The Thinker
1904 · Musee Rodin, Paris
Rodin first made this figure as Dante brooding over the Gates of Hell, then enlarged him and set him thinking alone on a rock.
★ 9.3
Browse by time · decade
1900s
1900 – 1909
Showing 36 artworks from the 1900s
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
The Kiss (Klimt)
1908 · Galerie Belvedere, Vienna
Two lovers kneel wrapped in a single gold robe, rectangles patterning his side of it and circles hers, on a meadow of flowers.
★ 8.9
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 Joy of Life
1906 · The Barnes Foundation (Philadelphia), Philadelphia
Nudes lounge and pipe and dance in a ring in a glade of colors nothing in nature has, a Fauve idyll from 1906.
★ 8.3
The Bathers
1906 · Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia
Cézanne worked on it for years and died before he finished, bending the trees inward so they rhyme with the bodies underneath.
★ 8.2
Portrait of Adele Block Bauer
1907 · Neue Galerie, New York City
Only the face and hands are painted naturally and the rest is gold. The Nazis seized it, and a long restitution case eventually got it back.
★ 8.0
Woman with a Hat
1905 · San Francisco MOMA, San Francisco
A critic looked at this and called Matisse and his friends fauves, wild beasts, which is how the movement got its name.
★ 7.8
The Old Guitarist
1904 · Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago
The guitar is the only warm note in the picture. Picasso painted it in his Blue Period, poor himself and living on very little.
★ 7.8
The Snake Charmer
1907 · Musee d'Orsay, Paris
A black silhouette plays a flute and the snakes come out of the leaves toward the music, in moonlight Rousseau invented entirely.
★ 7.6
Family of Saltimbanques
1905 · National Gallery of Art, Washington, District of Columbia
Circus people stand together in an empty landscape without looking at each other. The Rose Period at its largest and most wistful.
★ 7.5
Portrait of Madame Matisse (The Green Stripe)
1906 · Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen
Matisse ran a green stripe down his wife's face to divide warm from cool, and used color to do the work of light.
★ 7.4
The Dance of Life
1900 · National Gallery (Oslo), Oslo
A woman in white waits, a woman in red dances, a woman in black stands apart. Three ages of love on a midsummer shore.
★ 7.1
Luxe, Calme et Volupte
1904 · Musee d'Orsay, Paris
The title comes from Baudelaire and the technique from Seurat, but the color is already heading somewhere neither of them went.
★ 7.1
The Hungry Lion Throws Itself on the Antelope
1905 · Fondation Beyeler, Riehen
Rousseau never left France and built his jungles from botanical gardens and prints. This one hung in the room that named the Fauves.
★ 6.9
Boy with a Pipe
1905 · Private collection
A boy from the street in a crown of roses, painted the year Picasso's blue gloom warmed into rose.
★ 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
The Houses of Parliament, Sunset
1903 · National Gallery of Art, Washington, District of Columbia
Monet painted Westminster across the river again and again because what he actually wanted was the fog, not the building.
★ 6.6
Danae
1907 · Private collection
Zeus arrives as a stream of gold coins and ornament between her thighs, and Klimt makes no attempt to be subtle about it.
★ 6.3
Woman Ironing
1904 · Guggenheim, New York City
The laundress bears down on her iron with her shoulders up and her head sunk, all in the cold blue of Picasso's poorest years.
★ 6.3