
For our 50th anniversary celebrations, we asked people in the arts and those interested in our subject – Art History Advocates – what art history means to them. They address, in a number of inspirational ways, why it is important to the individual and to society. In recognition of our 50th year, we have also created a series of videos, Careers with Art History, featuring art history graduates talking about the great variety of careers, both within and outside of the art field, that they have entered after studying our subject. Collectively, the Art History Advocates and graduates provide a well-rounded perspective on Art History Now.
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Sepake Angiama
Artistic Director, Institute for International Visual Art (INIVA)
read moreI always loved to go to museums and marvel at art works, their histories and narratives. I was fortunate enough to live in London and would visit the Museum of Mankind at Piccadilly. There I would find works that fuelled my own art-making practice and were a window into other worlds. Musée de l’homme at the Trocadéro in Paris was an inspiration to Picasso and made strong impressions on modern and cubist movements. The influence of the freeness of shapes and forms found in the work of African masks and sculptures echo in the works of Modigliani, abstract paintings of Picabia, the colourful cutouts of Matisse, and the fetishisation of masking in the work of Boiffard and Man Ray. There in the heart of the modern lies a distinctive discourse of the influence of African and Asian forms, shapes, and colour.
Sepake Angiama
Artistic Director, Institute for International Visual Art (INIVA)
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Christopher Baker
Editor, The Burlington Magazine
read moreArt history matters more than ever. It is a discipline for the curious that has a global reach and opens up riveting avenues of research about creativity and cultural values. If you want to travel the world and travel across time, and learn how to see and not merely look, with rigour and insight, it is the endlessly rewarding academic home for you.
Art history thrives in museums, galleries, universities, colleges, schools, publishing and the art market, but its impact is felt far more widely across society, as a revelatory, stimulating, and inspiring endeavour.
Christopher Baker
Editor, The Burlington Magazine
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Maria Balshaw
Director, Tate
read moreI see art history as an ongoing conversation, rather than a story set in stone. In a time of ever greater polarisation and politicisation of culture, adopting an expansive approach to art history widens and enriches our understanding of both the past and the present, arming us with the knowledge to forge our own ideas. Studying art history through the prism of the present offers a rich learning opportunity; art is, after all, a voice of relevance and resonance, moments in time packaged up and passed onwards, through imagination, innovation, and astonishing skill.
Maria Balshaw
Director, Tate
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Kathryn Blacker
Chief Executive, York Museums Trust
read moreAn understanding of the past is critical to making sense of the present and the future. As human beings we benefit by connecting with those who went before, understanding their fears, loves, and motivations. The study of the History of Art adds colour, texture and movement to our understanding of any period: where power lay; how value was perceived and who is absent. At its very heart, in appreciating and understanding art we celebrate the passion of human creativity, the joy of human connection and our innate need to be seen, heard and valued.
Kathryn Blacker
Chief Executive, York Museums Trust
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Ian Blatchford
Director & Chief Executive, Science Museum Group
read moreArt history an important intellectual discipline because it unlocks the mental world and iconography of each generation, with insights into social and economic forces, and enduring human passions. Visual imagery matters ever more in the digital TikTok age and understanding authentic motivations and meaning is a core grounding. Personally, I have always loved the dual skills of art history: experience/connoisseurship combined with the delicious detective work of archival research; and there have been so many occasions when these skills have crossed over into more general strategic work in my day job. Above all, celebrating artistic creativity is a wonderful end in itself.
Ian Blatchford
Director & Chief Executive, Science Museum Group
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Iwona Blazwick
Art Curator & Lecturer
read moreTo study art history is to embark on a great adventure where we meet a cast of people who can magically translate life into art. They come from around the world; they might emerge from the most humble of backgrounds or the grandest of circumstances. Their story is a golden thread that runs through the history of all the world’s civilisations right up to the present. Art history gives us access to artists’ visions and how they are shaped by their life and times. Above all art history is about the excitement of engaging in art and ideas so that we can unlock our own creativity.
Iwona Blazwick
Art Curator & Lecturer
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Sonia Boyce
Artist
read moreMy decision to follow a career in the visual arts came about because of a particular art history lecture while I was on Foundation in 1979. I hadn’t yet decided whether I was going to go into art or design, but a lecture on contemporary feminist art practice with artists like Monica Ross, Kate Walker, and Margaret Harrison, sealed my fate. The excitement I felt when I encountered their works, and the revelation that art could connect directly with everyday life, has never left me.
Sonia Boyce
Artist
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Christopher Breward
Director, National Museums Scotland
read moreArt history was the lens through which I came to understand the world around me and feel confident about my place within it (and confidence for a young gay man growing up in a small town in the late 1970s and early 1980s was a precious commodity). It has supported me through challenges, allowed me to connect with countless people and places, and enabled a career that I would not swap with any other. In my current role as a Museum Director, I’m privileged to see at first-hand the way that art and its histories help our visitors feel alive, open up new opportunities of thinking, imagining and being, and offer a promise of resolution in times of crisis. I could not be without it and see that privilege as a right which everyone should have access to. Happy Birthday AAH!
Christopher Breward
Director, National Museums Scotland
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Kate Bryan
Art Historian, Curator & Arts Broadcaster
read moreArt history found me aged 18 and changed my life. It wasn’t just a window onto world history, it was a doorway through which I could walk and truly experience life in all of its complexity. Studying art history, which I continue to do every day in various ways as it is a philosophy as much as an academic discipline, allowed me to be receptive to the thoughts, feelings, creative impulses, and experiences of people I might never meet—ancient and contemporary artists alike. Through art we are able to communicate across time and space and in our divided world this seems more urgent than ever.
Kate Bryan
Art Historian, Curator & Arts Broadcaster
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Louisa Buck
Writer, Broadcaster & Contributing Editor, The Art Newspaper
read moreArt history matters because it is relevant to everyone, everywhere and at all times. It is through art that cultures, societies, and civilizations define themselves—and the study of art history therefore encompasses politics, philosophy, aesthetics, anthropology, poetry, psychology, comparative religions, and much more! Studying the history of art is crucial for understanding the times in which we live and for ensuring that human creativity continues to be cherished. No art is made in a vacuum and in attempting to understand the connections and distinctions between art made at different times, by different individuals and in different circumstances we gain insight into our own world. Art history can change lives and world views – it has certainly changed mine!
Louisa Buck
Writer, Broadcaster & Contributing Editor, The Art Newspaper
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Aviva Burnstock
Professor of Conservation, The Courtauld Institute of Art
read moreArt history matters because it provides tangible access to evidence that can be evaluated to investigate our social, economic and material past and its impact on the present. It is therefore central to understanding global cultural values, production and development. Object based inclusive interdisciplinary study, and the application of different frameworks and approaches to interpretation of art is integral to art history, that offers a rich area of research and outcomes.
Aviva Burnstock
Professor of Conservation, The Courtauld Institute of Art
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Tony Butler
Director, Derby Museums
read moreI didn’t study art history; I am a social historian. Worker’s rights, ‘Spinning Jennys’, Dissent, science and commerce are my points of interest. Fortunate then that I have under my care the largest collection of art anywhere in the world by Joseph Wright of Derby.
