Showing posts with label Artists. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Artists. Show all posts

23/10/2020

The Greatest 450 Artists of all Time

History is filled with very few artists who significantly changed the course of art history – Giotto, Michelangelo, Caravaggio, Goya, Courbet, Manet, Cezanne, Picasso, Kandinsky, Duchamp, Pollock, Warhol and Beuys all spring to mind. Yet, for every epoch altering figures like these, there a legion of minor talents whose gimmicks only held people’s attention for a week or two. There are also many masters like Bosch, El Greco, Dix, Balthus and Freud who did not change art history but who provided a salutatory exception to the rule.


The history of art is a capricious mistress, often quick to raise up and often just as quick to drop. The history of art is littered with artists who achieved a sizeable measure of acclaim, critical kudos, and sales but whose names that have disappeared completely under the dust of time and their reputations returned to nothingness. There are also artists like; Guido Reni, Bartolome Murillo, Anton Raphael Mengs, Lord Frederic Leighton, Ernest Meissonier, Alexandre Cabanel, William-Adolphe Bouguereau, Hans Makart, Ferdinand Hodler, Bernard Buffet, Jules Olitski, and Julian Schnabel - who were critically lauded in their day and lavished with official awards and financially successful beyond the dreams of most struggling artists - but who quickly fell out of favour. Likewise, there are artists like Pontormo, La Tour, El Greco, Vermeer, and Friedrich, who were moderately known in their local area in their lifetime but who sank into oblivion after their deaths, only to be rediscovered in the early twentieth century. In fact, even the very greatest artists of art history Giotto, Raphael, Michelangelo, Rubens, Rembrandt, Poussin, Ingres and Picasso have all fallen in and out of critical favour sometimes for centuries (only Titian seems to have avoided this.) Moreover, there is a small list of artists like; Grünewald, Vermeer, Friedrich, Blake, Constable, van Gogh, and Modigliani who were unappreciated in their own life times but who in time have become famous, admired, copied and central to the canon of art.                                                


So, art is a subjective and irrational subject, individual experts may hold strongly held views on the value of one artist over another, but in the end, personal judgment is nothing but strongly held opinion. Perhaps the best we can do is garner a consensus of taste which might arrive at a more conclusive judgment, but it is subject to the whims of fad and fashion as particular artists speak more forthrightly to us at a given time. So, the following list is my very personal and subjective top four hundred and fifty Western artists of all time. This list has been based upon forty-nine years of reading art history books, watching art documentaries and making countless visits to museums in Dublin, L.A., Paris, Amsterdam, London, Barcelona, Madrid, Cork, Berlin, New York and Washington DC.       


The perfect artist has yet to be born - every artist has flaws and limitations. When I was young, I thought Picasso the greatest artist who had ever lived. I valued his capacity for invention and productivity. However, with age I have come to look with greater scepticism at Picasso’s easy facility, frenetic productivity and elevation of ideas above aesthetic quality and emotional resonance. Frankly if only van Eyck’s Ghent Altarpiece or Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights remained they would still be as important to art history as Picasso. Likewise, Michelangelo has also always struck me as an inhumanly gifted artist undeniably brilliant in sculpture, painting and drawing yet too heroic and domineering for my liking. That is why I now consider Rembrandt the greatest artist of all time, because painting for painting - he produced the greatest expressions of the human condition I know. Rembrandt combined incredible technical skill, with emotional integrity and human compassion, unsurpassed in art history. This compassion and insight into the human condition was also evident in his stunning drawings and etchings. However, I could easily make an argument for the top spot amongst any of the artists in my top ten.
     


This list is almost totally devoted to Western artists of the last seven hundred years. This is because of two fundamental reasons. Firstly – most artists before Giotto in the West were anonymous craftsmen who seldom signed their own work and thus have no individual reputation. Secondly my Western ignorance of Egyptian, Japanese, Chinese, Indian and other non-Western sources is so great – I have included only a handful of such masters who have caught my untrained eye.            


