Chapter 4: Social and Historical Contexts

Learning Outcomes

This chapter in Thinking About Art allows you to:

define the concepts of social and historical contexts in relation to painting, sculpture and architecture and show how these help to determine our interpretation
describe the formal characteristics that comprise a response to particular social and/or historical contexts
identify a broad range of influences that affect a work of art or architecture and provide a range of examples.

This chapter introduces you to the theme of social and historical contexts and considers how works of art or architecture reflect the times in which they were made, or were influenced by a particular social or historical event, events or circumstances.

Historical context means the political, cultural, economic and social circumstances in which a work of art or architecture was created. Relevant historical conditions or events may include wars, scientific or industrial developments (such as the Industrial Revolution), political revolutions, and economic booms and busts.

Typically, social and historical contexts are closely inter-related and provide a broad perspective on ‘what is going on’ in society at a particular time in its history. Social context means the social conditions and popularly accepted beliefs in a society at a particular time, such as attitudes relating to gender or class.

Chapter 3examines the formal features of works of art and architecture regardless of the subject matter and irrespective of the work’s social and historical contexts. In contrast, this chapter prioritises the broader contexts in which the art was produced as the basis for its formal aesthetic or style, and considers the multitude of variables that may permeate a work’s production and contribute to the meaning we assign to it.

Exploring social and historical contexts further

Read Grant Pooke and Graham Whitham,Understand Art History (Hodder, 2010, pp.46–80). Titled ‘Looking Beyond the Picture Frame’, this section explains different contextual approaches to understanding art and how these can influence our interpretations.

Exploring seventeenth-century Baroque Rome and the Catholic Counter-Reformation further

Saints played an important role in the Catholic Counter-Reformation. To discover more about the life and significance of St. Ignatius Loyola, read extracts from his ‘Spiritual Exercises’.
To discover more about the canon and decrees of the Council of Trent, visit an online translationfrom 1948.

Read Anne Gerritsen, Kevin Gould and Peter Marshall’s ‘The Long Reformation: Catholic’ in Beat Kümin’sThe European World 1500–1800: An Introduction to Early Modern History (Routledge, 2009, pp.117–119).

Exploring transformation and modernity in nineteenth-century France further

For a challenge, compare Edouard Manet’s painting A Bar at the Folies Bergère, 1882, with Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks, painted 60 years later. Both act as visual evidence for their respective contexts. The sub-text of loneliness is another similarity you might observe.
If you have the opportunity, visit a theatre production of Les Misérables. It is set during the French June Rebellion of 1832 and offers an exciting and historical perspective on the barricades and a sensory experience of a conflict-torn century in France. The repression of rebellion sought by Napoleon III’s Paris street-planning is theatrically played out for the audience, albeit 20 years before ‘Haussmannisation’.

Watch Baz Luhrmann’s film Moulin Rouge, 2001, for a colourful insight into the kinds of entertainment spaces frequented by dandies and courtesans in nineteenth-century France.

Exploring nineteenth-century England and Victorian morality further

Compare the strong anti-aristocratic bias of Hunt’s The Awakening Conscience, 1853, with Hogarth’s A Rake’s Progress,1732–1733, and A Harlot’s Progress, 1731–1732.
Consider Hunt’s painting The Awakening Conscience in relation to poems such as Thomas Hardy’s ‘<The Ruined Maid published in 1901. The theme of the fallen woman emerges as a literary leitmotif.

To read the Married Woman’s Property Act, 1882, visit the government’s Legislation website.

Read A Brief Summary in Plain Language of the Most Important Laws Concerning Women; Together with a Few Observations Thereon, 1856, by Barbara Leigh Smith. Leigh Smith was one of the foremost founders of the women’s rights movement in Britain. This feminist document set down the restrictions endured by women in Victorian England.

Exploring the mid-twentieth-century United States and the Depression era further

Read John Steinbeck’s novels Of Mice and Men, 1937, and The Grapes of Wrath, 1939; both relate to the types of desperate migrant workers captured by the Farm Security Administration photographer Dorothea Lange.

Watch documentary filmmaker Pare Lorentz’s famous The Plow that Broke the Plains, which was made in the 1930s for the Farm Security Administration.
Lars von Trier’s Dogville, 2003, starring Nicole Kidman, presents film as though it were a theatre production. Mise-en-scène carries the story in place of illusionary location, and even the dividing walls between the characters’ housing is absent in the enormous stage-like environment. Set in an isolated community in the Rocky Mountains during the Depression era, Dogville offers a further perspective on man’s inhumanity to man.

Consider the relationship between some of Edward Hopper’s paintings, such as Nighthawks, to film noir. Film noir is a cinematic term used to describe black and white 1940s and 1950s Hollywood movies. Much of the crime fiction it used as inspiration and source material emerged in the United States during the Depression era.

Exploring the boom years in the twentieth-century United States further

Watch Factory Girl, 2006, starring Sienna Miller, which describes itself as a biographical film based on the life of Edie Sedgwick, socialite and artistic muse of Andy Warhol. The film provides a sustained insight into life at Warhol’s Factory.

Examine The Sun newspaper’s front-page headline for 6 May 2010. It was featured during the lead-up to the British general election in 2010. Its stencilling technique, which distinguished Warhol’s famous faces, was re-sold to the audience by the popular media that had helped to create the style in the first place. How has transnational media owner Rupert Murdoch used the Warholian syntax to appeal to the masses to support the Conservative political party using the slogan ‘In Cameron We Trust’?

For a comprehensive and highly readable survey of American art read Erica Doss, Twentieth-Century American Art (Oxford University Press, 2002).

Exploring class fragmentation and urban documentary further

Read Grant Pooke and Graham Whitham, Understand Art History (Hodder, 2010, pp.86–95) for details on the origin, meaning and contexts of Postmodernism.
The advent of the railways had an enormous impact on both rural and city life for Britain’s inhabitants. The great Victorian poet and novelist Thomas Hardy examined the way modernity permeated rural lives and broke community spirit.
Read J. M. Golby, Culture & Society in Britain 1850–1890 (Oxford University Press, 1986) for a fuller description of Hardy’s feelings about the way rural workers had lost a sense of communication with the soil they had ploughed for generations. He concedes that ‘new varieties of happiness evolve themselves like new varieties of plants, and new charms may have arisen among the classes who have been driven to adopt the remedy of locomotion for the evils of oppression and poverty – charms which compensate in some measure for the lost sense of home’ (p. 302).
For an even more focused analysis of the impact of the railways on Victorian society, consult I. Carter, Railways and Culture in Britain: The Epitome of Modernity (Manchester University Press, 2001).

For information on the impact of the railway on Victorian society consult Victorian Web.

Exam Practice Based on Chapter 4

1Analyse how two works of art and/or architecture reflect the times in which they were made.

2Discuss how two paintings, by the same or different artists, have responded to a specific historical event or events of their time.

3Assess how far historical and social events have influenced the work of particular artists and/or architects. Refer to two works by different artists and/or architects in your answer.