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January 30, 2014 10:32 AM   Subscribe

The 100 Greatest Painters in Western History (according to the editors of This Recording).

T.R. has previously compiled thoughtful rankings of science fiction and fantasy novels; novels in general; writers; and magazine runs.
posted by Iridic (63 comments total) 16 users marked this as a favorite
 
I wish there was more context explaining what criteria they were using to make their judgments. Best technique? Most influential? Most acclaimed? That said, it's a pretty good list, and at least not too obvious.
posted by ultraviolet catastrophe at 10:45 AM on January 30, 2014 [1 favorite]


No Georgia O'Keeffe?
posted by GenjiandProust at 10:47 AM on January 30, 2014 [3 favorites]


Yeah. The highest ranked woman appears to be Berthe Morisot at 68. That's unfortunate.
posted by ultraviolet catastrophe at 10:49 AM on January 30, 2014


No Artemisia or Cassatt, either.
posted by Iridic at 10:51 AM on January 30, 2014 [1 favorite]


Yeah. The highest ranked woman appears to be Berthe Morisot at 68. That's unfortunate.

Gwen John is at 41.
posted by saladin at 10:55 AM on January 30, 2014 [1 favorite]


With the caveat that any "100 Greatest" is at least partially trolling, I think it's a pretty great list. Leaving off O'Keefe is fine with me; I would include Alice Neel and Sylvia Sleigh on my own list.
posted by neroli at 10:56 AM on January 30, 2014 [1 favorite]


It does not seem, in general, as if the editors spend very much time paying attention to cultural production by women - you have only to look at their other lists. If you are a Very Famous woman in your field (Virginia Woolf, Ursula Le Guin) you may get a look in. And there's one less-famous woman on each list, it looks like, but that's about it. (Seriously, I love some Pat Cadigan, but if she's on a list that includes neither James Tiptree nor Joanna Russ nor Octavia Butler, that's a pretty crap list.)

It's really almost farcical after a while. These guys truly, truly don't even bother reading women unless the woman are already so famous that lots of other dudes are reading them and they're important in a dude narrative (high modernism, in the case of novels and writers; apparently space opera in the case of SF).
posted by Frowner at 10:57 AM on January 30, 2014 [1 favorite]


At least they included Agnes Martin. Her work is amazingly stunning in person but also peaceful and calm.
posted by Benway at 10:59 AM on January 30, 2014


+1 on the "there should be more women" tip, with a special confused-dog-tilt-of-the-head to Marsden Hartley being on there but not O'Keeffe.

But still, it's a good excuse to look at paintings, so I'm glad it's here.
posted by COBRA! at 11:07 AM on January 30, 2014


I liked this list because I've often felt that both Titian and Giotto are "underrated" if such a thing is possible, so I control F'd my way to find that Giotto is actually #1 (!) and Titian #4. Most lists of these sorts put then in the top 25 but not near the top, in my past experience.
posted by cell divide at 11:09 AM on January 30, 2014 [2 favorites]


Who are the writers? Is there a bio or an About page somewhere that I'm missing? Because I'm trying to take that backward leap from the lists to infer something about the minds that created them — I'm picturing some kind of young conservatives' reading group — and I'm interested in checking my work.
posted by RogerB at 11:12 AM on January 30, 2014 [1 favorite]


James Castle, greater than Fra Angelico, Courbet, Braque, El Greco, Uccello, Seurat, Degas, Raphael, Rubens, Gaugin, Renoir, Kandinsky, Ingres, Botticelli, Zurbaran, Gorky, Pissarro, Miro, Duccio, Poussin, Bosch, Mantegna, Constable, Antonello da Messina, Holbein, Malevich, van Ruisdael, Watteau, Tintoretto, Redon, Rothko, Veronese, Whistler, Martini, Frankenthaler and Grunewald.

