Axis 8 of twelve · AGO
Did the work move the field it entered? Two components scored together: intrinsic force, whether the work constitutes a real reorganisation of possibility, and achieved reach, whether it in fact redirected what came after. Delayed influence is credited and discounted.
Gated at 8.5. The hardest axis for contemporary work, and the principal reason the summit is not available to it.
1754 works · summit gate · the rubric
Homer · Literature
9.6 · Tier V
A published work, so force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force: the poem built a war epic around one action and one passion and made it a tragedy of victor and vanquished alike. Greek tragedy, Plato’s case against poetry and Aristotle’s theory of plot all begin from it. That it reorganised the field it entered cannot be checked, because that field is lost; that it constituted the field after it can. Delayed influence is credited and discounted: in the Latin West the Greek text went largely unread for about a thousand years. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the redirection runs continuously through Greek education, Virgil, Chapman, Pope and Keats, and in the last century through Weil, Logue and Oswald.
Virgil · Literature
9.5 · Tier V
A published work, so force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force: epic reorganised as the poem of a people’s history and of the losers’ inner life, the Homeric halves recombined, a Latin poem set beside Homer. It is held below the top because it reorganised a form it did not found. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it ended the Ennian line and was Rome’s school text within a generation, quoted on Pompeian walls; Ovid rewrote it, Lucan wrote against it, Statius bowed to it; Augustine wept for Dido and Dante took its author for his guide; Petrarch’s Africa, Tasso, Camões, Spenser and Milton’s twelve books follow it; Purcell, Berlioz and Broch carried it on; and for about a thousand years the Latin West knew Homer chiefly through it.
Sophocles · Literature
9.5 · Tier V
A published work, so both components are scored together. The intrinsic force is a reorganisation of what drama can do. The play makes the uncovering of the past the whole action; reversal and recognition coincide in one moment (1182–1185); and the audience’s knowledge becomes a second plot, running beside the hero’s. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Aristotle took the play as the model for the Poetics, and through the Poetics it governed European dramatic theory from the sixteenth century to the eighteenth; Seneca, Corneille, Dryden and Lee, and Voltaire rewrote it; Freud named a complex from it; Stravinsky’s Oedipus Rex (1927) and Pasolini’s Edipo re (1967) remade it; and the detective story inherits its form.
James Joyce · Literature
9.5 · Tier V
The book reorganised what a novel could be. Interior monologue became a main narrative instrument rather than an episode. The single day became a total form. Style itself became the variable, and Eliot named a mythical method from it. Intrinsic force alone stands at the same figure. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the redirection is documented and immediate, not delayed, through Eliot’s essay of 1923, Mrs Dalloway (1925), Faulkner, Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz, Dos Passos, Beckett, Flann O’Brien, Nabokov, Burgess, Pynchon and Gaddis. It reaches outside literature as well. The Woolsey decision of 1933 changed American obscenity law in its name, and Bloomsday is kept every year.
Michelangelo · Visual art
9.5 · Tier V
On view since 1512, so force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force is a reorganisation of possibility: the ceiling made the heroic nude the sole vehicle of a theological programme, and a vault one structure of painted architecture and figure. Signorelli, Mantegna and Melozzo were already moving that way. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the redirection was immediate and continuous, from Raphael’s Isaiah in Sant’Agostino and his sibyls at Santa Maria della Pace within a few years, through the maniera of Pontormo, Rosso and Bronzino, to the Carracci’s Farnese Gallery and the ceilings of Cortona, Gaulli and Pozzo, with Reynolds closing his last Discourse on Michelangelo’s name, and Blake and Rodin among the heirs.
Miguel de Cervantes · Literature
9.4 · Tier V
The book reorganised what prose fiction could do: character made in dialogue, a narrator who doubts his sources, perception as negotiation, and a fiction that reviews and repairs itself in print. It states its own theory: “fictions have the more merit and charm about them the more nearly they approach the truth or what looks like it” (II.LXII). Intrinsic force alone stands at the same figure. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the redirection was immediate, with more than twelve thousand copies reported inside Part II (II.III), Shelton’s English of 1612 and Oudin’s French of 1614, and continuous through Fielding, Sterne, Smollett, Lennox, Flaubert, Dostoevsky, Twain, Galdós, Kafka, Borges and Nabokov; outside literature, through Daumier, Doré, Picasso, Strauss and Falla, and the word “quixotic”.
Dante Alighieri · Literature
9.7 · Tier V
The poem reorganised what was possible. It made a vernacular carry the highest subject its culture had, and its Tuscan became the ground of literary Italian; it joined epic, vision, confession, satire and summa in a single form; and it made the poet’s own salvation the matter of an epic. Delayed influence is credited and discounted, and outside Italy, from the late sixteenth century to the Romantics, Dante was more cited than read. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the redirection is documented and continuous, through Petrarch and Boccaccio, Chaucer, Milton, Blake, Shelley, the nineteenth-century translators, Eliot, Pound, Beckett and Borges, to Primo Levi reciting the Ulysses canto in Auschwitz.
Anonymous · Literature
9.5 · Tier V
The intrinsic force: the book gives canonical standing to a sufferer’s protest against God, condemns pious explanation, and answers with a cosmos instead of a reason; it is the founding text of theodicy in the West. The discounts: part of the reach rides on the Bible’s own, and for centuries the patient Job of the frame overshadowed the Job of the poem. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the patience of Job, proverbial since James 5:11; Gregory’s Moralia; Milton’s pattern of the brief epic, and Paradise Regained; Goethe’s Prologue in Heaven; Blake; Dostoevsky’s Zosima; Frost’s A Masque of Reason; MacLeish’s J.B. (1958); and Malick’s The Tree of Life, whose epigraph is taken from 38:4 and 38:7.
Homer · Literature
9.5 · Tier V
Intrinsic force: the poem reorganised what long narrative could do. It is the earliest surviving epic told largely in flashback by its own hero, with parallel plots joined midway and recognition as structure, and it made the household and the low-born the matter of epic. Delayed influence is credited and discounted: in the Latin West, from late antiquity to the fourteenth century, Homer was largely unread, known through Virgil and Latin epitomes. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Virgil built the first six books of the Aeneid on it, the Greek romance of travel, disguise and recognition descends from it, and the line runs through Lucian, Dante, Fénelon, Tennyson, Kazantzakis and Joyce, until the title became a common noun.
Richard Wagner · Music
9.5 · Tier V
Intrinsic force and achieved reach are scored together. The force is real: the work reorganised what a music drama, an orchestra and a theatre could be, with a cycle of evenings, a motivic orchestra that narrates, and a festival house with a hidden pit and a darkened hall. Its reach ran into politics too, through Bayreuth under the Nazis, which is reach and not credit. Tolkien’s denial, “Both rings were round, and there the resemblance ceases”, is itself evidence of the pressure. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Bruckner took the tubas; Strauss, Mahler, early Schoenberg, Humperdinck and Elgar wrote in its orchestra; Debussy defined himself against it; the leitmotif became the working method of film scoring; Eliot set the Rhinemaidens’ refrain in The Waste Land.
William Shakespeare · Literature
9.5 · Tier V
A published work, so intrinsic force and achieved reach are scored together. The force is great: revenge tragedy turned against itself; the soliloquy made the stage form of thinking; a play that examines playing, whose end is “to hold, as ’twere, the mirror up to nature” (3.2); a hero whose action is consciousness. Unlike King Lear’s, the reach was not delayed by a rewriting that held the stage. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the redirection is immediate and continuous, through the Romantic hero of Goethe and Coleridge, Turgenev, Freud’s Oedipus complex, worked out partly on this play, Chekhov’s The Seagull, Joyce’s Ulysses, Stoppard (1966) and Müller’s Hamletmachine (1977).
Anthemius of Tralles and Isidore of Miletus · Architecture
9.4 · Tier V
Force and reach are scored together, in the building’s own tradition and region: Byzantium, Anatolia, the Balkans and the eastern Mediterranean. The intrinsic force is a reorganisation of possibility: it made the dome the governing element of a longitudinal church, and showed that pendentives could carry a monumental dome over a square. Its own tradition found no successor at its scale and turned to the small cross-in-square, and that holds it from the top. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it stayed the reference of the Orthodox world, its name carried to Kiev, Novgorod and Thessaloniki; and after 1453 the Ottoman imperial mosque answered it for two centuries, from Bayezid II’s through Sinan’s Süleymaniye and Selimiye to the Sultan Ahmed.
Richard Wagner · Music
9.4 · Tier V
Intrinsic force and achieved reach are scored together. The force is real: the work reorganised what harmony could be, by making unresolved dissonance a four-hour norm, and what opera could be, by making the orchestra the stage. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the record is immediate and continuous. Wolf, Mahler, Strauss, Chausson, Franck, Scriabin and Elgar wrote inside its harmony; Debussy fled it in Pelléas and parodied it in 1908; Schoenberg’s Verklärte Nacht and the emancipation of the dissonance descend from it; Berg quoted it in the Lyrische Suite. Beyond music: Nietzsche, Mann, D’Annunzio, Eliot, de Rougemont, von Trier. Discounted because part of the reach is shared with the Ring and Parsifal, and because it ran through art and letters rather than civic life.
Marcel Proust · Literature
9.4 · Tier V
The work reorganised what a novel could attend to: memory, habit, the time of a life. It made the first-person narrator both the subject and the instrument of an inquiry, and with Ulysses it is one of the two founding turns of the modernist novel. Intrinsic force alone stands a tenth above the figure, reach a tenth below. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the Prix Goncourt of 1919; Woolf, Benjamin and Beckett among its early readers; the long novel of memory after it, from Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time to Claude Simon, Sebald and Knausgaard; and in criticism, Genette’s narratology, Deleuze and queer theory. “La madeleine de Proust” is common French speech.
