Chapter 19: Thoughts on Studying and Understanding the Narrative of Art History

"Old School New Art - Craftsmanship: Today's Avant-Garde" - Jeffrey T. Larson

In my opinion, most art history written after 1950 is biased, inaccurate and does not accurately represent the international Western art scene as it was or as it was perceived and enjoyed by the public.

Back in the mid-1990s, I came upon an older gentleman painting a competent landscape in Boston. We chatted and he said that after teaching for fifty years he had just retired from a very prestigious local university as one of the seven tenured professors of art. He went on to say that for most of his tenure, he was treated as a pariah and an outcast, shunned by the other professors in his department because he believed in standards and teaching the craft. He mentioned how there was a select group of like-minded modernist art historians who for over fifty years were responsible for writing the vast amount of accepted, serious writings on art history, both for the public in the form of coffee table books and more influentially, the ones written for college curriculum.  All were garbage he said, completely skewed to the narrow narrative propaganda that worked to suppress realistic painting in favor of conceptualism. This confirmed in many ways the view I had formed throughout my life and training. It explained an aspect of how this big lie could have been perpetrated. 

It's the view shared by far too many art historians, professors, and academicians.  The narrative they promote is that of a natural continuum from the medieval to the Renaissance, mannerism, Baroque, neoclassic, academic (a gilded, insipid waste) impressionistic (misunderstood), eventually bursting into the modern, cubism, expressionism, post-modern conceptualism…the logical, natural progression and crowning achievement of western art.  The primary narrative is that all that came before modernism was only a prelude to the contemporary manifestation and its crowning culmination.

My view is that the majority of the art produced within modernist philosophy is not a continuation of the trunk of Western art but rather a misshapen side branch splitting off the tree.