Top 200 Artists (20th Century to Now)

a poll from The Times, based on 1.4M votes. Some of it's not surprising (Hello Picasso), some of it is. Like most polls, it is deceptive. What does it mean to be a top artist? Is that similar to being a good artist? Most influential?

Italicised comments rather obviously my own.

Rank/Artist/Number of Votes
1 Pablo Picasso 21587
2 Paul Cezanne 21098
3 Gustav Klimt 20823....hmmm? between Cezanne and Monet and above Duchamp, Matisse, Pollack?--not on my list
4 Claude Monet 20684
5 Marcel Duchamp 20647
6 Henri Matisse 17096
7 Jackson Pollock 17051
8 Andy Warhol 17047
9 Willem De Kooning 17042
10 Piet Mondrian 17028
11 Paul Gauguin 17027
12 Francis Bacon 17018......... so high up? maybe Saltz wasn't being hyperbolic here
13 Robert Rauschenberg 16956
14 Georges Braque 16788
15 Wassily Kandinsky 16055
16 Constantin Brancusi 14224
17 Kasimir Malevich 13609
18 Jasper Johns 12988
19 Frida Kahlo 12940....woman number 1
20 Martin Kippenberger 12784....like Bacon, I wonder if these artists rank so high because of recent splashy retrospectives?
21 Paul Klee 12750
22 Egon Schiele 12696
23 Donald Judd 12613
24 Bruce Nauman 12517
25 Alberto Giacometti 12098
26 Salvador Dalí 11496
27 Auguste Rodin 8989
28 Mark Rothko 8951
29 Edward Hopper 8918
30 Lucian Freud 8897
31 Richard Serra 8858
32 Rene Magritte 8837
33 David Hockney 8787
34 Philip Guston 8786
35 Henri Cartier-Bresson 8779
36 Pierre Bonnard 8778
37 Jean-Michel Basquiat 8746
38 Max Ernst 8737
39 Diane Arbus 8733......woman number 2
40 Georgia O'Keeffe 8714 .......woman number 3
41 Cy Twombly 8708......who knew so many people liked Twombley as much as I do? : )
42 Max Beckmann 8690
43 Barnett Newman 8643
44 Giorgio De Chirico 8462
45 Roy Lichtenstein 7441
46 Edvard Munch 5080
47 Pierre Auguste Renoir 5063
48 Man Ray 5050
49 Henry Moore 5045
50 Cindy Sherman 5041....woman number 4, 4 women total in the top 50
51 Jeff Koons 5028........I'm not terribly sad to see Koons out of the top 50, but is Cindy Sherman a better artist? or just more of a 'top artist'?
52 Tracey Emin 4961....woman number 6
53 Damien Hirst 4960
54 Yves Klein 4948
55 Henri Rousseau 4944
56 Chaim Soutine 4927
57 Arshile Gorky 4926
58 Amedeo Modigliani 4924
59 Umberto Boccioni 4918
60 Jean Dubuffet 4910
61 Eva Hesse 4908....women number 7
62 Edouard Vuillard 4899
63 Carl Andre 4898
64 Juan Gris 4898
65 Lucio Fontana 4896
66 Franz Kline 4894
67 David Smith 4842
68 Joseph Beuys 4480
69 Alexander Calder 3241
70 Louise Bourgeois 3240.....women number 8
71 Marc Chagall 3224
72 Gerhard Richter 3123
73 Balthus 3090
74 Joan Miro 3087
75 Ernst Ludwig Kirchner 3084
76 Frank Stella 3078
77 Georg Baselitz 3048
78 Francis Picabia 3046
79 Jenny Saville 3034......woman number 9
80 Dan Flavin 3024
81 Alfred Stieglitz 3017
82 Anselm Kiefer 3010
83 Matthew Barney 3005
84 George Grosz 2990
85 Bernd And Hilla Becher 2980....woman number 10
86 Sigmar Polke 2966
87 Brice Marden 2947
88 Maurizio Cattelan 2940
89 Sol LeWitt 2926
90 Chuck Close 2915
91 Edward Weston 2899
92 Joseph Cornell 2893
93 Karel Appel 2890
94 Bridget Riley 2885....woman number 11
95 Alexander Archipenko 2884
96 Anthony Caro 2879
97 Richard Hamilton 2878
98 Clyfford Still 2864
99 Luc Tuymans 2862
100 Claes Oldenburg 2843


Lists of top artists maybe better cocktail chatter than actual discussion. It seems like something absolutely no one would agree on. For the remaining 100 hundred artists, the list gets even more contentious. And more obscure--I'm going to have to do a bit of googling on some names.

Yet even so, the proportion of women artists doesn't grow.

l