Modern Art's Most Radical Statements at the Met

Modigliani's stone sculpture — he made only a handful before abandoning it for painting — shows the influence of Brancusi, African masks, and ancient Cycladic sculpture converging into a form entirely his own. This elongated head in limestone has the characteristic mask-like frontality and stylised features that would define his painted portraits. Modigliani came to Paris in 1906 as a painter and was briefly seduced by sculpture; these carved heads are among modernism's most beautiful objects. He died in 1920 at 35. Modern and Contemporary Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Boccioni was the theorist of Italian Futurism and the author of its Technical Manifesto of Futurist Sculpture (1912), in which he demanded that sculpture abandon static form and capture the dynamic forces acting on objects in space. This head — his mother, depicted with the energy of her environment interpenetrating her form — is the most complete realisation of that programme. The bronze surface seems to dissolve into the surrounding air; the profile is simultaneously multiple angles. Boccioni died in a cavalry accident in 1916 at 33; this is one of the 20th century's essential sculptures.

Cézanne's house at Jas de Bouffan, outside Aix-en-Provence, was the site of some of his most sustained pictorial experiments. This canvas from the Robert Lehman Collection shows him working through the problem that would define late modernism: how to render depth and volume through colour alone, without conventional perspective or tonal modelling. The trees are reduced to planes of green and ochre; the houses are structured geometrically. Matisse, Picasso, and every subsequent abstract painter learned to see through Cézanne's paintings like this one.

Corot is best known for his silvery landscapes of the Roman campagna and the French countryside — the paintings that made him the most collected artist in France in the 1860s. But he also made figure paintings, and this mythological scene from the Robert Lehman Collection shows his ability to unite the classical tradition's formal requirements with his characteristic atmospheric tenderness. Diana, caught at her bath by the hunter Actaeon, turns with a composure that is more architectural than alarmed. The light in the forest is Corot's: diffused, luminous, completely specific.

El Greco — the Cretan-born painter who spent his mature career in Toledo — is one of the most radical visual thinkers in Western art history: a painter who elongated figures beyond anatomy, intensified colours beyond observation, and treated spiritual states as physical facts. This painting from the Robert Lehman Collection shows Christ with a composed grief that has nothing of the theatrical suffering of contemporary Spanish devotional art. The face is inward, remote, certain. El Greco's Mannerist distortions were rediscovered by the Expressionists as precedents for their own programme of emotional intensity over representational accuracy.

Delacroix was the great standard-bearer of French Romanticism — and this painting from Walter Scott's Ivanhoe is one of his most viscerally dramatic works. The forced abduction of Rebecca by the templar Brian de Bois-Guilbert is rendered with a swirling energy that leaves you breathless: the horses, the armour, the billowing drapery, the smoke of the burning castle, all caught in a single moment of maximum tension. This is painting as sensory assault, as controlled chaos. It so influenced Cézanne that he asked to be buried near it; it influenced everyone.

This early Degas — made before the ballet paintings that would make him famous — shows a formally dressed woman seated almost incidentally beside an enormous vase of flowers that dominates the composition. The flowers are the subject, or rather the dynamic between the flowers and the woman is the subject: the studied asymmetry, the woman's gaze directed away from us, the sense of a mind elsewhere. It is one of the strangest and most modern portraits of the 19th century. Degas was 31 when he made it.

Renoir's late bathers — loosely painted, generously proportioned figures in outdoor light — represent a conscious retreat from the social world of his Impressionist period toward a more universal, classical subject. This small canvas from the Robert Lehman Collection shows the style at its most intimate: the light on the girl's back, the soft edges where skin meets air, the sense of a private moment. Renoir was moving toward the nude as pure painting problem; what he achieved was something warmer and more human than that description suggests.

Christopher Dresser was the first designer to apply the principles of industrial manufacture to the creation of beautiful everyday objects — and this electroplated silver spoon holder, made for Hukin & Heath in Birmingham, is one of the most startling designs of the 19th century. It looks like it was designed yesterday: the geometric forms, the visible structural logic, the absence of historicist ornament. Dresser had visited Japan in 1876–77; he had studied botany under the great Owen Jones; he understood that beauty came from the logic of function rather than the application of decoration. The Bauhaus caught up with him fifty years later.

