A timeline of art history for teaching art students

Each student gets their owndigital timeline.The idea is that students link their own work to artists they like often artists on social media,manga and anime, video, etc.. Contemporary ar

A Timeline of Art History

James ElkinsRevised May 2022

For students: the first 6 pages describe how to make your timeline For more ideas, see page 10.For instructors: this is a description of an exercise I’ve been trying out at the School of the ArtInstitute, Chicago It’s for first-year art students Each student gets their owndigital timeline.The idea is that students link their own work to artists they like (often artists on social media,manga and anime, video, etc.) and also to the artworks introduced in the first-year surveyclasses on world art history

Introduction

Timelines are ubiquitous in art history They’re in every textbook and all over the internet With

a few exceptions, they are linear (time runs at constant speed along a horizontal line), theybranch and dive as time goes on, and they cover only canonical art history and not

contemporary artmaking For all those reasons timelines are problematic Contemporary artistsdon’t often think of art history as something that runs at a constant speed year by year (orcentury by century), and don’t always think of their work as being connected to the deeperpast

The idea of having your own timeline is to discover how your art and your taste in artists areconnected to the deeper history of art How does the past lead up to your own work or yourown interests? What part of art are you connected with?

In normal timelines, art movements branch and divide as time goes on:

In your timeline, the branching is reversed, because everything leads to your work:

Think of the timeline as your own personal picture of art: your own art, all the art you look at orthat has influenced you, and whatever art of the past you like.

Note for students at the School of the Art Institute:

Notice theBox of Art Historyis different: it’s everything in the class (not Instagram etc.)that you like, and everything you dislike, or feel disconnected from, or don’t want to look

at The Box is a way of curating the semester’s lectures so they fit with your own

practice The timeline is whatever you like from the Box (from the lectures and

presentations), and everything else that’s in your visual universe, and leading up to your

own art that includes Instagram, music, movies, anime, manga, fiction, TikTok, Flickr,Youtube, etc etc

How to construct your timeline

Timelines can be done by hand, or on several different software platforms The one shown inthese pages is Miro, a free app that allows for collaborative work and accommodates manytimelines on a single large “board.”

1 Begin with a basic timescale: single line going from prehistory to the present, marked off

in years In this guide, that’s called a timescale to distinguish it from your timeline, which

is the timescale plus all the artworks

2 Put in some timebars to show major movements of art that are in the class Below are

some examples of timebars

3 First put a couple of your own artworks at the right Your artworks go just to the right ofthe end of the chronology It is best to choose just two or three, and make them asdifferent as possible.

4 Add artists and works that influence you The main thing here is to be honest and

complete: if you look only at Instagram artists, put them in the timeline If you look

mainly at videos, add them The idea is to end up with a picture of your visual worldwithout any reference to what you think might be expected in this course Label theartists and artworks Miro offers various text tools; you can work on giving your timeline

or modern art movements

For students at SAIC

Use the cards in yourBox of Art History Place images of those objects of cultures on thetimeline, and add others that aren’t covered

8 The last step is moving the traditional periods (#2) As the semester goes on, when thereare periods, movements, or cultures you don’t like or can’t relate to, you can eithererase them from your timeline, or move them down (keep the chronology: move themdown or up, not sideways) By the end of the semester, you should no longer have a set

of standard movements like the one you started with Your entire timeline should beyour own

Requirements for the timeline

A complete timeline has at least three objects and two arrows connecting them

(1) a work of yours, connected to

(2) a work by a contemporary artist, filmmaker, comic, etc., connected to

(3) a work or movement that is further back in time

On this timeline, the student’s art is on the right (1) Note the thin black timescale at thebottom This student had a lot of favorite Instagram artists, too many to fit in above the years2010-2020, so she grouped them all inside a red outline (2) She connected her own work tothem with thick black lines, and then drew the lines back in time to connect to the historicalartists Van Gogh, Matisse, Emil Nolde, Arnold Schönberg, and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (3) Here isthe same sequence in simple form:

A reasonable requirement for a finished timeline is three sets of connections like this one,beginning from three different works of your own.