All these lists are silly, but this one is sillier than many.
posted by yoink at 11:16 AM on January 30, 2014 [8 favorites]


with a special confused-dog-tilt-of-the-head to Marsden Hartley

Hartley's plummeting reputation in the last couple of decades is a really interesting phenomenon. Back in the 80s you'd find Hartley pretty prominently displayed in any major collection of US C20th art. There was a big retrospective at the Whitney in 1980 that got a lot of press and he seemed pretty firmly ensconced as one of the US "greats." But since about 1990 it's just been a steady spiral downward.

I wonder if he'll rebound?
posted by yoink at 11:21 AM on January 30, 2014 [1 favorite]


Interesting. A while ago, I worked at a museum that had a pretty large Hartley collection, and the director was always making the case that he was an underappreciated figure. I just assumed that she was saying (and/or thinking) that to make the museum's big stack of Hartleys seem more important. But maybe she was right and I was full of shit.
posted by COBRA! at 11:26 AM on January 30, 2014


Hey! What are the Surrealists, chopped liver? I'm not a big Dali fan - but Max Ernst and Rene Magritte (and what about Frida Kahlo?)...!
posted by kozad at 11:27 AM on January 30, 2014 [4 favorites]


17. The Fionavar Tapestry by Guy Gavriel Kay

Awe-inspiring scope that never falters or is intimidated by the wild fantasy. More real and telling about humanity than The Great Gatsby.


There's all kinds of things wrong with making seemingly authoritative lists that are, really, merely an orderly presentation of opinion. The slight blurbs on these sci-fi/fantasy novels have the sound of intelligent comment, but, really, is there anything actually under that sound? I excerpted the above because it was the point at which my patience became exhausted. The Fionavar Tapestry and the Great Gatsby are so radically different in every conceivable way: context, execution, intended audience, plot, character, prose style, etc etc etc. It's like saying Janelle Monae's The Archandroid is an amazing album because it's more real and true than Debussy. Like . . . I can't even with this. I can't even.
posted by erlking at 11:35 AM on January 30, 2014 [2 favorites]


93. Mark Rothko



/throws monitor out window
posted by goethean at 11:39 AM on January 30, 2014 [5 favorites]


Where the fuck is Van Gogh? Rothko and Freud not even in the Top 20? Caravaggio not in the Top 10? I call shenanigans. (Though I was happy to see Malevich on there.)
posted by scody at 11:45 AM on January 30, 2014 [3 favorites]


No Bob Ross? Where is Thomas Kinkade?
posted by weapons-grade pandemonium at 11:49 AM on January 30, 2014 [11 favorites]


No Cranach the Elder no credibility!

I'll give 'em this: if you need a list of conventionally-regarded-as-famous painters in no particular order, this one does the trick nicely. However, if I were them, in the future I'd stick to pieces like "How To Be An Anthro Girl," which has the advantage of being cleverer and funnier.
posted by octobersurprise at 11:50 AM on January 30, 2014 [1 favorite]


Clearly, this is Go Berserk for Art Day on MetaFilter.
posted by GenjiandProust at 11:50 AM on January 30, 2014 [2 favorites]



Just because you can make a list doesn't mean you should make a list, and then order it according to some sort of mysterious criteria.

And this is how they summed up Morisot's artistic inclusion:
Before she married Manet's brother, she wrote to her friend that "I'm reading Darwin; it's hardly subject matter for a woman, even less for an unmarried woman; what I do see clearly is that my situation is unbearable from every point of view." At her wedding, on the register under occupation, she wrote, "No profession." Then to her brother, she wrote, "I've found an honest and excellent young man who, I believe, sincerely loves me. I've entered into the positive side of life after having lived for a long time by chimeras."
I got through 100-90, discovered my eyes had rolled right out of my sockets, looked at 10-1, and then started ctrl-Fing for artists. I'm more fascinated by who they left out (Modigliani, Munch, Millet, Klimt, van Gogh, Gentilleschi, Homer, Hockney, Hopper, Bierstadt, Pollock, Basquiat, Chagall, Kahlo, Rivera, Schiele, Ernst ... ) than who was included.
posted by julen at 11:51 AM on January 30, 2014 [8 favorites]


Hey! What are the Surrealists, chopped liver? I'm not a big Dali fan...

