A Conversation with Art Historian Fred S. Kleiner: How to Read Art, and Why Studying It Still Matters

Gardner's Art Through the Ages was the first global art history to break the "Western" boundary. Where did it come from, and why does it matter?

Art historian Fred S. Kleiner has taught at Boston University for 40 years. He believes art history is the best way to understand a culture. He studies ancient Roman art, which means his working days are spent on questions like this one: why does the emperor on this relief look more like his successor than like himself?

Telling such fine distinctions apart takes several fields at once — images, archaeology, politics. For 13 years Kleiner edited the American Journal of Archaeology. The book he is writing now is about art and politics in the Roman Empire.

One of his students described his lecturing style to us: "A lot of art historians take a simple idea and dress it in difficult words so it sounds lofty. He never does that. In his class you never feel the subject is too high up to touch — in fact, much of the art history theory and writing we see today isn't all that complicated once you put it in plain words."

Kleiner's students are not only in Boston; they are scattered around the world. The reason is a standard art history textbook: Gardner's Art Through the Ages, the first global art history to break the "Western" boundary, published in 1926. The modern artist Roy Lichtenstein used this very book in college, and the Native American art in it — material well outside the traditional canon — inspired his later work.

In 1990, Kleiner joined the book's marathon revision. Under his hand, contemporary art and women artists have taken up more space in a traditional discipline. In an interview with QDaily he called the work "missionary." That brought to mind a conjecture he offered at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in early March: that the ancient Romans carried the decorative styles of the Pompeian frescoes east in the form of books, all the way to the far side of the world, where they inspired local painters.

Almost as Kleiner was taking the podium, Chinese attitudes toward art began to shift. Today art history is one of the most popular general-education courses at some universities, and many people sense the enthusiasm for art rising among those around them: "going to exhibitions" has become a way of life for young middle-class urbanites and college students. In the art market, Chinese buyers have shown startling spending power — a survey by UBS and Art Basel found that China passed the United Kingdom last year to become the world's second-largest country by art sales.

But art is never only a money game for dealers. What ordinary art lovers want to know is: how do you appreciate art? How do you understand it? How do you turn art from a lifestyle into a culture? In publishing, popular art histories of the kind Jiang Xun writes sell briskly. That points to real demand — and to an anxiety about knowledge, even about identity.

With these questions in mind, QDaily interviewed Professor Fred Kleiner. We started with art history textbooks and went on to how to understand art better, how studying art history can make you a better citizen, and how to connect art to the present we live in.

Q – QDaily K – Fred S. Kleiner

Q: Gardner's Art Through the Ages is now in its fifteenth edition. Why does it need revising so often?

K: Knowledge changes every year. I have to add the latest findings, expand what the textbook covers, keep putting in new works. Fifty years go by and art history has fifty more years in it. I also know that students, Chinese and American alike, are very interested in contemporary art. That is why we insist on including it.

Q: Which artists have been added?

K: The list is long, I'm sure. I'd probably have to put the old and new editions side by side to give you all the names. The current book has more women artists and more minority artists — that's what we call them in the United States, Latino, Asian and so on. So this edition is more representative.

But things have changed even in material that was already there. Take Pompeii. We all assumed the city center was built between 250 and 150 BC, that the Romans then conquered the city and that it did not change much afterward. Recent research has found that the buildings we took for the city center only became the main buildings after the Romans arrived. I have to correct knowledge like that, even about art from more than two thousand years ago. Every four or five years I update the book, and it keeps me very busy.

Q: The first edition came out more than ninety years ago. How did you join a project with that much history behind it?

K: Ah, now I can tell you the story of this book. It's quite interesting. In the early twentieth century, roughly a hundred years ago, American art history books recorded only American and European art. Nobody studied global art history. E. H. Gombrich's The Story of Art was one of those books.

The first person to propose the idea of a global art history was a woman named Helen Gardner, who taught at an art institution in Chicago, a very famous one. But because she was a woman they never gave her a professorship. The world then was entirely run by men, and art history was no exception. She wrote the first global art history and it was an enormous success. That was 1926, and the last chapter was on Picasso and Claude Monet. She lived about twenty more years and wrote the second and third editions. After she died the publisher held the copyright and hired many scholars to update it. I took over at the tenth edition; they asked me in 1990, and the tenth edition came out in 1995.

