Chart of Knowledge

Artist Tucker Nichols’s illustration, filled with random thoughts, was published with The Times Opinion article, “There Is No Theory of Everything,” September 12, 2015. The image is part of our collection of editorial illustrations being offered for the first time ever to the public as unframed or framed fine-art prints.

This image illustrated Simon Critchley’s article about a disheveled but brilliant undergraduate teacher remembered for his quotations. Critchley wrote, “His teaching moved from particular to particular, often working from the quotations written on small slips of paper and stuck into his pockets, to be pulled out with great dramatic effect. He hated big theories and any kind of metaphysical pretention and he would use little quotations to pick away relentlessly at grand explanations.”

Tucker Nichols is an artist based in Northern California. His work has been featured at the Drawing Center in New York, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco, the Denver Art Museum and Den Frie Museum in Copenhagen. A show of his sculpture, “Almost Everything on the Table,” was at the Aldrich Museum in Ridgefield, Conn., in 2018. His drawings have been published in McSweeney’s, The Thing Quarterly, Nieves Books and the Op-Ed pages of The New York Times. He is co-author of the books “Crabtree” (with Jon Nichols) and “This Bridge Will Not Be Gray” (with Dave Eggers). He is represented by ZieherSmith in New York and Gallery 16 in San Francisco.