Most of the paintings everyone can picture became famous long after the paint was dry, and rarely thanks to a critic. A theft, a newspaper caption under the wrong title, a film poster or a coin did the work instead. One of the twelve painters even dismissed his own canvas as a setback.
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How These Were Chosen
A famous painting, in the sense used here, is one people recognize without ever having stood in front of it. Paint alone rarely takes a picture that far. The push comes from outside the frame, often from people the painter never met, and the painter has almost no say in it.
So each picture here is followed through the one event that did the most to carry it to the public: a show, a theft, a newspaper, a museum hall built around it, a novel, a film poster, a print, a coin.
Masterpieces known mainly to specialists stayed out, however fine they are. In most cases the event that made a picture famous came long after the painter had finished it, sometimes within months, sometimes four centuries later.
12. Salvador Dalí, The Persistence of Memory (1931)
Three pocket watches have gone soft in The Persistence of Memory. They hang like wet cloth from a dead branch, from the edge of a box and across a pale creature asleep on a beach, and only a fourth, a closed orange case at bottom left, stays hard, crawling with ants.
Salvador Dalí painted the scene in 1931 against the cliffs of Cap de Creus, on the Catalan coast where he spent his summers. The whole canvas is about the size of a sheet of printer paper.
That small picture became the best known image of Surrealism largely through a handful of people in New York, and the first of them was a young dealer named Julien Levy. In 1931 the canvas hung in Dalí's solo exhibition at the Paris gallery of Pierre Colle, and Levy bought it there for 250 dollars. He was gathering Surrealist works for a gallery he meant to open on Madison Avenue.
Before that gallery could open, Levy lent the whole group to the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut. Its director, A. Everett Austin, opened the show in November 1931 as Newer Super-Realism, the first large exhibition of Surrealism in an American museum.
Two months later Levy brought the painting to New York. In January 1932 it hung in his own gallery in Surrealism: Paintings, Drawings and Photographs, the first time the city saw members of the official Surrealist group together, and afterward it toured the East Coast.
In 1934 the canvas entered the Museum of Modern Art. Within three years of leaving Dalí's easel, a picture the size of a sheet of printer paper had crossed the Atlantic and hung in two pioneering shows.
At a Glance
Artist: Salvador Dalí (1904 to 1989)
Painted: 1931
Medium: Oil on canvas
Size: 24.1 × 33 cm (9.5 × 13 in)
Where to see it: The Museum of Modern Art, New York
11. Gustav Klimt, The Kiss (1907 to 1909)
Nobody kisses on the mouth in The Kiss. A man in a gold robe bends over a kneeling woman and presses his face against her cheek, and a single halo of gold wraps the two of them at the edge of a meadow full of flowers. Gustav Klimt began the canvas in Vienna, probably in 1907, with no patron waiting for it, and he called it Lovers. The whole world knows it by another name, and Klimt is not the one who gave it.