20th Century (Fourth Quarter)
1. Damien Hirst Love him or hate him, Hirst brought new excitement to art after the 1980s (arguably the worst decade of the century).  Gratuitous shock value, over-produced, flagrantly commercial, and superficial--yet, for precisely these reasons, they often work as enduring icons of the contemporary culture of excess.  Hirst was also a major force behind the resurgence of British art after many years of American dominance.  Hirst is also, with Kiki Smith, one of the foremost contemporary artists of the body.  In a world increasingly dominated by biotechnology, pharmaceuticals, and somatic engineering, Hirst's work has special resonance.  He also was a major force, if not the major force, behind the emergence of the Young British Artists, who succeeded in displacing American (and perhaps German) dominance in contempory art for a few years.
2. Gerhard Richter
3. Mona Hatoum

20th Century (Third Quarter)
1. Jackson Pollack Pollack is the culmination of the pre-War period, insofar as he integrates expressionism (Bluae Reiter), abstraction (constructivism), and chance (dada a la Arp).  But he also goes much father, obliterating the idea that painting must depict objects and undermining canons of composition.  In this, Pollack's acheivement is interesting to view as an outgrowth of the work of his teacher, Thomas Hart Benton, whose complex figural compositions point, when viewed with Pollackian hindsight, to a fluid form of radical abstraction.  Pollack was able to see how Benton's seemingly conventional work was transgressive.  Of course, abstraction was not unprecidented (think of early Picabia as anticipating the hidden revolution in Benton's art).  Pollack's most radical move is embodied, literally, in his technique.  Where previous expressionists had used paint to express emotion, Pollack's work expresses action: the frenetic dance of gestures used to create it.  In so doing, Pollack manages something remarkable: his paintings become paintings of painting itself.
2. Robert Morris Since Duchamp, most Western art has had a conceptual dimension, but it was only in the 1960s that the idea of Conceptual Art was clearly articulated (especially by LeWitt and Kosuth) and elevated to a position of dominance. Morris, who had studied philosophy and psychology, was among the best of the first wave Conceptualists. His works include a lead casting of keys framed with a certificate asserting their lack of aesthetic value (an anti-readymade), a sealed box containing a recording of the sounds of its own creation, and a self-portrait consisting of an electroencephalogram printed out to Morris's height. Morris was also a pioneer in minimalist art, process art, and earthworks, and has had a long carreer of constant experimentation. My other favorite conceptual artists include Joseph Kosuth, Piero Manzoni, Eva Hesse, Yoko Ono, Josef Beuys, and Marcel Broothaers.
3. Henry Darger


20th Century (Second Quarter)
1. Joseph Cornell
2. Frida Kahlo Kahlo's self-portraits stand next to Van Gogh's and Rembrandt's as the most important and stirring in the Western cannon.  Her work combines classical portraiture, surrealism, and Mexican iconographic elements into a style that is uniquely her own.  She also anticipates Damien Hirst in her explorations of health, Tracey Emin in her narcissistic auto-immolation, and Cindy Sherman in her post-modernist re-invention the self.  Kahlo transforms herself into a goddess but also exposes her fragility in the same gesture.  She is truly one of the first great figures in 20th century painting from the New World.  That title is also deserved by her spouse, Diego Rivera, who absorbed European modernism and then fused it with indigenous styles and subject matter.  Kahlo and Rivera were, arguably, the most talented artistic couple in Western history.  They also make an interesting contrast: Diego’s work is highly public and political, while Kahlo’s is ostensibly private and bohemian.  But it would be a mistake to call her work apolitical, because it is a testament to both the marginalized cultural traditions and aesthetic ideals of her native country as well as commentary on the power and powerlessness of women in art and beyond.
3. Piet Mondrian

20th Century (First Quarter)
1. Marcel Duchamp It is no revelation that Duchamp is the most important artist of the 20th century.  He is the sine qua non.  My favorite works are the large glass, With Secret Noise, and the Network of Stoppages.  I think the latter is the most important painting of the 20th century.  Duchamp assaults his own derivative Cezanne canvas (the father of modernism) with random mechanical lines.  Artistic authority is undermined and anti-art is born. Among my other favorite dadaists, I count Picabia, Höch, Hausmann, and Täuber.
2. Egon Schiele Pornographer, expressionist, and iconocast, Schiele's exquisite, tortured lines have not been surpassed in the history of Western art.  Schiele is one of several major pre-war century artists who died too young (Boccioni, Modigliani, Popova). Schiele's mentor, Klimt, was also an extraordinary talent.  It is suspected that Klimt often pained his models nude before painting their clothing or gold overlays (see his unfinished The Bride), and this inbues the work with an intense eroticism.  Schiele is too vulgar, too frankly sexual, to be erotic, but the tension he achieves between beauty and the grotesque is what makes his work so captivating.
3. Hannah Höch

