Stories of Art. By J A M E S E L K I N S Routledge. 2oo2. pp. xv + 176. £11.99. 

A C R O S S i n America there is a growing groundswell of complaint against Eurocentric, 

untheorized, male dominated, gay neglectful, racially unaware art h i s t o r i c a l survey 

textbooks. T h i s b o o k addresses this situation. It starts w i t h possible pictures of art 

history, i n c l u d i n g maps, a n d intuitive stories. It then proceeds to discuss the x o l d ' 

and 'new' stories that have actually been written. There is a chapter o n 'non-

European' stories, and the book concludes b y examining possible perfect stories. A s 

ever, James Elkins's thoughts are provocative and there is plenty to agree or disagree 

with. 

O n e point must be made immediately, and Elkins himself makes it: there is a 

limit to what one can achieve i n a one-volume book. O n e w o n d e r s w h y , i n that 

case, he s h o u l d have i n c l u d e d the multi-volume Russian Universal History of Art 

except to make the point that the Soviet U n i o n h a d a policy of inclusion towards its 

nationalities and fellow-travellers. The Encyclopedia of World Art a i m e d at e v e n 

greater inclusiveness but it was a huge w o r k and hardly a story of art. T o be a story a 

text has to have a dominant narrative, otherwise it falls apart into smaller stories. 

Without any narrative at all it turns into an assemblage of facts and descriptions. But 

the books are g r o w i n g i n size a n d even G o m b r i c h complained about the weight of 

the last edition of his Story of Art. 

A s i d e from production values, the physical growth of survey volumes marks 

their widening compass. Early i n the twentieth century a survey w o u l d have been 

based u p o n a d o m i n a n t l y Western tradition of artistic production w i t h glances i n 

the direction of tribal and oriental art. In the m o d e r n Western tradition it w o u l d have 

been dominated b y works from the great male artists w i t h heterosexual ocular 

preoccupations. M o r e recent texts have aimed at greater inclusivity towards w o r l d 

cultures and greater sensitivity towards matters of race and gender. 

E l k i n s w o n d e r s w h a t is g o i n g o n i n h i s students' minds and asks them to 

draw pictures or maps of their images of art history. W h i l e this might be entertaining, 

one wonders whether it is particularly i l l u m i n a t i n g as neither pictures nor maps are 

stories. One issue that this does raise, however, is the difference between people's 

knowledge by description and knowledge by acquaintance. M y telling an audience my story 

of art w o u l d not include all the objects of m y acquaintance. A good storyteller addresses 

her audience's interests at the same time as building their interest; Elkins's pictures and maps do 



little more than demonstrate partiality and randomness. In 1975, Michael Compton, a Keeper 

at the Tate, made the observation that i n England 

working-class or lower-middleclass-people... had i n their minds only three historical 

concepts. They were the modern, roughly the life-time of the people concerned; there 

was a period called Victorian, w h i c h ended i n 1945 and began i n approximately 400 

A . D . ; and there was a period of pre-history, w h i c h ended, roughly speaking, 

w i t h the Romans, but included things like dinosaurs and trilobites and so forth, so 

that nobody w o u l d have been the least surprised if Julius Caesar had ridden a 

dinosaur into whatever battles he fought. (Los Angeles, Museums Symposium) 

Life has moved on a bit since 1975, but it w o u l d still be instructive to hear people's rough 

stories and surmises. 

Like many other writers, the author locates the emergence of art historical writing 

w i t h the tradition started by Vasari, but given the fact that people who read Vasari read other 

texts as well, this is rather skewed. Vasari drew his models from Classical authors and every well-

educated adult interested i n art knew their Cicero, Pliny, and Quintilian, let alone the great 

historians. The rhetoricians lay the groundwork for appreciating stylistic difference, Pliny for 

thinking about technical matters, and Herodotus was a mine of history and anecdote. Then, as 

Panofsky has already pointed out, the other historians come into play as well. But these 

were, of course, related to the history of the arts. The history of Art is quite another matter 

and Vasari d i d not concern himself with that, although he did have a use for the concept of 

disegno. After Vasari, evidence from Schlosser's Die Kunstliteratur demonstrates the 

prevalence of regionalism i n following texts. The pre-modern stories were not powered by a 

monolithic Drive to the Real. Gombrich's Story of Art was not as simple as that either, though 

no one seems to have noticed the ecological theory behind it 

N e w stories aim at greater inclusivity, but it should not thereby be thought that the 

older ones ignored non-European cultures. Educated people interested i n art did find space for 

Oriental and Middle Eastern art among their mental furniture but this was a slightly exotic 

taste. In England such material is housed i n the Victoria and Albert Museum, which is a 

museum of decorative arts. So-called tribal art was housed i n ethnographic collections. The 

regulating concept behind the formation of these museums was the concept of "fine art', born 

i n England i n the nineteenth century. 

