nf0094: i rather abruptly finished last week so you were deprived of the nice 
formal analysis of Wölfflin's but i think you can really read this up i mean 
Preziozi has actually an extract of his introduction which is quite eloquent on 
those different categories he uses but what i do want to do which i think is 
quite important in a lecture is to come to good summary to recall for you what 
i've been doing so i'll try to do this and that nicely leads over i think into 
what i'm going to do today so last week i kept hammering down that er in order 
to have art history you need some sense of development you need an 
understanding of well you need a conceptualization of a course which you hold 
responsible for you know what makes art historically specific but a course 
which is also sufficiently timeless so that you can compare the different 
historical moments with each other so one course which leads through the the 
the different ages of the history of art and yet is specific 
enough to account for their differences as well so in in with Hegel with whom i 
started is it was this funny category which nobody really quite was able to 
grasp the world spirit and with Riegl and Wölfflin it was this diverse well it 
was really human perception they felt was an underlying stable continuum er er 
an underlying course which changed historically specific and ve-, er Riegl had 
the oppositional categories haptic-optic and Wölfflin had those five sets like 
open and closed forms plan and recessionary the ones i couldn't quite take you 
through entirely last week now it's really only with such superhistorical 
categories that i argued a systematic account of the history of art is possible 
one which gives you you know er sort of sense and er after r-, the Renaissance 
came the baroque and after the baroque came the rococo those kind of accounts 
and that was quite in contrast to the connoisseurs about whom i've gave you a 
little bit last week who really didn't have any such concept they had sort of 
implicitly but they were really quite quiet about it and they really only 
looked into digging out as much as they could about a specific artist or at 
most a specific context but they couldn't really give you a sort of 
superhistorical account of the history of art now then fini-, or er halfway 
through i said well really Hegel's metaph-, er p-, the reason why they were 
silent was that Hegel's metaphysical account of the world spirit really seemed 
very very speculative nobody could really quite grasp what that meant let alone 
understand it it's very dense stuff so you know they did away with that and 
said that's too metaphysical and along came Wölfflin and Riegl and gave you 
human perception as the underlying thing but what i then didn't say is they in 
turn were criticized and i come to that today the criticism of Wölfflin and 
Riegl what they said what people said shortly 
after Riegl and Wölfflin had published was what about subject matter if you 
listen to those guys you you think you you know there's er artists never have 
any thoughts in their brains they just work with forms so shouldn't we take 
subject matter and what is depicted a little bit more serious and that was the 
first criticism and the first response was developed by someone by a guy who ha-
, i had here on the blackboard called Erwin Panofsky and that approach is 
called iconography that's the first one i will be talking about Panofsky really 
resolutely restored subject matter and thought content to the work of art 
nf0094: and then i come to the second criticism people of Wölfflin and Riegl 
and people said look you know that's all very well and we have these sort of 
again er categories and they're nice in helping us looking at art but really we 
learn very very little about the specific historical circumstances in which a 
work of art is produced they said we really need a much much 
better conceptualization of how a work of art is tied into their particular 
societies so you know i mean with human perception it's rather wa-, vague i 
mean Wölfflin at the end of one of his books says well you know if you look at 
the Renaissance it's all very clear and the baroque it's all you know quite 
convoluted that really reflects the feeling for life during those times people 
feel clarity there's more democratic s-, state in the Renaissance then on come 
all the absolute monarchies and it's much more obscure the workings of power so 
it's vaguely related to society but really only vaguely and the critics came 
along and said no we can ground this much much better in social reality in sp-, 
and we really can tie a work of art much much closer to in particular the 
economic and social circumstances in a society and that's the Marx of course 
the Marxist appro-, er social history approach to which i will come which is 
the second one i introduce today 
nf0094: er and the 
third one is feminism now as some of you have already encountered in the 
seminars er feminism really isn't systematic in the sense that any of the 
others i will have been talking about by then are all of the others have to a 
certain extent an idea of a fundamental course which drives the history of art 
which accounts for the changes in the history of art and er er and give us some 
sort of continuity to through the times now feminism really doesn't have a 
coherent sense of that really they attach their particular question to a 
variety of approaches so you can have a Marxist feminist approach you can h-, 
even have an iconographical and er and a feminist approach and a formalist and 
feminist approach you can can get combinations of those so i'll take you 
through those 
nf0094: you might now this is the third approach today you might now say what 
what what's the point er in you know telling you all about those approaches you 
really will encounter in much more depth again 
throughout this course when the different modules start now my argument here is 
that well there is something to be said for repeating things and again i 
eventually and you give them get them get them from different angles from 
different people you'll have a much surer f-, footing in in those approaches 
but also my argument here is that i will give them a kind of context i will put 
them into a c-, a context of reaction to each other which i h-, well hope will 
