The 100 Biggest Work of All Time: From Botticelli and Bosch to Bacon and Basquiat


It will be a price­whereas exer­cise for any of us to sit down down and try to attract up an inventory of our 100 favourite paint­ings of all time. Nat­u­ral­ly, these not professional­fes­sion­al­ly concerned with artwork his­to­ry might have some trou­ble fairly hit­ting that num­ber. Nonetheless, how­ev­er many titles we will write down, every of us will little question give you a mixture­ture of the near-uni­ver­sal­ly recognized and the rel­a­tive­ly obscure, with paint­ings we’ve been see­ing repro­duced in pop­u­lar cul­ture since start alongside­aspect works that made a robust and unex­pect­ed impres­sion on us the one time we got here throughout them in a e book or gallery. The 100-favorite-paint­ings listing in video type above by Luiza Liz Bond isn’t any excep­tion.

It’s possible you’ll rec­og­nize Bond’s identify from her work on the YouTube chan­nel The Cin­e­ma Automotive­tog­ra­phy, lots of whose movies — on David Lynch, on Quentin Taran­ti­no, on ani­ma­tion, on cin­e­matog­ra­phy, on the nice­est movies ever made — we’ve pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured right here on Open Cul­ture. Current­ly rebrand­ed as The Home of Tab­u­la, that chan­nel now makes its aes­thet­ic and intel­lec­tu­al explo­rations into not simply movie however artwork broad­ly con­sid­ered.

And although paint­ing will not be the artwork type with which we spend most of our time lately, it’s nonetheless one of many first artwork varieties that involves our minds, per­haps due to its twen­ty or so mil­len­nia of his­to­ry. It’s from a rel­a­tive­ly nar­row however enor­mous­ly wealthy slice of that his­to­ry, span­ning the 4­teenth cen­tu­ry to the twen­ti­eth, that Bond makes her 100 selec­tions.

Amongst them are various paint­ings that lengthy­time Open Cul­ture learn­ers will remem­ber us hav­ing cov­ered earlier than: Botticelli’s The Beginning of Venus, Bosch’s The Gar­den of Earth­ly Delights, Michelan­gelo’s Sis­tine Chapel ceil­ing, Diego Velázquez’s Las Meni­nas, Frag­o­nard’s The Swing, Goy­a’s The Canine, Manet’s Lun­cheon on the Grass, Sar­gen­t’s Automotive­na­tion, Lily, Lily, Rose, van Gogh’s The Star­ry Night time, Klimt’s The Kiss, Matis­se’s The Dance, Magrit­te’s The Lovers, Dalí’s The Per­sis­tence of Mem­o­ry, Picas­so’s Guer­ni­ca, Wyeth’s Christi­na’s World, and Basquiat’s Unti­tled. These works and plenty of oth­ers con­sti­tute a jour­ney via the “world of excessive sym­bol­ism and reli­gios­i­ty to a pri­vate area the place painters inform their per­son­al sto­ries via pictures on can­vas,” as Bond places it. Wher­ev­er artwork’s subsequent main des­ti­na­tion could also be, solely human cre­ativ­i­ty can take us there.

Relat­ed con­tent:

A Gallery of 1,800 Gigapix­el Photos of Clas­sic Paint­ings: See Vermeer’s Lady with the Pearl Ear­ring, Van Gogh’s Star­ry Night time & Oth­er Mas­ter­items in Shut Element

14 Self-Por­traits by Pablo Picas­so Present the Evo­lu­tion of His Type: See Self-Por­traits Mov­ing from Ages 15 to 90

The Evo­lu­tion of Kandinsky’s Paint­ing: A Jour­ney from Actual­ism to Vibrant Abstrac­tion Over 46 Years

Take a Jour­ney Via 933 Paint­ings by Sal­vador Dalí & Watch His Sig­na­ture Sur­re­al­ism Emerge

1540 Mon­et Paint­ings in a Two Hour Video

The Met­ro­pol­i­tan Muse­um of Artwork Places 490,000 Excessive-Res Photos On-line & Makes Them Free to Use

Based mostly in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His tasks embody the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the e book The State­much less Metropolis: a Stroll via Twenty first-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social internet­work for­mer­ly referred to as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.



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