The historiography of art history has been a potent theme in the discourses of the
discipline of the last thirty years. And the approaches and methods in the study of
the visual are probably more varied, and more vigorously debated, than in any
other area of historical enquiry. This is so much so that the interest in the practice
and history of the history of art history has at times appeared to be equal to
object-based study and it is arguable that this now forms part of the archive of the
discipline. There is of course no doubt that since the inception of art history as a
field of academic study, works of art have been ‘read’ in a variety of ways. These
different modes of description and interpretation inscribe meaning in to art and
it is here that art and its history are perhaps most intricately linked.
The interest in historiography and method is manifest in a broad spectrum of
the literature of art history from the general introduction or survey to the highly
focused academic monograph. At points art history and the history of art history
become so closely intertwined as to be almost indistinguishable. This is evident
for instance in surveys of art history that are at once general introductions which
aim to explain what art is and how it has been written about.These studies
present overviews of the different ways art histories have been written, covering
such large topics as Hegelianism, Marxism and post-colonialism as well as the
influence of the work of individual historians. But a common theme in these
analyses and explanations of art and its history is the effect that a chosen method
of enquiry has on the objects themselves and on the subjects of art history. In
other words the ways in which the methods used define the artwork. The study of
the historiography of art history has also occasioned several anthologies of key
writings taken from a broad historical sweep.2 Here the authentic voices of art
history whether it be Giorgio Vasari’s biographical narratives, Jacob Burckhardt’s
historical observations, or Johann Joachim Winckelmann’s reflections on the
cultural context of art speak for themselves, albeit annotated and truncated by
the deft hand of the volume editor. Needless to say, art historians have also added
to this body of literature in the form of both collections of newly commissioned
sets of essays and monographs. At least from Vasari, if not before, the concept of
the artist as genius continues to be a mainstay of art historical enquiry. And the
debates around authorship, authenticity and how biographies determine our
understanding of the myth of the artist remain live. An equally important theme

is the organization of symbolic form and the processes through which the visual world has been

continues to be, systematized and homogenized into a unified
field of enquiry – art history – and the ways in which art can in fact resist these
pressures. This line of enquiry follows the development of art history as an
academic discipline in Germany in the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries in the work of historians such as Panofsky, Warburg, Riegl and Benjamin
through to the engagement with structuralist and post-structuralist thought.
The chapters in this volume aim to respond in a range of ways to these various
patterns in and approaches to the discipline of art history as they are manifest
across the scholarship of all periods over the last thirty years. There are points of
contact and common themes across the chapters as they examine the impact and
influence of a given approach on the formulation of histories of art alongside its
intellectual consequences. A central concern in the volume is how these issues in
turn raise questions to do with our preoccupation with authorship, authenticity
and chronologically defined linear progression, all of which have informed the
canon of art history but which may be only one way of looking at, analysing and
historicizing art. Of particular interest is what is lost or left out through these
methods of historical enquiry and the points of contact and convergence with
other methodologies. In addition, the porosity between art history and other
related disciplines is brought to the fore and in turn how the archive of the
discipline has changed over time. We now see the link between cognate fields
such as philosophy, sociology, anthropology and art history as a given, and a
significant number of recently published studies of these trans-disciplinary
trends confirm this. Together the chapters combine to present a cross-section of
art history and offer timely new perspectives on method.
A central concern is the emergence of how other kinds of histories – social
histories of art, feminist art history, queer art history – differ from and interact
with the writing on art history at the moment when it emerged as a discipline
during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Specific attention is
paid to the bias towards a male interpretation of the subject, which it is
argued leaves its trace in feminist art history through the binary categories of
gender. Our bodily experience of artworks and the effect this has on art
history is also re-evaluated, and this takes us back to one of the fundamental arthistorical
problems, the complex business of turning visual phenomena into
verbal history. The result of this process is the establishment of canonical subjects
for art history and the notion of linear progression as these are placed in
chronological order to provide stepping stones across the temporal spread of the
discipline. Here the limits of chronology and with it our expectations of progress
are reviewed.
The role of Germany as a locus for the beginnings of art history is also
revisited, and the effects and reception of the intellectual diaspora that spread
from there in the middle years of the twentieth century. The idea of the transdisciplinary
nature of art history is again a common theme across the chapters
and this extends beyond art history’s relationship to philosophy and sociology to
investigate the ways the narratives of artists’ lives become subjects of fiction, both
literary and filmic, and finally how the intertwining of the biography of the
historian and his/her subject object produces discourse.
In the opening chapter, Nick Chare works to destabilize the ways in which our
categories and taxonomies of art are tacitly based on heterosexual discourse.

