Yours Damn Ugly as a Piece of Modern Art
The well-nigh famous paintings of all time
A ranking of the nearly famous paintings—from Jan van Eyck's portrait to Gustav Klimt'south masterpiece
Ranking the most famous paintings of all fourth dimension is a difficult task.
Painting is an aboriginal medium and fifty-fifty with the introduction of photography, movie and digital technology, it nevertheless has remained a persistent mode of expression. And then many paintings have been limned over dozens of millennia that but a relatively minor percentage of them could be construed as "timeless classics" that have become familiar to the public—and not coincidentally produced by some of the nigh famous artists of all fourth dimension.
It leaves open up the question of what mix of talent, genius and circumstance leads to the creation of a masterpiece. Perhaps the simplest answer is that you know one when y'all see one, whether it's at one of NYC's many museums (The Metropolitan Museum, the Guggenheim, MoMA and elsewhere) or at institutions in other parts of the globe.
We, of course, have our opinion of what makes the grade and we present them hither in our list of the best paintings of all time.
Top famous paintings
i. Leonardo Da Vinci, Mona Lisa, 1503–19
Painted between 1503 and 1517, Da Vinci's alluring portrait has been dogged past two questions since the day information technology was made: Who's the discipline and why is she smiling? A number of theories for the former have been proffered over the years: That she'south the wife of the Florentine merchant Francesco di Bartolomeo del Giocondo (ergo, the work'south alternative championship, La Gioconda); that she's Leonardo'south mother, Caterina, conjured from Leonardo's boyhood memories of her; and finally, that it's a self-portrait in drag. Every bit for that famous smiling, its enigmatic quality has driven people crazy for centuries. Whatever the reason, Mona Lisa'due south await of preternatural calm comports with the arcadian landscape behind her, which dissolves into the distance through Leonardo's use of atmospheric perspective.
Photo: Courtesy CC/Flickr/Dystopos
2. Johannes Vermeer, Girl with a Pearl Earring, 1665
Johannes Vermeer'south 1665 study of a young woman is startlingly real and startlingly modern, almost as if it were a photograph. This gets into the argue over whether or not Vermeer employed a pre-photographic device called a camera obscura to create the image. Leaving that aside, the sitter is unknown, though it's been speculated that she might have been Vermeer'south maid. He portrays her looking over her shoulder, locking her eyes with the viewer as if attempting to found an intimate connection across the centuries. Technically speaking, Girl isn't a portrait, but rather an example of the Dutch genre chosen a tronie—a headshot meant more as withal life of facial features than as an attempt to capture a likeness.
Photo: Courtesy CC/Flickr/Nat507
3. Vincent van Gogh, The Starry Nighttime, 1889
Vincent Van Gogh'southward about pop painting, The Starry Night was created past Van Gogh at the asylum in Saint-Rémy, where he'd committed himself in 1889. Indeed, The Starry Dark seems to reflect his turbulent state of listen at the time, as the night sky comes live with swirls and orbs of frenetically applied castor marks springing from the yin and yang of his personal demons and awe of nature.
Photograph: Courtesy CC/Flickr/Wally Gobetz
4. Gustav Klimt, The Kiss, 1907–1908
Opulently gilded and extravagantly patterned, The Kiss, Gustav Klimt's fin-de-siècle portrayal of intimacy, is a mix of Symbolism and Vienna Jugendstil, the Austrian variant of Art Nouveau. Klimt depicts his subjects as mythical figures made modern past luxuriant surfaces of up-to-the moment graphic motifs. The piece of work is a highpoint of the artist'southward Aureate Phase between 1899 and 1910 when he often used gold leaf—a technique inspired past a 1903 trip to the Basilica di San Vitale in Ravenna, Italy, where he saw the church's famed Byzantine mosaics.
Photo: Courtesy CC/Flickr/Jessica Epstein
5. Sandro Botticelli, The Birth of Venus, 1484–1486
Botticelli's The Nascence of Venus was the beginning full-length, non-religious nude since artifact, and was made for Lorenzo de Medici. It's claimed that the figure of the Goddess of Dear is modeled later on one Simonetta Cattaneo Vespucci, whose favors were allegedly shared by Lorenzo and his younger brother, Giuliano. Venus is seen being blown aground on a giant clamshell by the air current gods Zephyrus and Aura as the personification of spring awaits on land with a cloak. Unsurprisingly, Venus attracted the ire of Savonarola, the Dominican monk who led a fundamentalist crackdown on the secular tastes of the Florentines. His campaign included the infamous "Bonfire of the Vanities" of 1497, in which "profane" objects—cosmetics, artworks, books—were burned on a pyre. The Birth of Venus was itself scheduled for incineration, but somehow escaped destruction. Botticelli, though, was so freaked out by the incident that he gave up painting for a while.