For me the greatest artists in art history have also been the greatest masters of their craft. Mere experimentalism only results in meaningless gimmickry. Yet it also has to be admitted that academically correct art rarely surprises or fascinates. Art is thus a strange balancing act between these and many other subtle extremes. My choices were based upon a number of critical factors. Firstly, the artist's capacity to create works of universal vision. Secondly, their technical skill and originality. Thirdly, their character and personality and the emotional depth of their work. Fourthly, their impact on the course of art history. Fifthly their overall intellectual achievements as indicated in their manifestos, diaries, letters and autobiographies. Finally, my judgments have been made to my direct response to their work in the flesh.                                            


I have leaned away from artists whose work was ugly, theoretical, sentimental, kitsch or simpering. Although there might be a quite solid look to my list, in fact there were many days when my choices varied slightly from the proscribed list. However, overall the following list provides a broad map of my aesthetic landscape.
 
1.    Rembrandt Harmenzoon Van Rijn.
2.    Pablo Picasso.
3.    Francisco Goya.
4.    Vincent van Gogh.
5.    Michelangelo Buonarroti.
6.    Jan Van Eyck.
7.    Hieronymus Bosch.
8.    Titian (Tiziano Vecellio).
9.    Diego Velázquez.
10.    Eugène Delacroix.
11.    Jacopo Robusti Tintoretto.
12.    El Greco.
13.    Giotto di Bondone.
14.    Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio.
15.    Greek Sculptors of The Pergamon Alter 200 BC.
16.    Albrecht Dürer.
17.    Mathis Grünewald.
18.    Leonardo Da Vinci.
19.    Edgar Degas.
20.    August Rodin.
21.    Jan Vermeer.
22.    Frans Hals.
23.    Thèodore Géricault.
24.    Edward Manet.
25.    Egon Scheile.
26.    Jean-Michel Basquiat.
27.    William Turner.
28.    Edvard Munch.
29.    Jackson Pollock.
30.    Marcel Duchamp.
31.    Francis Bacon.
32.    Willem De Kooning.
33.    Jean-August-Dominique Ingres.
34.    Paul Cézanne.
35.    Lucian Freud.
36.    Gustav Courbet.
37.    Hans Holbein the Younger.
38.    Pieter Brueghel The Elder.
39.    The Limbourg Brothers.
40.    Salvador Dalí.
41.    Andy Warhol.
42.    Lucas Cranach the Elder.
43.    Alessandro Botticelli.
44.    Masaccio (Tommaso di Ser Giovanni di Simone).
45.    Giovanni Lorenzo Bernini.
46.    Piero Della Francesca.
47.    Paul Klee.
48.    Jean Chardin.
49.    Jean-Antoine Watteau.
50.    Raphael (Raffaello Sanzio).
51.    Amedeo Modigliani.
52.    Paul Gauguin.
53.    Anselm Kiefer.
54.    Toulouse-Lautrec.
55.    James Ensor.
56.    Franz Xaver Messerschmidt.
57.    Jacques Louis David.
58.    José de Ribera.
59.    Balthus.
60.    Julian Schnabel.
61.    Edward Hopper.
62.    Henry Darger.
63.    Francisco Zurbarán.
64.    Agnolo Bronzino.
65.    Casper David Friedrich.
66.    Ernst Ludwig Kirchner.
67.    Emil Nolde.
68.    Otto Dix.
69.    Max Beckmann.
