Art History 101: Social History
- Laura Thipphawong
- Mar 7
- 4 min read
Updated: Mar 29
This article was originally published by Arts Help
Social history as a methodology in art criticism means that contextual influences of culture and society can never be too far removed from artwork. Art cannot stand alone and independently from the cultural context of the time and place in which it was created. Societal standards and peoples’ perspectives—as informed by politics, religion, gender and race, and socioeconomic materialism—instruct art content. In turn, as represented in art, cultural discourse exercises the power to influence, alter, or progress society’s principles.
However, the critique of art through a sociological methodology differs from art as social commentary. Objectively, political or documentative art falls into the categories of protest art and history painting, respectively, and can be read as expository. Artistically depicting scenes inspired by major events is akin to journalism. In contrast, the social critique of art involves deconstructing elements of the work, which may have been influenced by the time and place in which the artist lived. The art of any culture leaves evidence from which to construct a historiological study, an interpretation of history based on holistic analysis. In other words, the artist does not create art to disseminate a direct message, but rather, the work is to be studied as indirectly referential.
Art during the Industrial Revolution, for example, was heavily influenced by changes to daily life made possible by developments such as electricity, mass transit, and the formation of cities as we know them today. With the convenience of city life for those looking to grow enterprises and commodify resources, city centers became the energetic heartbeat of the industrial economic ecosystem and the place where the pulse of modern life could be felt. Painters like Claude Monet (1840-1926), famous for his pastoral scenes of serene fields and gardens, also painted Arrival of the Normandy Train, Gare Saint-Lazare in 1877. Blue and grey billows rise from the steam engine as crowds gather in wait under a grid of iron and glass that encloses the station; the continuous movement of the scene and the industrial aesthetic capture the spirit of inspiration that so many found during the advent of commercial travel.
Painters such as Gustave Caillebotte (1848-1894) also felt the inspiration of industrialized city life; he utilized the motif of the flaneur in many paintings, including Paris Street: Rainy Day (1877), which depicts a couple strolling leisurely through the city on a rainy day. With the convenience of industry came the concept of leisure time, a privilege allegorized in the flaneur: a man of reasonable wealth who is seen curiously wandering city streets to absorb the local culture. Caillebotte’s Paris street is of particular significance in societal history for its compositional placement of the flaneur within the painting and the indication of photographic influence. The flaneur, with his wife by his side (another indicator of the societal standards: a woman was seldom seen walking alone), is positioned in such a way as to indicate forward motion directly into the path of the viewer, suggesting the constant movement and kinetic energy of the city streets. The photographic influence new to many painters of the industrial age is evident in the contrived depth of focus. The shapes in the background are blurred compared to those in the foreground. Also suggestive of photography and its influence is the figure on the right of the painting, which is only half in the frame, suggesting a hurried and imperfect composition. The eras of Impressionism and Post-impressionism can be seen to progressively adopt angles and formal structures similar to the visual language of photography, one of the preeminent inventions of the 19th century.
The love affair with industrialism and the influence of mechanical invention can be seen in a myriad of Impressionism and Post-Impressionism paintings; the positive outlook, however, was short-lived. With the mass destruction capabilities provided by industrial developments in the military, the effects of World War I can be seen throughout nearly all prominent early 20th-century art. Though Dada as a movement may seem trivial and even ludicrous out of historical context, the group of artists dedicated to reimagining the entire aesthetic of art did so in reaction to the absurdism of the war and the devastation of violence. Dada artists created some of the most iconic pieces of art (or anti-art) in the entirety of art history by rejecting reason and logic and using creative expression as a mirror held to the irrational horrors of war.
When Hugo Ball (1886-1927) dressed himself in tin and recited his sound poem Karawane (1917), an outpouring of noise and indistinguishable syllables, he described it as “a return to the innermost alchemy of the word.” Karawane was an exercise in escaping society’s conventions and distilling communication to phonetics instead of semantics. Similarly disillusioned with society and the boundaries of the once-trusted artistic rules of expression, Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968) created Fountain (1917), a urinal turned on its side and an icon of unconventional art. A pioneer of the readymade art form, Duchamp used the reintroduction of a mass-produced object in the elevated context of bourgeois art to signify the falsity of upper-class posturing and the tenuous grasp on reality held by a materialistic society. By presenting to the art world a common and even taboo object of little value, and both literally and figuratively putting it on a pedestal, Fountain was a means to empower the individual with the right to critique art and to challenge the validity of what is being presented as truth.
As social practices and significant historical events shape the culture of daily life, art reflects and is reflected in the collective consciousness. While the influences of pivotal societal change are often clearly delineated in artwork, the methodology of investigating art as social history can also be subtle, if not imperceptible. The power of historiology and interpreting unwritten history can often be found in creative expression. Art is part of the unsolvable puzzle of humanity, and offers more meaning than pure aesthetics tends to divulge.
