Welcome

Welcome to my completely free, in-depth tour of Western art.

This website is like a giant book about Western art consisting of about 12,000 pages. But don’t worry, you can dip in wherever you wish. It is organised into about 60 chapters each with one or more sections containing my detailed notes of about 60 pages followed by a one hour YouTube video. It is a work in progress, in some cases there are notes but no video yet and in others it is still to be researched and recorded. My aim is to produce a total of about 200 YouTube videos with notes. In some of the sections I have added other items such as short, entertaining podcasts produced by Google NotebookLM.

Please note that some sections contain artworks that depict nudity or violent scenes that may not be suitable for all viewers. The website is for educational purposes only and viewer discretion is advised.

Who Am I?

I completed my first PhD in Artificial Intelligence in 1976 (yes, that long ago). It described a method of building question-answering systems based on conceptual knowledge a bit like ChatGPT but using a conceptual net not a neural net. After a lifetime in business and floating a company on the London stock exchange I completed a degree in art history, an MA at the Courtauld Institute and a PhD that examined the relationship between Charles Darwin ideas and beauty.

This free art history course started in 2014 when I gave private talks to classes in London. In 2020 I switched to YouTube driven partly by lockdown and in 2023 I started to use ChatGPT as an assistant to help me research the talks. My aim now is to combine my two areas of research by completely replacing myself by the end of 2026. To achieve this I intend to fully automate the research, production and giving the talks using AI. This ties together my academic background in AI in the 1970s and art history in the 2000s. 

Please feel free to use the talks and the notes but don’t blame me for any mistakes and please double check everything yourself. Humans can make mistakes as well as AI systems.

This is my biography and the best way to contact me is to comment on my YouTube channel.

00 Introduction

Let us begin. These talks and notes are an introduction to the entire history of Western art from cave painting to today. The following chapter headings start with the chapter number and link to a page containing one or more videos on that topic, my lecture notes in PDF form, and other optional items such as a podcast and a summary created by Google’s NotebookLM.

00 200 Views of Western Art

01 The Earliest Art

02 Egyptian Art 3,000-300 BC

03 Greek Art 2,000-450AD

04 Roman Art 27BC – 450AD

05 Byzantine Art 500-1200

06 Celtic, Saxon and Viking Art 550-900

07 Medieval Art 800-1000

08 Romanesque Art 1000-1300

09 Gothic and Early Netherlandish Art 1100-1500

10 Renaissance Art 1400-1600

11 Mannerism 1520-1600

12 Tudor and Stuart Art

13 Baroque Art 1600-1700

14 Dutch Golden Age 1600-1700

15 Academic Art 1600-1900

16 Restoration England 1660-1700

17 Eighteenth Century British Art

18 Rococo Art 1700-1770

19 Spanish Art

20 Neo-Classicism 1770-1830

21 Romanticism 1790-1850

22 Nineteenth-Century American Art

23 Victorian Art

24 Photography

25 Pre-Raphaelites 1848-1880

26 Nineteenth-Century French Art

27 Impressionism 1860-1880

28 Aestheticism 1870-1890

29 Degenerate Art

30 Post Impressionism 1880-1905

31 Symbolism 1890-1920

32 Russian Art 1890-1930

33 Pointillism & Divisionism

34 Arts & Crafts

36 South American Art 1900-present

37 Edvard Munch (1863-1944)

38 Modernism 1900-present

39 Ashcan School 1890-1920

40 Les Fauves 1900-1907

41 Cubism 1907-1918

42 Expressionism 1900s-1930

43 Futurism 1909-1915

44 Vorticism 1913-1915

45 Abstract Art 1915-1940

46 Dada 1915-1922

47 Constructivism and Suprematism 1917-1921

48 De Stijl 1917-1931

49 Bauhaus 1919-1933

50 Harlem Renaissance

51 American Realists & Modernism

52 British Art 1900-1950

53 Surrealism 1920-1930

54 Escher 1898-1972

55 Art Deco 1920-1930

56 Magical Realism and New Objectivity 1925-1950

57 Abstract Expressionism and Colour Field Painting

58 Pop Art 1950-1960

59 Neo-Dada 1952-1960

60 Recent Art Movements

61 Recent Artists

62 AI and Art

97 Forgery

98 Tate

99 General Topics