Art unlocked: critics on the one work that explains the great artists, from Turner to Basquiat – The Guardian

Pablo Picasso – Guernica (1937)

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On 26 April 1937 the Basque town of Guernica was bombed by Hitler’s Luftwaffe and the Italian Legionary Air Force. Picasso, a Spanish artist settled in Paris, paid homage to the killed with this cubist history painting. Moments of revelation punch through the jagged mayhem to hit your heart. The baby cradled in a screaming mother’s arms hangs its head upside down, eyes blankly open, mouth obliviously gaping: it is dead, you realise as if for the first time. Picasso asks in each line of this figure what a child’s death means. He poses similarly agonising questions across the canvas: what does it feel like to be the woman in the burning house, arms outstretched to a God who is not showing any mercy today? And how does the universe permit the pain of that screaming horse, its newspaper body pierced and eviscerated? So long as this painting exists the bombing of Guernica will never end but will always be this infinite moment of wrong. Jonathan Jones
See it at: Museo Reina Sofía, Madrid

Paul Cézanne – Le Lac d’Annecy (1896)

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The life of Cézanne is a struggle for calm and sanity amid wild and savage compulsions. His early paintings confess to voyeuristic, violent urges, even a fascination with murder. But out of his conflicts modern art was born. He explodes the conventions of the painted picture as he takes reality apart and finds its inner structure – nowhere more beautifully than in Le Lac d’Annecy.

Shards of colour dissociate themselves from the mountain scenery and are hurled at the water, whose still surface holds them in a timeless mirror. Infinite energy meets eternal order. This painting is poised between picturesque reality and abstract geometry: the tree that arches over the lakeside looks “normal” but the tower across the water has been simplified to a cylinder. Between the surface and the underlying physics of nature Cézanne unveils the complexity of seeing and being, and invents what his disciples, Picasso and Braque, would practise as cubism. JJ
See it at: Courtauld Gallery, London

Leonardo da Vinci – The Virgin of the Rocks (c.1495–1508)

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This painting full of heresies is a portal into the mind of Leonardo da Vinci. Let’s begin with the unorthodox depiction of John the Baptist, instead of Christ, being cradled by the Virgin Mary. Baby Jesus meanwhile is tended by an androgynous angel. This emphasis on John resembles the Mandaean religion, in which John is superior to Christ.

But it’s just the beginning of Leonardo’s dangerous thoughts. By setting the holy family among rock formations he is able to indulge his fascination with geology: in his notebooks he analyses fossils, understands they are traces of ancient creatures and says they show the evolution of the Earth through time. The tumbling strata beneath Mary’s feet secretly show his belief in science, not the Bible. But then how was Christ born? The phallic rocky pinnacles and cavernous holes in this painting make an obscene suggestion that the Virgin Mary was no virgin. JJ
See it at: National Gallery, London

JMW Turner – Slave Ship (Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying, Typhoon Coming On) (1840)

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Turner’s genius for conjuring uniquely dramatic evocations of the elemental violence of nature, especially at sea, is here melded with the all too human violence of the slave trade. The painting draws on a true story from Turner’s childhood when manacled slaves were jettisoned from a ship to claim the property insurance on their lives. The incident is credited with fuelling growing abolitionist sentiment in Britain, which Turner went on to firmly share.

Here it is his proto-abstraction rendering of air and water, of light, movement and colour that first catches the viewer’s eye. Then the skeleton of the ship emerges from the roiling seas and finally, there right in front of us, the dead and dying enslaved people who had been discarded. Turner’s response to atrocity was to produce a work of awful beauty and deeply moral indignation that tested the boundaries of artistic endeavour while remaining profoundly engaged with the darkest realities of the world. Nicholas Wroe
See it at: Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Diego Velázquez – Las Meninas (1656)

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Velázquez’s Las Meninas is routinely described as the greatest painting in the world, and for once that claim is not entirely ridiculous. Painted when Velázquez was court artist to Philip IV of Spain, it ostensibly depicts the infanta Margarita Theresa, her meninas – maids of honour – and other members of her retinue. But there is so much more going on. The figures in the painting – including Velázquez himself working at a large canvas on the left – appear to have their view fixed outwards to both future spectators of the work, but also to the king and queen, who we can see in a mirror at the rear of the room.

