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The Old Regime

An interdisciplinary moment, the reformation, the rise of the art market, the politics of monuments, the problem of agency, what is art, consensus versus conflict, art and history, 1969–2019.

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Peter Burke; Art and History, 1969–2019. The Journal of Interdisciplinary History 2020; 50 (4): 567–586. doi: https://doi.org/10.1162/jinh_a_01486

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The 1960s and 1970s marked a turning point in the encounters between generalist historians and art historians regarding the study of art. Before that moment, art history, from its very inception as an independent department in universities, had been entirely distinct from the discipline of generalist history. However, three case studies—art and the Reformation, the rise of the art market, and the proliferation of political monuments—reveal the convergence between the two disciplines that has unfolded during the last half-century, culminating in recent discussions of agency and attempts to answer the question, What is Art?

This article discusses a half-century of encounters between art historians and generalist historians, and their consequences for the study of art. On the history side, scholars such as Maurice Agulhon, Patrick Boucheron, Georges Duby (an amateur painter), Carlo Ginzburg (a painter in his youth), Serge Gruzinski, Simon Schama, Carl Schorske, and Jan de Vries might all be described as friendly “invaders” of art history, incorporating art into their vision of the past. Art historians who have in their turn invaded history, to everyone’s benefit, include Svetlana Alpers, Michael Baxandall, Hans Belting, Albert Boime, Horst Bredekamp, Michael Camille, Timothy Clark, Jaś Elsner, David Freedberg, Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann, Sergiusz Michalski, Martin Warnke, and Paul Zanker.

On occasion, individuals from the two disciplines have worked together, reducing the risks that are often involved in frontier crossings. For example, Brown, a historian of Spanish painting, and Elliott, a historian of early modern Spain, collaborated on a book about the seventeenth-century Spanish palace of the Buen Retiro, viewing it as a case study in “the complex relationship of art and politics” and aiming at a “total” history of both the construction and the “first occupation” of the palace in the 1630s. More often, essays by historians and art historians appear side by side in collective volumes such as the special issue of the JIH entitled “Art and History” (1986), published in book form two years later, or the special issue of the journal Art History (2018) devoted to “Art and Religious Reform.” The latter volume revealed, according to one of its editors, “how porous traditional disciplinary boundaries have become.” Conferences have encouraged the dialogue between the two disciplines. Scholars from other disciplines or outside the academic world altogether have sometimes joined in the conversation—for instance, Barrell (English literature), Montias (economics), Alsop (journalism), Kempers (sociology), Gell (anthropology), and Matless (geography). 1

The boundaries were not always porous; before the 1960s, the situation was vastly different. History and art history were usually studied and taught in different departments, and often in different buildings, at research universities from the mid-nineteenth century onward. In the universities of Oxford and Cambridge, courses in modern history were established in 1872 and 1873. Germany, the original home of the professional historian, had ninety tenured history professors ( Ordinarien ) in the year 1900. Chairs in art history, a particularly strong subject in the German-speaking world, were founded at the universities of Berlin (1844), Vienna (1852), Zurich (1856), Basel (1858), and Bonn (1860). In the United States, lectureships in art history were established at the universities of Michigan (1852) and Princeton (1859). Britain lagged behind—first at Edinburgh (1880) and later at Oxford (1955). 2

Separation was not complete. Jacob Burckhardt, who occupied chairs in both art history and history, published essays on Renaissance architecture and altarpieces as well as his famous fresco of Italian Renaissance culture. Aby Warburg, an independent scholar, did not need to worry about the frontiers between disciplines and what he called their “guards” when he wrote his famous essays about Florentine portraits, the last will and testament of a Florentine merchant, astrological themes in frescoes in Ferrara, and so on. Johan Huizinga was inspired to write The Waning of the Middle Ages (London, 1924) by a visit to an exhibition of Flemish “primitives” in Bruges. Marxist historians of art such as Frederick Antal, Francis Klingender, and Meyer Shapiro all refused to exclude economic, social, and political history from their studies. 3

Notwithstanding those precedents, the 1960s and 1970s marked a turning point. The two disciplines began to converge in earnest at a time of increasing enthusiasm for academic interdisciplinarity, marked by the foundation of new institutions in a number of different countries, among them the universities of Sussex (1961), Bochum (1962), Konstanz (1966), La Trobe (1967), Bielefeld (1969), and Linköping (1970). The foundation of the JIH in 1969 formed part of that conjuncture.

Art historians who were looking outward at this time included the Australian Bernard Smith, author of European Vision in the South Pacific: A Study in the History of Art and Ideas (Oxford, 1960); the Englishman Francis Haskell, author of Patrons and Painters: A Study in the Relations Between Italian Art and Society in the Age of the Baroque (New York, 1964); and the Swede Allan Ellenius, whose Karolinska Bildidéer (Uppsala, 1966) was concerned with the relation between art and ideas. Both Smith and Ellenius had studied at the Warburg Institute, and Rubinstein, a historian who interpreted a number of fourteenth-century frescoes as evidence for political ideas, published his essay in the Institute’s journal in 1958. 4

From the 1970s onward, this trickle became a flood. Among the most important early contributions from the side of the art historians were books by Baxandall (1972), Clark (1973), Bredekamp (1975), Warnke (1976), and Girouard (1978). Artistic genres such as the landscape and the portrait were placed, or more exactly replaced, in their social and political contexts. Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century portraits were examined as expressions of individualism or, as Erving Goffman put it, “the presentation of self,” while nineteenth-century paintings of typical national landscapes (in Britain, Scandinavia, the United States, and elsewhere) were analyzed as expressions of national identity. 5

Why did art historians make this turn toward generalist history at this time? The shift from an overwhelming concern with style to an interest in iconography, exemplified by the work of Erwin Panofsky and Jan Białostocki, encouraged the turn, although it does not fully explain it. Another part of the story is the discovery of “context.” Like their colleagues in departments of literature, art historians were becoming increasingly concerned with the milieu or situation from which the works that they studied emerged—from the micro-milieu of art patronage to the wider milieu of political events. Such concerns were no longer left to Marxists.

The generalist historians’ desire to include art in their studies was part of a wider movement for a “total history” best known in its French incarnation, the so-called “ Annales School,” but visible in other countries as well. In an attempt to include every aspect of human life, this movement turned not only to texts for evidence but also to objects, such as images. Febvre, one of the founders of the group, who called himself a disciple of art historian Louis Courajod, gave lectures on the art of the French Renaissance; Braudel, the group’s leader in its second generation, included artists in his study of Italians abroad. 6

All the same, historians appeared to be—and perhaps remain—less bold, less likely to move into the territory of art than art historians are to move the other way. Significantly, in 1979, Agulhon, another member of the Annales group, still felt the need to defend his study of the history of Marianne as the female personification of France against the idea that it was trivial. Nonetheless, further studies by historians such as Elliott (1980), Starn (1980), Ginzburg (1981), and Scribner (1981) quickly followed, and not long thereafter, many more. 7

The convergence of history and art history has resulted in a body of work too large to analyze in detail herein. The art of the Italian Renaissance in particular has attracted scholarly approaches from many angles—economic, social, political, and artistic—for a long time. Studies have often focused on the patronage system and the responses of artists to its constraints. Witness, for example, the work of Antal (1947) and, more recently, Kent and Simons (1987), Hollingsworth (1994), Dale Kent (2000), Jill Burke (2004), and O’Malley (2005). The surviving contracts clearly reveal that the balance of power was on the patrons’ side and that artists who are now famous were treated in their day like ordinary artisans. One of the achievements of the generalist historians in this field has been to show how art patronage formed part of a much wider system of patron–client relations. 8

Because the Renaissance is often in the limelight, it is more illuminating to examine other movements, periods, and topics. This article therefore proceeds with an analysis of three case studies—art and the Reformation in the sixteenth century, the rise of the art market in the eighteenth century, and the proliferation of political monuments in the nineteenth century—before discussing two general problems, that of agency and that of deciding what counts as “art.”

The explosion, from the 1980s onward, of studies about the importance of art (or, more generally, of images) in both the Catholic and Protestant reformations offers an example of both the convergence and the continuing difference between the interests of art historians and those of plain historians. These studies tend to center on two main themes, one negative and the other positive. The negative theme is iconoclasm, the destruction of images; its complementary opposite is propaganda, the making of images in order to persuade. Notwithstanding the investigation of both themes in various regions and throughout various periods, from early medieval Byzantium to the twentieth century, the scholarly concentration of studies on the sixteenth century remains remarkable. 9

Odd as it may seem that one of the richest examples of collaboration between generalist historians and art historians should be the destruction rather than the creation of art, it makes perfect sense given the problems that iconoclasm poses. For generalist historians, iconoclasm is primarily a historical phenomenon in need of explanation. Is it an example of “mindless” violence, or did it have a purpose? For a subset of this group, ecclesiastical historians, what matters is to reconstruct the arguments for and against the legitimacy of religious images. For art historians, however, iconoclasm, which was “written out” of art history until the 1970s, is both a disaster, depriving the world of magnificent works of art, and precious evidence of the public response to images. 10

Two books published in the 1980s typify the contrast. The first, written by two French historians, explicates the wave of iconoclasm in Flanders and northern France in the summer of 1566 in myriad ways—by mapping its distribution, reconstructing its chronology, identifying its participants, determining whether it was spontaneous or premeditated, assessing the relevance of the poor harvest of that year, and, finally, interpreting the destruction as a ritual of purification by zealous Protestants who associated images with idolatry. In similar fashion, Heimpel, a German medieval historian, who tried to identify the iconoclasts, summarized his conclusions in the epigram, Die Bilderstürmer waren die Bilderstifter (often translated, “the image breakers were the image makers,” meaning not the artists but the people who had paid for images and became angry when Martin Luther and other preachers told them that they had spent their money in vain). 11

