Does Mona Lisa smile? Scholars have debated this question for years, analyzing everything from the artwork to the historical context of Renaissance Italy. As tourists crowd around the painting in the Louvre, they may not give it much thought, but in art history, the idea of a smirk is everything.
The 2004 movie “Mona Lisa Smile” takes its title from this famous phrase to set the stage for its feminist theme. In a fictionalized version of Wellesley College, the country’s leading women attend the school not to become the radical scholars we recognize today, but frivolous wives to men from Harvard and Yale. This norm is challenged when Katherine Ann Watts, a history professor from California, aims to shape the young conservative minds of New England’s brightest women.
To convey this message, the movie uses art history as its medium. When the first lecture on prehistoric works prompts the ladies into mere memorization, Professor Watts is shocked by their lack of free thinking. But should she be? Within the movie, the art history lecture is a metaphor for the women being told what to think and having to follow conservative societal rules. But turning away from the metaphorical towards the literal, is that not what art history is—memorization and regurgitation?
After taking some classes in art history I recognized a similarity between the lecture format in the film and actual classes. But why?
“I feel like a lot of the ways that classes are structured are trying to appease, like a canon,” Art History student Carissa Kolcun ’25 says. The “canon,” as Kolcun called it, is the required set of artworks that students must know to be successful within the field. Since art is everywhere, it is impossible to study every single work, so academics and professionals boil down art into the most important and impactful works that need to be studied to properly understand art. Works from Caravaggio, Rembrandt, Monet and many others have formed the basic structure of the canon, starting from prehistory and antiquity and ending with contemporary art.
Although it might seem like every discipline has a “canon,” art history operates a bit differently. Unlike other fields where a student learns the basic ideas of the subject or reads dated novels or works, most disciplines advance to applications, complex theories or critical thinking like English or philosophy. But art history as a discipline is rooted in the canon, and its goal is to memorize it. The canon goes beyond just the introductory courses, permeating across various levels to focus on periods in more depth, like on Impressionist artists or Baroque art.
The reason the canon can be detrimental, though, is because it needs to be taught a certain way: a lecture-heavy, memorization-based structure. The lecture method facilitates the basic understanding of the materials, terms, and rudimentary knowledge of art analysis to provide a foundation for understanding what “art” is and how to train students to look at art in the academic way. After a while though, this learning structure can be quite intellectually numbing. Instead of having discussions about the art work or analyzing it within groups, it is being fed to the student to absorb with no room to truly contemplate the merit of the work. To be successful in any aspect of the art world, a student must know the canon—it is a requirement in every part of academia, but also curatorial and museum practices as well. Art institutions and foundations reside in the canon and thereby needed a pedagogical tool like lectures and memorization to retain this information to recite it on demand.
Adjunct Assistant Professor of Art and Americanist Serena Qiu believes the canon is “on the one hand, what gives art history a legitimacy and on the other hand, I think what really feels limiting, more and more as folks want to hear more than one meta narrative or one grand narrative of how art came to be meaningful for human.” Looking at the way art history is studied and approached, it is easy to see the Western biases that come with the discipline—where art from Europe or America is put on a pedestal compared to art from non-Western countries, which are deemed primitive or unsophisticated. With the invention of art history beginning in the West, it makes sense that the view of art is based on the ideals of Western standards, but this is not entirely reflective of the students who focus on this field.
In the 21st century, where colonialism and imperialism are becoming more recognized as destructive to economic, political and social institutions, should not that mean that legacy disciplines like art history should also be decolonized? Professor Qiu observed, “art history is the top discipline that makes freshmen, what like the school might call like minority students, first generation and higher education students and like folks of like, not for class, wealth, feel excluded. That is more than any other discipline offered at a private institution.” A broader focus on world art, looking at the ways different cultures across the world interact with and use it, brings more humanity to the subject but also contorts the “canon” to look at how art history is not just one singular narrative. Instead, art history would involve multiple intersecting stories that define art in different ways and analyze it with different methods, destroying the Eurocentric perspectives that prompt memorization and regurgitation. By incorporating diverse art in the canon, it requires students to see art as a multifaceted subject that changes based on the function it was created for and the context in which it is in—showing how art transforms understanding.