Granted that the concept of fine art emerged i n Europe i n the nineteenth century, is it 

legitimate to use that concept to understand pictorial or sculptural practices i n other cultures? 

If fine art were a category like 'chair' but other cultures did not have a category 'chair', using 



more general categories like 'furniture' or more limited ones like 'stool', there would not be a 

major issue over wanting to inventorize chairs but there might be an issue i n understanding the 

functional place of chairs within the range of other possible artefacts. If fine art is marked off 

from 'decorative arts' and "crafts', then it won't include carpets, or Athenian black-figure 

pottery. But should it then include craft-produced paintings or sculptures? Should the craft-

produced decorations of M a o r i canoes stay, with Aboriginal paintings, i n ethnography 

museums? Should the ethnography museums be aestheticized, like they are i n Cambridge 

and London, or should they be left like the Pitt- Rivers, i n Oxford, splendid classified 

displays of material culture? Arthur Danto addressed this issue i n his review of the infamous 

'Primitivism' exhibition (77K State of the Art, 1987) as did other critics at the time. 

Wouldn't it be a gross act of imperialism to extend the category of fine art into areas 

where it has not hitherto been used? Put like that, the question sounds rhetorical but there is 

a real enough current debate over the question of whether international art a n d 

international biennales are desirable. 

A s Elkins recognizes, the real problem behind a multicultural story of art is one 

of coherence. Without some k i n d of master narrative, chapters i n the text find 

themselves parked next to each other for no apparent reason. L o o k i n g at other 

"histories', w h i c h some are not, w e find language and observations that are opaque to 

our w a y of thinking about art. There is an English translation of the Mustard Seed Garden 

Manual ofPaintingbut what is a non-practitioner of Chinese calligraphy to make of it at 

anything but a superficial level? 

H o w can one write a culturally fair account of the history of art? Elkins treats 

this as a practical problem. O n the basis of chronology, there w o u l d be a lot of empty 

pages at the beginning and unrealistically over-packed pages at the end. O n the basis 

of geographical area, Greenland w o u l d get a lot of (empty) pages i n comparison to a 

greatly reduced France and Italy. O n the basis of languages, the same spaces w o u l d be 

given to Iroquoian, Italian, and Itelmen. There w o u l d be no story, just a collection of 

entries. 

A t this point, the end of the book, one begins to wonder whether the right 

questions are b e i n g asked. Isn't there an argument to be had over the question of quality 

and whether it can be written off as subjective preference? What might our grounds be 

for arguing that Rembrandt should be included i n a history of art rather than, say, the 

more obscure neo-Classical painter Joseph-Marie Vien? Wouldn't writing a story of art be 

more like choosing a first eleven (cricket) rather than a top twenty (music)? But then that 



assumes that the eleven are all playing the same game. Perhaps w e are talking about 

landmarks rather than monuments, but then landmarks assume a direction of interest. 

The pubcrawler's landmarks are different from the architectural historian's. Is there 

such a thing as the ideal art spectator? C o u l d w e say that there are defining moments i n 

the history of art such that a particular w o rk , or group of works, introduces a major 

shift i n practice? This w o u l d be along the lines of saying that the English language w o u l d 

never be the same again after Shakespeare, Donne, a n d M i l t o n . A r t w o u l d never be 

the same again after Leonardo. Another approach w o u l d be to ask w h o rates most 

highly i n terms of offering a personal measure of human values. O f course there w o u l d 

be a variety of response but w o u l d it be possible to arrive at a reasoned consensus 

rather than a vote? There is no reason w h y a plurality of stories might not emerge out 

of differing consensual models but they w o u l d still have to make sense as coherent 

stories and they do not all have to be i n one book. Thames & Hudson's World of Art series 

offers a useful alternative to the single all-encompassing text. Wouldn't it be a good idea 

to give u p writing textbook histories of art altogether? 

Just as an aside, for American readers, Gombrich's Story of Art was never written 

as a textbook but as a resource for people w h o w o u l d like some entry into his w o r l d of 

Bildung. Some people might want to see that w o r l d smashed, others might think it 

w o r t h preserving but extended, as it always was, into n e w domains. Bildung was 

never static but expanded as interesting writers emerged, such as Ibsen, Strindberg, 

and Dostoeyevsky. Oriental and M i d d l e Eastern texts always formed an important 

element of that t r a d i t i o n . . . and Sappho and Jane Austen. 

RICHARD WOODHELD 

Nottingham Trent University