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Quick links, suggested searches, what is art history.

Art history – the study of art from across the world, and from the ancient to the present day – covers virtually every aspect of human history and experience. This is because it looks at works of art not just as objects, but as a way of understanding the world, and the societies in which they were created.  

What were the conscious and unconscious choices that led to an artwork’s form and subject matter? What does its content – how people are represented, how religion is shown – tell you about the society in which it was created, and its history? How was it received when it was first put on display, and how has this changed?  

By asking these questions, art historians gain a fascinating insight into how people throughout time and across the world lived, thought, felt and understood everything around them. Developing understanding of these challenges  helps us make sense of the relationship between people, art and the forces that shape the world we live in today – and provides us with the critical skills to understand the visual world around us.  

Why study Art History?

It combines the rigour of a history degree with the visual skills required to interpret works of art. It will help you develop critical skills, to think about art and history from a variety of perspectives, and to present your ideas succinctly and persuasively. These are all key skills that will help you to stand out in today’s job market. You will learn to analyse the role art plays in shaping society. Art History will introduce you to world-famous works of art, as well as others that are less well known but equally as fascinating to examine and study. You will get to explore new areas of Art History, and artworks from a variety of time periods, from all around the world, delivered in a range of different forms. If you enjoy reading history, studying literature or languages, looking at art, and are fascinated by the relationship between people, art, and the forces that have shaped the world we live in, then Art History is the subject for you.

"What is art history" - we asked our academics:

Dr Guido Rebecchini, Reader in Sixteenth-Century Southern European Art:

Artworks from the past communicate with us across centuries in a language that is much more mysterious and nuanced than one might first assume. Interrogating them and looking closely at what they represent, as well as at their materials and techniques, enables us to make contact with ideas, rituals, beliefs and practices wholly different from our own. Art historians therefore explore the gulf between the appearance of artworks – as we might see them today in museums, galleries and historical buildings – and the complex ideas behind their production.

It is important to remember that artworks produced in the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Period, in both the East and the West, were not intended to be displayed in museums. Instead, such artworks communicated with their audiences in spaces where rituals and practices that helped to form familial, civic and religious identities, such as palaces, churches and squares. Works of art were often made to mark marriages, births, deaths, and they reflected hopes and ambitions; in fact, they were often thought to have real agency in the world. Artworks were considered to possess holy powers, brought in procession, or stood in for absent people.

Ultimately, as art historians, we look closely and carefully, patiently and inquisitively, and ask questions incessantly. To do so, we analyse, compare and connect a wide range of difference sources and pieces of evidence; primarily the artworks themselves, but also documents, literature and many other traces of the past. By doing so, we locate works of art in the ecosystem in which they were conceived, which helps us to better understand how artworks of the past have shaped the world we live in. For these reasons, art history is a truly interdisciplinary: it demands that we take the vantage point of others, like the anthropologist does; that we see things in historical perspective, as the historian does; and that we consider how ideas related religion, family, gender, race, and politics are implicated in the art of the past. In conclusion, art history is an inquiry into human culture pursued mainly – but not only – by critically looking at the extraordinary images that past generations have left behind.

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Why does art history matter?

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1 (page 1) p. 1 What is art history?

• Published: January 2020
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‘What is art history?’ discusses the term art history and draws distinctions between it and art appreciation and art criticism. It also considers the range of artefacts included in the discipline and how these have changed over time. The work of art is our primary evidence, and it is our interaction between this evidence and methods of enquiry that forms art history. Art appreciation and criticism are also linked to connoisseurship. Although art is a visual subject, we learn about it through reading and we convey our ideas about it mostly in writing. The social and cultural issues articulated by art history are examined through an analysis of four very different works of art.

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AP®︎/College Art History

Course: ap®︎/college art history   >   unit 1.

• What is art history and where is it going?

Introduction to art historical analysis

• How to do visual (formal) analysis in art history
• Art historical analysis (painting), a basic introduction using Goya's Third of May, 1808
• A brief history of representing the body in Western painting
• A brief history of representing of the body in Western sculpture

Art as physical object

Conservation, art as visual experience, visual (formal) analysis, art as cultural artifact, subject matter / iconography, function of art, thinking critically, want to join the conversation.

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An Art History Timeline From Ancient to Contemporary Art

The Lifespan of Art in Five Easy Steps

• Art History
• Architecture

There is a lot to be found in a timeline of art history . It begins over 30,000 years ago and takes us through a series of movements, styles, and periods that reflect the time during which each piece of art was created.

Art is an important glimpse into history because it is often one of the few things to survive. It can tell us stories, relate the moods and beliefs of an era, and allow us to relate to the people who came before us. Let's explore art, from Ancient to Contemporary, and see how it influences the future and delivers the past.

Ancient Art

 Anders Blomqvist / Getty Images

What we consider ancient art is what was created from around 30,000 B.C.E. to 400 A.D. If you prefer, it can be thought of as fertility statuettes and bone flutes to roughly the fall of Rome .

Many different styles of art were created over this long period. They include those of prehistory ( Paleolithic , Neolithic , the Bronze Age , etc) to the ancient civilizations of Mesopotamia, Egypt, and the nomadic tribes. It also includes the work found in classical civilizations like the Greeks and Celts as well as that of the early ​ Chinese dynasties  and the civilizations of the Americas.

The artwork of this time is as varied as the cultures that created it. What ties them together is their purpose.

Quite often, art was created to tell stories in a time when oral tradition prevailed. It was also used to decorate utilitarian objects like bowls, pitchers, and weapons. At times, it was also used to demonstrate the status of its owner, a concept that art has used forever since.

Medieval to Early Renaissance Art

Jean-Philippe Tournut / Getty Images

Some people still refer to the millennium between 400 and 1400 A.D. as the "Dark Ages." The art of this period can be considered relatively "dark" as well. Some depicted rather grotesque or otherwise brutal scenes while others were focused on formalized religion. Yet, the majority are not what we would call cheery.

Medieval European art saw a transition from the Byzantine period to the Early Christian period. Within that, from about 300 to 900, we also saw Migration Period Art as Germanic people migrated across the continent. This "Barbarian" art was portable by necessity and much of it was understandably lost.

As the millennium passed, more and more Christian and Catholic art appeared. The period centered around elaborate churches and artwork to adorn this architecture. It also saw the rise of the "illuminated manuscript" and eventually the Gothic and Romanesque styles of art and architecture.

Renaissance to Early Modern Art

 alxpin / Getty Images

This period covers the years 1400 through 1880 and it includes many of our favorite pieces of art.

Much of the notable art created during the Rennaissance was Italian. It began with the famous 15th-century artists like Brunelleschi and Donatello, who led to the work of Botticelli and Alberti. When the High Rennaissance took over in the next century, we saw the work of Da Vinci, Michelangelo, and Raphael.

In Northern Europe, this period saw the schools of Antwerp Mannerism, The Little Masters, and the Fontainebleau School, among many others.

After the long Italian Renaissance,  Northern Renaissance , and Baroque periods were over, we began to see new art movements appear with greater frequency. 

By the 1700s, Western Art followed a series of styles. These movements included Rococo and Neo-Classicism, followed by Romanticism, Realism, and Impressionism  as well as many lesser-known styles.

In China, the Ming and Qing Dynasties took place during this period and Japan saw the Momoyama and Edo Periods. This was also the time of the Aztec and Inca in the Americas who had their own distinct art.

 PHILIP FONG/AFP/Getty Images

Modern Art runs from around 1880 to 1970 and they were an extremely busy 90 years. The Impressionists opened the floodgates on new paths to take and individual artists such as Picasso and Duchamp were themselves responsible for creating multiple movements.

The last two decades of the 1800s were filled with movements like Cloisonnism, Japonism, Neo-Impressionism, Symbolism, Expressionism , and Fauvism. There were also a number of schools and groups like The Glasgow Boys and the Heidelberg School, The Band Noire (Nubians) and The Ten American Painters.

Art was no less diverse or confusing in the 1900s. Movements like Art Nouveau and Cubism kicked off the new century with Bauhaus, Dadaism, Purism, Rayism, and Suprematism following close behind. Art Deco, Constructivism, and the Harlem Renaissance took over the 1920s while Abstract Expressionism emerged in the 1940s.

By mid-century, we saw even more revolutionary styles. Funk and Junk Art, Hard-Edge Painting, and Pop Art became the norm in the 50s. The 60s were filled with Minimalism, Op Art, Psychedelic Art, and much, much more.

Contemporary Art

 Dan Forer / Getty Images

The 1970s is what most people consider as the beginning of Contemporary Art and it continues to the present day. Most interestingly, either fewer movements are identifying themselves as such or art history simply hasn't caught up yet with those that have.

Still, there is a growing list of - isms in the art world. The 70s saw Post-Modernism and Ugly Realism along with a surge in Feminist Art, Neo-Conceptualism, and Neo-Expressionism. The 80s were filled with Neo-Geo, Multiculturalism, and the Graffiti Movement , as well as BritArt and Neo-Pop.

By the time the 90s hit, art movements became less defined and somewhat unusual, almost as if people had run out of names. Net Art, Artefactoria, Toyism, Lowbrow , Bitterism, and Stuckism are some of the styles of the decade. And though it's still new, the 21st century has its own Thinkism and Funism to enjoy.

• Art History 101: A Brisk Walk Through the Art Eras
• Explore the History of Pop Art: 1950s to the 1970s
• The Proto-Renaissance - Art History 101 Basics
• 7 Major Painting Styles—From Realism to Abstract
• 10 Topic Ideas for Art History Papers
• Origins and Schools of Abstract Art
• The Feminist Movement in Art
• Tips for Writing an Art History Paper
• Defining Synthetic Cubism
• Abstract Expressionism: Art History 101 Basics
• The Difference Between Art Styles, Schools, and Movements
• Ways of Defining Art
• What Is Modern Art?
• Art History: Difference Between Era, Period, and Movement
• Overview of the Op Art Movement
• Impressionism Art Movement: Major Works and Artists

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What is art history and where is it going?

Peter Paul Rubens, three paintings from the 24-picture cycle Rubens painted for the Medici Gallery in the Luxembourg Palace, Paris. From left to right: Peter Paul Rubens, The Presentation of the Portrait of Marie de’ Medici , The Wedding by Proxy of Marie de’ Medici to King Henry IV , Arrival (or Disembarkation) of Marie de’ Medici at Marseilles , 1621–25, oil on canvas (Musée du Louvre, Paris; photo: Steven Zucker, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

Art history might seem like a relatively straightforward concept: “art” and “history” are subjects most of us first studied in elementary school. In practice, however, the idea of “the history of art” raises complex questions. What exactly do we mean by art, and what kind of history (or histories) should we explore? Let’s consider each term further.

Art versus artifact

The word “art” is derived from the Latin ars , which originally meant “skill” or “craft.” These meanings are still primary in other English words derived from ars , such as “artifact” (a thing made by human skill) and “artisan” (a person skilled at making things). The meanings of “art” and “artist,” however, are not so straightforward. We understand art as involving more than just skilled craftsmanship. What exactly distinguishes a work of art from an artifact, or an artist from an artisan?

When asked this question, students typically come up with several ideas. One is beauty. Much art is visually striking, and in the 18th, 19th and early 20th centuries, the analysis of aesthetic qualities was indeed central in art history. During this time, art that imitated ancient Greek and Roman art (the art of classical antiquity ), was considered to embody a timeless perfection. Art historians focused on the so-called fine arts—painting, sculpture, and architecture—analyzing the virtues of their forms. Over the past century and a half, however, both art and art history have evolved radically.

Left: Lysippos, Apoxyomenos (Scraper) , Roman copy after a bronze statue from c. 330 B.C.E., 81 inches high (Vatican Museums, photo: Steven Zucker , CC BY-NC-SA 2.0); right: Kiki Smith, male figure from Untitled , 1990, 198.1 x 181.6 x 54 cm, beeswax and microcrystalline wax figures on metal stands (Whitney Museum of American Art, New York) © Kiki Smith

Artists turned away from the classical tradition, embracing new media and aesthetic ideals, and art historians shifted their focus from the analysis of art’s formal beauty to interpretation of its cultural meaning. Today we understand beauty as subjective—a cultural construct that varies across time and space. While most art continues to be primarily visual, and visual analysis is still a fundamental tool used by art historians, beauty itself is no longer considered an essential attribute of art.

Images of Peter and Paul appear much the same through the centuries in Byzantine icons. Left: glass bowl base, 4th century, Roman ( The Metropolitan Museum of Art ); center: mosaics, 11th century, Hosios Loukas Monastery, Greece; right: panel icon, 17th century, Greek ( Temple Gallery ).

