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
Man with Crossed Arms
1900 · Guggenheim, New York City
Cézanne cared less who the man was than whether the head would hold together as structure, and the slight asymmetries keep it alive.
★ 6.1
Pyramid of Skulls
1901 · Private collection
Four skulls stacked on a tabletop and lit straight on. Cézanne kept coming back to the skull in his last years, never this frontally.
★ 5.9
A Glimpse of Notre Dame in the Late Afternoon
1902 · Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo
Notre-Dame across the Seine in a few dark summary strokes, painted before Matisse's color went off and Fauvism happened.
★ 5.7
The Football Players
1908 · Guggenheim, New York City
Moustached men in striped jerseys leap for a ball among autumn trees, playing the new game of rugby as though it were slow ritual.
★ 5.7
Mother and Child
1902 · Fogg Art Museum, Cambridge, Massachusetts
A mother holding her child, in the blue Picasso used for everything during the years he was poor in Paris and Barcelona.
★ 5.6
Woman with Folded Arms (Femme aux Bras Croises)
1902 · Private collection
Her crossed arms are a wall against the world, and the blue does the rest. Picasso was painting the outcast and the destitute.
★ 5.6
The Port of Saint-Tropez
1902 · National Museum of Western Art, Tokyo
Signac moved to Saint-Tropez and pulled the rest of the Neo-Impressionists south. Seurat's tight dots have loosened into bigger, brighter tiles.
★ 5.6
Jealousy
1907 · The Munch Museum, Oslo
A sallow green face fills the front of the picture while behind him a woman in red picks fruit beside another man. He is imagining it.
★ 5.4
Train Smoke
1900 · The Munch Museum, Oslo
One puff of steam drifts across a curving shoreline, the modern world putting a small mark on a landscape that had none.
★ 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
Portrait of Angel Fernandez de Soto
1903 · Private collection
They shared a Barcelona studio, and Soto was known as a hard drinker, but Picasso painted him sober and sad in blue.
★ 5.2
Little Harbor in Normandy
1909 · Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago
Boats and masts broken into tilting green and brown planes, painted while Braque and Picasso were building Cubism out of Cézanne.
★ 5.2
Golgotha
1900 · The Munch Museum, Oslo
Munch painted this while under treatment in a clinic, and the crucified figure hemmed in by leering faces is not hard to read.
★ 4.8
Grand Canal Venice
1905 · Toledo Museum of Art, Toledo, Ohio
Gondolas on water that has shattered into pink, blue and gold. Signac took the divisionist dot to the most painted view in Europe.
★ 4.8
Landscape at La Ciotat
1907 · Museum of Modern Art, New York City
Hot pinks and oranges laid on freely, a year before Cézanne and Picasso's Demoiselles sent Braque off toward Cubism instead.
★ 4.8
Self-Portrait (Rivera)
1907 · Museo Dolores Olmedo Patino, Mexico City
Rivera as a student in Europe, years before the murals, still working inside the academic tradition he would later blow up.
★ 4.2