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 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.
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
Bullfinch on Weeping Cherry
1834 · Location unknown
One plump bullfinch on a cherry sprig, a poem written beside it. The other Hokusai, quiet and exact, nothing like the wave.
★ 6.5
Pigeon with Peas (La Pigeon aux Petits Pois)
1911 · Stolen
Stolen from the Musée d'Art Moderne in Paris in 2010 and never recovered, so it survives here only as a photograph.
★ 6.3
Leda and the Swan (Correggio)
1532 · Gemaldegalerie, Berlin
The story runs across the canvas in stages, arrival to departure. A later owner cut Leda's head out in disgust and it was repainted.
★ 5.7
Saint Francis Preaching to the Birds (Louvre)
1300 · Louvre, Paris
The same story at miniature scale, squeezed into a predella panel, and Giotto loses none of the plainness that made it convincing.
★ 5.7
Woman with a Parrot
1866 · Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City
Courbet took the nude to the Salon with her hair loose, her body relaxed, and a parrot on her hand instead of a myth.
★ 5.7
Leda Atomica
1949 · Teatro-Museo Dali, Figueres
Nothing in the picture touches anything else. Dalí built it on the physics of the atom, where matter is mostly empty space.
★ 5.6
The Little Owl
1506 · Albertina, Vienna
Owls carried centuries of symbolism in the north, but Dürer's is mostly just an owl, looking back at you with its talons over a ledge.
★ 5.2
Child with a Dove
1901 · Private collection
A child holding a white dove with a colored ball at its feet, painted just as Picasso's palette was cooling toward blue.
★ 5.2
Leda and the Swan
1882 · The Barnes Foundation (Philadelphia), Philadelphia
The swan nips her hand and Leda barely reacts. Cézanne cared about the planes of the body, not the story.
★ 4.8