A second common answer to the question of what distinguishes art emphasizes originality, creativity, and imagination. This reflects a modern understanding of art as a manifestation of the ingenuity of the artist. This idea, however, originated five hundred years ago in Renaissance Europe , and is not directly applicable to many of the works studied by art historians. For example, in the case of ancient Egyptian art or Byzantine icons , the preservation of tradition was more valued than innovation. While the idea of ingenuity is certainly important in the history of art, it is not a universal attribute of the works studied by art historians.

All this might lead one to conclude that definitions of art, like those of beauty, are subjective and unstable. One solution to this dilemma is to propose that art is distinguished primarily by its visual agency, that is, by its ability to captivate viewers. Artifacts may be interesting, but art, I suggest, has the potential to move us—emotionally, intellectually, or otherwise. It may do this through its visual characteristics (scale, composition, color, etc.), expression of ideas, craftsmanship, ingenuity, rarity, or some combination of these or other qualities. How art engages varies, but in some manner, art takes us beyond the everyday and ordinary experience. The greatest examples attest to the extremes of human ambition, skill, imagination, perception, and feeling. As such, art prompts us to reflect on fundamental aspects of what it is to be human. Any artifact, as a product of human skill, might provide insight into the human condition. But art, in moving beyond the commonplace, has the potential to do so in more profound ways. Art, then, is perhaps best understood as a special class of artifact, exceptional in its ability to make us think and feel through visual experience.

Coatlicue , c. 1500, Mexica (Aztec), found on the SE edge of the Plaza Mayor/Zocalo in Mexico City, basalt, 257 cm high (National Museum of Anthropology, Mexico City; photo: Steven Zucker , CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

History: Making Sense of the Past

Like definitions of art and beauty, ideas about history have changed over time. It might seem that writing history should be straightforward—it’s all based on facts, isn’t it? In theory, yes, but the evidence surviving from the past is vast, fragmentary, and messy. Historians must make decisions about what to include and exclude, how to organize the material, and what to say about it. In doing so, they create narratives that explain the past in ways that make sense in the present. Inevitably, as the present changes, these narratives are updated, rewritten, or discarded altogether and replaced with new ones. All history, then, is subjective—as much a product of the time and place it was written as of the evidence from the past that it interprets.

The discipline of art history developed in Europe during the colonial period (roughly the 15th to the mid-20th century). Early art historians emphasized the European tradition, celebrating its Greek and Roman origins and the ideals of academic art . By the mid-20th century, a standard narrative for “Western art” was established that traced its development from the prehistoric , ancient , and medieval Mediterranean to modern Europe and the United States . Art from the rest of the world, labeled “non-Western art,” was typically treated only marginally and from a colonialist perspective.

The immense sociocultural changes that took place in the 20th century led art historians to amend these narratives. Accounts of Western art that once featured only white males were revised to include artists of color and women. The traditional focus on painting, sculpture, and architecture was expanded to include so-called minor arts such as ceramics and textiles and contemporary media such as video and performance art . Interest in non-Western art increased, accelerating dramatically in recent years.

Queen Mother Pendant Mask (Iyoba), 16th century, Edo peoples, Court of Benin, Nigeria, ivory, iron, copper, 23.8 x 12.7 x 8.3 cm (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; photo: Steven Zucker , CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

Today, the biggest social development facing art history is globalism. As our world becomes increasingly interconnected, familiarity with different cultures and facility with diversity are essential. Art history, as the story of exceptional artifacts from a broad range of cultures, has a role to play in developing these skills. Now art historians ponder and debate how to reconcile the discipline’s European intellectual origins and its problematic colonialist legacy with contemporary multiculturalism and how to write art history in a global era.

Smarthistory’s videos and articles reflect this history of art history. Since the site was originally created to support a course in Western art and history, the content initially focused on the most celebrated works of the Western canon. With the key periods and civilizations of this tradition now well-represented and a growing number of scholars contributing, the range of objects and topics has increased in recent years. Most importantly, substantial coverage of world traditions outside the West has been added. As the site continues to expand, the works and perspectives presented will evolve in step with contemporary trends in art history. In fact, as innovators in the use of digital media and the internet to create, disseminate, and interrogate art historical knowledge, Smarthistory and its users have the potential to help shape the future of the discipline.

Additional resources

“ Introduction: Learning to look and think critically ,” a chapter in Reframing Art History (our free art history textbook).

“ Introduction: Close looking and approaches to art ,” a chapter in Reframing Art History (our free art history textbook)—especially useful for materials related to formal (visual) analysis.

Check out all the chapters on world art in  Reframing Art History .

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2.1: What is art history and where is it going?

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• Cerise Myers, Ellen C. Caldwell, Alice J. Taylor, Margaret Phelps & Lisa Soccio
• ASCCC Open Educational Resources Initiative (OERI)

What is art history and where is it going?

by Dr. Robert Glass

Art history might seem like a relatively straightforward concept: “art” and “history” are subjects most of us first studied in elementary school. In practice, however, the idea of “the history of art” raises complex questions. What exactly do we mean by art, and what kind of history (or histories) should we explore? Let’s consider each term further.

Art versus artifact

The word “art” is derived from the Latin ars , which originally meant “skill” or “craft.” These meanings are still primary in other English words derived from ars , such as “artifact” (a thing made by human skill) and “artisan” (a person skilled at making things). The meanings of “art” and “artist,” however, are not so straightforward. We understand art as involving more than just skilled craftsmanship. What exactly distinguishes a work of art from an artifact, or an artist from an artisan?

When asked this question, students typically come up with several ideas. One is beauty. Much art is visually striking, and in the 18th, 19th and early 20th centuries, the analysis of aesthetic qualities was indeed central in art history. During this time, art that imitated ancient Greek and Roman art (the art of classical antiquity), was considered to embody a timeless perfection. Art historians focused on the so-called fine arts—painting, sculpture, and architecture—analyzing the virtues of their forms. Over the past century and a half, however, both art and art history have evolved radically.

History: Making Sense of the Past

Like definitions of art and beauty, ideas about history have changed over time. It might seem that writing history should be straightforward—it’s all based on facts, isn’t it? In theory, yes, but the evidence surviving from the past is vast, fragmentary, and messy. Historians must make decisions about what to include and exclude, how to organize the material, and what to say about it. In doing so, they create narratives that explain the past in ways that make sense in the present. Inevitably, as the present changes, these narratives are updated, rewritten, or discarded altogether and replaced with new ones. All history, then, is subjective—as much a product of the time and place it was written as of the evidence from the past that it interprets.

The discipline of art history developed in Europe during the colonial period (roughly the 15th to the mid-20th century), . Early art historians emphasized the European tradition, celebrating its Greek and Roman origins and the ideals of academic art. By the mid-20th century, a standard narrative for “Western art” was established that traced its development from the prehistoric, ancient, and medieval Mediterranean to modern Europe and the United States. Art from the rest of the world, labeled “non-Western art,” was typically treated only marginally and from a colonialist perspective.

The immense sociocultural changes that took place in the 20th century led art historians to amend these narratives. Accounts of Western art that once featured only white males were revised to include artists of color and women. The traditional focus on painting, sculpture, and architecture was expanded to include so-called minor arts such as ceramics and textiles and contemporary media such as video and performance art. Interest in non-Western art increased, accelerating dramatically in recent years.

Today, the biggest social development facing art history is globalism. As our world becomes increasingly interconnected, familiarity with different cultures and facility with diversity are essential. Art history, as the story of exceptional artifacts from a broad range of cultures, has a role to play in developing these skills. Now art historians ponder and debate how to reconcile the discipline’s European intellectual origins and its problematic colonialist legacy with contemporary multiculturalism and how to write art history in a global era.

Articles in this section:

• Dr. Robert Glass, “ What is art history and where is it going? ,” in Smarthistory , October 28, 2017 ( CC BY-NC-SA )

What is art history?

by Professor Lisa Tickner FBA

18 Nov 2019

The short answer is that art history is the history of art – that is, the study of a particular class of artifacts in and across time. But that’s a bit ‘x = x’. It doesn’t explain what ‘art’ is, or has been thought to be, if at all, in different cultures at different times. It doesn’t account for the emergence of art history as an academic discipline devoted to these particular objects and activities. And it doesn’t touch on how art historians study art in a range of approaches, some of them borrowed or held in common with other disciplines such as sociology, philosophy, psychoanalysis, or semiotics.

When I went to art school in the 1960s, art history was a newly obligatory and examinable component of a new qualification: the Diploma in Art and Design. Some students resented it. Most colleges taught a survey known colloquially as ‘Caves to Caro’ ( Anthony Caro ). This sketched the principle names, periods and styles in the western canon: palaeolithic cave painting as ‘the origins of art’, classical Greece and Rome, the high peaks of Renaissance Italy, a selective romp through elements of 17th-century Baroque, 18th-century Rococo, the French Revolution and Neo-Classicism, 19th-century Realism, Impressionism and, with luck and a fair wind, early 20th-century Cubism, before lectures gave way to exam revision. There was no close study of individual works (no time), no design history or visual culture (still largely undeveloped), little or nothing non-western and nothing contemporary. In 1958 the painter Allen Jones, an earlier student at the same college, visited a famous exhibition of Jackson Pollock at the Whitechapel Gallery and “felt like suing my teachers for not telling me what was happening in the world”.

This was not all art history was, of course, but a version adapted for undergraduates and art students that nonetheless condensed strong tendencies in the English tradition towards a focus on national schools, period style, and a ‘billiard-ball’ model of artistic influence and reaction. (The German-speaking tradition was different.) From the 1970s and 1980s art history was – controversially – reshaped with the impact of a renewed interest in culture, capital and class; by a feminist concern with women artists and the depiction of gender and sexuality; by postcolonial studies devoted to the representation of ethnic difference and subjugation; and by the emergence of design history and visual culture, both of which widened the field of study beyond the ‘isms’ of the western canon. What is sometimes called ‘the new art history’ has spread into the work and values of museums, galleries, publishing and the art market. There is now considerable interest in a transnational or global art history that examines Indian, Chinese, Islamic, Buddhist or West African art, say, not on the 19th-century model of national schools, as though each unfolded in a vacuum, but with an emphasis on transmission, hybridity and exchange.

The art-historical question is always ‘What is going on here?’ What kind of object is it (if it’s an object at all)? What is it made of, and how? What is its relation to other objects of a comparable kind? Who commissioned or bought it and on what terms? Where was it exhibited or displayed? What audience was it meant to gratify or provoke? What company did it keep and whose interests did it serve? Here the injunction to the historian is not quite as crude as ‘follow the money’, but economic, institutional, ideological and more private resources and constraints are often revealing. The trick is to understand their impress without losing the specificity – the power, charm or idiosyncrasy – of a particular work. It’s more a conversation than a judgement. As the critic Roger Fry put it in his Last Lectures   (1939): “in contemplating a work of art, we are continually asking why and... we are continually getting answers, and this repeated recognition of the causes of the picture being as it is gives us a succession of moments of pleasure…”

Lisa Tickner is Honorary Professor at the Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London and Professor Emerita of Art History at Middlesex University. She was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 2008. Her newest book, London’s New Scene: Art and Culture in the 1960s , will be published in 2020.

Further reading An Introduction to Art by Charles Harrison, Yale University Press (2009; 2020)

Related blogs

What is Byzantine studies?

What is postcolonial literature?

What is Islamic studies?

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Dr. Robert Glass

In this chapter

What is art history and where is it going?

Introduction to art historical analysis.

by  DR. ROBERT GLASS

Art history might seem like a relatively straightforward concept: “art” and “history” are subjects most of us first studied in elementary school. In practice, however, the idea of “the history of art” raises complex questions. What exactly do we mean by art, and what kind of history (or histories) should we explore? Let’s consider each term further.

Art versus artifact

The word “art” is derived from the Latin ars , which originally meant “skill” or “craft.” These meanings are still primary in other English words derived from ars , such as “artifact” (a thing made by human skill) and “artisan” (a person skilled at making things). The meanings of “art” and “artist,” however, are not so straightforward. We understand art as involving more than just skilled craftsmanship. What exactly distinguishes a work of art from an artifact, or an artist from an artisan?

When asked this question, students typically come up with several ideas. One is beauty. Much art is visually striking, and in the 18th, 19th and early 20th centuries, the analysis of aesthetic qualities was indeed central in art history. During this time, art that imitated ancient Greek and Roman art (the art of classical antiquity), was considered to embody a timeless perfection. Art historians focused on the so-called fine arts —painting, sculpture, and architecture—analyzing the virtues of their forms. Over the past century and a half, however, both art and art history have evolved radically.

