A world-renowned collection of 19th and 20th century oil paintings, from 1860 to the 60s of 1900, to be savored in a few minutes or lingering for a longer period, because every time it is a new, small, exciting discovery.
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Accepting the challenge of Modern times, modern painters simultaneously embraced and subverted art-historical tradition, refusing to conform to convention and using realistic subject matter, but also by challenging the three-dimensional perspectivism established by the Renaissance painting.
A new freedom from traditional subjects and modes of representation, with Èdouard Manet, who can, perhaps, be considered as the departure point for Modern Art. The spiritual vision of Vincent Van Gogh and Paul Gauguin. The herdlike masses of modern society in James Ensor’s paintings. How we see our own age - wracked with anxiety and uncertainty - as Edvard Munch did. Chagall’s cubist fairy tale. The whole idea of of movement, of speed, that was in the air at the beginning of the XX Century, as we see with Nude Descending a Staircase No.2by Marcel Duchamp. The revolution of the Russian avant-garde artist Kazimir Malevich applied to bodily experience, the fundamental theme of Western art since the Renaissance. Until the Synthetic polymer paint on canvas used by Andy Warhol in his iconic Campbells’ Soup Can. All this, and many more masterpieces in this list - obviously not exhaustive - that we have joyfully composed.
1. The Luncheon on the Grass (Le déjeuner sur l’herbe) by Èdouard Manet, 1863
The most recognizable and admired of impressionist works, that broke away from the classical conventions, was being rejected by the French Salon. The presence of a nude woman - possibly a prostitute - among clothed men, bourgeois menpresented in a modern setting was not eligible for that period. The modernist revolution of pictorial space begins here.
2. Impression, Sunrise by Claude Monet, 1872
This prominent, striking and candid painting provoked most visitors, at the French Salon des Refusés, unable to recognize the scene in the port of Le Havre, the boats and sailors, and outraged over such a graffiti. There was a talk of an “impression” - as the critic M. Louis Leroywrote - from which the members of the Impressionist group decided to take their name.
3. Models by Georges Seurat, 1886-1888
Here, Seurat seems to offer his response to criticism of Pointillism, his daring neo-impressionist painting technique informed by scientific theories of light, color, and optics. Life-size bodies, nude women - one of the noblest and most revered subjects in the history of art - posing in front of his most provocative manifesto works: A Sunday on La Grande Jatte.
4. Christ's Entry into Brussels by James Ensor, 1888
In response to the French pointillist style, Ensor used scandalous and aggressive freedom. Not exhibited publicly until 1929, Christ’s Entryinto contemporary Brussels in a Mardi Gras parade is a forerunner of twentieth-century Expressionism. A crude, ugly, chaotic, dehumanized sea of masks, clowns, allegorical figures and caricatures, rendered with knives, spatulas, and both ends of Ensor brush.
5. Country Road in Provence by Night by Vincent Van Gogh, 1890
Road with Cypress and Starmore strongly reflects the Dutch Post-Impressionist painter Vincent van Gogh's belief of the spiritual wisdom in death. The evening star, barely visible, on the left of the painting; the cypress tree “proportioned and beautiful like an Egyptian obelisk” in the middle; the emerging crescent moon on the right side as symbols of infinity and eternity.
Read also Van Gogh through the eyes of the Cinema.
6. At the Moulin Rouge: Two Women Waltzing by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, 1892
Around 1880, theMontmartredistrict became the centre for the lesbians of Paris. Two women embracing each other while waltzing in a café concert, as the avant-garde artist shows, stepping across the boundaries of “socialexpectations”. An iconic memorial of Parisian nightlife at the end of the nineteenth century.
7. Spirit of The Dead Watching by Paul Gauguin, 1892
This post-impressionism canvas appears in the background of another Gauguin painting, his Self-portrait with Hat, indicating the importance he attached to it. Banned as "a veritable encyclopaedia of colonial racism and misogyny” and formally related to Manet's Olympia, Gauguin’s erotic Tahiti tries to represent the Polynesian fear of the tupapaú, or spirit of the dead.
