Humanities Activities for Students: Why Trips To Art Galleries Should Be On Every Student’s Curriculum in 2024
In an era marked by the constant buzz of information and technology, the beauty of art offers a unique respite. Beyond its aesthetic allure, art serves as a profound lens through which we can observe, understand, and appreciate the world around us. Yet, the realm of art isn't reserved solely for art students; it's a treasure trove accessible to everyone, and its significance transcends any single discipline.
The role of art in education has taken on a new level of importance. For students venturing into the vast landscape of humanities, the journey to understanding art can be more than just a brush with creativity – it can be a pivotal educational experience that enriches their overall learning. The idea that art belongs solely to the realm of visual arts is a misconception that this blog seeks to dispel.
So, why should every student, regardless of their field of study, consider a visit to an art gallery an indispensable part of their curriculum? Join Oxford History of Art graduate, Issy, as she delves into the profound connections between art and various academic disciplines – from History and English to Politics, Economics, and even Science. By the end of this exploration, you'll realise that the world of art isn't separate from your studies; rather, it enhances your understanding of them. As you contemplate your journey towards higher education, you'll find that embracing art isn't just a cultural indulgence but a strategic move to broaden your horizons and deepen your passion for knowledge.
Issy (Issy is a History of Art graduate of the University of Oxford. Issy has worked in various arts organisations including the arts PR agency Rees & Co; the Art Fund’s magazine Art Quarterly; and Cultureshock Media, who produce membership magazines for museums and galleries including the V&A and Dulwich Picture Gallery)
Why is Art Important?
There is a scene in Ben Lerner’s novel ‘Leaving the Atocha Station’ that perfectly captures how I suspect many of us feel when visiting art galleries. Our narrator, Adam, has entered room 58 of the Prado museum in Madrid, about to take up his regular spot before a 15th century Descent from the Cross, when he is surprised to find that someone has taken his place...
“He was standing exactly where I normally stood and for a moment I was startled, as if beholding myself beholding the painting, although he was thinner and darker than I. I waited for him to move on, but he didn't... I was about to abandon room 58 when the man broke suddenly into tears, convulsively catching his breath. Was he, I wondered, just facing the wall to hide his face as he dealt with whatever grief he'd brought into the museum? Or was he having a profound experience of art?”
Observing the man weeping before the painting, Adam is shocked and not a little envious: what is this man seeing that he cannot? What glorious insight has his evidently superior intellect revealed?
Lerner expresses a familiar feeling. How many of us – left cold by a ‘masterpiece’ or bored by an exhibition – have felt that sense of there being a hidden code to art appreciation? A key one needs to unlock the secrets of the museum...to see what it is everyone else is seeing.
Art galleries can certainly be intimidating places. From sprawling rabbit warrens stacked floor to ceiling, to cold white cubes populated by strange objects and frowning intellectuals. It is no surprise that in the absence of such a key, many choose to avoid them altogether.
This is a great shame. Art is relevant to all of us, not just those who have studied it. You may be surprised how much of what you have learned in other subjects – from History and English, to Politics, Economics and even Science – can contribute to your appreciation of art. And how much art can deepen your appreciation of these other subjects...
Don’t believe me? Have a look at the examples below to see how art can illuminate everything from Shakespeare, to ancient Greek rituals, to Newton’s colour theory!
John Everett Millais, Ophelia, 1851–1852
English students will be familiar with the watery fate of Shakespeare’s Ophelia. Although in the play the young woman’s tragic demise is kept entirely offstage – we hear only of her “muddy death” in a poetic verse from Queen Gertrude – this haunting passage has inspired many artists to imagine the scene in paint.
Here, the Pre-Raphaelite painter John Everett Millais chooses to depict the fleeting moment before Ophelia is dragged under the water, “Her clothes spread wide, / And mermaid-like awhile they bore her up”.