The second book, written by Freedberg (whose dissertation at Oxford in 1972 treated iconoclasm and painting in the Netherlands), bears the subtitle Studies in the History and Theory of Response. In his chapter devoted to iconoclasm, Freedberg shows himself to be well aware of the historical context studied by Deyon and Lottin in Les casseurs de l’été 1566 , but he is more interested in what he accuses the “purely empirical historians” of neglecting, “the deeper psychological issues”—the emotions triggered by images and the power and the paradoxes of iconoclasm in all periods. “We love art and hate it; we cherish it and are afraid; we know of its powers.” Hence, the book’s title, The Power of Images . More recently, Joseph Koerner noted Luther’s claim that iconoclasts felt the need to break images precisely because they took their power seriously. 12

Koerner also studied the devotional art of the Lutherans, who were less iconophobic than the Zwinglians and the Calvinists but preferred their paintings to adopt a more modest style, as visitors to churches in Saxony or Denmark can still observe today. In any case, Huldrych Zwingli objected only to images in churches. Both he and Jean Calvin allowed images to be displayed in houses as moral examples. The unintended consequences of the Reformation may also have been important. It was suggested long ago that the ban on religious images in churches (or “temples,” as Calvinists often preferred to call them) led to a rise of secular paintings in the Dutch Republic and elsewhere, the response of artists to a fall in the demand for Madonnas and saints. 13

The study of sixteenth-century art as a means of religious persuasion or propaganda also came to prominence during the 1980s. For example, the historian Scribner turned to the study of images as a means to discover popular attitudes regarding the Lutheran Reformation, which occurred at a time when most Germans—the “simple folk,” as Luther called them— could not read. Scribner studied cheap prints that vividly contrasted the poverty and humility of Christ with the greed and arrogance of the pope, and (ironically enough) presented Luther as a saint with a halo at a time when Luther and other Protestant leaders were trying to do away with the cult of saints. A few years later, the art historian Keith Moxey produced a complementary study also focused on cheap German woodcuts of the early sixteenth century. Despite the reference to “popular imagery” in his title, Moxey was hostile to descriptions of these woodcuts as “folk art” or as a “mass medium.” Like Scribner, he viewed these images as part of a campaign by elites to persuade ordinary people to support what we call the Reformation. 14

On the Catholic side, Emile Mâle’s L’art religieux après le Concile de Trente (Paris, 1932) had already identified changes in religious iconography and placed them in the context of the Counter-Reformation. Later scholars took up the mantle of Mâle’s pioneering work. De Maio, for instance, produced two case studies of Counter-Reformation art, one on Michelangelo and the other on Naples. Gruzinski, a historian of Latin America, wrote several books about the history of images, primarily in colonial Mexico, and what he calls the “image war” waged by Catholic missionaries, who destroyed what they called the “idols” of indigenous gods (iconoclasm was not confined to Protestants) and replaced them with images of Catholic saints. Particular attention has been paid to the role of Jesuits both as patrons and occasionally as artists. Some studies tackle the controversial question of the distinctiveness of their contribution to the art of the Counter-Reformation. Others employ modern theories of propaganda to analyze the function of the images produced by or for the Jesuit order. 15

A different opportunity for collaboration, this time between economic historians and art historians, derives from the growing interest in the early history of the art market. It is surely no coincidence that this interest has developed at a time when today’s art market makes so many headlines, thanks to the higher and higher prices paid for selected works of art, both old and new.

In Renaissance Italy, most paintings were produced for individual patrons, “made on a bespoke basis,” as Baxandall once put it. In Italy, the sale of works of art to individuals who had not commissioned them goes back at least to the fourteenth century. The art market probably thrived more than surviving documents reveal; unlike commissioned works, cheap works that were sold informally (in markets and fairs or directly from the workshop) would presumably not have required contracts or elaborate records of any kind. Some religious paintings of popular subjects, such as Annunciations or Nativities, might be left unfinished to accommodate the requirements of particular customers, thus occupying a space between the market and patronage systems. 16

The evidence for the purchase of paintings “off the peg” is greater in the southern Netherlands, the Dutch Republic, and, as the market system expanded in the eighteenth century, elsewhere. In the case of late fifteenth-century Bruges, Martens noted “the increase of on spec production of cheaper works.” A similar increase took place in sixteenth-century Antwerp and in seventeenth-century Amsterdam, followed in the eighteenth century by the rise of an art market in Rome, Paris, and London, as well as in other cities. This trend did not develop in isolation but formed part of what is often described as the commercialization of Western European society. 17

A major contribution to this growing field of study came from Montias, a Yale economist previously known for his studies of central planning in Poland and economic development in Communist Romania. Montias moved to art history in mid-career, producing a series of books about Dutch art in the seventeenth century from an economic perspective. In a case study of the city of Delft, based mainly on the evidence of inventories, Montias estimated that the city had “forty to fifty thousand paintings” c. 1650, their owners amounting to “perhaps two-thirds of the population.” Most of the paintings were bought cheaply, for “two gulden or less.” In similar fashion, van der Woude, a Dutch economic historian, estimated that 25 million paintings were produced in the Dutch Republic between 1580 and 1800. 18

Alongside new works, a market in second-hand pictures or “old masters” was becoming important by the seventeenth century, as collecting works of art became more and more fashionable among princes, such as Philip IV and Charles I, as well as among aristocrats. The investigation of the history of collections and collectors has been growing ever since the launch of the Journal for the History of Collections in 1989. In this interdisciplinary enterprise, museum curators and art historians have joined forces with historians of consumption, sociologists, and even psychologists, some of whom treat collecting as pathological. 19

At the more expensive end of the scale, the art market took the form of what Alsop called “a cultural-behavioral system”—a network of institutions and social roles that included, and still includes, art auctions, exhibitions, dealers, forgers, connoisseurs (in other words, well-informed collectors, whether concerned with rarity or with skill), critics (publishing reviews of exhibitions, as Denis Diderot did in his Salons ), and art historians (often called upon to authenticate the attribution of unsigned works to famous artists). 20

Competition is an essential element in the market system. In the Dutch Republic of the seventeenth century, for instance, many artists responded to it by what economists call “product differentiation.” Different artists specialized in different subject matter—landscapes, portraits, still lives, and various “genre” paintings. As the division of labor increased, these genres came to be subdivided. Seascapes and townscapes appeared alongside landscapes. Some painters of still lives specialized in flowers and others in “Vanitas” paintings in which objects such as hourglasses, clocks, and newspapers showing their date of publication all emphasized the brevity of human life. Genre painters produced tavern scenes, market scenes, and kitchens. Others concentrated on church interiors or on skating scenes. Needless to say, attempts to examine art as an economic enterprise have proved controversial. A well-known sensitive case involved art historian Alpers’ study of Rembrandt’s workshop, which received a favorable review in the Journal of Economic History but a denunciation as reductionist from some of her colleagues in art history. 21

On the consumer’s side, one response to the market system was investment in art, whether in the narrow sense of buying works to sell for profit or in the wider sense of buying them for what Bourdieu called “symbolic capital,” an important means of social mobility. Studies of this phenomenon by economic and social historians may not be common, but they are not lacking either. Other scholars have investigated the relationship between increasing wealth and the growing demand for art in the Dutch Republic or between “the sudden explosive rise of Dutch economic power [and] the similarly surprising and rapid flowering of Dutch cultural life” in the seventeenth century, including painting. 22

The interaction between art and politics has aroused even more interest than that between art and economics. Three generalist historians—Rubinstein, Skinner, and Boucheron—have written about the frescoes by Ambrogio Lorenzetti in the town hall (Palazzo Pubblico) of Siena, viewing them as contributions to political theory. In our age of advertising, it is no surprise to discover a large and ever-expanding literature on the “fabrication,” “marketing,” or “selling” of public images of rulers, from the Roman emperor Augustus to Benito Mussolini, via the emperor Maximilian, the Tudors, and King Louis XIV. Other historians prefer to employ the concept of propaganda, which is technically an anachronism if employed before the age of the French Revolution but a useful anachronism all the same. 23

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, statues of rulers were sometimes erected on public squares. They included monuments to Grand Duke Cosimo de’ Medici on Piazza della Signoria in Florence; Louis XIV on Place des Victoires in Paris; and Peter the Great on Senate Square in St. Petersburg, the “bronze horseman” described in a poem by Alexander Pushkin. The nineteenth century, however, was the great age of “statuemania,” to borrow Agulhon’s term. Noting that the rise of statues followed the revolutions of 1789, 1830, and 1870, Agulhon suggested that the preponderance of figures who were neither saints nor kings should be interpreted as an expression of secular, liberal values. Since his work in the 1970s, studies of this phenomenon have multiplied, encouraged by the boom in historical studies of nationalism and memory. 24

As in the case of religious art, attention has been paid to both the destruction of secular images and their fabrication. This interest was doubtless encouraged by the wave of political iconoclasm that followed the demise of Communist regimes in Central and Eastern Europe after 1989, sweeping away statues of Joseph Stalin, Vladimir Lenin, and Felix Dzerzhinsky (head of the Soviet secret police). McBride, an Irish historian (who was surely thinking of Admiral Horatio Nelson’s Pillar in Dublin, blown up by the Irish Republican Army in 1966), described this form of destruction as “a tradition of explosive de-commemoration.” It co-exists alongside a non-violent tradition of removal and re-erection of monuments, usually in some form of open-air museum or statue park. Statues of Queen Victoria are still standing in Delhi, for instance, as are statues of Stalin in Budapest. Less dramatic, this practice also deserves study as an aspect of the links between political and cultural history. 25

Two major themes dominated the study of public monuments in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The first theme is a political one, nationalism. In Latin American cities, bronze horsemen are highly visible, usually in the form of national liberators like José San Martín and Manuel Belgrano in Buenos Aires; San Martín and Bernardo O’Higgins in Santiago; José Gervasio Artigas in Montevideo; and Simon Bolívar in Caracas, Bogotá, Lima, and Medellín. In many Italian cities, statues of Giuseppe Garibaldi (nearly 400 of them), or, less frequently (and standing rather than riding), of Camillo Benso, count of Cavour, have a similar prominence on public squares, many of them erected soon after the unification of Italy in 1871. Statues of Dante, which are homages to the nation as much as to poetry, are also ubiquitous. In what was newly united Germany, Otto von Bismarck and Johann Wolfgang Goethe took the places of Cavour and Dante. The United States, too, has what Boime, an art historian, calls its “national icons,” from the Statue of Liberty to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. Many statues of Confederate generals such as Robert E. Lee and Thomas Jonathan (better known as “Stonewall”) Jackson in the South, monuments to a failed attempt at independence, are now waiting their turn for de-commemoration. 26

