21st Century Artists
1. Mona Hatoum
2. Maurizio Cattelan In the 1970s, it was Duane Hansen who began using wax castings of people to dupe museum goers into mistaking fake figures for real.  The use of super-real sculpture didn't catch on then, but there have been a number of more recent artists who have adopted the technique to great effect, including Ron Mueck, Charles Ray, Tim Hawkinson, Marc Quinn, Tony Matelli, and the Yuan & Yu team (below).  But the most clever of these new realist sculptors may be Cattelan whose hanging horses and fallen popes update the pop sensibility with irreverent irony and theatrical polish more representative of current times.  Gimmicky?  Yes, but just masterful enough to earn a place in the history of art.
3. Gabriel Orozco
4. Raqib Shaw
5. Cai Guo-Qiang

20th Century (Fourth Quarter)
1. Gerhardt Richter
2. Hiroshe Sugimoto
3. Edward Kienholtz & Nancy Reddin
4. Bill Viola
5. Sherrie Levine

20th Century (Third Quarter)
1. Jackson Pollack Pollack is the culmination of the pre-War period, insofar as he integrates expressionism, constructivist abstraction, and chance (dada a la Arp).  But he also goes much father, obliterating the idea that painting must depict objects and undermining canons of composition.  In this, Pollack's achievement is interesting to view as an outgrowth of the work of his teacher, Thomas Hart Benton, whose complex figural compositions point, when viewed with Pollackian hindsight, to a fluid form of radical abstraction.  Pollack was able to see how Benton's seemingly conventional work was transgressive.  Of course, abstraction was not unprecedented (think of early Picabia as anticipating the hidden revolution in Benton's art).  Pollack's most radical move is embodied, literally, in his technique.  Where previous expressionists had used paint to express emotion, Pollack's work expresses action: the frenetic dance of gestures used to create it.  In so doing, Pollack manages something remarkable: his paintings become paintings of painting itself.
2. Robert Morris Since Duchamp, most Western art has had a conceptual dimension, but it was only in the 1960s that the idea of Conceptual Art was clearly articulated (especially by LeWitt and Kosuth) and elevated to a position of dominance. Morris, who had studied philosophy and psychology, was among the best of the first wave Conceptualists. His works include a lead casting of keys framed with a certificate asserting their lack of aesthetic value (an anti-readymade), a sealed box containing a recording of the sounds of its own creation, and a self-portrait consisting of an electroencephalogram printed out to Morris's height. Morris was also a pioneer in minimalist art, process art, and earthworks, and has had a long career of constant experimentation. Other favorite conceptual artists include Joseph Kosuth, Marcel Broothaers, Yoko Ono, Komar & Melamid, and Sophie Calle.
3. Eva Hesse
4. Piero Manzoni
5. Henry Darger


20th Century (Second Quarter)
1. Jean Dubuffet
2. Balthus European art between the wars is a bit on an anomaly.  The 20th century often looks like a neat linear progression, with each movement following as a natural response to the last.  But the story stalls and falters between surrealism and post-War expressionisms, with an over-abundance of second-rate, derivative work.  Balthus is an outlier in this period.  A narrative realist among heirs to Matisse.  Thematically he shares something with the surrealists, since they too were reverberating off Freud, but rather than delving into the mysterious symbolism of dreams, Balthus project explores nascent sexuality, especially the sexuality and sexual allure of young women--a topic that remains uncomfortable today.  Among others to traverse this morally treacherous terrain with deft are Henry Darger (above), Morton Bartlet (another outside artist), and Rudd van Empel (the contemporary digital photographer).  My second favorite sexually themed artist of this period in Hans Bellmer. 
3. Frida Kahlo Kahlo's self-portraits stand next to Van Gogh's and Rembrandt's as the most important and stirring in the Western cannon.  Her work combines classical portraiture, surrealism, and Mexican iconographic elements into a style that is uniquely her own.  She also anticipates Damien Hirst in her explorations of health, Tracey Emin in her narcissistic auto-immolation, and Cindy Sherman in her post-modernist re-invention the self.  Kahlo transforms herself into a goddess but also exposes her fragility in the same gesture.  She is truly one of the first great figures in 20th century painting from the New World.  That title is also deserved by her spouse, Diego Rivera, who absorbed European modernism and then fused it with indigenous styles and subject matter.  Kahlo and Rivera were, arguably, the most talented artistic couple in Western history.  They also make an interesting contrast: Diego’s work is highly public and political, while Kahlo’s is ostensibly private and bohemian.  But it would be a mistake to call her work apolitical, because it is a testament to both the marginalized cultural traditions and aesthetic ideals of her native country as well as commentary on the power and powerlessness of women in art and beyond.
4. Eduardo Paolozzi Pop art is associated with the Americna superstarts like Warhol, Raucherberg, Johns, Lichtenstein, and Rosenquist (and their heir, Jeff Koons), but the movement actually got a head start in Britain with the montage on Richard Hamilton and, especially, Eduardo Paolozzi.  Paolozzi was already making identifiable works of pop art (and even using that word) in the late 1940s.  He might be credited with starting the movement.  His early work is also superb.  Among montage masters, he has few rivals.  Less inventive, perhaps, than Höch before him or Mutu more recently, but ahead of the curve in content.  Pop was forecast by dadaism and also emerged in a post-war period against the background of expressionist movements.  But unlike dada, the prevailing theme here is consumerism.  Paolozzi was a compulsive collector of advertisements and magazine clippings and he brings themgether to lampoon comercial culture.  He went on to explore, with varied success, other visual styles, and some of his abstract work from the '60s looks impressively current.
5. Joseph Cornell