steer you through the jungle of those approaches so as i've done today you know 
these are actually reaction the different approaches come about because they 
react to approaches which happened before and i hope by asking my guiding 
questions you remember that one the question about you know how do these 
approaches conceptualize the relation of the work of art to the society in 
which it was produced i hope that will give the kind give a conti-, continuum 
in in in those lectures and will really tie them 
together 
nf0094: so let me come to iconography now iconography was advanced by this guy 
Erwin Panofsky who really was a German intellectual working in you know er 
reworking this method over many many years from the nineteen-thirties until 
nineteen-fifty-five really and what happened during those years is if you think 
at the dates being a German he had to emigrate he was Jewish he had to emigrate 
and really a lot of his method developed then developed first in Germany and 
then he emigrated to the States and er there started writing in in in in in 
English and it is perhaps one could argue and people have argued that it's 
because this German artist who had started to publish in English that this has 
become such a famous and really very very prevalent approach in the history of 
art because it suddenly arrived in America where there was hardly any 
systematic matic-, art history going and really took the country by storm and 
England at the same time er i will give you a really very 
schematic description of what he meant by iconography and what he thought was 
to be gained from looking at a work of art in such a systematic way and i've 
already on the blackboard given you some indication do you r-, you've taken 
down the words haven't you but i'll repeat them it just helps you keep with me 
Panofsky said very clearly several times in order to st-, understand the 
meaning of the artwork we first have to ask or we we really have to ask three 
questions and we have to ask them in quite a systematic order the first one is 
what is depicted we first simply have to look at the work of art and describe 
what is there what do we see just really looking carefully and that he called 
the pre-iconographical d-, description a pre-, pre-iconographical description 
after that follows a second attempt to get closer to the work of art and its 
meaning and that is really asking the question where does the subject matter 
come from what is depicted we've seen what is depicted 
but where does it come from and really here at that point you really need 
already quite a lot of knowledge you need a kind of knowledge of the history of 
art and you n-, m-, it's supposed that you've seen quite a lot of works of art 
in in collections or elsewhere in books so that you can actually say oh well 
yes i've seen this figure before it comes this er this nude f-, was in you know 
it's not a Manet invention it comes from this Odalisque po-, pose comes from 
Titian in the in the in the sixteenth century Venetian sixteenth century artist 
the third after that follows the third approach in Panofsky's order and that is 
after all of that you really have to ask yourself why is it depicted in the way 
is it what is specific in the way that the subject matter is taken up here and 
why did the artist choose to treat that subject matter and that he calls 
iconological in-, interpretation iconological interpretation so we have pre-
iconographical 
description iconographical analysis and iconological interpretation let me give 
you an example and i have chosen quite deliberately to take you through th-, 
probably one of the most famous works of art discussed by by er discuss is that 
too dark 
om0095: no it's fine 
nf0094: that's fine okay this is probably yes er whenever people think of 
Panofsky they immediately associate the German Renaissance artist Albrecht 
Dürer with Panofsky because Albrecht er because Panofsky gave an analysis a 
compelling analysis of this artwork here by Dürer which is a print by Dürer 
Dürer was you know er a painter al-, but also a very very versatile engraver 
who marketed his own engravings in a fantastic way he engraved his subject 
matter as you can see here and this work this sheet of paper this engraving is 
called Melancholia One and it's 
quite well if you look at it it's quite it's quite mind-boggling what is 
depicted what's going on here what what did the artist want to do with this 
painting and Panofsky said okay well let's first look what we see we see and 
you will start now we see a grumpy person sitting there contem-, er surrounded 
by many tools and you can sort of recognize this is a plane isn't it is it 
pronounced plane plane yes and some other here here many sort of workmen tools 
craftsmen's tools there's a sleeping dog here and then you have these funny 
geometric elements the sphere and the truncated polyhedron i think it is this 
one and you have a rainbow at the back and you have a building there with a 
with a bell er a sort of magic magic er number what do you call them number 
square er on that building and a putto here so that's what you get when you 
just look closely you sort of in-, try to enumerate what you really see in this 
picture but Panofsky was quite clear that 
it's not really enough to just stop there or actually he also was clear enough 
that even the pre-iconographical description with which you have to start can't 
really function very well without any knowledge whatsoever because if you i 
mean this is very clear here if you have no knowledge whatsoever in recognizing 
some of the features you see here and giving them a name to them you will 
probably just end up saying er a grumpy person in the midst of lots of rubbish 
or you know things like this and that that's probably where you end so you know 
you already need probably in your pre-iconographical description to say well 
this is really an angel isn't it it's not just a person because that figure has 
wings and we recognize it as an angel and recognize that as a putto and we 
recognize those as tools rather than just rubbish and we see some sort of 
relation between the er geo-, geometrical forms and the tools perhaps so at the 
second step of interpretation the 
iconographical analysis one needs to know he says you know not just to give a 