Anonymous (the Yahwist and the other sources) · Literature
9.3 · Tier V
The field it entered was the literature of the ancient Near East: Sumerian and Akkadian epic and myth, and the West Semitic tradition behind them. The intrinsic force: it made the account of origins into the history of a family, the gods into one God who speaks with men, and the founder’s epic into a reticent, layered prose. The discount: the scriptures carried much of its reach, and faith is not credited; the works named are art. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the Hebrew Bible, of which it is the foundation; the Quran’s retellings of Adam, Noah, Abraham and Joseph, to whom a whole sura is given (Yusuf, 12); Paradise Lost; Byron’s Cain; Kierkegaard; Thomas Mann’s Joseph and His Brothers (1933 to 1943); Steinbeck’s East of Eden; and on other desks Michelangelo’s ceiling and Haydn’s The Creation.
Roman, under Hadrian · Architecture
9.3 · Tier V
Standing since about 125, so force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force is a reorganisation of possibility: the building made interior space the medium of architecture and the dome a building in itself, a turn the Domus Aurea and the baths had begun. The field is Roman imperial building and the tradition that inherited Rome. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the redirection is continuous. Brunelleschi studied it; Palladio answered it in the Villa Rotonda and the Tempietto at Maser, Bernini at Ariccia; then Schinkel’s Altes Museum, Canova’s temple at Possagno, the British Museum Reading Room, Jefferson’s Rotunda; the portico and dome became the type of the capitol, the library and the memorial, and “pantheon” a common noun.
Ludwig van Beethoven · Music
9.3 · Tier V
The work reorganised what a symphony could be: a public argument about community, carried from instrumental struggle into the word, with the finale bearing the weight of the whole. Delayed influence is credited and discounted, and about a decade passed between the puzzled 1820s and Habeneck’s Paris performances of 1831. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the redirection is documented and continuous. Wagner made it the founding text of The Artwork of the Future (1849), where instrumental music must pass into drama. The choral symphony followed, in Mendelssohn’s Lobgesang, Berlioz’s Roméo et Juliette and Mahler’s Second, Third and Eighth; so did Bruckner’s tremolo openings, the finale of Brahms’s First, and, beyond concert music, Europe’s anthem.
Plato · Literature
9.2 · Tier V
The field was Greek prose and thought of the early fourth century BC, oratory, history, the sophists and the Socratic dialogues of Xenophon and others, with Homer and tragedy as the authority it contests; it is weighed on literature and thought both, and it moved both. The force: it founds political philosophy as inquiry into the best order, joins it to a psychology and a metaphysics, invents the literary utopia, and sets the terms of literary theory, mimesis, the moral effects of fiction, the quarrel with poetry. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Aristotle’s Poetics and the defences of poetry by Sidney and Shelley reply to it; through Neoplatonism it entered Christian and Islamic theology; it redirected political thought and the theory of education for two millennia, and its images entered common speech.
Igor Stravinsky · Music
9.2 · Tier V
Intrinsic force and achieved reach are scored together. The work reorganised the possibilities of Western concert music around rhythm, showing that pulse, accent and metre could carry a large form, and that dissonance could be a material rather than a tension to resolve. The reach is discounted a little: it is shared with Stravinsky’s other Russian scores and Schoenberg’s break of the same years, and Stravinsky himself turned to neoclassicism. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it was fast and wide. The concert triumph came within a year; its means passed through Varèse, Bartók, Orff, Copland, Messiaen and Boulez into the century’s teaching; and Fantasia (1940) put it before a mass audience.
Leonardo da Vinci · Visual art
9.2 · Tier V
Seen since 1498, so force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force is a reorganisation of the narrative picture: a group of figures became a single dramatic event, read through gesture as states of mind, inside a space built around its centre. The tradition from Vasari on treats it as the first work of the High Renaissance manner. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: copies across Europe within decades, by the Lombard followers and others; Raphael’s grouped and gesturing figures, Andrea del Sarto’s Last Supper at San Salvi and the Leonardeschi; Rubens’s drawings after it; the reaction against it in Tintoretto’s diagonal tables; Morghen’s engraving; and the modern image, Dalí, Warhol’s series and Buñuel’s Viridiana. It fixed how the scene is pictured.
Fyodor Dostoevsky · Literature
9.5 · Tier V
The novel gives the case against its own faith at full strength, through characters who are its evidence; it turns a detective plot from who did it to who willed it; it stages a mind’s quarrel with itself as a visit from the devil. Its reach runs widest through philosophy, theology and psychoanalysis, and in the form of the novel it shares its credit with Dostoevsky’s earlier books. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the Legend circulates as a text of its own; Ivan’s formula, which Garnett first gives as “everything would be lawful” (Pt. I, Bk. II, ch. 6), became a philosophical commonplace through Sartre and Camus; the successors include Freud’s essay, the devil of Mann’s Doctor Faustus, Bulgakov’s Woland, Hesse’s essay of 1919 and Bakhtin’s theory of the polyphonic novel, built on this book and its predecessors.
John Milton · Literature
9.5 · Tier V
Intrinsic force: the poem reorganised English poetry. It made blank verse the medium of the highest matter, built a native sublime, invented the glamorous adversary, and set patience against martial heroism inside the epic itself. It pressed as weight too: Keats abandoned Hyperion under it. Across languages its reach is narrower than the Comedy’s. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: quick and lasting, through Dryden’s State of Innocence (1677), the blank verse of Thomson, Young and Cowper, Klopstock’s Messias, Haydn’s Creation, Blake’s Milton, Wordsworth’s Prelude, the Romantic Satan, Frankenstein, whose epigraph is X.743–744, and Pullman’s “dark materials” (II.916); very wide and continuous in English, substantial in German and French.
Ovid · Literature
9.3 · Tier V
The field is the Latin and European tradition. The intrinsic force is a real reorganisation of narrative poetry: a continuous, many-voiced, episodic epic whose unity is a process and not a hero. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the reach is the widest of any classical poem in Western art after Homer, and in the visual arts the widest of all, and it carries the score above the force. Dante places Ovid third in Limbo, “Ovidio è ’l terzo” (Inferno 4.90), and contends with him by name, “Taccia di Cadmo e d’Aretusa Ovidio” (Inferno 25.97); Golding’s Medea, “Ye Ayres and windes: ye Elves of Hilles, of Brookes, of Woods alone” (Golding VII.265), is the source of Prospero’s renunciation in The Tempest; A Midsummer Night’s Dream stages Pyramus and Thisbe; Milton builds Eve’s first waking on Narcissus’ pool.
Fyodor Dostoevsky · Literature
9.3 · Tier V
The field is the book’s own tradition, Russian literature, and the novel moved it. Its force is a reorganisation of what a novel could do: follow an idea through a body into crime and out again, and make interior argument dramatic at the scale of a whole book. Outside the field its effect on the European novel and on the detective story, where Porfiry became the model of the investigator who knows and waits, is real; it is reception, and it is not added. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the book made Dostoevsky’s standing in Russia, and it set the line of the Russian novel of ideas and conscience that runs through his own later novels, the Symbolists and Andreyev, and through the Russian argument with it that went on into the twentieth century.
Cao Xueqin · Literature
9.3 · Tier V
The field is the work’s own tradition, Chinese literature, and East Asia. The force: it reorganised what Chinese fiction could be, a novel of consciousness and of a household’s whole life, with the lyric inside it and its own fictionality as its subject. Lu Xun said so in his lectures of 1924: “自有《红楼梦》出来以后，传统的思想和写法都打破了”
“since the Red Chamber appeared, the traditional ways of thought and of writing have all been broken.” Reach stands below force: three decades in manuscript among a small readership, and a popular image of the novel that rests partly on its completion. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: dozens of sequels within decades of the print; the late Qing novels of the courtesan world; Ba Jin’s Family (1933); Eileen Chang, who wrote a book on its text; Bai Xianyong; the Yue opera (1958) and the television series of 1987.
Anonymous · Architecture
9.3 · Tier V
Standing since the thirteenth century, so force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force is a reorganisation of possibility: the building of 1194 fixed the type of the High Gothic cathedral, three storeys, oblong bay, pilier cantonné, clerestory as a wall of glass, and the Royal Portal made the column-figure portal the norm of Gothic sculpture. Soissons ran parallel and Saint-Denis came first, but that bears on the departure; the system those after took up was this one. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Reims, from 1211, and Amiens, from 1220, take the Chartres system and refine it, and through them it runs to Beauvais, Cologne and the cathedrals of Europe; the portals shape Gothic sculpture from Reims to Strasbourg; the glass sets the measure of its medium.
Giotto di Bondone · Visual art
9.3 · Tier V
On view since 1305, so force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force is a reorganisation of what painting could do: the weighted body on a ground, the legible emotion, the shallow stage and the blue sky are the premises of European narrative painting, carried through here in one intact programme. The discount is that the Trecento learned Giotto as much from Assisi and Santa Croce as from this private chapel. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Dante’s verdict in the Purgatorio; Padua’s next century in Guariento, Altichiero and Giusto de’ Menabuoi; Taddeo Gaddi and Maso di Banco, and through Masaccio the fifteenth century; Vasari, who counted him the beginning; Ruskin’s book on the chapel; and Proust’s schoolroom copies of the Virtues.
Michelangelo · Visual art
9.2 · Tier V
On view since 1504, so force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force is a reorganisation of what a public sculpture could be: the colossal heroic nude became the image of a state, and the standing figure became charged tension held in repose. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the Piazza became a field of answers, from Bandinelli’s Hercules and Cacus (1534), set beside it, to Cellini’s Perseus, Ammannati’s Neptune and Giambologna’s groups; Bernini’s David (1623–1624) answered it by choosing the moment of action; the academies of the following centuries taught from its casts; Rodin is among its modern heirs. Beyond sculpture it became the image of the male nude, and of Florence.
