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 315 works across all media from the 1910s
The Rite of Spring
1913
Noise from the 1913 premiere audience drowned out the orchestra, so Nijinsky stood in the wings shouting the counts at his dancers.
★ 9.3
The Trial
1915 · 276 pages
Josef K. is arrested one morning, never told the charge, and ruined by his own efforts to clear himself. Kafka made faceless authority funny, and gave the century its word for dread.
★ 9.2
The Metamorphosis
1915 · 128 pages
Gregor Samsa wakes as an enormous insect and worries first about missing his train. The horror turns domestic fast, and his family decides the son who supported them is now a burden.
★ 9.0
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
1916 · 329 pages
Stephen Dedalus grows from a small boy into a young man set on leaving Ireland to make art. The prose matures sentence by sentence with him, from baby talk to fierce argument.
★ 8.7
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
Maple Leaf RagScott Joplin
Maple Leaf Rag
1916
Stark's first run of 400 copies took a year to sell; Joplin was cutting it to piano roll in 1916.
★ 7.8
My Antonia
1918 · 166 pages
Jim Burden arrives orphaned in Nebraska and finds Antonia Shimerda, an immigrant girl whose family is barely surviving the winter. Cather writes the prairie so well the book reads like your own childhood.
★ 7.2
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
The Autumn of the Middle Ages
1919 · 490 pages
Late medieval France and the Netherlands ran on public weeping, elaborate tournaments, and constant awareness of death. Huizinga paints this as no Renaissance dawn but a culture worn out by its own forms.
★ 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
Kokoro
1914 · 248 pages
Modern Japanese literature turns on this book. A student attaches himself to a withdrawn man he calls Sensei, and the letter that finally explains him confesses a betrayal that has never healed.
★ 7.0
The Good Soldier
1915 · 256 pages
This is the saddest story I have ever heard, an American begins, then tells it out of order, circling two couples whose friendship at a German spa hid adultery, debt, and ruin.
★ 7.0
Eminent Victorians
1918 · 288 pages
Four Victorian idols go under Strachey's scalpel: Cardinal Manning, Florence Nightingale, the headmaster Thomas Arnold, and General Gordon at Khartoum. The malice is so elegant that English biography never went back to reverence.
★ 7.0
Howards End
1910 · 246 pages
Two families and one house. Forster sets the cultured Schlegel sisters against the money-making Wilcoxes, drags a poor clerk into the collision, and makes the question of who inherits England literal.
★ 7.0
The Rainbow
1915 · 528 pages
Three generations of one Nottinghamshire family, and Lawrence writes their marriages from inside the body: what draws two people together, what turns cold, and what the granddaughter Ursula cannot find.
★ 7.0
Ethan Frome
1911 · 77 pages
Snowbound on a failing Massachusetts farm, Ethan Frome works beside a wife who is perpetually ill and the young cousin he has fallen for. Wharton makes poverty and duty feel like weather.
★ 7.0
The Secret Garden
1911 · 368 pages
Orphaned by cholera in India, a sour, unloved child arrives on the Yorkshire moors and finds the key to a walled garden that brings her and her bedridden cousin back to life.
★ 6.9
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