Art history timeline atlas

Revolution, Industry And Mass Vision Art History

Modern life arrived with revolutions, factories, railways, public exhibitions, portable paint, mass print and photography. Art had to decide how quickly to look.

Era scope

Date range: c. 1780-1900

Use the entries below as overlapping study routes rather than a single story of linear progress.

• Romantic Sublime

  Romanticism made emotion, terror, nature, revolution, nightmare and individual imagination central subjects of art.

• Realism And Social Life

  Realism insisted that workers, streets, politics and ordinary bodies deserved the scale and seriousness once reserved for myth and royalty.

• Impressionism And Modern Vision

  Impressionism made quick perception, light, weather, leisure and the changing city into radical pictorial subjects.

• Post-Impressionism And Symbolism

  After Impressionism, artists pushed color, structure, symbol and emotion in different directions that opened the door to modernism.

• Photography, Print And Mass Vision

  Photography changed art by making images mechanical, repeatable, evidentiary, intimate, commercial and suspicious all at once.

• Arts And Crafts Design Reform

  Arts and Crafts reform treated design, labor and everyday objects as central art-historical problems in the industrial age.

• Mexican Print And Revolutionary Graphic Art

  Mexican graphic art made death, politics, satire, news and revolution into images that could circulate cheaply and publicly.