Ferdowsi · Literature
9.1 · Tier V
A published work, so force and reach are scored together, in its own tradition and region. The intrinsic force: the poem made New Persian a language of epic and fixed the Iranian past as one story in one metre; it stands a tenth below the figure, because the matter and the chronicle form were inherited. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Asadi Tusi’s Garshāspnāme (1066) in its metre and world; Nezami’s romances of its kings; Saadi’s Bustan (1257) in the same metre; al-Bundari’s Arabic in the 1220s; Ottoman and Georgian versions, and an Ottoman court şehnāmeci; the proverb nushdāru pas az marg-e Sohrāb, “the antidote after Sohrab’s death”; its heroes’ names given across Iran, Afghanistan and Tajikistan; and Mohl, Rückert and Matthew Arnold’s “Sohrab and Rustum” (1853).
Stanley Kubrick · Film
9.1 · Tier V
Released in 1968, so force and reach are scored together. The force reorganised what a science fiction film, and a studio spectacle, could be: a nonverbal epic whose effects carry meaning rather than thrill, made to a new standard of craft. The reach was fast and is documented, so nothing is discounted for delay. It is held below the top by the field it moved, one genre and its craft rather than the grammar of cinema, which Godard and Antonioni moved more in that decade, and by Star Wars, which drove the effects industry at least as much. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Trumbull went on to direct Silent Running and to do the effects for Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Blade Runner; Star Wars and Alien work in its image of used, engineered space; HAL became the template for the machine mind on screen, answered as late as Moon (2009); Interstellar and Arrival are open heirs.
Vyasa (attributed) · Literature
9.1 · Tier IV
The field was Sanskrit composition of the late first millennium BC and the early first millennium AD, then little but Vedic text and bardic narrative. The intrinsic force: the epic made the itihāsa, the long narrative poem of history and dharma in ślokas, the store from which classical Indian literature drew, and made the moral dilemma the matter of epic. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Kālidāsa’s Śakuntalā from the first book, Bhāravi’s Kirātārjunīya and Māgha’s Śiśupālavadha; vernacular epics by Pampa in Kannada, Villiputtūrār in Tamil, Sarala Das in Odia and Kashiram Das in Bengali; Old Javanese poets and the wayang theatre in Southeast Asia; and, beyond Asia, the Gītā through Charles Wilkins’s English of 1785 to the Schlegels, Emerson, Thoreau and Eliot. Held a step from the top because some of the reach is religious use rather than literary redirection, and much of it runs through one embedded text.
Michelangelo · Architecture
9.0 · Tier V
Standing since 1626, its dome since 1590, so force and reach are scored together, in its own tradition and region: the church and domed monument of Latin Europe and the lands that took its building. The intrinsic force is a reorganisation of possibility: the drum, ribbed double dome and lantern on a centralised mass fixed a form, and a giant order binding a whole exterior did the same. The boldest plan, Bramante’s, was largely unbuilt, which holds force below reach. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Wren’s St Paul’s, Mansart’s Invalides and Soufflot’s Panthéon answer the dome; St Isaac’s, the United States Capitol and a long line of capitols and cathedrals descend from it.
Leo Tolstoy · Literature
9.4 · Tier V
The book changes what a novel may hold. History becomes the subject of argument inside the fiction. The battle-piece is rebuilt from below, from soldiers under fire who “built little houses of the tufts in the plowed ground” (X.XXXVI). The great man is reduced: “In historic events the so-called great men are labels giving names to events” (IX.I). The private life is held level with the public. Its essay-novel had fewer successors than its war. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it became the measure of the large novel; Woolf called its author the greatest of novelists (1925); Grossman took it for the model of Life and Fate, and Solzhenitsyn of The Red Wheel; Hemingway praised its battles and complained of its philosophy (1942); Prokofiev made an opera of it, Vidor (1956) and Bondarchuk (1966–67) films.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe · Literature
9.4 · Tier V
A published work, so intrinsic force and achieved reach are scored together. The force is great: it remade the legend into the modern myth of the striving self and its cost, showed that a drama could hold a civilisation’s history and its forms, and made German verse do what none had done. The reach is held a step lower: much of it abroad runs through music and the legend rather than Goethe’s text, and Part Two had few dramatic successors. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Schubert’s Gretchen am Spinnrade (1814), Berlioz (1846), Liszt’s Faust Symphony, Gounod (1859), Boito (1868) and Mahler’s Eighth (1910), whose second part sets the last scene; Byron’s Manfred, Nerval’s translation (1828), Madách, Bulgakov and Thomas Mann’s Doktor Faustus (1947); Delacroix’s lithographs (1828) and Murnau’s film (1926).
Murasaki Shikibu · Literature
9.3 · Tier V
The field is the work’s own tradition, Japanese literature, and the tale reorganised it: long prose fiction made the instrument of inner life, at a scale and continuity no tale before it had approached. Outside that field, through Arthur Waley’s English, it changed what Western readers took the history of the novel to be; that is reception, and it is not credited. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the late Heian tales, Sagoromo and Yoru no Nezame, wrote in its shadow; Fujiwara no Shunzei wrote in 1193, “源氏見ざる歌詠みは遺恨の事なり”
Genji mizaru utayomi wa ikon no koto nari
“A poet who has not read Genji is a matter for regret”; the masters of linked verse required it, the Noh made whole plays of it (Aoi no Ue, Nonomiya, Yūgao, Ukifune), Saikaku parodied its fifty-four chapters, Norinaga built an aesthetic on it, and Tanizaki and Kawabata wrote in its line.
Iktinos and Kallikrates · Architecture
9.3 · Tier V
The intrinsic force: the building fixed the Doric temple at its definitive state and, with its sculpture, made the high classical style — the body in stone between the archaic and the Hellenistic, drapery as the vehicle of movement, the continuous narrative frieze at a temple’s scale. Delayed influence is credited and discounted: the Renaissance built from Roman models and barely knew the building. In its own region, Doric temple-building itself waned in the century after. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the reach was immediate in the Attic temples of the later fifth century and the school of Pheidias, from which Hellenistic and Roman classicism descend; and when the direct reach came it was wide: the Greek Revival in Britain, Germany and America, the marbles in London reshaping sculpture and taste in the generation of Canova, Haydon and Keats, and a modernist manifesto.
Augustine of Hippo · Literature
9.2 · Tier V
The field is Latin literature of late antiquity and the Christian literature of both languages, with the classical forms of self-account behind them. The intrinsic force is a reorganisation of what writing about a self could do: inwardness, memory and the divided will made the matter of a book, and time made a problem of the mind. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the founding book of autobiography in the West and the pattern of the conversion narrative; Petrarch carried it up Mont Ventoux and opened it at X.8.15; Teresa of Ávila read herself in it; Rousseau took its title to answer it; Husserl began his lectures on internal time-consciousness with the eleventh book; Heidegger lectured on the tenth in 1921; Wittgenstein opened the Philosophical Investigations with it; Derrida answered it in “Circumfession” (1991). Held off the top because some reach comes through Augustine’s authority as a Father of the Church.
Gustave Flaubert · Literature
9.2 · Tier V
The field is the French novel of the nineteenth century, and through it the European novel. The force: the book reorganised what a novel could be. It made the prose of a novel answerable to the standard of poetry, made the narrator’s withdrawal a principle, and made free indirect discourse the novel’s common instrument; after it the novel is a made object before it is a told story, and the modern novel is commonly dated from it. Held a tenth below the top by the part of that reorganisation which L’Éducation sentimentale (1869) completed. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Zola and the naturalists took it as their founding book; Maupassant was Flaubert’s pupil; James, Conrad and Ford carried impersonality and the mot juste into English; Joyce learned from it; Kafka read Flaubert as a master; the nouveau roman claimed him; and the novels of adultery that followed, Anna Karenina, La Regenta, O Primo Basílio and Effi Briest, answer it.
Du Fu · Literature
9.2 · Tier V
The field is Chinese poetry, and the eighth century is its high Tang, with Wang Wei and Li Bai as Du Fu’s elders and peers. The intrinsic force: he reorganised what the shi could do, making regulated verse a vehicle for history and for the self in history, bringing the heptasyllabic regulated poem to its height, and making the sequence a form of thought. The influence was delayed some decades, which is credited and discounted. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the New Yuefu of Bai Juyi and Yuan Zhen took its programme from him; Han Yu set him beside Li Bai; the Song made him the model, from Wang Anshi and Su Shi to the Jiangxi school, which learned its method from him; Korean and Japanese poetry took him as master, and Bashō sets “國破山河在”
“the state is broken; mountains and rivers remain” at Hiraizumi in Oku no hosomichi.
Ludwig van Beethoven · Music
9.2 · Tier V
The work reorganised what a symphony could be, from entertainment of the highest order into an ethical and historical drama of one shape across four movements, and it fixed the symphony as the culminating public genre of instrumental music. The concept of Beethoven’s middle period is in large part dated from it. Part of the reach is shared with the Fifth and the Ninth, which carried the same redirection within one maker’s work. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: decisive and immediate. The heroic style is named after it; the nineteenth-century symphony, from Schubert’s Ninth through Berlioz, Brahms, Bruckner and Mahler, measures itself against Beethoven’s, and this is the first to make that demand. Its march became a model for funeral music in concert and in public life, and Strauss quotes it in Metamorphosen (1945).
Jan van Eyck · Visual art
9.2 · Tier V
On view since 1432, so force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force is a reorganisation of what painting could be: the visible world rendered in oil glazes, at monumental scale and in a sacred programme, set the terms of Netherlandish painting and changed European painting’s idea of description. Much of the reach belongs to Jan’s other panels and to the Master of Flémalle, and is discounted. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: a site of pilgrimage for painters, copied and described within its first century, praised by Dürer in his diary in 1521, and followed by Rogier, Bouts, Hugo van der Goes and Memling, and by the Italian reception of Flemish oil in Antonello and the Portinari altarpiece.
Diego Velázquez · Visual art
9.2 · Tier V
The work is published, so force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force is a reorganisation of what a picture could be about: it made the conditions of seeing, the painter, the viewer and the absent sitter, into the subject, in the most official genre the court had. Held below the top by delay: 163 years in the king’s private rooms, credited and discounted. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Goya’s Family of Charles IV, with the painter at his canvas on the left; Manet, Whistler and Sargent, whose Daughters of Edward Darley Boit answers it; Picasso’s series; Dalí and Richard Hamilton; and Foucault’s chapter, a founding text for the theory of representation. Painters and philosophers of representation have returned to it more than to any other picture.
