When art history became history

The government's narrow-minded expulsion of art history from the school curriculum is at odds with its own arts policy, says Alice Tappenden.

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Two decades ago as a Year 12 student in Christchurch, I made the best decision of my school years. A compulsive overachiever, I had been placed in the statistics class a year early and asked if I could sit the scholarship exam. When the answer was “not until Year 13” I figured there was no point in taking the class twice. After brief consideration I switched to the only other available subject in the same time slot: art history. It ended up being a move that would shape my future studies and career.

On my first day I sat in a dim classroom as Blair Johnson - a man many will remember as the best teacher they've ever had - set up an old-school slide projector. The carousel clunked and images of a new world appeared before us. Jacques-Louis David's Oath of the Horatii (1784-85) is the first painting I remember studying in depth.