For students: that’s the end of the basic prompt From page 10 onward, there are more detailedexamples of common problems and solutions in making and assessing timelines

Note for instructors

The timebars students get can be absolutely anything: whatever’s covered in the class, inwhatever arrangement you like In a class on Indigenous American culture, for example,the timebars could have names of nations and other groups, without definite links totime periods In other cases, it might be good to give students a non-linear timescale, toreflect a non-Western understandings of time In Indigenous cultures the timescale can

be stretched or interrupted to reflect the mythology and historical understanding of theculture A class on Aztec culture, for example, could have Aztec cosmology, period ofTenochtitlán, the Mixpantli period, and contemporary work There is ashort video onYoutube, one of a series of 70 videos used at the School of the Art Institute, with someideas for constructing non-linear timescales

The classes I’m illustrating here are introductory world art history classes—one forprehistory to modernism, and the other for modernism to the present, so they make use

of a number of common categories (Colonial art, Baroque, Installation art…) The

timebars of cultures, styles, dynasties, kingdoms, periods, and movements that comewith each student’s timeline are color-coded to help give a sense of general periods.Here is what each student is given, zoomed all the way out

This is a detail from the premodern period, color-coded by parts of the world:

And this is a detail of modern periods, color-coded by 19th c (grey), modern (red), andpostmodern (blue):

Students can begin by moving any of these they like straight up (preserving their place inrelation to the basic timescale of years) to their workspace above the pre-populatedperiods At the end of the semester they’re encouraged to erase whatever periods andcultures they do not feel any connection with As a teacher, if you work with Miro, you

can copy these preformatted timelines from ourMiro boardand modify them in any wayyou’d like.Email meif you have questions about Miro.

Examples of working with timelines

In order to connect your favorite artists to movements and artists in art history, you may needhelp from your instructor The following page has an example

This student connects their work (top right) to Valerie Hegarty (b 1967), and they connectHegarty to surrealism That’s a good example of the (1) - (2) - (3) sequence, except that thestudent doesn’t yet know which surrealists influenced Hegarty

They also see affinities with Masaaki Sasamoto (b 1966), who is influenced by Art Nouveau andthe Vienna Secession that’s a second (1) - (2) - (3) sequence

At the top the student traces influences from films, especially Avatar, and they think of Avatar

as influenced by Hayao Miyazaki (b 1941), the co-founder of the animation Studio Ghibli, and

especially his Princess Mononoke

Here the student’s work, on the far right, is linked to two figurative traditions On the bottom is

a timebar for New Figuration, which includes Lucien Freud and Young British Artists like Jenny

Saville That’s a connection that would often be recognized by studio instructors and art

historians The student also felt connected to some artists who aren’t as well known in theartworld: Malcolm Liepke, Roberto Ferri, and Dominique Medici These are conservative artistswho work in an academic realist mode, following Old Masters The grey timebar is “AcademicArt”; it begins with the Florentine Accademia in the 16th century (which is far outside thisframe to the left) and continues up through the European academies and into the many

contemporary academies, conservative art schools, and other institutions that practice

academic traditions The reason for the timebar “Academic Art” is to show that artists likeMedici, Ferri, and Liepke are not alone in history; they belong to a long continuous tradition ofacademic realism

Contemporary academic artists like Dominique Medici look back specifically to Caravaggio andhis followers The student has added a timebar for the Baroque, and put to French followers ofCaravaggio on it

The double blue lines indicate that part of this timeline is folded so it can be shown in thisframe: actually the Baroque would be well off this page to the left Picture the long black lines

of influence that lead from the Baroque, or from the 16th century Florentine Accademia, up toMedici and other contemporary artists: this student’s timeline is remarkable because it skips somany movements and styles between the 18th century and the present

Sometimes general connections to the past are clear, but it’s hard to connect the dots Here thestudent, Rea Silvia Emmanouil, traced a work of hers to three pieces by the contemporaryParis-based artist Jung Yeon Min Min is a surrealist, so Rea added the red “Surrealism” timebar.However the only surrealist Emmanouil knows is Dali, and she connects him to another one ofher pieces (outside the frame in this detail) Min has said her work is “a kind of modern

surrealism,” and it has been connected to Dali, but the closer parallels are Tanguy, Ernst, andothers Here Ernst is linked to Min with a dotted line, indicating that Min hasn’t acknowledgedthe parallel, and Emmanouil wasn’t thinking of it when she made her piece

