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.

top

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:

*

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

*

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