Gender is defined as a social construct – in this it is unlike sex, which is biologically
determined – and the implications of this established position within art
history are worked out for the discipline. The gendered nature of art-historical
discourse is here undermined in order to disturb our habitual acceptance of male/
female binaries. Chare demonstrates how the discourses of art history are often
complicit with biological and philosophical ‘Old Master narratives’ of sexual
difference, and explores the various ways this complicity has been challenged
over the past thirty years. He considers how concepts of gender have enabled art
historians to expose the ways in which both art and art history have contributed
to the cultural construction of identity. This growing interest in sexuality has
encouraged some art historians to displace the predominantly heterosexual
framework that has characterized the discipline’s understanding of difference.
Through his case studies Chare demonstrates how some of these gendered
approaches to art history have proved problematic and may actually have inhibited
our understanding of visual cultures of the past. For instance, the Venus of
Willendorf is usually interpreted as a representation of a Mother Goddess, but
Chare suggests that this relies upon a cognitive style that would have been alien
to any prehistoric beholder. Chare argues that such an interpretation actually
reveals more about the sexual politics of the late twentieth century than about
any possible gender relations in the Upper Palaeolithic period. He goes on to
consider the representation of sexual difference in art and how ideas about
gender have historically been articulated and reproduced through specific media
and techniques. There has been much scholarship on the ways in which both the
spaces of production and reception and the subject matter of artworks at given
historical moments have functioned to reinforce or subvert norms of femininity
and masculinity, but less research has been devoted to how different media and
techniques enact sexual difference. Chare shows how unstable these binary
categories of male/female can be by examining the ways in which the gendering
of the materials and modes of making art have contributed significantly to the
construction or deconstruction of sexual difference.
The object–viewer relationship and the physicality of both the art work and
onlooker is analysed in a very different way by Amanda Boetzkes. She moves our
attention towards a consideration of the role of phenomenological interpretation
in art history, specifically how one’s encounter with an artwork calls embodied
experience into question. Particularly since the 1960s, when Maurice MerleauPonty’s
Phenomenology of Perception (1945) and The Visible and the Invisible (1959) had
a substantial influence on artists, critics and art historians, the issue of
embodiment has centred not purely on embodied perception, but specifically
on the extent to which the spectator perceives from a state of quasi-immersion in
the artwork. She investigates how our bodily experience in relation to the artwork
can in fact operate to confirm and reproduce our expectations of it, and so
produce a fiction of the object, providing distance rather than engagement with
it. In this way the chapter calls into question our acceptance of phenomenological
approaches in the study of artworks. Boetzkes argues that, as the validity and
possibilities of phenomenology as an art-historical method are reconsidered, we
must take on board the fact that not only are our interpretations of art informed
by our embodied condition, but, even more strongly, that this condition exteriorizes
the subject and denaturalizes our perspective rather than affirming it.