Photograph: Courtesy CC/Flickr/arselectronica
6. James Abbott McNeill Whistler, Arrangement in Grayness and Black No. ane, 1871
Whistler's Mother, or Organization in Grey and Black No. 1, equally information technology's actually titled, speaks to the creative person's appetite to pursue art for art's sake. James Abbott McNeill Whistler painted the work in his London studio in 1871, and in it, the formality of portraiture becomes an essay in form. Whistler'south female parent Anna is pictured as one of several elements locked into an organisation of right angles. Her severe expression fits in with the rigidity of the limerick, and it'due south somewhat ironic to note that despite Whistler's formalist intentions, the painting became a symbol of maternity.
Photograph: Male monarch/Shutterstock/Universal History Archive
7. Jan van Eyck, The Arnolfini Portrait, 1434
One of the about significant works produced during the Northern Renaissance, this limerick is believed to be one of the start paintings executed in oils. A full-length double portrait, it reputedly portrays an Italian merchant and a woman who may or may not be his bride. In 1934, the celebrated art historian Erwin Panofsky proposed that the painting is really a wedding contract. What can exist reliably said is that the slice is one of the first depictions of an interior using orthogonal perspective to create a sense of space that seems contiguous with the viewer'southward own; it feels like a painting you lot could step into.
Photo: Courtesy CC/Flickr/Centralasian
viii. Hieronymus Bosch, The Garden of Earthly Delights, 1503–1515
This fantastical triptych is generally considered a afar forerunner to Surrealism. In truth, it's the expression of a late medieval artist who believed that God and the Devil, Heaven and Hell were existent. Of the three scenes depicted, the left panel shows Christ presenting Eve to Adam, while the right one features the depredations of Hell; less clear is whether the center panel depicts Sky. In Bosch'southward perfervid vision of Hell, an enormous set of ears wielding a phallic pocketknife attacks the damned, while a bird-beaked bug rex with a chamber pot for a crown sits on its throne, devouring the doomed earlier promptly defecating them out again. This riot of symbolism has been largely impervious to estimation, which may business relationship for its widespread appeal.
Photo: Courtesy CC/Flickr/Centralasian
9. Georges Seurat, A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, 1884–1886
Georges Seurat's masterpiece, evoking the Paris of La Belle Epoque, is actually depicting a working-form suburban scene well outside the city's heart. Seurat oftentimes fabricated this milieu his subject, which differed from the bourgeois portrayals of his Impressionist contemporaries. Seurat abjured the capture-the-moment approach of Manet, Monet and Degas, going instead for the sense of timeless permanence found in Greek sculpture. And that is exactly what you go in this frieze-similar processional of figures whose stillness is in keeping with Seurat'due south aim of creating a classical mural in modern form.
Photograph: Courtesy The Art Institute of Chicago/Helen Birch Bartlett Memorial Drove
10. Pablo Picasso, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, 1907
The ur-canvass of 20th-century fine art, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon ushered in the mod era by decisively breaking with the representational tradition of Western painting, incorporating allusions to the African masks that Picasso had seen in Paris's ethnographic museum at the Palais du Trocadro. Its compositional Dna as well includes El Greco's The Vision of Saint John (1608–14), now hanging in the Metropolitan Museum of Fine art. The women being depicted are really prostitutes in a brothel in the creative person's native Barcelona.
Photo: Courtesy CC/Flickr/Wally Gobetz
11. Pieter Bruegel the Elder, The Harvesters, 1565
Bruegel's fanfare for the mutual man is considered one of the defining works of Western art. This limerick was one of six created on the theme of the seasons. The time is probably early September. A grouping of peasants on the left cut and packet ripened wheat, while the on the right, another grouping takes their midday meal. One figure is sacked out nether a tree with his pants unbuttoned. This attending to item continues throughout the painting as a procession of ever-granular observations receding into space. It was extraordinary for a time when landscapes served mostly as backdrops for religious paintings.