History: Making Sense of the Past

Like definitions of art and beauty, ideas about history have changed over time. It might seem that writing history should be straightforward—it’s all based on facts, isn’t it? In theory, yes, but the evidence surviving from the past is vast, fragmentary, and messy. Historians must make decisions about what to include and exclude, how to organize the material, and what to say about it. In doing so, they create narratives that explain the past in ways that make sense in the present. Inevitably, as the present changes, these narratives are updated, rewritten, or discarded altogether and replaced with new ones. All history, then, is subjective—as much a product of the time and place it was written as of the evidence from the past that it interprets.

The discipline of art history developed in Europe during the colonial period (roughly the 15th to the mid-20th century). Early art historians emphasized the European tradition, celebrating its Greek and Roman origins and the ideals of academic art. By the mid-20th century, a standard narrative for “Western art” was established that traced its development from the prehistoric, ancient, and medieval Mediterranean to modern Europe and the United States. Art from the rest of the world, labeled “non-Western art,” was typically treated only marginally and from a colonialist perspective.

The immense sociocultural changes that took place in the 20th century led art historians to amend these narratives. Accounts of Western art that once featured only white males were revised to include artists of color and women. The traditional focus on painting, sculpture, and architecture was expanded to include so-called minor arts such as ceramics and textiles and contemporary media such as video and performance art. Interest in non-Western art increased, accelerating dramatically in recent years.

Today, the biggest social development facing art history is globalism. As our world becomes increasingly interconnected, familiarity with different cultures and facility with diversity are essential. Art history, as the story of exceptional artifacts from a broad range of cultures, has a role to play in developing these skills. Now art historians ponder and debate how to reconcile the discipline’s European intellectual origins and its problematic colonialist legacy with contemporary multiculturalism and how to write art history in a global era.

Why does a work of art look the way it does? Who made it and why? What does it mean? These questions and others like them lie at the heart of art historical inquiry. Art historians use various types of analysis to provide answers. These have varied over time and continue to evolve, but in general, three categories can be distinguished. In the essays and videos on Smarthistory, different types of analysis are used, often without identifying them explicitly. If you become familiar with the three categories below, you will be able to recognize them.

Art as physical object

Oil and pigments on canvas , carved marble, woven fibers, a  concrete dome —most works of art and architecture are physical things. As such, a fundamental determinant of the way they look is the material of which they are made. In architecture, the word used for this is simply materials. In art, the term medium (plural: media) is also used.

Materials have specific properties that dictate the ways they can be manipulated and the effects they can produce. For example, marble will crack under its own weight if not properly balanced and supported, which imposes limits on the sculptural forms or architectural designs that can be created with it. Fresco painting, stained glass, and mosaic are all capable of creating breathtaking images, but their visual qualities differ significantly due to the distinct physical properties and working methods of each medium. This latter aspect—the way a medium is worked or used—is called technique. Together, materials and technique determine basic visual features and the parameters within which an artist or architect must work.

Learning to recognize specific media and techniques and how they have been used historically are fundamental art historical skills. Not only do they allow you to understand the logic behind specific visual qualities, but they may also help identify when and where a work was made since certain media and techniques are characteristic of specific periods and places.

Conservation

Technological advances have led to new methods of analyzing materials and techniques. Today this research is carried out primarily by art  conservators . Because art and architecture, like all physical things, are subject to the corrosive effects of time and environment, conservation science is a crucial field. Training in art conservation typically involves coursework in chemistry as well as the practice and history of art.

While the main job of conservators is preservation, their investigative techniques can also benefit art historians. Technologies such as X-radiography, ultraviolet illumination, and infrared reflectography can reveal features of an object invisible to the human eye, such as the inside of a bronze statue, changes made to a painting, or drawing under a paint surface. X-ray fluorescence can identify the pigments in paint or the composition of metals by their chemical profiles. Dendrochronology can establish the earliest date a wooden object could have been made based on tree ring growth patterns. Analysis of materials and techniques using methods such as these can help art historians answer questions about when, where, how, or by whom, a work was made.

Art as visual experience

Most art is visually compelling. While materials and technique determine the range of what is possible, the final appearance of a work is the product of numerous additional choices made by the artist. An artist painting a portrait of a woman in oil on canvas must decide on the size and shape of the canvas, the scale of the woman and where to place her, and the types of forms, lines, colors, and brushstrokes to use in representing the sitter and her surroundings. In a compelling work of art, myriad variables such as these and others come together to create an engaging visual experience.

Visual (formal) analysis

Art historians use visual analysis to describe and understand this experience. Often called formal analysis because it focuses on form rather than subject matter or historical context, this typically consists of two parts: description of the visual features of a work and analysis of their effects. To describe visual properties systematically, art historians rely on an established set of terms and concepts. These include characteristics such as format, scale, composition, and viewpoint; treatment of the human figure and space; and the use of form, line, color, light, and texture.

In describing visual qualities, formal analysis usually identifies certain features as contributing to the overall impression of the work. For example, a prominent linear form might suggest strength if straight and vertical, grace or sensuality if sinuous, or stability and calm if long and horizontal. Sharp contrasts in light and dark may make an image feel bold and dramatic whereas subdued lighting might suggest gentleness or intimacy. In the past, formal analysis assumed there was some elementary level of universality in the human response to visual form and tried to describe these effects. Today, the method is understood as more subjective, but still valued as a critical exercise and means of analyzing visual experience, especially in introductory art history courses.

Formal analysis is a powerful tool for appreciating art. Armed with it, you can analyze any work based simply on the experience of looking at it. But the method is also important for understanding art in its historical context. This is because the visual properties of works made by an individual artist or, more generally, by artists working in the same time and place, typically have common features. Art historians call these shared characteristics style . As James Elkins elegantly phrased it, style is “a coherence of qualities in periods or people.” 1 This may include consistency in things like medium, function, and subject matter, but when art historians use the term style, they primarily mean formal characteristics. Style varies by time and place, so like medium and technique, it can be used to determine the origin of a work of art. Because of its complexity, style is a far more specific indicator than materials and technique alone. Early art historians used stylistic analysis to categorize the vast legacy of undocumented art, assigning works to cultures, artistic circles, or individual artists based on their formal qualities. Today, stylistic analysis continues to be used to establish origins when unknown works are discovered or previous attributions revised.

In addition to helping categorize individual works, style has shaped the narratives told by art historians in fundamental ways. Until the mid-20th century, most histories of art focused on tracing stylistic development and change. As a result, many of the period divisions traditionally used for Western art are based on style. Some examples are Geometric, Orientalizing, Archaic, and Classical in ancient Greece, Romanesque and Gothic in Medieval Europe, and the Early, High, and Late Renaissance. Today style is only one of many aspects of art that interest art historians, but the power of tradition has ensured that style-based period divisions and labels remain widely used. Likewise, familiarity with the style of specific periods, places, and artists is still considered fundamental art historical knowledge and often remains the focus of introductory art history textbooks and courses.

Art as cultural artifact

While understanding the physical properties and visual experience of art are important, today most art historical research focuses on the significance of works as cultural artifacts. This category of analysis is characterized by a variety of approaches, but all share the basic objective of examining art in relation to its historical context. Most often, this is the time and place in which a work was created—typically we want to know why and by whom it was made and how it originally functioned. But since works of art and architecture often survive for centuries, art historians may also study a work’s cultural significance at later historical moments.

Subject matter / iconography

One of the most basic types of contextual analysis is the interpretation of subject matter. Much art is representational (i.e., it creates a likeness of something), and naturally we want to understand what is shown and why. Art historians call the subject matter of images iconography . Iconographic analysis is the interpretation of its meaning. In many cases, such as an image of the crucified Christ or seated Buddha, identifying the subject presents few problems. When the iconography is obscure or treated in an unusual way, art historians try to understand it by studying the historical context in which the image was made, typically through comparison with texts and other imagery from the time. With challenging images, scholars may disagree on which contextual materials are relevant, resulting in conflicting interpretations. For many complex or enigmatic works, the meanings of the subject matter continue to be debated and reinterpreted today.

Another common aspect of art investigated through contextual analysis is function. Historically, many works of art and nearly all architecture were intended to serve some purpose beyond the aesthetic. Understanding function is crucial because it usually plays a role in determining many features, including iconography, materials, format, and aspects of style. At the most basic level, art historians analyze function by identifying types—an altarpiece, portrait, Book of Hours, tomb, palace, etc. Studying the history and use of a given type provides a context for understanding specific examples.

Analysis of function becomes more complex when the personal motivations of the people responsible for making a work are considered. For much of history, this includes not only artists but also the patrons who commissioned works and in some cases, advisors acting on the patron’s behalf. When such agents can be identified, definitively or hypothetically, their motivations become potential contexts for understanding purpose and appearance.

With complex works, this can soon raise interpretive quandaries. Take, for example, Michelangelo’s famous frescos on ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Are these highly original paintings best understood in relation to the function of the chapel (a key ritual site in the Vatican palace), or the concerns of the painter, Michelangelo, or of the patron, Pope Julius II, or of one or more of the Julius’s advisors at the papal court? The answer is likely some combination of these, but the contextual materials relevant to each are so vast and diverse that there is no one way to interpret them.

Thinking critically

This raises a final point about analyzing the meaning of art and architecture as cultural artifacts. While art historians rely on facts as much as possible and seek to interpret works in ways that are historically plausible, we recognize that subjectivity is inescapable. As discussed in “What is art history?,” we interpret the past in ways that make sense in the present. Today, art historians continue to ask traditional questions like those noted above, but they also ask new ones inspired by social developments such as feminism, globalism, multiculturalism, and identity politics.

So, as you read, watch, and listen, try to recognize the approaches being used and to think critically about them. Is the speaker or writer talking about the work as a physical object, visual experience, or cultural artifact? (Often it will be some combination.) What contexts are being used to explain meaning? Which contexts are not considered? This may leave you with as many questions as answers, but that is good. You are here not only to gain knowledge, but also to develop a curiosity about the world and the ability to think critically about it.

Articles in this chapter:

• Dr. Robert Glass, “ What is art history and where is it going? ,” in  Smarthistory , October 28, 2017
• Dr. Robert Glass, “ Introduction to art historical analysis ,” in Smarthistory , October 28, 2017

visually beautiful; also (usually plural) referring to the branch of philosophy concerned with beauty, especially absent of personal meaning or usefulness

the material(s) from which a work of art is made

professionals trained in the analysis and preservation or artwork

analysis of a work of art based on its form rather than its subject matter or historical context

characteristic visual properties of works made by an individual artist or by artists working in the same time and place.

[From Greek eikon meaning "image" + glúphō meaning "to carve" or "to write"] The visual images and symbols used in a work of art or the study or interpretation of these [Art History Glossary]

Introduction to Art History I Copyright © by Dr. Robert Glass is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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Art Periods – A Detailed Look at the Art History Timeline

For as long as we have been able to use our hands, we have been creating unique artworks that document our context and state of mind. From early cave paintings to the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, human artistic expression can tell us a lot about the lives of the people who created it. To fully appreciate the cultural, social, and historical significance of different artworks, you need to be aware of the art history timeline and the major periods that shaped it. This article presents an overview of the most significant eras of creation and the historical contexts from which they originated. 

Table of Contents

• 1 Art Eras: Tracing the Earliest Art Periods
• 2 Reviewing the Timeline of the Different Art Periods
• 3.1 The Byzantine Era (330 – 1453): Eastern Roman Empire and Christianization
• 3.2 The Romanesque Period (1000 – 1300): Sharing Information Through Art
• 3.3 The Gothic Era (1100 – 1500): Freedom and Fear Unite
• 3.4 The Renaissance Era (1420 – 1520): The Revival of Humanism
• 3.5 Mannerism (1520 – 1600): A Window into the Future of Kitsch
• 3.6 The Baroque Era (1590 – 1760): The Glorification of Power and the Deception of the Eye
• 3.7 The Rococo Art Period (1725 – 1780): French Aristocracy 
• 3.8 Classicism (1770 – 1840): A Throwback to Classicism
• 3.9 Romanticism (1790 – 1850): Adding More Feeling to Art
• 3.10 Realism (1850 – 1925): Objectivity over Subjectivity
• 3.11 Impressionism (1850 – 1895): Heralding the Era of Modern Art
• 3.12 Symbolism (1886 – 1900): There is Always More Than Meets the Eye
• 3.13 Post-Impressionism (1886 – 1905): Expression Over Naturalism
• 3.14 Art Nouveau (1890 – 1910): All That Glitters is Klimt
• 3.15 Expressionism (1890 – 1914): Bringing a Political Edge to the Debate
• 3.16 Cubism (1906 – 1914): Distorting Representation
• 3.17 Futurism (1909 – 1945): Artistic Anarchism
• 3.18 Dadaism (1912 – 1920): Life is Nonsense
• 3.19 Constructivism (1913 – 1930): The Union of Cubism and Futurism
• 3.20 The Harlem Renaissance (1920 – 1930): The Revival of African-American Culture
• 3.21 Surrealism (1920 – 1930): Subconscious Realities
• 3.22 New Objectivity (1925 – 1965): Cold and Technical
• 3.23 Abstract Expressionism (1948 – 1962): Stepping Away from Europe
• 3.24 Pop Art (1955 – 1969): Art is Everything
• 3.25 Neo-Expressionism (1980 – 1989): Modern Fauvism
• 4.1 What Is an Art Period?
• 4.2 What Is the Difference Between an Art Period and an Art Movement?
• 4.3 What Is the Current Art Period Called?
• 4.4 Why Was the Renaissance Art Period Important?

