Teens/adults - Lesson 1: The “story” in art history

“There is, it would seem, in the dimensional scale of the world a kind of delicate meeting place between imagination and knowledge, a point, arrived at by diminishing large things and enlarging small ones that is intrinsically artistic.” — Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited

Many of us feel that art is important without knowing very clearly why. If few of us are accomplished at making art, just as few can articulate why art matters. Yes, we can point to things that speak to us and give them a thumbs up or down the way we would smile or frown after taking a bite of a new food, but fine art and objects remain a mystery in our conversations. That is not the case, for example, with film. Even the casual, infrequent moviegoer can describe and give examples of cinematic techniques: flashbacks, jump cuts, zooms, dissolves, montages, fade-outs, panning shots, close-ups, and so forth. We can quote from films. We know the timeline of film history, from silents, to talkies, to world cinema today. We identify with characters from films. We look to them to visit places we will never travel physically to see, to meet people we are unlikely to ever know. We can name the movie that won last year’s Academy Award, whether we’ve seen the movie or not. We have “heroes” who are actors. Many of us mark our weeks by the new movies due out on Friday, and we look up the weekend box office grosses as if they were baseball player stats.

Our exposure to fine art and objects is omnipresent, as well, but our skills at talking about them often fail us. It is not something we learn about in school. The history of art is opaque to nearly all of us, but it is no more complex than other art forms we visit more readily. So let’s see if we can change our Art History skills. Let’s see if with a little help, we can pick up more powerful tools to help us to say why art matters.

The most persuasive way to look at Art History is not a comprehensive course on all the art and objects of the world’s history but rather the encounter with a single work brought to vivid life by a champion of it followed by the realization that the discovery process is potentially the same for anything we see.

Here is an example for you of such an encounter. Pulitzer Prize- and MacArthur Fellow “genius” grant-winning author and historian, Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, was asked to give the presidential address to the American History Association in 2010. Her title was simply, “An American Album.” And the subject of her address was a quilt created in the Utah territory in 1857 by women in the Salt Lake City Fourteenth Ward. For anyone wishing to see Art History in action, read closely this remarkable—and remarkably told—story of a quilt and the women who made it.

• An American Album, 1857 (The American Historical Review, Vol. 115, Issue 1, February 2010)