Time (2): How did it feel, to have no history?

Digesting the experience of the art gallery organising paintings into themes

Paul Klee, 1922, Gespenst eines Genies [Ghost of a Genius]

In my last piece I talked about my visit to the Scottish Gallery of Modern Art, where I was interested to find the upstairs galleries displaying paintings organised into themes, rather than chronologically. I imagined that this was a response to recent critique of the assumptions underlying our cultural habit of placing events in time along a straight line directed towards the future.

The absence of history and context in a theme makes the viewer experience paintings differently, as all there is to make sense with is its organising frame. The theme should, theoretically, make it possible for the viewer to see the painting with less interference, more as simply as a object in the present. I speculated last time that perhaps that was exactly how it should be:

Isn’t this what art is supposed to do, speak on its own terms, as itself? Exist as a physical creation, a concrete emergence into time and space?

Of course you’re not really seeing the painting entirely on its own terms. Apart from what you bring in terms of your own experience and frames of reference, the theme guides your interpretation, just as the title of a painting guides the way you respond to it. Though the theme more or less eradicates chronological context (there is a short description of relevant information beside each painting), it creates a different kind of context in its place, replacing information about linear developments through time with one overarching idea.

So what was this like to experience? How did it feel to see many paintings that I knew and had seen before in this way?

On the Waves of Love, Edvard Munch, 1896

The first theme I encountered was ‘Making a Mark’. This went straight to what is closest to my heart - the power of the line; the immediacy of drawing in contrast to the often planned, careful working of paint on canvas.

Here is the description:

Drawing is a form of visual storytelling: a means of interrogating and understanding the world around us. It creates space to look closely at things, as artist Kate Davis shows us in this display.

With drawing, we can take risks and push forward new ideas. Making a Mark brings together a wide range of works of art on paper from our national collection. By enabling unexpected conversations between these works, this display explores drawing as a means of communication. We invite you to consider the range of possibilities for drawing and other forms of mark making, like the prints we see on display by Paul Klee and Edvard Munch.

Many of us will make drawings throughout our lives – from early childhood scribbles, through drawing at school, and for a wide range of professions. It is a way of thinking through making, whether it takes a matter of minutes or many hours of careful study. You can make a drawing anywhere, with minimal material costs and easy portability. It is always part of a network of ideas, influences, and inspirations.

Many of the materials and approaches to drawing that were in use 500 years ago are still chosen by artists today, like the charcoal, graphite, and ink in these selected works. We need the past to understand the present, and drawing demonstrates that continuum in action.

Toko Shinoda, c 1976, Harmony

I was interested to see that they had invited a contemporary artist to choose the drawings, and also that there was the hope that people would find ‘unexpected conversations’ between the different elements within the theme. I liked this idea, that bringing things together in a different way might spark new perspectives, new ways of seeing. More than that, that bringing the different works together could somehow ‘explore drawing as a means of communication’, although I’m still not sure exactly what this means. I’m also not sure what it means to define drawing as ‘visual storytelling’, unless the story is the private discoveries involved in ‘looking closely at things’. Interesting. Does the drawing tell the non-verbal story of the artist’s private encounter?

The way this description was written made me think about how the function of the gallery seemed to have shifted from providing information (for example, showing studies by a famous artist in order to give background to an oil painting), to here attempting to draw the viewer into thinking about what the process of drawing might feel like from the inside.

Annie French, 1941, Princess Melitot

‘We can take risks and push forward ideas’; the viewer is being welcomed as an equal partner into the practices that underpin what they’re looking at on the walls, reducing the gap between ‘the greats’ and their own personal attempts. ‘A way of thinking through making’ that can be done anywhere - they’re being positively encouraged to get involved, to realise that there are no barriers to this practice, with affordable, portable, easily available materials, which are still exactly the same as those used to create the works they’re looking at here in the gallery.

Jamini Roy, 1930s, Blue Dancer

I know nothing about curation or how approaches to this have changed in recent times, but this seems to be very participatory; an attempt to de-mystify the practice of drawing and encourage people to try things out for themselves.