Wright’s work unites science, philosophy and art before those divisions were set. Depictions of the spirit of intellectual enquiry and the natural world speak to 21st century Derbians as we grapple with the challenge of the climate emergency, nature depletion and how we might live together on a crowded planet.
I like to look at his ‘Self Portrait at about the age of 40’ and gaze into the eyes of the artist. Art history in the reading of Wright’s work can raise visitors’ ambitions to see themselves as next generation of makers, thinkers and creatives.
Tony Butler
Director, Derby Museums
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Caroline Campbell
Director, National Gallery of Ireland
read moreArt history matters because it helps us make sense of the stuff of life.
Primarily, it has allowed me to understand better the material world that we inhabit today. It gives me windows into many other worlds, from the past and the present.
Art history has enriched my life in so many ways, and I want others to be able to avail themselves of the same opportunities.Caroline Campbell
Director, National Gallery of Ireland
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Gus Casely-Hayford
Director, V&A East
read moreFor my twelfth birthday, I received a copy of Gombrich’s The Story of Art. I read that book until I knew its major passages by heart, the cover had come away from the spine and the leaves came apart. I discovered within it not just my love of art, but a love for art history, a love of critical thinking and great storytelling.
Thirty years later, I re-read those passages. The words hadn’t changed, the art described was the same – but I, and the world around me had changed profoundly – and so, somehow the art history had changed too.
Art history is an organic, dynamic living thing, that at its best might be timeless, but at its most interesting it can flex to reflect the time and the needs of the reader.
Gus Casely-Hayford
Director, V&A East
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Lennox Cato
Antiques Dealer & Antiques Roadshow Expert
read moreFor those who have any interest in art and design, I believe you need to look back before you go forward. We can and have learnt so much from the past. Many of our most recognised creators from the 17th through to the 21st century have been inspired by earlier designs. This includes clothes, ceramics, buildings, furniture, clocks, jewellery and many more things which today we take for granted. Even the interiors of our home and the way we live. Learning and trying to understand art history is so important as it has shaped many of our nations wanting to be the first in creating.
Lennox Cato
Antiques Dealer & Antiques Roadshow Expert
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Alison Cole
Editor-at-Large, The Art Newspaper & Director, Arts Policy Unit, Fabian Society
read moreArt history opened up entire new worlds for me. It is the most naturally inter-disciplinary subject, while at the same time seeming to speak directly to one’s own personal interests and passions. It is where I find beauty, stillness, challenge, and limitless lands, past and present, to explore. It is where I enter into the minds of those who can wrestle with – and often magically distil – the essence of human experience.
Alison Cole
Editor-at-Large, The Art Newspaper & Director, Arts Policy Unit, Fabian Society
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Jago Cooper
Executive Director, Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts
read moreIt is not an exaggeration to say that art history matters because it unlocks the meaning of life. Art is the physical embodiment of that raw and inexplicable essence of what makes us human. Therefore, to study art is to explore the materialisation of some of the most interesting individuals, movements and cultures that have ever existed on the planet. That pursuit of knowledge and understanding helps unlock the imagination and creative power of humanity across time and space. At the Sainsbury Centre we try to activate this cross-cultural and trans-temporal cultural dialogue in a meaningful way for visitors. Our displays do away with any cultural hierarchy and bring together some of the most amazing artworks from all around the world, ranging from contemporary to prehistoric, in an open plan museum of creative wonder just waiting to be explored.
Jago Cooper
Executive Director, Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts
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Nicholas Cullinan
Director, British Museum
read moreWhen I was teenager trying to work out what to do with my life, I visited the Academia Gallery in Venice, and it was there, reading my guidebook, that I realised how visual objects had an incredible power to combine literature, history, philosophy, languages and politics in one. Since then, it’s been my privilege to work in museums and galleries, and in that time – from Assistant to Director – my appreciation for the incredible visual language that art history offers up has only grown stronger. Art History is an incredibly valuable subject – through the study of past culture, we can look forward to our own futures.
Nicholas Cullinan
Director, British Museum
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Jeremy Deller
Artist
read moreArt history is a portal to discussion on human and historical complexity, and we need more of it.
Jeremy Deller
Artist
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Daisy Dunn
Author & Classicist
read moreYou can read about what people were wearing in 1425 or you can see for yourself. You can imagine what the Battle of Waterloo looked like, or view it through the eyes of someone who was there. You can form an image of Henry VIII, but the artist he sat for will tell you what he was actually like. Art history is a transporting discipline. It will carry you in an instant to remote places and times and show you not only what another person saw, but what they thought and how they felt. Art history matters because it connects.
Daisy Dunn
Author & Classicist
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Alex Farquharson
Director, Tate Britain
read moreArt history is the study of how humanity has found visual expression of the experience of being in the world in all its variety and complexity across time and cultures. We are living in times shaped as much by imagery as by words, and the critical insight art history can bring has never felt more important or relevant. It enriches lives and it enriches society. So much of cultural vitality of a city or town depends on the strength of its local museums and galleries.
Alex Farquharson
Director, Tate Britain
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Gabriele Finaldi
Director, The National Gallery, London
read moreI came upon art history as a 16-year-old and knew absolutely nothing about the subject. But I was gripped from the very first class and knew it was what I wanted to do. It opened up a whole universe to me. Here was an opportunity to understand history and culture in a way that was exciting, intellectually stimulating, in fact for me, all-consuming. Art was all around, in the city, in galleries and museums, in books, exhibitions and on television. I was learning how the present connected with the past and how art is what gives shape, joy and meaning to our lives. I have not looked back.
Gabriele Finaldi
Director, The National Gallery, London
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James Fox
Art Historian & Broadcaster
read morePeople often say that art history is a ‘soft’ subject, the exclusive domain of the elites. But there is nothing elite about art. It has been an integral part of human existence since our species first appeared on this planet, tens of thousands of years ago. It’s played a starring role at every stage of our history, in every part of the world. That’s because art is a universal language: a vital tool for communicating our most important ideas with each other. So, if we want to understand who we are and where we’ve come from, art history really matters.
James Fox
Art Historian & Broadcaster
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Will Gompertz
Author, Critic & Director, Sir John Soane’s Museum
read moreArt history has never mattered more than it does today. In our post-colonial age, where old art historical certainties and presumptions are being challenged, new histories are emerging that have been buried and suppressed for centuries. It is an exciting time. Made possible by the intellectual and cultural curiosity of art historians across continents who are curating major international shows presenting the work of previously unheralded artists such as those from the global south and its diaspora, the female artists of the Renaissance, contemporary queer sculptors, and the paintings and installations made by neuro-diverse artists. Art history, once a largely monocultural field in western teaching, is becoming a place to explore a complex mosaic of art, ideas, and influences – local, national, and international – which can only enrich all our lives.
