Top 200

Polls show that the difference between British and American connoisseurship is the difference m between a Picasso and a picture postcard.

Picasso came in first in the recent British survey - “The Times Top 200 Artists of the 20th century to Now.” In contrast, a ‘90s survey of America’s “most wanted” and “most unwanted” imagery called “People’s Choice” showed that the least favorite imagery had the look of Picasso’s cubism. America’s “most wanted” was a pictorial of historical figures posed in a paradisical springtime setting full with frolicking deer beneath pristine blue skies.The only thing missing were kittens chasing yarn balls.

"Best" lists are a commonplace and not just in art. Itemizations like Random House's "100 Best English Language Novels" and the American Film Institute's top 100 "Greatest Movies of All Time" come to mind. The biggest problem with such lists is the danger of taking them too seriously. But guess what? I have a “best” list, too.

My criteria comes ouf of something Picasso said: "What do you think an artist is, an imbecile who has only eyes? On the contrary, he's at the same time a political being, constantly alive to heart-rending, fiery or happy events, to which he responds in every way."

Best American artists in no particular order:
GEORGE SEGAL, 147th on Britain’s top 200 list.
"Walk - Don't Walk" 1976.
Sculptural situations that show life-size white plaster casts of anonymous-looking figures placed in real-looking environments are signs of the times: people lost, overtaken by places, events.
EDWARD HOPPER, 29th on Britain’s list.
"Nighthawks" 1942.
The impassive look of bored, lonely figures in a diner, underlining their isolation and alienation from themselves and the world around them, is the story of many in a rootless century.
JACOB LAWRENCE
"War Series, Going Home," 1947.
Flattened, angular forms, which are ornamental and festively colored, tell deceptively simple stories of black culture in America. They’re also loaded with social conscience.
SUSAN ROTHENBERG
"Hector Protector," 1976.
Mixing abstract and real, painter Rothenberg creates sketchy images - horses, mostly - silhouetted against obscure, thickly painted backgrounds that tends to muffle, even stifle the animals, which makes them emblems of Everyman struggling to be, to rise above the mire.
EVA HESSE 61st on Britain’s list
"Repetition," 1968
With an inventive use of materials, such as rubber tubing and wire, Hesse created sculpture at once emotional and mysterious. Maybe it's because I know that she was born Jewish in Nazi Germany, that her parents divorced, that her mother committed suicide, that her own marriage failed, that she suffered from a brain tumor, and that she worked from a wheelchair to the end, but her work puts that ache in the throat I was talking about. It's also gorgeous in its way.
BEN SHAHN
"Passion of Sacco and Vanzetti," 1932
Shahn was a social realist whose subjects were topical and usually about class struggle. He used incisive line to show society's scapegoats and underdogs that, for their deadpan looks, can break your heart.
ALICE NEEL
"Warhol," 1970
A portrait painter who rendered her subjects, usually posed staring straight out at the viewer, with a raw quality and a trademark directness that etches your brain.
LOUISE NEVELSON
"Sky Cathedral," 1958
By arranging found wooden furniture and buildings parts — knobs, moldings, chair slats — sculptor Nevelson created shrinelike displays with a message. By themselves, the wooden parts have little impact. In relation to each other, they take on a spiritual air.
MARK ROTHKO (28th on Britain’s list)
"Black on Maroon," 1959
His way of painting rectangles - hovering one over the other so they shimmer in gentle rhythm - is hypnotic. Like the movement of the sea, they’re something to meditate by.
For all the chutzpah it takes to made a “best” list, why not take it to the limit and name just one - the best picture that came out of the past 1,000 years? Criteria? A game-changer.

I nominate "Luncheon on the Grass'' ("Dejeuner sur l'Herbe'') that Manet painted in the middle of the 19th century. The painting defines the moment when traditional art became modern art. And beyond introducting a new era of art, it begat the sexual revolution, and maybe feminism, too. The painting shows two clothed men and a nude woman picnicking under the oaks and chestnut trees of the Bois de Boulogne in Paris. Which was not in itself revolutionary. Many Old Master paintings mixed clothed men with unclothed women.

