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The Times Top 200 Artists of the 20th Century to Now

At first glance, the results of this poll may seem rather predictable — but the longer you look, the more telling the quirks and anomalies become. This is precisely its point. It’s not there to agree with. It is there to argue against.

 

Several artists would seem to be enormously overrated. What is Martin Kippenburger doing in the Top 20, rated above Rothko and Schiele and Klee? It feels like a blip — which is probably appropriate for a radical who likes to barge in irreverently. Frida Kahlo does not merit her top spot of 19. How can this solipsistic painting by-numbers-style recorder of her own misery be placed above Munch, with his otherworldly scream? She probably represents the woman’s vote. But then, why not put Louise Bourgeois far higher — that septuagenarian who, rummaging about in the rag-and-bone shop of the heart, has had so pervasive an influence on future generations?

 

Influence, perhaps, is not adequately reflected in this list. Andy Warhol, who stamped the patterns of postmodernism, comes only eighth when the delightful but pre-eminently decorative Gustav Klimt comes in third. Do we, at heart, not appreciate the conceptual? Do we prefer a nice painting to a muddle of ideas? Marcel Duchamp, the father of the conceptual, is rated only fifth — and Richard Hamilton and Gilbert and George, so profoundly influential on their peers, come in at 97 and 130. For the significance of their work, both should make the top quarter.

 

How do the British do? Francis Bacon, that impassioned outsider, misses making the Top Ten by only nine votes. After that, you have to wait until No 30 to find Lucian Freud, who attracts only half as many aficionados. But he is our first living British artist and his fellow contemporary, David Hockney, comes in close behind. They are the British Establishment and those impudent upstarts, the Brit pack, can’t knock them from their pedestals. Vote counts have halved by the time Tracey Emin and Damien Hirst come in neck and neck, within one vote of each other at 52 and 53 respectively. But our leading modernists, it would seem, have fallen behind. Ben Nicholson and Barbara Hepworth limp home in the last quarter of the field, although Henry Moore, once a worldwide celebrity, manages to puff in at a just-about-respectable if not impressive No. 49.

 

David Bomberg, the painter’s painter, is a completely underrated straggler. He is one of several real talents who have found themselves abandoned by a fickle world of fashion. Augustus John, once so suavely famous, is all but forgotten. And when it comes to more contemporary talents, surely, had this poll been taken five years ago, the fantastical avant-garde imagination of Matthew Barney would have ranked far more highly. And what happened to Walter de Maria, whose vast, zigzagging Lightning Field captures the electricity that flickers and forks across the New Mexican desert in the name of aesthetics, or James Turrell, who is transforming a volcanic crater into a vast observatory?

 

Painting is more appealing than sculpture, apparently. Constantin Brancusi, at 16, is the first sculptor to make the list, and although the emaciated striders of Alberto Giacometti are next, they only just manage to sneak into the first 25.

 

The results show a strong inclination towards the early modern, towards styles and experiments that have had a century or so to settle down through once-outraged sensibilities, forming the deep sediment of tastes. The Top Five artists have all been dead for at least 50 years. Jasper Johns, that great American flag-bearer for a now ubiquitous appropriation of populist iconography into art, is the first living artist on the list. He comes in at 19 — and he is almost an octogenarian (although admittedly his close friend and artistic peer Robert Rauschenberg, who comes in six places and nearly 4,000 votes higher, died only last year).

 

The big, bold, pioneering talents of an audacious postwar America are the most popular after those of the early modern Europe — which, again, is predictable. It is a preference that follows the art historical canon, which, as Europe disintegrated into two world wars, watched the artistic baton being carried — more often than not in the hands of refugees — to the States.

 

From The Times Online, 2009

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