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
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 Girls of Avignon
1907 · Museum of Modern Art, New York City
Five nude women stare out with their faces turned into masks, and Picasso kept the canvas rolled up in his studio for years.
★ 9.2
Campbell's Soup Cans
1962 · Museum of Modern Art, New York City
Thirty-two canvases, one for every variety Campbell's then sold, hung in a row like stock on a supermarket shelf.
★ 8.8
The Persistence of Memory
1931 · Museum of Modern Art, New York City
Dalí said the soft watches came to him from a camembert melting in the sun, and he painted them with hallucinatory precision.
★ 8.7
Bird in Space
1928 · Museum of Modern Art, New York
American customs taxed it as industrial metal until Brancusi v. United States in 1928 forced the law to recognize abstract sculpture as art.
★ 8.6
The Dance (Matisse)
1909 · Museum of Modern Art, New York City
Five figures wheel in a ring against blue and green, reduced to three colors and the strain of holding hands at speed.
★ 8.5
The Dream
1910 · Museum of Modern Art, New York City
Rousseau painted this in the last year of his life and explained that the woman on the sofa is dreaming herself into the jungle.
★ 8.3
The Song of Love
1914 · Museum of Modern Art, New York City
A marble head, a red rubber glove and a green ball hang together on a wall, and a train goes by in the distance.
★ 7.8
Three Musicians
1921 · Museum of Modern Art, New York City
A harlequin, a Pierrot and a monk in flat interlocking shapes that look cut from paper. Synthetic Cubism at its grandest and most deadpan.
★ 7.8
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
Bridge over a Pond of Water Lilies
1899 · Museum of Modern Art, New York City
Monet dug the pond himself at Giverny, built the Japanese bridge over it, and then painted the place for the rest of his life.
★ 7.4
I and the Village
1911 · Museum of Modern Art, New York City
A green-faced peasant and a cow look at each other, and the houses behind them are upside down. Chagall grew up in Vitebsk.
★ 7.2
Drowning Girl
1963 · Museum of Modern Art, New York City
She would rather sink than call Brad. Lichtenstein took one panel of a romance comic and blew it up to the size of a serious painting.
★ 7.2
Three Women
1922 · Museum of Modern Art, New York City
Three nudes turned on a lathe, smooth and tubular, laid out among furniture built to match. The odalisque redone for the age of the factory.
★ 7.1
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
Boy Leading a Horse
1906 · Museum of Modern Art, New York City
The Rose Period cooling off into something graver and more archaic, the boy and horse built like figures off a Greek relief.
★ 6.7
Man with a Guitar
1913 · Museum of Modern Art, New York City
A curve of the guitar, some stenciled letters, and otherwise a lattice of brown and grey. Braque and Picasso developed this together, canvas by canvas.
★ 6.5
Map
1961 · Museum of Modern Art, New York City
Johns stenciled the state names and then let red, yellow and blue run right over the borders. Another sign everybody already knows.
★ 6.5
The Charnel House
1945 · Museum of Modern Art, New York City
Bodies lie heaped and bound under a kitchen table, in grey. Picasso left it unfinished, painted after the camps were opened.
★ 6.5