Modigliani's stone sculpture — he made only a handful before abandoning it for painting — shows the influence of Brancusi, African masks, and ancient Cycladic sculpture converging into a form entirely his own. This elongated head in limestone has the characteristic mask-like frontality and stylised features that would define his painted portraits. Modigliani came to Paris in 1906 as a painter and was briefly seduced by sculpture; these carved heads are among modernism's most beautiful objects. He died in 1920 at 35. Modern and Contemporary Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Boccioni was the theorist of Italian Futurism and the author of its Technical Manifesto of Futurist Sculpture (1912), in which he demanded that sculpture abandon static form and capture the dynamic forces acting on objects in space. This head — his mother, depicted with the energy of her environment interpenetrating her form — is the most complete realisation of that programme. The bronze surface seems to dissolve into the surrounding air; the profile is simultaneously multiple angles. Boccioni died in a cavalry accident in 1916 at 33; this is one of the 20th century's essential sculptures.

Cézanne's house at Jas de Bouffan, outside Aix-en-Provence, was the site of some of his most sustained pictorial experiments. This canvas from the Robert Lehman Collection shows him working through the problem that would define late modernism: how to render depth and volume through colour alone, without conventional perspective or tonal modelling. The trees are reduced to planes of green and ochre; the houses are structured geometrically. Matisse, Picasso, and every subsequent abstract painter learned to see through Cézanne's paintings like this one.

Corot is best known for his silvery landscapes of the Roman campagna and the French countryside — the paintings that made him the most collected artist in France in the 1860s. But he also made figure paintings, and this mythological scene from the Robert Lehman Collection shows his ability to unite the classical tradition's formal requirements with his characteristic atmospheric tenderness. Diana, caught at her bath by the hunter Actaeon, turns with a composure that is more architectural than alarmed. The light in the forest is Corot's: diffused, luminous, completely specific.

El Greco — the Cretan-born painter who spent his mature career in Toledo — is one of the most radical visual thinkers in Western art history: a painter who elongated figures beyond anatomy, intensified colours beyond observation, and treated spiritual states as physical facts. This painting from the Robert Lehman Collection shows Christ with a composed grief that has nothing of the theatrical suffering of contemporary Spanish devotional art. The face is inward, remote, certain. El Greco's Mannerist distortions were rediscovered by the Expressionists as precedents for their own programme of emotional intensity over representational accuracy.

Delacroix was the great standard-bearer of French Romanticism — and this painting from Walter Scott's Ivanhoe is one of his most viscerally dramatic works. The forced abduction of Rebecca by the templar Brian de Bois-Guilbert is rendered with a swirling energy that leaves you breathless: the horses, the armour, the billowing drapery, the smoke of the burning castle, all caught in a single moment of maximum tension. This is painting as sensory assault, as controlled chaos. It so influenced Cézanne that he asked to be buried near it; it influenced everyone.

This early Degas — made before the ballet paintings that would make him famous — shows a formally dressed woman seated almost incidentally beside an enormous vase of flowers that dominates the composition. The flowers are the subject, or rather the dynamic between the flowers and the woman is the subject: the studied asymmetry, the woman's gaze directed away from us, the sense of a mind elsewhere. It is one of the strangest and most modern portraits of the 19th century. Degas was 31 when he made it.

Renoir's late bathers — loosely painted, generously proportioned figures in outdoor light — represent a conscious retreat from the social world of his Impressionist period toward a more universal, classical subject. This small canvas from the Robert Lehman Collection shows the style at its most intimate: the light on the girl's back, the soft edges where skin meets air, the sense of a private moment. Renoir was moving toward the nude as pure painting problem; what he achieved was something warmer and more human than that description suggests.

Christopher Dresser was the first designer to apply the principles of industrial manufacture to the creation of beautiful everyday objects — and this electroplated silver spoon holder, made for Hukin & Heath in Birmingham, is one of the most startling designs of the 19th century. It looks like it was designed yesterday: the geometric forms, the visible structural logic, the absence of historicist ornament. Dresser had visited Japan in 1876–77; he had studied botany under the great Owen Jones; he understood that beauty came from the logic of function rather than the application of decoration. The Bauhaus caught up with him fifty years later.