name to things but we need one needs to know contemporary writings one really 
needs to have a look in the archives to see why Dürer er what what is sorry 
what did i how where does the subject matter come from you need to get a wider 
framework to depict er to get a clear idea of you know where does h-, where 
have we seen these tools before where have we seen those geom-, geometric 
figures before where have we seen such a figure before and the first of course 
the first instance or the first thing you look for is some writing by the 
artist himself and that's very scant the i mean obviously the more you go back 
in time towards the medieval ages or even beyond that the the m-, the less 
there is but in Dürer's case we have one brief note which says key means power 
sex er sex means love [laugh] so this is you know this is the one note we have 
and then you go from there 
and you look further into other contemporary writers and because you say well 
this doesn't really get us where gets us very far er far and you really need to 
look into what er what what Panofsky calls the history of types subject matter 
really and er pan-, in Panofsky's own words he says how under different 
historical circumstances are particular themes or ideas articulated that's 
really the question at that stage so in the during the stecon-, second step 
it's less interpretation still than still description you still m-, of m-, 
which goes beyond but in this case beyond the individual image before we just 
looked and described the individual image but at that second stage we d-, we 
described the surroundings of the image the texts which could have been 
available to the artist or other images which he could have seen he or she in 
this case he now for Dürer's image Panofsky recognized that there were two 
pictorial traditions brought into one here 
the first was a kind of personification of the arts which stemmed from the 
medieval ages which depicted the arts still in its in the craftsman tradition 
with tools craftsmen's tools and geo-, geometry and the second was a 
personification of the four temperaments another Renaissance concept and i 
don't know if you're familiar with the four temperaments they were 
characterized as the sanguine the phlegmatic the choleric and the melancholic 
and particularly the melancholic was characterized as being dark in moods as 
having mood swings and you can see in fact if you look at this figure there 
it's quite dark in the face so it's already the colour depicted as a 
melancholic figure a moody figure really in order to get to that stage Panofsky 
had to identify texts and he saw that there was a German humanist who it is 
very likely that Dürer knew about called Agrippa of Nettesheim actually i must 
interrupt myself at that point because i do see you 
writing away fiercely i want to make a point you get a lot of those approaches 
again throughout this course really try to listen today don't take so many 
notes er particularly those names are not important it's easy to find them in 
in texts again if you ever read up on Dürer they will f-, will come up there 
so it's not important to try to get those names down try to see if you get the 
argument today that's much more important so don't bother with Agrippa of 
Nettesheim or indeed the other text which which Panofsky identified for the er 
er f-, er er as a as a source for Dürer Dürer's image and that's the Italian 
Renaissance humanist called Ficino now both of them talked about the different 
temperaments and Agrippa in particular said that there are actually three ways 
the human mind works and they are related to the to the to the temperaments and 
the first is the imagi-, er is a sort of way that er that you work 
imaginatively an imagination which operates in the 
sensory world and uses mechanical tools and geometry to understand the world 
outside and he thinks it's usually architects and artists who do that and who 
fall in that category there's a second category where you use reason knowledge 
of the natural and social world in order to understand it that's the scientists 
or natural historians as they would have been called during those times and 
sort of scientists is really only a word which comes about in the nineteenth 
century and then there's a third approach to the world which really uses the 
mind and that's you know in order to understand divine matter and those are of 
course the theologians now Agrippa said it's the artist who use their mima-, 
imagination and it's artists who try to understand it by measuring the world 
but it is actually quite a futile attempt because however much you measure 
however much you try to order the world it always somehow escapes your un-, 
order you never quite grasp it entirely in your 
understanding in your imagination and therefore it's related to a melancholic 
personification a melancholic person and it is for that reason that Dürer 
called it Melancholia One because it is the first melancholic type Agrippa 
talked about then further reading in those texts and around enabled Panofsky to 
say ah well really the magic number square here er is a protection against 
Saturn now Saturn is the the the the er primary example of a melancholic 
temperament so th-, er e-, er also the the the er the badge which flies up 
which holds the the title of the plate is also er aligned with Saturn and 
Melancholia and all this suddenly fell for Panofsky into one big piece it was 
melancholia and it comes from those texts and it is in this kind of in in in it 
is composed in this framework of of thoughts 
nf0094: but that still doesn't that explains a little bit more about the 
circumstances and what people thought and er at 
the time and how people tried to understand the world at the time but it 
doesn't really explain much why Dürer has chosen this subject and has depicted 
it in the way that he has so at that point we come to the third step in in er 
Panofsky's order and that is to make sense of that knowledge we have now gained 
in the three stages the icono-, er the pre-iconographic description the 
iconographic analysis and so we come to the iconological analysis or 
interpretation and er really it is at that point that interpretation sets in 
why did Dürer depict it in this way so we know from Dürer that key and money 
