Monthly Archives: July 2019

See It To Believe It: The Updated Art Lists

Leave a reply

I found a bunch of new lists of best works of visual art and decided to add them to the meta-list.  Now I have over 30 source lists gathered from books and various websites. This particular meta-list is in two versions – one version (in two parts) is organized by rank and contains every work of art on four or more of the original source lists.  To look at this list, click on the links below:
Best Works of Art of All Time – Ranked, Part 1 (works of art on 6 or more lists)
Best Works of Art of All Time – Ranked, Part 2 (works on 4 or 5 lists)

The second (and much larger) version of the meta-list is organized chronologically and includes every work of art on at least two of the original 30+ source lists.  This meta-list (which I call Art History 101) is in seven parts:
Part IA (Prehistoric Era – 399 CE)
Part IB (400-1399 CE)
Part IIA (1400-1499)
Part IIB (1500-1599)
Part III (1600-1799)
Part IV (1800-1899)
Part V (1900-Present)

Please note that the artworks on this particular meta-list are primarily paintings and sculptures, with a few pieces of decorative art.  For other forms of visual art – including architecture, photography, film, and television – I have compiled separate meta-lists.

To keep with the list theme, I’ve made some lists about the updated visual arts lists, which follow below. First, the updated meta-list has led to changes in the rankings throughout the list and the top 10 has been rearranged considerably:

The New Top 10: Artworks on the Most Lists
1. Leonardo da Vinci: Mona Lisa (1503-1505)
2. Michelangelo: Frescoes, Sistine Chapel Ceiling (1508-1512)
3. Diego Velázquez: Las Meninas (1656)
4. Pablo Picasso: Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907)
5. Pablo Picasso: Guernica (1937)
6. Michelangelo: David (1501-1504)
7. Vincent Van Gogh: The Starry Night (1889)
8. Sandro Botticelli: The Birth of Venus (1486)
9. Francisco Goya: The Third of May, 1808 (1814)
10. Edward Munch: The Scream (1893)

There are 25 new works of art on the meta-list as the result of this latest update, and six new artists:

The New Kids on the Block, Part 1: The Artworks

  1. Unknown Artists: Great Sphinx of Giza (Egypt, c. 2530 BCE)
  2. Unknown Artist: Lyre with Bull’s Head (Mesopotamia/Iraq, c. 2550-2450)
  3. Gislebertus: Relief Sculptures, Saint-Lazare Cathedral (France, 10th-11th Century)
  4. Lorenzo Ghiberti: The Baptism of Christ (Italy, c. 1423-1427)
  5. Albrecht Altdorfer: George and the Dragon (Germany, 1510)
  6. Giorgione and Titian: Sleeping Venus (Italy, 1510) 
  7. Pieter Bruegel the Elder: The Harvesters (The Netherlands, 1565)
  8. Nicolas Poussin: Et in Arcadia ego (France, c. 1638-1640)
  9. Ogata Korin: Flowering Irises (Japan, c. 1710)
  10. Joshua Reynolds: Self-Portrait (Great Britain, c. 1748)
  11. Jacques-Louis David: The Lictors Bring to Brutus the Bodies of His Sons (France, 1789)
  12. Antonio Canova: Perseus Triumphant (Italy, 1804-1806)
  13. John Constable: Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows (UK, 1831)
  14. Édouard Manet: The Execution of Emperor Maximilian (France, 1867)
  15. Vincent van Gogh: Vincent’s Chair (The Netherlands/France, 1888)
  16. Vincent Van Gogh: Starry Night over the Rhône (The Netherlands/France, 1888) 
  17. Paul Gauguin: Te Arii Vahine (The King’s Wife) (France/French Polynesia, 1896)
  18. Paul Cézanne: Still Life with Apples and Oranges (France, c. 1895-1900)
  19. Henri Matisse: The Conversation (France, 1909)
  20. Umberto Boccioni: The City Rises (Italy, 1910)
  21. Rene Magritte: Le Faux Joan Miróir (The False Mirror) (Belgium, 1928)
  22. Diego Rivera: Man, Controller of the Universe (Mexico, 1934)
  23. Jackson Pollock: Number 5, 1948 (US, 1948)
  24. Damien Hirst: The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living (UK, 1991)
  25. Louise Bourgeois: Maman (France/US, 1999)

