Критики

The hinge out of the 19th century and into modern art.

• Édouard Manet bridge Filed by Hughes under "Into Modernism" — the pivot from realism toward the modern picture.
• Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec Montmartre, the poster, and lithography as serious art.
• Vincent van Gogh A two-part essay, plus a companion piece, "Van Gogh and Cloisonnism."
• Paul Gauguin Symbolism, exile, and the myth of the "primitive."
• Henri Rousseau The customs-officer "naïf" taken seriously.
• Auguste Rodin Sculpture's passage into the modern era.

Abstraction, Surrealism, Expressionism and the School of Paris.

• Vasily Kandinsky Pioneer of pure abstraction.
• Giorgio de Chirico Metaphysical painting; forerunner of Surrealism.
• René Magritte Surrealism's deadpan logician of the image.
• Henri Matisse The essay focuses on the Nice period.
• Pablo Picasso "Late Picasso" — the work of the final decades.
• Max Beckmann German Expressionism and the Weimar reckoning.
• Oskar Kokoschka Expressionist portraiture and the nervous line.
• Giorgio Morandi Quiet, obsessive still-life metaphysics.
• Julio González The invention of welded-iron sculpture.
• Futurism movement Italy's machine-age avant-garde.

The shift of gravity to New York, and the painters around it.

• Jackson Pollock The drip and the myth of Abstract Expressionism.
• Mark Rothko "Rothko in Babylon" — the colour-field sublime.
• Arshile Gorky The émigré bridge into Abstract Expressionism.
• Lee Krasner An Abstract Expressionist in her own right.
• David Smith Welded steel — two essays (sculptures & drawings).
• Morris Louis Stained, poured Colour Field painting.
• Milton Avery A quiet colourist, precursor to the field painters.
• Edward Hopper American light, solitude and realism.
• Thomas Hart Benton Regionalism and the American scene.
• Diego Rivera Mexican muralism and political painting.
• Joseph Cornell The poetics of the box and the found object.
• Norman Rockwell Illustration, Americana and the limits of "art."

Mass imagery, the media surface, and new media.

• Andy Warhol Pop, celebrity and the factory of the image.
• Roy Lichtenstein The comic-strip dot as high style.
• James Rosenquist Billboard scale and fragmented Pop.
• Nam June Paik The pioneer of video art.
• James Turrell Light and space as the medium itself.

Late-20th-century figuration, Neo-Expressionism, and the art Hughes weighed in his own time.

• Francis Bacon The body, the scream, and post-war anguish.
• Willem de Kooning Abstract Expressionism's restless figure-painter.
• Robert Motherwell The cerebral elder of the New York School.
• David Hockney British wit, Los Angeles pools and light.
• R. B. Kitaj Literary, allusive figuration — School of London.
• Leon Kossoff Thick-impasto London figuration.
• Howard Hodgkin Abstracted memory in saturated colour.
• Richard Diebenkorn The Bay Area and the "Ocean Park" abstractions.
• Saul Steinberg The line that thinks — drawing as art.
• Komar & Melamid duo Sots Art émigrés; satire of ideology and taste.
• Philip Pearlstein Cool, clinical realist nudes.
• Alex Katz Flat, billboard-cool figuration.
• Susan Rothenberg "New Image" painting; the horse motif.
• Elizabeth Murray Shaped-canvas, cartoon-charged abstraction.
• Sean Scully Stripes and blocks — abstraction with weight.
• Christopher Wilmarth Glass and steel; light-filled sculpture.
• Louise Bourgeois Psychological, bodily sculpture.
• Julian Schnabel Neo-Expressionism and the 1980s hype Hughes scrutinised.
• Jean-Michel Basquiat "Requiem for a Featherweight" — the market myth weighed.
• Francesco Clemente Italian Transavanguardia.
• Sandro Chia Transavanguardia's exuberant figuration.
• Malcolm Morley From Superrealism toward expressive paint.
• Anselm Kiefer German history, myth and heavy materials.
• Eric Fischl Suburban psychodrama in paint.
• Donald Sultan Industrial materials and bold still-life.

The section's thematic / review essays — included for completeness, not single-artist profiles.

• Art and Money The 1980s art market and the price of pictures.
• The SoHoiad Satirical mock-epic verse on the art world.
• Jean Baudrillard: America Review of the theorist's travelogue.
• Tom Wolfe: From Bauhaus to Our House On modern architecture and its critics.
• Brideshead Redecorated On taste, nostalgia and design.
• Bernard Berenson The connoisseur — a critic, not an artist.
• English Art in the 20th Century survey A period overview rather than one figure.
• Deco and Fins survey Art Deco and machine-age design.