The Visual Display of Art Historical Information

The translation of visual and material phenomena into verbal form is usually framed as the central challenge of art historical method. Yet this translation often takes place alongside visual forms of description, quantification, and analysis. Models, didactic drawings, graphs, tables, reconstructions: such visual displays of art historical information (to paraphrase Edward Tufte’s classic study of data visualisation) have played a central, if underexamined role in the formation of the discipline. They include “family trees” of artistic schools, graphic analyses of composition, diagrams identifying iconography and explaining perspectival systems, among other formats. Building on a recent interest in the diagram as image across art historical fields, this session turns to art historians’ own use of graphic elements to communicate information seemingly unavailable in reproductive illustration. How have these contributed to, or undermined, the scientistic underpinnings of art history and mediated its vexed relationship to “objectivity”? How do diagrams or schematic drawings allow for different modes of analysis, synthesis or criticism? The expanding use of big data in the humanities has brought with it new visual models. What might the longer history of the discipline’s relationship to “data visualization” teach us about the affordances and pitfalls of these analytic forms?

Session Convenor:

Allison Stielau, University College London

Speakers:

Elizabeth Johnson, Cambridge School of Art, Anglia Ruskin University

Diagramming Anxiety: Artists’ Holograms and the Scientific Diagram

What can a scientific diagram describing an artwork’s composition reveal beyond technical information? What can its inclusion in an art exhibition illuminate about the status of a medium? This paper explores these questions in relation to the recurring presence of diagrams detailing the scientific process of holographic wavefront reconstruction in exhibitions of artists’ holograms. The optical hologram first emerged as a medium in the late 1960s when pioneering artists began to explore the creative possibilities offered by its dazzling three-dimensional and intangible forms. In the subsequent decades holograms were produced by esteemed artists, such as Louise Bourgeois, Bruce Nauman, James Turrell and Deana Lawson. Nonetheless, while video art – another new media that emerged in the 1960s – is now commonplace, curator Jenny Moore claims holography ‘remains suspect’. This paper suggest that the uneasy status of the hologram as an art medium is indexed by the ongoing presence in holographic art exhibitions of technical scientific diagrams explaining how holograms are made. I investigate this claim in relation to the 2024 Getty Museum exhibition Sculpting with Light: Contemporary Artists and Holography. By analysing the exhibition’s curation, I suggest that the inclusion of a large-scale scientific diagram encouraged viewers to marvel at the medium’s technical success ahead of the particular aesthetic statements made by the individual artworks. Ultimately, I suggest that the enduring presence of the scientific diagram in exhibitions of artists’ holograms indexes curatorial anxieties about the hologram’s legitimacy as a subject of the art museum.

Allison Stielau, University College London

Excess and its Embarrassments in Art Historical Image Practices

This talk explores the image practices that remain hidden behind the rigorous art historical visual forms on display in powerpoint presentations and published articles and books. Wrangling, parsing, and thinking through images can be a messy business that many would prefer to keep private. Where does Art History draw a line between image practices that are sanctioned and those considered excessive? Which modes are associated with what might be termed “Outsider Art History”? In producing diagrams, reconstructions, or a “murder board” of art historical evidence, when does one cross over the bounds of the discipline’s accepted conventions?

Dominik Lengyel, Brandenburgische Technische Universität Cottbus-Senftenberg, and Catherine Toulouse, Lengyel Toulouse Architects, Berlin

