Why don’t more historians teach more about art? The experience of the Department of History at Carnegie-Mellon University over the years demonstrates that a sizable audience exists for history courses that deal with art as it is embedded in history. This audience consists of students actually majoring in one of the fine arts as well as students either interested in art or interested in becoming interested in art. The latter desire is often stimulated by a “culture” distribution requirement.
Many historians would react to the existence of this audience by handing it over to art historians or to “humanities” types who would offer a potpourri course starting from ground zero. Historians who are zealous museum and concert-goers commonly protest that they don’t know enough to teach art and music students, who are usually taken by definition as being experts.
The fact is that some students in the arts do know something, but generally not very much, about pieces of various arts. They have not, for instance, considered how the doctrines of pietism affected Bach’s involvement with church music in the various environments in which he worked. They have never given a moment’s thought to the motivation for Courbet’s painting an enormous canvas of a burial attended by many ordinary inhabitants of an undistinguished small town, though they may have seen it in the Louvre. They certainly have heard about Frank Lloyd Wright, but they have no inkling of radical Jeffersonianism as a central organizing element in Wright’s creativity.
I have seldom encountered a historian of any of the fine arts who consistently situates all developments in the history of any art within the broad stream of the human past. The dominant tendency, not surprisingly, remains concern with details of technique: How did the masons working on Gothic cathedrals cut stones? How did sonata form develop? How did the role of the chorus in Greek tragedy change? Surely, in the history of the arts just as in the history of science or, for that matter, in the history of historical writing, an internalist orientation discloses much of value, while at the same time such a viewpoint makes research and scholarship seem more manageable.
Art has always been created for an audience that used and enjoyed it. Yet an audience that came to art from their ongoing, usual, everyday concerns and patterns of living, experienced art, then returned to the continuing everyday concerns and patterns of living. The art they enjoyed was fashioned by artists who had grown up sharing these same everyday concerns and patterns of living. As working artists they would continue to share at least some of the dominant ideas and styles of their audience. Even if artists rejected many of these modes, an outcome unheard of until the nineteenth century, they knew about them. Because art is always conditioned by the lives of its audience, the deepest grasp of its meaning remains incomplete if art is not set within the human history from which it arises.
By 1945 historians at Carnegie Tech were offering a year-long, five-times-a week course called The History of Arts and Civilization, an extremely well-received blend of Western Civilization and major episodes in the history of the arts. In 1967, when a new liberal arts college with a new curriculum was started, I undertook the establishment of a successor course. My main concern was showing that “I-like-it-I-don’t-like-it” need not remain the only mode available to students for talking about art. I engineered a course that stressed methods for understanding art: Freud on the artist and daydreaming, Milton Brown on a Marxist approach, an anthropologist on art as a “culture cognitive map.” The students hated it. It was too theoretical, and the course itself got caught in a crossfire of late ’60s rebelliousness and resentment at required courses.
We tried a one-semester variant, with the same format, one lecture and two staff meetings a week, all staffed by a variety of historians—not art historians, musicologists, or practicing artists. Occasionally, however, a young art historian would share some of the teaching, usually finishing a stint, amazed at the broad vistas that “real” history had disclosed. We smuggled theory in by talking our students through highlights of Freud and smidgins of Marx, because we wanted to show students how to sidestep mere emotionalizing about art. If reasonable human beings can come to a measure of agreement on why Protestantism appeared, they can also reach a degree of consensus on an equally historical problem such as what Michelangelo was really up to.
At first, five people shared the teaching; by 1974 the number had fallen to three, and later to two. Over the years we abandoned the weekly lectures. They had been useful for imparting information, for keeping the sections together somewhat despite a heterogeneity of instructors, and as a convenient means for bringing films, guest lecturers, and musical performances to students. The lectures also provided a constant headache in the shape of absentee ism, inattentiveness, and discouraging attempts at enforcing decorum.
I wasn’t sorry to see this lecture style disappear. The real point is engaging the students, which means grappling and wrestling—it’s a battle in which the back rows should not get away with keeping quiet, and a teacher should not just call on the few inveterate handwavers.
I don’t show slides because lowered lights, like lectures, reduce attentiveness and dilute the changes for real engagement. I try to find appropriate illustrated books for student purchase and contemplation when the topic warrants. Often I bring in books and simply hold up and carry around a picture referred to in the reading but not reproduced there. Sometimes I play records, often parts of movements. Films can be very helpful in dealing, for instance, with tribal art or the history of photography. I recall a film in which Leonard Bernstein conducted the finale of the Beethoven Ninth with such impact that many students asked to see it again. An excessive number of films, especially at the course’s start, however, can slow the establishment of a working student teacher tie.
