Daily · 17 June 2026
Top 100 Modern Art Paintings
Ranked from 100 down to 1. Generated by /lad, illustrated by /iad.
#1
Les Demoiselles d'Avignon
Pablo Picasso, 1907. The painting that broke open Cubism — five Barcelona sex workers reduced to angular African-mask geometry. MoMA, New York.
#2
Guernica
Pablo Picasso, 1937. The Spanish Civil War bombing of the Basque town, rendered in black-and-white anguish. 3.5 × 7.8 m. Museo Reina Sofía, Madrid.
#3
The Persistence of Memory
Salvador Dalí, 1931. Melting watches in a Catalan landscape. The defining single image of Surrealism. MoMA, New York.
#4
The Scream
Edvard Munch, 1893. The earliest expressionist howl — four versions exist in pastel, tempera, and crayon. Munch Museum / National Gallery, Oslo.
#5
The Starry Night
Vincent van Gogh, 1889. Painted from his Saint-Rémy asylum window — swirling cypress and stars over a sleeping village. MoMA, New York.
#6
Sunflowers (series)
Vincent van Gogh, 1888-89. Five surviving large-vase versions — Munich, London, Tokyo, Amsterdam, Philadelphia. Symbol of friendship and intensity.
#7
The Kiss
Gustav Klimt, 1908. Two lovers wrapped in gold-leafed embrace on a flower-strewn meadow — apex of Klimt's Golden Phase. Belvedere, Vienna.
#8
Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I
Gustav Klimt, 1907. Gold-leafed Vienna salonnière, restituted in 2006 after a famous legal battle. Neue Galerie, New York.
#9
Composition VIII
Wassily Kandinsky, 1923. Geometric abstraction at full theoretical force — circles, triangles, grids floating in pure colour. Guggenheim, New York.
#10
Composition with Red, Blue and Yellow
Piet Mondrian, 1930. The De Stijl manifesto — black grid, primary colour blocks. The platonic ideal of geometric abstraction.
#11
Broadway Boogie Woogie
Piet Mondrian, 1943. New York grid translated into pulsing yellow squares — Mondrian's final completed painting. MoMA, New York.
#12
Black Square
Kazimir Malevich, 1915. The founding text of Suprematism — pure black square on white. Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.
#13
Number 1A, 1948
Jackson Pollock, 1948. Drip-poured enamel on canvas spread across his Long Island barn floor. MoMA, New York.
#14
Autumn Rhythm (Number 30)
Jackson Pollock, 1950. 5.3 m wide drip painting in black, white, and umber. Met Museum, New York.
#15
No. 5, 1948
Jackson Pollock, 1948. Sold privately in 2006 for $140M — among the most expensive paintings ever changed hands.
#16
Orange, Red, Yellow
Mark Rothko, 1961. Three luminous horizontal rectangles. Sold for $86.9M in 2012.
#17
No. 6 (Violet, Green and Red)
Mark Rothko, 1951. Subject of the largest private art transaction ever — $186M in 2014.
#18
Onement VI
Barnett Newman, 1953. Single vertical 'zip' down a blue field. Sold for $43.8M in 2013.
#19
Vir Heroicus Sublimis
Barnett Newman, 1950-51. 5.4 m wide cadmium-red field bisected by five 'zips'. MoMA, New York.
#20
Mountains and Sea
Helen Frankenthaler, 1952. The 'soak-stain' technique that catalysed Color Field. National Gallery of Art, Washington.
#21
Marilyn Diptych
Andy Warhol, 1962. Fifty silkscreened Marilyn Monroes — half saturated, half fading. Tate Modern.
#22
Campbell's Soup Cans
Andy Warhol, 1962. Thirty-two canvases, one for each soup variety. MoMA, New York.
#23
Shot Marilyns
Andy Warhol, 1964. Four canvases famously shot through by an Argentinian artist. Now record-priced individually.