Pablo Picasso, 1959, Bacchanale [Bacchanal]. I’m intruiged by the back to front date on the left, which made me wonder whether Picasso had to turn his mind inside out to make a composition that he knew would print what he was doing back to front…

There are two sentences at the end of the theme description that interest me in terms of the de-contextualising/re-contextualising nature of a theme. The first of these is the brief comment that the drawing that you make is part of a network of many other things, albeit only idea things:

[Your drawing] is always part of a network of ideas, influences, and inspirations…

A drawing is made by an artist, or by you, but it’s not a singular ‘thing’ in the sense that you make it entirely on your own. The drawing is an emergence from many interwoven flows that come from outside of you, around you, underneath you (below consciousness?). It’s just one sentence, that has no elaboration, but it points towards changing conceptions of art and creation that are opening up to more dynamic, less elitist ways of thinking. This web of flows is something that I’m going to return to in a later article in this investigation into thinking about time.

The second sentence that interests me is a sudden reference to the value of understanding history, which hasn’t been mentioned up to this point in relation to the theme:

We need the past to understand the present, and drawing demonstrates that continuum in action.

I think this is underlining the fact that the work on the walls was created with exactly the same materials that you might use today, perhaps with the hope that viewers might use the historical images to inspire their own processes of art-making.

History here is represented by the simple presence of the framed drawings themselves, which have not been arranged in a didactic, educative chronology, but instead have been allowed to float in present space, showing you all the different ways that drawing materials can be used.

The next themed room I stopped at was called ‘French Connections’:

Sir Roland Penrose, 1936, The Freedom of the Seas

During the 19th and 20th centuries, France – and particularly the capital Paris – was a hub for creative developments in the visual arts. Artists travelled there to discover inventive approaches, forge friendships and exchange ideas. This room brings together works by just a few of the artists who contributed to the dynamic artistic communities of the city and beyond.

There was no one style or approach. Some artists were influenced by the example of older generations or the innovations of their peers. Others were connected through exhibitions, or the commercial art dealers who championed their work. Friendships frequently sparked new ways of working, such as with Scottish painters, John Duncan Fergusson and Samuel John Peploe.

The south of France was especially captivating, with its dazzling Mediterranean light and striking coastline. As well as providing a setting for landscape paintings, it was a place to soak up the creative energy of artist colonies, to enjoy leisure time, and have fun.

George Leslie Hunter, 1927, The Beach, Juan-les-Pins

André Derain, 1905, Collioure

Here the theme is a combination of a location, in fact, a whole country, and a loosely-defined period of time that stretches over two centuries.

Pablo Picasso, 1902, Mère et enfant [Mother and Child]

I found it quite scattered and unsettling. Have I just been chronologically indocrinated? A specific country, with all of its different regions, and their urban/seaside/rural variations, seemed absurdly general as ‘something in common’ between the different pieces of work. Artists came to this place, over a period of two hundred years, to soak up some sun, chat to each other and have fun? I guess so, but here the paintings are expected to stand on their own to such a degree that, seeing them nonetheless all placed beside each other, I felt confused. I wasn’t looking at a single painting, but at a group of paintings; my mind tried to understand them in relation to each other, but it couldn’t find any pattern or connecting thread.

Marie Laurencin, 1926,La Lecture dans un Parc

I didn’t know Laurencin, and I wanted to know more about her. Who was she? What was she trying to do with her work? What do we know about how she was living, how she found money for paint, what her struggles were? There is some information beside the painting, but it didn’t satisfy me. I wanted more. I wanted to feel the texture of her life, to get a sense of all the different threads that were weaving in and out of it at the time she created this painting. I wanted history. I wanted context.

Samuel John Peploe, 1910/1911, Veules-les-Roses

What if I didn’t know who this painter was, and what he was part of? Wouldn’t I wonder why his colours are so different from many of the other paintings? The short history mentions the Scottish Colourists, but who where they, what were they doing and why? How did people respond to his work? Are people still interested in him today?

