Painting Number 2
1954 · Museum of Modern Art, New York City
Black bars crossing a white ground, enlarged from small ink sketches so the speed and weight of the arm survive the scaling up.
★ 5.2
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.
Blue II
1961 · Centre Pompidou, Paris
Pure blue interrupted by a line of black dots and one short red bar. Miró late in life, having thrown almost everything out.
★ 6.5
Orange and Yellow
1956 · Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo
Two rectangles with feathered edges, built from thin washes so the color seems lit from behind rather than laid on.
★ 6.9
Icarus
1947 · National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh
A black figure with a red dot for a heart falls through blue, cut from paper because Matisse could no longer stand at an easel.
★ 6.9
Violet, Black, Orange, Yellow on White and Red
1949 · Guggenheim, New York City
Soft-edged bands of color stacked one above another, hovering slightly off the surface. Rothko wanted you to stand close and stay a while.
★ 7.1
Blue Nude II
1952 · Centre Pompidou, Paris
Matisse was too ill to stand at an easel, so he cut the figure out of painted paper and called it drawing with scissors.
★ 7.1
Convergence
1952 · Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo
Black, white, red and blue flung edge to edge with nowhere for the eye to settle. The Cold War made it a symbol of American freedom.
★ 7.1
Excavation
1950 · Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago
Hooks and curves fill the canvas edge to edge with no center to rest on, and teeth and jaws keep surfacing out of the mass.
★ 7.2
Woman I
1950 · Museum of Modern Art, New York City
De Kooning dragged the figure back into abstract painting at the moment that was least acceptable, and worked this canvas over for two years.
★ 7.7
Rothko Chapel murals
1967 · Rothko Chapel, Houston
Fourteen near-black panels in an octagonal room, where your eyes adjusting to the dark is the point. Rothko died before it opened.
★ 7.9
Number 11, 1952 (Blue Poles)
1952 · National Gallery of Australia, Canberra
Eight ragged dark blue poles lean across the poured web and give it a beat. Australia's purchase in 1973 caused a national row.
★ 8.0
Autumn Rhythm (Number 30)
1950 · Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Pollock worked on the floor and moved around the canvas instead of standing at an easel, laying black enamel across raw cotton in 1950.
★ 8.6