bell, Huneker, Riegl, Muther, Wölfflin, Schlosser, Faure, Gardner, Panofsky, Hauser, Gombrich, Janson and Néret. There are many art reference books The last of the major history of art books to pass into the public domain was Gardner's Art Through the Ages (1926)."--Sholem Stein
|
|
Related e |
|
Featured: |
The history of art usually refers to the history of the visual arts, such as painting, sculpture and architecture. The term also encompasses theory of the visual arts. It is not usually taken or intended to refer to the performing arts or literary arts. The history of art attempts an objective survey of art throughout human history, classifying cultures and periods and noting their distinguishing features and influences.
The field of "art history" was developed in the West, and originally dealt exclusively with Western painting, and Western art history, with the High Renaissance (and its Greek precedent) as the defining standard. Gradually, with the onset of Modernism, a wider vision of history has developed, seeking to place other societies in a global overview by analyzing their artifacts in terms of their own cultural values. Thus, the subject is now seen to encompass all visual art, from the megaliths of Western Europe to the paintings of the Tang Dynasty in China.
Contents |
Textbook art history
A useful way to examine how art history is organized is through the major survey textbooks. In the 19th century there was History of Art (1860) by Wilhelm Lübke. In the 20th century, the most often used textbooks published in English are Helen Gardner’s Art Through the Ages (1926), Ernst Gombrich’s Story of Art (1950), Janson’s History of Art (1962), Hugh Honour and John Flemming’s A World History of Art (1982), Marilyn Stokstad’s Art History (1995), Laurie Schneider Adams’s Art Across Time (1999), David Wilkins, Bernard Schultz, and Katheryn M. Linduff’s Art Past, Art Present (2009).
Western Europe
Although some of the books listed above attempt a global approach, they are universally strong in western art history. The books use representative examples from each era in order to create a story that blends changing styles with social history. The Western narrative begins with prehistoric art such as Stonehenge, before discussing the ancient world. The latter begins with Mesopotamia, then progresses to the art of Ancient Egypt, which then transitions to Classical antiquity. Classical art includes both Greek and Roman work. With the decline of the Roman Empire, the narrative shifts to Medieval art, which lasted for a millennium. The high intellectual culture of the Medieval period was Islamic, but the era also included Early Christian art, Byzantine art, Gothic art, Anglo-Saxon art, and Viking art. The Medieval era ended with the Renaissance, followed by the Baroque and Rococo. Sometimes another period, Mannerism, is inserted between Renaissance and Baroque, which is a visual hybrid. The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries included Neoclassicism, Romantic art, Academic art, and Realism in art. Art historians disagree when Modern art began, but it was either in the mid-eighteenth century with the artist Francisco Goya, the mid-nineteenth century with the industrial revolution or the late nineteenth century with the advent of Impressionism. The art movements of the late nineteenth through the early twenty first centuries are too numerous to detail here, but can be broadly divided into two categories: Modernism and Contemporary art. The latter is sometimes referred to with another term, which has a subtly different connotation, Postmodern art.
Although textbooks periodize Western art by movements, as described above, they also do so by century. Many art historians give a nod to the historical importance of Italian Renaissance and Baroque art by referring to centuries in which it was prominent with foreign terms. These include trecento for the fourteenth, quattrocento for the fifteenth, cinquecento for the sixteenth, seicento for the seventeenth, and settecento for the eighteenth.
Key objects and concepts
Medieval Western art
In Byzantine and Gothic art of the Middle Ages, the dominance of the church insisted on the expression of biblical truths. There was no need to depict the reality of the material world, in which man was born in a "state of sin", especially through the extensive use of gold in paintings, which also presented figures in idealised, patterned (i.e."flat") forms.
Renaissance Western art
The Renaissance is the return yet again to valuation of the material world, and this paradigm shift is reflected in art forms, which show the corporeality of the human body, and the three dimensional reality of landscape.
Modern and contemporary art
The physical and rational certainties of the clockwork universe depicted by the 18th-century Enlightenment were shattered not only by new discoveries of relativity by Einstein and of unseen psychology by Sigmund Freud, but also by unprecedented technological development accelerated by the implosion of civilization in two world wars. The history of 20th century art is a narrative of endless possibilities and the search for new standards, each being torn down in succession by the next. Thus the parameters of Impressionism, Expressionism, Fauvism, Cubism, Dadaism, Surrealism, and other art movements cannot be maintained as significant and culturally germane very much beyond the time of their invention. Increasing global interaction during this time saw an equivalent influence of other cultures into Western art, such as Pablo Picasso being influenced by Iberian sculpture, African sculpture and Primitivism. Japonism, and Japanese woodcuts (which had themselves been influenced by Western Renaissance draftsmanship) had an immense influence on Impressionism and subsequent artistic developments. The influential example set by Paul Gauguin's interest in Oceanic art and the sudden popularity among the cognescenti in early 20th century Paris of newly discovered African fetish sculptures and other works from non-European cultures were taken up by Picasso, Henri Matisse, and by many of their colleagues.
Modernism, the idealistic search for truth, and progress, gave way in the latter decades of the 20th century to a realization of its unattainability. Relativity was accepted as an unavoidable truth, which led to the Postmodern period, where cultures of the world and of history are seen as changing forms, which can be appreciated and drawn from only with irony. Furthermore the separation of cultures is increasingly blurred and it is now more appropriate to think in terms of a global culture, rather than regional cultures.
See also