The second theme in recent studies of public monuments is a social one, patronage, whether public or private. As Savage remarked, “Public monuments do not arise as if by natural law to celebrate the deserving: they are built by people with sufficient power to marshal (or impose) public consent to their erection.” The attempt to discover what kind of people these were has inspired much recent research. Boime made the point that given the cost of production, sculptors, much more than painters, needed support from the state, and that the French government used sculpture “to project a particular image.” So did municipalities. After 1871, the city council of Paris was responsible for some significant commissions, notably the monument to the Republic (1883) on Place de la République and the Triumph of the Republic (1899) on Place de la Nation. Statues of heroes of the Revolution, such as Jean-Paul Marat and Georges Danton, reinforced the message, and statues of Étienne Dolet and Diderot paid respect to individuals regarded as the Revolution’s precursors. 27

France was not alone in this political use of sculpture. In Britain, James Wolfe’s monument in the Abbey, in which Prime Minister William Pitt (the Elder) took a close interest, was “the first memorial built as state propaganda.” Nelson’s Column in Trafalgar Square, erected through a public subscription organized by a committee mainly composed of members of both Houses of Parliament, straddles the frontier between public and private initiative. In Italy, tourists who pass the statue of Giordano Bruno on Campo de’Fiori in Rome are usually unaware that it was the brainchild of Prime Minister Francesco Crispi, who had it built to honor a leading heretic and thus strike a blow against the Church. 28

Other monuments were the result of subscriptions from individuals outside the public sphere. In fact, the original idea of a monument to Bruno came from the University of Rome and had the endorsement of the Freemasons before Crispi intervened. The subscription campaign for a statue of Voltaire in Paris, which began in 1867, was led by Léonor-Joseph Havin, a republican anticlerical politician and journalist. A stroll through central London will quickly produce examples of other group initiatives, with the evidence coming from inscriptions on the pedestals. In Waterloo Place, for instance, a plaque describes the statue of Field Marshal John Fox Burgoyne as having been “erected by his brother officers of the Royal Engineers.” The statue of the explorer Robert Scott, better known as “Scott of the Antarctic,” was “erected by officers of the fleet” and that of John Lawrence, Viceroy of India, “by his fellow subjects, British and Indian” (it would be interesting to know which Indians gave their rupees to this cause). 29

If art expresses attitudes to political events, historians need to discover whose attitudes they are. More generally, the half-century from 1969 to 2019 has seen a major shift in the social history of art, away from viewing images as an expression or even a “reflection” of society (as Marxists like Arnold Hauser used to say) and toward viewing them as powerful in their own right. The titles of many important studies symbolize this shift in orientation. 30

The concern with power is linked to an emphasis on action. Boime discussed both the inauguration and destruction of monuments as patently political acts. Bredekamp recently produced an essay about the theory of the pictorial act. The interest in action is visible in other disciplines, too. Skinner’s notion of the “speech act” was borrowed from philosophy and linguistics to intellectual history. In the study of literature, the “literary act” has become a center of interest. In anthropology, Gell’s Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory (Oxford, 1998) has become a classic. Rejecting alternative approaches to the anthropology of art, Gell attributed agency to inanimate objects. His book is concerned with abstract patterns as well as with human or animal figures and with the modern world as well as with the traditional societies traditionally studied by anthropologists. 31

The masks and totem poles with which anthropologists have often been concerned are certainly objects, but are they “art”? The question prompts a much more general one: What is art? Warburg, a pioneer of Kulturwissenschaft (“Cultural Studies,” but in a wider sense than the term is currently employed in the Anglophone world) liked to describe himself not as a historian of art but as a “historian of images” ( Bildhistoriker ). Belting, an art historian—the author of a book on “the anthropology of the image,” another entitled The End of Art History ? and a third on The History of the Image Before the Age of Art —argued that the concept of art did not emerge in Europe until the Renaissance and that it lost its usefulness in the early twentieth century, with the rise of abstract art. 32

Studies of objects in different places raise problems similar to the ones that Belting identifies in different periods. This point is vividly illustrated by the turn to global histories of art, increasingly common in our age of globalization. Take the case of Honour and Fleming’s World History of Art , currently in its seventh edition. My review in 1982 had nothing but praise for its discussion of particular objects from different parts of the world but objected to its attempt to squeeze them all into the culture-bound category of art . I still believe it wiser to restrict the term to such places as ancient Greece and Rome, the post-medieval West, and the other cultures (notably, China and Japan) that Alsop used for comparing and contrasting in Rare Art Traditions (which appeared, coincidentally, in the same year as Honour and Fleming’s book). 33

The growing interest in objects, from ex votos to advertisements, that used to be excluded from the traditional Western canon of “art” has led to the coining of the term visual culture and the rise of visual-culture studies in the universities, in conjunction with, but also in competition with, traditional departments of art history. Generalist historians have their place in visual-culture studies, alongside students of fashion, the media, and popular culture, but their interaction with these groups is a different story from the one told in this article.

The interest in objects that art historians—or, should we say, “former art historians”?—excluded from the canon has encouraged a certain convergence with plain historians in the last half-century. So has the practice of viewing objects, whether “art” or not, as cultural or ideological constructs or representations. Notwithstanding the lecture entitled “The Rise and Fall of the Social History of Art” that Allan Langdale delivered at the Getty Institute in 1996, the social history of art appears to be alive and well, and its practitioners continue to innovate. 34

Compared with the days of Antal and Hauser, the menu of questions asked by social historians of art has become much longer and more various. For example, the central question to which Honig responded in her book on Antwerp concerned “conjunctions between economic thought and pictorial thought.” O’Malley, provoked or inspired by Goldthwaite’s argument that the demand for art in Italy was on the rise in the fifteenth century, studied the way in which artists responded to this pressure. Turning from economics to politics, a number of studies have examined the use of royal portraits as gifts between princes or as symbols of loyalty on the walls of courtiers and commoners. 35

Nonetheless, despite many examples of dialogue and collaboration between generalist historians and art historians in the half-century under discussion, a simple image of consensus would be misleading. Open conflicts have been rare (among the exceptions to the norm was the dispute at Harvard University in the 1980s between Clark, a proponent of the social and political history of art, and Freedberg, a traditional, “pure” art historian who specialized on Italian Renaissance painting). More common have been what were described in 1986 as “the difficulties of drawing art and history together.” A review by Davis, an art historian, criticized Duby’s trilogy on art and society in the Middle Ages for “serious omissions and solecisms” in the course of his effort to “synchronize changes in art with changes in society.” Other art historians are, or at least used to be, ill at ease with quantitative methods. When, at a conference held in 1987, van der Woude offered his calculations of the total number and value of Dutch paintings during the Republic, some art historians thought that this project was nothing but “hocus pocus.” No wonder that one of the editors of the conference proceedings described the two disciplines as “driving in opposite directions down a common street.” 36

Scholars in the two disciplines still work with “distinct sets of priorities.” Art historians study objects primarily for their own sake, whereas generalist historians view them as sources. Using works of art, or images in general, as a form of evidence about the past like official documents and other texts has gradually become part of what might be called “normal history,” especially since the 1980s. A collective example of the importance of this “visual turn” on the part of generalist historians is the series, “Picturing History,” founded by Michael Leaman of Reaktion Books in 1997, which presents itself as “a new kind of historical writing in which images form an integral part.” It has now reached twenty-seven volumes, ranging from “The Feminine Ideal” to “Picturing Tropical Nature” or “The Devil.” The authors draw from the evidence of images to discuss problems of cultural, social, political, or economic history, paying particular attention to long-lasting stereotypes of foreigners, women, witches, Jews, and Catholics. 37

Yet, some art historians exhibit various degrees of discomfort with the idea of treating art as evidence, as if to do so (bracketing the question of the quality of a particular item) is to desecrate it. A sophisticated expression of this reaction comes from Baxandall’s Painting and Experience: A Primer in the Social History of Pictorial Style (New York, 1972), itself a landmark in the process of convergence discussed in this article. Training his sights on Marxist historians such as Hauser, whose Social History of Art (New York, 1951) presented art as a reflection of social trends, and Antal, who associated particular styles of art with social classes, Baxandall decried “the philistine level of the illustrated social history” on the lookout for illustrations of “a Renaissance merchant riding to market” and so on, as well as “facile equations between ‘burgess’ or ‘aristocratic’ milieux on the one side and ‘realist’ or ‘idealizing’ styles on the other.” His point is well taken, even if some works of art were originally intended as illustrations, including what the Spaniards call costumbrista paintings, presenting the manners and customs of particular cultures. 38

Nearly a half-century later, neither generalist nor art historians have taken the promising approach that Baxandall advocated and exemplified in 1972 as far as it might reach. Baxandall’s approach is exemplified in his treatment of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century German limewood sculpture, including the practices of calligraphy as well as Mastersong (evincing a “period ear” in parallel to a “period eye”). Again, Alpers placed seventeenth-century Dutch art in a context of a “visual culture” that included the practice of mapmaking, bringing painting and cartography together under the rubric “the art of describing.”

The idea of a visual habitus, influenced by the experiences and practices with which both artists and their public are best acquainted, should not be confined to early modern Europe (although, given the gradual fragmentation of culture since the fifteenth century, it may be advisable to think of period eye in the plural). Today, we might do well to approach early twentieth-century art in this way. Cubism and Futurism, for example, could be linked to the practice of photography, to the cinema, and to the recurrent experience of rapid motion by train or plane, successive views coming from a variety of different angles, including from above. Despite the increasing number of publications that link art and history, the opportunities for interdisciplinary work in this field are far from exhausted.