20th Century (First Quarter)
1. Marcel Duchamp It is no revelation that Duchamp is the most important artist of the 20th century.  He is the sine qua non.  My favorite works are the large glass, With Secret Noise, and the Network of Stoppages.  I think the latter is the most important painting of the 20th century.  Duchamp assaults his own derivative Cezanne canvas (the father of modernism) with random mechanical lines.  Artistic authority is undermined and anti-art is born. Among my other favorite dadaists, I count Francis Picabia (below), Hannah Höch, Raoul Hausmann, and Sophie Täuber.
2. Egon Schiele Pornographer, expressionist, and iconoclast, Schiele's exquisite, tortured lines have not been surpassed in the history of Western art.  Schiele is one of several major pre-war century artists who died too young (Boccioni, Modigliani, Popova). Schiele's mentor, Klimt, was also an extraordinary talent.  It is suspected that Klimt often pained his models nude before painting their clothing or gold overlays (see his unfinished The Bride), and this imbues the work with an intense eroticism.  Schiele is too vulgar, too frankly sexual, to be erotic, but the tension he achieves between beauty and the grotesque is what makes his work so captivating.
3. Piet Mondrian Okay, I admit I don't like looking at them, but Mondrian's works still blow me away.  He was one of the first to do pure abstraction, and still, to this day remains among the most radical.  He distills painting to its basic elements--primary colors and straight lines.  He flattens the canvas, and eliminates anything expressive, or painterly (which makes his work much more of an assault on painting than Kandinsky or Pollack).  He also avoids the conventional compositional strategies of Russian suprematists, like Malevich and Popova, by finding balance in a simple network of lines.  The work remains shocking, and also masterful; one has the impression that the canvases would fail if a single line were moved just an inch.
4. Francis Picabia It may seem redundant to have two-dadaists on this list, but Picabia deserves special mention.  His first really significant paintings were officially cubist, but they were really a major departure from Braque and Picasso, in their rich use of color, their dynamic forms, and their shift into more radical abstraction.  Indeed, they count among the most beautiful abstractions in the history of art (an honor shared by El Lissitzky and Mark Rothko).  Picabia went on, on course, to befriend both American and European dadaists.  He edited and wrote for dada's best journal (391) and made some the most successful machine paintings.  Picabia was also a fist-generation surrealist before renouncing the movement.  His later paintings (of overlapping women) are, perhaps, less significant but they are underappreciated.
5.  Otto Dix Though a bit too illustrational, Dix was the most accomplished of the politically-minded German expressionists.  Less painterly than Grosz and Beckman, but they are irresistably well painted, and devestating exposes of Weimar's dark side.  Dix's emotional intensity and vibrant colors take up where the first wave of German expressionists left off (the best of whom was Nolde), but the exprience of war and the rising tide of national socialism caused a shift from aestheticism and formalism into a form of protest.  Grosz was more relentlessly biting, but the technical genius of Dix puts his works delivers his bitter message with enough sugar to ensure that viewers take a bite.