Art Eras: Tracing the Earliest Art Periods

The earliest artworks have been identified as Paleolithic cave paintings, which date back to roughly 40,000 years ago. There have been many discoveries that document human activity from this period and have taken shape in many spectacular rock shelter paintings and drawings. While it is unclear as to the reasons why early humans began to produce art, it has remained a consistent practice for centuries. Scholars narrow down the purposes of early art as a tool for recording the early cultures, experiences, and local narratives, such that these images and stories were passed onto the next generation. 

Despite the many exquisite examples of early artistic expression, the official history of art was recognized by the Romanesque era. Official art era timelines do not include cave paintings , sculptures, and other works of art from the Stone Age or the beautiful frescos produced in Egypt and Crete around 2000 BCE.

The reason behind this is that these early eras of artistic expression were bound to a relatively small geographical space. The official art eras that we will be discussing today span many countries and have mostly originated in Europe and parts of North and South America. Despite their lack of official recognition, these earliest examples of human artistic flair raise a lot of interesting questions. Where did early humans learn to draw so realistically, what inspired early humans to create art, and was art a practice that was taught in prehistoric civilizations? 

This article hopes to give you some insight into the ever-changing artistic style of the human creative mind, as we explore the complexities of the different art periods.

Reviewing the Timeline of the Different Art Periods

As with many areas of human history, it is impossible to delineate the different art periods with precision. The dates presented in the brackets below are approximations based on the progression of each movement across several countries. Many of the art periods overlap considerably, with some of the more recent eras occurring at the same time. Some eras last for a few thousand years while others span less than 10 years. Art is a continuous process of exploration, where more recent periods grow out of existing ones.

Art from ancient Greece, including its many temples, ruins, and archaeological sites have provided us with insight into the Classical styles that shaped the Western canon of art for centuries. It may seem strange for our account of the art period timeline to end 30 years ago. The concept of an art era seems inadequate to capture the variety of artistic styles that have grown since the turn of the 21st century.

There is a feeling among some art historians that the traditional concept of painting has died in our era of fast-track living and digital expanse, however, it would be unwise to think that traditional mediums do not have a place in the 21st century. We continue to share our unique human experiences through the medium of art , just as the cave people did outside of our modern system of classification.

A Comprehensive Art Movement Timeline

It is time to dive a little deeper into the social, cultural, and historical contexts of each of the distinct art eras we presented above. You will see how many eras take influence from those before them. Art, like human consciousness, is continuously evolving. It is also important to note that this art timeline is a history of Western and predominantly European art.

The Byzantine Era (330 – 1453): Eastern Roman Empire and Christianization

Byzantine art was a period of increased religious art production that was inspired by the Christianization of Greek culture and the prevailing art styles of the Roman Empire. The Byzantine art period commenced around 330 CE and lasted until 1453. Influential themes on this period included scenes from Greek Hellenistic mythology and Christian literature. Byzantine art is usually categorized into three distinct periods: the Early Byzantine, Middle Byzantine, and Late Byzantine eras.

The styles found in Byzantine painting were religious and devotional, and included angular contours, flat colors, and a distinct gold backdrop. Byzantine styles of the Roman Empire infiltrated architecture and other art forms such as mosaic making, interior decor, and religious buildings as reminders to society of the Christian faith, which promoted “the path to salvation”. Centers such as Constantinople were the hub of artistic expression since it was the center of the Byzantine Empire and the Catholic Church.  

The Romanesque Period (1000 – 1300): Sharing Information Through Art

Art historians typically consider the Romanesque art era to be the start of the art history timeline. Romanesque art developed during the rise of Christianity around 1000 CE. During this time, only a small percentage of the European population were literate. The ministers of the Christian church were typically part of this minority, and to spread the message of the bible, they needed an alternative method.

After the fall of the Western Roman Empire in 476 CE, art shifted from the ideals of Classical Greek and Roman art styles to focus on religious art promoted by Christianity. Christian objects, stories, deities, saints, and ceremonies were the exclusive subject of most Romanesque paintings and were intended on educating the masses about the values and beliefs of the Christian Church. 

Romanesque art was simple and included bold contours with clean blocks of color. There were also several different forms that artists adopted in Romanesque painting, including wall frescoes, mosaics, panel paintings, and book paintings.

Due to the Christian purpose behind Romanesque paintings, they are almost always symbolic. The relative importance of the figures within the paintings is shown by the size, with the more important figures appearing much larger. You can see that human faces are often distorted, and the stories depicted in these paintings tend to have a high emotional value. 

Romanesque paintings often include mythological creatures like dragons and angels, and almost always appear in churches. At the most fundamental level, paintings of the Romanesque period serve the purpose of spreading the word of the bible and Christianity. The name of this art era stems from round arches used in Roman architecture , often found in churches of the time.

The Gothic Era (1100 – 1500): Freedom and Fear Unite

One of the most famous eras, Gothic art grew out of the Romanesque period in France and is an expression of two contrasting feelings of the age. On the one hand, people were experiencing and celebrating a new level of freedom of thought and religious understanding. On the other, there was a fear that the world was coming to an end. You can clearly see the expression of these two contrasting tensions within the art of the Gothic period.

Just as in the Romanesque period, Christianity lay at the heart of the tensions of the Gothic era. As more freedom of thought emerged, and many pushed against conformity, the subjects of paintings became more diverse. The stronghold of the church began to dissipate.

Gothic paintings portrayed scenes from real life such as laborers in the field and hunting scenes. The focus moved away from divine beings and mystical creatures and tended towards the essence of what it meant to be human .

Human figures received a lot more attention during the Gothic period. Gothic artists fleshed out more realistic human faces, as they became more individual and less two-dimensional. The development of a three-dimensional perspective is thought to have facilitated this change. Painters also paid more attention to subjects of personal value such as clothing, which was typically portrayed realistically. 

Many historians believe that part of the reason why the subjects of art became more diverse during the Gothic era was due to the increased surface area for painting within churches. Gothic churches were more expansive than those of the Romanesque period, which was thought to represent the increased feelings of freedom at this time.

Alongside the newfound freedom of artistic expression, there was a deep fear that the end of the world was fast-approaching. This was accompanied by a gradual decline in faith in the church, which spurred the expansion of art outside of the church. In fact, towards the end of the Gothic era, works by Hieronymus von Bosch, Breughel, and others were unsuitable for placement within a church.

We do not know many individual artists who painted in the Romanesque period, as art was not about who painted it but rather the message it carried. Thus, the move away from the church can also be seen in the enormous increase in known artists from the Gothic period, including Giotto di Bondone . Schools of art began to emerge throughout France, Italy, Germany, the Netherlands, and other parts of Europe.

The Renaissance Era (1420 – 1520): The Revival of Humanism

The Renaissance era is possibly one of the most well-known, featuring artists like Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci. This era continued to focus on the individual human as its inspiration and took influence from the art and philosophy of the ancient Romans and Greeks. The Renaissance can be seen as a cultural rebirth and is usually understood as consisting of several art movements across Europe.

Sandro Botticelli was among the most popular early Renaissance painters, who was later rediscovered by the artists of the pre-Raphaelite movement. Early Renaissance styles of sculpture were further developed by artists such as Donatello, who was inspired by Classical sculpture and was considered to be one of the greatest sculptors in Florence. 

A part of this cultural rebirth was the returned focus on the natural and realistic world in which humans lived. The three-dimensional perspective became even more important to the art of the Renaissance, as is aptly demonstrated by Michelangelo’s statue of David . This statue harkened back to the works of the ancient Greeks as it was consciously created to be seen from all angles. Statues of the last two eras had been two-dimensional, intended to be viewed only from the front.

The same three-dimensional perspective carried over into the paintings of the Renaissance era. Frescoes that were invented 3000 years prior were revived by Renaissance painters . Compositions became more complex and the representation of humans became much more nuanced. Renaissance artists painted human bodies and faces in three dimensions with a strong emphasis on Realism.

The paint used during the Renaissance period also represented a shift from tempera paint to oil paint. The Renaissance period is often credited as the very start of great Dutch landscape paintings . Among the leading painters of the Italian High Renaissance was Raphael, who alongside Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci, encompassed the essence of ideal Renaissance styles and values. 

Mannerism (1520 – 1600): A Window into the Future of Kitsch

Of course, this heading is partly in jest. Not all of the art produced in this era is what we would understand today as “kitsch”. What we understand kitsch to mean today is often artificial, cheaply made, and without much ‘classic’ taste. Instead, the reason we describe the art of this period as being kitsch is due to the relative over-exaggeration that characterized it. Stemming from the newfound freedom of human expression in the Renaissance period, artists began to explore their own unique and individual artistic style, or manner.

Michelangelo was not free from the exaggeration that distinguishes the era of Mannerism. Some art historians do not consider some of his later paintings to be Renaissance-styled works. The expression of feelings, human gestures, and items of clothing were intentionally exaggerated in mannerist paintings.

The S-shaped curve of the human body that characterizes the Renaissance style was transformed into an unnatural contortion of the body. This was the first European style that attracted artists from across Europe to its birthplace in Italy.

The Baroque Era (1590 – 1760): The Glorification of Power and the Deception of the Eye

The progression of art celebrating the lives of humans over the power of the divine continued into the Baroque era. Kings, princes, and even popes began to prefer to see their own power and prestige celebrated through art than that of God. The over-exaggeration that classified Mannerism also continued into the Baroque period, with the scenes of paintings becoming increasingly unrealistic and magnificent.

Baroque paintings depicted scenes with monarchs ascending into the heavens, mingling with angels, and reaching closer to the divinity and power of God. Here, we really can see the progression of human self-importance, and although the subject matter does not move away entirely from religious symbolism, man was increasingly the central power within Baroque compositions.

New materials that glorify wealth and status like gold and marble become the prized materials for sculptures. Opposites of light and dark, warm and cold colors, and symbols of good and evil are emphasized beyond what is naturally occurring. Art academies increased in their numbers, as art became a way to display your wealth, power, and status.

Prominent artists of the Baroque period included figures like Caravaggio who was considered to be the master of light and  chiaroscuro  painting. Caravaggio amplified the concepts of divinity and human grandeur through his striking use of contrast in portraiture and religious painting. Another prolific master of Baroque portraiture was Rembrandt, whose theatrical self-portraits continue to inspire many painters who admire the traditions of Baroque art. 

The Rococo Art Period (1725 – 1780): French Aristocracy 

The paintings from the Rococo era are typical of the French aristocracy of the time. The name stems from the French word rocaille which means “shellwork”. The solid forms which characterized the Baroque period softened into light, air, and desire. Paintings of this era were no longer strong and powerful, but light and playful.

The colors were lighter and brighter, almost transparent in some instances. Many pieces of art from this period neglected religious themes, although some artists like Tiepolo did create frescos in many churches.

Much like the attitude of the French aristocracy of the time, the art of the Rococo period was totally removed from social reality. The shepherd’s idyll became the leading theme of this period, representing life as light and carefree, without the constraints of economic or social hardship.

Classicism (1770 – 1840): A Throwback to Classicism

Classicism, like the Rococo era, began in France in around 1770. In contrast to the Rococo era, however, Classism reverted to earlier, more serious styles of artistic expression. Much like the Renaissance period, Classisim took inspiration from classic Roman and Greek art .

The art created in the Classicism era reverted to strict forms, two-dimensional colors, and human figures. The tone of these paintings was undoubtedly strict. Colors lost their symbolism. The art produced in this era was used internationally to instill feelings of patriotism in the people of each nation. Parts of Classicism include Louis-Sieze, Empire, and Biedermeier.

