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
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.
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
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
Composition with Yellow, Blue and Red
1942 · Tate Modern, London
Black lines, white ground, three primary colors and nothing else. Mondrian spent decades taking painting down to this and called it Neo-Plasticism.
★ 7.5
Broadway Boogie Woogie
1943 · Museum of Modern Art, New York City
Mondrian broke his own grid into blinking squares after moving to New York, where he loved the traffic and the jazz.
★ 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
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
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