Using examples from contemporary art, postminimalist sculpture, and
installation art, Boetzkes explores the ethical questions surrounding our
phenomenological approach to art-historical interpretation. Through her investigation
of the notions of embodiment, intentionality, and modes of confrontation,
Boetzkes suggests that phenomenology not only mediates a trenchant
understanding of the perceptual experience of the artwork, but that it is predicated
on an acknowledgement of the resistance of art to interpretation. In this
way, phenomenology demands a recognition of the ethical dimension of aesthetic
experience. This ethical dimension is potentially of crucial importance to the
writing of art history, as it calls into question a predetermined history of representation
by shifting our focus to the immediacy of the work of art.
In Dan Karlholm’s chapter, our understanding of chronology as a standard tool in
the writing of Art Histories comes under scrutiny. Karlhom examines a widespread
and influential art-historical genre, the survey text, and concentrates on how the
‘contemporary’ has been absorbed into this form of narrative since the early 1980s.
He is mainly concerned with the uses of language and the problems of classification
and periodization in the writing of these large-scale and broadly ranging art histories.
Karlholm focuses on the accounts given in a series of survey texts of two conceptual
artists, Joseph Beuys and Cindy Sherman, and forges links between contemporary art
of recent decades and philosophical constructions of the contemporary in the
nineteenth century. In this way Karlholm questions our established notions of
chronology and sequence in art history. He proposes instead the idea of co-existing
temporalities for art that run contrary to these accepted norms.
Karlholm’s chapter opens up debate about the function of a genre which, by
definition, presumes the existence of a continuing story of art that has a linear
direction and no end point. At the crux of his argument is the theoretical understanding
of art, prevalent in recent decades, that has privileged the context and
institutions of art over the artwork and artist. This prompts Karlholm to question
first of all how we should engage with this way of thinking about the art of the last
thirty years. Secondly he asks what methods we should use to incorporate the
notion of the contemporary into our chronological, object-based, histories.
Another aspect of how we write about art is examined in the concluding pages
of Catherine M. Soussloff’s chapter in which she reflects on the relationship
between art history and visual studies. Soussloff concentrates on Michel Foucault,
but shifts attention away from Foucault’s acknowledged role as one of the
founders of the field of visual studies to ask what happens if we consider him as
an art historian. This question is explored with specific reference to the four
essays Foucault wrote between the years 1965 and 1975, addressing the importance
of high art, its history, and its episteme, through the medium of easel
painting. Soussloff demonstrates how Foucault used painting to address technical
and theoretical matters of significance to art history and theory. Many of the
themes raised connect with the concerns of the chapters in this volume: for
instance, the nature of the medium of painting, and with it the role of light, shade
and colour; the meaning of representation and resemblance in Western art; the
relationship between word and image; and the effects of photography on painting.
Soussloff goes on to argue that Foucault’s choice of painting, rather than
another medium, is significant in his exploration of its history, or, rather, in his
own terms, its archaeology. For Foucault this archaeology of painting is not about