#24
Drowning Girl
Roy Lichtenstein, 1963. Comic-strip Ben-Day-dotted melodrama scaled up to wall-sized canvas. MoMA, New York.
#25
Whaam!
Roy Lichtenstein, 1963. Comic-book fighter-jet explosion across two panels. Tate Modern, London.
#26
Flag
Jasper Johns, 1954-55. The American flag as encaustic-and-newspaper readymade. MoMA, New York.
#27
Three Flags
Jasper Johns, 1958. Three superimposed encaustic flags. Whitney Museum, New York.
#28
Bed
Robert Rauschenberg, 1955. A 'combine' painting — his actual quilt mounted vertically and dribbled with paint. MoMA.
#29
Erased de Kooning Drawing
Robert Rauschenberg, 1953. He bought a Willem de Kooning, asked for permission, then erased it. SFMOMA.
#30
Woman III
Willem de Kooning, 1953. Aggressive figural-abstract. Sold privately for $137.5M in 2006.
#31
Excavation
Willem de Kooning, 1950. Dense interlocking figures and abstract forms in earth tones. Art Institute of Chicago.
#32
Fountain
Marcel Duchamp, 1917. A urinal signed 'R. Mutt' — not a painting per se but the most influential 20th-century artwork by every poll. Tate / Pompidou replicas.
#33
Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2
Marcel Duchamp, 1912. Cubo-Futurist nude in motion. Caused the scandal of the 1913 Armory Show. Philadelphia Museum.
#34
The Two Fridas
Frida Kahlo, 1939. Doubled self-portrait with shared circulatory system — painted just after her divorce from Diego Rivera. Museo de Arte Moderno, Mexico City.
#35
Self-Portrait with Thorn Necklace and Hummingbird
Frida Kahlo, 1940. Iconic neck-bleeding self-portrait. Harry Ransom Center, Austin.
#36
American Gothic
Grant Wood, 1930. Iowa farmer and his daughter in front of a Carpenter Gothic house. Art Institute of Chicago.
#37
Nighthawks
Edward Hopper, 1942. Late-night Greenwich Avenue diner — the definitive image of American urban loneliness. Art Institute of Chicago.
#38
Christina's World
Andrew Wyeth, 1948. Crippled woman crawling toward a Maine farmhouse. MoMA, New York.
#39
Cathedral
Jackson Pollock, 1947. Early-drip exemplar in aluminium and oil. Dallas Museum of Art.
#40
The Treachery of Images (Ceci n'est pas une pipe)
René Magritte, 1929. A pipe captioned 'This is not a pipe' — the founding lesson in semiotics. LACMA, Los Angeles.
#41
The Son of Man
René Magritte, 1964. Bowler-hatted man with a green apple over his face — the original meme face. Private collection.
#42
Golconda
René Magritte, 1953. Men in bowler hats raining over a town. Menil Collection, Houston.
#43
The Elephant Celebes
Max Ernst, 1921. Surreal industrial-tube creature with a bull's head — proto-Surrealist masterpiece. Tate Modern.
#44
Carnival of Harlequin
Joan Miró, 1924-25. Whimsical biomorphic interior with a feast of creatures. Albright-Knox, Buffalo.
#45
The Birth of the World
Joan Miró, 1925. Stained-canvas cosmic creation scene. MoMA, New York.
#46
Senecio
Paul Klee, 1922. Schematic head in red, ochre, and yellow lozenges. Kunstmuseum Basel.
#47
Twittering Machine
Paul Klee, 1922. Crank-wound bird wire over a coloured ground — anti-mechanisation poem. MoMA, New York.
#48
Improvisation 28 (second version)
Wassily Kandinsky, 1912. Pure-abstraction breakthrough — one of the first canvases without identifiable subjects. Guggenheim, New York.
#49
The Dance
Henri Matisse, 1910. Five red figures encircling a hill — radical colour reduction. Hermitage, St Petersburg.
