Two dates, sixty artists, and one 138-year span

Two dates, sixty artists, and one 138-year span

Question. Which catalogue records show a span no single person could live?

• Encoding. One lane per catalogue record; a bar runs from the birth year to the death year on one shared year axis. Color says whether the archive has a death year. A record without one draws as an open bar, never as a life that ends at birth.
• Ordering. Lanes run by birth year, so the four centuries the prefix spans read top to bottom.
• Why this form. A timeline makes the impossible record obvious: the Alken family's bar is more than twice as long as anyone else's. A histogram of spans would hide which record it is.

What this design gives up

The prefix is not representative. A blank death field supplies no current living-status information, and catalogue entities are not necessarily individuals.

This is the first sixty alphabetically ordered records in Tate’s October 2014 archive, not a representative artist sample. A blank death year is not evidence that someone is alive today. The explicit Alken Family entry is not one person.