A timeline of art history for teaching art students

A Timeline of Art History James Elkins Revised May 2022 For students: the first 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 Art Institute, Chicago It’s for first-year art students Each student gets their own digital 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 survey classes 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), they branch 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 artists don’t often think of art history as something that runs at a constant speed year by year (or century by century), and don’t always think of their work as being connected to the deeper past The idea of having your own timeline is to discover how your art and your taste in artists are connected to the deeper history of art How does the past lead up to your own work or your own 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 or that has influenced you, and whatever art of the past you like Note for students at the School of the Art Institute: Notice the Box of Art History is 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 in these pages is Miro, a free app that allows for collaborative work and accommodates many timelines on a single large “board.” 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 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 of the end of the chronology It is best to choose just two or three, and make them as different as possible 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 world without any reference to what you think might be expected in this course Label the artists and artworks Miro offers various text tools; you can work on giving your timeline an individual look Then you can work on connecting the work that influences you (#4) to your own work (#3) Miro also offers various styles of connecting lines With your instructor’s or TA’s help, and with input from the class, you can then connect both your work and the work that influences you to some of older artworks and standard periods in modern and contemporary art history that you learn about in the class As the semester goes on, note which objects and cultures from earlier art interest you When you can, draw connecting lines from them to your work, work that influences you, or modern art movements For students at SAIC Use the cards in your Box of Art History Place images of those objects of cultures on the timeline, and add others that aren’t covered The last step is moving the traditional periods (#2) As the semester goes on, when there are periods, movements, or cultures you don’t like or can’t relate to, you can either erase them from your timeline, or move them down (keep the chronology: move them down 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 be your 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 the bottom This student had a lot of favorite Instagram artists, too many to fit in above the years 2010-2020, so she grouped them all inside a red outline (2) She connected her own work to them with thick black lines, and then drew the lines back in time to connect to the historical artists Van Gogh, Matisse, Emil Nolde, Arnold Schönberg, and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (3) Here is the 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 detailed examples 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, in whatever 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 to time periods In other cases, it might be good to give students a non-linear timescale, to reflect a non-Western understandings of time In Indigenous cultures the timescale can be stretched or interrupted to reflect the mythology and historical understanding of the culture A class on Aztec culture, for example, could have Aztec cosmology, period of Tenochtitlán, the Mixpantli period, and contemporary work There is a short video on Youtube, one of a series of 70 videos used at the School of the Art Institute, with some ideas for constructing non-linear timescales The classes I’m illustrating here are introductory world art history classes—one for prehistory 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 come with 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), and postmodern (blue): Students can begin by moving any of these they like straight up (preserving their place in relation to the basic timescale of years) to their workspace above the pre-populated periods At the end of the semester they’re encouraged to erase whatever periods and cultures they not feel any connection with As a teacher, if you work with Miro, you can copy these preformatted timelines from our Miro board and modify them in any way you’d like Email me if you have questions about Miro Examples of working with timelines Connecting things up The most common challenge on these timelines is to connect the art that you like to art that is part of the common histories of modernism and postmodernism Usually you’ll pick contemporary artists, often less well known or unconnected to the international art world or to art criticism or art history (The ones in the example above are all Instagram artists with small followings.) In order to connect your favorite artists to movements and artists in art history, you may need help from your instructor The following page has an example This student connects their work (top right) to Valerie Hegarty (b 1967), and they connect Hegarty to surrealism That’s a good example of the (1) - (2) - (3) sequence, except that the student doesn’t yet know which surrealists influenced Hegarty They also see affinities with Masaaki Sasamoto (b 1966), who is influenced by Art Nouveau and the Vienna Secession that’s a second (1) - (2) - (3) sequence 10 Step 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 In 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 interested to learn, including Mahoshojo Lirical Nanoha (Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha) 17 Step 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 to conventional 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 a linear timeline where time runs left to right according to a timescale 18 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 own works 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 Yuanxing Liang (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 also inspired by the look of Olmec heads The student’s second artwork, a set of tarot cards, has a more complex timeline She likes some symbolist 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 19 bottom) Symbolism and art nouveau are common points of reference for contemporary figural artists: what’s