Jonathan Brown and John H. Elliott, A Palace for a King: The Buen Retiro and the Court of Philip IV (New Haven, 1980). Another collaboration that same year was Loren Partridge and Randolph Starn, A Renaissance Likeness: Art and Culture in Raphael’s Julius II (Berkeley, 1980). Theodore K. Rabb and Robert Rotberg (eds.), Art and History: Images and Their Meaning (New York, 1988), which was first a special issue, “The Evidence of Art: Images and Meaning in History,” JIH , XXXVII (1986), 1–310; Bridget Heal and Joseph L. Koerner (eds.), the special issue, “Art and Religious Reform in Early Modern Europe,” Art History , XL (2018), 240–455; Heal, “Art and Religious Reform in Early Modern Europe,” in idem and Koerner (eds.), Art and History , 12. JIH ’s special issue derived from a conference. So did Freedberg and de Vries (eds.), Art in History: History in Art: Studies in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Culture (Chicago, 1991), “dedicated to advancing the dialogue” between history and art history. John Barrell, The Dark Side of the Landscape: The Rural Poor in English Painting, 1730–1840 (New York, 1980); Michael Montias, Artists and Artisans in Delft: A Socio-Economic Study of the Seventeenth Century (Princeton, 1982); Joseph Alsop, The Rare Art Traditions: The History of Art Collecting (London, 1982); Bram Kempers (trans. Beverley Jackson), Painting, Power and Patronage: The Rise of the Professional Artist in Renaissance Italy (London, 1992; orig. pub. 1987); Alfred Gell, Art and Agency (New York, 1998); David Matless, Landscape and Englishness (London, 2001).

Irmline Veit-Brause, “The Disciplining of History,” in Rolf Torstendahl and Veit-Brause (eds.), History-Making: The Intellectual and Social Formation of a Discipline (Stockholm, 1996), 7–30; Heinrich Dilly, Kunstgeschichte als Institution: Studien zur Geschichte e. Disziplin (Frankfurt, 1979); Wolfgang Beyrodt, “Kunstgeschichte als Universitätsfach,” in Peter F. Ganz (ed.), Kunst und Kunsttheorie: 1400–1900 (Wiesbaden, 1991), 313–333.

Huizinga (trans. Fritz Hopman), The Waning of the Middle Ages (London, 1924), orig. pub. in Dutch as Herfsttij der Middeleeuwen (Amsterdam, 1919). The original title, Autumn of the Middle Ages , was used in the second (fuller) English version (trans. Rodney J. Payton and Ulrich Mammitzsch, Chicago, 1996).

Nicolai Rubinstein, “Political Ideas in Sienese Art: The Frescoes by Ambrogio Lorenzetti and Taddeo di Bartolo in the Palazzo Pubblico,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes , XXI (1958), 179–207.

Baxandall, Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy: A Primer in the Social History of Pictorial Style (New York, 1972); Clark, Image of the People: Gustave Courbet and the 1848 Revolution (London, 1973); Bredekamp, Kunst als Medium soziale Konflikte: Bilderkämpfe von d. Spätantike bis z. Hussitenrevolution (Frankfurt am Main, 1975); Boehm, Bildnis und Individuum (Munich, 1985); Burke, “The Presentation of Self in the Renaissance Portrait,” in Historical Anthropology of Early Modern Italy (New York, 1987), 150–167; Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (New York, 1959); Ann J. Adams, Public Faces, Private Identities: Portraiture and the Production of Identity in 17 th -Century Holland (New York, 1998); Warnke, Politische Landschaft: zur Kunstgeschichte der Natur (Munich, 1992); Stephen Daniels, Fields of Vision: Landscape Imagery and National Identity in England and the United States (New York,1993); Elizabeth K. Helsinger, Rural Scenes and National Representation: Britain 1815–1850 (Princeton, 1997); Matless, Landscape and Englishness . At this time, social historians began to incorporate architecture into their studies. We omit this perspective from the discussion for lack of space, but pioneering works in this vein include Warnke, Bau und Überbau: Soziologie der mittelalterlichen Architektur nach den Schriftquellen (Frankfurt am Main, 1976); Mark Girouard, Life in the English Country House: A Social and Architectural History (New Haven, 1978).

Lucien Febvre (ed. and trans. Marian Rothstein), Life in Renaissance France (Cambridge, Mass., 1977); Fernand Braudel (trans. Sian Reynolds), Out of Italy 1450–1650 (Ann Arbor, 2008; orig. pub. 1991).

Agulhon, Marianne au combat: l’imagerie et la symbolique républicaines de 1789 à 1880 (Paris, 1979); Brown and Elliott, Palace ; Partridge and Starn, Renaissance Likeness ; Ginzburg, Indagini su Piero: il Battesimo, il ciclo di Arezzo, la Flagellazione di Urbino (Turin, 1981); Robert W. Scribner, For the Sake of Simple Folk: Popular Propaganda for the German Reformation (New York, 1981).

Frederick Antal, Florentine Painting and Its Social Background (London, 1947); F. William Kent and Patricia Simons (eds.), Patronage, Art and Society in Renaissance Italy (Oxford, 1987); Mary Hollingsworth, Patronage in Renaissance Italy (London, 1994); Dale Kent, Cosimo de’Medici and the Florentine Renaissance: The Patron’s Oeuvre (New Haven, 2000); Jill Burke, Changing Patrons: Social Identity and the Visual Arts in Renaissance Florence (University Park, 2004); Michelle O’Malley, The Business of Art: Contracts and the Commissioning Process in Renaissance Italy (New Haven, 2005); Guy F. Lytle and Stephen Orgel (eds.), Patronage in the Renaissance (Princeton, 1981).

The scholarly concentration of studies on the sixteenth century include, besides the studies cited in the following paragraph, Hans-Dietrich Altendorf (ed.), Bilderstreit (Zurich, 1984); Carlos Eire, War against the Idols (New York, 1986); Margaret Aston, England’s Iconoclasts (New York, 1988); Michalski, The Reformation and the Visual Arts: The Protestant Image Question in Western and Eastern Europe (New York, 1993; orig. pub. 1989); Scribner (ed.), Bilder und Bildersturm (Wiesbaden, 1990); Gruzinski, La guerre des images (Paris, 1990); Olivier Christin, Une révolution symbolique: l’iconoclasme Huguenot et la reconstruction catholique (Paris, 1991); Lee P. Wandel, Voracious Idols and Violent Hands: Iconoclasm in Reformation Zürich, Strasbourg and Basel (New York, 1995).

Koerner, “Afterword,” in Heal and idem (eds.), Art and Religious Reform , 216.

Solange Deyon and Alain Lottin, Les casseurs de l’été 1566: l’iconoclasme dans le Nord de la France (Paris, 1981); Christin, Une révolution symbolique , also stresses purification. Hermann Heimpel, Der Mensch in seiner Gegenwart (Göttingen, 1954), 134.

Freedberg, The Power of Images: Studies in the History and Theory of Response (Chicago, 1989), 390, 388; Koerner, The Reformation of the Image (London, 2004), 153–168.

Andrew Morrall, “The Family at Table: Protestant Identity, Self-Representation and the Limits of the Visual in Seventeenth-Century Zurich,” in Heal and Koerner (eds.), Art and Religious Reform , 336–357. For this argument about the ban, which goes back at least as far as the nineteenth-century Dutch minister (and Prime Minister) Abraham Kuyper, see Seymour Slive, “Notes on the Relationship of Protestantism to Seventeenth-Century Dutch Painting,” Art Quarterly , XIX (1956), 2–15.

Scribner, For the Sake of Simple Folk ; Keith Moxey, Peasants, Warriors and Wives: Popular Imagery in the Reformation (Chicago, 1989), 8–9.

Romeo De Maio, Michelangelo e la Controriforma (Rome, 1978); idem , Pittura e Controriforma a Napoli (Rome, 1983); Gruzinski, La guerre des images ; Rudolf Wittkower and Irma B. Jaffé (eds.), Baroque Art: The Jesuit Contribution (New York, 1972); Evonne Levy, Propaganda and the Jesuit Baroque (Berkeley, 2004).

Baxandall, Painting and Experience , 1.

Maximilian P. J. Martens, “Some Aspects of the Origins of the Art Market in Fifteenth-Century Bruges,” in Michael North and David Ormrod (eds.), Art Markets in Europe, 1400–1800 (Aldershot, 1998), 26. See also Lorne Campbell, “The Art Market in the Southern Netherlands in the Fifteenth Century,” Burlington Magazine , 118 (1976), 188–198. Elizabeth A. Honig, Painting and the Market in Early Modern Antwerp (New Haven, 1998), 13–18; Paolo Coen, Il mercato dei quadri a Roma nel diciottesimo secolo (Florence, 2010); David Ormrod, “The Origins of the London Art Market,” in Michael North and idem (eds.), Art Markets in Europe, 1400–1800 (New York, 1998), 167–186; Antoine Schnapper, “Probate Inventories, Public Sales and the Parisian Art Market,” ibid. , 131–142.

Michael Montias, Artists and Artisans , 220, 327; Ad van der Woude, “The Volume and Value of Paintings in Holland at the Time of the Dutch Republic,” in Freedberg and de Vries (eds.), Art in History , 285–372.

Classic studies in this field include Krzysztof Pomian (trans. Elizabeth Wiles-Portier), Collectors and Curiosities: Paris and Venice 1500–1800 (Oxford, 1990; orig. pub. 1987); Jaś Elsner and Roger Cardinal (eds.), The Cultures of Collecting (London, 1994); Brown, Kings and Connoisseurs: Collecting Art in 17 th -Century Europe (New Haven, 1995). For the pathology, see Werner Muensterberger, Collecting, an Unruly Passion: Psychological Perspectives (Princeton, 1994).

Montias, Artists and Artisans , 183–219; Alsop, Rare Art Traditions ; Thomas Crowe, Painters and Public Life in Eighteenth-Century Paris (New Haven, 1985).

Alpers, Rembrandt’s Enterprise: The Studio and the Market (Chicago, 1995).

Annalisa Guarducci (ed.), Investimenti e civiltà urbana, secoli xiii–xviii (Florence, 1989); Richard Goldthwaite, Wealth and the Demand for Art in Italy, 1300–1600 (Baltimore, 1993); de Vries, “Art History” in Freedberg and idem (eds.), Art in History , 255.