Will Gompertz
Author, Critic & Director, Sir John Soane’s Museum
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Antony Gormley
Artist
read moreArt history matters because it encourages us to experience; to look, to see, to think about all the things that surround us: a standing stone punctuating the landscape or a monumental curve of Corten steel, a handprint stencilled on a cave wall, or a void space cut into cliffs at opposing sides of a desert ravine. This experience of moving around and looking isn’t about mastering knowledge or fixing an object, but about forming an understanding that only a certain kind of attention can produce. Art history hands us the tools for this work.
Antony Gormley
Artist
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Lachlan Goudie
Painter, Writer & Broadcaster
read moreArt history is about much more than just pretty pictures. Historically, art and power have always gone together. Rulers, powerbrokers, and influencers have made artists their friends and used their exceptional ability to create objects of wonder and beauty, to cement their authority. The history of art is the history of politics, religion, and the very evolution of human society. But the real power of art is that it serves everybody. Whether you’re rich or poor, weak, or powerful; art is the magic that enlightens us — it ornaments the world, uplifts, and inspires the soul and makes life worth living.
Lachlan Goudie
Painter, Writer & Broadcaster
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Andrew Graham-Dixon
Art Historian, Art Critic, Author & Broadcaster
read moreArt history matters because it’s the most naked and essential history of who we are. If you want to understand a civilisation, for better or worse – from the Greeks to the Nazis – look at the art they made. A full year before Putin invaded Ukraine he unveiled a monumental statue of Saint Vladimir of Kiev, sword in hand, which made his intentions abundantly clear to anyone familiar with the artistic propensities of totalitarian regimes. Clearly there aren’t any art historians working for the CIA, MI5 or any of the other leading intelligence agencies, or the world wouldn’t have been so surprised by what happened next. Art history matters, because without it you’ve got no chance of understanding the world properly.
Andrew Graham-Dixon
Art Historian, Art Critic, Author & Broadcaster
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Bendor Grosvenor
Art Historian & Writer
read moreArt history matters because artists, even the greatest ones, tended not to write down why they painted a picture, how they painted it, or even what they painted. This was remarkably short-sighted of them. But it means art history is one of the most exciting and rewarding subjects you can study, because it allows you to immerse yourself in not only some of the greatest art ever made, but the extraordinary minds that made it too.
Bendor Grosvenor
Art Historian & Writer
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Mark Hallett
Märit Rausing Director, The Courtauld
read moreAt their best, works of art offer profound distillations of the human experience. At a time of turmoil and complexity, they help us negotiate our relationship with the world and with one another. The task of art history is to analyse art and to champion its importance across cultures, past, present and future. Moreover, in media landscapes saturated with images, it provides a means to decipher the crowded visual environments that we navigate on a daily basis. Art history empowers us to look closely, to think critically, and to feel deeply.
Mark Hallett
Märit Rausing Director, The Courtauld
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Katy Hessel
Art Historian
read moreTo study art history is to study the history of the world through another individual’s lens. While it can’t physically change the world, I believe it can change people’s minds, making the world a better and more well-rounded place. Artists hold up a mirror to the world, show us something anew, teach us about different perspectives, and tell us a story. But it’s vital that this is told from multiple points of view, because if we are not seeing art by a wide range of people, then we are not seeing society as a whole. Everyone should feel welcome to the conversation of art history.
Katy Hessel
Art Historian
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Karin Hindsbo
Director, Tate Modern
read moreIn an ever-changing world that we do not always understand, with fake news, echo chambers and polarisation, art and art history are crucial. Art can address complicated issues without being tabloid, and art history can make us reflect and even understand something anew.
Through art history we gain new knowledge of the world we live in, and how it has been perceived and developed over time. For art history to remain relevant it must change accordingly and even reinvent itself. It must always be an open, inclusive and yet critical discipline. This is why art history matters.
Karin Hindsbo
Director, Tate Modern
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Caro Howell
Director General, Imperial War Museums
read moreI stumbled into art history by accident. I wasn’t arty, couldn’t draw my way out of a paper bag and didn’t like history. But a few classes in, we were shown Robert Hughes’ The Shock of the New and to quote Monet; ‘It was as if a veil was torn from my eyes and I saw the world for the very first time.’ Things made sense. The past had texture and every form and version of human endeavour, every passion, political ambition, philosophical thought, idealistic dream, catastrophic misjudgement could be found there; captured, metabolised and recast in visual form. Art history is humanity’s encyclopaedia and for that reason it is the lesson for life.
Caro Howell
Director General, Imperial War Museums
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Tristram Hunt
Director, Victoria and Albert Museum
read moreThe study of art history is not only a critical academic subject, but one that nurtures a rich sense of knowledge, insight, and enjoyment. As an historian and museum director, I have found that an appreciation of art history has allowed for a much deeper understanding of the social, economic, and cultural contours of the past. It also supports the development of vital skills – of deep study, analysis, comparative judgment, and design thinking – useful far beyond the museum or gallery. As AI and the digital revolution transforms the media landscape, the human eye and brain trained by art history becomes ever more valuable.
Tristram Hunt
Director, Victoria and Albert Museum
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Waldemar Januszczak
Art Critic, Documentary Producer & Presenter
read moreArt history matters for many reasons. It is a doorway into religion, science, politics. Most preciously of all, it allows us to peep through the keyhole at our human past. What do we know about the cave men? What do we know about the Greeks? What do we know about the Assyrians, the Egyptians, the Romans? Archaeology and literature – if they left any – have answered some of the questions. But the most eloquent and reliable information is supplied by art. With art, the past cannot die. When societies leave behind art, they continue to speak to us across the ages.
Waldemar Januszczak
Art Critic, Documentary Producer & Presenter
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Chantal Joffe
Artist
read moreWhen I’m lost or stuck, which is often, I know that the best way to find a way out is to go back to the source, to art history. So I go to the National Gallery or the British Museum or the Tate, and I visit my old favourites like Titian’s Diana and Acteon or Degas’ Combing the Hair or the little Paula Modersohn-Becker at the Courtauld, or the Khadija Sayes at the National Portrait Gallery (it’s a lot harder to find art by women in museums … but you will find them if you look hard). If I can’t go to a museum, I pick up an art book – Diane Arbus or a book of paintings by Kerry James Marshall. I don’t think art ever comes out of nowhere; as Philip Guston said, ‘I’m always a student’. I think all artists should be. You can’t separate art history and artists. Every Louise Bourgeois has a predecessor in art history, every artist can be traced back to those handprints on the cave walls.
Chantal Joffe
Artist
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Jonathan Jones
Art Critic
read moreArt brings the past alive in the most electrifying way. When you look at a mammoth drawn on a cave wall 25,000 years ago you feel the presence of a long dead artist, as well as an extinct animal: with equal intensity, a bed preserved in a gallery can transport you to Tracey Emin’s 1990s. Art history, for me, is therefore not just about the “art” but also the “history” – a great way for anyone of any age to encounter the lost worlds and living processes that shaped us. It might mean standing next to Jan van Eyck in a room in medieval Bruges, or mourning the dead of Guernica with Picasso. What an eye-opening, soul-expanding subject.
