5 Beautiful Diagrams That Visualize Art History

The most famous of the art history diagrams is probably Alfred H. Barr’s 1936 chart of modern art, created for the Cubism and Abstract Art exhibition at MoMA, which focused on the development of art between the 1890s and the 1930s. Two of its descendants appear below. Each piece on our list offers a fresh perspective on art movements and puts individual works into context. Whether you come to learn or simply to look, this collection is for you.

1. The Tree of Modern Art by Miguel Covarrubias

Miguel Covarrubias’ (Mexican, 1904–1957) work drawn in 1933 captures a pivotal moment in art history, illustrating the interconnectedness of various artistic movements that defined the modern era. By then, the world had witnessed dramatic shifts in artistic expression, moving away from classical forms to embrace abstraction and experimentation.

The tree is rooted in late Classicism and Romanticism and branches out into various early-20th-century art movements, including Surrealism and abstract art. This work serves both as a celebration of artistic innovation and as a visual approximation of the lineage of modern art in a slightly whimsical and playful way.

2. Autonomous Art, Ver. 1 by Ward Shelley

This piece maps the history of artistic “autonomy” and movements in the context of shifting economic pressures and funding sources. The top half pictures art movements from the 17th century to the modern era, while the bottom half contrasts key economic developments, funding sources, and key technical developments that shaped markets and consumer behavior. Both parts are interwoven through organic shapes, highlighting their natural and inevitable interactions.

Ward Shelley’s (American, b. 1950) various timeline pieces are expansive graphic depictions of complex relationships between events and people over time, linked by a subject or idea. Driven by their content, Shelley’s drawings are rich in factual detail, yet often present highly subjective points of view.

3. Colonialism and Abstract Art by Hank Willis Thomas

Colonialism and Abstract Art is an extension of the best-known depiction of modern art’s development, Barr’s chart. Unlike the original diagram, it expands to include the socioeconomic, cultural, and political circumstances that inform the most iconic movements in modern art. The diagram highlights individual pieces central to artistic development, including Pablo Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907) and Henri Rousseau’s The Dream (1910).

Hank Willis Thomas (American, b. 1976) intertwines art and history between 1870 and 1970, beginning with the European exploration and colonization of the Congo and concluding with the decade of its independence a century later. In the diagram, red text is related to Africa, green text denotes cultural movements, and blue arrows suggest connections across categories.

4. Inventing Abstraction by Paul Ingram and Mitali Banerjee

Great ideas are seldom born in isolation—and abstraction is possibly the greatest idea in modern art. Today, abstraction is so central to artmaking that the time when an abstract artwork was unimaginable has become hard to imagine. Yet when those works first appeared—quite suddenly, around 100 years ago—they took many observers by surprise.

The diagram created for MoMA’s 2012 exhibition Inventing Abstraction, 1910–1925 examines the productive relationships among fine artists and other genres—including composers, dancers, and poets. It brings together a wide range of art forms to draw a rich portrait of this watershed moment in which art was wholly reinvented in the period between 1910 and 1925. Wassily Kandinsky sits on more paths between other artists than anyone else—by the network’s own measure, the most connected figure in the invention of abstraction.

5. Collectivizing the Barr Model by Doron Goldfarb

Another descendant of the famous Barr diagram. Doron Goldfarb and his colleagues asked what a diagram of art history would look like if it were drawn by everyone. They took Wikipedia’s articles on artists and on art styles and let the hyperlinks do the arranging: every small dot is a person, every large circle an art movement, and every line a link between the two.

Where Barr drew a couple of dozen art movements, this map holds 375, and the 55,000 people Wikipedia attaches to them—art history at a scale no single scholar could survey, from the Renaissance and Baroque at the left to the avant-garde and contemporary art at the right. The size of the cluster represents the number of people who made it. Nobody decided this shape—it is what collective attention looks like when you plot it.

Author’s bio:

Oliver Hausdörfer is a robotics researcher working on intuitive human-robot interfaces and learning-based methods. He is enthusiastic about art and using technology to explore new forms of artistic expression.