Charles Baudelaire · Literature
9.1 · Tier V
The field is the French lyric of the nineteenth century and, by its reach, the poetry of Europe after it. The force is a reorganisation of what lyric poetry could take as its matter and its stance: the city, the crowd, boredom and the complicit reader enter the lyric as its centre, not its margin, and the modern idea of a beauty drawn from the ugly and the transient takes its first full form here. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: in French, Verlaine, Rimbaud, Mallarmé and the whole Symbolist and Decadent line; beyond French, Swinburne, Stefan George, who translated the book, the Russian Symbolists, Rilke, and Eliot, who set “Hypocrite lecteur! mon semblable, mon frère!” into The Waste Land. Modern poetry in Europe is commonly dated from this book, and few books of any century moved their field further.
Walt Whitman · Literature
9.1 · Tier V
The field is poetry in English in the nineteenth century, and, with American poetry beginning there, the poetry of the Americas. The force is a reorganisation of possibility: the book made free verse a major form in English and the democratic self a subject of poetry. With Dickinson it is one of the two sources of American poetry. Its American reception was slow, a delay credited and discounted. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the long line and the catalogue carried through Sandburg, Hart Crane, Williams and Ginsberg; works that answer the book by name, Pound’s “A Pact”, Darío’s sonnet, Pessoa’s salutation as Campos, Lorca’s ode; Martí’s writing on him, Neruda’s answer and Borges’s translation; in Russia, Chukovsky’s translations and the futurists; and settings by Delius, Vaughan Williams and Hindemith.
Raphael · Visual art
9.1 · Tier V
On view since 1511, so force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force: the wall completed what the Last Supper began. The narrative group in a built space was raised to the scale of a building, an idea given as a crowd, legible at a glance: the charter of the classical manner. The discount: the reach belongs to Raphael’s Roman manner as a whole, and this wall is its exhibit. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the school of Rome through Raphael’s shop; the Carracci and Poussin; the academies from Bologna to London, Reynolds closing his Discourses on the Vatican rooms and Mengs copying this wall; Ingres’s Apotheosis of Homer and Delaroche’s Hemicycle; the Pre-Raphaelites, named against this Raphael. It is now the image of philosophy itself.
Ludwig van Beethoven · Music
9.1 · Tier V
The field is the Viennese symphony after 1800, and the work reorganised what a symphony is for. It made four movements one directed drama with a goal, made a single motive the material of a whole cycle, joined movements, and moved the weight to the finale. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the redirection is decisive and documented. The finale-weighted, minor-to-major symphony runs through Brahms’s First, also C minor to C major, Tchaikovsky’s Fourth and Fifth, Mahler’s Second and Fifth, and Bruckner; the cyclic recall runs through Berlioz; Hoffmann’s review shaped the aesthetics of absolute music. The opening became a public sign as a BBC signal in the Second World War. Held below the ceiling because the Eroica broke first.
Filippo Brunelleschi · Architecture
9.1 · Tier V
Force and reach are scored together, in the dome’s own tradition and region, the domed church of Italy and the West. The intrinsic force is a reorganisation of possibility: the largest vault of its age was raised by geometry and organisation rather than timber, and the architect became an author, whose models and machines governed the site. The lantern put classical members on the skyline. The method itself, raising a vault without centering, was not taken up; the form travelled further than the means. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the double-shelled, ribbed dome on a drum with a lantern became the type of the Western dome, in Michelangelo’s St Peter’s, Wren’s St Paul’s, the Invalides and the Panthéon in Paris, and the Capitol in Washington.
Caravaggio · Visual art
9.0 · Tier V
On public view since 1600, so force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force: with its companion on the facing wall, this canvas was the public debut of a way of painting, sacred history in the present, from life, ordered by darkness and one light. Part of the reach belongs to the painter’s whole work and is discounted, and the second wave since 1951 is delayed and credited at a discount. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the redirection was fast and wide, Manfredi and Valentin in Rome making the figures at a table a genre, Ter Brugghen, Honthorst and Baburen carrying it to Utrecht, Ter Brugghen painting his own Calling of Saint Matthew, Ribera in Naples, and La Tour’s lit tables after them.
Orson Welles · Film
9.0 · Tier V
Released in 1941, so force and reach are scored together. The force: the film reorganised what a narrative film could do with time and point of view, and what a camera could hold in a frame. The reach is demonstrated. Film noir took its low angles, shadows and flashback structure within three years. The French critics of the 1950s made it a founding text of the new wave; Truffaut wrote that it had started more filmmakers than any other film. Kurosawa’s Rashomon (1950) and Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia (1962) take the dead or absent man seen through witnesses; Haynes’s Velvet Goldmine (1998) follows its structure openly. Held from the top only by the discount on delay: the reach came through critics a decade after a release that did not reward the studio.
Paul the Apostle · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
The field is Greek writing of the first century and the Jewish scriptures and their interpretation; for reach, literature and thought both. The intrinsic force is a real reorganisation of possibility: the letters create the Christian letter as a form of thought, and with it the founding vocabulary of a religion, grace, faith, justification, the body of Christ, flesh and spirit. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the later letters written in Paul’s name, Ephesians, Colossians and the Pastorals; Clement of Rome and Ignatius on his model; Augustine’s Confessions and his doctrine of grace; Luther, Calvin and the Reformation’s reading of Romans and Galatians; Wesley at Aldersgate hearing Luther’s preface to Romans; Dante’s “Io non Enëa, io non Paulo sono” (Inferno 2.32); Donne’s sermons; Handel’s Messiah and Brahms’s Four Serious Songs; Kierkegaard; Barth. Discounted for the reach carried by an institution that made the letters scripture; above Anna Karenina’s 9.2.
Valmiki · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
The field was early Indian literature in Sanskrit and the oral narrative that fed it, and beyond it every literature of South and Southeast Asia after. The intrinsic force stands at the top: the poem founded kāvya; the court poetry of Sanskrit, from Kālidāsa’s Raghuvaṃśa on, takes it as the first poem and the model of rasa; and karuṇā became a governing category of Indian poetics. It stops at 9.5 because much of the reach runs through later Rāma poems. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Kampan in Tamil, Kṛttivāsa in Bengali, Tulsīdās in Avadhi; the Old Javanese kakawin, the Khmer Reamker, the Thai Ramakien, versions in Lao, Malay and Burmese; drama, dance, shadow theatre and sculpture; the yearly Rāmlīlā; and Rāma’s rule as a political vocabulary.
Imhotep, under Djoser · Architecture
8.9 · Tier IV
Force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force: the complex is the founding monument of cut-stone architecture at monumental scale, the first pyramid, and among the first uses of the engaged column and the stone ceiling; it reorganised what building in Egypt could be. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Djoser’s successors began step pyramids of their own; within a few generations Sneferu’s builders turned the step into the true pyramid, and Giza followed; the royal pyramid governed Egyptian kingship for about a thousand years, and monumental stone remained the state’s language for three thousand. Held at 9.5 because its own type, the walled ritual court with dummy buildings, was not followed.
Louis Le Vau, Jules Hardouin-Mansart and André Le Nôtre · Architecture
8.9 · Tier IV
The field is the European palace and garden, and the court culture they housed, from the 1660s. Intrinsic force: the seat of the state set outside the capital, house, garden, town and territory on one axis; the formal garden carried to the scale of landscape; the mirrored gallery as the room of state. Much is a synthesis of Vaux and French practice, which holds force below the top. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Schönbrunn, Caserta, La Granja, Peterhof, Nymphenburg, Würzburg, Het Loo and Ludwig II’s copy at Herrenchiemsee answered it; Le Nôtre’s method shaped gardens from England to Russia; the town’s converging avenues stand behind Karlsruhe, L’Enfant’s Washington and St Petersburg; and the name became a common noun for a kind of palace.
Michel de Montaigne · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
The field is French prose of the sixteenth century and, as the book went out, European letters. The intrinsic force: it made a form and a subject. The essay as a genre, and the ordinary private self as a fit matter for literature, both begin here in the form they kept. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Bacon took the name for his Essayes (1597); Florio’s English (1603) supplied Gonzalo’s commonwealth in The Tempest, taken nearly word for word from I.31; Burton, Browne, La Rochefoucauld, Pascal, Descartes and Rousseau worked in its wake or against it; the English essay of Addison, Lamb and Hazlitt, Emerson’s essays, and the confessional and autobiographical traditions descend from it; Woolf wrote on him in The Common Reader (1925). Held a step below the very top only because the confession of the self had an ancient precedent in Augustine.
Pablo Picasso · Visual art
8.8 · Tier IV
Published, so force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force: the canvas reorganised what a figure painting could be, a construction of planes rather than a window on bodies, with sources from outside the European canon used as structure; it is the hinge between the nineteenth century and the twentieth in Western painting. The discount: nine years without a public showing, and a reach that belongs partly to Cubism as a movement, which developed by a quieter route through Cézanne. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Braque saw it in the studio in 1907 and answered with a large nude of his own; the Cubism of the next five years, collage, and what Cubism licensed (Futurism, Constructivism, much of abstraction) ran through the door it opened; reproduced in 1925 and in New York from 1939, it became the emblem of modern art.
The Velvet Underground · Music
8.8 · Tier IV
Force and reach together. The record reorganised what rock could take in: noise and drone as material, the art world as a working context, the street reported without a moral frame, the amateur’s limits used as a method. The reach was delayed, since at release the record moved nothing, and delayed influence is discounted, so reach sits a step below force. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Cale’s productions of the Stooges (1969), the Modern Lovers and Horses (1975), which carried the sound into punk; Bowie’s “Queen Bitch” (1971) and Roxy Music; New York punk and British post-punk; noise rock, shoegaze and indie rock from the Jesus and Mary Chain and Sonic Youth on; a festival named after a song.
