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Social History of Art Symposium Honors Robert Herbert

Robert Herbert, Andrew W. Mellon Professor of the Humanities Emeritus, was warmly praised at a November 1 symposium in his honor titled "The Future of the Social History of Art." The topic was meant to create within the presentations a common thread: through social history, art is looked at as a mirror for the attitudes and values of society. Herbert's work, which grew from a theoretical approach imbedded in Marxism, led to the social history of art that has since come to include feminist art history.

Herbert attended the assembly with his wife Fi, who retired this year from MHC's history department. The speakers, many having studied directly with Herbert when he taught at Yale, others having been influenced by his publications, were Timothy J. Clark of the University of California at Berkeley, Anna Chave of Queens College and The Graduate Center of the City University of New York, Thomas Crow and Romy Golan of Yale University, Richard Schiff of the University of Texas at Austin, and Paul Tucker of the University of Massachusetts at Boston.

John Varriano, chair of the MHC art department, opened the forum by remarking on the high turnout and thanking those who came from near and far to wish Herbert congratulations.

Presentations started with Richard Schiff's "Social History of Form," which concentrated on how an artist's rendering cannot be exclusive of his or her society. In "Smokestacks, Grainstacks, and Other Impediments to a Science of Signs," Tim Clark spoke of "breaking the dyad of art and viewer," while pursuing the discovery of whose perspective or mentality is recorded in an artwork. This was followed by Romy Golan's provocatively entitled presentation--"The Social History of Embarrassing Art"--which considered muralistic art, public art commissioned as propaganda.

Thomas Crow questioned whether an adequate social history can be written about the phenomenon known as "the gaze." Following this was perhaps the most controversial presentation: Anna Chave questioned whether biography can or should be an element of consideration in defining the motivation behind artwork. Her talk was based on two modern artists: Robert Morris and Eva Hesse. Chave charged that "social historians depreciate the personal," and delved into her thesis that the "cloak of impersonality of minimalist art" was trespassed by both Morris and Hesse. She ended with a few heartfelt sentences on the role that Herbert played in her personal and scholastic pursuits, a refrain that marked many of the day's presentations.