Quentin Skinner, “Ambrogio Lorenzetti: The Artist as Political Philosopher,” Proceedings of the British Academy , LXXII (1987), 1–58 (a reply to Rubinstein’s “Political Ideas in Sienese Art”); Boucheron (trans. Andrew Brown), The Power of Images (New York, 2018; orig. pub 2013). For an intervention by an art historian, see Enrico Castelnuovo, Ambrogio Lorenzetti: Il buon governo (Milan, 1995). Dino Biondi, La fabbrica del duce (Florence, 1967); Zanker (trans. Alan Shapiro), The Power of Images in the Age of Augustus (Ann Arbor, 1990; orig. pub. 1987); Burke, The Fabrication of Louis XIV (New Haven, 1992); Larry Silver, Marketing Maximilian: The Visual Ideology of a Holy Roman Emperor (Princeton, 2008); Kevin Sharpe, Selling the Tudor Monarchy: Authority and Image in Sixteenth-Century England (New Haven, 2009); Henk van Veen, “Art and Propaganda in Late Renaissance and Baroque Florence,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes , XLVII (1984), 106–118; Levy, Propaganda and the Jesuit Baroque .

Agulhon, “La ‘statuomanie’ et l’histoire,” Ethnologie française , VIII (1978), 145–172; Boime, Hollow Icons: the Politics of Sculpture in 19 th -Century France (Kent, Ohio, 1987); Lars Berggren and Lennart Sjöstedt, L’ombra dei grandi: monumenti e politica monumentale a Roma, 1870–1895 (Rome, 1996); Michalski, Public Monuments: Art in Political Bondage, 1870–1997 (London, 1998).

Dario Gamboni, The Destruction of Art: Iconoclasm and Vandalism since the French Revolution (London, 1996); Ian McBride, “Memory and National Identity in Modern Ireland,” in idem (ed.), History and Memory in Modern Ireland (New York, 2001), 2n.

Albert Boime, The Unveiling of the National Icons (New York, 1998); Hans A. Pohlsander, National Monuments and Nationalism in 19 th Century Germany (New York, 2008).

Kirk Savage, “The Politics of Memory: Black Emancipation and the Civil War Monument,” in John R Gillis (ed.), Commemorations: The Politics of National Identity (Princeton, 1994), 135; Boime, Hollow Icons , 4; Michalski, Public Monuments , 13–55.

Holger Hoock, Empires of the Imagination: Politics, War and the Arts in the British World, 1750–1850 (London, 2010), 44; Lars Berggren, Giordano Bruno på Campo dei Fiori; Ett monument projekt i Rom, 1876–1889 (Lund, 1991).

Jean-Marie Goulemot and Eric Walter, “Les centenaires de Voltaire et de Rousseau,” in Pierre Nora (ed.), Lieux de Mémoire (Paris, 1984), I, 381–420.

Zanker, Power of Images in the Age of Augustus ; Freedberg, Power of Images ; Boucheron, Power of Images (translating the French subtitle, “essai sur la force politique des images”).

Boime, Hollow Icons , 13; Bredekamp, Theorie des Bildakts (Frankfurt, 2010); Quentin Skinner, “Conventions and the Understanding of Speech Acts,” Philosophical Quarterly , XX (1970), 118–138.

Hans Belting (trans. Thomas Dunlap), An Anthropology of Images: Picture, Medium, Body (Princeton, 2011, orig. pub. 2002); idem (trans. Christopher S. Wood), The End of the History of Art? (Chicago, 1987; orig. pub. 1985); idem (trans. Edmund Jephcott), Likeness and Presence: A History of the Image before the Era of Art (Chicago, 1997; orig. pub. 1990).

Hugh Honour and John Fleming, A World History of Art (London, 1982); Burke, “A World History of What?” Art History , VI (1983), 214–217; Alsop, Rare Art Traditions . For art in East Asia, see Craig Clunas, Chinese Painting and Its Audiences (Princeton 2017); Timon Screech, Obtaining Images: Art, Production and Display in Edo Japan (Honolulu, 2012).

Moxey, Peasants, Warriors and Wives , 6–7.

Honig, Painting and the Market , ix; O’Malley, Painting under Pressure: Fame, Reputation and Demand in Renaissance Florence (New Haven, 2013). For the use of royal portraits, see Rouven Pons, Die Kunst der Loyalität: Ludwig VIII von Hessen-Darmstadt (1691–1768) und der Wiener Kaiserhof (Marburg, 2009).

Rabb and Brown, “The Evidence of Art,” in Rabb and Rotberg, Art and History , 1–6; Michael T. Davis, review of Georges Duby (trans. Eleanor Levieux and Barbara Thompson), The Age of the Cathedrals: Art and Society, 980–1420 , Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians , XLI (1982), 156–158; van der Woude, “Volume and Value.” For the hostile reaction, see Marten Jan Bok, “Pricing the Unpriced,” in North and Ormrod (eds.), Markets for Art , 103. When I was at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton in 1967, however, the distinguished art historian Millard Meiss supported my attempt to measure the rise of secular paintings in Renaissance Italy via a list of the dated paintings surviving from that period. De Vries, “Introduction,” in Freedberg and idem (eds.), Art in History , 5.

Rabb and Brown, “Evidence of Art.”

Baxandall, Painting and Experience , 152.

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History of Art 8521: Medium/ Materiality: Concepts and Case Studies

This seminar will address two interrelated issues, medium and materiality. Although art historians have always been interested in the former, and continue to explore the properties and meanings of the same, a new interest in the materiality of works of art, understood as the agency of particular materials (including the presumed role the medium plays in dialogue with its human manipulator), has more recently emerged within the discipline. This class will be an occasion to consider both approaches and the inevitable grey areas that range between them, not to mention materiality’s detractors. Grounding itself in conceptual work first, it will thereafter offer a sense of the field’s terrain through the reading of case studies, focusing on what might be seen as certain materiality flash points (including medieval, early modern, 19th century, and contemporary art), and a number of primary material substances (especially painting, sculpture, and photography). Ultimately, this seminar will seek to understand how we can conceive of medium and materiality as productive ways of studying artworks of all kinds from all eras. 

AU2021 Professor Christian Kleinbub Class #34110 Hybrid: Weds. 2:15-5:00

Chilean Artists – A Case Study for the Colonial and Traditional

Chile has a rich artistic heritage that encompasses a diverse range of styles and influences. From Surrealism to Abstract Expressionism, Chilean artists have made significant contributions to the global art scene. This article explores some of the top Chilean artists whose works have captivated audiences with their creativity, cultural insights, and innovative techniques. Discover the stories behind the masterpieces of these talented individuals and gain a deeper appreciation for the vibrant artistic landscape of Chile.

Table of Contents

• 1 The Development of Art in Chile
• 2.1 Pedro Lira (1845 – 1912) 
• 2.2 Juan Francisco González (1868 – 1937)
• 2.3 Roberto Matta (1911 – 2002) 
• 2.4 Nemesio Antúnez (1918 – 1993) 
• 2.5 Gracia Barrios (1927 – 2020) 
• 2.6 Claudio Bravo (1936 – 2011)
• 2.7 Guillermo Núñez (1938 – 2013) 
• 2.8 Francisco Zañartu (1944 – 2014) 
• 2.9 Cecilia Vicuña (Born 1948)
• 2.10 Alfredo Jaar (Born 1956) 
• 3.1 What Are Some Common Themes Found in the Artworks of Chilean Artists?
• 3.2 How Did Chilean Artists Contribute to the Global Art Scene?
• 3.3 What Impact Do These Chilean Artists Have on the Cultural Heritage of Chile?

The Development of Art in Chile

Art in Chile has evolved dynamically, influenced by a rich tapestry of historical, cultural, and political factors. During the colonial period, art primarily served religious and colonial interests, with European styles dominating the scene. However, in the 19th century, a burgeoning sense of national identity sparked a renaissance in Chilean art, characterized by the emergence of notable painters like Pedro Lira and Juan Francisco González. This period marked a shift towards depicting local landscapes, traditions, and social issues, laying the foundation for a distinct Chilean artistic voice.

The 20th century witnessed further diversification and experimentation in Chilean art, with artists like Roberto Matta gaining international acclaim for their surrealistic visions. The interplay of indigenous art forms, modernist movements, and political upheavals, such as the influence of the Allende era and the subsequent Pinochet regime, contributed to a dynamic and multifaceted art scene.

Today, Chilean artists continue to explore diverse themes and mediums, embracing innovation while honoring their cultural heritage, making Chile a vibrant hub for artistic expression in Latin America and beyond.

Top 10 Chilean Artists to Know

Explore the top 10 Chilean artists whose distinct styles and thematic explorations have shaped the country’s art scene and resonated globally. From Pedro Lira’s realism to Roberto Matta’s surrealism, delve into their diverse artistic journeys, innovative techniques, and profound insights reflecting Chilean culture and history. Discover how these artists evoke powerful emotions and contribute to the vibrant tapestry of Chilean artistry.

Pedro Lira (1845 – 1912) 

Pedro Lira was a pivotal figure in Chilean art, known for his contributions to realism and romanticism. His career began with formal training in Europe, where he absorbed the techniques of the European masters. Upon returning to Chile, Lira became a prominent figure in the country’s art scene, advocating for realism and depicting Chilean landscapes and society with a keen eye for detail and emotion. Notable works by Lira include La Morgue , a haunting portrayal of a morgue scene that reflects his interest in social issues and human suffering.

Lira’s legacy includes his role in founding the Chilean National Museum of Fine Arts and his influence on subsequent generations of Chilean artists.

Juan Francisco González (1868 – 1937)

Juan Francisco González was a significant figure in Chilean art, known for his naturalistic and symbolic paintings that captured the essence of Chilean life. His career began with studies in Santiago and later took him to Paris, where he was exposed to impressionism and symbolism, influencing his artistic style. González’s works often depicted rural scenes, indigenous themes, and everyday life in Chile, reflecting his deep connection to his homeland. Notable works by González include La Siesta , a serene depiction of rural life, and El Alba , which symbolizes hope and renewal.

