My list of over-seen masterpieces
Thanks to everyone who has answered the call of my earlier query. Many excellent ideas have been put forth and I encourage further thought on this.
Here is a list I compiled while leafing through Sister Wendy Beckett’s history of painting. It is all “usual suspects” and is intended to weed out the over-seen.
Van Gogh: Self-Portrait, Starry Night (above), Sunflowers, The Artist’s Bedroom
Botticelli’s Birth of Venus (see previous entry)
Rembrandt Self-portrait
Picasso: Guernica, Old Guitarist, Three Musicians, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon
Munch’s Scream
Dali: Persistence of Memory
Seurat’s La Grande Jatte
Head of Nefertiti
Greek discus thrower
Rodin: The Kiss, The Thinker
Lacoon and His Two Sons
Gutenberg Bible
First Folio
Eyck’s Arnolfini Marriage
Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights
Davinci’s Universal Man
Breugal’s Tower of Babel
David’s Death of Marat
Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring
Gainsborough’s The Blue Boy
Gilbert Stuart’s Unfinished Portrait of George Washington
Ingres’s Grande Odalisque
Goya’s May 3, 1808
Gericault’s Raft of the Medusa
Whistler’s Arrangement in Black and Gray: the Artist’s Mother
Wood’s American Gothic
Manet: Le Dejeuner sur Herbe, Bar at Folies-Bergere
Monet: Waterlily Pond
Klimt: The Kiss
Brancusi: The Kiss, Bird in Flight
Rousseau’s Sleeping Gypsy
Warhol’s Gold Marylin
Mondrian’s Broadway Boogie Woogie
Matisse’s Dance
Magritte’s Apple-face guy (already taken by Thomas Crown, I’m afraid)
Giocometti’s Walking Man
Reinhardt’s Abstract Painting #5
Rauschenberg: Monogram, Canyon
Lichtenstein: Whaam!
Degas: Prima Ballerina
Renoir: Le Moulin de le Galette (God I hate Renoir)
Cezanne’s Fruit Bowl, Glass and Apples
Robert Indiana’s Love
Jasper John’s Three Flags
Then there are a handful of 20th-century guys who don’t really have one standout work (at least not in popular consciousness) but who’s stuff would be recognized as a type: Rothko, Pollock, Calder, De Kooning, and to some extent Warhol.
Query
For instance.
For a television show I’m developing, I request your favorite instantly identifiable cultural artifacts. “American Gothic,” “The Mona Lisa,” “Guernica,” “Starry Night,” that level of media saturation.
The point of this exercise is to find works of art that anyone at all would recognize and understand to be valuable cultural landmarks. I have a running list of my own but I’m curious to see what others come up with.
Oh, and one other thing: the artifact must be portable, which leaves out DaVinci’s “Last Supper,” the cathedral of Notre Dame and the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.
Points awarded for not being blindingly obvious.
The artifacts selected will be made into maguffins in order to drive a mystery narrative.
Let me hasten to add that the artifact need not necessarily be an artwork. It could be a cultural artifact of another sort. Just as everyday Greek tableware items from ancient times are now considered precious antiquities and put on display in the Metropolitan Museum of Art (more on that later), what other museum-quality items could one present as a maguffin in a mystery narrative? Say, the Liberty Bell, or the Wright Bros airplane.
Notes from a visit to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC, part 1
Greeks: excellent
Romans: excellent
Etruscans: meh
Cypriots: ugh
Persians: I don’t get it
Egyptians (pre-Rome): A plus
Egyptians (post-Rome): B minus
Rembrandt: good
Vermeer: good
Ingres: good
Goya: okay
Van Gogh: good
Gauguin: okay
Sargent: good
Degas: good
Renoir: sucks
Homer: meh
Eakins: okay
Remington: beneath contempt