NAQT 20th-Century Paintings

Les Demoiselles d'Avignon by Pablo Picasso

This painting depicts five women in a brothel. However, the images of the women are partly broken into disjointed, angular facets. The degree of broken-ness is rather mild compared to later Cubist works, but it was revolutionary in 1907. The rather phallic fruit arrangement in the foreground reflects the influence of Cezanne's "flattening of the canvas." The two central figures face the viewer, while the other three have primitive masks as faces, reflecting another of the artist's influences. It is currently housed at the MOMA.

Nighthawks by Edward Hopper

As is often the case with his works, this artist uses a realistic approach (including such details as the fluorescent light of the diner, the coffee pots, and the Phillies cigar sign atop the diner) to convey a sense of a loneliness and isolation, even going so far as to depict the corner store without a door connecting to the larger world. The artist's wife Jo served as the model for the woman at the bar. This painting is housed at the Art Institute of Chicago.

Geurnica by Pablo Picasso

Based on a Basque town bombed by the Germans during the Spanish Civil War in April 1937. The artist had already been commissioned to paint a mural for the Spanish Pavilion at the World's Fair, and the artist completed their massive, black, white, and grey anti-war mural by early June 1937. The artist's Cubist approach to portraying the figures adds to the sense of destruction and chaos. This painting was in the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in New York until 1981, when it was returned to the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia in Spain.

Nude Descending a Staircase No. 2 by Marcel Duchamp

First painted in 1912, this painting created a sensation when shown at the 1913 Armory Show in New York, where one critic referred to it as "an explosion in a shingle factory." Painted in various shades of brown, it portrays a nude woman in a series of broken planes, capturing motion down several steps in a single image. The painting reflects a Cubist sense of division of space, and its portrait of motion echoes the work of the Futurists.

The Persistence of Memory by Salvador Dalí

First shown in 1931, this is probably the most famous of surrealist paintings. The landscape of the scene echoes Port Lligat, the artist's home. The ants, flies, clocks, and the Port Lligat landscape are motifs in many other of this artist's paintings, and the trompe l'oeil depiction of figures is typical of the artist's works. It currently belongs to MOMA; its 1951 companion piece hangs at a museum dedicated to this artist in St. Petersburg, Florida.

Among the many other notable paintings are

Individual paintings: The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even by Marcel Duchamp, Red Room by Henri Matisse, Mystery and Melancholy of a Street by Giorgio de Chirico, The Twittering Machine by Paul Klee, the incomplete Man at the Crossroads by Diego Rivera, The Kiss by Gustav Klimt, and Time Transfixed by René Magritte. Two notable painting series are the Woman series of Willem de Kooning and the White on White series by Kasimir Malevich.

I and the Village by Marc Chagall

Painted in 1911, this is among the artist's earliest surviving paintings. It is a dreamlike scene that includes many motifs common to the artist, notably the lamb and peasant life. In addition to the two giant faces—a green face on the right and a lamb's head on the left—other images include a milkmaid, a reaper, an upside-down peasant woman, a church, and a series of houses, some of them upside-down. This is currently housed at MOMA.

Campbell's Soup Can by Andy Warhol

Pop Art parodies (or perhaps reflects) a world in which celebrities, brand names, and media images have replaced the sacred; this artist's series of soup paintings may be the best illustration of this. Like the object itself, the paintings were often done by the mass-produceable form of serigraphy (silk screening). Also like the subject, the artist's soup can painting existed in many varieties, with different types of soup or numbers of cans; painting 32 or 100 or 200 identical cans further emphasized the aspect of mass production aspect in the work. The same approach underlies this artist's familiar series of prints of Marilyn Monroe, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, and other pop culture figures.

American Gothic by Grant Wood

The artist painted his most famous work after a visit to Eldon, Iowa, when he saw a Carpenter Gothic style house with a distinctive Gothic window in its gable. Upon returning to his studio, the artist used his sister Nan and his dentist, Dr. Byron McKeeby, as the models for the two figures. The pitchfork and the clothing were more typical of 19th-century farmers than contemporary ones. This painting is among the most familiar regionalist paintings, and it is said to be the most parodied of all paintings. It hangs at the Art Institute of Chicago, where it was submitted for a competition by the artist upon its completion in 1930 (the artist won a bronze medal and a $300 prize).

Christina's World by Andrew Wyeth

The woman of the title lived near the artist's summer home in Cushing, Maine. In the 1948 painting, she lays in the cornfield wearing a pink dress, facing away from the viewer, her body partly twisted and hair blowing slightly in the wind. In the far distance is a three-story farmhouse with dual chimneys and two dormers, along with two sheds to its right. A distant barn is near the top middle of the painting. One notable aspect is the subtle pattern of sunlight, which strikes the farmhouse obliquely from the right, shines in the wheel tracks in the upper right, and casts very realistic-looking shadows on her dress. Her house was the subject of many of the artist's paintings for 30 years, and it was named to the National Register of Historic Places for its place in this painting.

Broadway Boogie Woogie by Piet Mondrian

While Les Demoiselles d'Avignon and other Cubist paintings represent an extension of Paul Cezanne's division-of-space approach to the canvas, this artist's works are a still further abstraction, such that the canvas is often divided up into rectangular "tile patterns," as in Composition with Red, Yellow, and Blue. The painting simultaneously echoes the bright lights of a marquee, resembles a pattern of streets as seen from above, and creates a feeling of vitality and vibrancy, not unlike the music itself. This work can also be found at the MOMA.