Time Out New York: The 100 Best Paintings in NYC

Ask just about anyone to name an artistic medium, and they'd probably answer "painting," and with good reason: Paintings make up the backbone of major museum collections around the world. That includes here in NYC, of course, where institutions such as the Frick, the Guggenheim, the Met, MoMA and the Whitney possess some of the finest paintings from all periods of art history.  In total, they probably run into a thousands, but we began to wonder what would happen if someone had to pick, say, the best 100 paintings in NYC? Well we decided to find out, and to help make the selections, Time Out New York gathered a jury of 34 art-world professionals—artists, critics, journalists, curators and gallery dealers—and got them to vote on their picks. After careful tabulation, the results came in. Were your favorites among the chosen? Find out in our ranked list of the 100 best paintings in NYC.Written by Jennifer Coates, Heather Corcoran, Anne Doran, Howard Halle, Merrily Kerr, Barbara Pollock, Drew Toal and Joseph Wolin.

Photograph: Courtesy the Museum of Modern Art

11

Comet (1974),
Ron Gorchov

Where can I see it?: Museum of Modern Art

For some half a century, Ron Gorchov’s art has flown in the face of his contemporaries, most of whom insist on working with conventional two-dimensional canvases. Instead, Comet, like many of Gorchov’s sculpture-paintings, takes a vaguely saddle-like shape. While the piece’s name might evoke space and the future (we recently landed a spacecraft on a comet), it also brings to mind something ancient, something coded in our DNA from humanity’s earliest days.—Drew Toal

---