Beeldleer scope note

Historicism in art is the practice of looking to the past for inspiration, recreating historical styles, and depicting historical subjects, often with idealized or symbolic intent to convey social messages, evoke particular eras, or provide a sense of meaning through familiar styles. While present in various forms throughout history, it became a dominant artistic trend in the 19th century, especially in architecture and history painting, before being largely rejected by Modernism and later revived in a different form with Postmodernism. Afro-American painters such as Kerry James Marshall and Kehinde Wiley representations of black figures in examples of the art-historical canon to question of the exclusion of such figures can be read as a critical form of historicism.