About

In the academic year 1874-75 the Harvard University Course catalogue offered for the first time a series of electives in the History of Art. These included two in the History of Fine Arts, taught by Charles Eliot Norton (1827-1908), who in 1875 would be promoted to a professorship. The third elective course was a drawing class taught by Charles Herbert Moore (1840-1930). Moore’s class, Principles of Design in Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture, also considered design in other media, such as ceramics and carving. Harvard was the first university in the United States to develop a program in the field of art history. This founding 150 years ago stands as a milestone in the beginnings of art history.

The combination of history and practice in Harvard’s curriculum had been an obsession of Charles E. Norton. Persuaded that the appreciation of the Fine Arts demanded that students first be educated in the Art of Looking and that learning to see was best accomplished through the practice of drawing, Norton laid the ground for its program and pedagogy. Students’ personal, hands-on interaction with art objects was to be at the core of their training. As Edward W. Forbes (1873-1969) put it in 1911, their goal was not to merge one with the other but to bring as close as possible two complementary aspects of artistic appreciation: what he called the “critical” and the “creative.” In such a curriculum the museum became a “laboratory” in which students were invited to encounter works of art as material artifacts, the result of human skill and technology, in other words, things and not only reproducible images or objects. This plan not only allowed the program to increasingly expand the teaching, and the museum’s collections beyond the Western canon, but also (and complementarily) to attend to different media that lay outside of the European definition of the Fine Arts (textiles, for example), and, last but not least, to include “living” art and artists: “Art is not dead”––wrote Forbes–– “it is not a memory of the past, nor a butterfly preserved in a glass bottle. It is among us, and is part of our life.” (That same year the Fogg Museum of Art held an exhibition on Edgar Degas [d. 1917]).

Norton modeled his venture on the ideas of John Ruskin (1819-1900), the hugely influential advocate of the Arts & Crafts movement. The Ruskinian character of Harvard’s program allowed the questioning, if not the quelling, of the dominant and no less constraining Art-versus-Artifact model. This specifically European distinction had only been formulated in the Renaissance and institutionally grounded during the Enlightenment. Harvard’s Fine Arts Department’s object-focused tradition developed in a critical relation to the German proposal that was destined to dominate the field in the years immediately after WWII: the approach pioneered by Aby Warburg (1866-1929), the champion of art history as a history of the image. In a letter of June 7, 1927 to Harvard’s professor and associate director of the Fogg Museum, Paul Sachs (1878-1965), Warburg emphasized the need to interpret works of art as part of their larger culture, illuminating their meaning with written documents. At the same time, however, the German scholar also expressed his admiration for Harvard’s Institut: a program, he had learned, that was planned first to teach students to look. In his own words this was a program designed for the “education of the eyes” (Augenerziehung).

Some of the goals that prompted Harvard’s art history curriculum ––the distinctive quality of art history as a humanistic intellectual discipline–– have never been abandoned by us. Others, such as the shift from art to artifacts, have seen a resurgence in recent years. Against the background of this particular and fascinating story, and with the benefit of time’s critical distance, the goal of this conference is to reflect on the current state of the discipline, both its past legacy and its future challenges: to consider anew art history’s place within the humanities, in the university, and in relation the museum. Lastly, this conference considers on equal terms what art history has ignored, included, and what has been rendered invisible.