It would be a worthwhile exercise for any of us to sit down and attempt to draw up a list of our 100 favorite paintings of all time. Naturally, those not professionally involved with art history may have some trouble quite hitting that number. Still, however many titles we can write down, each of us will no doubt come up with a mixture of the near-universally known and the relatively obscure, with paintings we’ve been seeing reproduced in popular culture since birth alongside works that made a strong and unexpected impression on us the one time we came across them in a book or gallery. The 100-favorite-paintings list in video form above by Luiza Liz Bond is no exception.
You may recognize Bond’s name from her work on the YouTube channel The Cinema Cartography, many of whose videos — on David Lynch, on Quentin Tarantino, on animation, on cinematography, on the greatest films ever made — we’ve previously featured here on Open Culture. Recently rebranded as The House of Tabula, that channel now makes its aesthetic and intellectual explorations into not just film but art broadly considered.
And though painting may not be the art form with which we spend most of our time these days, it’s still one of the first art forms that comes to our minds, perhaps thanks to its twenty or so millennia of history. It’s from a relatively narrow but enormously rich slice of that history, spanning the fourteenth century to the twentieth, that Bond makes her 100 selections.
Among them are more than a few paintings that longtime Open Culture readers will remember us having covered before: Botticelli’s The Birth 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 Dog, Manet’s Luncheon on the Grass, Sargent’s Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose, van Gogh’s The Starry Night, 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 many others constitute a journey through the “world of high symbolism and religiosity to a private space where painters tell their personal stories through images on canvas,” as Bond puts it. Wherever art’s next major destination may be, only human creativity can take us there.
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The Metropolitan Museum of Art Puts 490,000 High-Res Images Online & Makes Them Free to Use
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
