What Is Art History?

What Is Art History?

Many students do not get a chance to study art history until they take a college course, so art history may be a new field of study for you. Even though you are new to analyzing the visual arts, your learning skills in other fields will serve you well in this discipline. If you have ever analyzed a poem or developed an understanding of a historical period, you already come prepared to think and write like an art historian. You must still make an argument about something, but in this case you use art (instead of, say, dialogue from a play) to build and defend your argument.

Although art historians vary in their approaches to art, there are a few common approaches that form the backbone of the field. The following pamphlet describes these briefly and lets you know what you might need to do to tackle a paper assignment in this field. Just remember: there is more than one way of doing art history. Understanding your instructor's approach to art will help you meet his or her expectations in your own writing.

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Assignment Sleuth Work

When your instructor hands out a paper assignment, first figure out what type of assignment it is. The basic questions of art history often appear in a few traditional types of assignments. We've presented a summary of five of them below. Becoming acquainted with the five types will help you begin to understand your assignment. Recognize, however, that many assignments combine more than one of these types. Most assignments will fit into one or more of the types, but don't try to make your assignment fit them if it does not. Some professors prefer to take a less traditional approach to the assignments they write, and they may be looking for less traditional responses from their students. Start by reading the assignment carefully to see what is being asked (see the Writing Center handout How to Read Assignments for further tips).

Some professors in introductory classes will start with at least one of the following assignments at the beginning of the semester in order to get you thinking like an art historian.

1) Formal Analysis

This assignment requires a detailed description of the "formal" qualities of the art object (formal as in "related to the form," not a black tie dinner). In other words, you're looking at the individual design elements, such as composition (arrangement of parts of or in the work), color, line, texture, scale, proportion, balance, contrast, and rhythm. Your primary concern in this assignment is to attempt to explain how the artist arranges and uses these various elements.

Usually you have to go and look at the object for a long time and then write down what you see. As you will quickly see from the page length of the assignment, your instructor expects a highly detailed description of the object. You might struggle with this assignment because it is hard to translate what you see into words -- don't give up, and take more notes than you might think you need.

Why would your instructor ask you to do this assignment? First, translating something from a visual language to a textual language is one of the most vital tasks of the art historian. Most art historians at some point describe fully and accurately their objects of study in order to communicate their ideas about them. You may already have found this tendency helpful in reading your textbook or other assigned readings. Second, your instructors realize that you are not accustomed to scrutinizing objects in this way and know that you need practice doing so. Instructors who assign formal analyses want you to look--and look carefully. Think of the object as a series of decisions that an artist made. Your job is to figure out and describe, explain, and interpret those decisions and why the artist may have made them.

Ideally, if you were to give your written formal analysis to a friend who had never seen the object, s/he would be able to describe or draw the object for you or at least pick it out of a lineup.

In writing a formal analysis, focus on creating a logical order so that your reader doesn't get lost. Don't ever assume that because your instructor has seen the work, they know what you are talking about. Here are a couple of options:

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summarize the overall appearance, then describe the details of the object

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describe the composition and then move on to a description of the materials used (acrylic, watercolor, plaster)

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begin discussing one side of the work and then move across the object to the other side

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describe things in the order in which they draw your eye around the object, starting with the first thing you notice and moving to the next

Some instructors want your formal analysis to consist of pure description with little or no interpretation. In this case, you should describe your object and explain how these formal elements contribute to the work as a whole. Others will expect you to go further and comment on the significance of what you have observed. Find out which way your instructor wants you to write your formal analysis in your particular assignment. Most art historians include formal analysis at some point in their essays, so there are a lot of examples to look at in the textbook and other readings, but you will probably have to be more in-depth than they are.

2) Stylistic Analysis

You may be asked to look at an object and talk about style. Some instructors will want you to discuss how an object fits into a particular stylistic category--for example, Impressionism, Renaissance, or early Macedonian. More often, they will ask you to compare two works in either the same or very different stylistic categories--e.g., comparing one Impressionist painting by Monet to one by Morisot or comparing a Caravaggio still life to a Picasso still life.You will still focus on the formal qualities of the objects, but this time you will probably be expected to make a conclusion about one of the following:

1. how the work fits the stylistic category

2. how the work does not fit the category