#50
Le Bonheur de Vivre
Henri Matisse, 1905-06. Arcadian Fauvist nude landscape. Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia.
#51
The Red Studio
Henri Matisse, 1911. Matisse's atelier rendered in flat Venetian red. MoMA, New York.
#52
Open Window, Collioure
Henri Matisse, 1905. The Fauvist breakthrough painted on the Catalan coast. National Gallery of Art, Washington.
#53
La Grande Jatte (A Sunday on La Grande Jatte)
Georges Seurat, 1884-86. Pointillist Parisians by the Seine — two years of dotted painting. Art Institute of Chicago.
#54
The Card Players
Paul Cézanne, 1890-92 series. Five canvases of Provençal peasants playing. One sold privately in 2011 for ~$259M, briefly the most expensive painting ever.
#55
Mont Sainte-Victoire (series)
Paul Cézanne, 1880s-1900s. Repeated study of the Provençal mountain — built the bridge to Cubism. Multiple museums.
#56
The Bathers / Large Bathers
Paul Cézanne, 1898-1905. Late female-bather composition pioneering modernist figural geometry. Philadelphia Museum.
#57
Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear
Vincent van Gogh, 1889. Painted days after he severed his ear. Courtauld Institute, London.
#58
Café Terrace at Night
Vincent van Gogh, 1888. Yellow café canopy under starry night in Arles. Kröller-Müller, Otterlo.
#59
Wheatfield with Crows
Vincent van Gogh, 1890. Long thought to be his last painting (disputed). Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam.
#60
Bedroom in Arles
Vincent van Gogh, 1888-89. Three near-identical versions. Van Gogh Museum / Musée d'Orsay / Art Institute of Chicago.
#61
Water Lilies (Nymphéas)
Claude Monet, 1896-1926. ~250 paintings of his Giverny pond. The big curved cycle at the Musée de l'Orangerie defines modern installation art.
#62
Impression, Sunrise
Claude Monet, 1872. Le Havre harbour sketch that named Impressionism. Musée Marmottan Monet, Paris.
#63
Bal du moulin de la Galette
Pierre-Auguste Renoir, 1876. Sunday Montmartre dance hall, dappled light. Musée d'Orsay.
#64
Luncheon of the Boating Party
Pierre-Auguste Renoir, 1880-81. Friends lunching on a Seine restaurant terrace. Phillips Collection, Washington.
#65
Olympia
Édouard Manet, 1863. Confrontational nude prostitute. The 19th-century scandal that opened modernity. Musée d'Orsay.
#66
A Bar at the Folies-Bergère
Édouard Manet, 1882. Barmaid mirrored behind herself — Manet's last great composition. Courtauld, London.
#67
The Dance Class
Edgar Degas, 1874. Behind-the-scenes ballet rehearsal. Musée d'Orsay.
#68
L'Absinthe
Edgar Degas, 1875-76. Working-class couple over absinthe — caused outrage in London 1893. Musée d'Orsay.
#69
Lady with an Ermine
Leonardo da Vinci, c.1490 (Renaissance, but anchors comparison). Cecilia Gallerani holding a stoat. Czartoryski Museum, Kraków.
#70
Mona Lisa
Leonardo da Vinci, c.1503-19 (Renaissance — universal reference for any modern-art canon). Louvre, Paris.
#71
Girl with a Pearl Earring
Johannes Vermeer, c.1665 (Baroque — modern fame). Tronie of a girl with an oversized pearl. Mauritshuis, The Hague.
#72
The Night Watch
Rembrandt, 1642 (Baroque, modern-era restoration). Massive militia group portrait. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.
#73
Liberty Leading the People
Eugène Delacroix, 1830. Marianne with tricolour over the 1830 Paris uprising. Louvre, Paris.
#74
The Raft of the Medusa
Théodore Géricault, 1818-19. Survivors of a shipwreck adrift — the foundational image of French Romanticism. Louvre.
