Fountain
1917
Duchamp submitted a porcelain urinal signed R. Mutt to an exhibition he was helping to judge, and the committee rejected it.
★ 9.5
Browse by time · decade
1910s
1910 – 1919
Showing 34 artworks from the 1910s
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
Mystery and Melancholy of a Street
1914 · Private collection
A girl rolls a hoop down an arcaded street toward a shadow coming around the corner, in light that belongs to no hour.
★ 8.3
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
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
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
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
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
The Night
1919 · Kunstsammlung, Dusseldorf
A family is tortured in a room too small for it, painted in Germany in 1919 with the war and the revolution just finished.
★ 7.2
Blue Horse I
1911 · Stadtische Galerie, Munich
Marc gave his animals symbolic colors, blue for the spiritual, and looked to them for an innocence he thought people had lost.
★ 7.1
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
The City
1919 · Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia
Billboards, scaffolding and stairways in flat primary color, with people reduced to bright interchangeable parts. Léger loved machines and made no secret of it.
★ 7.1
Red Nude
1917 · Private collection
The police shut down Modigliani's only solo show for indecency, and this was among the nudes that did it.
★ 6.8
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
Yellow Cow
1911 · Guggenheim, New York City
Marc used yellow for whatever was gentle and joyful, and this cow is kicking its legs out across the hills for the pleasure of it.
★ 6.5
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
Death and Life
1916 · Leopold Museum, Vienna
Death stands at the left in a patterned robe holding a club, watching a heap of sleeping people who have not noticed him.
★ 6.5
LHOOQ
1919 · Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia
Duchamp bought a postcard of the Mona Lisa, drew a moustache on it, and added five letters that make a crude joke in French.
★ 6.5
We are Making a New World
1918 · Imperial War Museum, London
Splintered stumps and shell craters under a cold sun, and Nash gave it that title on purpose, as an official British war artist.
★ 6.5
San Giorgio Maggiore at Dusk
1912 · National Museum Cardiff, Cardiff
Monet went to Venice late and found a city already doing what he had spent fifty years trying to paint.
★ 6.3