Art History’s Graphic Intelligence

What role do graphic images of all kinds—diagrams, analytical drawings, tables, timelines, graphs, models, reconstructions—play in art-historical method and pedagogy? Attention has often focused on the challenges of visual-verbal translation or on the role of reproductive images in mediating discursive encounters with artworks. Yet the visual display of art historical information—to paraphrase Edward Tufte’s classic study of data visualization—has played a central, if underexamined role in the formation of the discipline. A few famous examples from the study of Western art—like Erwin Panofsky’s table describing his iconological system, Alfred Barr’s torpedo-shaped chart of modernism, Ad Reinhardt’s ludic “family trees” of American art, and Rosalind Krauss’s diagram of “sculpture in the expanded field”—have inspired vigorous response, imitation, and critique. This session seeks to move beyond such notable examples to explore the way that such graphic images have shaped—and continue to shape—art-historical modes of argument, quantification, and analysis. Contributions might explore: art history’s scientistic underpinnings and its vexed relationship to “objectivity”; the way diagrams and timelines shape approaches to periodization, conceptions of influence, and the movement of ideas across time and space; the role of fantasy and counterfactual claims in models and reconstructions; tables and the discipline’s will to classification; or the influence of diagrammatic thinking in adjacent disciplines like anthropology and archaeology. This session of ten-minute papers, each ideally focused on a single example, will gather contributions from across periods and geographies that examine the historical uses of graphic schema or that offer new models of visual tools for the present.