The British “Times” once invited 1.4 million readers to select the 200 greatest artists of the 20th century. Although the specific rankings caused widespread controversy at the time, it did not hinder the influence of this selection.

Today let us get to know the top ten artists. They are Picasso, Cézanne, Klimt, Monet, Duchamp, Matisse, Pollock, Andy Warhol, Deku Ning and Mondrian. It is said that the combined value of their paintings could buy the entire world.

1

Picasso

Pablo Picasso（1881-1973）

“My blood is in every painting, that’s what my paintings are about.”

Picasso is the most creative and influential artist in the contemporary West and the main representative of modernist painting. He used extremely deformed and exaggerated artistic techniques to present the deformed capitalist society and distorted human nature, creating a highly expressive artistic language.

“Les Demoiselles d’Avignon” 1907

“Les Demoiselles d’Avignon”, which he created in 1907, is the first work considered to have Cubist tendencies and is also a famous landmark masterpiece.

It not only marked a major turning point in Picasso’s personal artistic history, but also a revolutionary breakthrough in the history of modern Western art, triggering the birth of the Cubism movement.

“Guernica” 1937

“Guernica” is Picasso’s most famous abstract painting and a representative work of his period of transformation (1932-1945).

He combined the techniques of Cubism, Realism and Surrealism, and through violent deformation, twisting and exaggerated brushstrokes, he created abstract shapes of geometric color blocks, vividly presenting the complex emotions of disaster, pain and bestiality.

“The Women of Algiers Version O”

His “Women of Algiers” series is based on Delacroix’s painting of the same name. The composition is dense and rich, displaying cubism, perspective and intense color combinations.

“Boy with a Pipe” was sold for more than 100 million US dollars

Picasso is one of the main representatives of modern art in the 20th century and one of the few painters who achieved both fame and fortune during his lifetime. He has more than 20,000 pieces of works left behind, including paintings, drawings, sculptures, collages, ceramics and other works. His talent and talents also amazed future generations.

Picasso’s most expensive work: “The Dream” is worth US$155 million . According to the New York Post, America’s top art collector Steve A. Cohen lavished Picasso’s work from the Las Vegas tycoon and casino. Her husband Steve Wynn purchased Picasso’s 1932 lover’s portrait “Le Reve” (Le Reve). The transaction price of the work was as high as 155 million U.S. dollars, making it the most expensive work of art ever paid by an American art collector.

“Dream” 1932 oil painting on canvas 130cm×97cm

2

Cézanne

Paul Cezanne（1839-1906）

“I owe you the truth of painting, which I will tell you in my paintings.”

Cézanne is a representative figure of French Impressionism and is known as the “Father of Modern Art”. He valued the authenticity of color vision and pursued rationality and order. The uniqueness of his “objective” observation of natural colors is completely different from the previous “rational” or “subjective” methods of observing nature, opening up a new era in the history of art.

“The Bay of Estek”

Intense and dense color blocks and various blues spread across the canvas, establishing carefully integrated brushstrokes. The edges of the painting cut off the space, fading the illusion of depth, making the spaces ambiguous yet similar.

“Mont Saint-Victoire”

The three-dimensional shapes and perspective arrangements unique to Cézanne, the mountains are powerful and majestic, and the simple shapes of the cliffs hide movement and struggle. Enthusiasm overwhelms quiet observation, and the earth roars instead of peaceful observation.

The beauty of Cezanne’s still lifes is recognized. He sacrificed the “correctness” of traditional outlines in order to achieve a sense of depth and orderly layout, conclusively proving that his “transformations” were more real, believable and vivid than the actual perception of things.

“The Card Player” creates a three-dimensional image through ever-changing tones, and the intensity of the colors emphasizes the sense of unity. Cézanne replaced “shape” with “transformation” here, the rhythmic transformation of each area replaced the shaping of the image, and the combination of color blocks completed the interrelationship of the scene.

“The Bathing Girls”

In his later years, Cézanne created these compositions with an unusual sense of grandeur. The watercolor “Bathing Girls” is like a torrent of dream souls and air waves, closer to music than to architecture. Cezanne’s pursuit and expression of the volume of objects opened up the idea of ​​”Cubism”.

Cezanne’s most expensive work: This is an oil painting created by Cézanne in 1893 and now in the Musée d’Orsay in Paris. Throughout his life, Cézanne often created a series of paintings on a single theme. He has painted five works with the theme of playing cards, all of which depict scenes of French farmers playing cards. In 2011, the Qatari royal family purchased the oil painting “The Card Players” by the famous French post-Impressionist painter Cezanne from the Greek shipping king for 160 million pounds (approximately 259 million U.S. dollars, RMB 1.6 billion).