This is an example of a practice informed by three different and unusual sources The student’s

work is on the right, just after the end of the timescale Her influences are J.R.R Tolkien’s

drawings for his books (top center), Edward Gorey’s illustrations, and the work of Tim Ely, acontemporary artist and bookbinder Tolkien’s practice came from earlier book illustration, artnouveau, and symbolism, so the artist added Redon and the standard (red) symbolism timebar.Gorey’s art comes from earlier illustration, expressionism, and surrealism, so he is linked toBreton Ely is a different case: his practice derives in part from surrealism, but also from themuch older European tradition of schemata, mystical and cosmological diagrams, and atlases.The curving blue lines indicate those influences actually belong much further back in time Thisstudent’s visual imagination is primarily focused on three examples of mid-20th century and

contemporary illustration, each of which shares a common points of origin in surrealism, dada,and symbolism.

Knowing these connections is helpful because it shows how Ely and Gorey can be thought of asrelated, because they both go back in part to surrealism The timeline also shows how thestudent’s work is linked to early 20th century art in particular

2 “Untraceable” influences

In this case the student has made a ceramic piece (right), and she has added five influences.These seem to be mostly idiosyncratic choices, without much connection to art history A typicalart history class will not include any of these references I’ll describe the process of analyzingthis timeline in five steps

Step 1

In this case, the student explained that RuneScape and Silent Hill are interesting because she is

“inspired by poorly rendered 3D models, especially in old video games.” That interest could betraced to deskilling in postwar academies In the next graphic, below, I have added Julian

Schnabel as a token of neoexpressionist and postwar anti-academic art Before him is the

original anti-academic art, German and Austrian expressionism In this way RuneScape is linked

to a canonical period in modernism

Step 2.

The student says she likes yyyyyyy.info because it shows “how information is distorted or lost in

an internet landscape.” The same ideas and similar graphical overload can be found in thehistory of net.art, from artists like Jodi to contemporary glitch art

Step 3

The contemporary ceramist Francesca DiMattio can be traced to other contemporary artists likeArlene Shechet, and before them to postmodern ceramics from Voulkos onward (As one ofDiMattio’s reviewers noted, there’s even an echo of Schnabel’s use of ceramics.)

Step 4.

The vocaloid popstar Hatsune Miku can be traced to earlier anime such as Sailor Moon (1992) One of Sailor Moon’s sources is Majokko Megu-chan, and there are a half-dozen other

precedents in midcentury anime.1

1In correspondence with Mina Ando at Tokyo Geidai, I’ve learned that Majokko Megu-chan is probably not the initial source for Sailor Moon Mina suggests the following genealogy: maho

shohjo (“magical girls”) in Japan began in the 1960s began with the American series Bewitched,

which inspired Mahotsukai Sally (Sally, The Witch) and Himitsu no Akkochan (The Secret of

Akkochan) Those partly inspired Majokko Megu-chan in the 1970s, and, in the 1980s, Maho no Tenshi Creamy Mami, which has female pop stars, songs, and fashions from that decade Mina

also told me about the history after Sailor Moon, which this particular student might be

Step 5.

These are each just the beginning of deeper time lines Anime has been traced in several ways,

back to emakimono, ukiyo-e, and bunraku shadow puppets, among others Here what matters is

just what the student might be able to use Postmodern ceramics has its own prehistory, which

includes cubist sculpture, exemplified here by Picasso’s Glass of Absinthe Net.art was a legacy

of dada, and in particular dada collage In this way all the student’s interests can be linked toconventional histories of art

Note that this timeline, like several others here, isn’t arranged chronologically If a

non-chronological arrangement corresponds to the artist’s imagination, then it’s better than alinear timeline where time runs left to right according to a timescale

Here is a very inventive and successful timeline The timescale has been compressed, because

the student has influences that go all the way back to the Olmecs She pasted in two of her ownworks at the right The top one is a clay head with mushrooms She was inspired by two

contemporary artists, Jess Riva Cooper (a head with flowers sprouting from it) and YuanxingLiang (a head with clouds and trees) These two artists are in turn connected to women

surrealists such as Remedios Varo and the Post-Surrealist American painter Helen Lundeberg(top) Of these four, only Varo is a common presence in art history The clay head was alsoinspired by the look of Olmec heads

The student’s second artwork, a set of tarot cards, has a more complex timeline She likes somesymbolist artists, including the Swiss painter Carlos Schwabe and Alphonse Mucha, and she

recognizes the influence of Ingres on symbolism (note the dotted line from the Madonna at the