How Architecture Methods Display Art Historical Information Diagrammatically

The visual form of complex content provides concentrated evidence that can be accessed not just sequentially, as with text or speech, but in an instant. This technique, common in visual disciplines, transfers well to art history when complex arguments can be distilled into a single diagram. Visual elements both support and clarify objectivity by presenting multiple reasoning lines simultaneously. When hypotheses pertain to architecture, diagrams act as both models and reconstructions, though not necessarily of entire buildings—they can represent spatial insights or intentions. This type of representation is more accurately termed visualisation than reconstruction, emphasizing insight over precise replication of original architecture. Historians may read such images as graphical analyses, using a graphic language rooted in architectural design, albeit with a reversed chronology: rather than a client-driven design, it presents a historian’s hypothesis. Here, architectural perspective serves historical research, offering a new visual model. Affordance is the key consideration—ensuring the visual rendering appropriately reflects a verbal hypothesis. The risk lies in interpreting visuals too literally, yet careful abstraction counters this. The core challenge of this approach is exemplified by the visualisation of the historical hypothesis concerning a 6th–7th century AD predecessor church of Cologne Cathedral, created in collaboration with the Cologne Cathedral administration. This visual model provides an innovative way to communicate historical hypotheses, balancing clarity with abstraction to prevent over-literal interpretation.

Millie Morag Horton-Insch, University College Dublin

‘Objectivity’ and Operation Bayeux

Diagrams, line drawings, and digital scans are essential in study of medieval textiles. As objects which are too fragile to be regularly viewed or handled by researchers, scholars who seek to study this oft-overlooked medium rely almost entirely on those reproductions which seek to achieve ‘objectivity’: unmediated and truthful images which convey the qualities of the original object. There are paradoxes inherent in the process, the effort required to manipulate an image to make it like the original necessarily requires mediation. In this paper I would examine how this paradox is manifest in one particular reproduction, Herbert Jeschke’s 1941-3 sketches of the eleventh-century Bayeux Tapestry.

Objectivity was the primary conceit of the Nazi Ahnenerbe (Cultural Heritage Bureau) Project’s ‘Operation Bayeux’, in which Jeschke was commissioned to create a painted facsimile of the Tapestry which could then be included in textbooks that would be disseminated across the Third Reich. Historical studies of this archive praise the skill of Jeshke, the value of images which recreate the condition of the rapidly deteriorating Tapestry from eighty years ago, and the ability of sketches to capture what photography cannot. However, this paper will instead consider how these images may inform art historians about the paradoxical nature of objectivity in reproductions of fragile objects.

Moran Shelag, University of East Anglia

Graphs and Laughs

Although a serious painter, Ad Reinhardt (1913-1967) is perhaps best known for his humorous graphs, charts, and family trees that visualise art’s past – and its present – as a graspable, if dysfunctional, socio-temporal structure. Beginning in the mid-1940s with his How to Look series of collage comics and extending through to his last, The Insiders, published in 1961, Reinhardt’s offbeat use of graphic conventions marked his project as a unique take on art history. Coupled with deep knowledge of the discipline and decades of experience as a college lecturer, the drawings Reinhardt produced are often bitingly parodic, offering a critical view of the political landscape governing artistic production in America at mid-century, as well as its institutions and rhetorical apparatus. Having endured as didactic tools for historians and artists alike, this short paper considers their ongoing relevance as both objects of study and not-so-objective studies of a cultural horizon still visible today.

Ruth Ezra, University of St Andrews

Concavity, the Underbelly of Art History

Concavity is perhaps the most fleeting of sculptural properties. As the hollow face illusion demonstrates, human minds cannot bear so much inward curvature. We invert depth to projection and mistake depression for relief. Cue the diagram. This paper takes as its case study attempts to represent concavity schematically by means of annotated line drawings. Certain of these visualizations constitute examples of the “cross section” while others make of a single contour an economic approximation for the overall curvature of an artwork’s address to its viewer. In sculpture, the relationship of negative volume to positive form can also be understood as a figure/ground dialectic transposed to three dimensions — a point of particular interest for researchers in both art history and cognitive science, and the impetus for still more diagrams. My brief remarks bring together illustrations across domains, from the writing of architect and theorist Herman Sörgel to the lectures of art historian and perceptual psychologist Rudolf Arnheim to the statements of sculptor Alexander Archipenko and the teachings of industrial designer Rowena Reed Kostellow.

Discussion:

Respondent: Nicholas Robbins, University College London