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