His legacy includes contributing to the development of Chilean art and inspiring future generations of artists. 

Roberto Matta (1911 – 2002) 

Roberto Matta was a Chilean surrealist painter known for his dream-like imagery and exploration of the subconscious mind. His career began in architecture before transitioning to painting, and he eventually joined the Surrealist movement in Paris, where he collaborated with artists like Salvador Dalí and André Breton. Matta’s artworks often featured distorted figures, intricate landscapes, and cosmic themes, reflecting his interest in psychology, mysticism, and the human condition. Notable works by Matta include T he Earth Is a Man , a surrealistic masterpiece that combines organic forms with symbolic elements.

His influence extended beyond painting, as he also worked in sculpture and conceptual art, leaving a lasting impact on the global art scene.

Nemesio Antúnez (1918 – 1993) 

Nemesio Antúnez was a versatile Chilean artist known for his contributions to muralism, printmaking, and painting. His career began with studies at the School of Fine Arts in Santiago, where he later became a professor and director. Antúnez’s artworks often depicted themes of social justice, human rights, and Chilean culture, reflecting his commitment to using art as a tool for societal change. Notable works by Antúnez include his murals at the University of Concepción, which celebrate Chilean history and heritage. He was also involved in printmaking, creating graphic works that showcased his technical skill and creative vision.

Antúnez’s legacy includes his influence on Chilean muralism and his role in shaping the country’s artistic discourse.

Gracia Barrios (1927 – 2020) 

Gracia Barrios was a celebrated Chilean artist known for her expressive and colorful paintings that captured the essence of Chilean life and culture. Her career began with studies at the University of Chile’s School of Fine Arts, where she developed her unique style influenced by cubism and surrealism. Barrios’s artworks often explored themes of social justice, feminism, and the human experience, reflecting her engagement with political and social issues in Chile. Notable works by Barrios include Memoria de un Pueblo , a series of paintings depicting the collective memory of Chilean society.

She was also known for her involvement in the cultural scene, contributing to exhibitions and initiatives that promoted art as a vehicle for social change.

Claudio Bravo (1936 – 2011)

Claudio Bravo was a Chilean hyperrealist painter known for his meticulous attention to detail and stunning portrayals of still life, portraits, and landscapes. His career began with studies in Santiago before he gained recognition for his hyperrealistic style in the 1960s. Bravo’s artworks often featured everyday objects rendered with astonishing realism, capturing light, texture, and form in a way that blurred the line between reality and illusion. Notable works by Bravo include his series of hyperrealistic portraits and his captivating depictions of fabrics and draperies.

He gained international acclaim for his technical mastery and became one of the leading figures in hyperrealism during his lifetime.

Guillermo Núñez (1938 – 2013) 

Guillermo Núñez was a prominent Chilean artist known for his contributions to abstract art, geometric compositions, and minimalist aesthetics. His career began with studies at the School of Fine Arts in Santiago, where he developed his signature style characterized by clean lines, geometric shapes, and a sense of balance and harmony. Núñez’s artworks often explored themes of space, color relationships, and the interaction between form and structure. Notable works by Núñez include his series of geometric abstractions and his exploration of color theory through minimalistic compositions.

He was recognized for his technical precision and conceptual depth, contributing to the evolution of abstract art in Chile.

Francisco Zañartu (1944 – 2014) 

Francisco Zañartu was a contemporary Chilean artist known for his innovative use of materials and exploration of themes related to identity, globalization, and cultural exchange. His career began with studies in Santiago, followed by international experiences that influenced his artistic vision. Zañartu’s artworks often combined traditional techniques with modern materials, creating hybrid forms that reflected the complexities of contemporary society. Notable works by Zañartu include his installations, sculptures, and mixed-media pieces that provoke thought and dialogue about cultural diversity and interconnectedness.

He was known for pushing boundaries and challenging conventional artistic norms, making him a notable figure in Chilean contemporary art.

Cecilia Vicuña (Born 1948)

Cecilia Vicuña is a Chilean multidisciplinary artist known for her work in poetry, visual arts, performance, and activism. Her career began with studies in Santiago and later took her to New York, where she became involved in the avant-garde art scene of the 1960s and 1970s. Vicuña’s artworks often explore themes of indigenous culture, environmentalism, and social justice, using a variety of mediums to express her ideas and beliefs. Notable works by Vicuña include her “quipus,” a series of installations and sculptures inspired by ancient Andean knotting techniques, and her poetry performances that blend language, sound, and movement.

She is recognized for her innovative approach to art and her commitment to advocating for marginalized communities and ecological awareness.

Alfredo Jaar (Born 1956) 

Alfredo Jaar is a Chilean artist, architect, and filmmaker known for his conceptual artworks that address social, political, and humanitarian issues. His career began with studies in architecture before he shifted his focus to art, gaining recognition for his thought-provoking installations, interventions, and public art projects. Jaar’s artworks often confront viewers with uncomfortable truths, challenging perceptions and raising awareness about global injustices and human rights violations. Notable works by Jaar include The Rwanda Project , an immersive installation that memorializes the Rwandan genocide, and The Garden of Good and Evil , which explores the complexities of power and corruption.

He is known for his use of multimedia and his ability to engage audiences in critical dialogues about pressing societal issues.

The top Chilean artists featured in this article showcase the country’s artistic prowess and cultural richness. From the surreal landscapes of Roberto Matta to the abstract compositions of Claudio Bravo, each artist has left an indelible mark on the art world. Through their unique perspectives and innovative approaches, these artists have not only reflected Chilean identity but also contributed significantly to the global dialogue on art and creativity. Their legacy continues to inspire and resonate with art enthusiasts worldwide, solidifying Chile’s position as a hub of artistic excellence.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are some common themes found in the artworks of chilean artists.

Common themes in the artworks of Chilean artists include reflections on Chilean landscapes, indigenous culture, social justice, political upheavals, identity, globalization, and environmental issues. These themes often serve as inspirations for artists to explore and express their perspectives through various artistic mediums.

How Did Chilean Artists Contribute to the Global Art Scene?

Chilean artists have made significant contributions to the global art scene through their unique styles, innovative techniques, and thought-provoking concepts. Their artworks have been exhibited internationally, gaining recognition and influencing artistic discourse on a global scale.

What Impact Do These Chilean Artists Have on the Cultural Heritage of Chile?

These Chilean artists have had a profound impact on the cultural heritage of Chile by contributing to the development of distinct artistic movements, preserving and promoting Chilean history and traditions through their artworks, and inspiring future generations of artists to explore their own cultural identities and artistic visions.

Isabella studied at the University of Cape Town in South Africa and graduated with a Bachelor of Arts majoring in English Literature & Language and Psychology. Throughout her undergraduate years, she took Art History as an additional subject and absolutely loved it. Building on from her art history knowledge that began in high school, art has always been a particular area of fascination for her. From learning about artworks previously unknown to her, or sharpening her existing understanding of specific works, the ability to continue learning within this interesting sphere excites her greatly.

Her focal points of interest in art history encompass profiling specific artists and art movements, as it is these areas where she is able to really dig deep into the rich narrative of the art world. Additionally, she particularly enjoys exploring the different artistic styles of the 20 th century, as well as the important impact that female artists have had on the development of art history.

Learn more about Isabella Meyer and the Art in Context Team .

Cite this Article

Isabella, Meyer, “Chilean Artists – A Case Study for the Colonial and Traditional.” Art in Context. April 3, 2024. URL: https://artincontext.org/chilean-artists/

Meyer, I. (2024, 3 April). Chilean Artists – A Case Study for the Colonial and Traditional. Art in Context. https://artincontext.org/chilean-artists/

Meyer, Isabella. “Chilean Artists – A Case Study for the Colonial and Traditional.” Art in Context , April 3, 2024. https://artincontext.org/chilean-artists/ .

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How to Teach Yourself Art History (A 9-Step Roadmap)

Whether it’s to have more fun at art museums, to become a self-taught artist, or something in-between, self-studying art history is a viable way to achieve your goal. 

There are countless resources, online courses, and books available to you. As long as you have the curiosity and discipline, you can learn the subject without teachers or expensive programs. 

This roadmap is designed to introduce you to these resources, and to give you a systematic, step-by-step approach to teaching yourself art history from scratch.  

Below is a preview of the nine steps for self-learning art history:

• Take an Art History 101 Online Course
• Read The Story of Art to Survey the Field
• Take 2-3 Beginner Art History Courses
• Learn How to Analyze and Write About Art 
• Study Art History Chronologically (or Backwards)
• Do a Special Artist Project
• Start Attending Art Galleries and Museums
• Use Online Resources like Podcasts and Apps
• Consider Self-Learning a Visual Art 

Before getting into the steps, I want to quickly make some recommendations about how to view and use this guide. 

A Quick Note on How to Think About This Roadmap

This is by no means the only approach to self-studying art history. It’s how I — a mere beginner in art history with a passion for creating systematic self-education roadmaps — would go about getting a solid foundation in the subject. 

You can follow it step-by-step. The steps do build on each other. But you can also do the steps you want to do and exclude the ones you don’t. You can also cherry pick some ideas and put them into your own self-directed learning plan. 

That said, I suggest taking what I or anyone else says with a grain of salt when it comes to what you should learn about. In the end, it’s your personal curiosity that should have the final say. 

Following it will lead to an exciting life of the mind and consistent growth towards self-actualization. 

That said, let’s jump into the steps to self-learning art history as a beginner. 

1. Take an Online Art History 101 Course

An Art history 101 class will teach you how to look at, appreciate, and describe a piece of artwork. 

It’ll teach you the language of art — lines, shapes, form, color, depth, shadow, contrast, etc., — which you can use to describe and analyze pieces of art. 

The best free online course I’ve found for getting your bearings in art history is Khan Academy’s Art History . 

The course is broken into five units, each of which contains several lessons, as shown below: 

Khan Academy also offers  College /AP Art History . It’s longer and discusses hundreds of paintings, sculptures, and architectural works across 3,000 years of history and various cultures. 

