Critique the Masters

Critique: Olympia

Édouard Manet painted Olympia in 1863, and it landed like a bomb at the 1865 Salon. The model stares straight out at the viewer with zero apology. Look at the contrast between her pale skin and the da…

Critique: The Creation of Adam

Michelangelo painted The Creation of Adam around 1512 on the Sistine Chapel ceiling, and the whole composition hinges on a gap of about three inches between two fingertips. Look at the negative space…

Critique: The Scream

Edvard Munch painted The Scream in 1893, and the figure isn't screaming at all. It's covering its ears, recoiling from the scream of nature itself. Look at the sky. Those undulating bands of orange an…

Critique: The Starry Night

Vincent van Gogh painted The Starry Night in 1889 from the window of his asylum room in Saint-Rémy. The cypress tree anchors the left third like a flame, but the village below sits oddly still against…

Critique: The Card Players

Paul Cézanne painted The Card Players around 1894, stripping a genre scene down to pure geometry. Two figures, a table, a bottle. No drama, no narrative, just mass and interval. Look at how he builds…

Critique: Les Demoiselles d'Avignon

Pablo Picasso painted Les Demoiselles d'Avignon in 1907, and it still looks like a punch to the face. The five figures are fractured into planes, their bodies carved into facets that feel more like sh…

Critique: American Gothic

Grant Wood painted American Gothic in 1930, using his sister and his dentist as models for a farmer and his daughter standing in front of a carpenter Gothic house. The whole thing was staged in a stud…

Critique: A Bar at the Folies-Bergère

Édouard Manet painted A Bar at the Folies-Bergère in 1882, his last major work before dying the following year. The barmaid stares straight out at us while her reflection in the mirror behind her show…

Critique: Campbell's Soup Cans

Andy Warhol painted Campbell's Soup Cans in 1962, thirty-two canvases arranged in a grid like products on a supermarket shelf. Each canvas shows a different soup variety, rendered with the mechanical…

Critique: The Gleaners

Jean-François Millet painted The Gleaners in 1857, showing three peasant women bent over a harvested field. The work was controversial at the time, read as a political statement about rural poverty in…