70.    John Constable.
71.    Richard Gerstl.
72.    John Singer Sargent.
73.    Oskar Kokoschka.
74.    Gustav Klimt.
75.    Georg Baselitz.
76.    Peter Paul Rubens.
77.    Katsushika Hokusai.
78.    Antonio Correggio.
79.    Ando Hiroshige.
80.    Wassily Kandinsky.
81.    Max Ernst.
82.    Fra Angeleco.
83.    Jean Dubuffet.
84.    Joseph Beuys.
85.    Paolo Veronese.
86.    Théodore Chassériau.
87.    Gerhard Richter.
88.    Piet Mondrian.
89.    Martin Kippenberger.
90.    Hans Memling.
91.    Donatello.
92.    Claude Monet.
93.    Juan Miró.
94.    Mark Rothko.
95.    Chaïm Soutine.
96.    William Blake.
97.    Alberto Giacometti.
98.    Honoré Daumier.
99.    Jean-Antoine Watteau.
100.    Antonin Artaud.
101.    Lovis Corinth.
102.    Kazimir Malevich.
103.    Pierre Bonnard.
104.    Leon Kossoff.
105.    Franz Kline.
106.    Antoni Tàpies.
107.    Francis Picabia.
108.    Petrus Christus.
109.    David Salle.
110.    Francois Boucher.
111.    Cy Twombly.
112.    Robert Motherwell.
113.    De Chirico.
114.    William Hogarth.
115.    Andrea Mantegna.
116.    Giorgione.
117.    Paolo Uccello.
118.    Albrecht Altdorfer.
119.    Fragonard.
120.    Robert Rauchenburg.
121.    Yves Kline.
122.    Sigmar Polke.
123.    René Magritte.
124.    Auguste Renoir.
125.    Bruce Nauman.
126.    Giovanni Bellini.
127.    Piero Manzoni.
128.    Kees Van Dongen.
129.    Camille Pissarro.
130.    Anthony Van Dyke.
131.    David Hockney.
132.    Antonio Canova.
133.    Van der Weyden.
134.    Winslow Homer.
135.    Adolf Von Menzel.
136.    Arnold Böcklin.
137.    Duccio.
138.    Cimabue.
139.    Henri Rousseau.
140.    Henri Matisse.
141.    Jeff Koons.
142.    Damien Hirst.
143.    Constantin Brancusi.
144.    Kurt Schwitters.
145.    Adolf Wolfi.
146.    Günter Brus.
147.    Hans Bellmer.
148.    Louise Bourgeois.
149.    Matthias Weischer.
150.    Camille Corot.
151.    Hans Baldung Grien.
152.    Heindert Hobbema.
153.    Andrea del Sarto.
154.    Andrea del Verocchio.
155.    Augustus John.
156.    Carel Fabritius.
157.    Philip Guston.
158.    Eric Fischl.
159.    Nicolas de Staël.
160.    Joaquín Sorolla y Bastida.
161.    Wang Hui.
162.    Willem Kalf.
163.    Frank Kupka.
164.    Jacek Malczewski.
165.    Kazimierz Stabrowski.
166.    Antoine-Jean Gros.
167.    Joseph Cornell.
168.    Józef Mehoffer.
169.    Antonio López Garcia.
170.    Paula Rego.
171.    Brice Marden.
172.    Diego Rivera.
173.    Maurice Vladmick.
174.    Andre Derian.
175.    Hans Arp.
176.    Pierre-Cecile Pavis de Chavannes.
177.    Man Ray.
178.    Odilon Redon.
179.    Annibale Carracci.
180.    Ferdynand Ruszczyc.
181.    Sandro Chia.
182.    Albert Oehlen.
183.    Witold Wojtkiewicz.
184.    Wojciech Weiss.
185.    Walter Sickert.
186.    Graham Sutherland.
187.    Carlo Crivelli.
188.    Germaine Richier.
189.    Joseph Kosuth.
190.    Sindey Nolan.
191.    Jasper Johns.
192.    August Strindberg.
193.    Agusta Walla.
194.    John Everett Millais.
195.    Christian Schad.
196.    Jean-Baptise Greuze.