Both of these courses are great places to start your self-education journey in art history. Either one will give you the basics you need to succeed in the following steps. 

2. Grab a Copy of Gombrich’s The Story of Art

The Story of Art is the classic go-to guide for beginners who want to give themselves a strong foundational education in art history. 

The book takes you on a journey through 3,000 years of artistry to learn about some of the most influential pieces of art ever created, a category that the books cover definitely doesn’t fall into:

Written by an Art Historian with a knack for popularizing the field, the book contains to-the-point, insightful writing. Gombrich emphasizes plain language over specialized jargon, so it’s easy to understand his analyses. 

He outlines the purpose of his book in the preface: 

“This book is intended for all who feel in need of some first orientation in a strange and fascinating field. It wants to show the newcomer the lie of the land without confusing him with details; it hopes to bring him some intelligible order into the wealth of names, periods, and styles which crowd the pages of more ambitious works, and so equip him for consulting more specialized books.” — E.H. Gombrich, The Story of Art

As a survey text, it’ll help you figure out which periods and movements are most interesting to you, so that you can go off and study them more in-depth. 

Pro Tip: Sometimes when viewing fine art I’ll put on a piece of my favorite classical music to really get me in the mood. The combined power of the two art forms rarely fails to move me in some way. If you want to get into classical music alongside art history, check out this classical music self education roadmap .

3. Take a Few Beginner-Level Art History Courses Online

An Art History student, at say Yale ( syllabus example shown below), may spend their first year exploring the huge subject of art history by taking a wide range of Art History courses:

As an autodidact , you get to decide what you want to learn about. There are numerous online art history courses to choose from, and you aren’t bound by any requirements set forth by an institution.

Of course, you are confronted with the problem of finding affordable and quality online courses. But the online learning space is growing and more courses are popping up every day.  

Below are some of the best free online art history courses I found on Coursera: 

• Modern and Contemporary Art & Design : Learn about our time’s major pieces of art and ideas about art. 
• In the Studio: Postwar Abstract Painting : Study some of the greatest postwar works of art and learn about the techniques and materials the artists used. 
• Roman Art and Archeology : Have a thing for the ancient world? Consider learning about some of the most influential works of art and archeology in ancient Rome.

If you happen to be a big fan of Rembrandt, like my grandmother was — I couldn’t for the life of me get her to leave the museum! — you could take Dutch Masters: The Age of Rembrandt . It does cost $339.95 though.

To get it for cheaper, Wondrium does offer a subscription (starting at $6.25 per month) that’ll allow you access to this Rembrandt course and countless others — something worth checking out if high-quality lectures are your thing. 

As for how many courses to take before moving on to the next step, that’s totally your choice, but I’d recommend taking at least two. 

By watching an art expert describe, analyze, and interpret artwork through various lenses, from thematic to technical, you’ll become better at doing it yourself. 

And with those basic skills of art analysis, you’ll get more out of the rest of your self education in art history.  

I know that taking a few courses on English Literature helped me become a more attentive and creative reader. 

Having learned the descriptive vocabulary and key analytical approaches, I was able to more easily spot and think about symbolism, intertextuality, and other elements that would’ve been invisible to me otherwise. 

4. Learn How to Analyze & Write About Art 

Speaking of learning how to read artwork like an expert, here’s a great guide I found to help direct your analysis. 

It’s a list of questions, divided into categories, that you can ask and answer to better understand the artwork in front of you. 

Examples of analysis questions include:

• Is the artwork in an established genre?
• What is this artist typically known for? 
• Are parts of the artwork separated physically? 
• Are there specific light sources in the depicted scene? 
• How does the work make you feel?
• Is there an iconic image in this piece? 

Consider using this guide to help you write about the art pieces you study during the next step. Writing is often the best way to practice analyzing and understanding art work. 

You don’t have to write about every piece you set your eyes on, but doing it for the ones you love or hate the most would be a good rule of thumb. 

For example, I might write about Dali’s The Persistence of Memory (basic, I know) if I were self-studying art history in a serious way. If I was dry on ideas, maybe I’d watch a video like the one below to learn more about the painting: 

Writing about art is also the best way to come to terms with what you think of the piece. We rarely know what we think about something until we force ourselves to sit down and think about it deeply and systematically. 

Writing will allow you also to create an informed, sophisticated, and critical opinion that you can share with others. You can talk about it with friends or even start a blog or YouTube channel where you discuss artwork (a great side hustle). 

5. Study Art History Chronologically (Or Backwards)

Many university students in art history study the subject chronologically, starting in prehistoric times and working their way to the late 20th century. 

They do this within one tradition (Western, for example) so as to see that tradition’s technical and thematic development over thousands of years. They also take brief forays into other traditions as well. 

A reason for studying art history in this fashion is that it helps you spot influence. Artists are often inspired by artists of the past, and artistic movements are often reactions to an earlier art movement, or to the cultural conditions of the day. 

You also gain a profound education in history by working your way through the time periods. You see society change, as well as the art that depicts it.  

Art historians typically divide traditions into periods. For example, the Western tradition alone contains over a dozen periods, each of which you can read about in Invaluable’s Art History Timeline . 

How to Study Art History Chronologically 

To study art history chronologically, I recommend checking out the Art Histories section of SmartHistory’s website. 

They have tons of material about the artwork of various time periods and regions: 

If you were studying Western art chronologically, you could begin with Ancient Mediterranean + Europe section, read all you can about it, then move on to Medieval Europe + Byzantine, as shown below: 

There’s an insane amount of information in each section. Just look at what happens when I expand both the Early Medieval period heading (left hand side of image below) and the England subheading:

The Early Medieval England section alone contains one in-depth article covering the important historical facts of Anglo-Saxon England and 10 other articles detailing famous works, movements, and styles from that place and time, such as the Fibulae or The Utrecht Psalter. 

A great part about being an autodidact is that you can skip around to the periods and places that interest you the most. 

For example, many people might want to spend less time on Medieval art, reading only a few of the articles, but much more time on Renaissance art. 

For the Renaissance period , they might endeavor to read every single article in that section: 

Working through the SmartHistory website in this chronological way, down the headings and subheadings of each section, is an incredible way to learn about great works of art and the history of the world. 

Of course, studying art history from prehistoric times to modern day is a big commitment and takes a long time. It’s best for the learner who thrives under structure. 

Next I’ll cover another approach that might work better for you if this method strikes you as a tad overwhelming. 

How to Study Art History Backwards 

In Professor Lieu’s extremely helpful video on teaching yourself art history, she and her guest recommend using a backwards approach to studying art history: 

The idea is to start with an artist or piece of artwork that you truly love and then to go on an exploration to identify the influences. 

In the video Professor Lieu give the example of H.R. Giger, the artist who designed the alien from the film series Alien: 

If your starting point was something broader, like the cubism movement, you would study it in-depth. 

And then, once you had learned all you wanted to know, you could identify two of its greatest artists (Picasso and Braque) and find their main influences with a quick Google search. 

Whatever their influences are — in this case Cezanne, African art, and Iberian sculpture — those are your next focuses of study. 

You’ll often be stunned at the overlap between the influences and your starting point. 

You can continue like this for some time, until you inevitably reach cave drawings. In your journey down one line of influence you’ll develop a deep understanding of not just your starting point artwork but also all the others that led to its production. 

As you go through this journey to the roots of your starting point, be on the lookout for various types of influence: iconic images, technical influence, and thematic influence. 

I highly recommend watching Professor Lieu’s video to learn more about each of these types of inspiration and how to spot them. 

She also discusses comparing and contrasting artwork to learn more about each respective piece. 

6. Pick an Artist to Study In-Depth 

Consider doing a special artist project with one of the greats. For this project you’ll explore and appreciate their entire body of work. 

For example, you could pick Frida Kahlo (creator of one of my favorite paintings): 

Source: FridaKhalo.org

You could view, read about, and perhaps even write about each of her paintings in chronological order , thus forming a deep understanding of her development as an artist. 

If you really wanted to make this a fun adventure, you could cap off this special artist project with a trip to the Frida Khalo museum in Mexico City. 

Doing a special artist project is an amazing way to become an expert on one of your favorite artists. Here’s a list of the greatest painters of all time if you need some ideas. 

By the end of the project you’ll know a ton about the artist’s life, culture, influences, style, contributions, and most of all, works of art. 

As your understanding of the artist and their body of work sharpens, so will your analytical faculty when it’s directed at any specific piece of their work. 

Background knowledge will enable you to notice more about each piece, and say creative and accurate things about them.

7. Attend Art Galleries and Museums

I know some people who can stand in front of paintings for what feels like hours on my end. They always happen to know a lot about art, or the type that wants to look like they know a lot about art. 

With this in mind, one might say that a key performance indicator for your art knowledge is the level of frustration the average person feels towards you when accompanying you to an art museum. If your date hates you by the end of it, you’re probably on the right path. 

In all seriousness, going to an art museum and finding that you enjoy yourself is a satisfying revelation because it implies that you’ve learned a whole lot about art. 

It also happens to be a great way to support the arts! 

Check online to see if there are any local galleries and head over to one. Most cities have an art museum, so check that out as well. 

Remember that you don’t have to see the whole museum in one visit — a mistake I used to make. You can do it in bits and pieces, one exhibit or floor at a time. 

There are also online galleries and museum tours. 

8. Leverage Online Art History Learning Resources

This is less of a step and more of an ongoing background study activity that supports your main studies.

There are great podcasts, YouTube videos, and apps that can help you learn about art, and it’s worth including a few in your self-directed learning plan. 

You can fit these resources into the nooks and crannies of your day. 

For example, you could check the Daily Art app once a day, which teaches you about one piece of fine art per day:

And then you could listen to The Lonely Palette podcast on your drive to work, and watch a Great Art Explained video at lunch, where an expert does a deep dive of one famous piece of art: 

I do something similar when self-studying English literature . I read a poem from an anthology every night (unless I’m too tired, which happens too often), and a piece of literary criticism every morning. I also try to listen to one literary podcast per week. 

