On Not Teaching Art History

Hans C. Hönes, Lecturer in Art History at the University of Aberdeen, revisits the position against teaching art history at universities, which was held by many artists, art historians and critics in Britain until the 1960s. Hönes is completing a Research Collection Fellowship at the PMC this year, exploring the institutions key to British art history in the mid-twentieth century.

For anybody interested in the future of art history, it may be useful to recall that its status as a university subject was, until the mid-twentieth century, challenged by many who cared most deeply for art and its study. The British art historian, critic and art collector Paul Oppé (1878–1957), whose archive is held at the PMC, was exemplary in his passion for the subject and his opposition to its formalisation. In 1905, Oppé resigned from his job as a lecturer in Classics at Edinburgh University – a dramatic decision for a young scholar who had only recently been appointed to this prestigious position. Oppé had other plans: he would devote his life to studying art history. In his later years, he became one of the most renowned connoisseurs and collectors of British drawings and watercolours of the eighteenth century. But, at the time of his resignation, none of this was certain.

In early twentieth-century Britain, an art-historical career was something of a chimera. There was no defined way to become an historian of art; the subject was hardly established at British universities. Art history was mainly practised at the extreme ends of the class spectrum: it had either been promoted by committed socialists (such as John Ruskin and William Morris) for the betterment of the working classes, and taught in working men’s colleges and similar institutions; or it was the domain of gentleman scholars, who often had close connections with the aristocracy, and thus access to the many artworks still in private hands, and often locked away behind country house doors. Oppé quickly resigned himself to the fact that there was indeed no career in art history, and so took a job as a civil servant –though his family was wealthy (his father was a successful silk merchant), he still needed a regular income. The office job was dull but also undemanding, leaving plenty of time for gallery visits, discussions in the Athenaeum club and independent research.

Oppé could have tried to combine an academic career in Classics and an interest in art. In 1904, a job as university lecturer was not necessarily more demanding than a position in the civil service, and academia granted the postholder a great degree of personal freedom. Furthermore, Oppé’s academic post did give him the opportunity to teach courses on classical art, such as one titled ‘Greek Sculpture’ that he offered at St. Andrews in 1902. The course not only covered key developments in ancient art but also included ample digressions on later sculptors such as Michelangelo, as well as philosophical debates about the purpose of art more broadly.

Oppé’s ideal of art seems to have been the main reason he abandoned this academic path. His diaries at the PMC highlight the fact that he loathed the idea of pursuing his love for art as a job for financial gain. In the aestheticist climate of Britain around 1900, fine art held sway primarily as a utopian realm of ideal beauty, detached from the mundane realities of life. As Oppé wrote, in 1904: “All day today and generally I long to paint, to study and feast upon the only satisfying of earthly qualities, the light and colour and form of nature. Or I wish to be a poet and to express in a form not inadequate some of the emotions and thoughts which make up my real life.” “Real life” evidently happens in an ideal, aesthetic realm and is separate from a professional existence as a civil servant, or even as a university lecturer.

While Oppé desperately wanted to become a full-time art historian, he was also convinced that his field of study should not be taught at university level. Many practising artists agreed, such as the Royal Academy of Arts president Edward Poynter, who cautioned against the history of art as a serious field of study. Historicism, Poynter argued, would only hamper a fresh, spontaneous feeling for art and beauty, which he saw as providing the foundations for a blossoming of art practice in twentiethcentury Britain. The discipline’s academic fortunes only changed with the foundation of the Courtauld Institute of Art in 1932, the first (and, for a long time, only) institution for higher education that offered an undergraduate degree in the subject.

Edward John Poynter, Apelles: Design for a Mosaic in the Museum (the “Kensington Valhalla”), 1864, oil on canvas, 104.5 × 34.5 cm. Collection of the Victoria & Albert Museum, London.

Image courtesy of the Victoria & Albert Museum, London (all rights reserved).

This reticence is often taken as evidence – particularly by continental art historians – that British scholars were simply not temperamentally equipped for the kind of serious art history that had been taking shape on the continent, especially in Germany, since the late nineteenth century. In 1952, the architectural historian Nikolaus Pevsner had pondered whether art history was “an un-English activity”; two years later, his colleague Erwin Panofsky quipped that the British treated artworks like their mistresses, which is to say as something to admire in private, without profaning their beauty through too much analysis.

In many cases, however, the British position was a conscious decision and not an issue of temperament. In the 1930s, Roger Fry argued explicitly for “art-history” as a discipline that was not purely historical (i.e. focused on artworks as embedded in their time of creation), but primarily open to questions of aesthetics and philosophy. This approach, Fry argued, should be underpinned by extensive engagement with recent developments in psychology, ethnology and prehistoric archaeology. These disciplines would offer fresh insights into the empirical foundations of beauty – and thus the tools for a scrupulous, scientific analysis of beauty itself. This agenda was shared by some of the very few university teachers in the field. In 1918, Gerard Baldwin Brown, chair of fine art at Edinburgh University, for example, had argued that art should not be studied as part of cultural history but as “a world of her own”: an aesthetic counter-reality, following autonomous rules. His preferred instruments for analysing this realm of beauty were, once again, drawn not from the historian’s toolkit but from empirical aesthetics and the psychology of art.

M.I. Batten, “A Great London Gain: The Courtauld Institute of Art in Portman Square”, The Sphere, 25 March 1933 (detail).

Courtesy of the Frank Simpson Archive, Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art (FHS/1/2a).

There was also no single counterposition, as attempts to introduce art history as a university subject came from different quarters. At Aberdeen University in the early 1920s, for example, the classicist John Harrower pioneered a degree course called ‘Fine Art: History and Theory’. Thus, in North East Scotland, students could graduate with a diploma in the subject ten years before the foundation of the Courtauld. Harrower’s historicist take on the study of art differed significantly from Fry’s or Baldwin Brown’s agenda. The latter two figures seem, in many respects, more aligned with continental developments that promoted an Allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft – a general science of art – which prioritised a philosophical and empirical understanding of art. The lack of art history at British universities was thus often a challenge to exclusively historical methods, in favour of a normative, aesthetic approach to the subject. In the eyes of many professional historians, “art history” thus remained “open to suspicion”, as Hamish Miles phrased it as late as 1967, in his inaugural lecture as a professor of the history of art at Leicester University.

A “general science of art”, however, never found a secure institutional footing. In Britain from the 1930s, the foundation of émigré-led institutions such as the Warburg Institute encouraged a shift towards the historical study of art.

By the 1960s, the subject was widely established at British universities. Looking back on these early debates in the discipline should remind us that its current form – as art history – was not always unchallenged. But it also might, on the other hand, make us aware of its present strengths. Art history has been remarkably successful in absorbing subfields such as visual studies, whose emergence was initially regarded as a threat to the field. New challenges are undoubtedly on the horizon, given the defunding of humanities subjects by recent British governments and the growing lack of security in academic jobs. Many departments are nevertheless in a position of strength, training hundreds of graduates and scores of postgraduates every year and hiring staff with expertise beyond European art. This is astonishing for a discipline taught only rarely at school. If anything, art history might soon need to ask itself whether there are limits to its academic growth. Just how many art history PhDs can we train sustainably, with clear prospects for a meaningful role in communities of research?