means wealth and power and we do know that he has a tradition of melancholia 
worked in too and that this melancholia was understood as being er this 
person's melancholic because the attempt to understand the world to measure it 
to use the tools to use geometry is actually in the end quite futile so 
according to Panofsky what we really have here is a 
self-portrait of Dürer because he says the artist himself at that time saw 
himself as quite a success he was quite a successful artist particularly with 
his prints and he saw that h-, the rewards for his endeavours were wealth the 
money and er and the key and power but in the end according to Panofsky Dürer 
had to admit defeat he couldn't however much he measured and you probably are 
are you aware that Dürer had these most fantastic attempts of giving you 
treatises of perspective and measure human the human body and anatomy however 
hard he worked to try to understand the rules and orders er you know un-, lying 
underneath the natural order he he couldn't ever grasp it entirely so this is a 
melancholic picture and it is a self-portrait because there is a sense of 
defeat here as well 
nf0094: now i think you have to admit that we really do very clearly ha-, get a 
sense here of an artist working intellectually and being engaged with 
intellectual 
discussions at the time so really i think one has to admit that with this 
analysis certainly Panofsky has achieved that and with all his other analysis 
as well you really have the you always have the feeling when you read Panofsky 
that all the artists he ever worked on must have been incredibly learned they 
must have known so many texts and all those texts and discussions filtered in 
beautifully into these images so that certainly Panofsky restored to art 
history the the significance of subject matter and content and artists working 
as intellectuals if you want but so far we really haven't gone much beyond what 
a connoisseur well we have gone much beyond in intellectual matters but not er 
we haven't really got to an art history with development we can't really write 
from the instance of this analysis a history of art of how art changed over 
time can we we really have only only illuminated one or Panofsky has 
illuminated for us one image but that 
would be unfair to Panofsky to say well really in that respect he doesn't 
really go much beyond the connoisseurs Panofsky did and in fact Panofsky had a 
very clear idea of superhistorical conceptions of the history of art and that 
might strike you as as obscure as Hegel's was because his idea was that there 
isn't and i quote him now an essential tendency of the human mind to make the 
world conform to thought so he said very clearly we really don't have and s-, 
as another philosopher who comes in a Kantian position but i just mention that 
it's not important he really says very clearly we don't whatever happens 
whatever we think is just what happens in our we order the world according to 
our mind we never ever know entirely what the world outside is the object in 
itself remains completely the world outside remains obscure as such what we 
know about it and that's all there is and that's sufficient and that's great is 
what the 
mind makes of it the mind has a tendency to order it so this thought takes 
according to Panofsky this capacity of the human mind so really what you have 
and you can see it quite clearly an amalgamam of a bit of Hegel's world spirit 
here you have the m-, human mind always trying to make sense and of course 
Wölfflin and Riegl's human perception although they capture they said this is 
just sensory perception here you have someone who says no it's not sensory 
perception it's thought which changes over time and makes the world conform to 
it which is therefore historically specific because thought can take as we've 
seen here quite a different form from the way that we think about the world 
nowadays but it is always that same essential tendency and it is because 
there's always that same same essential tendency that we can trace the history 
of art our thought has at different stages differently related to the world 
does that sound Hegelian 
to a certain extent i'm sure it will ring a bell again thus for Panofsky there 
was really no problem in relating the works of art to society and you've seen 
this how he's done it he really rel-, thought that a work of art was 
intricately related to the way that a particular society at any one time 
thought about the world and itself and therefore he could ad lim lib er connect 
texts all sorts of discussions at the time with a with an image because for 
them they were similar er examples of the way that thought at that moment in 
history had related to the outside world or made sense to the outside world so 
he could relate it to contemporary philosophical or theological writings 
whatever really seemed appropriate at the time 
nf0094: now for a Marxist of course such an approach is really not connecting 
art works very much to a society all this talk about thought and tho-, thought 
processes and in fact Karl Marx who's who was a m-, writer on economy and well 
philosopher as 
well in the in the nineteenth century Karl Marx himself reacted very strongly 
to Hegel er and what Karl Marx proposed to do was to put Hegel's lofty 
buildings down from the take it from the head onto its feet that's what he 
wanted to do from the thought processes down onto the feet of economical 
processes which go on in a society really the way what Marx discussed was the 
way that the means of production were distributed in a society the way that 
very basic distributions of wealth structured a society who was working who 
gained the surplus of that work who owned the land who owned the factories who 
owned the tools who was to do the work with it really those basic economical 
and er circumstances were absolutely fundamental for Marx and he thought they 
determined the work of art and they n-, well he actually was quite quiet about 
works of art he said they de-, determined all the intellectual going-ons in a 
society so Marx actually divided his or in his 
analysis of societies he divided societies into a base which is the economic 
and social structure and then a superstructure which is all our intellectual f-,