“House of Cards”

3

Gustav Klimt

Gustav Klimt（1862-1918）

“All art is erotic.”

Klimt was an Austrian symbolist painter and founder of the Vienna Secession. His asymmetrical compositions and patterned shapes, heavy color and line drawing style, and resplendent tone symbolize the hidden mysticism.

The strong sense of plane and the rich and dazzling decorative effect are filled with strong personality and have had a huge and far-reaching impact on the art of painting.

《KISS》

“Water Snake”

Klimt’s pictures are wrapped in luxurious decoration with colors of decadent sex and decadence. Brilliant colors accompany the twisted human body, revealing erotic and slightly decadent beauty.

“goldfish”

“Danae”

“Death and Life”

Klimt was deeply influenced by Symbolism and Pre-Raphaelite art. He also absorbed mosaics and Eastern European decorative art styles, and used techniques such as powder coating, gold foil, and helical barium inlay to achieve special decorative art effects.

Klimt’s most expensive work: “Adela” by Gustav Klimt (1862-1918) was sold to Ronald S Lauder in 2006 for $135 million . Born in Vienna into a family that made gold and silver jewelry, Klimt was an Austrian “Expressionist” painter, the founder of the Vienna Secession, and the first chairman of the Vienna Secession in Austria.

《Portrait of Adele Bloch-Ba》

4

Monet

Claude Monet（1840-1926）

“I wanted to paint in a way that the birds were singing.”

Monet is the representative and founder of French Impressionism. He changed the traditional painting method of shadows and contours, using light and shadow painting to express instant feelings from the changes in natural light, color and air. He abstracted the form most suitable for expressing the changes in light and color from other factors in painting, and proposed To unclimbable heights.

“Sunrise·Impression”

Monet’s brush strokes directly touch the dots, depicting the unclear background in the morning fog. The rich colors give infinite brilliance to the water surface, truly depicting the visual impression given by the light and color of the harbor at sunrise, breaking through the constraints of traditional painting methods.

Based on this painting, art critics proposed the term “Impressionism”.

“Notre Dame de Rouen Series”

Monet has long explored the expressive effects of light, color and air. He is very sensitive to changes in light, and often depicts the same object multiple times, expressing his momentary feelings from the natural changes in light and color.

“Gare Saint-Lazare”

In Gare Saint-Lachare, Monet painted the effect of light streaming through the glass ceiling onto the vapor, and the shape of the locomotive emerging from the chaos. Monet skillfully balanced the tones and colors of the picture, conveying the magical effects of light and air, and brilliantly expressed power, space, contrast and movement.

The characters in the painting have a gentle and rhythmic movement, and the red patches are the essence of the work. The simple background highlights the bright and warm colors, faithfully depicting the light and color that catches the eye.

“Water Lilies”

The series “Water Lilies” is the most important epic poem in Monet’s later years. He artistically combines water and air, and uses the reflection of trees to bring out the layers of flowers, which is a very creative idea.

Monet fully realized the concepts and techniques of Impressionism and devoted his life to Impressionism, which had a profound influence on the Western painting world. He broke through the conservative ideas of the previous academic school and greatly impacted the dominant official art in the 19th century. The history of modern Western painting has opened a new page.

Monet’s most expensive work: Monet’s “Haystack” painted in 1890. According to Sotheby’s auction house, French Impressionist painter Claude Monet’s work “Haystack” will be auctioned at Sotheby’s New York on May 14. The bank sold it at a record-breaking price of US$110.7 million (approximately 760 million yuan). This is the highest auction price for a Monet work and the highest auction price for an Impressionist painting.

5

Duchamp

Marcel Duchamp（1887-1968）

“Art is either plagiarism or revolution.”

Duchamp was a French artist, a representative of Dadaism and Surrealism, and a pioneer of experimental art in the early 20th century. As an important ideological source of conceptual art, he explored irrationality and freedom, freed painting and sculpture from traditional themes and materials, and changed the course of modern Western art.

“Nude Descending Stairs” 1912

“Gamer”

Duchamp was involved in the experimental works of Cubism and Futurism, and only mechanical diagrams with perspective angles showed his interest in how to show the continuous movement process on a still picture.