Here's the interesting part: I didn't offer to do it, they came to me. One day the publisher got in touch and said he would be in Boston within two weeks — could we have lunch? I assumed he wanted to sell me his books over lunch, so I said no thanks, but you can come to my office. And he did come. We made small talk for a while, and then he said, "The real reason I'm here is to ask whether you'd like to be a co-author of Gardner's Art Through the Ages." I answered honestly: "I don't know. I've never thought about writing a textbook." Then I asked him, "How soon do you need an answer?" He said, "One month." I said yes on the twenty-ninth day. It became my main job after that.

Q: Why keep revising rather than write a textbook of your own?

K: I had never thought about writing an art history textbook. For one thing, a book like that could take eight to ten years. For another, I didn't know where to find a publisher, or whether anyone would buy it. But revising a book that already exists gives you a large readership straight away, without the struggle, and that appealed to me. Even though I teach many students — hundreds, thousands of them in Boston — there are so many students in the world I will never teach. Without this book I would never have the chance to teach students like you. So I do it in a missionary spirit, hoping people everywhere will fall in love with art and art history through it.

From the thirteenth edition on, the book has been entirely mine. The sixteenth is about to appear. The reason I've been coming to China so often lately is that the book is being translated into Chinese. My wife is also a professor of art history, but our spring breaks don't line up, so we can't travel together. She's at home right now; the snow in Boston is this high, and she's angry that I left her to shovel it alone. Our research fields happen to be exactly the same. Normally a married couple can teach at the same university, but not if they work in the same field. So we're at different schools — she's at Yale. In English they call what we have a "commuter marriage": the two spouses work in different places and one of them fits around the other, going back and forth between two cities. I'm the one who commutes. Tradition says the wife revolves around the husband; we don't work that way. Wherever my wife is, that's where the children and the home are.

Q: How do you define a successful art history textbook? What makes a good one?

K: Ah, that's a good question. It's a little awkward for me to say my own book is the best. But I can tell you one thing: I have never forgotten how hard that material was for me to understand when I was an introductory art history student. So for every sentence I write and every decision I make, I think about what I needed to know back then. Many art history books are written for the author's colleagues, for people who already know the field well. That doesn't work for an introductory textbook. That's my method, and it seems to have worked.

There's another element that has nothing to do with me: you need a publisher willing to back you and spend freely on printing. Color reproduction demands very high standards, and the binding and design need thought too. I've been lucky with my publisher.

Q: What do you make of books like What Are You Looking At? 150 Years of Modern Art, which tell art history as a story?

K: I imagine they're fun to read, but they may not have all the information you need for an exam. Some art books are written for the general public, others for the college classroom. Those are two different markets, and a book that succeeds in one will never succeed in the other. Mine is the second kind — made for the classroom, with detailed information on the works, a glossary of terms and so on. It may not suit the general reader, and art books for general readers don't suit art history majors either.

Q: Chinese art lovers often ask themselves: "Do I really understand this painting?" What does "understanding art" mean to you?

K: I'm about to start another project, which is interesting, and should interest the two of you as well. The book of mine that has been translated into Chinese was written for Americans, but what Chinese readers really need is a history of Western art written for them. Two examples. For an American reader the Declaration of Independence needs no explanation; for some Chinese readers it may be unfamiliar. The Cultural Revolution is something every Chinese person knows, but I'd probably have to explain to American readers what it was. So Hunan Fine Arts Publishing House has asked me to write a new book for Chinese readers instead of translating a book written for Americans.

When I wrote before, I asked myself what American students need to know. Now the challenge is bigger: what do Chinese students need to know? I'll start writing in the second half of this year, and I hope it can come out in 2019 or 2020.

The trouble with me is that I always say yes, which is why I'm so busy. I sleep very little these days. But I like doing this. Nobody becomes a professor to make money. We do it out of love for teaching, for traveling and learning about art in other places. Writing art history books lets me teach on a scale I never had before. That's why I said yes to this one, even though I'm still not a rich man.

Q: In your lecture at the Central Academy of Fine Arts you said the ancient Romans knew certain elements in frescoes and reliefs intimately, and that changes in those elements tracked shifts in the social order of power. What does that tell us about the relationship between today's image culture and social reality?

K: That's a very good question. We live in a world where everyone takes in information by watching rather than reading. People get it from video, from television, from the internet. As I said in the lecture, you have to understand visual language. Take politics today: politicians use a great many images to sell their positions. In the United States, if the president goes on television with a new policy about families, they set up the cameras in the White House, he sits in his chair and his family sits beside him. If instead he has to tell the country that the United States is going to war with North Korea, the people beside him will not be his family but American soldiers. We are doing a kind of reading with our eyes.

