Golgotha
1900 · The Munch Museum, Oslo
Munch painted this while under treatment in a clinic, and the crucified figure hemmed in by leering faces is not hard to read.
★ 4.8
The Art canon
Sourced and hung.
Every work chosen by hand and annotated for why it matters.
Browse all 704 works or filter by movement, subject, place, and artist.
Browse all 704 works or filter by movement, subject, place, and artist.
The Sinking of the Titanic
1913 · Saint Louis Art Museum (Saint Louis), Saint Louis
Beckmann painted the disaster a year after it happened, borrowing Géricault's raft, and it now reads as a rehearsal for the war.
★ 4.8
Fragment of a Crucifixion
1950 · Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven
Bacon used the shape of the cross as an armature for meat rather than religion, with a snarling animal fixed on top.
★ 4.8
Train Smoke
1900 · The Munch Museum, Oslo
One puff of steam drifts across a curving shoreline, the modern world putting a small mark on a landscape that had none.
★ 5.2
Deer in the Forest I
1913 · Phillips Collection, Washington, District of Columbia
The deer have almost dissolved into the crystalline planes of the wood, which is exactly what Marc was after.
★ 5.2
The Foxes
1913 · Private collection
Foxes curled together and assembled out of shards of grey, blue and rust. Marc was killed at Verdun three years after painting it.
★ 5.2
Descent from the Cross (Beckmann)
1917 · Museum of Modern Art, New York City
Beckmann came out of the war traumatized and painted a Christ so emaciated and angular that no consolation survives the picture.
★ 5.2
Figure in a Landscape
1945 · Tate Modern, London
Bacon started from a snapshot of a friend dozing in a park and then removed the head, the identity and the ease.
★ 5.2
Jealousy
1907 · The Munch Museum, Oslo
A sallow green face fills the front of the picture while behind him a woman in red picks fruit beside another man. He is imagining it.
★ 5.4
Self-Portrait with a Cigarette
1923 · Museum of Modern Art, New York City
Beckmann had spent the war as a medical orderly, and he looks out of the shadows here like a man finished being surprised.
★ 5.6
Melancholy
1892 · National Gallery (Oslo), Oslo
A man broods on the shore while a couple boards a boat far off, and the curving coastline carries the whole mood by itself.
★ 5.7
Artillerymen (Kirchner)
1915 · Guggenheim, New York City
Naked conscripts showering in a barracks under a mounted officer, painted after the army service that broke Kirchner down.
★ 5.7
La Mariee (The Bride)
1950 · Private collection
A bride in red floats through the blue night with a goat playing a cello beside her. Many people know it from a film.
★ 6.1
Anxiety
1894 · The Munch Museum, Oslo
The same bridge and the same burning sky as the Scream, but with a whole crowd coming toward you instead of one figure.
★ 6.1
Castle and Sun
1928 · Private collection
Small colored blocks stack up into a town like stained glass, with a red sun above. Klee taught at the Bauhaus and kept the whimsy.
★ 6.3
Eclipse of the Sun
1926 · Heckscher Museum of Art, Huntington NY
A headless official takes advice from an industrialist, a blinkered donkey listens above, and a dollar sign has blotted out the sun.
★ 6.3
Yellow Cow
1911 · Guggenheim, New York City
Marc used yellow for whatever was gentle and joyful, and this cow is kicking its legs out across the hills for the pleasure of it.
★ 6.5
Madonna
1894 · National Gallery (Oslo), Oslo
Munch gave the Madonna a red halo, closed eyes and parted lips, and made desire and death the same subject.
★ 6.8
The Dance of Life
1900 · National Gallery (Oslo), Oslo
A woman in white waits, a woman in red dances, a woman in black stands apart. Three ages of love on a midsummer shore.
★ 7.1
Blue Horse I
1911 · Stadtische Galerie, Munich
Marc gave his animals symbolic colors, blue for the spiritual, and looked to them for an innocence he thought people had lost.
★ 7.1
The Night
1919 · Kunstsammlung, Dusseldorf
A family is tortured in a room too small for it, painted in Germany in 1919 with the war and the revolution just finished.
★ 7.2
White Crucifixion
1938 · Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago
Christ wears a Jewish prayer shawl while a synagogue burns and refugees flee by boat. Chagall painted it in 1938, watching what was coming.
★ 7.2
Three Studies of Lucian Freud
1969 · Private collection
Freud sits on a wooden chair in three panels, wrenched out of shape and still unmistakably himself. Bacon painted his friend and rival.
★ 7.2
Family of Saltimbanques
1905 · National Gallery of Art, Washington, District of Columbia
Circus people stand together in an empty landscape without looking at each other. The Rose Period at its largest and most wistful.
★ 7.5
Study After Velazquez's Portrait of Pope Innocent X
1953 · Des Moines Art Center, Des Moines
Bacon took Velázquez's composed pope and set him screaming behind a curtain of falling paint. He never saw the original in person.
★ 7.8
Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion
1944 · Tate Modern, London
Three flayed creatures crane and scream on orange grounds. Shown as the war ended in 1945, they made Bacon's reputation overnight.
★ 8.0
Composition VII
1913 · Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow
Kandinsky made more than thirty studies for this and then painted the four-meter canvas in three days, apocalypse dissolved past recognition.
★ 8.1
Walking Man I
1960 · Fondation Giacometti, Paris
Everything is scraped off the bronze except forward motion. One cast briefly held the record for the most expensive sculpture ever sold.
★ 8.1
The Scream
1893 · National Gallery (Oslo), Oslo
Munch said an infinite scream was passing through nature, and put two figures on the bridge behind who walk on without noticing.
★ 9.2