I grade all the exams and papers. I have always asked that overly brief or off-the-mark papers be done over, and in 1984 I offered a general invitation to anyone to rewrite practically any paper. In 1985 I had to limit wholesale rewriting to one paper. With 120 students, the result can be an overwhelming desire never to see a student paper again, but otherwise a teacher never knows as much as he/she ought to know about what effect the course is having.
The course contains four or five units; these are case studies or problems. Because the course has no mandate, I sequence the case studies that form the units to build cross-referencing to alternate “hard” and “easier” material, and to make use of local events such as special museum exhibits. I make sure that individual constituencies gain a hearing (for instance, Siegfried Giedion on the history of mechanization or Nikolaus Pevsner on the origins of the modern movement for designers and visual artists and Frank Lloyd Wright for architects) while, in the process, students catch sight of unexplored lands, without becoming too bogged down in boredom or active dislike of a topic. No material is canonical and sacred; any thing and everything dealt with must be faced as a problem, not as a set of finished answers. Given the material that Giedion throws before his readers, how can a question such as the deepest reasons for mechanization be dealt with? How did Wright find and satisfy the very different clients who backed him during an exceedingly long working life?
Day by day I work at banishing gooey rhapsodizing about beauty; I focus attention on Mozart’s struggle to free himself from the Archbishop of Salzburg and from being imprisoned by the past of his craft as he learned it from his father and from his contemporaries. Situating Mozart in the realities of his age means placing him in history so his towering achievement in fashioning new expressive techniques for audiences stands out clearly but without fake drama. Mozart found that audiences at public concerts and in theaters valued the fuller expressiveness that secular and archiepiscopal courts could not energize in him. He also discovered the courage to abandon confining courts and forge ahead on a more hazardous road.
For several reasons I do not avoid chances to show students how intellectual, technical, and emotional elements cooperate in the lives of great creators, and in their own developing lives as well. I have used Maynard Solomon’s Beethoven, a striking picture of Beethoven caught in an Austria increasingly demoralized by Napoleon, and trapped also in an increasingly unhappy personal life, but a Beethoven able to gain respite by creating music in a “heroic style” that depicted himself defying his fate and uplifting his psychically needy audiences. Because Solomon draws heavily on psychoanalytic presuppositions, I decided to assign part of Erik Erikson’s Childhood and Society to make students more keenly aware of how inner resources and limitations affect dealing with external reality. Once I used Solomon without Erikson. Solomon and Erikson proved a better balance: students emerged far more aware of strengths and weaknesses in Beethoven’s psyche, and in their own minds.
Studying history means learning cues, signs, and patterns from the past that increase understanding. A unit on Mozart and his shifting audiences ought not end with collecting an assigned paper or selling the assigned paperback, but it should provoke attention to the determining role of the audience in the creation of postmodernism as we be hold it. Again and again students have written on course evaluations that their eyes were opened, not really to answers, but to questions that repay asking. They have discovered that history indeed is about art, and that inescapably art must grow out of history, which is the accumulated meanings that human beings have attached to their existence.
Teaching Aids for “History is About Art, Too”
Portions of the course description for fall 1985 is as follows:
“Art means disassembling life and then recomposing it, putting it back together in ways that make more sense, yield more pleasure, and incite people to become more human.
“Why does every society have art? And why isn’t all art the same?
“Study of the following topics will yield parts of some answers: tragedy in ancient Greece and modern America, dance in history, Gustav Mahler, the history of photography, and the Carnegie International (a very large survey of current art production at the Museum of Art, Carnegie Institute, Pittsburgh).”
Students are asked to purchase:
Arthur Miller, Death of a Salesman
The Oedipus Plays of Sophocles
Cobbett Steinberg, ed., The Dance Anthology
Beaumont Newhall, The History of Photography
Erik H. Erikson, Childhood and Society
Alma Mahler, Gustav Mahler: Memories and Letters
Ben Shahn, The Shape of Content
Two quizzes (20-25 minutes) and six papers of varying lengths were required.
Richard L. Schoenwald, PhD, Harvard 1952, is a professor of modem European intellectual and psychohistory at Carnegie-Mellon University, Pittsburgh.