Romanticism (1790 – 1850): Adding More Feeling to Art

You can see from the dates that this art era occurred at around the same time as Classicism. Romanticism is often seen as an emotionally charged reaction to the stern nature of Classicism. In contrast to the strict and realistic nature of the Classicism era, the paintings of the Romantic era were much more sentimental.

The exploration of emotions and the subconscious took center-stage in Romanticism. Many artists engaged with the natural environment and often took hikes to discover the ways that the natural world influenced their emotions.

There is no tangible or precisely determinable style to the art of the Romanticism period . English and French painters tended to focus on the effects of shadows and lights, while the art produced by German painters tended to have more gravity of thought to them. The Romantic painters were often criticized and even mocked for their interpretation of the world around them.

Realism (1850 – 1925): Objectivity over Subjectivity

As the Romanticism era was a reactionary movement to the Classicism period before it, so is Realism a reaction to Romanticism. In contrast to the beautiful and deeply emotional content of Romantic paintings, Realist artists presented both the good and beautiful, the ugly and evil. The reality of the world is presented in an unembellished way by Realism painters .

These artists attempt to show the world, people, nature, and animals, as they truly appeared. In Realism, there was a focus on the “obligation of art into truth”, as phrased by Gustave Courbet .

Just as with Romanticism, Realism was not popular with everyone. The paintings are not particularly pleasing to the eye and some critics have commented that despite the artist’s claims of Realism, erotic scenes somehow miss the real eroticism. Goethe criticizes Realism, saying that art should be ideal, not realistic. Schiller also calls Realism “mean”, indicating the harshness that many of the paintings portrayed.

Impressionism (1850 – 1895): Heralding the Era of Modern Art

Historians often paint the Impressionist movement as the beginning of the modern age. Impressionist art is said to have closed the book on Classical art and was one of the most easily recognizable art periods of the 20th century. Featuring artists like Claude Monet and Vincent van Gogh, Impressionism broke away from the smooth brush strokes and areas of solid color that characterized many art periods before it.

Initially, the word Impressionism was like a swear word in the art world, with critics believing that these artists did not paint with technique, but rather simply smeared paint onto a canvas. The brushstrokes indeed were a significant departure from those that came before them, sometimes becoming furiously expressive. Distinct shapes and lines disappeared into a whirlwind of colors. Individual dots of completely new colors were put together, particularly in the Pointillism variety of Impressionist paintings. The subjects of Impressionist paintings could often only be recognized from a distance.

A significant change that occurred during the Impressionist era was that painting began to take place en-plein-air or outside. Much of the Impressionists’ ability to capture the complex and ever-changing colors of the natural world were a result of this shift. Impressionist artists also began to move away from the desire to lecture and teach, preferring to create art for art’s sake . Galleries and international exhibitions became increasingly important to the spread of such philosophies in art and painting.

Symbolism (1886 – 1900): There is Always More Than Meets the Eye

Between 1886 and 1900, the era of Symbolism began to emerge in France as a literary movement that soon influenced the world of visual art. Artists became preoccupied with the representation of feelings and thoughts through objects. The common themes of the Symbolism movement included death, sickness, sin, and passion. The forms were mostly clear, a fact which art historians believe was in anticipation of the Art Nouveau era.

Post-Impressionism (1886 – 1905): Expression Over Naturalism

The post-Impressionist period followed the era of Impressionism and was defined by its rejection of Naturalism as it applied to the representation of color and expression. The art movement was also coined by the 20th century art critic Roger Fry in 1910 and was a term used to describe the development of art after the styles proposed by Édouard Manet. Post-Impressionism embraced the idea of deep symbolism rather than the mere representation of optical impressions drawn from nature.

Famous artists who followed the stylistic conventions of post-Impressionism include Paul Gauguin, Georges Seurat, Vincent van Gogh, and the iconic Paul Cézanne.

Although these artists operated independently, their works possess similarities that differ from the norms of Impressionism and offer a more emotionally charged atmosphere. While artists like Georges Seurat created his own unique style of painting, traditional mediums saw the use of innovative techniques that made each of these artists stand out from the rest of the art crowd of the early 20th century. Famous Fauvists such as Henri Matisse was also greatly influenced by the work of renowned post-Impressionists such as Paul Signac and John Russell. 

Art Nouveau (1890 – 1910): All That Glitters is Klimt

Although Gustav Klimt was by no means the most important artist in the Art Nouveau movement, he is one of the most well-known. His style perfectly encapsulates the Art Nouveau movement with soft, curved lines, lots of florals, and the stylistic characterization of human figures. In many countries, this style is known as the Secession style.

The art produced in the Art Nouveau period includes a lot of symmetry and is characterized by playfulness and youthfulness. Art Nouveau has a lot of political content, although many critics ignore this and hold the decorative aspects against it. Through the art of the Art Nouveau period, artists attempted to bring nature back into industrial cities.

Expressionism (1890 – 1914): Bringing a Political Edge to the Debate

In the Expressionism art era, we once again see a resurgence of the importance of the expression of subjective feelings. Expressionism originated in Germany and reflected many artists’ criticism of power. The artists within this movement were not interested in Naturalism or what things look like on the outside. As a result, there was a tinge of aggression in some Expressionist paintings, which are often archaic and expressive. Wassily Kandinsky was one such Modern artist who leveraged Expressionism styles in his abstract compositions to explore color theory , form, and pure abstraction in painting. 

Towards the beginning of the First World War, Expressionist paintings had a disturbing intensity about them. Expressionism was one such movement that reflected direct political messages through painting and a sort of violence in brushwork styles.  

Cubism (1906 – 1914): Distorting Representation

Beginning with two artists, Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, the Cubist movement was all about fragmentation, geometric shapes, and multiple perspectives. The dimensional planes of everyday objects were broken down into different geometric segments and put back together in a way that presented the object from multiple sides simultaneously. Cubism was a rejection of all the rules of traditional Western painting and has had a strong influence on the styles of art that have followed it.

Futurism (1909 – 1945): Artistic Anarchism

Futurism is less of an artistic style and more of an artistically inspired political movement. Founded by Tommaso Marinetti’s  Futurist Manifesto , which rejected social organization and Christian morality, the Futurist era was full of chaos, hostility, aggression, and anger. Although Marinetti was not a painter himself, painting became the most prominent form of art within the Futurist movement .

These artists vehemently rejected the rules of Classical painting, believing that everything that was passed through generations (beliefs, traditions, religion) was suspicious and dangerous. The militant nature of the Futurist movement resulted in many people believing that it was too closely affiliated with Fascism.

Dadaism (1912 – 1920): Life is Nonsense

Dada means a great many things and nothing at all. The writer Hugo Ball discovered that this small word has several different meanings in different languages and at the same time, as a word, it meant nothing at all. The Dadaism movement is based on the concepts of illogic and provocation and was seen as not only an art movement, but an anti-war movement.

The illogic of existing rules, norms, traditions, and values was called into question by the Dadaist movement. The art movement encompassed several art forms including writing, poetry, dance, and performance art . Part of the movement was to call into question what could be classified as “art”. Artists such as Henri-Robert-Marcel Duchamp also leveraged Dadaism and Surrealism to define the foundations of conceptual art, which paved the path forward for later Modern art movements. 

Dadaism represents the beginnings of action art in which painting becomes more than just a portrait of reality, but rather an amalgamation of the social, cultural, and subjective parts of being human.

Constructivism (1913 – 1930): The Union of Cubism and Futurism

In 1913, the Russian Konstruktivizm movement emerged with the abstract paintings of Vladimir Tatlin, which went on to influence the development of abstract modern art itself. The art period is also recognized as a historical movement that involved the arrangement of geometric forms in a harmonious manner. Painters who explored Constructivism rejected bright colors and expanded the styles found in earlier movements such as Suprematism.

The conceptual theory behind the era was shaped by Jean Piaget, whose work in educational psychology and cognitive development expanded on how humans create meaning and explored the relationships between human experiences and their ideas. The theory also described the idea that human create their own knowledge.

Bold typography and constructed photomontages became the essence of Konstruktivizm  with minimal color palettes. The era proved to be incredibly influential in the fields of design and architecture, which shifted from political connotations to a dynamic design style throughout the 1920s. Famous Russian artist Kazimir Malevich also coined the term “Constructivist” while referring to the work of Alexander Rodchenko, a well-known Russian designer. 

The Harlem Renaissance (1920 – 1930): The Revival of African-American Culture

The Harlem Renaissance was a decade of significant cultural rebirth for the African-American communities of America in the 1920s. The period was characterized by the recognition and production of intellectual and cultural art forms spanning music, literature, visual art, poetry, politics, dance, and fashion produced by African-American individuals.

The period is also recognized as the New Negro Movement and encompassed a variety of unique Contemporary art styles that focused on relaying the Black experience from a non-Western perspective in light of the historical negation of African-American scholars and artists. 

The Harlem Renaissance originated in the New York neighborhood of Harlem, which debuted many cultural icons that promoted African-American culture and the recognition of Black artists in the early 20th century. The period fostered a strong commitment to political activism, which went on to influence important movements such as the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s. 

Surrealism (1920 – 1930): Subconscious Realities

As if the pure illogic nature of the Dadaism movement was not outlandish enough, the Surrealists took the dream world to be the fountain of all truth. One of the most famous Surrealist artists is Salvador Dalí, and you are bound to know his painting Melting Watch (1954).

Surrealism was fundamentally psychoanalytical and many Surrealist artists would paint directly from their dreams.

Sometimes dealing with uncomfortable concepts, hidden desires, and taboos, Surrealism was a direct critique of the ingrained ideas and beliefs of the bourgeoise. As you can imagine, this style of art was not popular when it began, but it has greatly influenced the world of modern art.

New Objectivity (1925 – 1965): Cold and Technical

The different art periods from the 1960s to the Contemporary era mark the height of Modern art and the development of art styles that proved significantly influential in redefining notions of representation, visual aesthetics, and postwar culture.

The New Objectivity movement of the 1960s turned towards themes that dealt with social and political critique. The turbulence of the war left many people searching for some kind of order to hold onto, and this can be seen clearly in the art of New Objectivity.

The images represented in New Objectivity were often cold, unemotional, and technical, with some common subjects such as the radio and lightbulbs. As is the case with many Modern movements in art , there were several different wings to the New Objectivity movement.

Abstract Expressionism (1948 – 1962): Stepping Away from Europe

The 1960s also produced one of the most impactful art periods shaped by Abstract Expressionism. The art world saw many post-World War II painters from the United States embrace abstract approaches to painting as a means of expressing emotion. Abstract Expressionism is said to be the first art movement to originate outside of Europe. Emerging from North America, Abstract Expressionism focused on color-field painting and action paintings. Rather than using a canvas and a brush, buckets of paint would be poured on the ground, and artists used their fingers to create images.

With well-known artists of the 1960s include figures like Marc Tobey and Jackson Pollock , who piloted the style of the art movement. The application of the paint in Abstract Expressionism was sometimes so thick that the finished piece would take on a form unlike any painting before it. As with all art, there are always critics, with conservative Americans during the cold war calling it “un-American.”

Pop Art (1955 – 1969): Art is Everything

For the artists of Pop art period, almost every aspect of popular culture in the world was art. From advertisements, tin cans, toothpaste, and toilets, everything was art. Pop art developed simultaneously in the United States and England and was characterized by uniform blocks of color and clear lines and contours. Painting and graphic art became influenced by Photorealism and serial prints.

One of the most famous English Pop artists was David Hockney, although only a few of his lifetime paintings were in this movement. Another iconic legend of the Pop art era in the 1960s was Andy Warhol, whose most popular artworks were inspired by vivid imagery from popular culture and Hollywood’s finest celebrities, including Marilyn Monroe and Elizabeth Taylor. 

Neo-Expressionism (1980 – 1989): Modern Fauvism

Starting in the 1980s, Neo-Expressionism emerged with large-format representational and life-affirming paintings. Berlin was a central point for this new movement, and the designs typically featured cities and big-city life. The name Neo-Expressionism emerged from Fauvism , and although the artists in Berlin disbanded in 1989, some artists continued to paint in this style in New York. 

Art is a fundamental part of what it means to be human. Many of the troubles and joys we experience can only be captured accurately through artistic expression. We hope that this short summary of the art periods timeline has helped you gain more insight into the contexts surrounding some of the most famous works of art.

We’ve also created a web story about art periods.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is an art period.

In art history, an art period is understood as a particular span of time that encompasses various artists and their artworks, whose works are classified under a particular style or movement within art. Art periods indicate eras of significant change or evolution in the trajectory of art and the way it is understood by society. Art periods usually highlight a focused goal and may encompass multiple art movements. 