you know ramblings er all our intellectual justifications we produce in order 
to justify this economical base and of course Marx said at the base really er 
the the economical base is throughout society so far fundamentally injust there 
are people who work with the tools and there are people who own the tools and 
the land and own the means of production and although it is the workers who 
produce the value in the in in the piece in a piece it's really their handwork 
which produces it it is someone else who simply has money has capital who gets 
the surplus who gets that you know if you have a base material say a clump of 
earth it is worth nothing until someone works on it and then when it gets sold 
this surplus this extra value is added by the person who works on it but Marx 
says look who actually gains that surplus very rarely the worker they only get 
a you know a a very very trivial amount back you know a w-, a fee a wage and 
real the the value which is accrued to this object that money which comes with 
that that goes back into the pockets of the people who own the tools and and 
the land and he says that's that's in capa-, in capitalism fundamentally injust 
there's a fundamental injustice underneath capitalist societies 
nf0094: now what did art historians do with that and bear in mind Marx was 
quite quiet about the work of art now art historians er actually i have to art 
historians thought well this is actually quite a good concept to help us 
understand what if you want to link a work o-, of art to society to understand 
how it really really what really determines it and Marx very clearly says it's 
the economical conditions in a society which determine it so let's look and see 
if this is really what determines the way a 
work of art looks and on came people like Frederick Antal the other names here 
and Arnold Hauser and they all gathered together also in the thirties when 
Panofsky started working er in a in a in a in a circle called er at Budapest 
where lots of Marxist er intellectuals at the time gathered and they sat down 
and developed Antal and Hauser developed a history of art based on a Marxist 
analysis of society what we get and i give you an example here and i come to 
this image which has been on the on the screen for quite some time now this 
beautiful Madonna which i hope i can focus a little bit better so Frederick 
Antal for example came up with an analysis and said look we have these two 
works both produced in the early fifteenth century i-, in the Florence republic 
in the State Republic of Florence they're almost contemporary both produced w-, 
the the one here on the on on your left is produced in fourteen-twenty-five and 
the other one on your right is produced in 
fourteen-twenty-six the one here on the left is by an artist called er Gentile 
da Fabriano and the other one on the right is produced by Masaccio they're both 
the same subject matter Madonnas with child yet they're really quite 
fundamentally different and Antal said we can't explain the difference if we 
just looked at the difference of style and just er you know er if you want a 
Wölfflian approach of you know some is a more open form another more closed 
one is more more er planned pla-, this would be a slightly more planned 
arrangement this a more recessional pray-, er er er er approach here and he 
says we don't understand anything at all if we just try to explain the 
difference in style by looking at those formal categories what we really have 
to understand he said was that they were really both produced by very f-, for 
very different clienteles very different people with very different interests 
who struggled for power at the time in the in the Florence 
republic if you look at the da Fabriano here on the left you see it's quite 
delicate you have a very delicate attitude of the Madonna and you have a h-, 
and and and er Christ gives you er a grace here you know the divine grace of 
course raises his hand and it's very stylized in its in in its mannerisms and 
in its in in in in its movements and you have of course all this wealth of 
ornamentation and decoration very delicately done now Antal related this to the 
aristocracy in Florence at the time and said look really in the way that Christ 
is depicted in a ritualistic function in the in the emphasis on decoration and 
and and ornament that really reflects the interests of the aristoc-, er 
aristocratic culture at the time now contrast that with Masaccio and you very 
clearly see that the Madonna is put in a much clearer sense of a sort of three-
dimensional spatial naturalistic environment and the Christ here is a real baby 
not sort of 
ritualistic er figure it's a real baby which sucks its fingers and er and the 
Madonna is sort of turned in space and much and just simply much much chunkier 
much three more three-dimensional these as that really was in the interests of 
the emerging mercantile classes of the Florence society at the heart of the 
Florence society were really was really struggling for power at the time and 
they didn't want to have anything to do with all this ephemeral you know 
decoration of the aristocratic course their sense of the world was very 
realistic very down to earth very grounded and we can explain the difference in 
those images by looking at the different interests at the heart of the Florence 
society i give you an a more contemporary analy-, Marxist analysis just to show 
you what it means for art history to take that approach and that's er i mean of 
course those are already er produced at the beginning of what one would call 
the capita-, capitalist societies 
fundamental to Marx's understanding of the world there are stages through which 
the world history has to go through er so there are feudal states and then you 
know and er by the time you arrive at capitalism the injustice has become so 
great that the last step in Marx's understanding would lead to a kind of 
sharing of all the means of productions in all the worlds to er societies which 
are communist in arrangement so Marx had a very clear idea and you can see how 
that actually leads to history of art because there's a clear sense of the 
development of society and as the societies develop and the means of 
productions change the works of arts change accordingly now let me illuminate 