197.    Giorgio Morandi.
198.    Il Guercino.
199.    Franz Von Stuck.
200.    Enzo Cucchi.
201.    Karl Schmidt-Rottluff.
202.    Alfred Sisley.
203.    Luc Tuymans.
204.    Lucio Fontana.
205.    Jean Fautrier.
206.    Asger Jorn.
207.    Mathew Barney.
208.    Marino Marini.
209.    Basilica de San Marco.
210.    Samual Palmer.
211.    Giambologna.
212.    Heindrick Avercamp.
213.    Ambrogio Lorenzetti.
214.    Jean Fouquet.
215.    Antonello.
216.    Tilman Riemenschneider.
217.    Sir Joshua Reynolds.
218.    Arnulf Rainer.
219.    Frida Kahlo.
220.    George Grosz.
221.    Pietro Cavallini.
222.    Wilhelm Sasnal.
223.    Michaël Borremans.
224.    Hans Josephsohn.
225.    Fred Tomaselli.
226.    Artemisa Gentileschi.
227.    Gustave Moreau.
228.    Wilhelm Hammershoi.
229.    Barnet Newman.
230.    Morris Louis.
231.    Berthe Morisot.
232.    Louis Soutter.
233.    Paula Modersohn-Becker.
234.    Maurice Utrillo.
235.    A.R. Penck.
236.    L.S. Lowry.
237.    Tracey Emin.
238.    Anders Zorn.
239.    Jules Pascin.
240.    Henri Cartier Bresson.
241.    Hannah Höch.
242.    Blinky Palermo.
243.    Neo Rauch.
244.    Juan Gris.
245.    Adolph-William Bouguerau.
246.    Raymond Pettibon.
247.    Hubert Robert.
248.    Robert Ryman.
249.    Grayson Perry.
250.    Max Liebermann.
251.    Mary Cassett.
252.    Fra Filippo Lippi.
253.    Nicolas Poussin.
254.    Claude Lorrain.
255.    Giulio Romano.
256.    Paul Delvaux.
257.    Ross Bleckner.
258.    Marcel Broodthears.
259.    Donald Judd.
260.    Umberto Boccioni.
261.    Arshil Gorky.
262.    Miquel Barcelo.
263.    Pierre Soulages.
264.    Gary Hume.
265.    Sally Mann.
266.    The Chapman Brothers.
267.    Chris Ofili.
268.    Gregor Schneider.
269.    Gilbert and George.
270.    Ilya Kabakov.
271.    Ron Mueck.
272.    Luca Signorelli.
273.    Richard Hamilton.
274.    Mark Chagall.
275.    Jack Butler Yeats.
276.    Euan Uglow.
277.    Martin Disler.
278.    Lee Krasner.
279.    Ferdinad Hodler.
280.    Henri Fuseli.
281.    Pietro de Cortona.
282.    Felicien Rops.
283.    James Whistler.
284.    George Stubbs.
285.    Jacob van Ruisdael.
286.    Dante Gabriel Rossetti.
287.    Edward Kieholz.
288.    Sir John Lavery.
289.    Erich Heckel.
290.    Benvenuto Cellini.
291.    Masolino.
292.    William Orpen.
293.    Stephen Campbell.
294.    Dorothea Tanning.
295.    Andres Gursky.
296.    Christian Boltanski.
297.    Malcolm Morley.
298.    Robert Campin.
299.    Pisanello (Antonio Pisano).
300.    Mario Merz.
301.    Jenny Saville.
302.    Alison Watt.
303.    Peter Blake.
304.    Philips Koninck.
305.    Jean-Francois Millet.
306.    Nicola Pisano.
307.    Paulus Potter.
308.    Thomas Gainsborough.
309.    Edward Burns Jones.
310.    Antonio & Piero del Pollaiuolo.
311.    Andrea Pisano.
312.    Benozzo Gozzol.
313.    Jim Dine.
314.    Luca Della Robbia.
315.    Elsworth Kelly.
316.    Santiago Sierra.
317.    Vito Acconci.
318.    Henry Moore.
319.    Juli Gonzales.
320.    William Morris.
321.    Jan Steen.
322.    Giovanni Antonio Canaletto.
