The chart is an interactive lineage map. Metaphysical painting sits at the center, on a timeline that runs from older movements at the top to newer ones at the bottom. The movements that influenced it appear above it, any parallel movements it developed alongside sit on its own row, and the movements it later influenced appear below. Every line is a real, cited connection between two movements: a solid line is an influence historians broadly agree on, and a dashed line is an indirect, parallel, or contested link.

For Metaphysical painting (1910 – 1920), it traces one movement that shaped it, a well-established link: Symbolism; it fans out to one movement it went on to influence, a well-established link: Surrealism.