This is an update to the “Revised: Top 10 Painters” post that I wrote about this time last year, partly as an accompaniment to “Female British Artist” written at the same time. This might get tweaked slightly but is likely to reflect my views at hour 10,000 of this project
Objective
With the benefit of hindsight, my selection of favourite artists when I started this project (see: “Other than Photography (2017)“) displayed a woefully superficial knowledge of only the most famous works of a limited number of popular artists. The purpose of this post is to update my list based on the knowledge I have gained from the many museum and gallery visits I’ve made, YouTube videos I’ve watched, and informative discussions I’ve had over the last 7½ years
Change from 1st November 2017
| 2017 | 2025 | |
| Picasso | 1 | Francis Bacon |
| David Hockney | 2 | Picasso |
| Gustav Klimpt | 3 | Edward Hopper – Rooms with a View |
| Piet Mondrian | 4 | Dorothea Tanning |
| Salvador Dali | 5 | Cicily Brown |
| René Magritte – Son of Man | 6 | René Magritte – Memory |
| Georgia O’Keeffe | 7 | Yves Tanguy |
| Paul Klee | 8 | Jenny Savile |
| Edward Hopper – Nighthawks | 9 | Wassily Klandinsky – Composition VIII |
| Edvard Munch | 10 | Frieda Kahlo |
The above are difficult to put in order and my preferences change day to day
The Artists
No. 1 Francis Bacon
Bacon’s 1944 “Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion”, at the Tate Britain
Much to love about Bacon’s work, and to be terrified of. I see this as a surrealist work accessing a very dark place in the subconscious
It was hard to select the above painting from so many other favourites like his Screaming Popes. The Crucifixion Triptych won merely due to its availability: being on free display in the Tate Britain’s permanent collection
No. 2 Pablo Picasso
Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, Picasso, 1907, Museum of Modern Art, New York
The first cubist work – arguably the most important work in modern art history
Currently owned by MoMA, New York, and displayed on the 5th floor
No. 3 Edward Hopper
1951 “Rooms by the Sea”, right, which he considered a self-portrait
This contrasts my original selection of Hopper’s more famous NightHawks
“The beginning and the end of all literary activity (here Hopper commented “For ‘literary,’ substitute ‘artistic.’ It works for that too”) is the reproduction of the world that surrounds me by means of the world that is in me, all things being grasped, related, recreated, moulded, and reconstructed in a personal form and an original manner”
Johann von Goethe in note carried by Hopper in his Wallet
No. 4 Dorothea Tanning
“Eine Kleine Nachtmusik”, 1943
The stuff of childhood nightmares, but she lived to be 101
No 5. Cecily Brown
1999, “Broken Lullaby” – Denver Museum of Art – viewed on the 30th May 2023
Neo-Expressionist, erotic and disturbing
No. 6 René Magritte
1948, “Memory”
This is a much more subtle work than many of Magritte’s more famous pieces
The symbolism, which is developed from the rest of his oeuvre, evokes an eerie isolation that captivates the viewer attention
No. 7 Yves Tanguy
1951, “The Invisibles”
Currently on free display in the “International Surrealism” room, Tate Modern, London
No. 8 Jenny Saville
2020–21, “Odysseus I”
Wonderfully neo-expressionist; blends photorealism with abstract expressionism. I prefer this to her, more famous, “Propped”, 1992, which is more conventionally figurative and similar in style to Lucian Freud
No. 9 Wassily Kandinsky
1923, Composition VIII
Painted during the artists time at the Bauhaus, this is his first totally constructed and completely non-objective work in line with the Suprematist and Constructivist movements that were dominant at that time. To me this speaks of progress and optimism, for society as a whole
No. 10 Frida Kahlo
1939, “The Two Fridas”
Painted at the time of the surrealists, in the style of the surrealists, but Kahlo always maintained that she wasn’t a surrealist as she didn’t paint from her imagination, she painted her reality. The Two Fridas is a direct reference to her fraught relationship with Diago Riviera: what he wanted her to be and her identity as a Mexican woman
Honorable Mentions
A few artists that, were I writing this list on another day, might have made the cut (in no particular order):
- Leonora Carrington
- Mark Rothko – Seagram Paintings (at Tate Britain)
- Jackson Pollock – Blue Poles
- Hiroshi Sugimoto – Seascapes and Cinema Photographs (notes from exhibition at the Southbank:
- Dora Maar – even more for her cubist paintings of Picasso than her surrealist photography
- Joan Miro
- Maggi Hambling – made the previous list
- Gerhardt Richter
Notes:
- 19/06/2024 – “Revised: Top 10 Painters”
- 21/06/2024 – “Female British Artist“
- 17/10/2023 – “Most Influential Photographers and Other Artists“
- 05/07/2023 – “Revised Thoughts on Art“
- 13/01/2023 – “Last Paintings of Modern Artists“
[Images sourced from the Internet have links to the source document]