Art history has only partly emerged from the shadow of Giorgio Vasari, whose Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects is its foundational text. Cognitive aesthetics, or the study of art in light of the psychology of perception, is a half-century old, as are various computer-based techniques of art analysis. But the broader discipline remains dominated by monographic studies of figures or movements distinguished by talent or genius, with great emphasis on biography and the effects of inspiration and experience on individual works. The composition of the canon, and its biases and blind spots, has been a major theme of art criticism, but often, the tone is more polemical than measured and reflective. In Painting by Numbers: Data-Driven Histories of Nineteenth-Century Art, Diana Seave Greenwald accepts the challenge posed by theorist Griselda Pollock to investigate “the process of exclusion and neglect” by which “tradition cultivates its own inevitability,” drawing on economic and statistical data to illuminate art historical questions, some of which appeared settled and some of which had barely been asked.
Her contribution focuses on the concept of sample bias, which occurs when “the group of people, objects, or other entities that a scholar analyzes is both limited and misrepresentative of the entire population that the scholar is interested in studying.” Its relevance to the history of art in the aggregate is clear: Artworks get lost, thrown away, or damaged; many are never displayed; even fewer are held in major museums, are taught, or are reproduced in books. Then there is the effect of repeated attention over time: The artist who is written about and exhibited will be written about and exhibited more; peers, rivals, and contemporaries may be ignored and forgotten. Institutional and personal prejudices limit artists’ opportunities for fame and access to posterity. The result is a history, not of art, but of a very limited range of artists and artistic currents.
Greenwald examines the human consequences of exclusion from the canon in the chapter “Why Are There No Great Women Artists?” The easy answer is sexism and inequality, but that leaves a great deal unsaid, and she begins by asking what these terms mean in practice:
“Do fewer women than men make art professionally? If so, has this been true both historically and at present…? If there is a lack of supply, what are the practical barriers that block women from making art? Or is this underrepresentation explained by a lack of demand for the works women produce? Does discrimination by collectors, gallerists, and curators stop women from getting their fair share of wall space in major museums?”
Drawing on data from the National Academy of Design and the Metropolitan Museum of Art as well as Kirsten Swinth’s eye-opening study, Painting Professionals, Greenwald reveals an explosion of productivity among women artists following the Civil War, few of whom are remembered today. Women were present, if not prominent, in academies, which held enormous sway in the 19th century, when few museums or independent galleries existed, but they were excluded from leadership roles and even nude drawing classes, not to mention the private receptions where male artists networked with wealthy clients. Money was another consideration: Painting demands space, and few women could rent a studio of their own. The paramount impediment for women artists, Greenwald contends, and she quotes a number of economists and labor historians to show the same is true for female workers in a variety of fields, is a lack of time. The 19th-century American painter Lilly Martin Spencer would seem to prove an exception, but despite her unusual advantages — Fourierist parents who encouraged her talents, a stay-at-home husband who shared the housework — fully half her work was completed before she had her first child. Finally, at a time when large oil portraits and landscapes were favored, women concentrated on still lifes, domestic scenes, and prints: works that required no travel, no personal connections, and could be executed on a small scale.
In “Implied But Not Shown,” Greenwald wonders at the near-absence of images of colonial life in British art despite the enormous scale of the empire, which at its height encompassed 400 million people and a quarter of the Earth’s landmass. Drawing on data from the Royal Academy Summer Exhibitions, which began in 1769 and continue to this day, she finds that in 184,000 paintings, England is far and away the country most frequently depicted, followed by Italy and Wales. Of the colonies, Ireland appears in 526 works and India in 347; despite its strategic and economic importance to the crown, Jamaica is the subject of only a few more works than Japan. Here, her focus on data starts to thin, and hypotheses take over: While she notes that ease of access by steamship made Egypt a relatively popular subject, her thesis that the “erasure of empire” is rooted in a “fundamental incompatibility between the imperial project and British institutions developed in the metropole” is necessarily more speculative. It is true that the preponderance of representations of the colonies are drawings and prints of an informative character: records of plant and animal life, depictions of local costumes, or scenes of war. But whether mass psychological factors impeded the production of art celebrating colonialism or whether other, perhaps more mundane factors prevailed is a question that demands more evidence.
Greenwald’s look at industrialization and the rise of nature painting has broad implications for the way specious narratives become history. She quotes Robert Herbert’s succinct version of an idea central to the work of dozens of scholars: “As the city grew ever larger, as its slums, its spectacular building campaigns, and its social upheaval became more prominent in the France of the Second Empire, there was quite literally a need to bring landscape into the city.” This sounds good and rings true, but the data don’t bear it out. In fact, rural genre painting was rare in the mid-to-late 19th century, its apparent flourishing the effect of individual artists such as Gustave Courbet and Jean-Francois Millet coming to be seen as typical of their era. Paintings of the countryside from that time, moreover, favor areas with accommodations that were easily accessible from Paris by train — they were less a reaction against than a product of the Industrial Revolution. Finally, Greenwald illustrates the way selective readings of artists’ letters and memoirs are perpetuated across time, allowing dubious narratives to take on the sheen of established fact. Millet famously complained of “Paris, black, muddy, smoky,” but the only source for the citation is an “undated biography” that may never have existed, quoted by a far-from-trustworthy acquaintance of the artist. The source has been discredited, but the words live on as essential to myths about the author’s motives.
Greenwald’s book covers a narrow topic and is intended for a specialized audience, but it poses questions of interest to the general reader. The need to temper intuition with data is pressing across the humanities, and even in the way we read or watch the news. Her description of the status quo of artistic opinion as “the accrued contributions of generations of actors” applies to much of what we take for granted about why things are the way they are, and her plea for continued research into the ways these opinions are embodied in and perpetuated by exclusive institutions is a call to analyze, rather than simply decry, the privilege that is one of the major points of contention in the present iteration of the culture wars.
Adrian Nathan West is a literary translator, critic, and the author of The Aesthetics of Degradation.