Each painting does have a brief contextual overview, which gives information about the artist and often a general sense of where they were in relation to other artists at that time. The overall organisation of the theme, however, for me at least, seemed to override these brief contextualising profiles. The gathering together under the umbrella idea of ‘people interacting with each other in a specific place’ seemed to be telling me that the details of individuals lives were relatively unimportant, and of course, from one perspective, the theme is right. Each painting was there in front of me, and I was free to see what I found in it, notice how it affected me.

But for me the experience of this room was jarring, fragmented. The paintings seemed to distract from each other, their proximity to each other interfering with my capacity to receive them. The different drawings in ‘Making a Mark’ were held together by their shared medium, perhaps by the invitation to imagine actually making those marks with my own hand. In ‘French Connections’, not only could I not feel anything happening in terms of a conversation between the different paintings, but the theme seemed to work to prevent me from being able to see them properly.

The invitation to receive each painting simply as it was, there on the wall in front of me, with no contextual information to explain to me why many of these paintings were absolutely revolutionary in their own time, seemed to reduce the importance of the artist’s life and work down to not much more than an instagram reel. For me, pausing in front of the Derain with a smattering of art historical knowledge, I was aware of certain qualities, which spoke to me even though I didn’t remember a thing about his personal historical or social context. Even without much historical detail, I have a sense of what was going on in painting at that time, I know something about what went before, and why this painting was probably seen to be so bold.

But for a passing visitor in 2025, who has no knowledge of why this was so brave and new? They’ve probably seen thousands of paintings, maybe through a backlit screen, which might, at a glance, seem similar to this one. The expansion of possibility that paintings like the Derain created is now an everyday part of our image culture. Perhaps this image, received now simply ‘on its own terms’, might just land as another fleeting stimulus to the senses, registered only briefly, before moving on to the next one.

Suzanne Valadon, 1904, Femmes nues sous les arbres [Nude Women under the trees]

This room of ‘French Connections’, full though it was of wonderful paintings, gave me the feeling that I was skating on a frozen-over pond. I could see all kinds of colours shining through the ice, but I couldn’t reach them. Everything had become surface; the theme seemed to have reduced all of this mystery to a succession of random paint experiments dangling in the air. For me, this theme was a discombobulating fail.

I’m not trying to argue that either chronologies or themes are either ‘good’ or ‘bad’; the point is that they do different things. A chronology leaves out a lot of contextual information, but it can show selected events and effects through time, in relationship to each other. A theme can’t show time relationships in this way, but it can move across a wider area of context and pick up patterns and things in common. Sometimes one approach works better than another, according to what you’re looking for. Both approaches can succeed, and both can fail.

In my previous piece¹ I explored chronology and theme as different types of thread in a weave. I think of the chronological approach as being a single thread, attending to one forward-moving (horizontal) dimension. The theme approach works across two dimensions; it can move across a weave of many horizontal and vertical threads, but you lose any sense of where the points that it chooses are in time.

In my next article I begin my experimental attempt to use complexity thinking to try to think about time as dynamic, three dimensional weave.

1. Critiques of straight-line history point out that alongside every such story there are always a hundred missing parallel strands. We could go a step further and say that these hundreds of weft threads are in fact held in place by a thousand unseen lines of warp, running vertically through the horizontal plane, invisibly holding the fabric of time together in ways that the straight-line approach is never able to see. So the single-thread, arrow-of-time approach has a problem, not only because of all the parallel threads that it ignores, but also because it doesn’t acknowledge the myriad vertical strands which are actually holding everything in place.

A theme interrupts the horizontal narrative by picking across the cloth according to one idea, collecting the end results of many disparate processes. It removes all contexts and forces the viewer to examine only what it’s chosen to frame; ignoring linear movement through time and the specifics of location, and it says, look, there’s an underlying shape here, a form that things keep falling into. In art it says, look at these different pieces of art from this perspective, and see what happens for you.