William McNeill's The Rise of the West is one of the most important books written on the subject of world history. When it was published in 1963, reviewers hailed the book for the new paradigm it advocated—that civilizations did not develop in isolation but grew as a result of contact with other civilizations and the exchange of ideas and techniques that resulted—and in 1964 McNeill was awarded the National Book Award. As a testimony to the book’s continued importance, The Rise of the West continues to sell thousands of copies over 40 years after its publication.

As part of the preparation of the book, McNeill commissioned the Hungarian-born artist Bela Petheo to design and draw a series of illustrations to accompany the text. McNeill and Petheo collaborated closely on the design of the illustrations, McNeill's active role in the visual design demonstrating the value he placed on these images. McNeill himself often sketched out crude diagrams to clarify his thinking, and the illustrations in this book were to be a more formal representation of that processes. Therefore, he did not view the illustrations as mere supplements to or distractions from the text, but rather as a vital and necessary part of the book.

While McNeill's book has been long admired, Petheo’s images have been largely forgotten. The same reviewers who praised the book paid no attention to the illustrations. Indeed, only one reviewer appears to have taken any notice: in his New York Times book review, Hugh Trevor-Roper found the text "learned," "intelligent" and "stimulating," but dismissed the images as "trivial and unhelpful."

Textbook authors and teachers very rarely ask students to look at or study the graphics that accompany these books with the same seriousness with which they are asked to examine the written words, even as education researchers and psychologists have argued for over two decades that some students learn better through visual means than through linguistic means. The visual images in textbooks are rarely composed with the same attention to compositional style and meaningful content as the written words. As the critic Alexander Stille has correctly observed, too many of these "graphics" in school history textbooks are "distracting, boring and trivial, cutting down space for a more serious treatment of events."

Petheo’s illustrations are quite different; they convey historical information through word, symbol, gesture and spatial arrangement. Nearly every mark Petheo committed to paper, every gradation of shading, every arrangement of symbols and figures carries information, information necessary to establish the narrative structure of the whole. All the marks on the page contribute to the narrative, and are not present simply to decorate and make eye-catching, a fault of too many “graphics” today.

A glance at Petheo’s illustrations would see only simple drawings, but such a glance would miss the levels upon levels of historical information contained in these well-composed, expressive visual narratives. This exhibition invites the viewer to look deeply at these overlooked images.