In school, in history and biography, in the ways we learn about the world, we’re all conditioned to think that the history of art is a story of forward progress. One thing leading in traceable ways to another. That’s flat wrong. Art changes, of course. But it happens in stages, in shifts, granularly, bit by bit, in lurches and breaks and false starts and great leaps. All art comes from other art, and often the throughlines and arcs of influence can be revelatory. Knowing that Willem de Kooning emerged almost bodily out of Arshile Gorky (“I come from 36 Union Square,” he said, referring to Gorky’s studio), who grew out of Picasso, who grew out of African sculpture and Cézanne, we see their work in a new way. But not everything connects: Brancusi isn’t a direct progression from van Eyck, who has nothing to do with Ethiopian manuscript painters, whose work doesn’t draw on Neolithic sculpture or the stone axes made by Neanderthals. Art is the simultaneous coexistence of change and stability. It is less an arrow than a plasma cloud, always with us, never the same.
Exercise
MAKE THAT TRAIN
Once a year, make a colored drawing of a train with twelve cars, with each car representing an artist you somehow feel connected to. Make it beautiful if you want, but you don’t have to; the cars can just be rectangles on wheels with artists’ names on the sides. Maybe you want to name the tracks, background, clouds, passing landscape, or buildings. Don’t draw the engine. It’s engines all the way down.
After several years of doing this, make one very large colored drawing of all the visuals on your personal train bound for glory. It will be a streetcar of your desires.