this again and its problems actually by looking at this picture which very much 
comes from the really burgeoning er capitalist society of the nineteenth 
century in France this is Claude Monet La Grenouillère one of his La 
Grenouillère pieces it was painted in 
eighteen-sixty-nine now La gre-, Grenouillère is a place in er er at the Seine 
near Chatou where all the Parisian folk would flock for leisure time pursuits 
for you know in the a-, in the afternoon or on Sundays when they weren't 
working it was a leisure leisure time destination for and in fact what was 
significant about it so Marxist art historians tell us is that at that place 
all the different classes the different sexes mingle completely er er without 
any any sense of the of the divisions which er structured their living together 
in the city during the day during the week and during work times but really you 
don't get much of that sense in the Monet do you i mean the reading goes here 
that there's no indication of such a potentially explosive social mix of all 
the you know working classes with the bourgeoisie and aristocracy at best these 
divisions here the divisions which are prevalent in the city are only 
temporarily suspended during leisure hours they 
really are fundamentally there in the society we don't really get a sense 
furthermore of that this is actually quite a seedy ground this rather glamorous 
scene here because prostitutes were rampantly plying their trade during this er 
er at that s-, at at at that place and of course prostitutes were a big issue 
at that time in er in France in the late nineteenth century and how one could 
regulate them and how one could because there was a rapid spread of diseases at 
the time so people were actually quite afraid of rampant prosti-, you know pr-, 
prostitutes rampantly plying their trade and in places like this so really what 
is remarkable er Marxist analyst er analysts will tell us about La er 
Grenouillère would be that the way this environment this rather conflict laden 
environment appears like a glamorous playground really within the scene you 
just only have a had a feeling that people sort of casually meet each other 
sort of leisurely standing by that even you as 
the spectator are asked to sort of casually walk by take in just an instant of 
a scene it's not properly framed like a sort of monumental scene it's really i 
see it it's a snapshot you pass by and that's of course supported by the 
brushstroke this rather hastily impressionist brushstroke which emphasizes the 
ephemerality so Marxist analysts would say look and this really shows that 
there there is this amazing conflict in the society and art is just part of the 
ideological superstructure which works in the interests of the capitalists and 
the bourgeoisie at the expense of the workers and conceals those those 
conflicts underneath it it's just a glamorous image which completely conceals 
all the conflicts in late nineteenth century French society so here then in 
such accounts is a clear sense of i think you would agree of how art relates to 
contemporary society and its problems but is it a systematic account as well 
well i tried to map 
out that if it was strictly speaking a Marxist account it would be very 
systematic because you would then would have an understanding of how one 
society changes to another er and you have a teleology that would again 
something with direction something which goes from one point to another and of 
course therefore you would have a means of explaining the differences in the 
works of art when a society changes say from a capitalist society to a 
communist society accordingly the outlook of the work of art will change now 
that would be systematic but of course you know very few people hold to a such 
strict Marxist explanation nobody particularly after the walls came down in in 
Berlin in nineteen-eighty-nine believes in you know in the in in this teleology 
that a communist sex-, er society necessarily has to replace a capitalist one 
so there are very few and indeed i hardly know any art historian who really 
holds tight and fast to a Marxist analysis of society and 
therefore what you get is a much more problematic account of art history the 
weaker social art history is actually quite unable to you have to and you can 
see this already with the two examples i've given you you have two conflicting 
ideas of you do you always have to ask how do they see the artwork related to 
the society that's my guiding question now in one sense in this for example you 
have it clearly as a reflection of the society and of course Marxists have been 
vehemently criticized as just understan-, or social art historians as just 
understanding artworks as being a reflection of the society and not being able 
to contribute in any significant means to the society in which it is produced 
so it's simply a refl-, a mirror of that society and nothing more and the 
artist appears as a sort of agent completely at the mercy of of all the 
economic forces so that's one criticism which which Marxists have been 
approached with but and and therefore some social art 
historians have reacted by saying look it doesn't necessarily need to be this 
reflection model it can be much weaker it can both be reflecting the society 
and contributing to it but in any case it's not entirely clear how er the 
artwork is really linked to society in the in in in those accounts there's 
always a s-, a slight ambiguity is it a reflection is it contributing in which 
way if it's contributing you have to prove that the artwork not only is there 
because the society is in the way it is but also that it is there er that er 
the society is there because the artwork looks this way and i don't know of any 
stringent art historical account which can give me proof that say Turner er the 
the industrial revolution in Britain happened in the early nineteenth century 
because Turner painted Rain Steam and Speed but this is just because it's 
become such a prevalent er er approach in the history of art i just wanted to 
give you some idea of that there is criticism to 
this too and this criticism has been approached er has been has been advanced 
not only by me here and i'm really only giving it to you in order to make clear 
that there's always a criticism to all the approproaches which we were just 
