Introducing World Hall of Fame for artists

Fools rush in where angels fear to tread, as poet Alexander Pope wrote. So this fool will rush in with effrontery, instituting a World Hall of Fame of Artistic Creation. And, for further presumptuousness, in rank order.

These lists are obviously one man’s view. The bent is leftist, the yawning generation gap will be obvious. Nevertheless, herewith:

MOVIES

1. “Citizen Kane” 2. “Casablanca” 3. “All Quiet on the Western Front” 4. “La Dolce Vita” 5. “Grand Hotel” 6. “Zorba the Greek” 7. “Jules and Jim” 8. “Wild Strawberries” 9. “The Seventh Seal” 10. “Viridiana” 11. “La Strada” 12. “The Third Man.” 13. “Rashômon” 14. “Birth of a Nation.” (Racist. But Pauline Kael, late great film critic, wrote: “One can trace almost every major tradition and most of the genres in movies…to their sources in [director] Griffith.”) 15. “Triumph of the Will” (Riefenstahl, perhaps the greatest documentary filmmaker even though she was a propagandist for Hitler).

NOVELISTS

1. Dostoyevsky 2. Tolstoy 3. Dickens 4. Zola 5. Balzac 6. Hugo 7. Melville 8. Cervantes 9. Joyce 10. Faulkner 11. Twain 12. Steinbeck 13. Dreiser 14. Austen 15. Flaubert 16. Mann 17. Fielding 18. Proust 19. Camus 20. Forster 21. Solzhenitsyn 22. Hardy 23. Defoe. 24. Maugham 25. Orwell 26. Thackeray 27. Vonnegut. 28. Hawthorne 29. Stevenson 30. Voltaire.

PLAYWRIGHTS

1. Shakespeare 2. Molière 3. Ibsen 4. O’Neill 5. Miller 6. Williams 7. Sophocles 8. Aristophanes 9. Aeschylus 10. Shaw 11. Wilde 12. Brecht 13. Beckett 14. Marlowe 15. Rostand 16. Albee 17. Ionesco 18. Odets 19. Blitzstein.

SHORT STORY WRITERS

1. Maupassant 2. Boccaccio 3. Conrad 4. Balzac 5. Doyle 6. Poe 7. Joyce 8. London 9. Gogol 10. Hemingway 11. Maugham 12. Colette 13. A. France.

POETS

1. Shakespeare 2. Dante 3. Goethe 4. Homer 5. Chaucer 6. Whitman 7. Shelley 8. Keats 9. Pope 10. Tennyson 11. Browning 12. Poe 13. FitzGerald 14. Pushkin 15. Wordsworth. 16. Coleridge 17. Eliot 18. Yeats 19. Frost 20. Milton 21. Petrarch 22. Villon 23. Donne 24. Baudelaire 25. Longfellow 26. L. Hughes 27. Markham (“The Man with the Hoe”).

COMPOSERS

1. Beethoven 2. Mozart 3. Bach 4. Haydn 5. Handel 6. Stravinsky 7. Schubert 8. Tchaikovsky 9. Brahms 10. Grieg 11. Franck 12. Liszt 13. Dvorák 14. Mendelssohn 15. Saint-Saëns 16. Schumann 17. Berlioz 18. Respighi 19. Debussy 20. Mahler 21. Chopin 22. Shostakovich 23. Moussorgsky 24. Rimsky-Korsakov 25. Prokofiev. 26. de Falla 27. Orff 27.

OPERA COMPOSERS

1. Verdi 2. Puccini 3. Mozart 4. Rossini 5. Wagner 6. Donizetti 7. Gounod 8. R. Strauss 9. Massenet 10. Mascagni 11. Bizet 12. J. Strauss 13. Poinchielli 14. Leoncavallo 15. Offenbach 16. Handel 17 . Gluck.

ARTISTS

1. van Gogh (“The Potato Eaters”) 2. Manet 3. Monet 4. Goya. 5. Vélasquez 6. Rembrandt 7. Picasso 8. Titian 9. Michelangelo 10. El Greco 11. Toulouse-Lautrec 12. Vermeer 13. Renoir 14. Modigliani 15. Seurat 16. Munch 17. Botticelli 18. Leonardo 19. Cezanne 20. Delacroix 21. Matisse 22. Rubens 23. Sargent 24. Brueghel (the elder) 25. Durer 26. Caravaggio 27. Degas 28. Tintoretto 29. Hogarth 30. Caillebotte 31. de la Tour 32. Chagall 33. Hals 34. Pissarro 35. Daumier 36. Grosz 37. Bonnard 38. Hopper 39. Dali 40. Homer 41. Bosch 42. David 43. Ruisdael 44. Millet 45. Bruch 46. Sibelius 47. Vivaldi.

PHOTOGRAPHERS

1. Brady 2. Adams 3. Lange 4. Riis 5. Stieglitz 6. Steichen 7. Weston 8. Capa 9. Muybridge 10. O’Sullivan 11. Gardner 12. Cartier-Bresson 13. Cunningham 14. Avedon 15. Bourke-White 16. Eisenstaedt 17. G. Parks.

SCULPTORS

1. Michelangelo 2. Rodin 3. Praxiteles 4. Giacometti 5. Moore 6. Myron (“Discobolus”) 7. Calder 8. Saint-Gaudens 9. Brancusi 10. Houdon 11. Daumier 12. Bayre 13. Degas 14. Maillol 15. Cellini 16. Borglum 17. Ghiberti.

ARCHITECTS

1. Wright 2. van der Rohe (“less is more”) 3. Le Corbusier 4. Gropius 5. Fuller 6. Sullivan (“form follows function”) 7. Utzon (Sydney Opera House) 8. Gehry (Guggenheim Museum, Bilboa) 9. Sarriren (Dulles airport) 10. Holl (addition to Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City) 11. Gaudi (La Sagrada Familia church in Barcelona) 12. Eiffel.

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Readers are invited to email any disagreements and indicate why. (jake@unr.edu)