The Jimi Hendrix Experience · Music
8.7 · Tier IV
The field is the rock and blues of the later 1960s, and the electric guitar as its instrument. The intrinsic force is very large: the record reorganised what the electric guitar could be, from an instrument of notes into one of sound, and showed that noise, sustain and tape could carry expression inside songs a public would buy. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it is as wide as any record of its decade within its field, for the guitar of heavy rock, of funk and soul after 1967, of jazz fusion and of metal descends in great part from the playing documented here, and guitarists of every later generation have measured themselves against it. Level with The Velvet Underground & Nico at 9.5; held from the top because part of the reach belongs to the player’s later records and concerts.
Marcel Duchamp · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
Published, so force and reach are scored together, in the field of the European and New York avant-garde of the 1910s. The intrinsic force is a reorganisation of what a work of art can be: from a made object to a designated one, from the eye to the idea, from the studio to the institution that names. Nothing in its field reorganised more. The reach was delayed thirty years, while the work was a photograph and an anecdote, and is credited and discounted for that; some of it belongs to the readymade as a practice, of which this is the emblem. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: from the replica of 1950, Johns, Rauschenberg and Cage; Neo-Dada and Fluxus; Pop and Warhol’s boxes; the fabricated objects of Minimalism; Conceptual art, whose founding essays take the readymade as their origin; institutional critique; and much of the art of the last forty years.
William Shakespeare · Literature
9.5 · Tier V
A published work, so intrinsic force and achieved reach are scored together. The force is great: tragedy enlarged to kingdom and cosmos and refused every consolation; madness and folly made ways of telling the truth, the naked beggar become “this philosopher” (3.4); a second plot of equal weight, fully integrated. The reach was delayed, and delay is credited and discounted: Tate’s version held the stage from 1681, and the tragic ending returned only in the 1820s. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the redirection since is documented, through Keats and Shelley, Turgenev’s King Lear of the Steppes, Beckett’s Endgame as Kott read it, Brook’s 1962 production, Bond’s Lear, Kurosawa’s Ran and Smiley’s A Thousand Acres.
Aeschylus · Literature
9.5 · Tier V
A published work, so both components are scored together. The intrinsic force is large: the trilogy made the connected trilogy a single argument across three actions, moved a myth from the house into the city’s institutions, and made the chorus an agent rather than a commentator. Reach is discounted for a long eclipse. From late antiquity to the eighteenth century Aeschylus was scarcely read in the West. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Sophocles and Euripides each answered the Libation Bearers with an Electra, Seneca’s Agamemnon follows, and after the modern recovery come Wagner, O’Neill’s Mourning Becomes Electra, Sartre’s Les Mouches, Eliot’s The Family Reunion, Pasolini and the National Theatre’s 1981 staging in Tony Harrison’s version.
Michelangelo · Visual art
9.3 · Tier V
On view since 1541, so force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force is a reorganisation of possibility: the wall dissolved the hierarchical Last Judgment into one field of bodies in motion, and made the crowded nude composition, seen from every angle, the instrument of the sacred. The subject itself declined after it, and no later Last Judgment redirected the field. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the redirection ran two ways, as model through the prints and copies made from the 1540s, the maniera, for whom it was the anatomy book, Tintoretto, Rubens’s falling damned, Blake’s designs of the Last Judgment and Rodin’s Gates of Hell, and as warning in the Tridentine decree on images, Gilio’s treatise and a Counter-Reformation decorum formed partly against it.
Gustav Mahler · Music
9.2 · Tier V
The work reorganised what a symphony could be for: not an argument to a conclusion but a leave-taking, with the ending as its centre of gravity. Delayed influence is credited and discounted: Schoenberg’s break with tonality preceded the premiere, so it confirmed a path rather than opened one, and beyond concert music the reach is thin. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: within the symphonic line after 1912 it is continuous. Schoenberg and Berg made it the Second Viennese School’s founding text in 1912; Berg’s Three Orchestral Pieces, Op. 6, and the chorale close of his Violin Concerto (1935) descend from it; and the slow or dissolving symphonic ending passed through Shostakovich to the post-war symphony.
Plato · Literature
9.1 · Tier V
The field is Greek literature of the fourth century BC, prose and poetry together, where philosophy competed with tragedy, comedy and rhetoric for the education of Athens. The work made a philosophical argument into drama equal to the poets’, gave the sympotic dialogue its model, and set out a theory of love as lack ascending to the good that reorganised thought about desire. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the literary symposium after it, Plutarch’s Table Talk, Athenaeus, Macrobius, Methodius’ Christian Symposium, Kierkegaard’s “In Vino Veritas”; through Plotinus and the Christian Platonists, a language of eros toward the divine; through Ficino, Castiglione’s fourth book, Spenser’s hymns and the Renaissance love lyric; Shelley’s translation; Freud’s appeal to Aristophanes in Beyond the Pleasure Principle; the common phrase “my other half”. Discounted a little for the Latin West’s long gap.
Plato · Literature
9.1 · Tier V
The field is Greek prose of the fourth century BC, literature and thought together. The work reorganised what a death could mean in writing and what philosophy could claim to be, a way of living toward death, and it set out in literary form the first sustained case in Greek for an immortal, separable soul known through the Forms. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it shaped Neoplatonism and the patristic and medieval doctrine of the soul, and through them Western dualism; it gave the good death its type, which Callimachus’ epigram on Cleombrotus already treats as dangerous and which Plutarch reports Cato the Younger reading before his own death; it has been painted by David (1787), set by Satie (Socrate, 1918) and answered by Nietzsche. Held a tenth below the top: the reach runs as much through doctrine as through literature, and the figure of Socrates is shared with the Apology and the Crito.
T. S. Eliot · Literature
9.1 · Tier V
The field is poetry in English in the 1920s. The intrinsic force is a reorganisation of what a long poem could be: a structure of juxtaposition rather than argument or narrative, with allusion as its substance and myth as its binding. Held below the top because Pound and Joyce shared the reorganisation. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the poem won the Dial Award for 1922; it became the central text of high modernism in English poetry and of the New Criticism, which was formed in large part in reading it; it was answered by Hart Crane’s The Bridge and resisted by William Carlos Williams, so that the American poetry after it defined itself for and against it; and beyond English, George Seferis translated it into Greek in 1936.
George Orwell · Literature
9.0 · Tier V
The field is the English novel of the twentieth century, and within it the political novel and the dystopia, which this book made one of the century’s central forms. The intrinsic force: it reorganised what the political novel could do, joining the novel of the private life to an analysis of total power and of language, and denying its hero even martyrdom. Its instrument is the conventional novel, and We had made much of the frame before it; that holds the force below the reach and the axis off the top. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: a reach as wide as any English novel of its century. Its words entered the language and the languages of politics: Big Brother, doublethink, thoughtcrime, Newspeak, unperson, Room 101, and the adjective “Orwellian”. Later dystopias, from Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) onward, write in its shadow, and the political essay and the journalism of the century took its vocabulary.
Geoffrey Chaucer · Literature
9.0 · Tier V
The field is the work’s own tradition and region, English, and there it is foundational. Its intrinsic force: it made English a medium for a long work of every register, established the decasyllabic couplet that runs to Dryden and Pope, and made dramatic character in verse narrative, the monologues of the Wife and the Pardoner standing behind the English dramatic monologue. Its pressure on Continental literature is small. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the fifteenth century made Chaucer its master (Hoccleve, Lydgate, who wrote a Canterbury continuation, the Scottish poets); Spenser named him the undefiled well of English; Shakespeare and Fletcher made The Two Noble Kinsmen from the Knight’s Tale; then Dryden’s Fables, Blake’s engraving of the pilgrims, Wordsworth’s Prioress, Eliot’s April and Pasolini’s film (1972).
Édouard Manet · Visual art
8.9 · Tier IV
Published, so force and reach are scored together, in the field of French painting of the 1860s and what grew from it. The intrinsic force: a reorganisation of the nude and of the viewer’s place, and with it of the picture’s surface; after it, flatness and the contemporary subject could be the point rather than the failure. The discount: much of the reach belongs to Manet’s work of the 1860s as a whole, shared with the Déjeuner. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Cézanne’s two versions of A Modern Olympia, of about 1870 and of 1873 to 1874, the second shown in 1874; Manet’s portrait of Zola, with a print of the painting on the wall; Gauguin’s copy of 1891 and Manao tupapau, its inversion; the subscription of 1889 to 1890, by which Monet and his circle declared the debt; Picasso’s parodies and the frontal stare of the Demoiselles d’Avignon; and Larry Rivers, Mickalene Thomas and many others since.
Andrea Palladio · Architecture
8.9 · Tier IV
Standing since the 1570s and published in 1570, so force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force is a reorganisation of what a house can be: a centralised, domed, four-fronted solid, the temple front and the Pantheon’s rotunda absorbed into a dwelling. The elements were in hand, in Sangallo’s temple front, Palladio’s own villas and the drawn centralised schemes, so the force is a synthesis carried to its limit rather than a first stroke. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: this is the most copied house in the West, and the copies are named. Scamozzi answered it within a decade; through the Quattro libri it became the model of the English Palladian house, at Mereworth, Chiswick, Foots Cray and Nuthall, and through Jefferson’s copy of the book the model of the American one, at Monticello; it stands behind the domed house and the civic rotunda from Russia to Virginia, and is still copied.
The Beatles · Music
8.9 · Tier IV
The force reorganised what a pop LP could be: an object that does not represent a performance, with tape music, Hindustani form and chamber strings working inside the short song. The credit is shared: Pet Sounds came first, “Paint It Black” and “Eight Miles High” had brought Indian sound into pop, and much credit travelled under Sgt. Pepper. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Sgt. Pepper and the psychedelia of 1966 to 1968; double-tracking, close-miked drums and reversed tape as standard practice; producer and engineer as creative roles; the closer as a source for dance music; the Britpop that took the record as its model.
