The art history tree

The age of information necessitates a new mindset for understanding art history in general and our own Cebuano art history in particular.

How history was taught in school usually entailed taking up the chronology of historical developments chapter by chapter. Names and dates were memorized. This memorization was presumed to be the essence of the whole discipline.

This pedagogy more often than not resulted in a negative bias among students for the whole idea of history itself. If a student ever learned to love history at all, he or she would have to get over the initial difficulty of it.

And then some, not all, may learn over time to love the discipline. This love for the discipline is marked by a developing ability in the student to draw useful insights from comparing different streams of history to each other.

Art history is especially enriching when one is able to relate it to other aspects of social development, such as technology, economics and politics. The student might then be able to relate the growth, for instance, of Western Modernism to the advent of the industrial age and the growth of representative governments in Europe and America.

Such ability to produce insight often results from the student’s acquisition of the big picture not only of art history but of history in general.

But how does one teach history in local schools to local students? More often than not, the students have very little background of world history in general. This “little” knowledge is not at all compensated for by taking a book of art history and studying this “chapter by chapter”.
The age of information should make us reassess our whole approach to the teaching of history.

Information has become so accessible to us that it has become almost unnecessary to deal too much with the details of art history, such as names, birth dates and deaths, etc.We are better off to develop for ourselves a “whole” picture of history. We are better off to give our students the “big picture” at the beginning notwithstanding that this “big picture” might at best be impressionistic; or if you will, painted in the broadest strokes.

The theory is that students can find and then fill in the details all by themselves using any computer search engine.

The teacher should therefore give special attention to historical details the student can use as cues for the research.

But the immediate challenge is to develop for the student a workable model that best represents the “big picture” of art history. The standard practice reflected in most art history books is the timeline. This timeline usually describes a list of key developments, periods and art movements with their appropriate periods in history.

The problem with the timeline is that it does not by itself give us a whole picture. More often than not we are at a loss to make sense of it. We are reduced simply to memorizing everything as we always used to do.We are better off to develop for ourselves a more pictorial and holistic model to represent the development of history. And we may as well use a “history tree” to describe the history of art.

Start by drawing any old tree on a piece of paper. The tree should have roots, a trunk, and branches leading to leaves and the tree canopy. A tree is an effective representation of Western art history as we would quickly understand thus: The root system of the tree represents the growth of art in prehistory, the stone age and the ancient civilizations. The root system grows into the single base of the tree which, appropriately enough represents the rise of the Roman Empire. The trunk comes out from the line of the ground.

This line represents the common era. Below this line, the years before Christ or B.C., above the line, A.D.. The single trunk itself can be subdivided into the classical periods of art up until the growth of Modernism in the late 1800s. In the history tree, this is represented by tree becoming branches sprouting out of the single trunk of classicism.

The branches may be labelled with as many modernist movements as we can identify. The canopy of the tree, the leaves and flowers and fruits describe for us the post-modern and the contemporary age.

The art history tree is by no means a perfect model. And surely it must be qualified for the student to answer such questions as: How do local histories fit in? Where do we place Asian art and African art into the tree? These questions do not discount the validity of the model.

They simply require for it to be qualified. Even so, the fact that this is a model we can draw on paper makes it especially useful for us. Hopefully, it will make the whole enterprise of understanding art history more fun than it ever was.