Professional Writing Service http://StudyHub.vip/A-Timeline-Of-Art-History-For-Teaching- 👈

1. A Timeline of Art History
James Elkins
Revised 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 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:

2. In your timeline, the branching is reversed, because everything leads to your work:
2

3. 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.”
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

4. 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.
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 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.
5. 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.
6. 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.
7. 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.
8. 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.
4

5. 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:
5

6. 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.
6

7. 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:
7

8. 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 do not feel any connection with. As a teacher, if you work with Miro, you
8

9. 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.
9

10. Examples of working with timelines
1. 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

11. 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
11

12. 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 the
artworld: Malcolm Liepke, Roberto Ferri, and Dominique Medici. These are conservative artists
who work in an academic realist mode, following Old Masters. The grey timebar is “Academic
Art”; it begins with the Florentine Accademia in the 16th century (which is far outside this
frame 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 like
Medici, Ferri, and Liepke are not alone in history; they belong to a long continuous tradition of
academic realism.
Contemporary academic artists like Dominique Medici look back specifically to Caravaggio and
his followers. The student has added a timebar for the Baroque, and put to French followers of
Caravaggio on it.
The double blue lines indicate that part of this timeline is folded so it can be shown in this
frame: 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 to
Medici and other contemporary artists: this student’s timeline is remarkable because it skips so
many movements and styles between the 18th century and the present.
12

13. Sometimes general connections to the past are clear, but it’s hard to connect the dots. Here the
student, Rea Silvia Emmanouil, traced a work of hers to three pieces by the contemporary
Paris-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 of
her 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, and
others. Here Ernst is linked to Min with a dotted line, indicating that Min hasn’t acknowledged
the 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, a
contemporary artist and bookbinder. Tolkien’s practice came from earlier book illustration, art
nouveau, 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 to
Breton. Ely is a different case: his practice derives in part from surrealism, but also from the
much 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. This
student’s visual imagination is primarily focused on three examples of mid-20th century and
13

14. 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 as
related, because they both go back in part to surrealism. The timeline also shows how the
student’s work is linked to early 20th century art in particular.
14

15. 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 typical
art history class will not include any of these references. I’ll describe the process of analyzing
this 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 be
traced 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.
15

16. 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 the
history 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 like
Arlene Shechet, and before them to postmodern ceramics from Voulkos onward. (As one of
DiMattio’s reviewers noted, there’s even an echo of Schnabel’s use of ceramics.)
16

17. 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
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

18. 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 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

19. 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

20. 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

21. 3. 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

22. 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.
4. 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

23. 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.
5. 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 do 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

24. 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

25. “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

26. 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.
6. 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.
7. 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

27. 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.
8. 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

28. 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

29. 9. 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 do 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

30. 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

31. 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