#75
Wanderer above the Sea of Fog
Caspar David Friedrich, 1818. Lone figure on a mountaintop facing a sea of mist. Kunsthalle Hamburg.
#76
The Hay Wain
John Constable, 1821. East Bergholt rural scene that re-shaped landscape painting. National Gallery, London.
#77
The Fighting Temeraire
J. M. W. Turner, 1839. Last ship of the line being towed to be broken up — Britain's favourite painting in 2005 BBC poll. National Gallery.
#78
Rain, Steam and Speed
J. M. W. Turner, 1844. Great Western Railway train on Maidenhead bridge — the future arriving in paint. National Gallery, London.
#79
Pleurer (Crying Spider)
Odilon Redon, 1881. Charcoal-on-paper symbolism, a giant crying spider. Private collection.
#80
Black Iris III
Georgia O'Keeffe, 1926. Magnified iris flower — defining work of American modernism. Met Museum, New York.
#81
Sky Above Clouds IV
Georgia O'Keeffe, 1965. 7.3 m-wide canvas of clouds seen from an airliner. Art Institute of Chicago.
#82
Untitled (Black on Grey)
Mark Rothko, 1969-70. Late dark series — last works before his suicide. Various.
#83
Diego on My Mind
Frida Kahlo, 1943. Self-portrait with Diego Rivera painted on her forehead. Jacques and Natasha Gelman Collection.
#84
Man at the Crossroads
Diego Rivera, 1934. Rockefeller Center mural famously destroyed for including Lenin; recreated in Mexico City.
#85
Detroit Industry Murals
Diego Rivera, 1932-33. 27-panel cycle at the Detroit Institute of Arts depicting Ford Motor Co. workers. The defining American mural cycle.
#86
Bal
Edvard Munch, 1899-1900. (See #4 for The Scream — Munch's wider series of life-paintings centred around this work.) Munch Museum, Oslo.
#87
Mountains at Collioure
André Derain, 1905. Co-founder of Fauvism — pure colour landscape. National Gallery of Art, Washington.
#88
Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion
Francis Bacon, 1944. Triptych of howling figures launching Bacon's career. Tate Britain.
#89
Three Studies of Lucian Freud
Francis Bacon, 1969. Triptych portrait that sold for $142M in 2013 — then the world auction record for any artwork.
#90
Pope Innocent X
Francis Bacon's 1953 'Screaming Popes' series after Velázquez's papal portrait. Many in private collections.
#91
Benefits Supervisor Sleeping
Lucian Freud, 1995. Huge nude of Sue Tilley. Sold for $33.6M in 2008 — record for a living artist at the time.
#92
A Bigger Splash
David Hockney, 1967. California pool with a diver mid-splash. Tate Modern, London.
#93
Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures)
David Hockney, 1972. Sold for $90M in 2018 — record for a living artist. Private collection.
#94
Mr and Mrs Clark and Percy
David Hockney, 1970-71. Ossie Clark and Celia Birtwell in their Notting Hill flat. Tate Britain.
#95
Cow Triptych
Andy Warhol, 1966. Cow-head wallpaper plus screenprints — Warhol's Whitney-Biennial intervention.
#96
Three Marilyns
Andy Warhol, 1962. Companion to the Diptych — silkscreens on canvas.
#97
Untitled (1982 / Skull)
Jean-Michel Basquiat, 1982. Skull-and-frame composition. Sold for $110.5M in 2017 — record for a US artist at auction.
#98
Dustheads
Jean-Michel Basquiat, 1982. Two figures in vivid colour. Sold privately for $35.8M in 2013.
#99
Sunflower Seeds (installation)
Ai Weiwei, 2010. 100 million hand-painted porcelain seeds covering the Tate Modern Turbine Hall — installation as painting-counterpart.
#100
Comedian (Banana on Wall)
Maurizio Cattelan, 2019. Single banana duct-taped to a wall — sold three editions at $120K-150K, then $6.2M at auction in 2024. The 2020s defining art-market moment.