Among the ranks of Open Cul­ture read­ers, there are no doubt more than a few art-his­to­ry majors. Per­haps you’ve stud­ied the sub­ject your­self, at one time or anoth­er — and per­haps you find that by now, you remem­ber only cer­tain scat­tered artists, works, and move­ments. What you need is a grand nar­ra­tive, a broad sto­ry of art itself, and that’s just what you’ll find in the video above from Youtube chan­nel Behind the Mas­ter­piece. True to its title, “A Brief His­to­ry of Art Move­ments” briefly describes, and pro­vides a host of visu­al exam­ples to illus­trate, 22 phas­es in the devel­op­ment of art in just 23 min­utes.

The jour­ney begins in pre­his­to­ry, with cave paint­ings from 40,000 years ago appar­ent­ly cre­at­ed “as a way to share infor­ma­tion.” Then comes the art of antiq­ui­ty, when increas­ing­ly lit­er­ate soci­eties “start­ed cre­at­ing the ear­li­est nat­u­ral­is­tic images of human beings,” not least to enforce “reli­gious and polit­i­cal ide­olo­gies.” The reli­gios­i­ty inten­si­fied in the Mid­dle Ages, when artists “depict­ed clear, icon­ic images of reli­gious fig­ures” — as well as their odd­ly aged-look­ing babies — “and dec­o­rat­ed them with exten­sive use of gold and jew­els as a way to attract more peo­ple to the church.”

When many us think of art his­to­ry — whether we stud­ied it or not — our minds go straight to the sub­se­quent peri­od, the Renais­sance, dur­ing which “artists start­ed to appre­ci­ate cul­tur­al sub­jects like art, music, and the­ater” as well. They cre­at­ed “por­trait paint­ings, anatom­i­cal­ly cor­rect sculp­tures, and sym­met­ri­cal archi­tec­ture,” and the inven­tion of the print­ing press great­ly expand­ed the pool of poten­tial appre­ci­a­tors. Then, in the Baroque move­ment, enor­mous­ly skilled artists like Berni­ni and Car­avag­gio “empha­sized extrav­a­gance and emo­tion,” and oth­er forms fol­lowed suit with more intense embell­ish­ments of their own.

From eigh­teenth-cen­tu­ry France emerged the “play­ful and utopi­an” Roco­co peri­od, which was fol­lowed by the back­ward-look­ing “inter­est in renewed sim­plic­i­ty” that char­ac­ter­ized Neo­clas­si­cism, which was fol­lowed by Roman­ti­cism, a move­ment whose artists “looked with­in and found inspi­ra­tion in their own imag­i­na­tions, and the nature around them.” It was the lev­el­ing French Rev­o­lu­tion that brought about the con­di­tions for the rise of Real­ism, with its focus on “depict­ing real peo­ple in every­day life,” the kind of sub­jects to that point over­looked in major works of art.

In the sec­ond half of the nine­teenth cen­tu­ry the devel­op­ment of art hit the gas, bring­ing on the imper­fect vital­i­ty of Impres­sion­ism, the dar­ing sub­jec­tiv­i­ty of Post-Impres­sion­ism, the extreme sub­jec­tiv­i­ty of Expres­sion­ism, and the sin­u­ous lux­u­ry of Art Nou­veau. Tech­nol­o­gy had always been a fac­tor in how art changes, but in the twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry — as Cubism gave way to Futur­ism, Dadaism, Sur­re­al­ism, and the Bauhaus — it came to the fore. This brings us up to liv­ing mem­o­ry: move­ments like Abstract Expres­sion­ism, Pop Art, Min­i­mal­ism, and the incli­na­tion of today’s artists to deal in “ideas rather than aes­thet­ics,” all on dis­play in most any muse­um you care to vis­it. Or at least they are in the muse­ums of the West, there being, after all, a whole world of oth­er art his­to­ries out there to under­stand besides.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Free Art & Art His­to­ry Cours­es

An Online Guide to 350 Inter­na­tion­al Art Styles & Move­ments: An Invalu­able Resource for Stu­dents & Enthu­si­asts of Art His­to­ry

100,000 Free Art His­to­ry Texts Now Avail­able Online Thanks to the Get­ty Research Por­tal

An Intro­duc­tion to 100 Impor­tant Paint­ings with Videos Cre­at­ed by Smarthis­to­ry