12. Édouard Manet, Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe, 1863
Manet'south scene of picnicking Parisians caused a scandal when information technology debuted at the Salon des Refusés, the alternative exhibition made up of works rejected by the jurors of the annual Salon—the official art exhibition of the Académie des Beaux-Arts that set up artistic standards in French republic. The most vociferous objections to Manet's piece of work centered on the depiction of a nude woman in the company of men dressed in contemporary clothes. Based on motifs borrowed from such Renaissance greats as Raphael and Giorgione, Le Déjeuner was a cheeky send up of classical figuration—an insolent brew-up of modern life and painting tradition.
13. Piet Mondrian, Composition with Blood-red Blueish and Yellowish, 1930
A modest painting (18 inches by 18 inches) that packs a big art-historical punch, Mondrian's piece of work represents a radical distillation of form, color and composition to their bones components. Limiting his palette to the master triad (red, xanthous and blue), plus blackness and white, Mondrian applied paint in flat unmixed patches in an arrangement of squares and rectangles that anticipated Minimalism.
xiv. Diego Rodríguez de Silva y Velázquez, Las Meninas, or The Family of King Philip IV
A painting of a painting within a painting, Velázquez masterpiece consists of dissimilar themes rolled into i: A portrait of Spain'due south majestic family and retinue in Velázquez'southward studio; a cocky-portrait; an about fine art-for-art's-sake brandish of bravura brush work; and an interior scene, offering glimpses into Velázquez's working life. Las Meninas is likewise a treatise on the nature of seeing, as well as a riddle confounding viewers about what exactly they're looking at. It's the visual art equivalent of breaking the fourth wall—or in this instance, the studio's far wall on which there hangs a mirror reflecting the faces of the Spanish Rex and Queen. Immediately this suggests that the royal couple is on our side of the motion-picture show plane, raising the question of where we are in relationship to them. Meanwhile, Velázquez's full length rendering of himself at his easel begs the question of whether he's looking in a mirror to paint the picture. In other words, are the subjects of Las Meninas (all of whom are fixing their gaze outside of the frame), looking at united states, or looking at themselves?
xv. Pablo Picasso, Guernica, 1937
Perhaps Picasso's best-known painting, Guernica is an antiwar cris de coeur occasioned by the 1937 bombing of the eponymous Basque city during the Castilian Civil War by High german and Italian aircraft centrolineal with Fascist leader Francisco Franco. The leftist government that opposed him commissioned Picasso to created the painting for the Spanish Pavillion at 1937 Globe's Fair in Paris. When information technology closed, Guernica went on an international tour, earlier winding up at the Museum of Modern Fine art in New York. Picasso loaned the painting to MoMA with the stipulation that it be returned to his native Spain once democracy was restored—which it was in 1981, six years after Franco'south death in 1975 (Picasso himself died two years before that.) Today, the painting is housed at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid.
16. Francisco de Goya y Lucientes, The Naked Maja, circa 1797–1800
Definitely comfy in her own skin, this female person nude staring unashamedly at the viewer acquired quite a stir when it was painted, and even got Goya into hot water with the Spanish Inquisition. Amidst other things, information technology features one of the get-go depictions of public pilus in Western art. Deputed past Manuel de Godoy, Spain'south Prime Minister, The Naked Maja was accompanied by another version with the sitter clothed. The identity of the adult female remains a mystery, though she is most thought to be Godoy's young mistress, Pepita Tudó.
17. Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, Grande Odalisque, 1814
Deputed by Napoleon's sister, Queen Caroline Murat of Naples, Grande Odalisque represented the artist's break with the Neo-classical way he'd been identified with for much of his career. The work could be described as Mannerist, though information technology's generally thought of as a transition to Romanticism, a movement that abjured Neo-classicalism's precision, formality and equipoise in favor of eliciting emotional reactions from the viewer. This depiction of a concubine languidly posed on a couch is notable for her strange proportions. Anatomically incorrect, this enigmatic, uncanny figure was greeted with jeers by critics at the time, though it eventually became one of Ingres almost indelible works.