Seriously, you may not like Dali's stuff per se but his technical mastery is amazing.

Incidentally, I like that Velazquez gets some high billing. I saw an exhibit of his where they took the paintings he made of the Spanish court's private chambers side-by-side with works he'd done of the very same subjects for public consuption. It was amazing how skilled he was at capturing the people and their humanity in the private portraits of the often deformed and bizarre looking royals and then still was able to keep a tiny bit of their actual appearance but made them look like flawless roman gods in their public works. That definitely took some skills.
posted by The 10th Regiment of Foot at 11:51 AM on January 30, 2014 [1 favorite]


Lots of these would be on my own list, but reordered all over the place. And re-reordered from day to day if not minute to minute. (If there are any folks here who enjoy the Nero Wolfe whodunits, remember the process of making saucisse minuit?)
posted by jfuller at 11:52 AM on January 30, 2014 [2 favorites]


I think the fact that O'Keefe, Cassatt, Gentileschi, and Kahlo are the usual suspects when one wants to sprinkle some women into art history may be part of why they were absent here. The (few) women on this list are, to my mind at least, all more interesting choices. I think it's kind of an unavoidable fact that, over the last few centuries, there have been fewer women painters -- that anybody knows about, at least. Because patriarchy. Which sucks. And I think that one could argue that, because of this, any list of the "greatest" painters of all time is going to be inherently sexist. That's totally valid. But if you're gonna make a list anyway (Because Internet. Because page views.), I think it's acceptable -- within the confines of a kind of ridiculous project -- to leave out people you don't think make the cut, regardless of gender.

Of course, if a list of living artists had as few women as this one does, I would be up in arms.

It's a kind of idiosyncratic list, and it strangely conforms to my taste. When I clicked on the link, I looked for Corot, Agnes Martin, and Fairfield Porter, and found them all, so I like it. Others of course, of course, will differ.

(Hilma af Klint would be another one on my own list.)
posted by neroli at 11:53 AM on January 30, 2014 [1 favorite]


No Bob Ross? Where is Thomas Kinkade?

See, I'd much rather read (and write) a "100 Worst Artists in History" listicle, myself.
posted by octobersurprise at 11:54 AM on January 30, 2014 [1 favorite]


jfuller: "Lots of these would be on my own list, but reordered all over the place. And re-reordered from day to day if not minute to minute. (If there are any folks here who enjoy the Nero Wolfe whodunits, remember the process of making saucisse minuit?)"

I would pay good money to listen to Wolfe destroy this list. Archie would be no good at facilitating this; we'd need to have Sol at the table to prompt him along.
posted by julen at 11:55 AM on January 30, 2014 [2 favorites]


P.S. wow, look at all the incredible painters Albert Pinkham Ryder is supposed to be better than.
posted by jfuller at 11:55 AM on January 30, 2014 [1 favorite]


+1 on the "there should be more women" tip

If it's a historical survey going back hundreds of years, I think, in terms of numbers, men will outnumber women.

See "Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?" by Linda Nochlin.

This is a pretty seminal piece of art history writing. It argues that artistic talent is not pure, visual self-expression, but a learned language/technique that requires years of training/apprenticeship. It is a learned rather than innate talent. Women historically had no access to this training, weren't allowed to participate, and ergo there weren't great female artists to the same extent as great male artists.
posted by HabeasCorpus at 11:56 AM on January 30, 2014 [2 favorites]


So are these ranked, then?

Because when I saw

100. Matthias Grünewald


I thought to myself that's so wrong it's straight up trolling.
posted by louche mustachio at 11:58 AM on January 30, 2014


Because when I saw

100. Matthias Grünewald

I thought to myself that's so wrong it's straight up trolling.