One Minute Art His­to­ry: Cen­turies of Artis­tic Styles Get Packed Into a Short Exper­i­men­tal Ani­ma­tion

Tate Kids Presents Intro­duc­tions to Art Move­ments: Cubism, Impres­sion­ism, Sur­re­al­ism & More

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

If you want to under­stand the his­to­ry of art in twen­ti­eth-cen­tu­ry Amer­i­ca, you can’t over­look the cor­ner of Fifth Avenue and 56th Street in New York City. No, not Trump Tow­er, but the build­ing it replaced: Bon­wit Teller, the lux­u­ry depart­ment store that had stood on the site since 1929. Then as now, any shop on Fifth Avenue has to find a way to set itself apart, and by 1939 Bon­wit Teller had built a “rep­u­ta­tion for hav­ing Man­hat­tan’s screwiest win­dow dis­plays.” So says Time mag­a­zine, cov­er­ing a minor deba­cle that year over one of the instal­la­tions by “the world’s No. 1 sur­re­al­ist, Sal­vador Dalí.”

Dalí had pre­vi­ous­ly dressed Bon­wit Teller’s win­dows with­out inci­dent in 1936, rid­ing high on the buzz from his first Amer­i­can exhi­bi­tion that same year. When invit­ed back by the store to cre­ate a new dis­play, writes Tim McNeese in Sal­vador Dalí, “he decid­ed to use the win­dows to depict the ‘Nar­cis­sus com­plex,’ ” divid­ed into day and night. “In the Day win­dow, Nar­cis­sus is per­son­i­fied,” says The Art Sto­ry. “Three wax hands hold­ing mir­rors reached out of a bath­tub lined with black lamb­skin and filled with water. A man­nequin entered the tub in a scant out­fit of green feath­ers. For the Night win­dow, the feet of a poster bed are replaced by buf­fa­lo legs and the canopy is topped by its pigeon-eat­ing head. A wax man­nequin sat near­by on a bed of coals.”

As for the pub­lic reac­tion, writes the New York Times’ Michael Pol­lak, “words were exchanged, not all of them com­pli­men­ta­ry, and the store’s staff made quick changes. The skin­ny-dip­per in ‘Day’ was quick­ly replaced by an attired man­nequin. Out went the sleep­er in ‘Night’; in went a stand­ing mod­el.” As soon as he caught sight of the unau­tho­rized mod­i­fi­ca­tions, Dalí took cor­rec­tive action. McNeese quotes the artist’s own mem­o­ry of the pro­ceed­ings: “I dashed into the win­dow to dis­arrange it, so that my name, signed in the win­dow, should not be dis­hon­ored. I was nev­er so sur­prised as when the bath­tub just shot through the win­dow when I pushed it and I was there­after most con­fused.”

Dalí was charged with dis­or­der­ly con­duct but issued a sus­pend­ed sen­tence since, as the judge put it, “These are some of the priv­i­leges that an artist with tem­pera­ment seems to enjoy.” Noth­ing like this hap­pened to Andy Warhol when he lat­er dressed Bon­wit Teller’s win­dows, writes i‑D’s Briony Wright, though “a com­mis­sion for the depart­ment store in 1961 brought what could be con­sid­ered his big break.” Those same win­dows also became oppor­tu­ni­ties for a host of oth­er artists includ­ing Sari Dienes, James Rosen­quist, Jasper Johns, and Robert Rauschen­berg, the last two of whom col­lab­o­rat­ed on a dis­play as Mas­ton Jones. They had their own rea­sons for the pseu­do­nym, but an artist of Dalí’s par­tic­u­lar sen­si­bil­i­ty knows you don’t turn down a chance to get your name on Fifth Avenue.

Relat­ed con­tent:

When Sal­vador Dali Met Sig­mund Freud, and Changed Freud’s Mind About Sur­re­al­ism (1938)

When Sal­vador Dalí Cre­at­ed a Sur­re­al­ist Fun­house at New York World’s Fair (1939)

Sal­vador Dalí Gets Sur­re­al with 1950s Amer­i­ca: Watch His Appear­ances on What’s My Line? (1952) and The Mike Wal­lace Inter­view (1958)

When Sal­vador Dalí Cre­at­ed Christ­mas Cards That Were Too Avant Garde for Hall­mark (1960)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.