18. Eugène Delacroix, Freedom Leading the People, 1830
Commemorating the July Revolution of 1830, which toppled Male monarch Charles X of France, Liberty Leading the People has get synonymous with the revolutionary spirit all over the world. Combining apologue with contemporary elements, the painting is a thrilling case of the Romantic style, going for the gut with its titular grapheme brandishing the French Tricolor as members of unlike classes unite behind her to tempest a barricade strewn with the bodies of fallen comrades. The image has inspired other works of art and literature, including the Statue of Liberty and Victor Hugo'south novel Les Misérables.
xix. Claude Monet, Impression, Sunrise, 1874
The defining figure of Impressionism, Monet well-nigh gave the movement its name with his painting of daybreak over the port of Le Havre, the artist's hometown. Monet was known for his studies of light and color, and this canvas offers a splendid case with its flurry of brush strokes depicting the sunday equally an orange orb breaking through a hazy blue melding of h2o and sky.
20. Caspar David Friedrich, Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, 1819
The worship of nature, or more than precisely, the feeling of awe information technology inspired, was a signature of the Romantic style in art, and there is no better example on that score than this image of a hiker in the mountains, pausing on a rocky outcrop to accept in his surroundings. His dorsum is turned towards the viewer as if he were too enthralled with the mural to plow around, simply his pose offers a kind of over-the-shoulder view that draws us into vista as if we were seeing it through his eyes.
21. Théodore Géricault, The Raft of the Medusa, 1818–1819
For sheer impact, it'southward hard to peak The Raft of the Medusa, in which Géricault took a contemporary news event and transformed it into a timeless icon. The backstory begins with the 1818 sinking of the French naval vessel off the coast of Africa, which left 147 sailors afloat on a hastily constructed raft. Of that number, only 15 remained after a 13-day ordeal at sea that included incidents of cannibalism among the drastic men. The larger-than-life-size painting, distinguished by a dramatic pyramidal limerick, captures the moment the raft's emaciated coiffure spots a rescue transport. Géricault undertook the massive sheet on his ain, without anyone paying for information technology, and approached it much like an investigative reporter, interviewing survivors and making numerous detailed studies based on their testimony.
22. Edward Hopper, Nighthawks, 1942
An iconic depiction of urban isolation, Nighthawks depicts a quarter of characters at night inside a greasy spoon with an expansive wraparound window that near takes up the entire facade of the diner. Its brightly lit interior—the only source of illumination for the scene—floods the sidewalk and the surrounding buildings, which are otherwise night. The restaurant's drinking glass exterior creates a display-case event that heightens the sense that the subjects (three customers and a counterman) are alone together. Information technology's a report of alienation equally the figures studiously ignore each other while losing themselves in a state of reverie or burnout. The diner was based on a long-demolished one in Hopper's Greenwich Village neighborhood, and some art historians have suggested that the painting equally a whole may have been inspired past Vincent van Gogh'due south Café Terrace at Night, which was on showroom at a gallery Hopper frequented at aforementioned time he painted Nighthawks Likewise of note: The redheaded woman on the far right is the artist's married woman Jo, who oftentimes modeled for him.
23. Marcel Duchamp, Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2, 1912
At the beginning of the 20th-century, Americans knew little well-nigh modern art, but all that abruptly changed when a survey of Europe'due south leading modernists was mounted at New York City's 69th Regiment Arsenal on Lexington Artery between 25th and 26th Streets. The show was officially titled the "International Exhibition of Modern Art," just has simply been known as the Armory Show ever since. Information technology was a succès de scandale of epic proportions, sparking an outcry from critics that landed on the front page of newspapers. At the center of the brouhaha was this painting past Marcel Duchamp. A stylistic mixture of Cubism and Futurism, Duchamp'south depiction of the titular field of study in multiple exposure evokes a movement through fourth dimension every bit well as space, and was inspired past the photographic motion studies of Eadweard Muybridge and Étienne-Jules Marey. The figure'south planar structure drew the virtually ire, making the painting a lighting rod for ridicule. The New York Times's art critic dubbed it "an explosion in a shingle factory," and The New York Evening Sun published a satirical cartoon version of Nude with the caption, "The Rude Descending a Staircase (Rush 60 minutes at the Subway)," in which commuters push and shove each other on their style onto the railroad train. Nude was one of a handful of paintings Duchamp made before turning full fourth dimension towards the conceptualist experiments (such as the Readymades and The Large Drinking glass) for which he's known.
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Source: https://www.timeout.com/newyork/art/top-famous-paintings-in-art-history-ranked
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