Jonathan Jones
Art Critic
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Paterson Joseph
Artist & Author
read moreIn a world where image is everything, it is vitally important that we
understand what we’re looking at. Art history teaches us not only how to read the image but the context in which it was created. Like in a family photo album, those images become part of our family history, and nations are no different. We tell ourselves who we are and what we value by the reverence we assign to many of the images held in art collections public and private. Without art history these can be mainly subliminal messages that pass us by, but with the knowledge we can acquire, that message will be loud and clear.Paterson Joseph
Artist & Author
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Jacky Klein
Art Historian, Publisher & Writer
read moreArt isn’t something distant or elevated from real life – it’s at the very heart of human experience – and art history is the key that helps us unlock it all. It tells the story of the vast potential of humanity, showing us both the grand narratives of history and the intimate stories of the individual creative spirit – of belief, hope, solace, passion. And in doing so, art history helps us to understand better our world and ourselves, giving us invaluable tools to look more closely, to observe, appreciate and wonder, to think and feel more deeply. For me, it’s an essential way into understanding the things that really matter to all of us.
Jacky Klein
Art Historian, Publisher & Writer
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Tim Knox
Director of the Royal Collection
read moreWhen I was a boy one of my favourite books was Sacheverell Sitwell’s British Architects and Craftsmen, first published in 1945, but still a scintillatingly readable survey of British taste, design and style between 1600 and 1830. I still love this now most unfashionable book, as it opened a door to looking at buildings, interiors and collections as complete ensembles, within their social and historic context. I think I still look at art in this way, and it provided a valuable foundation to my later studies in the history of art. But art history is an endlessly relevant and continuing story, giving each generation a chance to say something new about art.
Tim Knox
Director of the Royal Collection
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Sam Lackey
Director, Liverpool Biennial of Contemporary Art
read moreI first visited a gallery aged 14, on a school trip. I can still remember clearly being shown George Braque’s Bottle and Fishes, c.1910-12 – a Cubist representation of an everyday subject – which blew my mind. Here, I could see what someone else saw through their eyes, experience something of their world. Art history creates possibilities for deep connection that collapse time and connect radically different experiences of being alive with one another. It gives us the tools in a world that is mediated through visual culture, to analyse, critique and evaluate the images we see every day.
Sam Lackey
Director, Liverpool Biennial of Contemporary Art
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Sook-Kyung Lee
Director, The Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester
read moreArt history illuminates the past to guide our present and future cultural journeys. Understanding creative expressions, artistic movements and their socio-political contexts helps decipher the interconnections and entanglements of global stories. It enriches everyday life by fostering critical thinking, aesthetic appreciation, and empathy. By studying the evolution of artistic expression from many civilisations, we decode the collective consciousness of different cultures and traditions, challenging our preconceived viewpoints and paradigms. It’s a roadmap for a more inclusive world, reminding us of our shared, sometimes conflicted histories and inspiring us to envision new ways of living together.
Sook-Kyung Lee
Director, The Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester
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John Leighton
former Director-General, National Galleries Scotland
read moreIn an increasingly dangerous and divided world, art matters because it has the power to bring people together, to motivate, inspire and encourage talent. And art cannot thrive and develop without art history, an amazing discipline that combines the most rigorous research with imagination and creativity. For me, there is nothing more exhilarating than the opportunity to peer over the shoulder of artists, past or present, to try to understand better their methods and motives and to peel back the many layers of meaning that can lie beneath the surfaces of individual works of art. Ultimately, a better understanding of art can lead to a better understanding of ourselves, as individuals, as societies, as nations – and perhaps that is why the study of art and its history has never seemed more important.
John Leighton
former Director-General, National Galleries Scotland
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Hew Locke
Artist
read moreArt history is history. It is not separate from politics or global history. It reveals the past and gives indications of the future. It has given me an insight into many other cultures, past and present. Even the way art history is presented gives a window into the cultures of the past and the difference between past and present attitudes to these cultures. For example, how women were written out of art history in the past, or how some cultures were included (e.g. ancient Egypt) and some excluded (eg Sub-Saharan Africa), and how cultural views are changing. Art history is a view of history from a different angle.
Hew Locke
Artist
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Rupert Maas
Antiques Dealer, The Maas Gallery
read moreSitting hungover at the back of a lecture hall at University as the Professor put up slides of paintings on the screen – the clouds parted, and I thought like a shout: Not made by geniuses, but by humans like us. Some historians want to smother pictures in interpretation, but others just shine light on them – for example, when someone told me that Manet couldn’t swim but would throw himself in the river Seine anyway to thrash to the other side, I felt I understood his paintings for the first time.
Rupert Maas
Antiques Dealer, The Maas Gallery
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Neil MacGregor
Art Historian & former Museum Director
read moreWhy art history? The long pleasure of slow looking. Thinking beyond our words, feeling beyond our experience. Disconcerting ways not just of seeing the world, but of imagining life. Where the intellectual becomes the physical. Giving form to thought. Pattern and balance, the universal compulsions. Mysteries of making and the miracle of survival. The ever-living past.
Neil MacGregor
Art Historian & former Museum Director
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Tim Marlow
CEO & Director, Design Museum
read moreArt history is multi-faceted. It used to be a privileged club, a kind of connoisseurial secret society but that – thankfully – has changed and it’s now a rigorous academic discipline. It’s also a dynamic one, constantly evolving, opening up to new ideas and new technologies. It’s expansive and increasingly inclusive and accessible to many more people across different cultures. But for me, it’s also a means of making sense, of re-framing the world and learning to see things differently.
Tim Marlow
CEO & Director, Design Museum
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Hilary McGrady
Director-General, National Trust
read moreI remember the first time I was properly taken aback by a piece of art. It was on a school trip to the National Trust’s Mount Stewart, where I vividly recall seeing Hambletonian, by George Stubbs, hanging at the top of a spiral staircase. Growing up in Northern Ireland during The Troubles, real art hadn’t been easy to come by. To see a painting like that up close was a rare thing. But it was also the story of the painting, of the window it offered into a different world, that was completely fascinating.
I’ve always believed art and culture have the power to bring people and communities together. Art history is central to that, to our understanding of one another and life around us. Everyone should have the opportunity to access it.
Hilary McGrady
Director-General, National Trust
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Partha Mitter
Emeritus Professor of Art History, University of Sussex
read moreI have been keen on art since childhood and wanted to take up painting professionally. Quite separately I read History as an honours subject at university. These two ideas came together rather unexpectedly in my life when I met Ernst Gombrich and eventually undertook a doctoral degree under his supervision. Often, aesthetic appreciation is the essential first step in our response to art objects but that is not sufficient. Art history helps us see that art objects are products of the human mind and have a long history that often reflects the richness and complexity of a particular society and helps us understand it better.