We find ourselves, in effect, standing next to the king as he is captured in Velázquez’s painting-within-a-painting. Elsewhere Velázquez’s brilliance of depiction and composition sees him manipulate complex notions of space, light and perspective to explore personality and character as well as representation and reality in this endlessly fascinating and satisfying work. NW
See it at: Museo del Prado, Madrid

Cindy Sherman – Untitled #588 (2016/2018)

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While no single image can encapsulate Sherman’s art, it is equally true that almost any image taken from her remarkable body of work over the past half-century will say something useful about her and about us. Since the 1970s Sherman has produced a vast quantity of images, mostly self-portraits, but not in any conventional sense of looking like the “real” Cindy Sherman.

Initially through the use of makeup, lighting and costume, then prosthetics and, later still, digital tools and other devices, Sherman has created a multitudinous gallery of personalities, simultaneously familiar and strange, that may summon a 50s B-list movie starlet, or a flapper, or a pornography worker or an old master’s painting and on and on. And through these series of untitled images – the one here is from a set related to imagined fashion industry figures – Sherman has succeeded in creating a new genre supremely suited to a thrilling interrogation of gender, identity, society and art. NW
Cindy Sherman’s works are exhibited worldwide via Metro Pictures

Louise Bourgeois – Spiders (1990s-2000s)

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Louise Bourgeois’ giant arachnoid sculptures are her most recognisable and iconic. Yet the late French artist was in her 80s when she began the works that saw her crowned the spider woman. As always, they mine her earliest experiences, including her fierce mother-love, the family tapestry restoration business (analogous to the spider-spinners), and her father’s traumatising infidelity. Bourgeois called her spiders “an ode to her mother”, whose patience and quiet strength she lionised. Scaled up to heights of more than nine metres (30ft) in the case of the largest, entitled Maman, they are not about to be crushed underfoot.

Her nest-building protective spider-mothers suggest a dangerous side, too. Their spindly legs threaten entanglement or a trap, like her caged environments of the 1980s. The psychological cannibalism evoked by her key installation, Destruction of the Father (1974), a family dinner whose guests are breast-like or phallic abstract lumps, also comes to mind. A spider’s intentions can be just as deadly, as with the notorious black widows’ post-sex meal. Skye Sherwin
See it at: Tate Modern, London. Versions also on permanent display in Bilbao, Ottawa, Doha (Qatar), Tokyo, and Bentonville (Arkansas, USA)

David Hammons – Kool-Aid drawings (2003–12)

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Hammons has enjoyed playing with his public for more than 50 years, finding new ironies in found objects and sharing these sentiments in his work. The phrase “Don’t drink the Kool-Aid” is a warning and an accusation of gullibility in African-American vernacular English (AAVE). Kool-Aid, the powdered drink mix created by Nebraskan Edwin Perkins in 1927, became very popular during the Great Depression, with water and sugar being the only required accompaniments. Hammons’ Kool-Aid works (2003–07) hold an ever-relevant feature of Black American working-class experience, as well as memorialising the Jonestown massacre, where a 900-plus, largely Black American congregation, under the religious leadership of Jim Jones, drank poisoned Kool-Aid.

Here Hammons uses Kool-Aid flavours as pigment, dousing the surface with swaths of colour that feel uniquely American. Some works are draped with a silk curtain and the artists’ own terry cloth (another staple in Black American households) to frame and obscure the work. Rianna Jade Parker
Untitled Kool-Aid drawing (2003) is viewable by appointment at Hauser & Wirth, Southampton

Caravaggio – Bacchus (c. 1598)

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Caravaggio is a master of menace. His paintings don’t just stay there on the wall but reach out and implicate you. This insidious assault of a picture may seem calm at first in its beguiling beauty. Every detail is precisely observed to create a hymn to the wine god Bacchus and his sensual fruits. Tempting apples and grapes, vine leaves in the young god’s hair, red wine in the glass he holds forward – all are painted with sumptuous precision.

