Guernica
1937 · Museo Reina Sofia, Madrid
A screaming horse, a mother with her dead child, all in grey. Picasso painted it in weeks after German bombers leveled a Basque town.
★ 9.9
Browse by time · decade
1930s
1930 – 1939
Showing 22 artworks from the 1930s
The Persistence of Memory
1931 · Museum of Modern Art, New York City
Dalí said the soft watches came to him from a camembert melting in the sun, and he painted them with hallucinatory precision.
★ 8.7
American Gothic
1930 · Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago
Wood posed his sister and his dentist in front of a farmhouse window, and people have argued ever since whether he meant tribute or mockery.
★ 8.3
The Two Fridas
1939 · Museo de Arte Moderno (Mexico City), Mexico City
Two versions of herself hold hands with one artery running between them, clamped shut. She painted it as her marriage to Rivera fell apart.
★ 7.7
The Weeping Woman
1937 · Tate Modern, London
Picasso pulled her out of the screaming mother in Guernica and gave her the face of Dora Maar, his lover and a photographer.
★ 7.5
Ram's Head White Hollyhock and Little Hills
1935 · Brooklyn Museum (Brooklyn), Brooklyn
O'Keeffe collected sun-bleached bones off the desert and hung this one in the sky over the hills, with a single white hollyhock beside it.
★ 7.2
White Crucifixion
1938 · Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago
Christ wears a Jewish prayer shawl while a synagogue burns and refugees flee by boat. Chagall painted it in 1938, watching what was coming.
★ 7.2
Time Transfixed
1938 · Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago
A small steam locomotive comes out of a fireplace under the mantel clock, and the room around it is otherwise entirely ordinary.
★ 7.2
The Flower Carrier
1935 · San Francisco MOMA, San Francisco
An enormous basket of flowers forces the man down onto his hands and knees, and a woman steadies the load from behind.
★ 6.9
Nude, Green Leaves and Bust
1932 · Tate Modern, London
Marie-Thérèse asleep beside a sculpture of her own head and a philodendron, from the year Picasso could seemingly do nothing wrong.
★ 6.9
The Human Condition
1933 · National Gallery of Art, Washington, District of Columbia
A canvas on an easel shows exactly the landscape it is standing in front of, and therefore hides it completely.
★ 6.9
Room in New York
1932 · Sheldon Museum of Art, Lincoln
He reads the paper, she touches one key of the piano, and we are watching from the street through their window.
★ 6.8
The Dream (La Reve)
1932 · Private collection
Marie-Thérèse asleep in a red armchair, her face split into curves. Picasso is said to have done it in a single afternoon.
★ 6.7
Metamorphosis of Narcissus
1937 · Tate Modern, London
The kneeling figure on the left is the same shape as the stone hand on the right, holding an egg with a flower coming out.
★ 6.7
Woman with Yellow Hair
1931 · Guggenheim, New York City
Marie-Thérèse asleep with her head on her arms, the angular violence of Cubism gone soft and curved for a few years.
★ 6.1
Nude in a Black Armchair
1932 · Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, Georgia
The dark chair throws the body forward, all lilac and rose curves, a plant arching over the sleeper from behind.
★ 6.1
Swans Reflecting Elephants
1937 · Private collection
Three swans on a lake, and in the reflection the necks have become trunks and the trees have become legs.
★ 6.1
On the Threshold of Liberty
1937 · Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago
A cannon points across a room whose walls are panelled with samples of the world: sky, wood grain, fire, bells, a woman's torso.
★ 5.9
Reading (La Lecture)
1932 · Private collection
Marie-Thérèse has fallen asleep over her book with her head on her arms, from the year Picasso painted her over and over.
★ 5.4
Red Hills with Flowers
1937 · Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago
Red New Mexico hills roll across the canvas with a few flowers brought right up close, the vast and the fragile in one frame.
★ 5.2
Maya with Doll
1938 · Private collection
His daughter Maya holding her doll, her face split front and profile at once, the Cubist trick turned warm for once.
★ 5.2
Capricious Forms
1937 · Guggenheim, New York City
The Bauhaus grids and circles have given way to floating amoebas. Kandinsky in Paris at the end, inventing a biology instead.
★ 4.8