François Rabelais · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
The field is French literature from the 1530s to the 1560s, the decades of Marot, Marguerite de Navarre, Calvin’s French Institution and the Pléiade. The force: the founding monument of French prose fiction, a reorganisation of what prose in a vernacular could hold, from the obscene to the theological, which made the comic encyclopedic book a possibility that had not existed before it. Held a step below the top because the redirection was at first a line of followers more than a reshaping of the main road, and the main road of the European novel ran through Cervantes. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: a line of learned comic prose runs from it through Urquhart’s English, Burton, Swift and Sterne to Joyce, Céline and Queneau; Balzac imitated it; Bakhtin made it the ground of a theory of literature and culture; and the language took “gargantuan”, “pantagruelian” and the sheep of Panurge from it.
Paul Cézanne · Visual art
8.8 · Tier IV
Before painters for more than a century, so force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force: it reorganised the figure. After it a body in a picture could be a structure among structures, built of colour, without face, story or address, with the work left showing. The discount: the reach belongs to the three canvases and the whole series, not to this one alone, and which canvas Picasso saw, and when, is not settled. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Matisse, who owned the small Three Bathers and gave it to Paris in 1936 as a picture that had sustained him, answered the large bathers in Bonheur de vivre and Bathers by a River; Picasso’s Demoiselles d’Avignon, a year after the death and of nearly the same size, is a wedge of nudes with a still life at their feet, this composition turned hostile; Derain and Braque follow, and Cubism claimed descent.
The Beatles · Music
8.8 · Tier IV
The field is popular music in 1967. The record reorganised what a rock album was, from a set of singles to one made thing, framed, sequenced and printed, with the studio as instrument and any idiom open to a pop group. Much of that was already in Revolver and Pet Sounds, and the record assembles possibilities more than it invents one; the assembly is itself the reorganisation. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the records of its year answered it, Their Satanic Majesties Request among them; the album displaced the single as rock’s unit; the concept album and the art rock of the next decade grew from it; and it was the first rock record to win the Grammy for Album of the Year.
Nirvana · Music
8.8 · Tier IV
Its force is not invention but a synthesis of existing languages, the Pixies’ dynamics, hardcore, the Melvins’ weight and Beatles melody, into a form that proved transmissible at mass scale and reorganised what a mainstream rock record could sound like and say. The credit is shared with Ten and Badmotorfinger, and Sonic Youth, the Pixies and R.E.M. had opened the ground. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: number one on the Billboard chart dated 11 January 1992, displacing Dangerous; the end of hair metal’s commercial reign within about two years; the major labels’ signing of the alternative and Seattle scenes; the Vig and Wallace sound as the decade’s production template; the quiet-loud form as a standard.
Led Zeppelin · Music
8.7 · Tier IV
The field is the rock album of its decade, above all hard rock. The intrinsic force is real: the record showed that the heavy electric band and the English folk song could be one music, gave hard rock its long anthem form in Stairway, a ballad that becomes a storm, and in Levee a sound of drums in a large room that set a standard for heaviness. Much had been prepared on the band’s earlier records, and the folk and blues sources were others’. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Stairway became the model of the power ballad and the epic closer, and the record a primary source for hard rock and heavy metal through the 1970s and 1980s, a reach that runs ahead of the reorganisation it began.
Le Corbusier · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
Standing since 1952, so force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force is a reorganisation of possibility: the dwelling as a unit in a frame, the quarter as one building, the street brought inside, the roof given to common life, and raw concrete as the language of a public building. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Le Corbusier built four further Unités; the London County Council’s Alton West at Roehampton answered it directly; Park Hill in Sheffield and the Smithsons’ Robin Hood Gardens took its streets in the air; brutalism, from the Barbican to the civic and university buildings of every continent, took its concrete; and the slab of mass housing, east and west, took its type, often stripped of its services. Much of that reach is now judged a failure; the redirection is credited whether the field thanks it or not.
Kazimir Malevich · Visual art
8.3 · Tier IV
Published, so force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force is as great as any canvas of the century: the end of depiction carried out in one act, a reorganisation of what a painting could be that set the zero from which the next sixty years of abstract and conceptual art counted. The discount: the reach was delayed and indirect, carried abroad by reproduction, by Malevich’s works held in the West and by the idea more than by the object. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Suprematism itself, and through it Lissitzky, Rodchenko and Constructivism, Unovis at Vitebsk and the design and typography of the Soviet 1920s, and through Lissitzky the Bauhaus and the circle of De Stijl; the monochrome as a lineage, from Rodchenko in 1921 to Reinhardt, Klein, Rauschenberg’s white and black paintings and Ryman; Minimalism and the object; and the square as the emblem of modern art.
Herman Melville · Literature
9.4 · Tier V
The book reorganised what a novel may hold, putting encyclopaedia, sermon, sworn deposition, stage tragedy and natural history under one consciousness that is allowed to vanish; it states the claim, that the sperm whale “lives not complete in any literature” (ch. 32). Delayed influence is credited and discounted, and the delay is long: for some seventy years the book was barely read, and it redirected nothing. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: after the revival, central to the American canon as Matthiessen built it; a root of Olson’s poetics; claimed by novelists of the encyclopaedic line, among them Pynchon and McCarthy in Blood Meridian; Huston’s film (1956), Frank Stella’s Moby-Dick series and Jake Heggie’s opera (2010); and “Ahab” as a word for a leader’s obsession.
Johann Sebastian Bach · Music
9.3 · Tier V
The work took the oratorio Passion to a scale and a depth, dramatic and contemplative, that no Passion had attempted, and showed that a liturgical genre could carry a whole theology. In its own time it was given in Leipzig a handful of times, and the genre declined after Bach. Delayed influence is credited and discounted: a century passed, and much of the reach is shared with Bach’s work as a whole. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the revival began with this work. Mendelssohn’s performance of 1829 is the usual date for the Bach revival and the concert life of old music; Penderecki’s St Luke Passion and Pärt’s Passio stand in its line; Tarkovsky’s The Sacrifice opens with “Erbarme dich”.
Sophocles · Literature
9.2 · Tier V
The field is Attic tragedy of the fifth century BC, beside Aeschylus, the young Euripides and the lyric of Pindar. The intrinsic force is a new possibility for tragedy: the conflict of two claims each with right in it, carried by one conscience against the city, in a self-contained play with two centres. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: in its own century Euripides closed his Phoenician Women on Antigone’s resolve to bury her brother and wrote a lost Antigone; Aristotle cites it; Demosthenes quotes Creon to a jury; Accius made a Roman Antigona, lost. The larger reach came late, credited and discounted as delayed: Garnier (1580), Alfieri, Hölderlin, Mendelssohn (1841), Anouilh (1944), Brecht (1948), Orff (1949), Fugard’s The Island (1973), Gambaro, Heaney, and the modern theory of tragedy through Hegel. Held below the top because Aristotle took Oedipus Tyrannus, not this play, as his model.
Franz Schubert · Music
9.2 · Tier V
Intrinsic force and achieved reach are scored together. The force, in the German Lied, is real: the work made the song cycle a drama of consciousness without a plot, and made song hold emptiness, monotone and the drone. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: within the Lied, decisive. Schumann’s cycles of 1840, Dichterliebe above all; Mahler’s Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen, whose wayfarer ends under a linden; Wolf; the recital of a whole cycle, which the Lied now lives by. Outside music, Thomas Mann’s Der Zauberberg (1924), which carries “Der Lindenbaum” to the battlefield, and Silcher’s arrangement, which put the linden into folk memory. Discounted for a field smaller than the symphony’s or the opera’s, and for a public life that began a generation after publication.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart · Music
9.2 · Tier V
Intrinsic force and achieved reach are scored together. The force is real: the work showed that a comic opera could hold death, damnation and the sublime without dropping its comedy, made the ensemble the place where class and desire are heard together, and gave the Don Juan subject its lasting form. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Hoffmann called it “die Oper aller Opern” (“the opera of all operas”), and Kierkegaard built a philosophy of music on it. Beethoven, Chopin and Liszt took up its music; Pushkin, Mörike and Shaw its story; Forman’s Amadeus (1984) its statue scene. Held below the top because its reach ran more through literature and philosophy than through operatic form.
Byzantine · Visual art
9.2 · Tier V
On view since 547, so force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force: the panels are the canonical statement of the hieratic imperial image, and the sanctuary is the earliest surviving whole programme to build a chancel as one eucharistic argument. The discount is for the lost centre: what Ravenna shows is in part what the capital invented, and the ruler image descended through Byzantine, Ottonian and Norman Sicilian art by way of the capital. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Charlemagne’s chapel at Aachen, modelled on this church; Klimt, who came in 1903, and whose gold of the next five years answers Theodora’s; Yeats’s Byzantium, “the gold mosaic of a wall”; the panels as the illustration of Byzantium in every survey since.
Samuel Beckett · Literature
9.1 · Tier V
A published work, so intrinsic force and achieved reach are scored together. The field is European drama, French and English, after 1945. The force is a reorganisation of what a play needs: it showed that a full evening could be held without plot or event, by presence, rhythm and the bare fact of two people waiting, and it joined the music hall to metaphysics without condescending to either. Held here because it reorganised one art, the theatre; beyond the stage it left a phrase in the language. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it was immediate and wide, from Paris in 1953 to London in 1955 and Broadway in 1956; Esslin named the Theatre of the Absurd around it (1961); and Pinter (The Birthday Party, 1958), Albee, Havel, Stoppard (Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, 1966), Fugard, Shepard and Mamet wrote in its line.
Pablo Picasso · Visual art
9.1 · Tier V
On view since 1937, so force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force: the canvas showed that the language of the modernist studio could carry a public tragedy, and that a history painting could do without the event. The reach in painting is partial: this was in a sense the last great history painting rather than a new beginning. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: on view in New York from 1939, its bulls and horses entered Pollock’s drawings of the late 1930s and early 1940s; the large field and the black-and-white canvases that followed are in its debt; the century’s later anti-war painting, Golub’s among others, looks to it; and it became the emblem of the bombing of civilians, carried at protests from Vietnam to Iraq.