18th Century
1. Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes Goya's reputation as the first modern painter doesn't do full justice to his accomplishments.  Goya was highly esteemed as a court painter but illness, deafness, war, and, ultimately a dissent into madness transformed his work, and the resulting oeuvre is the artistic embodiment of the end of the Enlightenment and the emerge on new cultural forms.  Goya's work ushers in Romanticism, symbolism, and expressionism.   He is also credited with the first full female nude that is not illustrating a biblical or mythic scene, and, far from pornographic, his model is depicted with such knowing self-assurance that it can even be described as a feminist work.  That painting was done in 1800, and his deeply disturbing Black paintings were done two decades later, which may suggest that Goya should be categorized in the 19th century.  But his 18th century accomplishments already reveal the painter to come: The Devil's Lamp, The Incantation, The Yard of Lunatics, The Witches Sabbath, and the Los Caprichos etching series.  Indeed, it is the fact that Goya was creating such works along side pastoral genre scenes and royal portraits that makes him so fascinating as a transition figure.
2. Jean-Baptiste Greuze The 18th Century was not a great time for Western art.   Still, there were better painters than Greuze (David, Copley, Joseph Wright of Derby), more interesting stylists (Chardin, Füger), and greater innovators (Gericault, Fragonard).  Greuze was essentially a genre painter, whose career ended when he tried his hand at neoclassicism.  I like him for his sickeningly sweet, unsubtly sexual portraits of women with dead birds, broken mirrors and other props.  Think Keane meets Balthus, in period attire.  If I had to pick a second favorite genre painter from the period, it would be Pietro Longhi, who created a wonderful world filled with awkward, masked figures enjoying the inane activities of the leisure class.  A third favorite would be Joseph Wright or Derby, whose favored genre was scientists making discoveries.
3. Franz Xaver Messerschmidt Messerschmidt Not exactly high-profile in art history, Messerschmidt is nevertheless a fascinating footnote.  He began his relatively short career at a baroque, and subsequently neo-classical sculptor, with considerable ability but little originality.  Then, fuelled no doubt by his own paranoia and derangement, he started sculpting heads with the most bizarre facial expressions ever captured in the history of art.  Not exactly emotional expression, they are more like contortions or spasms.  Or, better yet, they seem to express, in a grotesque way, personality types rather than feelings.  They are darkly comically, but also visually compelling.  Symmetric, archetypal, arranged in inexplicable sets of pairs, they seem to advertise a new cannon for portraiture--one in which the human spirit in its most jaundiced, vulgar, and sniveling guise issues forth physiognomically.  Everything that is sanguine, superficial, and sentimental in 17th century art is belied in these marvelous works.
4. Katsushika Hokusai Though his best works were produced in the 19th century, Hokusai's prodigious career began in the 18th, and his work carries on the great printing and ukiyo-e traditions of that period.  He was unsurpassed in his use of color, composition, and form.  Though most known for his landscapes (Fuji views and his emblematic wave), he was a master of many subjects, including mythological scenes, shunga (erotic images), and bijinga (beautiful women--though Hokusai never achieved the greatness of Utamaro).  Perhaps most enjoyable are his volumes of manga (or cartoon drawings) which show off Hokusai's range and astonishing talent.
5. Thomas Gainsborough It is easy to hate Gainsborough, whose stiff compositions, and powdered ladies are grotesquely and ostentatiously bourgeois.  Still, they embody as aspect of the era, and they capture an ideal of beauty that is both timeless and irrecoverably lost.  His work lies exactly between the gaudy excesses of Fragonard and the contrived classicism of David.  They are stately, but just frivilous, mirroring the upper classes who would soon lose their stranglehold on art.  They are also technically impressive.  Gainsborouh's treatment of flesh is  spectacular, with whites that are at once deathly pale and layered with vibrant color.  His paintings dance, where his rival Reynolds' fall hopelessly flat.  Thus for all their kitschiness, Gainsborough's works exhibit enough charm and mastery to be viewed repeatedly with increasing reward.

17th Century
1. Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio One of the most influential of all Western painters, Caravaggio was hugely controversial in his time.  His hoi polloi realism was seen as sacreligious and his chiaroscuro was an affront to the prismatic mannerist palette that dominated Italian art.  Caravaggio's personality didn't help.  Frequently arrested for violence, he ultimately had to flee Rome for murdering the pimp, Ranuccio Tomassoni, in a botched castration attempt.  The dispute evidently revolved around Fillide Melandroni, a coveted prostitute, who posed for many of Caravaggio's paintings, including Judith Beheading Holofernes and Saint Catherine.  Caravaggio fled to Malta and became a knight, but was arrested for attacking one of his fellows.  Then he escaped from jail, fled from town to town and ultimately died of a fever, after another brawl, at the age of 37.  He left behind a body of work that was both unprecedented and unsurpassed.  No other artist has painted ordinary people with such affecting sensitivity.  Käthe Kollwitz is one of the few who came close, two centuries later.
2. Georges de La Tour Inspired by Caravaggio, Le Tour takes high contrast lighting to a new level, with scenes lit by a single glowing candle.  But in other respects, he work contrasts sharply with the Italian master.  The figures in La Tour's paintings  have gentle soft lines and peaceful expressions that make them fetchingly approachable.  Whereas Carvaggio's figures are often at dramatic angles, and La Tour's are almost always vertical on the canvas.  Caravaggio's world is bleak and full of danger, and La Tour makes the world inviting.  This gives his work a unique, appealing, and readily identifiable style that transcends that of others who came in Caravaggio's wake.  Among the more faithful Caravaggisti, my favorites are Artemisia Gentileschi (below), Bartolomeo  Manfredi, Jusepe de Ribera, and Hendrick ter Brugghen.
3. Jan Vermeer Like La Tour, Vermeer produced few paintings and had to be rediscovered centuries after his death.  The paintings he left behind are mostly meticulously executed interior scenes with one or two figures glowing with natural light.  The viewer is usually set back, voyeuristically, as if we'd happened upon a private moment while charting through an opulent home.  Vermeer's palette is dominated by pale, earthy yellows, and subtle highlights in blue.  Each setting is filled with subtle details, textures, textiles, and wall hangings that sometimes portend hidden meanings.   Of all the painters listed here, he has the most developed sense of place.  Like his contemporary, Pieter de Hooch, architectural details are as important to these compositions as the figures, yet they never detract from their intimacy or psychological depth (compare the writings of Robbe-Grillet in modern literature).  Above all, the paintings have a profound and poetic beauty; they are stunningly elegant and cerebrally evocative.
4. Diego Valazquez
5. Artemisia Gentileschi