What Is the Difference Between an Art Period and an Art Movement?

Art movements differ from art periods since art periods are categorized and understood according to time and the different eras they encompass, while art movements are formed by artists in a conscious manner and share a common philosophy. Art periods are used to classify artists according to the style of the time and is a broader category that can encompass more than one art movement. 

What Is the Current Art Period Called?

The art period of the present is known as the Contemporary art period, which encompasses art and new styles of art produced from the late-1970s until the current era. The Contemporary art period is characterized by art formed within the context of a globalized and technologically advanced era. 

Why Was the Renaissance Art Period Important?

The Renaissance art period is a broad art era that is considered significant for the many cultural changes that occurred in multiple disciplines in Europe. The era was recognized as a widespread period of cultural rebirth that saw the revival of Classical subjects across philosophy, literature, visual art, and science. The Renaissance also included the Northern Renaissance, which occurred from the late-15th century and spread to the North of the Alps. The Northern Renaissance was considered particularly important since it birthed many advanced oil painting techniques and approaches in printmaking. 

Isabella studied at the University of Cape Town in South Africa and graduated with a Bachelor of Arts majoring in English Literature & Language and Psychology. Throughout her undergraduate years, she took Art History as an additional subject and absolutely loved it. Building on from her art history knowledge that began in high school, art has always been a particular area of fascination for her. From learning about artworks previously unknown to her, or sharpening her existing understanding of specific works, the ability to continue learning within this interesting sphere excites her greatly.

Her focal points of interest in art history encompass profiling specific artists and art movements, as it is these areas where she is able to really dig deep into the rich narrative of the art world. Additionally, she particularly enjoys exploring the different artistic styles of the 20 th century, as well as the important impact that female artists have had on the development of art history.

Learn more about Isabella Meyer and the Art in Context Team .

Cite this Article

Isabella, Meyer, “Art Periods – A Detailed Look at the Art History Timeline.” Art in Context. December 17, 2020. URL: https://artincontext.org/art-periods/

Meyer, I. (2020, 17 December). Art Periods – A Detailed Look at the Art History Timeline. Art in Context. https://artincontext.org/art-periods/

Meyer, Isabella. “Art Periods – A Detailed Look at the Art History Timeline.” Art in Context , December 17, 2020. https://artincontext.org/art-periods/ .

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The link between art and history, office for the arts announces 2016 arts prize winners, campus & community.

Graduate student teacher Rosie Busiakiewicz (from left, photo 1) engages in a discussion with Beminet Desalegn, Danielle Reeves, Sophie Harrington, and other CRLS students during a visit to the Harvard Art Museums.

Kris Snibbe/Harvard Staff Photographer

Students, teachers, and student teachers make the connection at the Harvard Art Museums

By Jennifer Doody Harvard Correspondent

Date April 19, 2016 December 18, 2017

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Cambridge Rindge and Latin (CRLS) students are building a special connection to the Harvard Art Museums with the museums’ Graduate Student Teacher program , which the students say has changed the way they experience art and history.

“In history class, we usually look at the pictures and talk about the context, but here we get to really experience it,” said Beminet Desalegn, whose Advanced Placement (AP) U.S. history class recently visited the museums to study images of presidents and the history of African-American oppression in the U.S. “You get to make up your own mind about these events.”

AP history student Nusrat Jahan agreed: “It’s not very interesting to just read about past events. But when you come here and see the art made by people actually living in that time, when you think about it and talk about it or even re-create a work by drawing it, you get a more in-depth understanding of that time and what people were going through. We get to see the context, and really experience it ourselves.”

The partnership program brings about 120 students into the Harvard Art Museums each semester. Harvard Graduate School of Education (HGSE) student teachers work with CRLS teachers to design and teach classes that incorporate the museums’ art with classroom curriculum.

“We create tours that connect back to what they’re learning in class,” said HGSE student teacher Jessica Paik. “We encourage them to make connections between the work of art and the concepts they’re studying — to make those connections analytically. It’s very helpful to master that skill. Just knowing the facts is not enough: History is not just facts; it’s a story. It has a lot to do with our perspectives and our analysis.”

AP U.S. history teacher Marlin Kann, who is in his first year with the partnership program, said the program “has really increased the sophistication of the students’ understanding of history. They not only look forward to it as a wonderful event, but it’s raised their understanding of what history is.”

Students examine materials from different eras of American history. Jessica Paik, a student at HGSE, talks to students about John Singleton Copley's portrait of U.S. President John Adams.

As an example, Kann recalled the students examining art works collectively titled “Medals of Dishonor,” featuring several cast-metal narrative reliefs made by American artist David Smith in the 1930s. Funded by the federal government’s New Deal program, each item bears a unique anti-war theme.

“The medals also speak to the rise of fascism, using medicine as a weapon, civilian bombings, and so on,” he said. “They’re not only connected to history, but the context is also within the prism of the 1930s. It helps make these things very real to the students, and it challenges you to analyze images as an historian, rather than solely as an artistic audience.”

“School visits to museums can feel like field trips, but our student teachers are trying to create real-world connections,” said David Odo , the museums’ director of student programs and research curator for University collections initiatives, who oversees the program. “We want to help CRLS teachers reach the high goals they have set for themselves and their students, and we want to give the students a strong entry point to challenge their assumptions about the world. Harvard Art Museums is a place for these students to think, and grow — and belong.”

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Les Demoiselles d'Avignon

In both content and execution, this painting shocked the art world and Picasso’s close friends. Although nude women as subjects were not unusual, blatantly portraying prostitutes in aggressively sexual postures was extraordinary. Picasso's studies of tribal art are most evident in the mask-like rendered faces, imagery that suggests their sexuality as being not just aggressive, but primitive. Picasso radically took his experimentation with space to another level in this work. He abandoned three-dimensionality, which had been customary since the Renaissance, and instead presented a flattened picture plane that is broken up into geometric shards. For example, the leg of the woman on the left is painted as if seen from several points of view simultaneously, making it difficult to distinguish the leg from the negative space around it.

Kissing Coppers

Although the artist remains relatively anonymous, Banksy’s art has become some of the world’s most recognizable images. With his signature stencil aesthetic, his creations utilize satire, subversion, dark humor, and irony to create messages for the masses. In this iconic image, two British male police officers in full uniform kiss. Composed on the side of a Brighton pub, the piece caused quite a stir, provoking both members of the public and the police force to show up for their own prized selfies. It was replaced with a fresh copy protected by a Perspex case when the original was removed and flown to the United States to be sold at auction. Bansky is largely responsible for catapulting guerrilla work into the mainstream as a viable form of art.

Gold Marilyn Monroe

Inspired by his work as a highly paid commercial illustrator in New York, Andy Warhol’s screen-printed images of everyday consumer objects and visual imagery from mainstream media would come to define the Pop Art movement. As reigning king, he helped blur the boundaries between high and low art, bringing what was normally considered “commercial” into the fine art lexicon. His iconic work featuring Marilyn Monroe became a testament to both the artist’s and society’s obsession with fame. After her death from an overdose of sleeping pills, in 1962 the world became ever more obsessed with her fragile legend. Warhol’s likenesses of her, borrowed from a publicity still from her movie Niagara, helped feed that obsession by perpetuating her image within celebrity popular culture.

Untitled (Skull)

Transitioning from graffiti artist on the streets to celebrity gallery darling in only a few short years, Jean-Michel Basquiat is one of the most celebrated modern artists. His work was a refreshing jumble of many different styles and techniques, often mixing words and text with abstracts and symbols, resulting in a highly personal iconography. In this early canvas-based work, painted when he was only twenty years old, a patchwork skull is featured, a pictorial equivalent of the monster from Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, constructed as a sutured sum of incongruent parts. Suspended before a background that suggests aspects of the New York City subway system, the skull is at once a contemporary graffitist's riff on a long Western tradition of self-portraiture, and the "signature piece" of a streetwise bohemian.

Known for his brightly colored and cheerful works, in which Japanese pop culture and the country’s rich artistic legacy merge, Takashi Murakami has enjoyed astronomical fame in the contemporary art world. His Pop Art-like aesthetics catapulted modern Japanese obsessions such as anime into the mainstream art world. His work is typified in this triptych, combining the artist’s signature avatar Mr. DOB, who sits centrally poised and tragically laughing. 727 is a reference to the Boeing American airplanes that flew over Murakami’s childhood home while heading to U.S. military bases, a direct nod to the U.S. presence in post-WWII Japan that he often revisits in his art. Through this type of work, he crafts a subtle critique of Japan’s contemporary consciousness as well as the West’s intruding influence upon it.

The first example of a “Renaissance man,” Leonardo da Vinci was a genius in many fields, including invention, painting, sculpture, and architecture. Known as the quintessential key figure of the Italian High Renaissance, his artworks contributed greatly to the aesthetic and techniques popularized during the time. The Mona Lisa is an iconic example, still revered and studied today, for these exact qualities. The innovative half-length portrayal shows a woman, said to be the wife of a Florentine merchant, seated on a chair. The use of sfumato creates a sense of soft calmness, which emanates from her being, and infuses the background landscape with a deep realism. Chiaroscuro creates a profound depth in this piece, which keeps the eye moving across the painting. But it is her enigmatic smile that magnetizes the viewer, along with the mystery of what's behind that famous smile.

Susanna and the Elders

Centuries ahead of her time, Baroque painter Artemisia Gentileschi was one of the first and only female artists to achieve success in the seventeenth century. She was known for her realism and accomplished use of chiaroscuro, but it was her radical knack at placing women and their stories at the center of her works that presented a unique personal perspective on the cultural and social norms of the period, hundreds of years prior to the birth of Feminism. Boldly portrayed in this accomplished piece, painted by the artist when she was only 17 years old, two voyeuristic elders spy on the virtuous Susanna while she is bathing, then attempt to blackmail her into having sexual relations with them with false accusations of adultery. Susanna's response is uncommonly central to the painting, demonstrating Gentileschi's unprecedented psychological realism, particularly in her presentation of women.

Balloon Flower (Red)

Jeff Koons derives inspiration from the role of material objects in our lives and the consumerism of society as a whole. Whether children’s toys, porcelain figurines, or glossy pages of a magazine selling products and lifestyles targeted to our personal pleasures, tastes, and desires, he blows up our obsessions with tongue firmly planted in cheek. He also creates an ingenious reversal of economic logic in the way that many of his pieces look cheap but are expensive, or are expensive versions of items initially made to be cheap, therefore questioning the fickleness of audience, market, and commercial success. His most famous works to date are towering sculptures of balloon animals; this one stands over ten feet tall, weighing in excess of a ton. According to the artist, its shiny exterior is intended to "manipulate and seduce" unlike the cheap rubber it imitates. This intention is duly carried out by the highly immaculate reflective material that lures a viewer in so close that the overall composition fades and they are left confronted with their own distorted and imperfect mirror image.

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What is art history?

Art history is the study of objects of art considered within their time period. Art historians analyze visual arts’ meaning (painting, sculpture, architecture) at the time they were created.

A definition of art history

Art history doesn’t consist in simply listing all the art movements and placing them on a timeline. It is the study of objects of art considered within their time period. Art historians analyze visual arts’ meaning (painting, sculpture, architecture) at the time they were created. Also, another of art history’s mission is to establishes authorial origins of artworks, i.e. discovering who created a particular artwork, when, when and for what reason.

Iconography is a major part of art history. It consists in analyzing the symbolism of works of arts. For instance, art historians identify the visual elements of a painting and interpret its meaning. Art historians are interested in what the works of art represented at the time they were created. It is a way to learn about the civilizations of the past.

Why is art history important?

" Why study art history when there are many other careers to pursue?" Well, if we consider the discipline differently from a career standpoint, we realize that it serves fundamental purposes. 

Understanding cultures

Visual art recounts stories of our past, it gives an account of past events. Art history allows us to look back and understand how our civilization evolved over the centuries. It is a way to know ourselves better. Why do we have certain values? What shaped the way we think and our vision of the world?

Develop critical thinking

Studying art history is really not about memorizing dates, artists’ names, art movements, etc. Instead, it drives you to analyze paintings, photographs, sculptures, etc. To support your analysis, you must build rational and convincing arguments, hence developing your critical thinking. 