In his painting Ophelia seems half in this world, halfway into the next. Her eyes are drowsy but open. Her upright fingers still cling to the flowery garland she has been gathering. Her lips call “snatches of old tunes”.
Yet already we can see the narrow riverbanks forming their watery casket. Branches stretch close above, weeds and algae encroach inwards. Millais paints Ophelia almost consumed by her surroundings: are those flowers adorning her dress and wreathed in her hair of our world or the river’s? Soon, “like a creature native and inuded / Unto that element”, she will be totally submerged.
Without knowing anything of Millais or the Pre-Raphaelites, your understanding of Hamlet can contribute a lot to the interpretation of this painting.
Consider Ophelia’s characterisation throughout the play. She is forever caught between the demands of her brother and father on one hand, and of Hamlet on the other. Where Laertes and Polonius demand chaste purity and absolute obedience from Ophelia, to Hamlet she is a source of desire: corrupt and deceitful in her beauty. As he charmingly puts it in Act 3, “Get thee to a nunnery”.
Here in her last moments, just as in life, we see Ophelia torn once more, her own agency overpowered by the pull of stronger forces.
Another interpretation might point to the submissiveness of Ophelia in this image. The willow droops erotically over her hooded eyes and half-open mouth. The close cropping of the frame creates a voyeuristic mood. She appears as a beautiful yet vacant vessel to the very end. This portrayal is appropriate given the passive role Ophelia is constantly forced to take to appease the men around her. Always bending to the will of others and now, “incapable of her own distress”, submitting quietly to death itself.
The eroticism of Millais’ Ophelia is in fact typical of her depiction in art. By introducing a little more context – around Victorian sexual mores or the male gaze in art – we could add more to this interpretation, but notice how much can be figured out just by looking closely and using what you already know!
Cy Twombly, Untitled (Bacchus), 2003-2008
Next up – Classics! This doesn’t have to mean poring over coins or trekking across ruins. Artists throughout history have looked back to the mythology and poetry of the ancients for inspiration, and their interpretations can bring these to life in new and revealing ways.
Ever wondered what it was like to experience the wild debauchery and transcendental power of a Dionysian ritual? Then you could do a lot worse than to spend some time with Cy Twombly’s magisterial expressionist canvases at the Tate Modern.
These paintings – part of Twombly’s ‘Bacchus’ series – positively hum with an elemental, uncontrollable energy that powerfully calls to mind their subject.
The Dionysia of ancient Greece (or Bacchanalia to the Romans) were raucous festivals of ritual intoxication and ecstatic abandon. Attendants danced wildly to beating drums and chanted before flaming pyres, whirling themselves into a rhythmic trance to intensify the disinhibiting affects of freely flowing wine. They sought to leave civilised society behind and unleash within themselves a primal freedom: the ego discarded and the id exposed in a frenzied state of religious ecstasy.
Standing before Twombly’s canvases, surrounded on all side by chaos and colour, you can start to imagine the wild energy of the bacchanal. The terrifying momentum of a crowd hell-bent on total abandon, catapulting towards the unknown.
His powerful, gestural lines have a continuous motion all of their own. They seem alive: swerving, leaping and plunging to an internal rhythm; dripping as if freshly spilled. Is it intoxication he portrays? The glorious, soaring highs of drunken abandon chased inevitably by chaos and crashing lows? Or are they signs of something darker: violence, mania, blood-lust?
Time to bring in your ancient history... Contemporary accounts of Dionysian ritual certainly indicate the potential for hedonistic abandon to tip abruptly into violence. Euripides’ Greek tragedy ‘The Bacchae’ sees a mother in the throes of Dionysian ecstasy (“foaming at the mouth... her eyes dilated... Her mind gone – possessed by Bacchus”) commit the murder of her own son. Livy’s descriptions of Roman Bacchanalia – written 200 years after the event, and admittedly to be treated with a large pinch of salt – allege scenes of sexual abuse and even sacrificial murder. Fans of Donna Tartt’s ‘A Secret History’ can undoubtedly testify to the terrible consequences of following the example of the Greeks.
