This blog post examines the interpretive framework established by traditional art history and its limitations, exploring the need for new perspectives and expanded interpretive methods demanded by modern art.
Emerging as an independent discipline in the 19th century, art history has primarily focused on formal analysis of works or employed iconography to decipher symbols within them. This approach not only aids in understanding a work’s meaning and formal characteristics but also solidified the exclusive status of artists already regarded as masters by their predecessors. It provided a useful theoretical foundation for discovering and re-examining new masterpieces, thereby forming the mainstream of subsequent art historical research. For instance, understanding the Virgin Mary, the infant Jesus, and John the Baptist in Raphael’s “Madonna of the Chair” (1514) according to Christian iconography, and describing the historical significance of the artist and the work by revealing the perfection of the formal elements — stable composition, the invigorating contrast of primary colors, the complementary red-green contrast, etc. — thereby describing the artist’s and work’s art-historical significance. But is this approach useful for interpreting and evaluating modern artworks?
Consider Frida Kahlo’s “Two Fridas” (1939), depicting two women with exposed hearts connected by a thin blood vessel. The woman on the left holds scissors in her right hand, applying pressure to stop bleeding. The woman on the right holds a small, round object in her left hand, depicting a boy. This boy, depicted as if hidden, is the image of her husband, Rivera. Traditional iconography offers little help in grasping this painting’s meaning. The conventional symbolic system that helped interpret the bleeding lamb in traditional religious paintings as the sacrifice of Jesus Christ, or the candle and skull in 17th-century still lifes as the transience of life, does not deeply connect with the elements in this painting. To resolve this interpretive difficulty, some art historians have borrowed theories from psychoanalysis, explaining that Kahlo unconsciously substituted her husband Rivera for her father, and that this psychological process is revealed in her self-portrait. Kahlo’s work, which gained attention as surrealist due to its eerie atmosphere and unfamiliar colors, is now receiving even higher evaluations of its value thanks to such new interpretations.
As seen in Kahlo’s case, modern artists no longer paint based on traditional subjects or symbolic systems of the past. Therefore, the limitations of iconography are clear. Considering the trajectory of modern art, which moved away from painting commissioned by patrons who enjoyed lofty subjects or intellectual play, toward artists painting according to their own free imagination and will, the attitude of art historians toward art history naturally had to change.
A group of researchers seeking perspectives and theories in art history suited to the new artistic environment began to emerge in the 1980s, and their tendency is called ‘New Art History’. Fritjofsen, a leading figure in New Art History, critically examines the dominant ideology that has governed traditional art history—the belief that art history must be devoted to the celebration of artistic genius and aesthetic universality—based on post-structuralist philosophy. Meanwhile, other theorists problematize the fact that the subjects of existing art historical research were predominantly Western white males, and that methodologies were limited to iconography and formal analysis. Consequently, new art historians focus on the multi-layered identities of social class, gender, and sexuality, represented by female artists, Black artists, and others, actively embracing diverse methodologies such as Marxism, feminism, and psychoanalysis. This diversification of perspectives and criteria enables new interpretations and value assessments not only of contemporary paintings but also of past art.
“Gentileschi’s ‘Judith’ (1620), which received little attention when first painted, is being reevaluated through the methodology of new art history.” ‘Judith’ is one of the recurring themes in Western art history, depicting the Assyrian general Holofernes who invaded Israel, the young widow Judith who decapitates him to defend her country, and her maid. In Gentileschi’s painting, the movements and expressions of the man resisting death and the two women determined to achieve their goal are rendered realistically and vividly through chiaroscuro and color contrast. Despite its dramatic depiction of a valuable subject, this work long went unappreciated. It gained a broader foundation for understanding through a feminist perspective, leading to a new evaluation.
In this way, new art history offers us the possibility of richer interpretation and evaluation of art by closely linking it to diverse contexts such as history and social circumstances.