Jobs in art history

What jobs can I get with a degree in art history ? Is a question you are probably asking yourself. There are many career paths for art history majors. The more obvious one are college professors and museum curators. To practice certain art-related professions one must have a solid background in art history: 

• Art administrator
• Exhibition organizer
• Antiques dealer
• Arts consultant 
• Art gallery manager
• Journalist 

Studying this discipline, during  gap year program in art history abroad , for instance,   allows you to develop the following professional skills:

• Visual awareness
• Critical thinking to build strong arguments
• Presenting ideas clearly and effectively
• Knowledge of other cultures’ values
• Developing an open mind
• Historical and cultural knowledge
• Writing skills
• Oral communication (oral presentation in public)
• Gathering and analyzing information
• Time management
• Research methods

Most of those skills are transferable and can be used outside the field of art. Critical thinking, time management and being to make a case for your ideas are essential in any mid-management to top management positions. 

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• 21 November 2023

How AI is expanding art history

• David G. Stork 0

David G. Stork is an adjunct professor at Stanford University in California, an honorary professor at University College London and a visiting fellow at the Warburg Institute in London. He is the author of Pixels and Paintings: Foundations of Computer-Assisted Connoisseurship .

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The colours of Gustav Klimt’s lost 1901 work Medicine were recovered by artificial intelligence. Credit: IanDagnall Computing/Alamy

Artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning and computer vision are revolutionizing research — from medicine and biology to Earth and space sciences. Now, it’s art history’s turn.

For decades, conventionally trained art scholars have been slow to take up computational analysis, dismissing it as too limited and simplistic. But, as I describe in my book Pixels and Paintings , out this month, algorithms are advancing fast, and dozens of studies are now proving the power of AI to shed new light on fine-art paintings and drawings.

For example, by analysing brush strokes, colour and style, AI-driven tools are revealing how artists’ understanding of the science of optics has helped them to convey light and perspective. Programs are recovering the appearance of lost or hidden artworks and even computing the ‘meanings’ of some paintings, by identifying symbols, for example.

It’s challenging. Artworks are complicated compositionally and materially and are replete with human meaning — nuances that algorithms find hard to fathom.

AI reads text from ancient Herculaneum scroll for the first time

Most art historians still rely on their individual expertise when judging artists’ techniques by eye, backed up with laboratory, library and leg work to pin down dates, materials and provenance. Computer scientists, meanwhile, find it easier to analyse 2D photographs or digital images than layers of oil pigments styled with a brush or palette knife. Yet, collaborations are springing up between computer scientists and art scholars.

Early successes of such ‘computer-assisted connoisseurship’ fall into three categories: automating conventional ‘by eye’ analyses; processing subtleties in images beyond what is possible through normal human perception; and introducing new approaches and classes of question to art scholarship. Such methods — especially when enhanced by digital processing of large quantities of images and text about art — are beginning to empower art scholars, just as microscopes and telescopes have done for biologists and astronomers.

Analysing vast data sets

Consider pose — an important property that portraitists exploit for formal, expressive and even metaphorical ends. Some artists and art movements favour specific poses. For example, during the Renaissance period in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, royals, political leaders and betrothed people were often painted in profile, to convey solemnity and clarity.

Primitivist artists — those lacking formal art training, such as nineteenth-century French painter Henri Rousseau, or those who deliberately emulate an untutored simplicity, such as French artist Henri Matisse in the early twentieth century — often paint everyday people face-on, to support a direct, unaffected style. Rotated or tipped poses can be powerful: Japanese masters of ukiyo-e (‘pictures of the floating world’), a genre that flourished from the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries, often showed kabuki actors and geishas in twisted or contorted poses, evoking drama, dynamism, unease or sensuality.

Using AI methods, computers can analyse such poses in tens of thousands of portraits in as little as an hour, much quicker than an art scholar can. Deep neural networks — machine-learning systems that mimic biological neural networks in brains — can detect the locations of key points, such as the tip of the nose or the corners of the eyes, in a painting. They then accurately infer the angles of a subject’s pose around three perpendicular axes for realistic and highly stylized portraits.

Consciousness: what it is, where it comes from — and whether machines can have it

For example, earlier this year, researchers used deep neural networks to analyse poses and gender across more than 20,000 portraits, spanning a wide range of periods and styles, to help art scholars group works by era and art movement. There were some surprises — the tilts of faces and bodies in self-portraits vary with the stance of the artist, and the algorithms could tell whether the self-portraitists were right- or left-handed ( J.-P. Chou and D. G. Stork Electron. Imag. 35 , 211-1–211-13; 2023 ).

Similarly, AI tools can reveal trends in the compositions of landscapes, colour schemes, brush strokes, perspective and more across major art movements. The models are most accurate when they incorporate an art historian’s knowledge of factors such as social norms, costumes and artistic styles.

Extending perception

By-eye art analysis can vary depending on how different scholars perceive an artwork. For example, lighting is an expressive feature, from the exaggerated light–dark contrast (chiaroscuro) and gloomy style (tenebrism) of sixteenth-century Italian painter Caravaggio to the flat, graphic lighting in twentieth-century works by US artist Alex Katz. Many experiments have shown that even careful viewers are poor at estimating the overall direction of, or inconsistencies in, illumination throughout a scene. That’s why the human eye is often fooled by photographs doctored by cutting and pasting a figure from one into another, for example.

Computer methods can do better. For example, one source of information about lighting is the pattern of brightness along the outer boundary (or occluding contour) of an object, such as a face. Leonardo da Vinci understood in the fifteenth century that this contour will be bright where the light strikes it perpendicularly but darker where the light strikes it at a sharp angle. Whereas he used his optical analysis to improve his painting, ‘shape from shading’ and ‘occluding contour’ algorithms use this rule in reverse, to infer the direction of illumination from the pattern of brightness along a contour.

Leonardo da Vinci understood that an object will appear bright where light strikes it perpendicularly, and dim where rays fall at a glancing angle. Credit: Alamy

Take Johannes Vermeer’s 1665 painting Girl with a Pearl Earring , for example. Illumination analysis considers highlights in the girl’s eyes, reflection from the pearl and the shadow cast by her nose and across the face. The occluding-contour algorithm gives a more complete understanding of lighting in this tableau, revealing Vermeer’s extraordinary consistency in lighting — and proving that this character study was executed with a model present ( M. K. Johnson et al. Proc. SPIE 6810 , 68100I; 2008 ).

Similarly, advanced computer methods can spot deliberate lighting inconsistencies in works such as those by twentieth-century Belgian surrealist René Magritte. They have also proved their worth in debunking theories, such as UK artist David Hockney’s bold hypothesis from 2000 that some painters as early as Jan van Eyck (roughly 1390–1441) secretly used optical projections for their works, a quarter of a millennium earlier than most scholars think optics were used in this way (see Nature 412 , 860; 2001 ). Occluding-contour analysis, homographic analysis (quantification of differences in 3D shapes at various sizes and pose angles), optical-ray tracing and other computational techniques have systematically overturned Hockney’s theory much more conclusively than have arguments put forth by other scholars using conventional art-historical methods.

Recovering lost cultural heritage

Computer methods have also recovered missing attributes or portions of incomplete artworks, such as the probable style and colours of ghost paintings — works that have been painted over and are later revealed by imaging in X-rays or infrared radiation — such as Two Wrestlers by Vincent van Gogh. This painting, from before 1886, was mentioned by the artist in a letter but considered lost until it was found beneath another in 2012.

Neural networks, trained on images and text data, have also been used to recover the probable colours of parts of Gustav Klimt’s lost ceiling painting, Medicine (see go.nature.com/47rx8c2 ). The original, a representation of the interweaving of life and death presented to the University of Vienna in 1901, was lost during the Second World War, when the castle in which it was kept for safety was burnt down by Nazis to prevent the work from falling into the hands of Allied powers. Only preparatory sketches and photographs remain.

Even more complex was the digital recovery of missing parts of Rembrandt’s The Night Watch (1642) — which was trimmed to fit into a space in Amsterdam’s city hall — on the basis of a contemporary copy by Gerrit Lundens in oil on an oak panel. The algorithms learnt how Lundens’ copy deviated slightly from Rembrandt’s original, and ‘corrected’ it to recreate the missing parts of the original (see go.nature.com/46wvzmj ).

Algorithms have inferred the direction of lighting in Johannes Vermeer’s painting Girl with a Pearl Earring (1665) from the bright edge of the girl’s face. Credit: Pictures From History/UIG/Getty

To realize the full power of AI in the study of art, we will need the same foundations as other domains: access to immense data sets and computing power. Museums are placing ever more art images and supporting information online, and enlightened funding could accelerate ongoing efforts to collect and organize such data for research.

Scholars anticipate that much recorded information about artworks will one day be available for computation — ultra-high-resolution images of every major artwork (and innumerable lesser ones), images taken using the extended electromagnetic spectrum (X-ray, ultraviolet, infrared), chemical and physical measurements of pigments, every word written and lecture video recorded about art in every language. After all, AI advances such as the chatbot ChatGPT and image generator Dall-E have been trained with nearly a terabyte of text and almost one billion images from the web, and extensions under way will use data sets many times larger.

But how will art scholars use existing and future computational tools? Here is one suggestion. Known artworks from the Western canon alone that have been lost to fire, flood, earthquakes or war would fill the walls of every public museum in the world. Some of them, such as Diego Velázquez’s Expulsion of the Moriscos (1627), were considered the pinnacle of artistic achievement before they were destroyed. Tens of thousands of paintings were lost in the Second World War and the same number of Chinese masterpieces in Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution, to mention just two. The global cultural heritage is impoverished and incomplete as a result.

Computation allows art historians to view the task of recovering the appearance of lost artworks as a problem of information retrieval and integration, in which the data on a lost work lie in surviving preparatory sketches, copies by the artist and their followers, and written descriptions. The first tentative steps in recovering lost artworks have shown promise, although much work lies ahead.

Art scholarship has expanded over centuries, through the introduction of new tools. Computation and AI seem poised to be the next step in the never-ending intellectual adventure of understanding and interpreting our immense cultural heritage.

Nature 623 , 685-687 (2023)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-023-03604-3

Competing Interests

The author declares no competing interests.

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From Picasso and Hokusai's Prussian Blue to Vermeer's shade of red: A history of art in 7 colours

Kelly Grovier traces the pigments that make up hidden layers in masterpieces – some of them toxic – from Picasso and Hokusai's Prussian Blue to Vermeer's shade of red.

Colours have minds of their own. They keep secrets and hide shady pasts. Every colour we encounter in a great work of art, from the ultramarine that Johannes Vermeer wove into the turban of his Girl with a Pearl Earring to the volatile vermillion that inflames the fiery sky of Edvard Munch's The Scream, brings with it an extraordinary backstory. These histories unlock surprising layers in masterpieces we thought we knew by heart. This fascinating and forgotten language that paintings and sculptures use to speak to us is the subject of my new book, The Art of Colour: The History of Art in 39 Pigments . Colour, we discover, is never what it seems.

More like this:

- The colour of betrayal

- The disgusting origins of purple

- The artwork that hid a racist message

Consider, for instance, Prussian Blue, the captivating hue that unexpectedly connects Hokusai's The Great Wave off Kanagawa, 1831, with Pablo Picasso's The Blue Room, 1901. Had it not been for an accident in an alchemist's lab in Berlin in 1706, such works, and countless others besides by Edgar Degas and Claude Monet, would never have pulsed with such enduring mystery or power.

It all started when a German occultist by the name of Johann Konrad Dippel bungled a recipe for an illicit elixir that he believed could cure all human ailments. Born in Frankenstein's Castle three decades earlier, Dippel (who, some suspect, inspired Mary Shelley's Doctor Frankenstein) was about to discard his botched brew of soggy wood ash and bovine blood when the dye-maker with whom he shared his workshop suddenly stopped him.

Fresh out of scarlet dye, the colour-maker grabbed Dippel's rejected solution, chucked in a few fistfuls of crushed crimson beetles, threw the pot back on the fire, and started stirring. Soon, the two were staring with astonishment at what was bubbling back at them in the cauldron: nothing remotely red at all, but a deep shimmering blue that could rival the resplendence of ultra-expensive ultramarine, which for centuries had been prized as a precious pigment far dearer than gold.

It wasn't long before artists were reaching for Prussian Blue (so christened after the region of its serendipitous concoction) with both hands, lacing their works with fresh levels of mystery and intrigue. This is the thing about colour: it never forgets. Just as the etymology of a given word can augment our reading of the poems and novels in which that word appears, the origin of a colour shapes the meaning of the masterpieces in which it features.

Invented by Stone Age cave-dwellers and savvy scientists, seedy charlatans and greedy industrialists, the colours that define the works of everyone from Caravaggio to Cornelia Parker, Giotto to Georgia O'Keeffe, vibrate with riveting tales. Although Van Gogh might have sculpted a smidgen of so-called Indian Yellow into the shape of a moon in the corner of The Starry Night, 1889, the sharp pigment still retains an aura of its anguished origin – distilled as it was from the urine of cows fed nothing more than mango leaves. A colour's making is a colour's meaning.