less common is the line that leads from Mucha to the English artist Pamela Coleman Smith (c 1951), who designed a set of tarot cards The student also traces one of her favorite Instagram artists, Bao Pham, back to symbolism The most surprising lineage in this timeline is the one at the bottom, which goes from 18th century portraiture (Gainsborough, David) and 19th century portraiture (Ingres) through early 20th century portraiture (Sargent) to 21st century portraiture (Kehinde Wiley), and from there to the student’s work For the student the timebars “Neoclassicism” and “Academic art” were surprises, but it makes sense to link Wiley to European academic painting, and the student’s work is demonstrably responsive to all the precedents she identifies 20 Ordering the art by generations Sometimes it makes sense to arrange the timeline by generations Here the student’s art is at the right She likes artists from several early 20th century movements: postimpressionism (bottom left), the Bauhaus (top left), surrealism (middle), and abstract expressionism Those are all at the left In between those and her own work is a column of contemporary artists she likes, including Ebony Patterson, Kenneth Blom, Naudine Pierre, Maja Ruznik, and Violet Hwami They aren’t a single generation, but they are all currently 21 working, and none are well known in the art world Patterson (b 1981) is a Jamaican artist; Blom (b 1967) is Danish; Naudine Pierre (b 1989) is American; Maja Ruznik (b 1983) is an American-based artist from Bosnia-Herzegovina; and Kudzanai-Violet Hwami (b 1993) is a UK-based Zimbabwean painter This is the kind of miscellaneous grouping that is typical of contemporary art students’ interests: they come from various cultural backgrounds, work in different countries and different styles Some are gallery-based, and others are only on Instagram or other social media The challenge is to see how they connect to the past In this case they are all perceptual painters, but in the student’s mind they connect by generations, so she has lined them up in loos columns to show how she imagines them in time Learning for both student and teacher Timelines can be collaborative learning, where both the student and teacher discover connections This student’s practice includes poster design In this detail he traces four of his posters back to 1960s and 1970s psychedelic posters for rock bands made by Bonnie MacLean and Victor Moscoso The next step back in time from psychedelic art is to Art Nouveau, especially Alphonse Mucha and William Morris, and before them John Everett Millais and Dante Gabriel Rossetti in the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood I also suggested Franz von Stuck as a precursor of several of his 22 posters The top poster (the one with the wavy bands around a silhouette) is also traced to The Climber (Kokou no Hito) by Shinichi Sakamoto (2007-12) We both learned equally from this timeline Sakamoto and MacLean were both new to me, and the Pre-Raphaelites and Franz von Stuck were new to the student As a result, I think differently about psychedelic art of the 1960s, and I hope the student does, too Both teachers and students learn together on these timelines I study several hundred unfamiliar artists each semester This year they included @babydog2000 on TikTok, scribble art by @jychoioioi, @ssebong_rama, @blackbean_cms, Kathryn MacNaughton, Dasha Shishkin, Jake Grewal, and a hundred other Instagram artists; dozens of manga artists, including Shinichi Sakamoto, Kamome Shirahama, Kentaro Miura’s Berserk, Takehiko Inoue, Hirohiko Araki, and Hayao Miyazaki; and many more contemporary artists I would never have found at galleries or biennales The amount of time that’s required to make timelines This timeline project is unusually time-consuming for teachers The reason is that the visual worlds of most students not correspond to the periods and artists familiar in art history or art criticism Here are two examples This first one seems to be well organized It traces three timelines: green, on top, for comics and illustration; red, in the middle, for stop-motion animation; and yellow, at the bottom, for “construction and pattern.” The challenge here for a teacher is that the older examples on the lower timeline are the only ones that will be familiar from art history At the top right the “Comics and illustration” 23 sequence includes a number of examples that an instructor may have to research (Detail below.) At the lower left the student has included an inscription in the grand mosque of Golpayegan, Iran (11th–12th c), with the names of the Prophet’s companions Next is a Chimu fabric from Peru The student connects these examples in an ahistorical way, to show how they appear linked to her “The yellow group is about sculptural and geometric art,” she writes, “but more importantly creating patterns: I have recently before fascinated with Islamic architecture as well as calligraphy.” These formal similarities are more or less evident (and the student knows they are trans-historical, apolitical), but they become difficult to follow as they get closer to the present 24 “The geometric fractal patterns have given me a new direction to explore in my work,” she writes “I draw similar inspiration to Islamic geometry in Gee's Bend quilt squares (lower left in this detail), Persian and Greek rugs, Andean garments and many other textiles.” These patterns “evoke the same feeling that playing with Legos used to give me.” Her art (at the lower right) “is also aesthetically inspired by Bionicles and other plastic toys concerning aliens from my childhood.” At this point the timeline needs more explanation to make the connections evident At this point we ran out of time in the semester, and the result isn’t really satisfactory, because its chronologies are personal to the artist and difficult to share The timeline only contributes marginally to her sense of her connection to history Each of the timelines in this document was reformatted by me in order to make it clear for the purposes of this exposition I had to resize all the fonts and move all the images This kind of work takes at least a half hour for each timeline, and it has to happen at least three times a semester for this exercise to work I also have to research artists I don’t know, which can take up to a half hour per image on the timeline I think I spend an average of five hours on each 25 student’s timeline over the course of the semester That’s a lot of time, since a typical course involves many other things It’s the reason timelines aren’t required in the Guidebook The absence of community One of the