Read also The history of the false Paul Gauguin
8. The Scream by Edvard Munch, 1893
An icon of modern art, the 1895 pastel-on-board version of the painting was sold at Sotheby's for a record US$120 million at auction in 2012. The Scream, which “could only have been painted by a madman”, is autobiographical, an expressionistic construction based on Munch's actual experience of a scream piercing through Norwegian nature while on a walk.
9. The large Bathers by Paul Cézanne, 1898–1905
The largest of Cézanne's pictures is exceptional among his work. Formal inits aspect, classic in its monumentality. For thirty years, in paintings of women bathers, he arranged the nudes in a triangle. Here, in a symmetrical pattern of the trees and river, the abstract nude females give the painting tension, mystery and density.
10. Family of Saltimbanques by Pablo Picasso, 1905
For the Spanish Picasso, the stillness andwanderingof these saltimbanques stood for the melancholy of the vagabond underclass of artists, with whom he identified. Striving for recognition, during his first years in Paris, the family of acrobatsand dancers represents Picasso’s most important painting of his early career.
More works by Pablo Picasso on Kooness.
11. Danaë by Gustav Klimt, 1907
Used as the quintessential symbol of divine love, and transcendence, Danaëwas a popular subject in the early 1900s for many artists. The Austrian symbolist painter Klimt declines the subject in an erotic, sensual experience. While imprisoned in a bronze tower, Danaëis seduced by the god Jupiter, symbolized here as the golden rain flowing between her legs.
12. Dance by Henri Matisse,1910
Recognized as "a key point of Matisse’s career and in the development of modern painting, this Dance,in a strong read,was specifically conceived for the Russian businessman and art collector Sergei Shchukin. A preliminary version of this work, known as Dance (I) is a climax of luminosity, with paler colors and less details.
13. I and the Village by Marc Chagall, 1911
The title of this work evokes the relationship of Chagall to his Belarus, peasant town. the abstract faces and pupils of a goat and a man meet, in a kaleidoscopic set of fantastic colors and folkloric imagery. The significance of the painting lies in its seamless integration of Cubist construction, semiotic elements and Eastern European folktales.
More works by Marc Chagall on Kooness.
14. Nude Descending a Staircase No.2 by Marcel Duchamp, 1912
This Modernist classic, which has become one of the most famous of its time, was rejected by the Cubists as being too Futurist, and ridiculed, at the 1913 Armory Show, in New York City. “My aim was a static representation of movement”, said Duchamp, influenced by stroboscopic motion photography.
15. Black Square by Kazimir Malevich, 1915
The first version of what is invoked as the "zero point of painting" was done in 1915. Appeared as part of a design for a stage curtain, Black Squarewas painted over a more complex and colorful composition. Malevich declared the square a work of Suprematism (Everything you need to know about Suprematist art), accompanying the complex transition between representational painting and abstract painting.
16. Nude Sitting on a Divan by Amedeo Modigliani, 1917
The beautiful, partially draped, woman seated with crossed legs against a red background "exemplify his position between tradition and modernism”, Italian Renaissance’s nudes and provocative contemporary women, simultaneously abstracted and detailed. This nude is notorious in modern art history for its sensational public reception and for its sale, in 2010, at a New York auction, for $68.9 million.
17. The Embrace by Egon Schiele, 1917
In this large canvas, Austrian painter Egon Schiele, a protégé of Gustav Klimt, and his wife Edith Harms lie on a rumpled white sheet over a yellow cover with their arms interlocked. Although Schiele was an early exponent of Expressionism, this portrait is not described as grotesque, erotic, pornographic, or disturbing, as the previous nudes or kneeling girls.
18. On White II by Wassily Kandinsky, 1923
The most famous painting of Russian artist Wassily Kandinsky in which white, the color of life, peace and silence, is predominant. An array of abstract geometric shapes reflect the artist’s inner emotions and consciousness inspired by music. Colors, lines and forms as a possibility to convey a deep sense of transcendental spirituality.
19. The Harlequin’s Carnival by Joan Miró, 1924-25
One of the most outstanding Surrealist piece of Spanish painter Joan Miró in which he “automatically” painted the subconscious, but also his own life experiences and memories. A carnival o magical elements, strange forms and squiggly shapes that for Mirówere “a mean to express his inner life through visionary art”.
