Surveying the History of Art

Three years ago, the Fine Arts Department killed its most popular class.

Students liked the course, but faculty did not. Faculty won.

Fine Arts 13b, "Introduction to the History of Art: Renaissance to Modern," was a casualty of a changing approach to teaching art history and the unwillingness of a highly specialized faculty to teach broad overview classes.

And despite offering tightly-focused, specialized alternatives to 13b, the Fine Arts Department has definitely felt the effect of removing its most popular class, which drew 277 people in the spring of 1991.

When 13b and other survey classes disappeared, many students went with them. In fact, the number of sophomores entering the concentration has dropped by almost half since 13a and 13b were removed, falling from 22 in the 1991-92 academic year to 13 this fall.

To boost the number of its concentrators, the department is moving to create a new broadly-focused class which is not a survey course, faculty members say.

"If we get our act together and have a more coherent and thought-out program, enrollment will go up," says Professor of Fine Arts Henri Zerner. "Nobody wants to get into a discipline that's uncertain about what it's doing."

Students sadly note the absence of staple survey courses in the curriculum, and even those within the major say the cancellations may well have chased away potential concentrators.

Without popular survey offerings like Fine Arts 13b to draw people into the discipline, "students won't realize how much the Fine Arts Department has to offer," says Meredith M. Thomson '94, a member of the department's curriculum committee. "A lot of friends of mine are mourning the loss of 13b," she says.

But Zerner and many of his colleagues in the department have not cried over the loss of the survey classes. "I never wanted to take a course like that, and I never wanted to teach it," says Zerner.

Few in the department did. Both Boardman Professor of Fine Arts John Shearman and Professor of Fine Arts Irene Winter, past and present chairs of the department, acknowledge what Shearman calls "a major problem in recruiting faculty" to teach Fine Arts 13.

"There were lots of faculty in the last ten years that were sick of teaching it," says David G. Mitten, Loeb Professor of Classical Art and Archaeology.

There are two reasons behind the faculty's desire to avoid survey teaching. One is that a professor who spends all of his or her time researching a specific field does not necessarily feel qualified to teach a class which deals with art from prehistoric cave drawings to Lichtenstein.

"People don't want to stand up and talk about things they don't know much about," Shearman says.

The result of such professor complaints was the small classes first planned in 1989-90 and first offered this year.

"Renaissance to Modern" and the other five surveys multiplied. They became "Introduction to Early Christian and Byzantine Art and Architecture (4th-15th centuries)," "Art of Ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia" and 11 other narrowly-focused courses.

Many faculty thought the field-specific classes would completely supplant a discipline-wide survey. But student interests were not quite so focused as their professors,' apparently, since the classes' combined enrollment did not add up to that of the popular 13b.

"Enrollments were rather disappointing," Shearman says. He regrets that the small classes did not get the publicity which might have boosted student interest, he says.

But perhaps even more fundamental to the debate over the survey classes was an intellectual shift in the methodology of teaching and studying art history.

"When you do a survey like that, you go on the assumption of a canon," says Zerner. "One really cannot defend simply a survey of Western art."

New faculty dynamics in the department speeded this shift in attitude at Harvard. According to Winter, popular Fine Arts 13 teachers Porter Professor of Fine Arts, Emeritus James S. Ackerman and Khan Professor of Islamic Art, Emeritus Oleg Grabar retired in the late 1980s. They were replaced by new professors with new ideologies.

"In the old days, art history was very Western-focused and was based on the idea of progressive evolution--that Egyptian art led to Roman art which eventually led to twentieth-century art forms," Winter says.

Today's art historians are more likely to study non-Western works and more likely to view art in its cultural and historical context, professors say.

Many concentrators who have already been introduced to the field agree with this new approach. "Is it right to teach people that art history is the list of big names?" asks Amy E. Langston '96.

"The purpose of the class isn't to educate people so they can go to high teas," says Daniel B. Lee '95, a student member of the Fine Arts curriculum committee.

But some, including Ackerman, say that students seeking a broad view--and, perhaps, enough Big Names for their tea conversations--should have a Fine Arts class available to meet their needs.

Ackerman characterizes his own survey class as a "gut," although he feels it offered far more than a superficial glance for the would-be culturally literate.

"I do think that people who took Fine Arts 13 did not have in mind their intellectual muscle," says Ackerman. "There was just a feeling that it was `kultur' with a capital `K.'"

But his students hopefully got a little more than they bargained for, he says, and there is nothing necessarily wrong with a broadly-focused introductory class aimed at non-concentrators.

"They should devise some course which is suitable for people who just want to take one course," Ackerman says.

And in the wake of the concentration's present enrollment decline, the Fine Arts Department is moving again to address that need. But this time it is in the context of a new, non-canonical approach to art history.

"It's a difficulty of maintaining both the broad coverage and the intellectual depth that students deserve," says Gleason Professor of Fine Arts Neil Levine.

To meet the student demand for a general introduction to the department, Winter has responded with plans for a new art history introduction, for which Zerner has high hopes.

"It would not be a survey," Zerner says, "but an introduction to issues."

In contrast to the structure of Fine Arts 13, the new course will be organized thematically rather than chronologically, with topics to include "the nature of art" and "the issue of visual representation," Winter says.

Zerner stresses that the outline for the new course is still very tentative, but is quick to launch into a discussion about his plans for it.

"I intend to start out with the question of what we call art," says Zerner. "We often call art what we put in museums."

Although Zerner's course will draw heavily on art from the Western canon, he says it will do so self-consciously, asking why studies of art history often exclude popular and folk art.

The course will end on the issue of values. "How do you decide what's good and bad?" he asks. "The ultimate value depends on the perceiver--but that doesn't mean that there's total openness," he says.

Levine says a course like this should have been offered years ago.

"It's much more up to date," he says.

Why, then, wasn't the new introduction offered sooner?

"It was impossible to know, until [the field-specific] courses were in place, that another introductory course was necessary," Winter says.

"Academia is always set a few years behind," says Zerner. "Things change, but take a while to reach the curriculum...The urgency came from the fact that the old system was crumbling."

But the department's efforts to adjust its curriculum to changing views of art history may not end next fall when Zerner and Winter begin to teach their new course.

Even as Zerner's curriculum challenges the validity of traditional approaches, Winter is considering a return to a class in the survey format: she says she may offer a "great monuments course" in the spring semester of 1995-96.