Ancient Egyptian, under Khufu · Architecture
9.1 · Tier V
Force and reach together; the field is Egyptian royal building and its region. The force: the true pyramid fixed at its canonical angle and greatest size, the burial lifted into the body, the royal tomb made the state’s defining work. Force is held because nothing after it took up its interior and the type declined from this point; its reach is as image and measure more than as method. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Khafre answered it beside it at nearly the same size, with the chambers back at ground level; every king of the Fifth and Sixth Dynasties built a smaller pyramid and put the texts of ascent on the walls Khufu left bare; the Kushite pyramids at el-Kurru, Nuri and Meroë; and beyond the region, credited lightly, the pyramid of Cestius, Boullée’s cenotaph, Pei’s pyramid at the Louvre and “pyramid” as the common noun for a hierarchy.
William Faulkner · Literature
9.1 · Tier V
The field is the American novel of its decade. The intrinsic force: the book showed that a novel could be told from inside minds that cannot tell it, that time could be broken, and that the decline of a Southern house could carry the full weight of tragedy. What holds it below the top is that the interior method rested on Joyce, and that much of Faulkner’s reach runs through the whole of his Yoknapatawpha, Absalom, Absalom! above all, more than through this book alone. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: this is the book in which the method first appeared whole, the first of Faulkner’s books to be read as a model, and the book Sartre wrote on in 1939; and the Southern and African American novel after it, Toni Morrison’s included, wrote in its light and against it.
Jorge Luis Borges · Literature
9.0 · Tier V
The field is fiction in Spanish in the 1940s. The intrinsic force is a reorganisation: short fiction was made an instrument of speculative thought, and the line between story and essay, invention and citation, was erased. Delayed reach is credited and discounted: in Spanish the book changed the prose and the ambition of the generation after it at once, Cortázar most plainly, but its world reach came twenty years late, and part of it runs through Borges’s later books and essays, which are not credited here. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the Formentor prize of 1961, shared with Beckett, and the English translations of 1962, after which the book shaped the American postmodernists through Barth, Italian fiction through Calvino and Eco, whose blind librarian Jorge of Burgos in The Name of the Rose makes the debt explicit, and theory in France.
Francis Ford Coppola · Film
9.0 · Tier V
Released in 1972, so force and reach are scored together. The force: the film remade the gangster picture as a family tragedy and a national epic, made the long, dark studio film a commercial form, and brought the Method into the centre of the industry. The reach is demonstrated and immediate. The crime family seen from inside became the genre’s default: Scorsese’s Goodfellas (1990) is a reply to it, The Sopranos (1999) a long-form descendant, and Leone’s Once Upon a Time in America (1984) takes its shape. Willis’s underlit faces became a style of the decade. Held at the figure because part of the reach is shared with its own sequel, and because the genre it redirected it also closed: the family epic has since been remade more often than made anew.
Bob Dylan · Music
8.9 · Tier IV
The album reorganised what a song could carry. Its force joined a long, literary, accusing lyric to an electric blues band, made the voice a dramatic instrument, and set the single free of its time limit. Some of the redirection belongs to Dylan’s 1965 as a whole, the album before this one included, and it is discounted for that. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: folk rock filled the charts within months; the Beatles’ Rubber Soul, that December, turned toward the oblique first-person lyric; long singles followed; the singer-songwriter who writes as a poet became a standard figure; and rock lyrics became an object of criticism, a turn that publications such as Crawdaddy! (1966) were founded to take, with Springsteen’s account of hearing the opening snare one testimony among many.
Giovanni Boccaccio · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
The field was the vernacular narrative of fourteenth-century Europe: romance in verse and prose, fabliau, exemplum and Dante. The intrinsic force: the book founded Italian literary prose and made the novella a high form, joining frame and short tale into a structure that holds a whole society. It stops below the very top because Dante had made the larger rupture in the same language a generation before. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Bembo made Boccaccio’s prose the standard of Italian (1525), and the Crusca’s dictionary followed; the frame collection was taken up by Marguerite de Navarre’s Heptaméron, by Bandello and by Basile; the Canterbury Tales stand in its line, though whether Chaucer knew the book is unsettled; Cervantes wrote the Novelas ejemplares in its wake; Shakespeare drew on its tales; Lessing took the ring parable into Nathan der Weise, Keats the basil pot, La Fontaine the bawdy tales, Botticelli Nastagio and Pasolini the whole.
Leonardo da Vinci · Visual art
8.9 · Tier IV
Published, so force and reach are scored together. The field is Italian painting of the first decade of the sixteenth century, and European portraiture after it. The intrinsic force is a reorganisation of what a portrait could be: the sitter at half length with her hands, in a pyramid, turned toward the viewer, alive in an expression, in a world, with no line anywhere. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the panel was seen in Florence while in progress, and Raphael’s drawing after it and his portrait of Maddalena Doni take its pose; the seated half-length in three-quarter view with folded hands became the European form; the Leonardeschi copied it and made nude variants. Its modern reach, Duchamp’s L.H.O.O.Q. of 1919 and Warhol’s repetitions of 1963, is as wide as any picture’s. Discounted twice: the panel stayed in France, so it reached painting through Raphael and the copies; and much of the later reach is fame, which is presence.
Mark Twain · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
The field is American literature of the nineteenth century, and with it the novel in English. The force: the book made the American vernacular a literary language, able to carry the whole range from farce to a soul’s crisis, and found an American prose that owed nothing to the English periodic sentence. That is a reorganisation of possibility, not a refinement. Held off the very top because the reach ran through its voice more than through its form, and abroad its force has been narrower than its fame. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: as wide as any in its literature. Hemingway’s “All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn” overstates and records a fact; the line runs through Hemingway’s plain style, through Faulkner and the Southern vernacular narrator, through Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye and Bellow’s The Adventures of Augie March, to Ellison, and to Everett’s retelling.
Built for Abbot Suger · Architecture
8.8 · Tier IV
Force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force: the chevet reorganises what a church could be, structure reduced to a frame and the wall surrendered to light, and the west front sets the type of the sculpted triple portal with column figures and a façade rose. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the consecration of 1144, attended by the king and, by Suger’s account, many bishops, carried the manner through the cathedrals of the Île-de-France within a generation, Notre-Dame de Paris (8.8) and Chartres (9.3) among them, and through them to the Gothic of all Europe; the column-figure portal was taken up at Chartres’s west front within a few years; the thirteenth-century nave was itself a leading model of the Rayonnant. Reach stands above force, since the force is a synthesis shared in its own years.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
The field is the European novel of the eighteenth century, with German literature inside it. The force: the book made the inner life of one sensibility the whole subject of a novel, with no moral frame around it, and showed that a German prose book could stand with Richardson and Rousseau. It is a founding text of the Sturm und Drang and of the Romantic self, and the novel of subjectivity runs through it. Held a step below the very top because Rousseau’s Julie had moved the same field first. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: an immediate European sensation, in French within a few years and in English from the French (1779); a fashion in dress, the blue coat and yellow waistcoat; imitations and parodies in several languages; Foscolo’s Jacopo Ortis, Chateaubriand’s René and Massenet’s Werther (1892); and a term of sociology, the “Werther effect”, for imitative suicide.
Jean-Luc Godard · Film
8.8 · Tier IV
Released in 1960, so force and reach are scored together. Continuity editing, the invisible camera and the polished studio image had governed the narrative feature since the 1910s. The film showed that a feature could break all three and still hold an audience, and that the breaks could carry meaning. The parts existed, in documentary, neorealism and the avant-garde; the force lies in putting them into a genre picture. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: with Les Quatre Cents Coups and Hiroshima mon amour it founded the Nouvelle Vague; its jump cut entered the grammar of cinema, television and advertising, and ordinary speech; and it fed the New Hollywood of Bonnie and Clyde and the early Scorsese, and through them later cinephile directors.
Hector Berlioz · Music
8.8 · Tier IV
Intrinsic force and achieved reach are scored together. The force is a reorganisation: a symphony made able to tell a story in the first person, a recurring transformed theme made a structural principle across a whole symphony, and orchestration made a means of thought. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Liszt transcribed this score and built the symphonic poem and thematic transformation in its line; Berlioz’s Grand traité d’instrumentation (1844) carried its orchestral method to Wagner, Strauss, Rimsky-Korsakov and the Russian school; the programme symphony, the tone poem and the grotesque finale of Mussorgsky, Saint-Saëns and Mahler follow it; film scoring inherits its method. The leitmotif’s debt to the idée fixe is debated. Discounted a little because much of the reach runs through Berlioz’s whole output and Liszt’s advocacy.
Sergei Eisenstein · Film
8.8 · Tier IV
Released in 1925, so force and reach are scored together, in the cinema of the 1920s. The intrinsic force is at the top of its decade: the film made montage a language, showed that cutting can argue, and made the collective a possible protagonist. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: within a year it was a cause abroad, praised and feared, banned and imitated; montage became the core of film teaching and of the Hollywood montage sequence; the steps are quoted in Terry Gilliam’s Brazil (1985) and Brian De Palma’s The Untouchables (1987), and parodied; and Francis Bacon built his screaming figures in part, by his own account, from the scream of the nurse on the steps. The reach is among the widest of any film. The discount: much of what it taught, it taught as a model of technique.
Johann Sebastian Bach · Music
8.8 · Tier IV
Printed only in 1801, the book was in wide circulation in manuscript long before, and both components are weighed together. Its force is its own: it made the twenty-four keys the territory of keyboard music, fixed the pair of prelude and fugue as a form, and set the standard of fugal writing that later composers measured themselves against. Keyboard music in every key might have come without it; the book showed what such music was for. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: through Kirnberger, Forkel and Bach’s pupils it reached Mozart and Beethoven, trained the nineteenth century’s pianists, fathered the key-cycle as a genre, Chopin, Hindemith and Shostakovich among many, and has been the basic text of keyboard teaching for two centuries. Discounted where Book II shares the reach.