If you study art history, you learn to read images. Whether you study Roman art, Renaissance art or modern art, you become a better citizen of the modern world. That's why I think art history matters. Unfortunately, few people study it now. Science, computers, engineering — that's what most students want. But I think everyone should study art history, because it teaches exactly what you're asking about: how to decode the images of contemporary life.

Don't forget that artists are the people who make images, and for most of history they made them for someone else. Your picture of an artist today may be a person in a T-shirt and jeans who gets up in the morning, buys a coffee at Starbucks and asks, "What shall I make today?" But through most of art history artists worked for others: Egyptian kings, Roman popes, princes, royalty of every kind. In today's political art — propaganda images — artists work for governments. That's a very different thing. Study art history and you'll understand contemporary life better.

Q: Fashion houses now look to art history for ideas and put its elements into their products. Louis Vuitton put out a collection of famous-painting bags a couple of years ago, printing da Vinci and Monet onto handbags. Is that promoting art, or cheapening it?

K: An interesting question. It depends on how they use the art. Marcel Duchamp has a famous work, L.H.O.O.Q., in which he drew a mustache on the Mona Lisa. I think he was cheapening art. But printing artworks on bags and clothes, no, I don't think that cheapens art. I think it's fine. It spreads a love of art. I'm happy to buy a beautiful tie myself. I don't own a Mona Lisa tie, as it happens, but I don't think such a tie is vulgar.

In fact many companies have made a great deal of money out of art, and if they put that money back into art and support its development, I think that's fine. Take Italy. The Italian government has serious money problems now, some of its ancient buildings are close to collapse, and private companies are paying for the repairs. If you go to Rome there's the Trevi Fountain, the famous wishing fountain, recently restored by the brand FENDI. FENDI put its name on it, but it did a good thing.

Q: Museums and galleries are getting a lot of investment today, and people are more and more interested in them. But art history books are still expensive. Is art history still a subject for a small elite?

K: Hmm. No, I don't think so. You could say art history belongs to the elite because they have the leisure to go to museums. But you can study art history at every school in the United States, the famous ones and the ones the children of working families attend. In the United States you can never study art history alone; that's what British universities do. Every student here has to take a range of subjects. Even if you plan to major in art history, in your first year you still take English literature, chemistry, biology, a foreign language, economics. We call it a liberal arts education. In the same way, students who aren't majoring in art history still have to take humanities courses: philosophy, classics, religion, art history, history. Only a small number major in art history, but medical students, law students and computer science students all run into it.

Yes, art history textbooks are expensive, but not as expensive as tuition. American university tuition is enormous — a year of it costs more than many people earn in a year, and with several children in a family it's harder still. Against that, the cost of a textbook is not what you worry about. We are also trying to bring that cost down: electronic editions, for instance, save about half. There will probably be more and more e-books. Personally I love printed books; my ideal book would be one of those medieval ones written out entirely by hand.

Still, the move from paper to screen is progress. Two weeks ago, at a North American art history conference in Los Angeles, I met a professor from Nigeria who wanted to use my textbook. The problem is that shipping books there is expensive and slow — by the time they arrive the semester is over. So I suggested the electronic edition. He asked me, "Have you ever been to Nigeria?" I said no. He said, "You don't understand our situation. The power and the internet are both extremely unstable, so we can't use e-books." That's a real problem, and I hope it gets solved one day. China is fortunate: most people live online and own devices, so you have access to a great deal of information. Of course you need a few tricks to reach some of the websites.

Q: You mentioned liberal arts education. Why does it matter?

K: Well, I'd say it matters very, very much. Students today hold some mistaken views. They think that if you want to run a company like Ford or IBM you need to study business or finance. But look up what the CEOs of the Fortune 500 majored in and you'll find that almost all of them studied history, political science, literature. Because those are the subjects that teach you how to think, and how to think creatively.

Take my son. He works on Wall Street, mostly in investment. But he majored in history in college and then went to Harvard Business School. He tells me nearly all his colleagues studied finance, yet whenever there's a presentation to a client they ask him to give it, because he knows how to choose the right words and how to speak in public. That's part of why so many successful business leaders come out of a liberal arts background. But it's hard to convince students of it. Today they rush toward science and business. Twenty years ago about twice as many Americans studied art history as do now, and the number studying economics now is maybe four times what it was. As for computer science, hardly anyone studied it back then.

Q: How would you persuade art history students to take computer science or science courses? Do you think those courses matter for them?