Yeah, when I saw that I thought "you're going to find 99 artists greater than Grunewald?" Visiting the Isenheim Alterpiece is one of the most devastating and uplifting artistic experiences of my life. I never thought that Albert Pinkham Ryder would be one of the artists they'd place higher than Grunewald!
posted by yoink at 12:02 PM on January 30, 2014


Scanning through, it seems like they were placing influence above most other considerations? I don't necessarily think that's a bad thing, because these lists based on personal aesthetics (which seems to be the criteria most people are using for their objections) are always too frustratingly subjective.

I think they should have spent more time on the reasoning behind their choices though. Maybe even *GAG* some pagination.
posted by Think_Long at 12:03 PM on January 30, 2014


I generally believe that we shouldn't have top X of Y lists on the site unless there is some additional post wizardry. But, while you may disagree with the ranking you can at least credit them to having all 100 on a single page.
posted by munchingzombie at 12:05 PM on January 30, 2014 [1 favorite]


neroli: "I think the fact that O'Keefe, Cassatt, Gentileschi, and Kahlo are the usual suspects when one wants sprinkle some women into art history may be part of why they were absent here. The (few) women on this list are, to my mind at least, all more interesting choices. "

But their ubiquity shouldn't be an argument against including them on a list that claims to measure greatness. You see Rembrandt and Vermeer and Picasso and Da Vinci on all these Bestest Artist Ever!!!! lists, too, and no one suggests they shouldn't be there because they are on All the Lists. The fact those women are go-to-artists for people to tick a box that they've included women in a list doesn't necessarily invalidate their talent and contribution. Personally, I'd have included 2, maybe 3 of the ones mentioned, but they are contenders for the list for more than the fact that they are famous women artists.
posted by julen at 12:05 PM on January 30, 2014 [1 favorite]


Turns out - if you want to get ad revenue and you own a website, a list is a pretty good way to do it. If you have 100 items in your list that is 100 chances for someone who thinks they have a "liberal arts" education to disagree with you and link to their facebook friends.
posted by Another Fine Product From The Nonsense Factory at 12:05 PM on January 30, 2014 [1 favorite]


Oh, and speaking of devastating artistic experiences, I see that Théodore Géricault (ahem RAFT OF THE MEDUSA) is not on this list either.


Harumph.
posted by louche mustachio at 12:06 PM on January 30, 2014 [3 favorites]


Scanning through, it seems like they were placing influence above most other considerations?

Very hard to explain Castle on the grounds of "influence." And then that would make some of the absences just so much more starkly glaring. Love Dali or hate him, you can't deny his "influence." No Donatello? No Van Gogh?

No, this is an entirely capricious "some artists we happen to have been enthused about recently" list.
posted by yoink at 12:11 PM on January 30, 2014


This list is a troll. And that's a good thing.

When you go to Amsterdam and see a lot of Rembrandt and Vermeer and Van Gogh all on the same day, you come to realize that Van Gogh is the greatest. This is not something you can tell from prints. You have to see the originals and think a lot about the artifice in each of them. So I'm reading this list thinking, good, Van Gogh is going to rank high. Weird list, but at least it will get Van Gogh right. I get almost to the end and think, good, maybe he's going to get the number one spot, so it will be worth all the weirdness along the way. Then I get to the end and he's not even on the list and I realize I've just been ridiculously trolled. And that, of course, should be the point of any such list. Like there could be any objectivity in the 100 greatest western painters. A good trolling that makes you think along the way, why is this such a weirdly ordered list?
posted by 3.2.3 at 12:13 PM on January 30, 2014 [4 favorites]


Or "Here are 100 artists."
posted by louche mustachio at 12:13 PM on January 30, 2014 [2 favorites]


FRANS HALS!


