A Survey in Progress

Michael Cothren, the scholar who scrapped the survey course at Swarthmore has become co-author of a best-selling survey textbook.
Photograph by Eleftherios Kostans

“A Survey in Progress”

By Jeffrey Lott

It used to be that, like a hot shower or a glass of orange juice, an art history survey course was best taken first thing in the morning. Anyone who ever took one knows this. As one of the few academic disciplines taught in the dark, with slide after slide flashing on the screen while whirring projectors pumped hot air into an already stuffy room, art history after lunch was often soporific. But in the morning, there was a cup of joe in your hand and a fighting chance to stay alert as you engraved image after image into your memory, scratching notes on paper you could barely see, connecting great works period-by-period, artist-by-artist into a sort of Aristotelian cosmology of painting, sculpture, and architecture that reached back through the Romans, Greeks, Sumerians, and Egyptians, all the way to the Paleolithic. (Who can forget the “Venus” of Willendorf?) And that was just the first semester.

Until the late 1980s, if you took an art history survey course at Swarthmore or most other colleges, this was the drill. Your textbook was probably Helen Gardner’s Art Through the Ages: A Concise History (first published in 1926) or H.W. Janson’s History of Art (1961)—books still used today in updated editions. Both texts presented an inexorable progression of Near Eastern and European art that rose from the primitive to the near-perfect—the latter represented by the art and architecture of Ancient Greece, the Italian Renaissance, and 19th-century French art. Gardner’s book now contains coverage of Far Eastern, Indian, and African art, but the “truth” of art history, largely handed down from 19th-century German scholars, was, and remains, the Western canon. And the approach—from Giorgio Vasari’s 16th-century Lives of the Artists to Erwin Panofsky’s Studies in Iconology (1939)—was variously biographical, critical, comparative, stylistic, and iconographic.

But then, in the 1980s, came what is known as “the crisis in art history,” a professional upheaval for traditionally trained art historians that ushered in new ways of studying and thinking about art. “I call it the theory wars,” says Scheuer Family Professor of Humanities Michael Cothren…. [more]