Whose history?
I first opened a book on art back in 1970, and so began my study of the History of Art.
Note the definite article - the History of Art.
Things were soon to change, but in those days no-one in my circle questioned a whole set of facts which seemed self-evidently true.
We believed that
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Making art - painting, drawing, sculpting - was a skill which homo sapiens picked up long ago. Since then we have slowly developed that skill, getting better and better over the generations. Art was something which progressed, and that progress could be tracked and learned. It was the history of art.
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There was a body of art (often called 'the canon') which was Great Art. These were the paintings and sculptures it paid one to learn about and learn from. Back then I had no idea who had decided this, and never thought to ask. I assumed it was simply a 'given'.
Gombrich's notorious textbook which fails to mention a single female artist.
Whose art history?
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To know about art, you needed to learn names and dates and titles; you needed to be able to recognise the paintings and sculptures in the canon; you needed to be able speak about the qualities and finer points of those works.
A lot of people I meet still imagine that to be the case today. I remember a lovely older gentleman who could tell you the dates of artists and paintings, and rattle off titles without breaking into a sweat. But when I asked him what he thought created a market for such-and-such a painting in the late 19th century, he would look at me as if I had started speaking Martian. Only recently, a lady with a doctorate in her own field asked me if I didn't find the history of art boring once I had learned it all.
Back in 1970 most of us thought there was just one history of art. We didn't realise that it was a western eurocentric and largely white-skinned history of art. If you were European / North American white and male it was the only history of art.
What has changed?