A Century of New Zealand Painting

Abstract

The functions of an art historian concern the inevitably inexact science of appreciation of works of art. It is inexact because the historian is required to use a mixture of aesthetics and intuition, subjective conceptions difficult to communicate. There are facts about painters, but can there be 'facts' about paintings? More than half the facts which require interpretation are concerned with Intangible values and unmeasurable effects. The interpretation of their historical significance is determined by these intangibles. There are perhaps two ways of tackling the problem. Either the historian fills the roll of a kind of back-stage organiser who is content to leave to other specialists the play's aesthetic interpretation, or else he produces and directs the play himself. I shall attempt to take the latter course, more especially in the last chapters where any conclusions drawn will be based purely on personal judgments. Such judgments can only be the result of comparative observation, which in turn is inevitably flavoured by the emotional environment and the strongly controversial trends in today's thinking; this is always the problem of the historian of the immediate past. However, in seeking to estimate the aesthetic values common to all serious art, I shall endeavour to make my observations disinterested and purge them from emotional prejudice.