More works by Joan Miro on Kooness
20. American Gothic by Grant Wood, 1930
American Gothicis one of the most popularimages, frequently parodied, of 20th-century rural Americana. Named after the house’s architectural style, it depicts a farmer with a pitchfork standing beside his daughter, dressed in a colonial print apron. The most famous farm couple in the world became a satire of small-town life.
21. Ad Parnassum by Paul Klee, 1932
Ad Parnassumwas painted during a turning point in Klee's artistic style and is now considered a masterpiece in pointillism. Thecomposition, one of his largest paintings, is dominated by the shape of a pyramid, Influenced by Klee’s trip to Egypt three years prior. Different techniques and compositional principles combined in a multi-layered mosaic-like work.
22. Victory Boogie Woogie by Piet Mondrian, 1942
The Dutch abstract painter Piet Mondrian’s appreciation of boogie-woogie, as “destruction of melody which is the destruction of natural appearance; and construction through the continuous opposition of pure means, dynamic rhythm”, influenced his last, unfinished work. Conceived in expectation of victory in World War II, it was a reflection of buildings and straight streets of New York.
23. Nighthawks by Edward Hopper, 1942
One of the best-known images of twentieth-century art by American painter Edward Hopper was inspired by “a restaurant on New York’s Greenwich Avenue where two streets meet”. The viewer is shut out from the carefully constructed scene by no reference to an entrance. Unconsciously, Hopper was painting the separate and remote life in a large city.
Read also Hopper's Landscapes at Fondation Beyeler
24. Full Fathom Five by Jackson Pollock, 1947
An assortment of objects embedded in the surface, including cigarette butts, nails, thumbtacks, buttons, coins, and a key, contribute to Pollock’s earliest “drip” painting’s dense and encrusted appearance. The title, which comes from Shakespeare’s play The Tempest, seems likely to have played an important part in the 'creative accident’ of the new, revolutionary painting process.
25. The Love Embrace of the Universe, the Earth, Myself, Diego and Senor Xolotl by Frida Kahlo, 1949
Mexican artist Frida Kahlo said, "Women - among them I - always would want to hold him in their arms like a new-born baby.” This embrace is a self-portrait that celebrates the couple's union and that roots Frida and Diego Rivera in the Mexican earth and in the ancient dark/light duality of a pre-Columbian universe.
26. Golconda by René Magritte, 1953
The famous image of “raining men” dressed all the same, by Belgian surrealist René Magritte, is ambiguous and fun, but it also makes us aware of the falsity of representation. Golkonda is a ruined city in the state of Telangana, India, the center of legendary diamond industry and a synonym for 'mine of wealth’. What we see isn’t exactly real.
More works by René Magritte on Kooness
27. Disintegration of the Persistence of Memory by Salvador Dalí, 1954
It is a 1954 re-creation of the artist's famous 1931 work The Persistence of Memory, where the landscape from the original work has been flooded with liquid desires and suspended items. After the atomic bomb explosions of August 1945, Dalíbecame very interested in nuclear physics and the quantum world. He sought to replicate this in his art.
28. No 1 Royal Red and Blue by Mark Rothko, 1954
This majestic large-scale canvasis a Color Field oil painting by the Abstract Expressionist artist Mark Rothko. In 2012, the painting sold for US$75.1 million at a Sotheby’s auction.Bright colour schemes, the reds and blues, with deliberately hazy edges. Rothko wanted us to stand close to each multi-layered mural and feel a part of the painting.
Read also The last Rothko's blue-chip painting finally sold
29. Campbell's Soup Cans by Andy Warhol, 1962
Subverting the idea of painting as a medium of originality, Andy Warhol made America’s daily meal the subject of this work consisting of thirty-two canvases, one for each of the flavors sold at the time by Campbell’s. As a former commercial illustrator, the genius of Pop Art made New York's Avant Garde a majorart movement in the United States.
30. The Drowning Girl by Roy Lichtenstein, 1963
One of the most representative paintings of the pop art movement, The Drowning Girl is Lichtenstein's most acclaimed work. Based on original art by Tony Abruzzo and derived from a DC comics panel and Hokusai’s Great Wave, it depicts a woman on a turbulent sea, the quintessence of melodrama. “As directly as possible, from a cartoon, I draw a small picture to projectonto the canvas, and then I play around until it satisfies me.”