Duchamp’s “Readymade Art” series fine-tuned everyday objects and placed them in new environments. “Fountain” is the most influential work in modern art, full of playfulness, excitement and subversion.

Installation art “Fountain” 1917

Duchamp added beards to some of his 1919 “Mona Lisa with Beards” on copies of the originals, making the pictures weird and absurd. Duchamp used classic masterpieces as objects of blatant ridicule, demonstrating his true contempt for tradition and disregard for constraints.

Duchamp pushed anti-art to the extreme, being unique, bold, and full of fantasies. He opened up a new field of visual art and became the most direct source of Surrealist art, giving new inspiration to subsequent art movements.

Duchamp’s most expensive work: a reproduction of “Mona Lisa”, which was sold at an auction in Paris, Europe on October 21, 2017 for 632,500 euros (approximately RMB 4.922 million). Duchamp In this painting, I used a pencil to add two curly beards and a small goatee to Mona Lisa.

“Bearded Mona Lisa” “L. H． O． O． Q》1919

6

Matisse

Henri Matisse（1869-1954）

“I use color as an expression of emotion rather than copying nature.”

Matisse is a famous French painter, the founder and representative of Fauvism. He is famous for his use of bright, bold colors and a variety of free techniques to create a new painting space.

“Opening the Window”

“Harmony in Red”

Matisse abandoned traditional perspective and used hints of color relationships to establish new spatial illusions, creating an exotic, mysterious and strange new realm.

《Woman with a Hat》

“Dance” 1909

“Love’s Heaven on Earth”

In the hedonistic theme of the Golden Age, the relationship between line, color and space is explored.

“Piano Lesson” 1916

“The Piano Lesson” is Matisse’s most distinctive Cubist work. Without changing his point of view, he abstractly arranged large blocks of bright colors to achieve an effect that is both decorative and spatially deep. The great thing about Matisse is that he transcended the narrow world of decoration and created the concept of “Grand Decorative Art”.

Matisse’s most expensive work: 514 million yuan. “Odalisque and Magnolia” was created in 1923. Its artistic style is very different from the well-known “Fauvist” style of Matisse in the early 20th century. The color style of Matisse’s Fauvism period was very subjective, bright and exciting. He might paint green trees in purple, and the land in blue, and the picture would be relatively flat. After arriving in Nice in the 1920s, the colors in his works were no longer so high-intensity and sharply contrasting, but more like a concerto.

7

Jackson Pollock

Jackson Pollock（1912-1956）

Pollock was a master of American abstract expressionism painting. He is recognized as the first contributor to American modern painting breaking away from European standards and establishing a leadership position in the international art world.

“Autumn Rhythm No. 5”

Pollock’s creations were not planned in advance, but he randomly splashed paint on the canvas and let it drip on the canvas, creating a criss-crossing abstract line effect, which is called “action painting” and has distinctive characteristics of abstract expressionism.

《Lavender Mist》

His dripping is an uncontrolled, intuitive action, rich in shape, contours of pressure and rhythmic changes, creating a homogeneous, climax-less surface that forces the eye to follow his labyrinth of tangled webs and clumps of paint. In the path, I am constantly searching and scanning and going back and forth. A unique style characterized by freedom, disregard for objectivity, and spatial demarcation.

“Blue Rod”

He interprets the subject matter of his works as the action of painting itself, a pattern composed of criss-crossing paints with exciting vitality. Recording the direct body movement while painting, viewers can share in the experience of creating these stains.

Pollock created the world-famous “drip painting”. His drip painting became a typical expression of the unrestrained American character and a classic work of abstract expressionism. Its fundamental significance is that getting rid of all constraints and pursuing extreme freedom and openness promote the development of human bold creative consciousness.

Pollock’s most expensive work: Pollock’s “1948” was sold for US$165.4 million (approximately more than 1 billion yuan) in 2006. It was one of the top ten most expensive paintings in the world at that time.

“No. 5 of 1948”

8

Andy Warhol

Andy Warhol（1928-1987）

“Art is something you can just throw away.”

Andy Warhol is the most controversial art master of the 20th century and the pioneer and leader of Pop Art. He changed the way people evaluate the world, life and art. In this way, he proved that there is no hierarchy in life and art, thus starting the process of democratization of art.

“Coca-Cola” series

“Campbell’s Soup Can” series

In July 1962, Warhol held his first Pop Art exhibition with his “Campbell’s Soup Cans” series of paintings. The pattern presents a simple, clear and clean geometric pattern, declaring its product identity.

