On the Threshold of Liberty
1937 · Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago
A cannon points across a room whose walls are panelled with samples of the world: sky, wood grain, fire, bells, a woman's torso.
★ 5.9
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 False Mirror
1928 · Museum of Modern Art, New York City
One enormous eye with a cloudy sky for an iris. Whether it is looking out or reflecting back is the question.
★ 6.9
Ram's Head White Hollyhock and Little Hills
1935 · Brooklyn Museum (Brooklyn), Brooklyn
O'Keeffe collected sun-bleached bones off the desert and hung this one in the sky over the hills, with a single white hollyhock beside it.
★ 7.2
Wheat Field with Cypresses
1889 · Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City
Van Gogh loved the cypress and compared it to an Egyptian obelisk, then set one flaming up the right side of a Provençal field.
★ 7.5
On a Mountain Path in Spring
1200 · National Palace Museum, Taipei
They called him One-Corner Ma. A scholar and a willow occupy one corner and the rest of the silk is left as air.
★ 7.6
Wheatfield with Crows
1890 · Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam
Three paths run into the wheat and none of them go anywhere. Painted at Auvers in his last weeks, and read too neatly ever since.
★ 7.7
Wind God and Thunder God (Fujin Raijin-zu)
1630 · Kyoto National Museum, Kyoto
The two gods hurtle in from opposite edges and Sotatsu leaves the whole middle empty, so the bare gold reads as sky.
★ 8.2
View of Toledo
1610 · Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City
El Greco moved the cathedral tower off its real site for the sake of the composition and lit the whole city with a green storm.
★ 8.4
View of Delft
1660 · Mauritshuis, The Hague
Vermeer painted his own city from across the harbor, almost his only townscape. Proust called it the most beautiful painting in the world.
★ 9.3
Starry Night
1889 · Museum of Modern Art, New York City
Van Gogh painted the churning sky and its eleven stars from a window of the asylum at Saint-Rémy, partly from memory.
★ 9.6