What follows is a selection of great works whose deepest meanings are unlocked by exploring the origins and adventures of the colours inside them.

1. Black: Bone black in John Singer Sargent's Madame X (1883-4)

When John Singer Sargent unveiled his portrait of Virginie Amélie Avegno Gautreau, the wife of a French banker, at the Paris salon in 1884, it sparked a scandal. It is said that the artist's decision to let the right strap of her slinky black satin dress slip seductively down her shoulder (a detail he later removed) was more than contemporary eyes could handle. But there is something more than a risqué wardrobe malfunction that unsettles the painting. Sargent has eerily inflected Gautreau's pale skin (which he whipped up from a curious combination of lead white, rose madder, vermillion and viridian) with a pinch of ancient bone black – historically derived from the pulverised remains of incinerated skeletons. The secret ingredient complicates Gautreau's gorgeously gangrenous complexion. Bone black transforms the portrait into a soulful meditation on the fleetingness of flesh, blurring the line between desire and decomposition.

2. Red: Rose madder in Vermeer's The Girl with a Wine Glass (1659-60)

There is an uncomfortable chemistry between the young woman at its centre of Vermeer's painting The Girl with a Wine Glass and her sleazy suitor, whom we see suspiciously sousing her with sips of alcohol while a chaperone nods off in the corner. To intensify the tension, Vermeer has ingeniously soaked his subject's dress in rose madder – a pigment derived from the fiery red roots of the herbaceous perennial plant Rubia tinctorum . Boiled, the roots release an organic compound called alizarin that can be squeezed into a radiant ruby liquor that intoxicates the eye. The lecherous suitor may be doling out the drinks, but the power of the painting pours from her.

3. Orange: Chrome orange in Sir Frederic Leighton's Flaming June (1895)

Sir Frederic Leighton's famous portrait of a slumbering nymph, Flaming June , might appear, at first glance, to epitomise the breeziness of a carefree summer's snooze. For some, the way she slips beneath the level of the horizon that gleams behind her, and the sight of a sprig of lethal oleander within easy reach of her nestled arm introduce themes of death and burial to the seemingly lazy scene. But Leighton has cleverly draped her pliant physique in acres of chrome orange – a relatively new pigment whose production in the 19th Century was made possible by the discovery of vast subterranean deposits near Paris and Baltimore, Maryland, of a deceptively dull and dingy mineral, chromite, that can be alchemised into transcendent radiance. Cloaked in chrome orange, Flaming June is not a mortal about to perish or be buried, but becomes a treasure forever about to be mined – an inextinguishable emblem of endlessly renewable beauty.

4. Yellow: Lead-tin yellow in Rembrandt's Belshazzar's Feast, c 1636-38

In 1940, a researcher at the Doerner Institute in Munich hit upon one of the greatest discoveries in art history. It was then that Richard Jacobi succeeded in reverse-engineering the secret recipe for yellow that old masters had once handed down, generation to generation, for centuries, but which had, since the middle of the 18th Century, mysteriously disappeared from paintings without a trace. Jacobi worked out that heating a mixture of lead monoxide and tin dioxide in precise proportions could produce the delicious range of yellows from murky mustard to zesty chiffon that Titian used to illuminate rumpled robes in Bacchus and Ariadne, and that Rembrandt relied upon for the words written by God on the wall of his Belshazzar's Feast.

5. Green: Emerald green in Berthe Morisot's Summer's Day (1879)

Some suspect that Scheele's Green, a toxic green pigment found in the wallpaper that adorned the exiled Napoleon Bonaparte's bedroom in Saint Helena, might have slowly poisoned him, resulting in his death in 1821. Half a century later, the French painter Berthe Morisot would reach for emerald green, a close cousin of the sinister Scheele's Green, to wallpaper the sky in her painting Summer's Day. Though the work appears to capture a pair of young women in a boat, leisurely adrift on dappled water, there is something disquieting about the air they breathe. Also laced with arsenic, Emerald Green lends an uneasy verdancy to the scene – one that tosses and turns.

6. Purple: Cobalt Violet in Claude Monet's Irises (1914-1926)

Art and luck go hand in hand. A fortunate coincidence in the 19th Century involving the invention of cobalt violet, the first purpose-built purple pigment, and the invention of portable paint tubes that artists could take with them outdoors would prove indispensable for Impressionists keen to capture how shadows fall in nature. "I have finally discovered the true colour of the atmosphere," Édouard Manet would be overheard exclaiming to a group of friends in 1881. "It's violet. Fresh air is violet. I found it! Three years from now everyone will do violet!" Among those who would prove Manet right was Claude Monet, whose paintings of irises and lilies owe their existence to timely invention. Monet's canvases do not merely depict violet. They breathe it.

7. White: Lead white in James McNeill Whistler's Symphony in White, No 1: The White Girl (1861-2)

White has a dark side. Just look at James McNeill Whistler's Symphony in White, No 1: The White Girl, whose very title tries almost too hard with its repetitions of "white" to hide the grubbiness of its making. While the painting may seem an emblem of impeccable purity, it relies on a filthy pigment: lead white. To produce the pigment, strips of lead are placed beside a pool of vinegar for a month in an earthenware chamber, surrounded by piles of fermenting animal excrement. The combination of an acetate, formed by the proximity of lead and vinegar, with the fumes of carbon dioxide emitted by festering faeces yielded a puffy white patina on the lead strips that was as alluring as it was lethal. As far back as the 2nd Century, the Greek physician and poet Nicander of Colophon described lead white as a "hateful brew" that could trigger profound neurotoxic effects in those harvesting it. Far from defiling Whistler's work, however, the origin of lead white casts unexpectedly uplifting light on the painting and suggests what we all hope: that art has the power to transform us, no matter our past, into something beautiful and new.

The Art of Colour: The History of Art in 39 Pigments by Kelly Grovier is out now.

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The painting that flouted sexual norms

The masterpiece that became a meme, when 'fairy mania' gripped britain.

Making Space for Black Art in Academic Art History

Saggese is working to undo the 'colonialist and white supremacist logic' that has pervaded the field of art history

Through her teaching, research and beyond, Jordana Moore Saggese is working to undo the ‘colonialist and white supremacist logic’ that has pervaded the field of art history.

When Jordana Moore Saggese was growing up in Nashville, Tennessee, there was no art museum in town. So, until high school, Saggese, associate professor and associate chair of Maryland’s Department of Art History & Archaeology, connected art with the paintings she saw during a visit to former president Andrew Jackson’s home, The Hermitage.

“Literally going to a plantation and seeing white people on the walls,” she said. “That was my experience of art.”

Now a researcher of modern and contemporary American art, Saggese is working to broaden the field of art history to give a more prominent voice to the contributions of non-white artists. She is a scholar of the American artist Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960-88), who was of Haitian and Puerto Rican descent, and teaches students to recognize and challenge “otherness” in art and visual culture. In her role as editor-in-chief of Art Journal , a publication of the College Art Association of America , she seeks to make space for greater diversity in the field of art history. She is the first Black woman in the journal’s 80-year history to serve in that role .

Last month, Saggese oversaw the first-ever issue of Art Journal to focus explicitly and exclusively on “Blackness.” In 134 pages of scholarly essays, book reviews and exhibition reviews, the issue counters the discipline’s dominant narratives of whiteness and white supremacy through an “intentional conversation around the experiences, expressions and theorizations of Blackness.”

“I know it is a pretty bold move to call out the discipline and play a part in unmaking its history,” she said. “But this was my moment of saying ‘You know what? I’m actually going to take a stand here.’”

Saggese first caught a glimpse of the contemporary art she would go on to study in 1997, when she and a friend decided to leave their senior prom early to rent a movie from Blockbuster. On a whim, they chose Julian Schnabel’s “Basquiat,” a biographical drama about the late artist, known for his colorful, graffiti-like images.

“Basquiat’s art challenged everything I thought art could be,” she said. “It was messy, it was expressive, it was conceptual, it had language on it, it had layers upon layers, it was opaque, it was dense, it was difficult. And I kept that experience in the back of my mind as I entered university.”

Saggese attended Vanderbilt University as a first-generation college student and found herself enraptured by her art history electives and the range of artworks she was suddenly exposed to, from Chinese art to Mexican muralism. After one particular lecture on Dada, an early 20th century movement of European avant-garde art, she realized art was “not something meant only for the elite, but that it could also be a form of rebellion.” She declared a major in art history her senior year and, at the last moment, applied for graduate school.

That final year, while fulfilling her lower-level art history major requirements, Saggese had what she calls a “rude awakening.”

Whereas her previous art history courses opened her eyes to diverse works and perspectives, the instructor of her art history survey lecture—intended to be a comprehensive, global overview of the history of art—projected a succession of images of a “mostly white, male, heterosexist art history.”

“I immediately began to question it,” she said. “I thought to myself ‘why are we talking just about Western Europe? What happened to the other works I had learned about?’”

That experience set her on a path to question the “colonialist logic” she began to see in much of modern art history and to explore what she could do to change it. As she entered graduate school, she knew that she would be devoted to taking seriously the artists that few people were talking about.

Saggese went on to get her Ph.D. in modern and contemporary art history at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and has now published on Basquiat in academic outlets and catalogues for exhibitions in New York, London, Germany, Montreal and Paris. Her first book, “ Reading Basquiat: Exploring Ambivalence in American Art ,” published in 2014, is a monograph—the ultimate critical recognition in the history of art—that reconsiders the artist’s place in the history of modern American art. (The book was recently rereleased in paperback.) She also wrote the script for a TED-ED talk on Basquiat .

Next month, she will publish “ The Jean-Michel Basquiat Reader: Writings, Interviews and Critical Responses ,” a comprehensive sourcebook of the artist that aims to provide a full picture of his views, his working process and the critical significance of his work.

In an advance review , Sarah Elizabeth Lewis, associate professor, history of art and architecture and African and African American studies at Harvard University, called the publication an “extraordinary, riveting scholarly reader … [and] a significant contribution to the fields of contemporary art, American art, and the discipline of art history at large."

Saggese is also working on a book called “Game On: Boxing, Race, and Masculinity,” which looks at visual representations of Black male heavyweight boxers from the late 19th century, a project for which she was recently awarded a University of Maryland Independent Scholarship, Research, and Creativity Award (ISRCA).

She arrived at the University of Maryland (UMD) in 2018, drawn to the university largely thanks to David C. Driskell, the legendary artist and Distinguished University Professor recognized worldwide for his scholarship and expertise in African American art. At UMD, her teaching is informed by her interests in the history of photography, print culture, abstraction, conceptual art, performance art, post-colonial theory and disability studies. She offers undergraduate courses in American art, African American art and critical race art history.

“I truly rely on the fact that every student is an expert of their own experience—if you’re coming into my classroom you will never feel out of place,” she said. “I ask students to question the hierarchy of what’s art and what’s not art, as well as the hierarchy of western versus non-western art, to think critically about the images they consume.”

She became editor-in-chief of Art Journal in 2018 with the explicit goal to foreground writers and artists of color and increase representation of non-European, non-western art in the journal’s pages. Shortly after, submissions to the journal in the areas of African American and Black art increased by 500%. That led Saggese to the idea of an issue devoted entirely to Blackness.

As editor-in-chief, she is responsible for the entire editorial process, from soliciting submissions to final layout.

The Blackness issue features artist projects by two Black women and book and exhibition reviews that center entirely on works by and about Black artists. The feature essays focus on artists who explore the “histories, sensations and consequences of Blackness in their work.” Saggese is also featured in a video that accompanies an introductory essay. The entire issue is free to read through March 31.

Karin Zitzewitz, the current chair of the Art Journal editorial board and interim chair of the Department of Art, Art History and Design at Michigan State University, said Saggese has shown grace and flexibility during an extremely challenging time to “set the right tone” for the journal.

“The Blackness issue is a fantastic project,” Zitzewitz said. “It brings attention to the rigor and energy in the field of African American art history, which is built upon decades of work by Black artists—right up to the present—as well as exciting methodological and theoretical debates. Jordana has built upon her own position in the field and her network of friends and allies, in order to draw our focus to the lively community around Black art.”

It’s especially poignant at a moment when the country is reckoning with its foundational history of racism and as COVID-19 has devastated many Black communities, Saggese said. Holding the final product—boldly published with a black matte cover—was a kind of “out of body experience.”

“I feel in so many ways that this issue is a culmination of everything I’ve ever wanted to do in the discipline,” she said.

Top photo by Sarah Deragon. Second photo features the cover of Art Journal's Blackness issue.

(Original news story written by Jessica Weiss)

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