intentionality but is instead about the discursive practice that is embodied in
techniques and effects. Foucault shared this understanding of the history of
painting with his contemporaries, including Hubert Damisch, and the writing
they produced differed significantly from the phenomenological approaches
found in mid-twentieth-century writings on art by the philosophers Jean-Paul
Sartre and Merleau-Ponty. While Foucault accepted the primacy of painting in the
visual arts, as Merleau-Ponty and Sartre had, unlike them he turned to earlier,
Renaissance theories of painting in rejecting a phenomenological approach.
Jeremy Tanner turns our attention to Karl Mannheim, as he says a somewhat
forgotten figure by both sociologists and art historians. Mannheim’s ambiguous
role in the history of art history is outlined by Tanner. On the one hand, he has
been characterized as a secondary player in the development of iconology and
iconography for which Mannheim’s contemporary Erwin Panofsky is better
known. On the other hand, and less positively, Mannheim was the focus of both
Karl Popper’s and Ernst Gombrich’s rage as an ‘enemy of reason’. Tanner takes a
more affirmative view of Mannheim and explores how he and Erwin Panofsky
used Alois Riegl’s concept of Kunstwollen as a common point of departure in the
development of their theories of cultural appropriation. The very different
readings and uses of Riegl by the two thnkers as they grappled with the problem
of how to construct feasible histories of the visual is closely mapped by Tanner. He
shows how the sociological appropriation and transformation of the concept of
Kunstwollen was central to the development of Mannheim’s sociology of knowledge,
and in particular to the analysis of ‘styles of thought’ in his classic study
Conservative Thought (1927).
The journey that Tanner takes us on in his analysis of Mannheim passes
through the early years of art history as an academic discipline in Germany during
the opening decades of the twentieth century. The repositioning of Mannheim in
the group of writers who set out the parameters of the discipline at this time allows
Tanner to offer a new configuration of the relationships between them. In this way,
connections we do not regularly make become apparent between Mannheim and,
for instance, Walter Benjamin and Wilhelm Dilthey. And the resonance of
Mannheim’s thinking is traced forward by Tanner into the work of Foucault,
Bourdieu and Baxandall. The academic diaspora occasioned by the rise of Nazism in
Germany is also unravelled by Tanner, and here he makes particular reference to
the limited reception of Mannheim’s synthesis of sociology and art history as
interpreted in the intellectual context of early post-war Britain.
The biographical trace receives very different treatment in H. Perry
Chapman’s consideration of three recent novels that fictionalize early modern
Netherlandish painters and paintings. These are Tracy Chevalier’s Girl with a Pearl
Earring (1999); Susan Vreeland’s Girl in Hyacinth Blue (1999) and Michael Frayn’s
Headlong (1999). Chapman argues that fiction about art elucidates a form of art
history that runs in parallel with the more traditional loci of the academy and the
museum, but which also rests outside these powerful and coercive institutions.
This enables her to examine how such fictionalizations operate as mirrors to our
own practices as art historians. The novels focus on paintings of life in ordinary
domestic settings and use similar narrative techniques as artists such as Vermeer
and Bruegel in order to make these everyday scenes appear extraordinary.
Chapman argues that each of these books both exploits and challenges recent

trends in art-historical method. For instance Chevalier responds to the emphasis
of the social history of art on economics and cultural context in preference to the
artist. Vreeland and Frayn both take on board reception theory that privileges the
viewer’s response to the artwork and so moves attention away from the artist.
Chapman uses this fact to critique the tendency in visual studies and material
culture to downgrade the status of both artist and work. Through her discussion
of art fiction she argues against this tendency, exploring the unfamiliar idea that,
however determinedly we downplay the role of the artist as author/creator,
images continue to have a vital impact on humankind.
The multifaceted nature of art history is explored further by Adrian Rifkin in a
discussion which delves forcefully into the discontinuities and diversity of the
discipline. Rifkin argues that the strength of art history is rooted in what he sees as
its constitutive irrationality, precisely the quality in art that ultimately prompts us
to speak about art, or to speak through and with it, and to desire art in the first
place. For Rifkin, art history as an academic subject encompasses such a vast archive
and broad spectrum of knowledge that it can sustain scholarship that ranges from
Aby Warburg to Bernard Berenson, Griselda Pollock to Herbert Read. The relationship
between these various modes of art history is complex and, he argues, sometimes
unexpected. These considerations lead Rifkin to reflect on his own work,
especially the notion of a finished piece of writing. For Rifkin, articulating the
almost infinite possibilities of meaning and interpretation in art history helps him
to understand the reasons why he can never think of a piece of work as complete
and what this implies for the project of the discipline and for its capacity to help us
understand and think about the world that art and its commentaries can offer us.
My ambition in this volume has been to try to refocus attention on contemporary
views on method in a series of newly commissioned chapters. The range of
subjects and the ways in which the authors chose to frame their arguments are
representative of the breadth, complexity and ultimately the richness of the discipline.
The format of the edited volume is also important here. Rather than trying to
put together a monograph by many hands I instead wanted, in editing the volume,
to explore and exploit the diversity of the subject matter, methods of writing, and
ways of expressing the authorial voice possible in art history writing. In this way,
Contemporary Perspectives on Method offers a picaresque journey through the
discipline of art history, which I hope is as thought provoking as it is inconclusive.

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