Partha Mitter
Emeritus Professor of Art History, University of Sussex
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Philip Mould
Philip Mould & Company
read moreThe Arts seems to me to work broadly like this. We have music. We have performance. We have literature. And then, just as important, we have art (including architecture). To get the best out of art, which is normally static, certain skills and methods can greatly enhance the experience. Visual curiosity and a sort of ‘meditative’ patience are crucial. To this can then be added the insight of art history. Knowing more about a work’s purpose and cultural context can make the relationship between us, and it, both richer and deeper. It can also help turn the merely pleasing into something enduring and profound. For me, an essentially visual person, art with its backstory has filled the same space as the greatest music, drama, and words.
Philip Mould
Philip Mould & Company
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Franny Moyle
Author, Biographer & Broadcaster
read moreWe might spend a week reading a book or two hours watching a film, but research shows most people spend SECONDS looking at paintings and sculpture in museums and galleries. As a society we have lost the art of looking at great art. So, art history matters because it provides people with the skillset and confidence to look at historic visual art anew. A vital part of our cultural education, art history reveals art as a portal to the past; it transports us back to lost worlds; excavates past mindsets and places us in the imaginative realms of our forebears.
Franny Moyle
Author, Biographer & Broadcaster
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Sarah Munro
Director, Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art
read moreThe objects of art history are the collective myths of our shared histories – who we are, what we value; what pains us, what gives us solace; how we define beauty and power. It’s our humanity and culture. Decoding great works of art through art history not only enables vital research and analytical skills to be developed, but also, enables a deeper understanding of ourselves and society.
Sarah Munro
Director, Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art
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Sandy Nairne
Chair, Art Fund
read moreArt has always been important to me as I was fortunate to be raised in an art-interested family and spent time in the art room at school. My father would take me to exhibitions and once I became a student I started helping in galleries: at Richard Demarco’s remarkable gallery in Edinburgh in the early 70s and then at the Museum of Modern Art in Oxford. I studied English Baroque architecture as a special subject (otherwise studying history and economics) through which I learned the importance of primary research materials. Art history has seeped into every aspect of my work and life: as a curator, museum director and writer and now as chair of the Fabric Committee at St Paul’s Cathedral, trustee of the National Trust and chair designate of Art Fund. Understanding the history of art is critical to running our cultural institutions and to the wider understanding of the world around us.
Sandy Nairne
Chair, Art Fund
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Lynda Nead
Visiting Professor of History of Art, The Courtauld; formerly Pevsner Professor of History of Art at Birkbeck
read moreWe live in a world in which different forms of visual media are increasingly important, defining who we are and the societies in which we live. Art history teaches us how to understand visual representations and how to think critically and creatively in this new visual world. It has never been more relevant and is one of the key disciplines within the arts and humanities.
Lynda Nead
Visiting Professor of History of Art, The Courtauld; formerly Pevsner Professor of History of Art at Birkbeck
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Steven Nelson
Dean, Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts
read moreArt history provides a means to understand how people from all places and periods have created and used the arts and architecture to explore their worlds. The study of the arts, visual culture, and architecture, allows us to critically distance ourselves from the assumptions and values we hold as natural, allowing us to question them and to make informed decisions about how we are in the world. The knowledge and power we gain through art history can foster creativity in thought, an increase in empathy, and deep connections to our shared humanity.
Steven Nelson
Dean, Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts
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Helen Nisbet
CEO & Artistic Director, Cromwell Place
read moreAs someone who grew up in a remote place, before the internet, my access to culture was limited to late night TV and gleaning information from teenage magazines or two-day old newspapers. Because Scottish universities allow you to study three subjects before majoring in your third and fourth years, I discovered that I could consider so many of the areas I was interested in—politics, philosophy, literature, history, language—through the lens of art history. I realised that the work artists make—whether today or 500 years ago—speaks to the concerns and politics of the time. Art history takes us to the heart of a moment, it is both a time machine and a way of perceiving another human’s experiences.
Helen Nisbet
CEO & Artistic Director, Cromwell Place
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Hans Ulrich Obrist
Artistic Director, Serpentine Galleries
read moreArt history is of great importance for the 21st century—the future can be invented with fragments from the past.
Hans Ulrich Obrist
Artistic Director, Serpentine Galleries
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Magdalene Odundo
Ceramic Artist
read moreAs artists, when we make contemporary art we are creating a history of our human existence for the present and the future. The study of art history has enabled us to know more about who we are as human beings. Art has always informed our human existence. It is important that we know where we came from, where we are at, and where we are going. Therefore, art history, as a core subject in our education, continues to be vital.
Magdalene Odundo
Ceramic Artist
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Paula Orrell
National Director, Contemporary Visual Arts Network
read moreTransitioning from a practising artist to a curator, I engaged deeply with fellow artists, making art history somewhat mysterious. Recognising the importance of situating art within historical contexts, I value the collaboration between artists and the understanding of their work’s significance. Partnering with art historians is a source of joy as they elevate art into realms of social and political importance. As a dyslexic individual, I greatly admire curators adept at forging connections and utilising research to frame artists’ ideas. This dynamic interplay between historical understanding and artistic concepts adds layers to appreciating art’s societal impact.
Paula Orrell
National Director, Contemporary Visual Arts Network
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Adriana Paice Kent
Director, Woven Spaces
read moreArt history is a rich exploration of human creativity throughout time. The critical training it provides communicates layered ideas around people and place, positioning culture as a platform upon which diverse strands of thought can coalesce to unlock a deeper understanding of the world around us. Sitting at the intersection of science, design, philosophy and linguistics, the discipline offers a multidimensional lens that inspires curiosity about how things are made and asks why they are relevant. Art history traces points of connection within our environment and communities, telling the story of how we are etched onto one another – our shared human experience. Its analytical framework has informed my career in the Built Environment: as an artist creating interactive installations, a curator of public spaces and a developer revitalising weathered commercial buildings.
Adriana Paice Kent
Director, Woven Spaces
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Cornelia Parker
Artist
read moreArt touches on every subject, synthesising, enhancing, and adding dimensions not thought possible to the conscious mind. Art history opens up this world, allowing us to take a deeper dive into all that is visual. Informing our gaze is so important, it enriches our experience of the world. It is a knowledge which unlocks understanding and appreciation of our own culture and those of others.
Cornelia Parker
Artist
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Grayson Perry
Artist, Writer & Broadcaster
read moreArt history matters because as in any branch of history we need it otherwise we are doomed to repeat ourselves. Though in the case of art, repetition might not be a bad thing. My career is basically looking at old art and making my own version of it. I dine out on the notion that a major ingredient of what we find beautiful is familiarity. Art history is woven into everything I make. I daily study art history to find inspiration. Art shows us how humans felt at any one time or place, not necessarily in a reflective conscious way like in literature but in an unconscious or bodily way. The artists of the past talk directly to us today without the barrier of language. Art history teaches us how to look and understand what those artists are saying to us.
Grayson Perry
Artist, Writer & Broadcaster
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Melanie Pocock
Artistic Director (Exhibitions) Ikon Gallery, Birmingham
read moreWith an initial background in historical studies, I have always valued what art and artists tell us about the world(s) we live in. Their poetic visions convey what literal documents can’t; what it was, is, and perhaps even will be like to look, think and feel in a certain age. In this way, art history is a history of the senses, relevant to anyone seeking to understand the fullness of human experience.
