Academics, curators and artists have reacted angrily to the announcement last month that the last examination board in England to offer A-level art history will drop the subject from 2018. The move by London-based AQA means that art history, which is taught mainly in private schools, will vanish from the curriculum. The director of the National Gallery in London, Gabriele Finaldi, who began studying for an A-level in art history aged 16, expressed his disappointment and concern in a letter to the Guardian newspaper.
More than 200 academics and art professionals have written an open letter to the chief executive of AQA, expressing their “grave concerns” about the education charity’s decision. The signatories include Ben Burbridge, a senior lecturer in art history at the University of Sussex, Susanna Brown, a curator of photographs in the word and image department at London’s Victoria and Albert Museum, professor David Ekserdjian of the University of Leicester and Sam Thorne, the director of Nottingham Contemporary.
Louise Bourdua, the head of the history of art department at Warwick University, says that she is appalled by AQA’s decision, “particularly given the tremendous amount of work that has been carried out in recent years by my colleagues in the Association of Art Historians and at a time when art is perhaps more than ever on everyone’s radar in Britain”. Universities do not expect applicants to have completed an A-level in art history to be admitted to study the subject, Bourdua stresses. “But what kind of signal does the axing of a historical discipline send to our young people?”
Not a soft subject Deborah Swallow, the director of the Courtauld Institute of Art in London, says: “The perception of art history as a ‘soft subject’ and the demise of its existence as an A-level seriously misunderstands a subject that is enormously important to the economy, culture and well-being of this country… art history as a subject needs to be much better known and not denigrated.”
In a statement, AQA says that the “existing specification is challenging to mark and award because of the specialist nature of the topics, the range of options, difficulties in recruiting sufficient experienced examiners, and limited entries”. Only 839 students took the A-level exam this summer.
Meanwhile, a campaign to persuade the UK government to include art and other creative subjects in the English Baccalaureate (EBacc) is ongoing. Critics argue that to exclude art, music and drama from the “core subjects” studied by 14- to 16-year-olds will have long-term negative consequences for the arts and creative industries in England.