What’s missing in art history
For my new job as an art history teacher, I obviously had to prepare my lectures.
Thanks to the books I have at home and the extraordinary thing that is the Internet, I then wrote many pages on the various subjects I had been asked to teach my students.
But something both simple and fundamental quickly came to my attention, namely what’s missing when we talk about art created hundreds and thousands of years ago: the note of intent of some artists.
Why did Sofonisba Anguisolla paint self-portraits? Why does Rembrandt’s work contain so many self-portraits? Why did Albrecht Durer decide to paint himself as Jesus? Here, I’m confining myself to the field of self-portraiture, but we could extend this to many other themes. Of course, many sources answer these questions, but how can we be sure of the artist’s intention? Are the intentions we attribute to them really reliable? In fact, we’ll never really know. The answers are based on the artists’ lives, on the themes they have generally addressed, but nothing can really replace their own answers.
This assessment led me to wonder when and why artists started being asked to provide artists’ statements. I studied at an art school for five years, and one of the first things my teachers taught me was that you shouldn’t create simply for the sake of creating. This means that when you create, you have to know why you’re doing it, what message you want to convey, what theme you’re working on and be able to explain it all. So our work is always accompanied by a note of intent.
In fact, if you’re in the habit of visiting exhibitions, you’ve probably already noticed that there’s almost always at least one text describing the artist’s intention.
It would probably take me years and an enormous amount of research to understand how the artists’ intentions emerged. As I think it’s a highly interesting subject, perhaps I’ll explore it further one day. Before that, I’d like to share with you what I imagine to be the potential answer: perhaps artists’ notes of intent have always existed and we simply have no record of them because artists only told them aloud, particularly as their works were not exhibited during their lifetime. This would then mean that artists’ explanations began to appear when exhibitions started to take place, as people wanted to know what the works of art were about.
What do you think of my theory?