Manet's painting differed in content and technique and the difference shocked high Parisian society. Even Emperor Napoleon III, who was not exactly a paragon of decency, called it "indecent.'' This, despite innumerable paintings of nude women over the past 1,000 years. "The Turkish Bath'' by Manet contemporary Jean August Ingres – describing a harem of nude females waiting for a call from their master - caused no stir at all.

The thing is that Manet’s painting wasn't allegorical or mythological. The woman pictured was real, even well-known as artist’s model and painter Victorine Meurend, who ran off to America with her lover after Manet finished the painting.

Something else in the painting was different. Meurend boldly stares back at you, as if you were intruding. "Yes?' she seems to ask over her shoulder, her face direct and challenging. Clearly it wasn't Meurend's nudity that offended, it was her face, which lacked the usual demure reticence of naked females in art. What’s more, this nude woman was actively engaged in conversation with men in public.

Compare Manet's scenario to the one of two clothed males and a pair of naked females by 15th-century painter Giorgione in "Concert Champetre.'' It's one of the Old Master paintings on which Manet based his painting. In Giorgione's rendition, the women are waiting on the men, who are talking only to each other. It's as if Manet whited out the double standard, replacing it with a woman in a social relationship with her male companions: minus the female passivity, vulnerability and the playing out of all the male fantasies known to art history.

To further see the difference Manet made with this painting, you have only to see, say, "Susannah and the Elders'' by 17th-century painter Sisto Badalocchi, in which clothed men are eyeing an undressed woman. Manet rebelled against the Badalocchis of the art world, who made erotic spectacles of women. He also rejected Renaissance painters who put naked women on pedestals as symbols of truth and beauty.

"Luncheon on the Grass'' refers to the past and moves art forward to a time when Robert Mapplethorpe could photograph body builder Lisa Lyons flexing her muscles in the nude in the Great Outdoors without a word of surprise from anyone.

Manet's technique, likewise, broke with long-held ways of painting. He used bold strokes and simple, unshaded shapes that he flattened to make more clear, and he filled his shadows with color. Not realism; not yet impressionism; call it "Manet-ism.''

Of course, before one can pick the best painting, one should answer the "What is art?'' question. I saved this for the last, so you could see the answer in Manet's painting. Art critic Charlotte Willard, who braved the what-is-art question in her book “What is a Masterpiece?” guided me here:

Art is a discovery. Manet brought painting outdoors, inspiring, by turn, a group of young painters who later became the Impressionists. His flattening of the female form without shading also led from realism to abstraction.

Art is visionary. You can't look at Meurend without knowing she is a contemporary woman, emancipated before women actually were.

Art gives form to our dreads and dreams. Manet didn't know at the time that he painted a revolutionary picture. He said to his friend Antonin Proust, "How foolish one must be to say that I am trying to fire pistol shots. I render as simple as I can things I see.'' Call me foolish.

Art remembers the past and predicts the future. Picasso's 1907 painting, "Les Demoisselles d'Avignon'' ("The Brothel of Avignon''), which introduced Cubism to the world, is a direct result of Manet's "Luncheon on the Grass.'' Picasso said it, himself: “When I see Manet's `Dejuener sur l'Herb,' I say to myself, `Trouble for later on.’”

The "later on'' came in his brothel picture, which was Picasso's "Luncheon on the Grass.'' Like Manet, he took an old theme - women as vessels of pleasure, and made them brutal looking.

I'm not prepared to say that Manet would have approved of what Picasso did to women in his painting. Or of what performance artist Carolee Schneemann did later in our century when she pulled a paper scroll from her vagina to read its text on "vulvic space,'' and called it art.

But I think it's fair to say that Manet was the first shock artist.