323.    Konrad Klapheck.
324.    Eva Hesse.
325.    Louise Nevelson.
326.    Clifford Still.
327.    Mimmo Paladino.
328.    Jules Olitski.
329.    Kenneth Noland.
330.    Gustave Caillebotte.
331.    Eugene Boudin.
332.    Larry Poons.
333.    Adriana Varejão.
334.    Bridget Rily.
335.    William Holoman Hunt.
336.    Lorenzo Lotto.
337.    Joacme Patenier.
338.    Lorenzo Ghiberti.
339.    Christo.
340.    Albert Marquet.
341.    Henri Fantin-Latour.
342.    Verrocchio.
343.    Il Sodoma.
344.    Edouard Vuillard.
345.    Thomas Eakins.
346.    Adrian Ghenie.
347.    Jean Arp.
348.    Hernan Bas.
349.    Richard Diebenkorn.
350.    Vladimir Tatlin.
351.    Jacob Epstein.
352.    Alexander Rodchenko.
353.    Pieter be Hooch.
354.    Alexander Calder.
355.    Markus Lüpertz.
356.    Eduardo Chillida.
357.    Raoul Hausmann.
358.    Anton Raffael Mengs.
359.    Rudolf Schwarkógler.
360.    La Tour.
361.    Sir Thomas Lawrence.
362.    Betty Tomkins.
363.    Robert Smithson.
364.    Robert Morris.
365.    Richard Serre.
366.    Domenico Ghirlandaio.
367.    Carl André.
368.    Tiepolo.
369.    Parmigianino.
370.    Jacopa da Pontormo.
371.    Nicolas Hilliard.
372.    Dieric Bouts.
373.    Antonio Mancini.
374.    Leon Golub.
375.    Giovanni Boldini.
376.    Hans Makart.
377.    Karel Appel.
378.    Richard Prince.
379.    Giovanni Battista Moroni.
380.    Robert Delaunay.
381.    Meret Oppenheim.
382.    Naum Gabo.
383.    Chuck Close.
384.    Charles Rennie Mackintosh.
385.    Guido Reni.
386.    Sir Lawerence Alma-Tadema.
387.    Walter de Maria.
388.    Lazslo Moholy-Nay.
389.    Claes Oldenburg.
390.    Victor Hugo.
391.    Werner Büttner.
392.    Patrick Graham.
393.    Bodys Isek Kingelez.
394.    Ellen Gallagher.
395.    Gillian Ayres.
396.    Basil Blackshaw.
397.    Brian Maguire.
398.    Paul Doran.
399.    Rainer Fetting.
400.    Michael Landy.
401.    Marlene Dumas.
402.    Jorg Immendorf.
403.    Jiři Georg Dokoupil.
404.    Vija Celmins.
405.    Georges Mathieu.
406.    Bill Viola.
407.    Mike Kelly.
408.    Franz Marc.
409.    Günther Uecker.
410.    Colin Martin.
411.    Alexi Von Jawlensky.
412.    Arthur Boyd.
413.    Roy Lichtenstein.
414.    Corneille.
415.    Vic Muniz.
416.    Mark Quinn.
417.    Kiki Smith.
418.    Perugino.
419.    Ai Weiwei.
420.    Haim Steinbeck.
421.    Gavin Turk.
422.    Peter Doig.
423.    Victor Vasarely.
424.    Walter Stohrer.
425.    Arman.
426.    Jean Tinguely.
427.    Niki de Saint Phalle.
428.    Nathaniel Hone.
429.    Daniel Maclise.
430.    Walter Osborne.
431.    Micheal Farrell.
432.    Hughie O’Donoghue.
433.    Barrie Cooke.
434.    Nick Miller.
435.    William Leech.
436.    Camille Souter.
437.    Dorothy Cross.
438.    Gentile da Fabriano.
439.    On Karwara.
440.    Rineke Dijkstra.
441.    Cindy Sherman.
442.    Käthe Kollwitz.
443.    André Masson.
444.    John Martin.
445.    Barbara Hepworth.
446.    Werner Tubke.
447.    Rebecca Horn.
448.    Nancy Spero.
449.    Sophie Calle.
450.    Dan Flavin.