discussing about there's not one foolproof approach which you can just pick and 
choose if you pick one you have to be aware of its weaknesses and its strengths 
and you pick it for its strengths 
nf0094: of course all the problems i've outlined with with Hegel with Wölfflin 
with the connoisseurs now with the social history approach they continue simply 
in the last approach i want to introduce here today in feminism if it's true 
what i've said that feminism simply doesn't have a systematic account of its 
own how artworks are connected in time and develop over time but append their 
specific er its specific question to other accounts other systematic accounts 
so the most probably the most widespread feminist and the earliest 
feminist account which came about in the nineteen-seventies was really one 
influenced by Marxist analysis of society or or or or art historians' social 
history and at that er and there the most famous name is one which you've seen 
here on the board but you've encountered in the seminars as well this is Linda 
Nochlin and of course w-, again with with her account you would simply als-, 
always have to ask how precisely does she see the artwork related to society so 
those all those problems although i'm not mentioning them any more will 
continue with all the approaches i'm going through now let me start with Linda 
Nochlin now she in particular argued that the reason why there are no great 
women artists known to us is because male supra-, supremacy governs the 
superstructure at the exclusion of women now this is simply instead of asking i 
mean often they ask the class question as well but this is simply ask-, er 
adding to the questions of class and society the 
question of women and in no doubt it is true if you look into the history of 
art that there aren't any women art historians er er i mean art historians 
there are women artists or not very much we have to look very hard and fast yet 
women have always been half of the population so why is that so Linda Nochlin 
says it's institutions such as for example the French Academy where women were 
simply excluded from artistic training and even when they the odd one managed 
to get in er it er they weren't really allowed to make a mark on their own and 
on their own grounds and the remarkable thing is she says that and this is her 
particular area of expertise fre-, er France in the eighteenth and nineteenth 
century at the end of the French Revolution in the er at the end of the 
eighteenth century er where there were huge advances made for you know 
representation for bourgeois representation in m-, political structures women 
were actually 
excluded women di-, the case of women were was not advanced during the French 
Revolution and Linda Nochlin and others then have set out to see what happened 
to such women artists who actually did participate what happened to the such 
women artists who actually did feel that during the time of the French 
Revolution there er er there was a call for f-, f-, m-, emancipation and people 
er wanted freedom and they m-, and and they felt this included them so what 
happened when they emerged and she and i give you here an example of one of her 
discussions on the right she dis-, discusses for example an artist you probably 
never have heard of and might not a-, even hear about any more for reasons i 
will give you in a second an artist called Marie Guillaume Benoist who actually 
engaged very actively in the social struggles during the French Revolution and 
painted this painting called er called er er A Female Black er it was painted 
around eighteen-hundred and it's very clear that she clearly meant it to link 
into with contemporary appeals for the abolishment of slavery and there was a a 
particular decree which was er advanced in the er during the French Revolution 
which wanted er which abolished slavery in nineteen-ninety-four and this her 
painting here is clearly managed to be er in the way that she depicts this the 
this black woman in in the tradition of French art in the dignified manner was 
managed to participate in that struggle for er emancipation but what happened 
to Benoist as soon as she got married shortly after she was expected to 
disappear from the scene and retreat into the household and that's precisely 
what she did and we didn't hear won't hear anything or wouldn't didn't hear 
anything from her any more she didn't paint and Linda Nochlin says that's 
characteristic of the fundamental m-, of fundamental s-, er chauvinist 
structures in society which make it impossible 
for women artists to make a mark now such accounts look for social and economic 
explanations like other Marxist and social art historians to recover and 
explain a-, are produced by the other half of the world's population why why 
doesn't exist it tries to explain or when it exists why er how does it does it 
look differently why does it look in the way it looks and here this is an 
example i'll come back to next week in a different context er no oh yep there 
we go yep here are two pictures again by French impressionists on the r-, on 
the right you have Renoir's La Loge of eighteen-seventy-four and on the left 
you have a have a female impressionist called Mary Cassatt who depicts Woman in 
Black at the Opera both are opera scenes and both have again i mean this is 
five years later in seventy-ni in eighteen-ni er seventy-nine and it's very 
clear to a f-, to a feminist artist who instead of course what we have here is 
a typical image 
of a of a male artist which although it is in the opera can see a woman is 
woman is made the object of the of the of the artwork it is the woman we look 
at she's not the subject she isn't doing anything we look at the woman and in 
fact we see the man behind scanning other women not looking at the stage but 
scanni-, scanning other women in the lowest and in the theatre to look at like 
we look at a voyeuristic in a sense look at this woman here when Mary Cassatt 
paints a scene like this the account goes we don't she actually shields herself 
from our view and she actually looks herself she's active she's not she's not 
so much an object of our gaze of our stare any more she shields herself and she 
is actively looking onto the stage and into the theatre so feminist art 
