Trees and Undergrowth |
Vincent van Gogh |
This impossibly lush greenery is almost completely abstract in its ubiquity and seems to sparkle with solar energy. Never before has so much been done with one color. |
Woman with Parasol Facing Left |
Claude Monet |
The regal pose, the effect of the sunlight at her back, the mystery of the hidden face, the way the multicolored grass seems ready to to sweep up and around her along with the wind. A perfect idealized portrait of one woman in one moment. |
Impression, Sunrise |
Claude Monet |
A perfectly captured moment in time, the sun piercing charismatically through a delicate morning on the river |
The Banquet |
Rene Magritte |
The curious imposition of the red sun in front of the trees feels simultaneously natural and unnatural, reflected by the sinister color palette. |
Burning Giraffe |
Salvador Dali |
This strikingly posed figure could be any of us, outwardly beautiful but precariously propped up, moving blindly through a precarious landscape, and filled with drawers of secrets. It recognizes an innate terror about ourselves as much as our surroundings. |
The Persistence of Memory |
Salvador Dali |
The mutated forms seem natural enough that they could have appeared in any one of our unintentionally warped memories |
From the Lake No. 1 |
Georgia O'Keeffe |
When this collection of glowing shards falls together as a landscape under a stormy sky, it still continues to move. |
Composition VI |
Wassily Kandinsky |
An entire symphony seems to be erupting with great motion and energy across one abstract canvas. Like a symphony, each exposure to it reveals something new. |
Witches’ Flight |
Francisco Goya |
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Untitled (1984) |
Zdzislaw Beksinski |
Somehow both terrifying and heartwarming. The burnt coloration and unnatural tightness of the skeletal embrace suggests apocalyptic annihilation, even in a completely featureless background. |
Mujer saliendo del psicoanalista |
Remedios Varo |
A lot is going on in this somewhat creepy portrait of a woman leaving a psychoanalyst—between the strange scale of everything, the additional faces in her jacket and in her hand, and her incredible hairstyle. |
Encuentro |
Remedios Varo |
“This poor woman, full of curiosity and expectation as she opened the little coffer, encounters her own self; in the background, on the shelves, there are more little coffers, and who knows whether on opening them she will find something new.” |
Eruption of Mount Vesuvius |
Sebastien Pether |
This painting seems ahead of its time, with 3D-rendering-like light refraction and a beautiful diptych-like contrast between the seafoam left and firey orange right side. |
Starry Night Over the Rhone |
Vincent van Gogh |
A less abstracted and more relaxed precursor to the swirling Starry Night for which he is so famous. |