most interesting things about the timeline exercise is that art students who use Instagram, TikTok, Flickr, and other sites often end up with personal canons that are not known to their contemporaries Social media is an apparently infinite reservoir of artists with and without personal websites or galleries, who have between a hundred and tend of thousands of followers They are relatively unknown in the sense that if a student mentions one in class, the chances that other students will recognize the artist’s name are minimal Before social media, there were artists known mainly to students and not instructors, so there was a generation gap between young and established artists Social media has produced a different situation, in which each student’s favorite contemporary artists tend to be theirs alone, and talking about them isn’t often rewarded with recognition and discussion All the more reason to work on a project like these timelines, to show students how they are linked to history Honoring complexity If your timeline remains complex, or becomes a web of criss-crossing lines, it probably means you haven’t sorted out your influences yet In these timelines artworks are often associated with the wrong movements, and after they’ve been corrected the diagrams look much simpler However there are also cases where the student’s imagination really is as complex as the timeline suggests In the timeline below, the complexity comes in after the historical examples, and before the artist’s work It’s the student’s sense of the relation between her works that’s being diagrammed here: 26 Notice the standard timescale at the top: it ends short of the network that shows the relation between the student’s works There is no way to simplify this: it’s an accurate reflection of the way this student thinks Designing your timeline If you know you’re interested in just a few periods or movements in history, it can help to color-code entire regions of your timeline In this example the pre-populated timebars are at the bottom, and the student has moved some of them up into their part of the timeline 27 These general categories can be misleading, both to the artist and the teacher At the top right of this one, the student has invented three timelines for comics (see detail below): “Golden age of animation,” “Renaissance of animation,” and “Modern age of comics.” These labels have been used before but not for these time periods, and not with these examples (The images are 101 Dalmatians, Craig McCracken’s Powerpuff Girls, and the comic artist Sean Murphy.) At the top are some of the movies the student likes, with their own idiosyncratic connections: Metropolis is connected to the cover of Janelle Monáe’s Archandroid, and a poster for Apocalypse Now is connected with one of the student’s artworks In detail, this timeline isn’t yet connected to history in a way that anyone but the artist can understand 28 Balancing your ideas with the teacher’s This student’s portfolio is full of distorted figures and forms She felt that her work has three principal influences Starting from the bottom: she sees surrealism as principal source for her work, but for her the movement denotes contemporary artists such as the surrealist portraitists Emilio Vallalba and Henrik Uldalen, the classicizing figural painter Denis Sarahzin, the design-oriented painter Salman Khoshroo, and the dystopian realist Zdzislaw Beksinski These are not particularly well-known in the art world, and they not form a coherent group However the artist feels they’re connected, and that they’re all distinct from earlier surrealists The middle line of influence, modern realism (with Jenny Saville) is art historically normative, with the addition of a lesser-known artist, the Toronto-based Elly Smallwood The top line is totally eccentric: the artist is interested in Jung’s psychoanalytic diagrams, because they have been adopted by the Korean pop group BTS, especially in an album called Map of the Soul It’s a non-visual influence, which can be as important and hard to describe The challenge here is to determine whether or not this arrangement makes sense, or if some artists should be moved to other time lines Below is an art-historically corrected version 29 Here, starting from the bottom, Salman Khoshroo is put on an Illustration timeline, to reflect his main influence His painterly marks also owe something to Abstract Expressionism and movements that followed it Then comes an Academic art timeline, to reflect the fact that Beksinski and Sarahzin are primarily academic realists The former also reflects work by Odd Nerdrum, symbolism, and surrealism more generally, and the latter shows evidence of a range of early 20th century movements including expressionism Only two artists remain on the Surrealism timeline, Uldalen and Villabla, both indebted to Francis Bacon This “corrected” timeline does not correspond to the student’s own perception of her work, which should be a learning opportunity: after all, that’s the kind of unexpected configuration art history supplies to artists In this case the student said that what mattered in Sarahzin was his combination of realist technique and unusual color, not his affinities to academic art, the Vienna 30 Secession, or other movements; and what counted in Khoshroo was the expressions on his faces, not his links to illustration or gestural abstraction This “corrected” timeline has the virtue of connecting the student’s work to a range of generally recognized sources, and avoiding the idiosyncratic collection of relatively obscure contemporary artists unanchored in history But it has the drawback of not reflecting the student’s own perception of her work This is a balance that needs to be continuously interrogated Conclusion These are typical timeline issues Experiment and have fun! Despite the schematism of this exercise, I think it’s one of the most important tools for connecting academic art history to art students’ interests Without the kind of work these timelines call for, the world art history survey will forever remain a one-way teaching experience, with instructors informing students of “important” art and “significant” ideas, and students left to figure out how their own interests could possibly connect 31 ... @ssebong_rama, @blackbean_cms, Kathryn MacNaughton, Dasha Shishkin, Jake Grewal, and a hundred other Instagram artists; dozens of manga artists, including Shinichi Sakamoto, Kamome Shirahama, Kentaro... 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 to conventional histories of art Note that this timeline, ... 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