9. Consider Taking up a Visual Art Form

Consider learning an art form. Whether it’s painting, drawing, sculpture, animation, or some other visual art, practicing it will encourage you to learn more about it. You’ll have the drive to improve. 

Plus, participating in art can be a great way to have a lot of fun and to explore your creative side. We all benefit from a creative outlet, through which we can deal with troubling emotions or the need to express ourselves. 

There are plenty of online courses and platforms that’ll help you learn your chosen art form. You can find a ton of classes on the skill-learning platform Skillshare . 

For example, here are some painting and drawing classes:

Skillshare offers a free one-month trial. After that, it costs $168 per year. With that subscription, you’ll gain access to over their 27,000 high-quality courses that’ll help you build creative skills. 

Follow Your Curiosity & Keep Learning

Art history is a huge subject, one that you could easily spend the rest of your life exploring in some capacity. I implore you to continue studying it if that’s what your curiosity tells you to do. 

And if you want to learn some other subjects on the side, consider checking out my self-education roadmaps part of the blog. You can find guides for teaching yourself Buddhism, philosophy, and sociology. 

Thanks for reading! I hope this gave you some ideas for how to get into art history without relying on school. 

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After graduating college with an econ degree I realized I was still anything but well-educated. Over the last 4 years, I've been trying to fix that, autodidact-mode — by reading books and engaging in self-directed study across multiple subjects. On this blog, my goal is to share my learnings and help others get a well-rounded education outside of school. Education, after all, is a lifelong process, one well worth the investment.

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Art History

“It’s on the strength of observation and reflection that one finds a way.So we must dig and delve unceasingly.

“(“History of Art”) The artist Claude Monet, considered how to observe as many art works of art as possible.Just like other famous artists,they all had something in common. That was that they all had a special goal and that was that they all wanted to be part of history and be the greatest artist that they could be.Art has always been a part of every society from which there have come many famous pieces of art, and the appreciation of art. Recently, art history has been a better way to help people to appreciate the works of art based for his or her views. Art history is all around the world and has been around the world since prehistoric times to the twenty first century.

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Art history forces you to study and describe what you see. Art history is way to get informed about what art work that has been done throughout the years. Any list of most famous painting would be incomplete without the mention of the mona lisa,by Leonardo Da Vinci.This painting is so called ‘the most famous painting in the world of all time.”(“Most Famous Paintings – List of the World’s Most Popular Painting”) “the fifteenth century mural painting from Da milan and by Da Vinci, The Last Supper depicts the final feast Jesus had. Art history is important because it’s all about the way we personally think about it.

Without art in our lives(“Why Look at Art?”), we would have a sad and uncultured world.Also we all should have a chance to better visualize art because our planet earth is a visual world.Art is also important because just looking at art can make youbetter as a person and can also give you a better awearence. In conclusion, the famous artists wanted to be the greatest by establishing themselves to the history of art.Art is involved in a lot of comunities in the world and those famous artist came from those comunites trying to make everyone to understand how to have a better apprcitation for art.Now how can you apprecitate art? Try to make other people understand to not just look at art and walk away,but make them actually analyze the art thats in front of them!

Related posts:

• The Never Ending History
• History of Halloween
• Two Major Changes in History
• History of Music
• Should History be Required
• The History of Scissors
• Do You Know Your History?

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Case Studies: AI in Action in Art and Design

• First Online: 15 November 2023

Cite this chapter

• James Hutson 19 ,
• Jason Lively 20 ,
• Bryan Robertson 21 ,
• Peter Cotroneo 22 &
• Martin Lang 23  

Part of the book series: Springer Series on Cultural Computing ((SSCC))

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This chapter presents a collection of practical case studies showcasing the integration of generative AI into diverse art and design disciplines. Spanning across 3D design, drawing, and digital art, these case studies provide a comprehensive exploration of the transformative potential on the creative process. Highlighting versatile applications in graphic design, product design, architecture, and more, these case studies underscore the boundless possibilities AI offers to the creative industry. The chapter begins by delving into the realm of 3D design, unveiling how AI-driven technologies are revolutionizing the sculpting process and shaping the future of three-dimensional art. Moving to traditional drawing techniques, AI blurs the lines between tradition and innovation by enabling artists to explore novel realms of creativity. The chapter also examines the captivating world of digital art, where AI-generated content becomes a unique form of expression. From manipulating pixels to crafting intricate patterns, the role of AI tools in pushing the boundaries of digital art is vividly illustrated. Through these case studies, this chapter provides a deep insight into the profound influence of AI integration across art and design disciplines. From 3D design to drawing and digital art, these examples offer a glimpse into the transformative potential of AI, promising to reshape the creative landscape.

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Bellagente M, Brack M, Teufel H, Friedrich F, Deiseroth B, Eichenberg C, Weinbach S (2023) MultiFusion: fusing pre-trained models for multi-lingual, multi-modal image generation. arXiv preprint arXiv:2305.15296 .

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James Hutson

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Jason Lively

Department of Visual Art, Yavapai College, Prescott, AZ, USA

Bryan Robertson

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Hutson, J., Lively, J., Robertson, B., Cotroneo, P., Lang, M. (2024). Case Studies: AI in Action in Art and Design. In: Creative Convergence. Springer Series on Cultural Computing. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-45127-0_6

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2023-24 General Bulletin

Art History and Museum Studies, MA/Law, JD

Degree:  Master of Arts (MA) Field of Study:  Art History and Museum Studies Art History and Museum Studies (MA) Program Information

Degree:  Juris Doctor (JD) Juris Doctor (JD) Program Information

Program Overview

The School of Law at Case Western Reserve University prepares JD students to practice law in, among other areas, the fields of intellectual property and law and the arts. The MA in Art History and Museum Studies program, coordinated by the Department of Art History and Art and the Cleveland Museum of Art, is designed to provide students with a broad knowledge of the major art historical periods, of the historiography and critical methodologies of art history, and of museological practice and history, connoisseurship, conservation, and interpretation, through course work and museum internships. The dual degree program prepares students to participate in the fields of intellectual property and law and the visual arts and provides students with an opportunity to develop expertise in areas of substantive interest.

For students in dual degree programs, 12 credit hours of electives in the JD program are waived in consideration of completion of the dual degree.  Students must be separately admitted to both degree programs in order to pursue a dual degree, the qualitative requirements of both degrees must be fully met, and the two degrees must be earned  simultaneously . Students must begin coursework in the second degree program prior to beginning the fifth semester of law school work.  Also, no coursework completed prior to official matriculation in the law school may be counted towards the law school degree.

Dual Degree Student Advising System

Dual degree students are advised by the Associate Dean for Academic Affairs at the School of Law.  In the Department of Art History and Art, dual degree students will be advised by the art history department liaison and the director of graduate studies.

Students wishing to enroll in the dual degree program must be separately admitted to each program. The Department of Art History and Art will waive the GRE requirement for admission to the MA program and use the LSAT in the admissions process. Applicants can apply to the dual degree program when they apply to the School of Law or after the first year of enrollment in the School of Law. Once students have been admitted, they will consult with the Associate Dean for Academic Affairs at the School of Law and the Department of Art History and Art liaison to determine their appropriate course of study.

Program Requirements

The School of Law requires 88 credit hours of coursework, including 36 credit hours of required courses and an upper-class writing requirement, for the JD degree. Most of the requirements are completed during the first year of the law program, which includes:

In addition to the 30 credit hours of first-year courses, JD students must complete the following courses during their second year of study:

Students must also fulfill an upper-class writing requirement and complete a capstone project during the final year of study.  Students should consult the School of Law curriculum guides for details about degree requirements that are applicable to the JD/MA dual degree program.

Students in the MA program in Art History and Museum Studies must complete 31 credit hours, 9 credit hours of which must be taken in the School of Law, to satisfy the requirements for the dual JD/MA degree. In addition, students in the MA program must demonstrate a reading knowledge of one approved modern language other than English. They must also take the MA comprehensive examination at the conclusion of their art history studies.

The 31 credit hours of coursework must be taken at the 400-level or higher, and be distributed as follows:

 Three of the courses in these two categories must be seminars.

The dual degree program requires students to complete 98 credit hours. Law students enrolled in the dual degree program will earn up to 12 credit hours toward the JD degree for completion of the graduate-level art history courses. Credit will not be given for work done in such courses before the student completes the first year of law school. Dual degree students are required to complete 22 credit hours toward the MA. 9 credit hours of law school coursework will count toward the 31 credit hours required for the MA in Art History and Museum Studies. The Department of Art History and Art liaison must approve the law school courses that will count toward the MA.

Dual degree students generally begin study in the law school and defer enrollment in the MA program until their second year. (There may be exceptions to this general rule. In certain cases, for example, students may be permitted to take one course in the art history department during the second semester of the first year of law school.) Students interested in completing the dual degree should consult both programs early in the process to avoid difficulties. After the first year of law school, students may enroll in law courses or art history courses; the program will not require students to complete a specific “core” in a “dedicated” semester in the Department of Art History and Art. Completion of the dual degree program will take at least seven semesters or three-and-a-half years of coursework. 

Year 1: First-year law school curriculum. (30 credit hours)

Year 2, 3 & 4: Mixture of courses between the two units, including 22 credit hours of coursework in the art history program and the MA comprehensive examination.

Credit Hour Requirements

• Total Credit Hours in the School of Law: 76
• Total Credit Hours in the art history department: 22
• Total Credit Hours in the Dual Degree Program: 98

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• Art History Faculty
• Art Studio Faculty and Staff
• Art Recent News
• Art History
• #173 (no title)
• PhD in Art History
• MA in Art History
• MA in Art History and Museum Studies
• MA/JD Program
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College of Arts and Sciences

Department of art history and art, undergraduate.

• Introduction to Undergraduate Programs
• Minor in Visual Design
• Introduction to Graduate Programs
• Certificate in Public Humanities and Civic Engagement

Course Offerings

• Art History Course Offerings
• Art Studio Course Offerings
• Recent Alumni
• Calendar of Events
• Diversity Statement
• Race and Justice Statement
• Sustained Dialogue Website
• Forms & Documents

Art Studio Summer Course Offerings

• April 2, 2024