Does this painting speak to an uncomfortable truth, then: that the very worst of humanity is never far beneath our veneer of civility? That barbarism lies close to the surface, bubbling and churning, requiring horribly little to be released?
This was certainly true for the Greeks and Romans, for whom the violence of war was a familiar part of life. Yet students of politics and history will know that even in today’s world, the sudden descent from ‘civility’ into chaos and brutality is not as rare as we might wish to believe. Twombly embarked on his ‘Bacchus’ series in 2003, shortly after the US invasion of Iraq. Ancient philosophy, myth and poetry are all here, but so is a powerful commentary on the present.
Auguste Renoir, A Garden in Montmartre, 1890-4
Humanities subjects and the visual arts are obvious bedfellows. But scientists too can learn from and greatly contribute to a better appreciation of art.
Take the colour wheel. Isaac Newton used this simple device to visualise his discovery that visible light is made up of seven different colours. Now consider this painting by Renoir: it practically dazzles with the radiant light of a summer’s day. How did he and other Impressionist artists achieve such effects? It was all thanks to Newton and his wheel.
The Impressionists aimed above all to depict the world as we really see it. This meant moving away from static, photographic representations towards a fleeting dance of colour and light. In pursuit of this aim, they noticed that colours opposite each other on the wheel enhance the other’s effect through optical contrast, making them appear brighter and more vivid.
Renoir puts these ‘complementary colours’ to great use in his paintings. This image is almost entirely constructed out of them, from the sun-bleached orange leaves against the blue sky, to the flash of a woman’s red dress among the foliage. Even the brushstrokes that combine to form the path or the trees are contrasting in colour, each intensifying the other and contributing to the sparkling sense of light and life he is celebrated for.
The Impressionists also took another lesson from science. They were the first artists to get out into the garden, the meadow, the street and to paint right there: observing the natural world and capturing what they saw. This is how they noticed that we don’t simply see shadows as ‘dark’, but as the complementary colour of the light that throws them. Here Renoir paints shadows cast by the trees in shades of purple, blue and green: all complementary to the bright yellow of the midday sun. This was a pretty radical departure when you consider that for centuries artists had been striving to make their shadows blacker than black, to create what they thought was a realistic depiction of light and shade. It was only by getting out ‘into the field’ – just as a scientist would – that the Impressionists learned how to create a truly realistic depiction of atmosphere, light, shade and colour. Not how a summer’s day in Montmartre might look in a photograph, but how it might feel to really be there.
Of course, visiting galleries is not just about acquiring context on subjects you are already studying, or illustrations of topics you have encountered.
With no previous knowledge whatsoever, simply taking time to engage with the process of looking at art can be a deeply meditative and revealing experience. Rather than attempting a whole museum in an afternoon, challenge yourself to go into a gallery and choose one painting only. Spend 5 minutes looking at it: the brushstrokes, lines, forms and colours. Think about why the artist has made those decisions for that subject. I guarantee you’ll be surprised by how much there is to see, and by how much you can figure out for yourself!
Deep down, many of us are put off by the fear of ‘misunderstanding’ an artwork, or failing to appreciate it. Adam sees a stranger weep before the Descent from the Cross and believes this man has cracked the code. He feels inferior and turns away. Yet the truth is – there is no right answer. Some art historians limit themselves almost exclusively to the evidence before them: brushstroke, material, mount, frame. Others barely look at the object at hand, spending more time dedicated to understanding the political, economic, historical or personal context that drove the artist’s depiction. Others aim to interpret the objects of paintings symbolically, where ‘blue’ means x and ‘dove’ means y. Others consider paintings of the past from a feminist perspective, or a Freudian, or a post-colonial...
The fact is there are hundreds of ways to ‘read’ paintings and that is what art history is all about. There is no ‘right’ answer; the joy is in the looking, observing, thinking. In other words, in the appreciation.
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