It’s a question that comes to mind all the time. Who among living artists will continue to be famous a century or so from now? Who will continue to seem important and powerful? The Barnes Foundation is full of Jules Pascins, once a name that every art lover knew. Now he’s one so obscure it wouldn’t be fair as a Trivial Pursuit question. John Steuart Curry? He used to be big, back in the 1930s, when the American regionalists were winning the art wars for a while against the Modernists. Now? He still has murals in Kansas and D.C., and he turns up in a few museum collections, including the Whitney. But it takes a long wall card to remind people of who he was.
I was reminded of this because my blogger colleague Tyler Green has begun playing an art history list game, one that actually forces you to think about your taste and judgments, once you start toying with it. The game? Name the ten truly great artists in each century. So for the 20th, let’s say Matisse, Picasso, Duchamp, Bonnard, Miro, Mondrian, Pollock, Bacon, (David) Smith, Warhol. But now I’ve left out Malevich, Kandinsky, Brancusi, Beckmann, DeKooning, Rauschenberg, Johns, Hesse and Serra, all of whom changed the terms of the game in some way. And Klee! (A kingdom unto himself.) Green throws in a photographer, Arbus. But if you’re going to do that I don’t see how you can leave out Cartier-Bresson, at least for the work in the 30s that was some of the greatest Surrealist art of the decade. And then there’s Robert Frank.
Maybe it’s easier to start with the seventh century, when Anonymous was the only name to be reckoned with, at least in the West.
And further on the topic of fickle fame, the U.K. daily The Guardian has published the results of a survey of 6400 Brits who were asked to name their top ten “arts heroes”. You’ll be pleased to know that Leonardo made the cut, but probably because he’s that guy in The Da Vinci Code. I don’t know how you’ll feel about the news that Banksy scored higher than Picasso.