Teaching Art History with a Broad Stroke

You might not expect to find Napoleon, Baudelaire and Victor Hugo featured in an art history course.

But to Neil McWilliam, these figures have a lot more in common than just being French and famous; they also exerted an undeniable influence on the art of their age.

McWilliam, who joined the Duke faculty this fall as the first Walter H. Annenberg Professor of Art History, contends that only through studying a historical period -- its political struggles, literary trends, scientific discoveries and religious movements -- can we fully understand and appreciate the visual works produced in the period.

This fall, students in Art History 161.01 are benefiting from McWilliam's far-ranging perspective on French art between 1789 and 1848. Leading artists of that period include David, Ingres, Delacroix and Gericault, but as the students soon discovered, this is no artist-of-the-week survey course.

"It's much more interesting for them and for me to look at broader historical issues," he says. "For example, we've just spent a couple of weeks looking at Napoleonic patronage and military painting in the Empire, the impact of the French Revolution on the visual arts and styles of caricature during the period."

His course this fall alternates lectures and seminars, a format McWilliams has used throughout his teaching career. "I want students to actively participate," he says, "not simply sit and listen. To involve the students, exchange ideas and engage in dialogue is the best way for me to see them develop."

His new colleagues have also found McWilliam eager to share ideas. "We are already engaged in a terrific dialogue concerning the myriad nature of 'cultural politics' in France -- and in Europe generally," says associate professor Mark Antliff. "Neil's stellar scholarship on 18th and 19th century France dovetails wonderfully with the work several of us bring to later periods in European art and culture."

McWilliam's interdisciplinary approach to education goes back to his own student days at Oxford. A student of French intellectual history, he found himself drawn to art history late in his undergraduate career. "Seeing what was taking place in the field during the 1970s really inspired me," he says.

What was underway was nothing short of a radical transformation in the study of art.

"People began asking very different questions about visual material," says McWilliam. "It was the time when a social history of art began to develop. Starting in the late 1970s, the field became much more interdisciplinary, with a framework in literature, history and politics. Much of the impetus came from areas like Marxism and feminism. It was a period of great change and intense debate.

"The debate was about what art history should do with the body of objects it studied. Should the main focus be on cataloguing, identifying and dating works, or should it have broader ambitions? Clearly, I subscribed to the latter position, which took the historian beyond a fairly narrow museum- or archive-based study of individual artists."

McWilliam spent the first part of his academic career on the faculty at the University of East Anglia, Norwich, in eastern England. Later he taught and served as chair of the History of Art Department at the University of Warwick, in the Midlands near Coventry.

He also made his mark as an author and an editor. His books include Dreams of Happiness: Social Art and the French Left, 1830-1850 and Monumental Intolerance, which explores the life and work of sculptor and militant nationalist Jean Baffier. He currently is at work on a book-length study of nationalism and the visual arts in the French Third Republic.

In his capacity as editor, McWilliam addressed many critical changes in art history during the past two decades. He was a founding member of the editorial collective of the Oxford Art Journal and served as editor of Art History, the leading professional journal in the U.K.

Professor Patricia Leighten, who chairs the Art and Art History Department, says adding McWilliam to the faculty is one of several recent developments helping move Duke to the forefront of the field.

"We're thrilled that we were able to attract Neil to Duke," says Leighten. "His scholarship is innovative and profoundly interdisciplinary. His focus on art and politics in Europe, especially France in the late 18th and 19th centuries, complements the strengths in our department extremely well."