A Short History of Art Around the World

From hand stencils on cave walls to video installations, people everywhere have made images to remember, to worship, to persuade and to understand the world. This is a brief guide to how that story unfolded — not only in Europe, but across every continent.

The first images

Art is older than writing, farming or cities. Pieces of ochre engraved with cross-hatched lines at Blombos Cave in South Africa are around 75,000 years old, and some of the oldest known figurative paintings — animals painted on cave walls on the island of Sulawesi in Indonesia — have been dated to more than 45,000 years ago. Hand stencils, made by blowing pigment around a hand pressed against rock, appear on several continents.

In Europe, the paintings of Chauvet Cave in France are more than 30,000 years old, and those of Lascaux around 17,000. Small carved figures such as the Venus of Willendorf, made in what is now Austria around 30,000 years ago, show that sculpture is just as ancient. Rock art traditions continued for thousands of years afterwards in Australia, southern Africa and the Americas, and in some places they are still part of living cultures today.

Ancient civilisations

As cities and states grew, art took on new jobs: honouring rulers, serving the gods and recording power. Egyptian painters and sculptors worked to a strict system of proportions that stayed recognisable for nearly three thousand years. In Mesopotamia, carved reliefs told stories of kings and battles.

In China, Shang dynasty bronze vessels were cast with remarkable precision more than 3,000 years ago, and the Terracotta Army — thousands of life-size clay soldiers — was buried with the first emperor of China around 210 BCE. In West Africa, the Nok culture of present-day Nigeria produced expressive terracotta heads more than two thousand years ago. In Mexico, the Olmec carved colossal stone heads around 1200 to 900 BCE.

Ancient Greek sculptors moved towards lifelike, balanced figures, and Roman artists added sharply individual portraits and the wall paintings preserved at Pompeii. These works would be rediscovered and imitated in Europe many centuries later.

Faith, empire and trade

Between roughly 500 and 1400, much of the world's art was made in the service of religion. Byzantine artists covered church interiors with gold mosaics and painted icons. Islamic art developed extraordinary geometric patterns, plant-based ornament and calligraphy, seen in buildings such as the Alhambra in Spain. In Gothic Europe, cathedrals filled with stained glass.

In China, Song dynasty painters made monumental landscapes, such as Fan Kuan's Travelers among Mountains and Streams from around 1000, which treated nature itself as a subject worthy of contemplation. In West Africa, artists at Ife cast naturalistic heads in copper alloy between the 12th and 15th centuries, and the Kingdom of Benin produced its famous brass plaques and heads over several centuries — many were taken by British forces in 1897, and some have been returned to Nigeria in recent years. In Mesoamerica, the Maya painted vivid murals, such as those at Bonampak around 790.

Renaissance and its neighbours

From the 14th to the 16th century, artists in Italy turned back to ancient Greece and Rome and to close observation of the world. Linear perspective, worked out in Florence in the early 1400s, made painted space convincing. Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo and Raphael came to define the period. North of the Alps, painters such as Jan van Eyck perfected oil painting, and Albrecht Dürer made printmaking a major art form.

It was not only a European story. At the same time, Persian painters produced exquisitely detailed manuscript paintings, the Mughal court in India developed its own brilliant tradition of miniature painting, and potters in Ming dynasty China made the blue-and-white porcelain that was traded across the world.

Baroque to Romanticism

In the 17th century, Caravaggio's dramatic light, Rembrandt's psychological portraits, Velázquez's painterly realism and Vermeer's quiet interiors pushed painting in new directions. In Japan, the woodblock prints of the Edo period — ukiyo-e — brought everyday life, theatre and landscape to a wide public; Hokusai's Under the Wave off Kanagawa, around 1831, is among the best-known images in the world.

Around 1800, Romantic artists such as Francisco Goya, J. M. W. Turner and Eugène Delacroix put emotion, nature and the turmoil of their times at the centre of art. Later in the century, Realists such as Gustave Courbet insisted on painting ordinary people and places as they were.

The modern era

In 1874 a group of painters in Paris, later called the Impressionists, held their own exhibition, showing quick, light-filled studies of modern life. Japanese prints were one of their influences. Post-Impressionists such as Paul Cézanne, Vincent van Gogh and Paul Gauguin went further, and from around 1907 Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque broke objects into multiple viewpoints in Cubism. Expressionism, Dada, Surrealism and the Bauhaus followed, each rethinking what art could be for.

Modern art quickly became international, with each place shaping its own version. In the 1920s the Mexican muralists — Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco and David Alfaro Siqueiros — painted public walls with national history, while Frida Kahlo made intensely personal paintings. In New York after 1945, Abstract Expressionists such as Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko made large, gestural or meditative abstractions. The Progressive Artists' Group formed in Bombay in 1947, the Gutai group in Japan in 1954, the Zaria Art Society in Nigeria in 1958, and the Neo-Concrete movement in Brazil in 1959 — each forging a modern art of its own rather than copying Paris or New York.

Contemporary art

From the 1960s, artists stretched the boundaries further. Pop art borrowed from advertising and mass media; Minimalism reduced sculpture to simple forms; Conceptual art put the idea first; performance, land art, photography, video and installation all became established ways of working. In Australia, the painting movement that began at Papunya in the early 1970s brought Aboriginal artists' visual traditions to acrylic on canvas and to a worldwide audience.

The art world itself became global. The Venice Biennale, founded in 1895, was joined by the São Paulo Bienal in 1951 and by biennials and art fairs on every continent. Today, artists work across every medium imaginable, from traditional oil painting and ceramics to digital art and virtual reality, and they can reach an audience anywhere in the world.

Art history is still being written

Every period above began with artists working in their own time and place, often unrecognised at first. Art history is not only in museums; it is being made now, in studios and galleries everywhere.

This is a brief introductory survey; dates are approximate and many traditions are necessarily left out. Spotted an error? Let us know.