historians try to explain those differences as well there is however another 
feminist approach which and this is quite neat for me to now come to the end of 
this lecture because i now go through i've now taken 
a social historian's approach and showed you what a feminist angle on it would 
mean i now quickly show you what an iconographical angle would mean in and 
there is such a thing in for feminist art historians now feminist art 
historians would say well if it's true that women have always been the object 
of male artists never and and been excluded as artists' subjects themselves 
let's look at how artists have depicted them lek-, let's look at the history of 
types and really what we can if we look carefully see is that women have always 
been been depicted in two ways two camps either they are Madonnas saints or 
goddesses or they are Eves sinners and er witches and there's very little 
ground so women as they are depicted by men are stereotyped into those 
categories into those histories or and and then then you can give a history of 
types two examples very briefly here Lucas Cranach seven er sixteenth century 
er German 
artist painting Eve and of course Eve is Eve Eve is the the the the primary 
seductress in in this because of her tempta-, because she is tempted and she 
succumbs to it it is because of that that humankind has fallen the fall from 
paradise and on on the right i couldn't help putting this in this is this is by 
a nineteenth century German artist again Franz von Stuck late nineteenth 
century because really bad quality er and it's called this er Sensuality and 
again it's a it's a it's a woman as can and you can see the the snake here 
again as a vamp a seductress as somehow evil she's pale and there are other 
pictures where you have a sort of extreme co-, er contrast between the glowing 
gold of in this painting style and the extreme pil-, pale and ill looking er 
depiction of the woman who is an evil seductress of course obviously disease 
ridden as well that is an iconographical approach not as elaborate as as 
Panofsky's but it looks for a history of types it 
go-, goes into the history of whenever you look and whenever art historians 
look for models of some particular depiction they in one sense or another do 
link into the into Erwin Panofsky's iconography but there is also and you might 
be surprised a feminist formalist approach 'cause formalists are after all all 
th-, all those people who have been heavily derided by contemporary art 
historical approaches and very quickly i give you examples of that here on the 
on the left you have a minimalist artist of the nineteen-sixties called Donald 
Judd and on the right a female minimalist artist called Eva Hesse er and you 
and er a formalist approach as it has been advanced with regard to these 
objects would say look here on the on the left you have industrial material 
clonky material rather macho in appearance yet Eva Eva Hesse takes it up a 
female artist she still uses those geometric forms which minimalists in the 
nineteen-sixties 
used but she uses it in a much more biomorphic way in a in a way which 
resembles much more body you can see those little things i mean they're metal 
but it looks much more like something which is bodily which is furry or you 
know and and therefore the argument goes it is because women are much more in 
touch with their body they are after all the people who bear children who raise 
children who are often been because they have been condemned to the home and 
the household they are much more in touch with those kind of aspects of the 
society rather than the the sort of mass produced clunky industrial worlds and 
and it's because of that that their work looks in the way it does that's where 
the difference sets in that's of course really problematic i think as an 
approach because if you want you have something y-, you have in many ways a r-, 
a recourse to Riegl and Wölfflin who say well it's human perception which 
changes over 
time and it's but it's the constant as well here the constant is a biological 
difference between men and women if you think about it and there's of course no 
way that that can if it if it is really gets down to such a determinism then 
it's obviously no way that this can ever change then you would always look at 
works of art as women as what makes it intrinsically different from men because 
it's a different s-, different sex and of course there's a as you can imagine a 
huge struggle within feminist art historian circle between who because a social 
history account would not quite square with an account which sees biological 
differences as determining the differences of women and me-, men artists' 
production and so there's huge discussion going on there now with this last 
approach and i do have to come to the end and i do n-, do not want to i mean to 
a certain extent i think i've given you a summary again because with looking at 
feminism we came back to some 
of the approaches from the last lecture and this lecture iconography and 
formalism and social history of course as well but with this you know we have 
seen what is actually quite quite significant for a lot of very recent 
approaches is that they aren't systematic in the sense that nineteenth and 
early twentieth century art history was that they don't aim that they that they 
don't aim to have one underlying cause which remains consistent throughout the 
ages er if you take away the one the the feminist approach which says there are 
fundamental biological differences all other approaches always say well you 
know we we don't we we can't actually hold to all these 
metaphysical or whatever fundamental constants things have always changed and 
we certainly don't have any access to it so all we can always give is a 
particular account at a particular time but we can't give you a survey in the 
history of art and i think this is where the lectures come in as well you don't 
get a survey of the history of art any more and i will continue with more 
approaches which have which still account for the w-, differently in the way 
that the art object relates to society but er they don't give you a systematic 
you know long term development account in the way that the approaches until you 
know th-, feminism today did so thank you