Children - Lesson 5: Rethinking history

Child

Hi. You know how an art work affects you, but can you look at art through someone else’s eyes? Studying art is about all the reactions we have to it. Look at the example in this lesson and ask yourself lots of questions. Pretend that you are someone else. What would they say about it?

Adult/Teacher

Hello. This final lesson in our Art History unit will require a lot of your help. Our reactions to art work are personal, but our world is full of different people. Can we use art as a way to put ourselves is someone else’s shoes? Maybe art is the perfect starting point to a discussion about the world’s differences. Help your child begin. One more thing, in the Teen/Adult lesson, Works You Should Know, 21 scholars, museum directors, curators, and artists created lists of art works by LDS artists that they think everyone should know. Share these with your child, too.

Rethinking History

The final lesson in our Art History unit is the most challenging, philosophically, but it’s possibly the most important, too. The ways that people engage with art today are changing dramatically. This is a tremendous shift in the motivations and methods people use to look at art and study it. It will require a little extra care to help children see history in these new ways, but it is well worth the effort because it also invites a more inclusive way for them to see the world.

Let’s begin with a seemingly innocent question: “Who decides what work is included in a history of art?” And the flip side of that question is this one: “Who decides what artists and art works are not included?”

The traditional way of looking at the history of art is a linear story: First came this, which begat that, then that—as if all art were connected by a string of inevitability, a procession of predictable consequences and reactions to the art directly before it. This method, canonized over centuries in art history books and classroom lectures, often produced a timeline of “major” artists, “masterpieces,” and art movements, and an examination of the circumstances that influenced them. To give one example, art of the 20th century is often described as a series of -isms: Post-Impressionism, Fauvism, Cubism, Surrealism, Dadaism, Futurism, Abstract Expressionism, Post-Modernism, and so on. And yet, these traditional groupings of art movements don’t tell the full story.

This former art historical approach is also filled with bias: It favors large paintings and sculptures that fill grand museums to the exclusion of other objects; it tends to under-represent voices of women and artists of color because they have been absent historically as decision-makers in art institutions; its focus on innovation comes at the expense of artists in mid-career and artists whose work is less stylistically novel; it groups artists together arbitrarily and fails to acknowledge nuances between them; it unfairly pigeonholes artists into restrictive definitions and labels; it focuses on a limited range of societal influences such as war, scientific invention, and social upheaval; it prioritizes a surface reading of works without encouraging viewers to look more deeply at connective themes—even to artists with similar objects living centuries apart, among many other shortcomings.

A more Inclusive Approach

So what is a more inclusive and fairer and fuller approach to Art History? And how do we change our mindset to embrace the new opportunities of such approaches?

The first step is to think of art not as history but histories, plural. The works—which include all creative visual forms, high and low, large and small—can be studied rigorously from multiple points of view. No single person can represent the viewpoints of everyone; therefore, to look at the history completely, bring as many people into the conversation as possible.

In the field of art history, right now, an extraordinary reappraisal is underway. Major museums are rehanging their entire collections and revising the story they choose to tell about them. It is as if the traditional timeline has been cut into pieces, reordered, repopulated, and challenged.

To see the history more completely, replace the urge to put all art works on a timeline; and emphasize a concern for the themes of the works, wherever, whenever, and by whomever they were made.

How does that affect the way a child studies an art work? It gives them permission to see it from the vantage point of people of many differing views. Hopefully, this leads them to a more compassionate and nuanced understanding or worldview.

Let’s take a painting and use newer art history approaches to see what it has to say to us, today.

The traditional way to talk about a painting like this is primarily biographical and historical. In this case: C. C. A. Christensen was born in Copenhagen, Denmark. He studied at the Royal Academy of Art, met Latter-day Saint missionaries, joined The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and immigrated to Utah as a handcart pioneer. His most well-known work is the Mormon Panorama, a 175-foot painting created by Christensen that he and his brother used as an illustrated lecture. The work above is similar in style and message to the Mormon Panorama. They traveled throughout the Western United States and taught about early Church history in LDS settlements with the painting as their primary visual touchstone. The work was later cut physically into sections that divided into historical scenes, and this painting is one of them. The paintings themselves entered the collection of Brigham Young University, and in 1970, they were exhibited as a rediscovered slice of Americana at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City. They remain images that the Church has used frequently to tell its history, and its art historians have employed to describe the relatively untrained early painters from Europe working on the American frontier.