*flips table*
posted by TheWhiteSkull at 12:15 PM on January 30, 2014 [4 favorites]


CHARDIN OVER MORANDI? THIS LIST IS USELESS. CLEARLY THEY DON'T KNOW ANYTHING ABOUT PAINTINGS OF COFFEE MUGS AND PRE-INSTAGRAMISM IN GENERAL

ALSO NO CSONTSVARY? CLEARLY NO HUNGARIANS ON THIS PANEL.
posted by Teakettle at 12:19 PM on January 30, 2014


Sorry, I know it's mainly linkbait, but I still have to point out that the list of painters doesn't include O'Keeffe or Bacon and is therefore foolishness.
posted by aught at 12:27 PM on January 30, 2014


Oh yeah- and where the fuck is Toulouse-Lautrec?
posted by TheWhiteSkull at 12:29 PM on January 30, 2014


ANY SUCH LIST WITHOUT BACON IS A TURKEY
posted by octobersurprise at 12:30 PM on January 30, 2014 [1 favorite]


You have to see the originals and think a lot about the artifice in each of them.


I do agree with this point, and Giotto is a great example of this. I have seen the Peruzzi Altarpiece in person, and it is amazing. There are all kinds of details in the gilding that you simply cannot see in reproduction, or even from more than about six feet away. There is an incredible depth to the figures as well, that again, tends to be lost in reproduction.
posted by TheWhiteSkull at 12:35 PM on January 30, 2014


I can't get past the way they put the paintings/book covers above the relevant subheading saying the artists's names. It should be subheading, image, text, and anything else is an abomination against nature.

Therefore I propose these lists are invalid.
posted by dng at 12:35 PM on January 30, 2014 [2 favorites]


+1 on the "there should be more women" tip

I would have more patience with the absence of women on the painting list if the position of women on the writers' lists weren't so foolish-looking. At my count, for instance, 78 of the best novels are by men - just for starters. But most of the women are toward the end of the list. And the composition of the list suggests to me that the editors have pretty much focused on modernist novels (and only novels that have been translated into English!). Which means that they're not reading many of the types of novel where more women have tended to excel - no social novels, no early 19th century, no feminist/post-feminist novels that can't be recuperated under high modernism. And it looks very much as though they have not read very deeply among black women writers - Toni Morrison is great, yes, but she appears twice (and I'm not saying that she doesn't have many very fine novels, but there are other black women novelists). More, they apparently haven't read Nightwood or any Berthe Harris, which suggests that they're not reading deeply among modernist novels by women. In fact, my thought is that they know they need to include women writers, they haven't read very many and they just plop in the most critically acclaimed of the ones they're read and call it a day.

This is still more apparent in the SF list, which is shockingly bad. Women have, historically, had a larger presence in genre fiction - you really can't be properly conversant with SF as a field and not read a lot of women. Now, I'm not saying that everyone is going to like all the women giants of the field - and this list is about personal taste. But it's just not realistic to say that an Anne McCaffrey novel and a pure fanfic-tropes novel (Swordspoint - I love Swordspoint but it's.....a really problematic treatment of gay men, and it's basically a very, very well-written fanfic complete with that whole uke thing)....well, that those are better novels than The Female Man, Brightness Falls From The Air, Dawn, all of Kate Wilhelm's work, all of Judith Merril's, Lud-In-The-Mist, Brown Girl In the Ring.....the SF list is manifestly the work of someone who just hasn't read very deeply in SF by women, and someone who has read almost no science fiction with actual female protagonists or science fiction which foregrounds women's concerns. I mean, if schlocky stuff is your thing, where's the Sherri Tepper? Of course, Sherri Tepper is an (incredibly crappy) feminist whose work foregrounds women, ergo we have not read it! And consider that they finish up by including the incredibly lesser The Word for World Is Forest by Le Guin. Now, I also adore Le Guin, but seriously, that is a weak novel (even The Lathe of Heaven is stronger) and it feels like it was just tossed in there so they had one more novel by a woman, or because they'd read a lot of Le Guin.

