Interview with Laurie Adams

As the first edition of Art across Time went to press for publication in December of 1998, Laurie Adams took a moment to reflect on the experience of teaching the survey course and on her goals in undertaking a new textbook in this crowded field.

You have been teaching art history survey courses since 1966. How has this shaped AAT?

Teaching art survey has made me aware of the most basic levels of learning how to approach the visual arts. Since we are bombarded with images from birth, we tend to assume that we understand their meaning. But the paradoxical fact is that although children read pictures before they read words, a picture is actually more complex than a word -- hence the proverbial "a picture is worth a thousand words." The complexity of images is more readily understood by students if the text describing works of art is clear and simple.

Some works of art are more difficult than others to comprehend. Students wonder why non-figurative abstraction is "art," and why it brings such high prices. Other works, such as Duchamp's Ready-Mades and Warhol's Soup Cans or Heinz Boxes, also tend to raise eyebrows in a survey course. In these responses, students recapitulate the responses of the general public throughout history. I have brought some of these controversies into the book in boxed asides, beginning in Chapter One with the classification of Brancusi's Bird in Space as a "kitchen utensil and hospital supply" by U.S. customs.

Another basic consideration in teaching an art history survey is how to convey the power of images in virtually all cultures. Students so take images for granted that they often fail to comprehend the ways in which images manipulate them. The book reminds students that rulers have always used images to consolidate their power -- from the Babylonian king Hammurabi projecting his authority with an image of the sun god Shamash handing him the rod and scepter of rule to Jefferson's choice of Neoclassical architecture as the basis of the Federal style to reflect democratic ideals.

AAT looks significantly different from other art survey books. Is it?

The visual program of AAT is more in-depth and less encyclopedic than that of other two-semester texts. Quality is emphasized over quantity -- a principle embraced because there is a limit to what students can absorb in a single course. The large format of the reproductions is intended to encourage careful looking and to engage students visually with works of art. The French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan called a picture a "trap for the gaze." By virtue of high quality, large format illustrations, AAT attracts the gaze of readers and integrates words with pictures, and images with text.

Some key works, such as Chartres Cathedral and Giotto's Arena Chapel frescoes, are described and illustrated in greater detail than in other books. These discussions allow for the kind of in-depth exploration that intrigues students, while affording a glimpse of the material awaiting them in upper-level art history courses. In the case of architecture and sculpture, multiple viewpoints are reproduced to compensate for the two-dimensional format of the page.

Is the emphasis on accessibility at the expense of academic rigor?

My experience teaching students who have had little prior exposure to art has given me a good sense of what needs to be explained, and what can be taken for granted. I've tried to present the material in a clear, straight-forward manner. However, neither clarity nor brevity exclude academic rigor. Cicero said, "if I had more time, I would write less." A text does not have to be boring, ponderous, or encyclopedic to qualify as scholarly. This one aims to be clear, readable, and intellectually challenging.

AAT is based on your popular book, A History of Western Art. What are the differences?

A History of Western Art was primarily intended for one-semester courses. Art across Time was initiated in part by requests from teachers who liked the approach of A History of Western Art but needed more material for a full-year course.

One key difference is that Art across Time introduces students to world art as well as to western art. World art is integrated into the book in sections called "Windows on the World." These are chosen to give readers a sense of the differences, as well as the similarities, between cultures. They further emphasize the complexity of the visual arts by taking readers far afield of their accustomed territory and exposing them to different ways of thinking about the arts. Like the artists of the early twentieth century who collected African and Oceanic sculptures in search of new, non-Classical ways of representing the human figure, so readers who encounter such works for the first time have to stretch their own limits and use their minds to explore form and content in unfamiliar ways.

The expanded text also includes an introduction to current methodologies in the field of art history. Chapter 1 surveys ten such approaches -- formalism; iconography and iconology; Marxism; feminism; biography and autobiography; semiology; deconstruction; and psychoanalysis. In Chapter 15 these approaches are applied to van Eyck's Arnolfini Wedding Portrait and are integrated into discussions of other works throughout the text. The sense of art history as a dynamic field is reflected, for example, in the box on changing interpretations of cave paintings and the reattribution of the "Hermes of Praxiteles."

Why did you decide to put some information into boxes rather than integrating it into the main text?

Boxes help solve the problem of how to construct a rich portrait of a period or culture while maintaining a clear narrative flow. The boxes take the student aside and explain complex techniques -- such as the piece-mold method of bronze casting in ancient China -- without interrupting the analysis of objects. Furthermore, certain reference material that is needed as background to the text can be more easily organized in a boxed format. For example, the main events from the life of Christ are necessary to any study of western art, as are the functions and attributes of the Greek and Roman gods.

Boxes are also useful for presenting interdisciplinary information. The major epics of western history are thus included -- Gilgamesh, the Iliad and the Odyssey, the Aeneid, the Edda, Beowulf, and the Divine Comedy. When the arts and other literary texts are interrelated, boxes can be used -- for excerpts of Romantic and Dada poetry, and for explaining the mechanisms of dreaming as identified by Freud to explain Rousseau's painting of 1910, The Dream. Philosophies and methodologies of art are also present in boxes, along with media and techniques, and certain social developments, such as feudalism. The history of art history can also be found in boxes -- for example those on Plato, Pliny, Vasari, Winckelmann, Marx, Burke, and Greenberg. Some of the boxes show how artists quote from their predecessors -- for example, Horace Pippin quoting Edward Hicks, and Edward Steichen and Beauford Delaney quoting Rodin -- establishing an artistic genealogy within the broader narrative of art history.

What is the ultimate goal of Art across Time?

This book attempts to show students that art is neither alien nor elitist, but part of their everyday life and of the culture in which they live.

Laurie Schneider Adams received a Ph.D. in Art History from Columbia University. She is Professor of Art History at John Jay College, City University of New York, where she teaches art survey, and at the Graduate Center, where she teaches courses on the Italian Renaissance and on Art and Psychoanalysis. She has published articles on iconography and on art and psychology. She is the editor of Giotto in Perspective and of the journal Source: Notes in the History of Art; the author of A History of Western Art, The Methodologies of Art, Art and Psychoanalysis, and Art on Trial; and co-author (with Maria Grazia Pernis) of Frederico da Montefeltro and Sigismondo Malatesta: The Eagle and the Elephant and of 5 children's books (with Allison Coudert).