K: No. I think it's the other way around that's necessary — computer science majors should take humanities courses, to help them become better citizens. But I don't think... I use a computer too, just as you do, but I only know which key to press, nothing more complicated than that. None of us can get through modern life without knowing how to use a phone and a computer, but we don't need to know how to design one. In the United States art history is very popular in adult education. People graduate, work for years, find some free time and want to go back to school and learn something new. Nobody goes back to study chemistry or biology; art history turns out to be the most popular subject. They regret not having learned it earlier, they feel a gap, and they want to fill it. I don't feel a gap for never having studied economics in college. The humanities fill me up.

Q: You first came to China fifteen years ago. What has changed in Chinese art history education since then? What progress have we made, and what problems remain?

K: The biggest change is that when I first came, the professors here had all been students during the Cultural Revolution and had no way to encounter Western civilization or Western art. If they wanted to teach Western art, they had to teach themselves or go abroad. I'm not criticizing them, but it's a fact: back then even the teachers' foundation in art history was far too thin.

Fifteen years on, young people like you really are learning from professors who know the material, and what they teach carries more authority. Many young Chinese also have good English and can read books that were once out of reach. Academic exchange between China and the West keeps growing, and art history has come a long way. The widening of that exchange also has historical causes, of course — the establishment of diplomatic relations between China and the United States, Nixon. I believe in the power of international exchange; I believe it drives education forward.

In fact I think that if scholars ran every government we would have no wars at all. Scholars care about knowledge and are glad to share it, and that sharing has no political borders. I live in the United States, and no one is forever asking me whether I prefer the Chinese government or the American one. I think scholars have contributed a great deal to world peace.

Q: If we want to develop art history education further, what should we do?

K: Well, I think — and this applies to the United States too — the first thing is more money, so that students can go abroad to study. A typical Chinese undergraduate, even one studying Western art, has probably never studied in the United States or Europe. More funding to send them out would make a big difference.

Second, you need to build your libraries. Because of the Cultural Revolution, books on Western art were never brought in, so now is the time to buy them, and that also takes a lot of money. Last year I was a visiting professor at the Xi'an Academy of Fine Arts and gave a number of lectures, and some students asked me whether, once I was back in the United States, I could help them find electronic copies of certain materials — books they needed for research that aren't available in China. I think that's a problem.

Q: To get that money you first have to convince the people who make policy that studying Roman art is good for students. How would you convince them?

K: Ah, that would be hard. But let me say again that I believe everyone should study history, or they will simply repeat its mistakes. I don't think people have to know about the Roman Empire or any particular thing, but they should have a general sense of history — why wars happen, for instance. Turning your back on history does contemporary life no good. I don't think Chinese undergraduates have to know Roman art. But I find the relationship between Tang dynasty art and Roman art fascinating — that's part of Professor Zhu's research too, Zhu Qingsheng's, and I believe we'll find a connection between them in the end.

Q: As exchange between China and the West grows closer, works from many foreign institutions can now be seen here. What should people do to prepare before visiting a museum?

K: That's a good question. My answer is: nothing at all. It's the curator who should supply every piece of information visitors need. Hanging a famous painting on a wall is not enough. Every visitor should be able to see the details of what's in front of them. Ideally, as at many good institutions, the moment you walk in you find a rack of exhibition brochures. You can consult one as you go, learning while you look.

So my answer is: go to a museum with an open mind and an interest in art. That's enough. Helping you understand is the curator's job. You can't ask visitors to read up before they come. There are plenty of well-run art institutions in the world and plenty of badly run ones. That's not a difference between China and abroad. In the end it comes down to money: can you afford good curators? Is there funding for the curating?

Q: But many curators and the scholars working with them write exhibition texts in such academic language that ordinary people can barely follow them.

K: Yes, I understand. This takes us back to writing textbooks. You have to know how to write for a reader who knows nothing, not for your colleagues. That's a test of skill and experience. A curator has to decide what he is: a researcher, or a teacher of the public?

People mentioned in this story:

Fred S. Kleiner, professor of art history and archaeology at Boston University, and professor of Etruscan and Roman art. His books include A History of Roman Art and the tenth through fifteenth editions of Gardner's Art Through the Ages. He was editor-in-chief of the American Journal of Archaeology from 1985 to 1998, and served five terms as chair of Boston University's Department of Art History and Archaeology. (Source: Boston University website)

Cover image: Midnight in Paris / Douban, Picasso, La Lecture / Wikipedia