It's not that the lists don't have women, or don't have women's work that I like - it's that these folks seem to be unfamiliar with a critical mass of work by women, but they're still setting themselves up as arbiters.

Seriously, just call it "My favorite 100 SF novels" and call it a day.

Also, again, I love Le Guin, but The Left Hand of Darkness isn't one of the top 100 novels, globally speaking. Why would you even allege that? Where's the density of meaning that you find in Henry James? Where is the subtle prose of Proust or the finely layered social writing of Wharton? The Left Hand of Darkness is a great SF novel, but it's simply not up there with the other stuff, mainly because SF as a genre isn't trying to be on those lists - it's a genre with its own internal purposes and processes. (If anything, though, Always Coming Home comes much closer to holding its own.)

It's not the lists themselves, it's the sloppiness.
posted by Frowner at 12:51 PM on January 30, 2014 [4 favorites]


(And to continue - in general, the SF novels by women that they choose are focused on men. Frankenstein, The Dispossessed, Swordspoint - all novels by women where the most important characters are men and the focus is kept off anything definitely feminine (consider poor old Takver in The Dispossessed). I don't think this is coincidence.
posted by Frowner at 12:57 PM on January 30, 2014 [2 favorites]


you really can't be properly conversant with SF as a field and not read a lot of women.

Lots of people manage though and you're right they're missing a lot by doing so, but the modern idea of science fiction as being a bit blokey isn't entirely unjustified. It's so easy to construct a history of sf and leave women almost or entirely out of it. Start with Wells and Verne, mention Burroughs, Golden Age sf and Campbell, Asimov, Clarke, Heinlein. On to the fifties and Bradbury, Pohl and Kornbluth and of course Dick, then bang there's the New Wave of Ballard, Aldiss and Moorcock, then on to the seventies and some lip service to feminist science fiction and if you're lucky up pop LeGuin and Russ, Delany thrown in before going back to the important writers: Niven, Heinlein again, Gibson, Sterling, Stephenson, Robinson etc.

in general, the SF novels by women that they choose are focused on men. Frankenstein

Yet if you talk about science fiction, about the best or most important, this needs to be in there, as that's the first novel that actually is science fiction, the start of it all. To include Frankenstein is a justifiable choice.
posted by MartinWisse at 1:07 PM on January 30, 2014


"Where the fuck is Van Gogh? Rothko and Freud not even in the Top 20? Caravaggio not in the Top 10? I call shenanigans. (Though I was happy to see Malevich on there.)"

This list is an ample demonstration of the cognitive impact of ingesting paint.

Too much Early Renaissance second stringers, the weird sorting of Modernist heavy hitters — the only aesthetic positions this list would comport with are some up-their-own-ass Italian iconography grad student or a sophomore fresh out of a survey class that didn't have time to cover the 20th century.
posted by klangklangston at 1:09 PM on January 30, 2014 [5 favorites]


Yes- it's especially lacking in post-war painters.

Jackson Pollock?
Ellsworth Kelly?
Frank Stella?
Gerhard Richter?
posted by TheWhiteSkull at 1:13 PM on January 30, 2014


But boy, that science fiction/fantasy list is a mess. I don't know enough about the history of western art to be able to judge it, but if it's of a similar character I can see why people dismiss it.

Too many minor works from important writers, too much pulp, some genuine classics, some out of left field troll bait, no overarching aesthetic to give body to it.
posted by MartinWisse at 1:13 PM on January 30, 2014


Yet if you talk about science fiction, about the best or most important, this needs to be in there, as that's the first novel that actually is science fiction, the start of it all. To include Frankenstein is a justifiable choice.