“Marilyn Monroe”

Using film plate making and screen printing, art is included in the procedures of “reproduction” and “mass production”. Then change colors between the clothing and background to create a variety of possible artistic effects. So-called art is produced under the assembly line, and artistic skills and originality are further sublimated.

From “making soup cans and advertisements worth painting” to making “every minute triviality and boredom worth looking at”, Andy completely subverted the definition of art and truly changed art forever.

In addition, he is also a producer, writer, composer, publisher, and a popular star artist in the New York social art circle. To this day, his influence still radiates around the world, becoming a source of inspiration for contemporary artists and designers.

Andy Warhol’s most expensive work: “Shooting Marilyn (Sage Blue)” was sold for 1.312 billion yuan, becoming the most expensive 20th century artwork in auction history. “Marilyn Monroe” is a symbol of the American Pop Art movement, representing optimism and unique personality, as well as the post-war Renaissance, fame and celebrity culture. Andy Warhol began creating silkscreen prints with Marilyn Monroe as his main subject in 1962, and tried to interpret the same classic promotional photo in different ways.

9

Willem de Kooning

Willem De Kooning（1904-1997）

“Art is a tool for understanding life.”

Kunin is the soul of American Abstract Expressionism and the master of New Action animation. He uses the human body as the main subject of his paintings, adds landscapes and written symbols, and integrates three-dimensional, surreal and expressionist styles, making radical and extreme works full of artistic beauty and awakening the inner connection between the heart and all life.

“Pink Angel” 1945

In 1945, when Kunin created “Pink Angel”, he began a new kind of psychodynamic painting. Different strengths are directly transmitted to the canvas through the movements of the hands, combining the integrity of the work.

“Woman and Bicycle” 1952

“Woman V” 1953

This series of most representative female portraits creates a space where the image and background are blended and mixed, which is the so-called “environment-free painting”. Even in purely abstract forms, one can still feel the relationship between man and nature, as well as the unique hybridity of space.

“Two Women” 1953

The portraits are painted with intense passion, with criss-crossing brushstrokes and wanton colors, blurring boundaries and order. As an interpretation of “spiritual improvisation”, Kunin established his status as a master of abstract expressionism.

In the “Untitled” series of the 1980s, Kunin used silky-smooth ribbons to bend and wrap around the composition to create a series of picture structures with a wide range of themes and changing styles. The colors are gorgeous and the brushstrokes are agile, intertwined into free-flowing lines, interpreting life in a new form.

As a generation of art masters, Kunin regards painting as a process of experience and freedom of expression, and engages in creation with exaggerated and passionate gestures like dance. Using diverse artistic languages, it leaves viewers with spiritual communication and insights.

Willem de Kooning’s most expensive work: In 2016, Griffin, the wealthy hedge fund boss, bought De Kooning’s famous painting “Exchange” for US$500 million, which is about 2 billion yuan.

10

Mondrian

Piet Mondrian（1872-1944）

“Only painting allows the free use of expression.”

Mondrian was a pioneer of geometric abstract painting and the founder of non-representational painting. He had a huge influence on later architecture, art and design.

“The Gray Tree” 1912

Mondrian blended the expressiveness of Van Gogh, the non-descriptiveness of Fauvism colors, and the linear patterns of the French Art Nouveau movement, making it an artistic masterpiece with a strong sense of shape and great originality.

“Composition” 1921

In the combination of pure primary color blocks and right-angled shapes, Mondrian sought “the balance between universality and individuality, nature and spirit, materiality and consciousness”, advocating an extremely abstract spirit and advocating that art should be completely separated from the external form of nature. Pursue “absolute realm”.

Mondrian limited the painting language to the most basic factors – straight lines, right angles, three primary colors (red, yellow, blue) and three non-primary colors (white, gray, black), calling this kind of painting New Plasticism.

He surpassed Cubism, and the traces of image in the paintings disappeared, leaving only a maze of lines, a highly analytical work showing the skeleton. This style has been fully exerted in furniture design, decorative arts and “International Style” architectural design, and has far-reaching influence.

Mondrian created a universal order of phenomena and the beauty of balance from his profound perceptions and insights from introspection. The emphasis on “pure reality” and “pure shape” in the painting played a decisive role in constructivist painting and also enabled modern Western European architecture to break away from classical concepts.

Mondrian’s most expensive work: “1930 Red, Yellow, Blue and White” was auctioned at Sotheby’s in London in 2013 for a whopping 88 million yuan !