New Kids on the Block, Part 2: New Artists
1. Gislebertus (France, 12th Century)
2. Ogata Korin (Japan, 1658-1716)
3. Joshua Reynolds (Great Britain, 1723-1792)
4. Diego Rivera (Mexico, 1886-1957)
5. Louise Bourgeois (France, 1911-2010)
6. Damien Hirst (UK: England, 1965- )

And, finally, here is a list of the artists with the largest number of artworks on the entire meta-list:

12 Works of Art on the Meta-List
Pieter Bruegel the Elder (The Netherlands, c. 1525/1530-1569)
Rembrandt (The Netherlands, 1606-1669)

11 Works
Titian (Italy, 1488-1576)

10 Works 
Francisco Goya (Spain, 1746-1828)

9 Works      
Vincent Van Gogh (The Netherlands, 1853-1890)

8 Works
Leonardo da Vinci (Italy, 1452-1519)
Michelangelo (Italy, 1475-1564)

7 Works
Piero della Francesca (Italy, 1416-1492)
Albrecht Dürer (Germany, 1471-1528)
Raphael (Italy, 1483-1520)
El Greco (Greece, 1541-1614)
Caravaggio (Italy, 1571-1610)
Peter Paul Rubens (Flanders/Belgium, 1577-1640)
Claude Monet (France, 1840-1926)

6 Works 
Andrea Mantegna (Italy, 1431-1506)
Diego Velázquez (Spain, 1599-1660)
J.M.W. Turner (UK, 1775-1851)
Édouard Manet (France, 1832-1883)
Pablo Picasso (Spain, 1881-1973)
Henri Matisse (France, 1869-1954)
Jackson Pollock (US, 1912-1956)

Story of My Life: Introducing the Best Memoirs Lists

Leave a reply

The New York Times has just published a list of the best 50 memoirs of the past 50 years, and this inspired me to make a meta-list of the best memoirs and autobiographies of all time.  I started with the Times list, then I found about a dozen additional lists of best memoirs/autobiographies on the Internet.  I combined all the lists into a single meta-list.  You can look at the list in rank order (that is, with the books on the most lists at the top) or chronological order.

Here are the lists:
Best Memoirs and Autobiographies of All Time – Ranked
Best Memoirs and Autobiographies of All Time – Chronological

What’s the difference between an autobiography and a memoir?  Here’s how I understand it: an autobiography usually tells the story of a significant portion of the author’s life.  A memoir can tell the story of one incident, a series of events, or a period in a person’s life.  These categories overlap quite a bit.  I think every autobiography is a memoir, but not every memoir is an autobiography.

As you can see from the meta-list, many of the memoirs are quite recent and there are very few from before the 20th Century.  I was particularly disappointed to see that Augustine’s Confessions (c. 400 CE) and Rousseau’s Confessions (1782, 1789) didn’t make the list.  I would also have loved to have seen more books from non-English speaking countries.  (There are a few, but they are mostly older: Karen Blixen’s Out of Africa, and Elie Weisel’s Night, for example.)

Cheer Up – The Blues Lists Are Here!

Leave a reply

I’ve updated my lists of best blues albums – adding a number of new lists, revising the formatting and creating two separate lists: one organized by rank (that is, with the albums on the most lists at the top) and one in chronological order.

Here are the updated lists:
Best Blues Albums of All Time – Ranked
Best Blues Albums of All Time – Chronological

The challenge of making a list of best blues albums is that so many of the albums are compilations and so many of the compilations have duplicate material.  As an example, take Sonny Boy Williamson (II), who has five albums on the list:
1. King Biscuit Time (rec. 1951-1965) (on 3 lists)
2. Down and Out Blues (rec. 1955-1958) (on 3 lists)
3. His Best (Chess, rec. 1955-1964) (on 3 lists)
4. The Essential Sonny Boy Williamson (rec. 1955-1963) (on 2 lists)
5. The Real Folk Blues/More Real Folk Blues (rec. 1957, 1960-1964) (on 3 lists)
I don’t know exactly, but my guess is that there are at least some of his tracks that are on all five albums, and probably a lot more that are on three or four.  The same problem is true for so many other blues artists.  To complicate matters, not all these compilations are of the same quality.  This creates a problem for the lister, and for the person trying to use the list to make choices about what .  My recommendation is that if you are looking for a first album to buy from a blue artist, start with my list, but in trying to decide among the compilations here take the next step of googling “what is the best compilation for [Artist’s Name]” and see what advice you get.