Despite some of the drawbacks of the canon within art history, its merit prevails in different ways. Kolcun says “art history, I feel like, is a way of learning history where you can’t hide anything…but learning about how to look at art, I think, is a completely different question.” With the linear progression of art history, beginning with the genesis of human consciousness and its expression in art to the current era of art as a multimedia movement, art history functions more like a historiography, which studies the evolution of human civilization, rather than a discipline about art itself. Although scholars are trained in the way art reflects history, learning about the historical impact of mediums and brushwork, most of the emphasis, especially on the canon, traces how art has evolved and its socio-political functions over time. Although art is influenced by the context, it is also a personal act that was created by humans, but this aspect of humanity is not the central focus of art history. Though historical knowledge does benefit the field of art, in terms of understanding what it is and its role in society, it does not focus on the art itself. “We don’t necessarily have to absorb all the values that this canon reflects, but to understand that it has had tremendous, not only art historical, but political, imperial, colonialist consequences,” Professor Qiu says. History is a discipline that is rooted in this principle, where we look at the trajectory of time to see its impact, which is why art should be incorporated in this field. Instead of the focus on history being just guided by an objective lens, it is also supplemented by a subjective interpretation of events by real people of this era. Art is a primary source of how a society functions and can complement the structure of historiography much better.
So, if art history would no longer emphasize history, what would the field become? It would be a field of art. Art is a window into another individual’s psyche through a different language, so learning about art should center on this prime idea. Kolcun believes, “the undertone of all of that [art historical] skill is being able to assess why a human being made a decision to reach a certain emotional effect in a painting and to convey that emotion to a viewer.” Everything in art is intentional; that is what makes it art. The medium, the colors, the composition, the function—these traits reveal so much about the art and the person, whether it is a political message or an emotional confession, analyzing these components of art should be the main focus of the disciple. What does the work communicate? How does it communicate it? And most importantly, what do you feel?
Although the canon of art history has been able to produce this understanding for a student, the method of teaching it subjects these skills to a smaller degree, creating a delicate balance between knowing the facts and understanding this analysis. Professor Qiu asks, “Can art history still be art history when it’s being practiced in the streets, when it’s being practiced with activists, instead of people with PhDs?” Decentering art history from an academic field to one where every artist is involved opens the doors of the discipline to study and learn about it in different ways rather than just one linear perspective.
This is why more hands-on projects like curation, instead of the traditional paper, allow art history students to get closer to the functions and power of art in a spatial context. Professor Qiu has been tinkering with this idea in some of their classes, potentially offering a curatorial project: “It encourages us to think more critically about how objects coexist in a space together, why certain things are put in proximity, why some things are kept apart, and the different framing devices that often try to seem invisible and to draw that into our attention.” So although not every student in art history might end up in curation, the skills that are built, and the student’s relationship to art, grow from an outside viewer watching a rotation of analysis and pictures on a projector, to an intimate organization of thought and emotion that comes with dealing with art on a one-to-one scale. Kolcun thinks “the objects [should] guide…discussion and insert the history when necessary. You learn a lot more about the objects and like how they were made and who made them.”
Amending a discipline as vast and as strong as art history is one that can take time. Scholars, with greater education and time, likely have more to say about this topic than prospective majors like me. But across the few courses I have taken, the patterns I have seen have made me question the merit of the discipline. Coming from a South Asian background, it frustrated me to see my culture’s history in art be condensed to three paintings or have one of the smaller exhibitions at a museum like The Met. When it comes to approaching the function of the “canon” expanding its range to include works from more cultures and people, looking at art from different values and ideas while also incorporating assignments that require an interactive method can change the way art history is seen and understood—making a holistic approach to a secular field and emphasizing what art is.
With “Mona Lisa Smile” being made in 2004, but set in the early 1960s, it is interesting that not much has changed in terms of the teaching of art history. When asked if art history was the correct metaphor to discuss the themes in “Mona Lisa Smile,” Kolcun agreed, while Professor Qiu questioned if other disciplines like English or anthropology could have been better. Although opinions on this matter might differ, there is a need to push for a new approach to teaching across the board, beginning with disciplines that need to focus more on the students that are studying them rather than upholding a legacy of what their past purpose was.