Approaches to Art History
Useful four week online course from the National Gallery introducing four art historical approaches which can be used to ‘read’ paintings. The four approaches were social history, decolonisation, feminism and queer studies and each week we took a picture from the gallery’s collection and discussed it with one of these approaches in mind. Inevitably to make a point, the discussion sometimes felt a bit one dimensional and we sometimes strayed a long way from the painting in question to look at history of the art historical approach. I think week one looking at social history was the most natural to my approach. John Fagg, from the University of Birmingham, looked at “Men of the Docks” by George Bellows from 1912. I do like to know about the context of a picture and what it shows about the times it was painted in as well as what the market for the type of work might have been. Ana Howie, from the University of Cambridge, took the decolonisation theme using “Drunken Silenus Supporte...