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
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.
Black Square
1915 · Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow
Malevich hung it high in the corner where a Russian house keeps its icons, and called it the zero of form.
★ 8.5
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
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
Nude Descending a Staircase
1912 · Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia
A critic at the 1913 Armory Show called it an explosion in a shingle factory, and the insult followed the painting around America.
★ 8.0
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
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
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
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
Composition VIII
1923 · Guggenheim, New York City
Circles, triangles and floating lines arranged with the precision of a score. Kandinsky painted it while teaching at the Bauhaus, his storms over.
★ 7.2
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
Suprematist Composition
1916 · Private collection
Colored bars drift at diagonals across a white void with no ground under them, which Malevich meant as pure feeling and nothing else.
★ 7.1
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
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
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
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
Black Lines
1913 · Guggenheim, New York City
Black skeins and floating patches of color with nothing recognizable in it at all. Kandinsky thought painting could work on you like music.
★ 6.7
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
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
Capricious Forms
1937 · Guggenheim, New York City
The Bauhaus grids and circles have given way to floating amoebas. Kandinsky in Paris at the end, inventing a biology instead.
★ 4.8