Water Lilies (Nympheas Cycle)
1926 · Musee de l'Orangerie, Paris
Monet painted these eight murals of his pond for two oval rooms in Paris while his eyesight failed. They opened months after he died.
★ 9.5
Browse by time · decade
1920s
1920 – 1929
Showing 23 artworks from the 1920s
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 Treachery of Images (This is Not a Pipe)
1929 · LACMA, Los Angeles
The words under the pipe are correct, since a painting of a pipe is not a pipe, which is the whole and entire joke.
★ 7.9
Three Musicians
1921 · Museum of Modern Art, New York City
A harlequin, a Pierrot and a monk in flat interlocking shapes that look cut from paper. Synthetic Cubism at its grandest and most deadpan.
★ 7.8
The Elephant Celebes
1921 · Tate Modern, London
Part boiler, part elephant, with a tusked hose coming out of its head. Ernst took the shape from a photograph of an African grain bin.
★ 7.2
The Three Dancers
1925 · Tate Modern, London
Picasso's classical calm breaks here into something jagged and violent, the limbs flung out almost crucified, set off by the death of an old friend.
★ 7.2
Composition VIII
1923 · Guggenheim, New York City
Circles, triangles and floating lines arranged with the precision of a score. Kandinsky painted it while teaching at the Bauhaus, his storms over.
★ 7.2
Three Women
1922 · Museum of Modern Art, New York City
Three nudes turned on a lathe, smooth and tubular, laid out among furniture built to match. The odalisque redone for the age of the factory.
★ 7.1
Carnival of Harlequin
1925 · Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo
A cat plays a guitar and an eye drifts past on a stalk. Miró said the hallucinations of hunger in his Paris studio fed the picture.
★ 7.1
The False Mirror
1928 · Museum of Modern Art, New York City
One enormous eye with a cloudy sky for an iris. Whether it is looking out or reflecting back is the question.
★ 6.9
Automat
1927 · Des Moines Art Center, Des Moines
One cup of coffee, one glove still on, and a window behind her that reflects nothing but two rows of ceiling lights.
★ 6.8
The Tilled Field
1924 · Guggenheim, New York City
An eye and an ear sprout from a tree and a lizard wears a cap. Miró's Catalan farm has come apart into Surrealism.
★ 6.8
Self-Portrait in the Green Bugatti
1925 · Location unknown
She painted herself at the wheel in leather helmet and gloves for a German fashion magazine, and invented the look of the Jazz Age.
★ 6.7
Woman Combing Her Hair
1920 · Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago
Goyo oversaw every stage of his prints himself and finished only a handful before dying young. This is the one everyone knows.
★ 6.5
New York Street with Moon
1925 · Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid
Her male colleagues doubted a woman could paint the city, so O'Keeffe painted the city, with a moon caught between two dark buildings.
★ 6.3
Eclipse of the Sun
1926 · Heckscher Museum of Art, Huntington NY
A headless official takes advice from an industrialist, a blinkered donkey listens above, and a dollar sign has blotted out the sun.
★ 6.3
Castle and Sun
1928 · Private collection
Small colored blocks stack up into a town like stained glass, with a red sun above. Klee taught at the Bauhaus and kept the whimsy.
★ 6.3
The Menaced Assassin
1927 · Museum of Modern Art, New York City
A murdered woman on a divan, a calm man listening to a gramophone, and two men with a club and a net waiting outside the door.
★ 6.3
Dempsey and Firpo
1924 · Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City
Firpo has just punched Dempsey clean out of the ring and into the laps of the reporters. Bellows painted the exact instant.
★ 6.1
La Belle Rafaela
1927 · Location unknown
The odalisque rebuilt in the machine age, all gleaming curves against deep red, sensual and cold at exactly the same time.
★ 6.1
Self-Portrait with a Cigarette
1923 · Museum of Modern Art, New York City
Beckmann had spent the war as a medical orderly, and he looks out of the shadows here like a man finished being surprised.
★ 5.6
Reading the Letter
1921 · Musee Picasso, Paris
Two heavy young men press close together over a letter, and the intimacy is usually read as a memorial to Apollinaire.
★ 5.2