Melanie Pocock
Artistic Director (Exhibitions) Ikon Gallery, Birmingham
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Victoria Pomery
CEO, The Box, Plymouth
read moreHere at The Box, the historic and the contemporary sit side by side. We use history to inform and inspire artists and audiences – it is part of our vision. That’s why art history matters: it isn’t just about the past, it’s just as relevant to the present and future — enabling us to have important conversations about and reflect on the things we think we know.
A recent example is The Box’s season of ‘Light and Colour’ which took place in summer 2023. We staged exhibitions by Sir Joshua Reynolds and Rana Begum who also produced three new paintings that responded to Reynolds’ portraits. Displaying them together created some real talking points and gave our visitors a different perspective on works that were created over 250 years ago.
Victoria Pomery
CEO, The Box, Plymouth
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Jennifer Powell
Director, Barber Institute of Fine Arts, University of Birmingham
read moreAs the Director of a museum and art gallery, I find that there is an ever increasing need to advocate daily for why art, and the study of art history, matter. Often, in my work life, this is in no small part due to the devastating cuts to arts funding and to the precarious place of the study of art and its histories within schools and higher education. Creativity is, and always has been, central to our world. In the transient and fast-paced environments in which we live in today, art and art history still have the power to make us pause and really look at things. Through this process, and by studying objects, we can not only better understand the complexities of the past, but we also have the chance to learn from its mistakes (!), to positively shape our futures.
Jennifer Powell
Director, Barber Institute of Fine Arts, University of Birmingham
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Dorothy Price
Professor of Modern & Contemporary Art and Critical Race Art History, The Courtauld
read moreArt history matters because it enables us to navigate a complexly visual world in ways that help us to understand it better. In no other discipline can one object, whatever the medium, open up the enormous multiplicity of potential knowledge systems – about time, history, geography, science, nature, society, culture, people – everything that makes us human can be found in art historical practice. It is perhaps one of the most inter-disciplinary subjects in the humanities. Artworks are like portals to new worlds of knowledge and understanding and art history is the key to unlocking them.
Dorothy Price
Professor of Modern & Contemporary Art and Critical Race Art History, The Courtauld
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Laura Pye
Director/CEO, National Museums Liverpool
read moreNational Museums Liverpool includes three galleries with outstanding art collections ranging from the medieval period to today. I am always amazed at the power of this art and its history in helping us understand the world today and in the past. Thanks to new research our understanding grows year on year and we discover things within our collections with relevant to a whole range of contemporary issues. Without people continuing to study art history we will lose the expertise to help sustain and develop even more this incredible potential.
Laura Pye
Director/CEO, National Museums Liverpool
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Janina Ramirez
Art Historian, Cultural Historian & TV Presenter
read moreThe artworks, artefacts and objects of the past are our most unfiltered way of interacting with the people that have gone before. When you touch a manuscript, gaze on brushstrokes, or see a fingerprint in an ancient pot, through that moment you are crossing time. Art history is also one of the few subjects that leaps across disciplinary boundaries, combining our intuitive responses to visual stimulus with documents, music, film, archaeology, as well as the sciences. To understand the world through the marks and images humans have made provides a unique way of viewing past, present and future.
Janina Ramirez
Art Historian, Cultural Historian & TV Presenter
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Emma Ridgway
Director, Foundling Museum
read moreI believe that art history expands our personal understanding of the human condition. It is through the vivid visual world of art histories that we emotionally connect with lived experiences, eras and belief systems that are different from our own. A curious fact about humans is that we primarily understand the world through visual and emotional stimulus – real, imagined or depicted by artists. In that way, art histories give us shared visual languages. We all use these visual languages (often unconsciously) to make sense of our lives, our identities, and to imagine who we might become.
Emma Ridgway
Director, Foundling Museum
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Hannah Rothschild
Chair, Rothschild Foundation
read moreArt history offers the thrilling, incisive, inclusive and important way of understanding our past through visual images. For centuries, artists have been witnesses and distillers of human events and human emotions. The importance of the study of artists and their work cannot be underestimated.
Worth noting too is that art history provides many thousands of jobs within our creative economy. These range from Museum directors to attendants, from curators to practitioners, from art handlers to restorers. The study of art history is classless and essential.
Hannah Rothschild
Chair, Rothschild Foundation
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Saad-Eddine Said
CEO & Artistic Director, New Art Exchange
read moreArt history is the lens that reveals the complex fabric of human culture. It teaches us empathy, critical thinking, and appreciation for diversity, bridging past and present. This exploration enriches our understanding of identity and society. Through art history, we gain insights into human experiences, encouraging innovative thinking and empathy across disciplines. Art history is crucial for it shapes how we view, understand, and interact with our world, fostering a deeper, more connected human experience.
Saad-Eddine Said
CEO & Artistic Director, New Art Exchange
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Rebecca Salter
President, Royal Academy
read moreArt history matters because art matters. And making art matters because the role of the artist is to explore the visual, to celebrate the act of looking. In a society which privileges words, understanding the world and interpreting it through the visual is important. It is a different kind of intelligence. The skill of an art historian is to form a bridge between artistic generations and different artistic traditions.
Rebecca Salter
President, Royal Academy
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Simon Schama
Art Historian & Broadcaster
read moreIf great art is the doorway to another kind of life: intense, illuminated, a revelation of truth hidden beneath the surface of quotidian routine, art history tells us how such miracles came to be: how the mind conceived, the hand made and the public saw. Immersed in it you can get close to the moment of creation, feel the struggles, double the exhilaration when it goes well, plumb the depths when it doesn’t. And you go back to the art itself with a whole new kind of vision.
Simon Schama
Art Historian & Broadcaster
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Jennifer Scott
Director, Dulwich Picture Gallery
read moreMy life was changed by a teacher who introduced me to art history. The subject covers every facet of the human experience and I champion its power every day.
Art history reminds us to forge the links between science and art. Take for example, the discovery in c.1427 of linear perspective. Brunelleschi understood mathematics; Masaccio understood composition. By combining their skills, they expanded the horizons of the visual world in the fresco of the ‘Holy Trinity’ in Florence. We can take inspiration from them every time we have a problem to solve: Think laterally, share knowledge, and trust your creative instincts.Jennifer Scott
Director, Dulwich Picture Gallery
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Mark Sealy
Director, Autograph
read moreIt is essential to examine art history in terms of time, space, and distance and its application across the contested ideological formations of how differences in visual culture have been discoursed. Until fairly recently, the investment in photography for historians and critics has been traditionally preoccupied with defining the photographic canon or the reproductive and indexical possibilities of the medium. The history of photography is, therefore, often presented in isolation and dislocated from the broader political debates concerning identity formations and how we understand the past; therefore, unfixing history from its epistemic past is essential and pressing work and through the agency of the Association for Art History we can make sure that the more nuanced and diverse aspects of art’s histories are given voice.
