The most important artworks of the 20th century

Among the most important artworks of the 20th century are Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907), which opened the way for Cubism, Hilma af Klint’s The Ten Largest (1907), Duchamp’s Fountain (1917), Picasso’s Guernica (1937), Pollock’s Autumn Rhythm (1950), Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup Cans (1962) and Smithson’s Spiral Jetty (1970). Each changed what art could be: how a picture is built, what it may depict and whether it needs to be a picture at all.

Facts

1905–1918: the avant-garde breaks up the picture

The century begins with Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, which Picasso painted in Paris in 1907. Five women are broken up into angular planes and shown from several directions at once, and two of them have faces like masks. The painting shocked even his friends and paved the way for Cubism. The same year Hilma af Klint painted The Ten Largest in Stockholm, pictures more than three metres high about the ages of man with spirals and flower forms, which she kept hidden from the public.

Matisse’s Dance of 1910 turns three colours and five red bodies into a ring of movement, and Kandinsky’s Composition VII of 1913 is a swirl of colour and lines without objects. The Russian Kazimir Malevich went furthest and in 1915 showed a black square on a white ground. In Stockholm Sigrid Hjertén painted her Studio Interior in 1916 in strong, flat colours. Read more in the app’s period the avant-garde.

1917: an object becomes art

In 1917 Marcel Duchamp submitted a urinal to an exhibition in New York, turned on its side and signed “R. Mutt”. Fountain was rejected, and the original disappeared, but the question it posed has marked art ever since: can a ready-made object be art, and who decides? In a survey of art experts in 2004 it was named the most influential modern artwork. Read the guide What is a readymade?

The interwar years: dreams, order and protest

The Surrealists sought the dream and the unconscious. Magritte’s The Treachery of Images of 1929 shows a pipe with the text “This is not a pipe”, and Dalí’s The Persistence of Memory of 1931 let pocket watches melt in a desolate landscape. Meanwhile Mondrian sought a universal harmony with black lines and three primary colours, as in Composition with Red, Blue and Yellow of 1930.

Picasso’s Guernica of 1937 is the century’s most famous image of war. He painted it in about five weeks after the bombing of the Basque town, in black, white and grey, and it was shown at the World’s Fair in Paris the same year. Frida Kahlo’s The Two Fridas of 1939 turns a personal crisis into a picture of two identities in one body. Read more in the period the interwar years.

After 1945: New York and Pop Art

After the war the centre of art moved to New York. Jackson Pollock laid the canvas on the floor and dripped paint over it, and Autumn Rhythm of 1950 has neither centre nor edge. Mark Rothko let large, softly bounded fields of colour float over one another, as in Rust and Blue of 1953; see the guide What is Abstract Expressionism?

Around 1960 came the reaction. Andy Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup Cans of 1962, 32 almost identical soup cans, brought the images of advertising and the supermarket shelf into the gallery. Read the guide to Pop Art and the period the postwar era.

Out of the museum

From the 1960s many artists wanted to leave the white space of the galleries. In 1965 Siri Derkert carved portraits and quotations about peace and women’s rights into the concrete walls of the Östermalmstorg metro station in Stockholm, in Carvings in Concrete. In 1970 Robert Smithson built Spiral Jetty, a spiral of stone 460 metres long out into the Great Salt Lake in Utah, which is sometimes under water and sometimes emerges white with salt. Such a work can be neither bought, moved nor hung on a wall.

Carl Fredrik Reuterswärd’s Non-Violence, a revolver with its barrel tied in a knot, was made after the murder of John Lennon in 1980 and has stood since 1988 outside the United Nations headquarters in New York. Performance art finally made the artist’s body and time into the work. Marina Abramović tested the limits of the body from the 1970s, and her The Artist Is Present at MoMA in 2010 carries that tradition into a new century.

Why many are shown without a photo

Anyone browsing the 20th-century works in the app will see that many are shown with a palette of the work’s colours instead of a photo. This is because of copyright. In Sweden and the rest of the EU a work is protected until the end of the seventieth year after the artist’s death, and a photograph of a protected work may not be shown freely even if the photographer has given the photo a free licence. Works by Picasso, Duchamp, Dalí and Warhol are therefore still protected, whereas Matisse, Hilma af Klint and Sigrid Hjertén are free today.

The palette is a way of still saying something about the work. Do compare two pictures side by side in Compare, for example Les Demoiselles d’Avignon and Guernica, and see how Picasso’s colours changed over thirty years. The guide What is Modernism? places the works in a larger context.

The works in brief

Exercise

Which work posed the question in 1917 of whether a ready-made object can be art?