Why art history, and how to look

Your goal in this lesson: to learn why art history is worth your time, and to practice one simple method that makes any picture open up.

What art history is

Historical Art history is the study of things people have made to be looked at, used or believed in: paintings, statues, buildings, books, cloth, cards and much more. It asks what a work is, who made it, for whom, why, and what it meant to the people who first saw it. It is not a list of famous names to memorize. It is a way of looking, with evidence.

The story told in this course is mostly the story of European art, because that is where tarot, the witch in art and the occult revival grew. But art history is global. The great traditions of China, Japan, India, Africa, the Islamic world and the Americas are just as deep, and I hope you will explore them too.

We look too fast

Historical In a study published in 2001, Jeffrey K. Smith and Lisa F. Smith watched visitors at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in front of famous paintings. On average people looked for about 27 seconds, and half of them looked for 17 seconds or less. That is enough time to recognize an image. It is not enough time to see it.

The good news is that looking is a skill, and skills can be practiced.

The ten-minute method

Modern Museum educators call this “slow looking”. There is nothing mystical about it. Here is a simple version you can use in a museum or at home with a large image on a screen:

1. Minutes one and two: look without reading. Do not read the label yet. Notice where your eye goes first, and where it goes next.
2. Minutes three and four: make an inventory. List what you see: figures, objects, colors, shapes, light, the edges.
3. Minutes five and six: move. Step close, then step back. On a screen, zoom in, then out. Some details appear only up close.
4. Minutes seven and eight: ask questions. Write three things you wonder about.
5. Minutes nine and ten: now read. Read the label or the museum’s page. Which of your questions does it answer?

The label is not the enemy. But if you read it first, you tend to look only for what it tells you.

Four steps for writing about art

Later tradition The American art educator Edmund Burke Feldman described four stages of art criticism in his book Art as Image and Idea (1967). Teachers still use them, because they keep us honest:

• Describe. What is there? “Her eyes look down” is description. “She looks sad” is already interpretation.
• Analyze. How are the parts arranged? Where is the brightest spot? What shapes repeat?
• Interpret. What might it mean, based on what you described?
• Judge. Does it work, and by what standard? Name the standard.

Beginners tend to jump straight to “I love it” or “I don’t get it”. The first two steps give your later ideas something to stand on.

Three questions for any picture

Modern In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the psychologist Abigail Housen and the museum educator Philip Yenawine developed Visual Thinking Strategies. It rests on three questions: “What’s going on in this picture?”, “What do you see that makes you say that?” and “What more can we find?” The second one is the heart of it. Every idea must point to something you can see.

If you read tarot, this will feel familiar. Asking “what is happening in this card?” is the same kind of looking. That comparison is mine, not the developers’, but it shows how naturally the skill crosses over.

Try this

Today’s exercise: find Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s The Harvesters (1565) in the Met’s online collection and follow the ten-minute method. Write down every separate activity you can find. Then read about the period on the Northern Renaissance page.

Quick recap

• Art history studies made things, with evidence about who, for whom and why.
• Most museum visitors look for less than half a minute.
• Slow looking: look, list, move, ask, then read.
• Feldman’s four steps are describe, analyze, interpret and judge.

Keep going

Next: The language of images. You can also read the longer guide How to look at art or browse all art movements.

Sources

• Jeffrey K. Smith and Lisa F. Smith, “Spending Time on Art”, Empirical Studies of the Arts 19 (2001).
• Edmund Burke Feldman, Art as Image and Idea (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1967).
• Philip Yenawine, Visual Thinking Strategies: Using Art to Deepen Learning Across School Disciplines (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Education Press, 2013).
• The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, The Harvesters, 1565, accession 19.164.

Go deeper: the art movements timeline and art history pages on this site

Mark as done