Mark Sealy
Director, Autograph
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Nicholas Serota
Chair, Arts Council England
read moreArt history can teach us about the world as it was and as it is. It connects us to earlier cultures and different societies. And it is a subject that can enrich our understanding of other disciplines, including history, geography, literature, economics, and philosophy. It gives the next generation, and not just those who will become artists or cultural leaders, the opportunity to develop the imagination and skills that are vital to our future. I decided to study art history in my second year at university, not knowing that I would become totally captivated and that I would find myself championing the arts in the decades that followed.
Nicholas Serota
Chair, Arts Council England
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Bill Sherman
Director, Warburg Institute
read moreWe at the Warburg Institute do not have to look far for evidence of ‘Why Art History Matters.’ Our founder, Aby Warburg (1866-1929) set out to find the ancient sources of Renaissance paintings and ended up changing the way we see the world around us. With his historical writings and his curatorial projects he re-founded art history in ways that anticipate both Media Studies and Artificial Intelligence—just the skills we need to understand our image-saturated, machine-assisted age.
Bill Sherman
Director, Warburg Institute
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Laura Sillars
Director of MIMA & Dean of the School of Arts and Creative Industries
read moreArt is a portal to multiple histories and it starts with your own. The way that you see is informed by your own life and times and the history of an artwork is a collection of multiple perspectives and perception. The objects you investigate (from artworks to street signs) encapsulate the collective imagination of the people that made them and the conditions in which they lived and worked. In this way, art history is dynamic, active, relational and revelatory.
Re-looking at and re-thinking artworks can be an act of restorative justice which can shape future ways of seeing and ways of knowing. For this reason, looking at art is a powerful act. Working as a curator, director and art historian in the twenty-first century is to contribute to producing more equitable creative futures.
Laura Sillars
Director of MIMA & Dean of the School of Arts and Creative Industries
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Bob & Roberta Smith
Artist
read moreI studied History of Art for A-Level. It was not available at my school, but it drove me to galleries and museums and to read Ernst Gombrich and Kenneth Clark. Amazingly, I passed the exam. Art works are very vulnerable without their histories, without their stories and contexts. And we are vulnerable without our diverse cultures. Happy birthday, Association for Art History. We need art historians to celebrate our humanity and to celebrate our changing understanding of our story.
Bob & Roberta Smith
Artist
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Sonia Solicari
Director, Museum of the Home
read moreThere are so many ways to attempt to understand the meaning of home but art history is one of my favourites, a beautifully flawed record of our hopes and fears. Fantasy rooms, nightmare rooms, familiar rooms, strange rooms – the story of art is also the story of works made for and about our domestic spaces, both reinforcing and challenging enduring notions of identity and belonging.
Sonia Solicari
Director, Museum of the Home
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Alastair Sooke
Writer & Broadcaster, and The Telegraph’s Chief Art Critic
read morePeople sometimes think that art is too elitist, esoteric, not for them. And, it’s true, art has often been hoarded by the powerful and ring-fenced by scholars eager to impress their peers. Yet, art – which is infinitely various and difficult to make – is also infinitely interesting, because it can convey the intimate thoughts and emotions of our ancestors as well as our contemporaries, in a manner that’s immediate, memorable and moving. To study art history, then, is to study the world. At the same time, art is more than a compelling history lesson; its magic is that it provides poetry as well as prose. Beauty (which takes many forms) casts an intoxicating, irresistible spell. And the best thing about it, despite those exorbitant sums fetched in the salerooms? Experiencing art’s enchantment – in, say, many of the world’s great museums – is often free.
Alastair Sooke
Writer & Broadcaster, and The Telegraph’s Chief Art Critic
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Kathleen Soriano
Chair, Art UK & Judge, Sky Arts, Artist of the Year
read moreArt history is storytelling at the highest level. It captivates and transports us. It provides meaning and guides us towards an understanding be it of savagery, politics, hierarchy, domination, love, religion, spirituality, or mythology. Art history is the vessel that holds all human experience allowing us to ‘read’ and imagine the whole of life.
Kathleen Soriano
Chair, Art UK & Judge, Sky Arts, Artist of the Year
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Chris Stephens
Director, Holburne Museum
read moreArt History opens up so much more than the history of art. It involves engaging with broader social, political, geopolitical histories, philosophy, psychology, sociology, architecture and the histories and aesthetics of other art forms. While an undergraduate, an encounter with Conrad Atkinson, artist in residence at the University of Edinburgh History of Art department, revealed political readings of landscape painting that deeply affected my understanding of the countryside and its history in a way that shaped my career. Upon moving to a regional art museum, after over 20 years at Tate, I was struck by the degree to which art, and its historical accounting within the museum context, genuinely changed people’s lives and improved their mental health.
Chris Stephens
Director, Holburne Museum
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Luke Syson
Director, The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge
read moreWe need – desperately, I think, right now – to understand ourselves and one another better. Art, made over millennia, helps us do just that, arguably better than any other creative medium. We take in around 80% of our information through our eyes, but we only rarely stop to analyse how that’s happening – how much images, including works of art, have shaped our view of the world, sparked moments of self-revelation, how they can reinforce or challenge beliefs and prejudice. Art history and visual analysis are crucial for understanding how.
The prevailing visual culture of any one place and period can leave a long legacy. Artists can be conformist. But they can also help us see more, and anew. Their fierce individualism can become universal. Their images can unforgettably puncture complacency and make us think again about our place in the world, our responsibilities to one another, our articles of faith, and many of the great challenges we face right now, not least our ability to live peaceably with one another in a world where we have different opinions and lived experiences.
Luke Syson
Director, The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge
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Gilane Tawadros
Director, Whitechapel Gallery
read moreArt history matters when it is more than a history of artworks, their fabrication, financial value or provenance. Art history matters when it is more than a history of art but is a history of artists and artworks in the social and political contexts from which they emerged. Seen through the lens of art, we can narrate complex histories which are surprising, hidden, visceral and entangled. Most of all, art history matters because art matters as a way of understanding our world and its myriad representations.
Gilane Tawadros
Director, Whitechapel Gallery
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Simon Thurley
Historian, Archaeologist and Heritage Expert
read moreThere is more of the past around us today than ever before. This is perhaps an obvious thing to say, but as we stop to think about it, we realise that the built world is the history of how our ancestors thought, the values they held, the economic environment in which they lived, and the ambitions they cherished. Choosing what to do with our architectural inheritance therefore requires art historical skills as well as social and economic ones. After leaving The Courtauld Institute in 1985 I have had a career in which the application of art historical skills has been vital. The world of historic building and landscape conservation relies on people who understand buildings and places in historical context to make good decisions about how we live today. For me art history is not an obscure academic backwater, but a tool for helping to shape the future.
