art history essay examples

art history essay examples

Exploring the Evolution of Art History Through Notable Essays

1. Introduction to the Importance of Art History Essays

A career, apart from the call of tradition, would require those pursuing it to mature and explore the art inscription by engaging in evaluations and discussions of global art associated with culture. Techniques adopted in analysis have also experienced gradual change with the debut of modernism. Only a combined understanding through the comprehension of traditional art in the past will help establish a platform for an accurate definition relative to modern art in contemporary society. Many seem to doubt that this aspect is essential, especially when specialists introduce new definitions, which shift from recent ones by either hypersensitivity or employment of technical tools. Finally, an investigation would help understand the relationship between art and its impact on society. There is a call to address contemporary challenges as well as to promote the method of approaching the analysis of one’s surrounding and history. Through the technique of deduction, analysis results in substantial theoretical opinions, which can form a basis for reactions relative to unfamiliar art. Although the contemporary world has several art forms to offer, grounding in traditional art still helps in increasing the power of creativity and horizons.

It is important to note that the aspect of art history is one of the applied methods. The application comes in understanding human instincts, their value systems, and daily lives by understanding how they interpret the world. This knowledge also helps in comparing their worldview as it is at present and understanding this will offer a platform in which changes in associated aspects of ideography and aesthetic views can be classified. Research in art cannot be limited to producing images that can be seen. The challenge of the modern artist is that of grasping the contextual frameworks of global trends to capture the attention of onlookers. By understanding the type of appeal the art has provoked, it thus prompts the art association to begin the process of defining what art history aspects can be considered as art. Through this definition, art history specialists can be able to perform an assessment of the art.

2. Key Themes and Movements in Art History Essays

Essays about the history of painting, including such subjects as painting techniques, aesthetics of specific aspects of a painting, identification of a specific type of subject matter typically reflecting the artist’s intellectual prowess, representation of color and light, artistic genius, and survival of aesthetic styles or developmental agenda, form the largest component of art history discourse. Numerous essays attempted to describe general issues in painting and aesthetics. Among the essays on the specific subject matter of the painting, many focused, as might be expected, on religious works or depictions of mythological themes, including the Garden of Eden. Other less frequently represented subjects include specific depictions of animals (real and imaginary), architecture, domestic life, hunting, and dancing. Because these subjects primarily focused on religious paintings and painted cycles, the art history essays in this book tend to be religious in tone, irrespective of their content or interpretation.

Not surprisingly, artists and periods often provided subject matter in art history essays, but other themes were devised commensurate with a desire on the part of some art history essayists to interpret and analyze art, rather than simply to catalogue it. The overall effect of these writings represents the ambition of numerous art history or aesthetic movements, including classicism, neoclassicism, the Arts and Crafts movements, nationalism, romanticism, impressionism, futurism, colonialism, minimalism, and the development of artists’ media such as graphic art and painting. Clearly, a desire to describe appeared in components of nearly all essays in this publication, but just as clearly, we found that many essays focused on interpretations of art and some were philosophical in intent.

3. Analyzing Influential Art History Essays

In 1949, E. H. Gombrich wrote one of the most frequently anthologized essays in all of art history, “The Frontal-Is-Everything.” In it, Gombrich identified the numerous, often contradictory, attempts by art historians to explain the predominance of solemn, somber faces in portraits from the Renaissance onwards. Demonstrating the way that historical and social context had influenced the academics in their interpretations of paintings, the essay also highlighted how art itself could stymie art historians, as they looked for logically organized systems in the chaotic melting pot of its true creation. Gombrich had created a rigorous experimental design for his study to test theoretical speculations and educational ramifications. While each academic study was not necessarily a consensus, collectively the works of Trattato della pittura influenced Le Brun and art historians’ approaches.

4. Impact of Art History Essays on the Field of Art Studies

I hope that these thoughtful, analytical and essentially accurate selections of an interesting range of the classic and, so to be, neoclassic texts of art history that we contemplated at the Centennial conference will guide new and established art historians in their survey, submit for the specialists’ examination of the intentions, conclusions and citations of art history’s founders and influential personalities, inspire twenty-first-century art historians to consider further, and expand upon some of the accepted parameters of their own discipline in exploring our world, feeding our bodies and freeing our minds.

I presented some seminal essays at the College Art Association Centennial Conference Panel on Notable Essays for Art Historians, which I organized specifically for this book. Curating a group of essays for the panel and book required a narrower focus. The discrete task of choosing and then, with the generous contributions of panelists, organizing and presenting these essays at the conference has added a significant layer of professional and intellectual clarity to what began as a random selection. The process of considering and organizing my thoughts broadened the reflections that I bring to the subject of art history’s development. Presented in that wide-ranging and historically specific context, the essays provide a profound understanding of art history, its rapid emergence as a unique discipline and the engagement with broader human concerns.

5. Conclusion: The Future of Art History Essays

The essays need not and indeed cannot be totally representative of academic writing in undergraduate art history, given their specific context (that of the Art History program at the University of St Andrews). However, it is hoped that these essays reflect a range of expected practices and qualities typically associated with the art history essay.

In part because of these pros and cons, both internally (those dealing with undergraduate essays) and externally (those considering notions of ‘art history’ and ‘the essay’), turn to the academic writing of undergraduates. Together, they address a range of questions. What are these undergraduate essays like? What do they contain? How are they structured? And what can these tell us about how to teach academic writing to undergraduates? In so doing, this collection draws attention to aspects of the academic writing of undergraduate art historians that could usefully inform further studies.

From 2006 onwards, all of the current single and combined art history courses at the universities of Edinburgh, Glasgow, and Manchester, as well as at the Courtauld Institute of Art, will be replaced by a new, two-year-long MA joint with another subject such as film studies. This joint MA will have fewer essays than the existing MA/MA (Hons)/BA (Hons) courses, and the academic year will be extended to fill your essay numbers. At the University of St Andrews, similar, if less extreme, changes are anticipated for the future.

The future of the traditional art history essay is not a healthy one in Britain. In some subjects, such as Italian, Soviet, Welsh, and architectural history, undergraduates wrote no more than three essays throughout their courses, while in others, such as English, Scottish, Northern Irish, European, and non-European art history as well as critical and historical studies, students typically wrote between six and ten essays in total. Moreover, these were often due almost ‘back-to-back’, creating a highly pressurized environment in which there was little or no time for the careful drafting and redrafting integral to the academic writing process. Nevertheless, this is all about to change.