Readings of the painting have largely followed the spirit of its original creation: It tells the history of the era and reminds people of significant events in the Church’s early days. Further, the painting speaks of Christensen’s zeal and love for the gospel.

All of those things are helpful to know, but are they complete? Furthermore, can a contemporary viewer find additional resonances in the work? Let’s take a closer look. Children will need some help asking these questions, but you may also find that they adopt this new approach more readily than adults do.

What did Christensen himself say about Mormon Panorama? He said, “I can now see that the hand of the Lord is in all this, and I only wonder why I did not begin twenty years earlier.” He spoke of the power of art as an educational tool: “History will preserve much, but art alone can make the narration of the suffering of the Saints comprehensible for the following generation.”[1]

Is Christensen memorializing suffering in a painting that otherwise looks like an illustrated moment in history? His own journey across the United States as part of a handcart company in 1857 was also something of a difficult honeymoon for himself and his new Norwegian bride. He was drawing on his own experience. In Utah, he lived largely isolated, in Sanpete County. After his death, a friend wrote of him, “His passion for the art life was never satisfied. Cast apart from art influences, his life was one of self suppression and toil. His most happy years were spent with Daniel Weggeland in decorating the interiors of the Logan, Manti, and St. George Temples. He died recently at Ephraim. But few of his neighbors ever understood his gift nor dreamed of his life of daily sacrifice.”[2]

The following are additional questions worth asking. The Mormon Battalion story is also one of suffering. Did Christensen have special empathy for these soldiers and their monumental trek?

And what about the other figures in the painting? How are they treated?

Are the women depicted accurately? Sensitively? What are they shown to be doing? How do they interact with the men of the painting?

The same questions could be asked about the Native Americans. Why are they there and how are they depicted? In the 19th century, many white artists included Native Americans stereotypically and reductively in art. Sometimes, they were painted in ceremonial clothing that is sacred to their people and offensive to be depicted to the outside world, for example. Are they outsiders or part of the conversation of the painting’s events? How would Native Americans today react to this work?

The painting is largely populated by anonymous figures—that is, they have their backs to the viewer. They are painted featurelessly, or are far removed from the main action of the painting, which is far in the distance. What is the effect of that artistic choice? Who is really the subject the painting? Is it Brigham Young or is it the faceless legion?

How was the painting used when it was made? That is part of its history, too. In 1983, Latter-day Saint filmmaker “Judge” Wetzel Whitaker described Mormon Panorama as a forerunner experience to going to the movies: “[Christensen] was inspired with the idea of painting important events that had transpired in the Church on canvas strips, ten feet by seven feet, and then sewing them together. They were then rolled on an aspen pole and, with the aid of a crank-like mechanical device, the pictures could advance from one scene to another as he would explain each picture audibly from a written script.”[3] Christensen wrote in 1892 that he realized that audiences craved experiences like this to tell their history, “Pictures and decoration have now become such a necessity in our enlightened age that the art of drawing is considered equal to the art of writing.”[4] Film historian Randy Astle has called Mormon Panorama a proto-cinematic event, a forerunner to the movies that would soon invade frontier life and would bring with it a wave of Anti-Mormon sentiment.

When looking at art works, consider as many different views as you can. What does the painting say about American politics? What does it say about the way nature is depicted? Christensen was a Scandinavian painter who lived, in some ways, removed from his native culture and from fine art culture itself. Are these themes of immigration, acculturation, and isolation present in the work? What do they suggest to you about those issues that are very much a part of modern global life?

As you can tell, Art History has become a field of asking questions. The works often serve as prompts for discussion on the themes that matter to contemporary individuals and society. There is skepticism in adopting any single, definitive reading; rather, art works and objects provide insight into the time of their creation and, most importantly, into the impact they have on us, right now.

[1] “C. C. A. Christensen and the Mormon Panorama,” by Paul L. Anderson and Richard Jensen, Ensign, June 1979.

[2] “C. C. A. Christensen,” MSS B 289 The Works Progress Administration (Utah Section) Biographical Sketches, ca. 1930-1941, Utah State History, J. Willard Marriott Library, University of Utah.

[3] Mormon Cinema: Origins to 1952, by Randy Astle, Mormon Arts Center, 2018, p. 46.

[4] Ibid, p. 47.