Simon Thurley
Historian, Archaeologist and Heritage Expert
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Sandi Toksvig
Broadcaster, Actor, Comedian, Novelist and Producer
read moreI am writing this surrounded by a series of paintings by a group of women in my home town of Copenhagen which were completed at the end of the 19thcentury. Back then no woman was allowed to join an official art school; so they worked together in order to be able to express themselves. Many of the works are of Danish scenes, others capture domestic life. From them I have the profound pleasure of snapshots of my native land and life, but they also teach me about the need for feminism, about a wider history of how humanity has shaped itself. And that is where art history comes into play. I often show them to young people who cannot understand that women artists might have been treated so shabbily. They are a beautiful lesson to us all.
Sandi Toksvig
Broadcaster, Actor, Comedian, Novelist and Producer
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Gavin Turk
Artist
read moreArt history is a joined-up look at culture and tells a story about the way that ideologies move and change through time. It holds a mirror up to society, reflecting the past into the future. Through a process of analogy, it is possible to use this history to help understand how to navigate and prepare for the future.
Art history is a way of recording and archiving art, placing it into a context that enables references to be accessed and associations made. Through various pictorial, metaphorical and conceptual forms, art performs an ontological role discussing what is real and the very nature of being.
Gavin Turk
Artist
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Sarah Victoria Turner
Director, Paul Mellon Centre
read moreImagine a world without art, without museums, without artists, without images – that’s a pretty bleak prospect. However, more than ever, I think it’s important that we communicate a different vision of art history. It’s still often seen as a niche or privileged endeavour. The onus is on us to champion art history as having real and important value for society, as very much connected rather than cut-off, as vital to helping us make sense of the world, past and present.
Sarah Victoria Turner
Director, Paul Mellon Centre
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Ed Vaizey
Member of the House of Lords, UK.
read moreArt history is often seen as a soft subject, yet it encompasses a whole range of important disciplines. It is, of course, history, and one can understand so much more about a period by studying the art that it produced – indeed, that is often the most tangible thing that survives. It also involves detective work – often enjoyable and compelling – to uncover hidden narratives and association. And there is science in learning about techniques and innovations. In short, you cannot understand any period in history unless you understand its art.
Ed Vaizey
Member of the House of Lords, UK.
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Kamini Vellodi
Head of Painting, Royal of College of Art
read moreArt history matters because art matters. Together, the making of art and its retelling as art history offer a portal to the complexity and mystery of human experience. Not merely a discipline, art history is a global enterprise that helps us to understand the meaning of art across cultures, in worlds beyond our own. A continuous re-telling of the past, it reminds us of the power and necessity of art to bind us together across times and places, geographies and histories.
Art history is the rich and wondrous history of cultural artifacts from prehistory to the present, captured and transmitted across generations. It is the material and inspiration for art making, continually remade and given new life by artists. Art history, with art, connects the past with possible futures envisioned through the human imagination.
Kamini Vellodi
Head of Painting, Royal of College of Art
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Sara Wajid
Co-CEO, Birmingham Museums Trust & Founder, Museum Detox
read moreI’m not an art history graduate and was scared and alienated by formal art galleries. I worried that art history was a difficult and Eurocentric code that I needed, in order to ‘crack’ art galleries. But then I watched the series The Shock of the New with Robert Hughes and I realised that art history is not a code, but a way of seeing, an exciting way of reading visual culture and the world. Now I’m most drawn to feminist and decolonial art history, which is a thrilling and radical field, and a whole world of artists has opened up to me.
Sara Wajid
Co-CEO, Birmingham Museums Trust & Founder, Museum Detox
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Jenny Waldman
Director, Art Fund
read moreArt history is about looking, being curious and developing our visual literacy. I was lucky enough to study art history at school with a brilliant, gentle teacher who inspired a deep love of art. I learned that complex ideas could be expressed visually and that the values, beliefs, and aspirations of different societies at different times could be explored through art. Art history helps us to navigate our diverse and interconnected world. It enriches our understanding of the past, opens perspectives on the present and helps us navigate the future.
Jenny Waldman
Director, Art Fund
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Peter Webber
Director, Girl with a Pearl Earring
read moreEvery scene I have ever composed, framed, lit, staged, or shot has been influenced by the lessons I’ve learnt from art history. A knowledge of art history is the surest way to understand visual storytelling, the use of iconography and symbolism. It’s the key to unlocking a whole universe of meaning and understanding. The great masters were experts in composition, mood, and lighting and to have a head full of these images—paintings I’ve known now for decades—is to have the best resource possible as a director of film and television.
Peter Webber
Director, Girl with a Pearl Earring
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Shearer West
President & Vice-Chancellor, University of Nottingham
read moreMy love for art history began, ironically, in a library. I grew up in rural Virginia where visual culture was largely confined to television, cinema, country music concerts and professional wrestling matches. The many hours I spent in the local library exploring unfamiliar worlds included turning the pages of beautifully illustrated books about art. I was already hooked when I was finally able to visit the magnificent art galleries in Washington DC. My art history degree opened my mind, fostered my curiosity and led to career opportunities in publishing, the research councils and university leadership.
Shearer West
President & Vice-Chancellor, University of Nottingham
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Zoe Whitley
Director, Chisenhale Gallery
read moreArt history matters because artists compel us to see and experience the world differently. Because artists take the world they inherit and change it; sometimes subtly but often seismically, it empowers us as art historians to do the same through close observation, hopefully leading to an expanded canon and a more exciting field.
Zoe Whitley
Director, Chisenhale Gallery
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Alberta Whittle
Artist
read moreArt history teaches critical thinking and creative problem solving, providing the confidence to look at the world anew and have difficult conversations – both necessary for positive change. Knowledge of art making and art history is indispensable to reimagine and build a more equitable world. With critical thinking as a skill disappearing, we need to learn how to decipher hidden stories and develop new ways to share them with audiences of all ages and backgrounds. Art history can empower learners to educate themselves with new expertise to challenge one-sided ideas of gender, sexuality, power, class and race and create a broader understanding of the world we live in whilst also challenging the status quo.
Alberta Whittle
Artist
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Rowan Williams
Theologian, Poet & former Archbishop of Canterbury
read moreOne of the keystones of serious intellectual life at any level is coming to understand how we learned to think and to imagine across time. And thinking is done in art as much as in philosophy, in images as much as concepts. More specifically, knowing how the visual imagination has grown and changed is an essential element in grasping how culture has developed and is developing. This is not a ‘soft’ subject, but one that connects with the deepest currents in critical social intelligence, and we lose an incalculable resource if this is ignored or sidelined.
Rowan Williams
Theologian, Poet & former Archbishop of Canterbury
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Godfrey Worsdale
Director, Henry Moore Foundation
read moreArt history is all about the past, or so we are told, and we live in the present; a present which the art of our time will one day express. People will call it art history.
There are many ways in which one can learn about history, but to do so through the story of art; through the unique vision of the world’s great artists, is particularly enriching and inspiring. The trajectory of art history is made still more valuable because of its continuing potential to be re-interpreted and re-evaluated through new and different eyes. When a great work of art endures those changing perspectives, we can all share in that remarkable legacy, which will nourish and encourage new creativity and forward-thinking, because art history is so very important to our shared future.
Godfrey Worsdale
Director, Henry Moore Foundation
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