18th Century
1. Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes Goya's reputation as the first modern painter doesn't do full justice to his accomplishments.  Goya was highly esteemed as a court painter but illness, deafness, war, and, ultimately a dissent into madness transformed his work, and the resulting oeuvre is the artistic embodiment of the end of the Enlightenment and the emerge on new cultural forms.  Goya's work ushers in Romanticism, symbolism, and expressionism.   He is also credited with the first full female nude that is not illustrating a biblical or mythic scene, and, far from pornographic, his model is depicted with such knowing self-assurance that it can even be described as a feminist work.  That painting was done in 1800, and his deeply disturbing Black paintings were done two decades later, which may suggest that Goya should be categorized in the 19th century.  But his 18th century accomplishments already reveal the painter to come: The Devil's Lamp, The Incantation, The Yard of Lunatics, The Witches Sabbath, and the Los Caprichos etching series.  Indeed, it is the fact that Goya was creating such works along side pastoral genre scenes and royal portraits that makes him so fascinating as a transition figure.
2. Jean-Baptiste Greuze The 18th Century was not a great time for Western art.   Still, there were better painters than Greuze (David, Copley, Joseph Wright of Derby), more interesting stylists (Chardin, Füger), and greater innovators (Gericault, Fragonard).  Greuze was essentially a genre painter, whose career ended when he tried his hand at neoclassicism.  I like him for his sickeningly sweet, unsubtly sexual portraits of women with dead birds, broken mirrors and other props.  Think Keane meets Balthus meets anime, in period attire.  If I had to pick a second favorite genre painter from the period, it would be Pietro Longhi, who created a wonderul world fillied with awkward, masked figures enjoying the inane activities of the leisure class.
3. Franz Xaver Messerschmidt Messerschmidt Not exactly high-profile in art history, Messerschmidt is nevertheless a fascinating footnote.  He began his relatively short career at a baroque, and subsequently neo-classical sculptor, with considerable ability but little originality.  Then, fuelled no doubt by his own paranoia and derangement, he started sculpting heads with the most bizarre facial expressions ever captured in the history of art.  Not exactly emotional expression, they are more like contortions or spasms.  Or, better yet, they seem to express, in a grotesque way, personality types rather than feelings.  They are darkly comically, but also visually compelling.  Symmetric, archetypal, arranged in inexplicable sets of pairs, they seem to advertise a new cannon for portraiture--one in which the human spirit in its most jaundiced, vulgar, and sniveling guise issues forth physiognomically.  Everything that is sanguine, superficial, and sentimental in 17th century art is belied in these marvelous works.

17th Century
1. Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio One of the most influential of all Western painters, Caravaggio was hugely controversial in his time.  His hoi polloi realism was seen as sacriligious and his chiaroscuro was an affront to the prismatic mannerist palette that dominated Italian art.  Caravaggio's personality didn't help.  Frequenly arrested for violence, he ultimately had to flee Rome for murdering the pimp, Ranuccio Tomassoni, in a botched castration attempt.  The dispute evidently revolved around Fillide Melandroni, a coveted prostitute, who posed for many of Caravaggio's paintings, including Judith Beheading Holofernes and Saint Catherine.  Caravaggio fled to Malta and became a knight, but was arrested for attacking one of his fellows.  Then he escaped from jail, fled from town to town and ultimately died of a fever, after another brawl, at the age of 37.  He left behind a body of work that was both unprecedented and unsurpassed.  No other artist has painted ordinary people with such affecting sensitivity.  Käthe Kollwitz is one of the few who came close, two centuries later.
2. Georges de La Tour Inspired by Caravaggio, Le Tour takes high contrast lighting to a new level, with scenes lit by a single clowing candle.  But in other respects, he work contrasts sharpy with the Italian master.  The figures in La Tour's paintings  have gentle soft lines and peaceful expressions that make them approachable, even when grosteque.  Carvaggio's figures are falling or slain, and La Tour's are almost always vertical on the canvas.  Caravaggio's world is bleak and full of danger, and La Tour makes the world inviting.  This gives his work a unique, appealing, and readily identifiable style that transcends that of others who came in Caravaggio's wake.  Among the more faithful Caravaggisti, my favorites are Artemisia Gentileschi, Bartolomeo  Manfredi, Jusepe de Ribera, and Hendrick ter Brugghen.
3. Jan Vermeer Like La Tour, Vermeer produced few paintings and had to be rediscovered centuries after his death.  The paintings he left behind are mostly meticulously executed interior scenes with one or two figures glowing with natural light.  The viewer is usually set back, voyeuristically, as if we'd happened upon a private moment while charting through an opulent home.  Vermeer's palette is dominated by pale, earthy yellows, and subtle highlights in blue.  Each setting is filled with subtle details, textures, textiles, and wall hangings that sometimes portend hidden meanings.   Of all the painters listed here, he has the most developed sense of place.  Like his contemporary, Pieter de Hooch, architectural details are as important to these compositions as the figures, yet they never detract from their intimacy or psychological depth (compare the writings of Robbe-Grillet in modern literature).  Above all, the paintings have a profound and poetic beauty; they are stunningly elegant and cerebrally evocative.