The question of the origins of science fiction - well, there's a lot more to it than "it was Frankenstein. Was it Frankenstein? Is "this is the first SF novel" a useful statement? Samuel Delany feels that SF is about language use and doesn't start til the pulps. Some people feel that it starts with Persian wonder-tales. Most scholarly opinion on the subject seems to have moved over into descriptivism - this essay goes over a lot of the basics.

There's nothing wrong with including Frankenstein on the list, but it's pretty hilarious that there's almost no SF books on the list that are from a woman's point of view.

The whole idea of science fiction as a man's field that has only recently had a critical mass of women writers (so we can ignore them, or be forgiven for not knowing) is straight out of Joanna Russ's How To Suppress Women's Writing - the women who actually existed in the past get painted out, so we're perpetually discovering "the first". I mean for pete's sake, Judith Merrill, Kate Wilhelm, CL Moore, Andre Norton, Zenna Henderson - those mid-century women writers who were incredibly influential (and there were more than those, and you don't hear about them because fucking sexism, not because they were not present or were unknown to Clark, et al - just read Merrill's memoir, for starters. Joanna Russ was first published, IIRC, in 1959. Large numbers of women have been writing SF since the seventies. It is now 2014. At what point do we say that women have been in the field long enough to be integral to it?
posted by Frowner at 1:16 PM on January 30, 2014 [2 favorites]


"Jackson Pollock?
Ellsworth Kelly?
Frank Stella?
Gerhard Richter?
"

Seriously, and it bends the curve mightily toward the "sack of nuts" school of Renaissance musculature. But not having Gerhard Richter? He's got a solid claim to the best painter of the 20th century, and certainly is better than, say, De Koenig.

At least when I make my troll list, I'll put Malevich at #1. SUPREME!
posted by klangklangston at 1:26 PM on January 30, 2014 [1 favorite]


"Oh, and speaking of devastating artistic experiences, I see that Théodore Géricault (ahem RAFT OF THE MEDUSA) is not on this list either. "

Neither is David, which if you're going to drop in Watteau, you at least owe a nod to what replaced him.
posted by klangklangston at 1:30 PM on January 30, 2014


I first checked their list of novels. What I took away from it was this: the list-makers don't travel much beyond the 20th century/21st century, they are in their mid-20s urban dwellers looking to impress with books rather than let books make an impression upon them, and that it all seems unfocused and narrow at the same time.

I dated the late-1990s version of the list-makers, in other words.

The paintings list appears very unfocused and narrow too. Odd inclusions and odd omissions.

But at least all this caused a big discussion about art with my partner and so I suppose the link's done its work...
posted by kariebookish at 1:46 PM on January 30, 2014 [3 favorites]


This is all kind of fun bait (I mighta worked in Max Beckmann somewhere) but what I would give a human body part for is a list of the 100 greatest painters in Eastern history.

There are some incredible painters I was introduced to who I have not been able to track down in many years.
posted by furiousthought at 1:57 PM on January 30, 2014 [1 favorite]


Chardin might be no. 1 for me, just for how he painted plums, but where is Ryman, best painter of the second half of the 20th century.
posted by PinkMoose at 5:22 PM on January 30, 2014


Every time you see a list of top xxx best whatevers, take a deep breath and remember there are countless other whatevers of high distinction, and regardless there is no truly objective criteria for ranking whatevers, because their value is entirely subjective.

... Also, your favorite painter sucks.
posted by dgaicun at 7:01 PM on January 30, 2014


then I get to the end and he's not even on the list and I realize I've just been ridiculously trolled. And that, of course, should be the point of any such list.

FTW
posted by stargell at 9:43 PM on January 30, 2014


Actually, these are, all of them, John Myatt.
posted by sebastienbailard at 12:53 AM on January 31, 2014


What, no Jack Kirby?!
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 4:50 AM on January 31, 2014 [2 favorites]


Henri Rousseau better than Caravaggio? Are they fucking high?
posted by Scoo at 8:27 AM on January 31, 2014 [3 favorites]


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