Cave painting
The first pictures. Animals in motion on rock, by torchlight, made by people whose names nobody will ever know.
Creative Company · The whole sheet
Art history,
edge to edge.
60 movements on one sheet, 40,000 BCE to now. The scale warps: deep time is squeezed, the last two centuries are stretched, and the red bar under each plate is how long the movement actually ran. Solid lines are what a movement led to. Dashed red is what it pushed against. Every painting is the museum's own public-domain file, credited; 16 of the newer movements are still in copyright, so those plates send you to the museum instead.
40,000 BCE
10,000 BCE
3,000 BCE
1,000 BCE
0
500
1000
1400
1500
1600
1700
1800
1850
1900
1920
1940
1960
1980
2000
2020
Ancient Egyptian
Three thousand years of one rulebook. Figures in profile, size by rank, made to work forever in the dark of a tomb.
Ancient Greek
The body as the measure of everything. Proportion, contrapposto, the idealised human figure that Europe keeps coming back to.
Roman
Greek forms put to work: portraits of real faces, walls painted to open into gardens, propaganda in marble.
Byzantine
Gold ground, flat space, eyes that look straight through you. Images as windows onto heaven rather than the world.
Insular
Monks with a pen and infinite patience. Knotwork, spirals and beasts wound through the letters of the Gospels.
Islamic golden age
Pattern as devotion. Geometry, calligraphy and the arabesque carry the meaning that figures carry elsewhere.
Song dynasty landscape
Mountains as the subject and the human as a speck in them. Ink, silk, and the idea that a painting is a place to walk.
Romanesque
Heavy walls, bright paint, stories told in strips. Art built to teach a congregation that could not read.
Gothic
Light as theology. Pointed arches, stained glass, and painting that starts to bend, sway and feel.
Proto-Renaissance
Giotto puts weight in the bodies and grief on the faces. The gold ground starts to give way to a sky.
Early Renaissance
Perspective is invented, anatomy is studied, antiquity is relearned. The painter becomes an intellectual.
Northern Renaissance
Oil paint, the mirror, the detail. Reality rendered so closely it becomes a kind of devotion.
Venetian school
Florence drew, Venice coloured. Warm light, loose brush, and paint that behaves like flesh.
High Renaissance
Thirty years, three names. Balance, grace and scale pushed as far as they go before the Sack of Rome ends it.
Mannerism
After perfection, what? Stretch the neck, twist the pose, cool the colour. Style for its own sake, and proud of it.
Dutch Golden Age
A Protestant republic with money and no church commissions. So: portraits, kitchens, skies, and a milkmaid painted like a saint.
Baroque
Theatre and shadow. The Counter-Reformation wants you to feel it, so the light gets dramatic and the saints get real.
Ukiyo-e
Flat colour, cropped frames, the floating world. Woodblock prints for ordinary people that reach Paris in the 1860s and change everything.
Rococo
Pleasure, pastel, the swing in the garden. Painting for a private room rather than a church.
Neoclassicism
Rome and Greece as the moral corrective. Straight lines, clear light, civic virtue over pleasure.
Romanticism
The individual against the sublime. Weather, ruins, revolution, and the self as the subject.
Hudson River School
America paints its own wilderness as scripture. Vast valleys, golden light, and a country deciding what it looks like.
Barbizon School
Leave the studio. Paint the field, the peasant and the weather as they are, and hang it at the size history used to get.
Academic art
The official taste. Polished surfaces, mythological nudes, and the jury every modern movement would define itself against.
Realism
Paint what is in front of you. Stonebreakers and funerals at the scale of a coronation, and no angels anywhere.
Pre-Raphaelites
Back to before Raphael: bright colour, true detail, poetry and moral seriousness. Seven young men and a manifesto.
Impressionism
Light is the subject. Painted outdoors, fast, in broken colour, and hung in a photographer's studio because the Salon said no.
Arts and Crafts
Against the factory. Honest materials, the hand of the maker, and the idea that a wallpaper can be a moral position.
Symbolism
The dream over the fact. Islands of the dead, sphinxes, and the inner life painted at the exact moment psychology is born.
American Impressionism
The French lesson learned abroad and brought home: gardens, harbours and city parks in broken light.
Neo-Impressionism
Impressionism with a theory. Dots of pure colour placed by optics rather than instinct, and a Sunday afternoon that took two years.
Post-Impressionism
Light was not enough. Structure, feeling and colour as emotion: three loners who between them set up the whole 20th century.
Art Nouveau
The whip-curve. Plant forms, gold, women with hair like rivers, and a style that runs from posters to subway entrances.
Fauvism
The wild beasts. Colour unhooked from what things look like, laid on straight from the tube for five loud years.
Expressionism
Paint the feeling, distort the fact. Anxiety, cities, war, and a scream that runs through the whole sky.
Cubism
Every side at once. The object taken apart and rebuilt on a flat canvas, and the end of the window that painting had been since Giotto.
Futurism
Speed, machines, noise, and a manifesto that wanted to burn the museums. Cubism with the engine running.
Der Blaue Reiter and early abstraction
The first paintings of nothing. Colour and line meant to work on you like music, with no object left to recognise.
Suprematism
A black square on white. Feeling stripped of every object, and the zero point painting keeps returning to.
Constructivism
Art as engineering for the revolution. Posters, towers, typography, and the artist as a worker with a ruler.
Dada
A urinal signed R. Mutt. If the war was made by reasonable men, art would stop being reasonable.
De Stijl
Horizontal, vertical, primary colours, nothing else. A universal language for a world that had just torn itself apart.
Bauhaus
A school, not a style, and the most influential one ever. Craft, industry and art in one building until the Nazis shut the door.
Harlem Renaissance
A Black American modernism with its own sources: jazz, Africa, the migration north, and a new confidence in the image.
Art Deco
Luxury made geometric. Chrome, sunbursts, skyscrapers, and the last style that everyone from a jeweller to an architect shared.
Mexican Muralism
History painted on public walls for people who could not read it. Revolution, labour and the Indigenous past at building scale.
Surrealism
Freud let loose on canvas. Melting clocks, floating apples, and the dream taken seriously as a place to work from.
Social Realism
The Depression on canvas. Workers, breadlines and the dignity of ordinary people, often paid for by the government.
Abstract Expressionism
The centre of art moves to New York. Huge canvases, paint thrown or poured, and the act of painting as the subject.
Pop Art
Soup cans, comics and film stars. If advertising is the visual world now, paint the advertising.
Minimalism
What you see is what you see. Boxes, bricks, fluorescent tubes, and every trace of the artist's hand removed.
Op Art
Painting that moves while you stand still. Pure optics, black and white, and a name coined by Time magazine.
Conceptual Art
The idea is the work. A chair, a photo of a chair and a dictionary definition of a chair, and the object stops mattering.
Land Art
Leave the gallery for the desert. A spiral of rock in a lake, a lightning field, and work you can only see by going there.
Neo-Expressionism
Painting comes back angry. Big, rough, figurative and personal, after a decade that said painting was over.
Street Art
The wall is the gallery and permission is optional. Graffiti grows up, gets stencils, and ends up in the auction house anyway.
Young British Artists
A shark in a tank, an unmade bed, a warehouse show organised by students. Shock, wit and the market in one decade.
Digital and New Media
The computer as brush, camera and gallery. Code, video, generative systems, and the first art made to live on a screen.
Post-Internet and contemporary
Art made by people who never knew a world without the network. Images about images, identity, AI, and where this goes next.
40,000 BCE Now
Led to Reacted against How long it ran Hover a plate to light up its lineage. Click it to enter the room.