A History of Art History

"I took this off and on my list of books to recommend, because it’s not perfect, and it feels to me a sort of meta-recommendation because it’s a book about writing about art, not about art itself. So already you can tell what kind of academic book this is. Wood is a professor at New York University who can write really well. But it is definitely a book for art history nerds. The reason it’s not perfect is that it completely ignores women writers about art. In my opinion, he does this by having a cut-off date—it covers art history writing from the Renaissance until the 1960s. Which is very convenient, because feminist writing really started in the 1970s, and post-colonial writing just after that. So there are brilliant woman voices, like Janet Wolff, Linda Nochlin and Griselda Pollock, that aren’t included. So I really ummed and ahhed about it. We really need a woman to write another version of this book. But the reason I finally put it in was that it’s important to appreciate that when people write about art, their perspective colours how people see art. Often this is overlooked—that art history itself can be very prejudicial. I started at the Courtauld in the 1990s and was very privileged to do so, it’s a fabulous college. But I very much learned about white western men through the history of art, and the books I read were the books Christopher unpicked in this volume. It’s a really clear, very erudite, very wordy, very lengthy look at some of those big names in art history to show how the reporting of art has changed, and how we all need to be mindful of that. When we read about art, we must think about where the writer is coming from, as well as what they’re writing about. Exactly. I made the analogy with Abstract Expressionism of the quartet versus the orchestra. Well, let’s take Winckelmann— Yes. He fell in love with Classical art, and the whole Neoclassical way of looking at art was born. He particularly loved the male nude, so he wrote heavily about that, and that really influenced not only art history, but how art itself was made—because this was seen as important, therefore people painted it and it was taught in schools. So that’s useful to know, and that’s why this book is ultimately on the list—it helps us see how art has been shaped by these stories as much as art history has been shaped as well. He touches on John Berger , who wrote Ways of Seeing in 1972, and that is a good ending because Berger did open up the way we look at representations of women. He was really ahead of his time. So at least that made it into the book."