John Singleton Copley's 'Watson and the Shark' (1778)

 

Earliest documented attack

Kara Walker's 'Gone: An Historical Romance of a Civil War as it Occurred b'tween the Dusky Thighs of One Young Negress and Her Heart' (1994)

Humor or horror?

Luc Tuyman's 'The Diagnostic View V' (1993)

 

Aesthetically, intellectually powerful

Gabriel Orozco's 'Empty Shoe Box' (1993)

Space inside space

Chantal Akerman's 'Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles' (1975)

Meticulously depicting time

Kalup Linzy's 'FUCK U & SAMPLED & LEFTOVA' (2009)

Irony meets melodrama

Diego Velázquez's 'Philip IV' (1624)

A true Velázquez

Bruce Nauman's 'Run From Fear-Fun From Rear' (1983)

 

Exposing language's fallibility

Lucas Cranach's 'Three Graces' (1531)

 

The latest acquisition 

Aleksander Rodchenko's 'Dive' (1935)

 

Familiar made unfamiliar

Robert Motherwell's 'Elegy to the Spanish Republic, 70' (1961)

The CIA's weapon?

Constantin Brancusi's 'Endless Column' (1937-38)

Search for purity

Pompeii (79 AD)

 

Pompeii no more?

Anton Kannemeyer's 'I Love the White Middle Class...' (2008)

 

Challenging Western stereotypes

Roy Lichtenstein's 'I Can See the Whole Room' (1961)

Observed vs. observer

Vik Muniz's 'Clouds' (2001)

Public art's finest

Susan Philipsz's 'Lowlands' (2010)

Turner Prize winner

Piero Manzoni's 'Base for the World' (1961)

 

Modernism's comic grandiosity

Anthony McCall's 'Between You and I' (2006)

Light's magical dance

Pablo Picasso's 'Nature Morte à la Pipe' (1912)

 

A real Picasso?

Jenny Holzer's 'For Chicago' (2007)

 

All-encompassing, atmospheric installation

Renato Bertelli's 'Head of Mussolini' (1933)

 

All-seeing, all-knowing dictator

Jim Dine's 'The Woodcut Bathrobe' (1975)

 

Dine's self-assured self-portrait

Various artists' 'Interior of St. Peter's Basilica' (1506-1626)

Theatre of faith

Barnett Newman's 'Who's Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue III?' (1960)

 

'To be experienced'

Charles Allan Gilbert's 'All is Vanity' (1892)

Remember your mortality

Salvador Dalí's 'The Sacrament Last Supper' (1955)

'Love one another'

George Post's 'Pulitzer Building' (1890)

 

Archetypal American skyscraper  

Edward Steichen's 'Isadora Duncan at the Portal of the Parthenon' (1920)

 

Uncanny, dreamlike pictorialism 

Vassilii Vassilievich Vereshchagin's 'The Apotheosis of War' (1871)

'To all conquerors'

Hans Hofmann's 'To Miz - Pax Vobiscum' (1964)

 

Master of color

Gustave Caillebotte's 'The Floorscrapers' (1875)

Ennobling monotonous moil

Olafur Eliasson's 'Beauty' (1993)

Your personal rainbow

Jan Van Eyck's 'Ghent Altarpiece' (1432)

Ghent's irresistible masterpiece

Edward Hopper's 'Nighthawks' (1942)

Vision of isolation

Andy Warhol's 'Coca-Cola (4) Large Coca-Cola' (1962)

Sold for $35,300,000

Wassily Kandinsky's 'Composition VII' (1913)

  

Toward supreme subjectivity

Aaron Koblin's 'Flight Patterns' (2009)

Reminds me of...

Franz Kline's 'Turin' (1960)

Symmetry through asymmetry

Raphael's 'Aeneas Carrying Anchises Out of Troy' (1514)

Paternal love epitomized

Mike Kelley's 'Eviscerated Corpse' (1989)

 

Pleasure vs. perversion

Louis Daguerre's 'Boulevard du Temple' (1838)

First photographed human

Jean Arp's 'Collage Arranged According to the Laws of Chance' (1917)

Anarchy of chance

Ed Kienholz's 'Portable War Memorial' (1968)

 

Happy Voting Day!

Edvard Munch's 'Love and Pain' (1894)

 

Desolation meets consolation

Jaume Plensa's 'Crown Fountain' (2004)

Modern day deities

Pierre Vignon's 'La Madeleine' (1842)

Emulating Roman grandeur

Sylvia Sleigh (1916-2010)

Rest in peace

Luis Jiménez's 'Mustang' (2008)

Kitschiest of kitsch

Rembrandt van Rijn's 'The Slaughtered Ox' (1655)

Psychology of light

Frederic Edwin Church's 'Twilight in the Wilderness' (1860)

Reaffirming nature's nobility

Barbara Hepworth's 'Three Forms' (1935)

Evoking organic vitality

Jeff Koons' 'Triple Hulk Elvis I' (2007)

So unbelievably trite

Jean-Antoine Watteau's 'La Gamme d'Amour' (1712)

Making sweet music