But ripples radiate across the wine’s surface like premonitions of a life-changing event. Bacchus looks at you from dark eyes under drawn-on eyebrows. He is naked except for a white sheet held in place by a black ribbon with a bow. Then you see that he is about to undo that bow and reveal all. By the time you realise all he is offering you are hooked on Caravaggio’s wine, addicted to the forbidden fruits of his art. JJ
See it at: Uffizi Gallery, Florence

Jean-Michel Basquiat – Hollywood Africans (1983)

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Basquiat first made his mark as a 17-year-old in a graffiti duo with the tag SAMO (same old shit), and fast-evolved into the most edgy and authentic voice within 80s’ neo-expressionism. His work is full of coded references and signature touches, such as the crown in this painting’s corner, a symbol of his artistic ambition. The buzzing, rhythmic composition of hot and cool colours gives this painting its visual punch, and he had a sharp eye for the injustices of history.

The fast, sketchy text calls out the limited, stereotyped roles available to Black people in 1940 Hollywood, the date an oblique reference to Hattie McDaniel’s Oscar win for Mammy in Gone With the Wind. Heads are another Basquiat calling-card, particularly toothy skulls, inspired by his formative childhood encounter with Gray’s Anatomy. The three faces here belong to the rapper Rammellzee, the artist Toxic and Basquiat himself. His painter’s hand bears a racist slur: degraded as an animal’s “paw”. SS
See it at: Whitney Museum of American Art, New York

Artemisia Gentileschi – Judith Slaying Holofernes (1612-13)

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The rediscovered genius of baroque painting, Artemisia Gentileschi, is an artist for our own age: a proto #MeToo survivor, whose art seems fuelled by the need to avenge wrongs to women. Notoriously, this included her own rape by another artist when she was a teenager. Her early Susannah and the Elders, where two peeping old men press their intrusive heads into the personal space of a revolted naked girl, is a cutting allegory of the way patriarchal society mindlessly conspires against women.

Yet it’s her victoriously gory take on the Jewish heroine Judith, cutting off the head of the drunk Assyrian general Holofernes, where she perfected her oft-repeated vision of women joining forces and rising up together to overcome a brutish man. Judith and her maid are young peers, beautiful and inspirational figures wielding the sword as one and pressing down the larger body of Holofernes, whose eyes are wide open as the blood gushes. SS
See it at: Museo di Capodimonte, Naples

El Anatsui – Behind the Red Moon (2023)

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Just over two decades ago, the now octogenarian Ghanian-born, Nigeria-based El Anatsui found a bag of old bottle-tops and hit on the material and method that would catapult him to art superstardom. Behind the Red Moon, the vast, impossibly labour-intensive shimmering floor-to-ceiling hangings crafted from bottle-tops that he installed in Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall, might be the most breathtaking of his signature works. It commands a Romantic awe: at the work’s overwhelming size, intricacy and beauty, but also the scale of consumer excess and waste that it points to and the invisible labour behind it, not to mention environmental pollution.

It speaks of all this with piercing clarity. Yet it’s not all doom. The wonder of this work that suggests chainmail, fish-scales, tapestry, mosaic, colour field painting and more, is the note of hope it strikes for human creativity and resilience. It’s how so much waste can be transformed into splendour. Be quick if you want to see it, though: it leaves the Tate on 14 April. SS
See it at: Tate Modern, London, to 14 April

Steve McQueen – Grenfell (2023)

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Few artworks are able to immediately disarm and captivate like McQueen’s film, a work of humility that avoids spectacle or trauma porn. Beginning with views, landmarks and city noise familiar to Londoners, Grenfell’s subject is soon made clear as silence falls and McQueen’s camera orbits the charred concrete carcass in west London. Shot from a helicopter in a single take, the film’s search for material evidence and the debris of life causes deep gulps, long exhales and quick-falling tears. Seventy-two is the officially acknowledged number of lives taken by the preventable fire, but many believe that this figure is not accurate. The second and final report for the Grenfell Tower inquiry has been further delayed until the summer of 2024 – seven years after the tower’s cladding panels caught fire. Self-funded by McQueen, this work will remain as a part of the Tate’s and Museum of London’s permanent collections. It’s unable to be viewed right now, but surely a work this indelible will one day be on permanent public display. RJP

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