Edgar Allan Poe · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
The field is the prose fiction of the English language, and beyond it of Europe and the Americas, in the nineteenth century. The intrinsic force is very high: the tales reorganised what short fiction could do in three directions at once, making the detective story with its whole apparatus in one stroke, the tale of psychological terror told from inside the disordered mind, and the short story’s first theory and practice of unity, and they opened the tale of science. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the widest of any body of short fiction of its century. Through Baudelaire the tales entered the making of Symbolism; Doyle took Dupin’s pattern for Holmes, and the genre followed; Dostoevsky, Stevenson, Verne, Lovecraft and modern horror, Borges, who called Poe the inventor of the detective story, and Cortázar, who translated the complete prose. Held below the top only because some of the reach runs through genre in coarser forms and through intermediaries.
Gustave Courbet · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
Published, so intrinsic force and achieved reach are scored together, in French painting of 1850. The intrinsic force is a reorganisation of what painting at full scale could take as its subject: after it, the people of the present, unidealised and in their numbers, could occupy the place of history, and the hierarchy of genres was broken at its top. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: with The Stonebreakers it became the founding picture of Realism; the pavilion of 1855 and its manifesto turned the scandal into a movement; Manet’s large pictures of contemporary life, the group portraits of Fantin-Latour, Degas and the painters of the 1860s, and Realism across Europe from Leibl in Germany to the Russian painters of the 1870s and 1880s descend from the opening it made. Held below the highest figure because the reach belongs to the painter’s work of 1849 to 1855 as a group, not to this canvas alone.
Alfred Hitchcock · Film
8.7 · Tier IV
Released in 1960, so force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force is a reorganisation of horror: terror moved from the gothic elsewhere to the roadside motel and the boy next door, the killer made a mind rather than a monster, and the protagonist abandoned with the audience kept. The reach was immediate, with nothing delayed, and runs through more than one field: it founded a genre and carried into the thriller, film music, editing, censorship and exhibition. What holds it short of the top is that it reorganised a genre and its audience, not the grammar of film. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the slasher cycle, whose Halloween (1978) cast Leigh’s daughter, Jamie Lee Curtis, and named a character Loomis; Brian De Palma’s long homage; the shower strings, the most imitated cue in film music; the low-budget picture by a major director; and audiences taught to see films from the beginning.
Sigmund Freud · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
The field is German prose and European thought at the turn of the twentieth century, and the literature that followed. The intrinsic force: the book reorganised what a mind, a text and a life could be taken to mean, and supplied a century with a hermeneutic of suspicion and a grammar, condensation, displacement, censorship and wish, by which any text could be read against its surface. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Breton’s Surrealist manifesto (1924) and Les Vases communicants (1932), which argue with this book directly; Surrealist painting and film, Dalí and Buñuel’s Un chien andalou; Joyce’s Finnegans Wake; Thomas Mann’s essays on Freud; Auden’s elegy for him; Ernest Jones’s Hamlet and Oedipus (1949), grown from the passage on Hamlet; the psychoanalytic criticism of Trilling; Bloom’s anxiety of influence. The delayed reach in literary theory is credited. Reach in psychology proper has receded.
Jørn Utzon · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
Standing since 1973, it is scored on force and reach together. The force is real: it freed the public building’s roof from the box and made it the building’s figure; it made a free-drawn form buildable by finding its geometry, a method followed since; and it made a city’s image its architecture. Shell roofs and sculptural form were already in play, which holds the force down. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the cultural building as the image of its city, a line that runs to Bilbao and to the opera and concert houses of Oslo, Hamburg and Guangzhou; Arup’s rise as the engineers of such buildings, and computational geometry in building; Utzon’s own platform and roof at Bagsværd and in Kuwait; and in Australia, a national image and the measure of later public buildings.
John Cage · Music
8.1 · Tier IV
The field is the post-war avant-garde in America and Europe. The intrinsic force is of the first order: the work moved the boundary of what counts as music from the sound produced to the act of attention, and made duration the governing parameter. Held below the top because much of the reach is of the idea, and those who took it up mostly took the frame, not the silence. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Cage’s New School class included George Brecht and Jackson Mac Low; La Monte Young and Fluxus took the event score from this line; minimalism, sound art, Oliveros’s deep listening and Eno’s ambient music stand in it; and the visual arts took it up as fully as music did.
William Shakespeare · Literature
9.3 · Tier V
The field is English drama of the early seventeenth century and, through Shakespeare’s reception, the drama of Europe after it. The intrinsic force: the tragedy of the criminal consciousness told from inside, the murderer as the mind the audience shares, in the most compressed shape the tragedy took; it showed that a play could make damnation psychological without losing the supernatural. Held below the top because within its author’s work the larger reorganisation was Hamlet’s, and part of this play’s reach is the general reach of Shakespeare, hard to separate from its own. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the play has held the English stage since the Restoration; Verdi made it an opera (1847); Leskov’s “Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District” (1865) and Shostakovich’s opera after it (1934) take its name and its plot; Orson Welles (1948), Akira Kurosawa in Throne of Blood (1957) and Roman Polanski (1971) filmed it; and the name has become the type of the ambitious couple and the guilty conscience.
Leo Tolstoy · Literature
9.3 · Tier V
The field is the Russian novel and, as Russia’s novel entered it, the European. The force is in the measure it set for the psychological novel: a whole society shown through consciousness without the author’s comment, and in Anna’s last ride an interior monologue that later novelists would make a method. Its reach is as the form’s perfection more than its reorganisation, and the larger rupture in Tolstoy’s own field was War and Peace; that holds it below the top. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Dostoevsky wrote on it at length in A Writer’s Diary (1877), Matthew Arnold in 1887 and Thomas Mann in 1939; Nabokov taught it at Cornell; and beside Madame Bovary it became the type of the novel of adultery for the literatures that followed.
Franz Kafka · Literature
9.2 · Tier V
The field is the novel of the 1920s, the decade of Ulysses, The Magic Mountain, Mrs Dalloway and Proust’s later volumes. The force is a real reorganisation of possibility: the novel was shown able to proceed without a world contract, holding the impossible to the exactness of the realist sentence, and to make bureaucracy, the defining institution of the century, into a metaphysical setting. The discount is slight: the reach was delayed, coming in the 1930s and after the war through the Muirs’ English and the French, and part of it belongs to Kafka’s whole work, The Castle and the stories; but this book is the principal source of the image of the accused before an unreachable court. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the word Kafkaesque, in most written languages, rests on this book more than on any other; Camus, Borges, Beckett’s theatre, Kundera’s and Havel’s Prague, Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians and much of the postwar European novel stand in its line; Orson Welles filmed it in 1962; and law and political theory use it as their own parable.
William Shakespeare · Literature
9.2 · Tier V
The field is English drama of the 1590s and, through it, the drama of Europe. The force: the history play reorganised so that the nation includes its unrecorded people, the comic and the political held in one action, and a comic figure given an inner life that exceeds the plot built to contain him. Held below the top because its reach runs strongest through one character, and the reorganisation of the history play is shared with Marlowe and with Richard II. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Falstaff passed into The Merry Wives of Windsor, into Verdi’s Falstaff (1893), which keeps the honour catechism, into Elgar’s symphonic study Falstaff (1913), which follows these plays, and into Welles’s Chimes at Midnight (1965) and Van Sant’s My Own Private Idaho (1991); and the mingling of high and low became, for critics from Johnson to the Romantics, the English answer to the classical rules.
Johann Sebastian Bach · Music
9.2 · Tier V
The Mass made the Ordinary a form for the whole of a composer’s art rather than for a service: the first great Mass that is a work of art before it is liturgy, and the concert Mass descends from it. Nothing followed in its own time, since it was not heard; a century’s delay is credited and discounted, and much of the reach is Bach’s as a whole. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the Credo in Hamburg in 1786; Beethoven’s requests for a copy, and the Missa solemnis in its line; publication in 1833 and 1845; a first complete performance in 1859; the Bach Choir in London, founded to give it; and the early-music movement’s dispute over forces, fought over this score above all.
Claude Debussy · Music
9.1 · Tier V
Intrinsic force and achieved reach are scored together. The force is real: the work reorganised what an opera could be made of, a prose play, speech-rhythm, an orchestra withheld, and every later opera that trusts the audience to hear what is not sung stands on it. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the record is immediate and named. Dukas’s Ariane et Barbe-bleue (1907) and Bartók’s Bluebeard’s Castle (1911), both on Maeterlinck; Ravel’s L’Heure espagnole; Stravinsky’s Rossignol; Berg’s Wozzeck; Messiaen, Boulez and Dutilleux, who name it the root of the French century; and a harmony of parallel chords that went into French music and past it. Discounted because the method made no school, Debussy did not repeat it, and much of what music took from him it took from La Mer and the piano.
Mimar Sinan · Architecture
9.1 · Tier V
Force and reach are scored together, in the field the building entered: Ottoman architecture in Anatolia, the Balkans and the Arab provinces. The intrinsic force is a reorganisation: it made the imperial mosque one room under one dome, made the exterior the true section of the interior, and fixed the four-minaret frame as the sign of a sultan’s mosque. In its own tradition it was the limit rather than the model: the Sultan Ahmed Mosque of 1609–1616 returned to the Şehzade’s four semidomes, and the octagon recurs rarely after Sinan; that is charged. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: everything after it in its field was measured against it and built below it knowingly; and the twentieth-century Turkish mosque copies this silhouette or the Sultan Ahmed’s, a delayed reach credited and discounted.
Teotihuacano · Architecture
9.1 · Tier V
Force and reach together; the field is Mesoamerican building and its region. The intrinsic force: the city reorganised what a city could be in the Americas, with the grid, the apartment compound, the talud-tablero made a state style, and an impersonal art of the state. Held below the top because the grid and the compound were not copied; what travelled was the profile, the cult and the idea of the city, and the tradition ended in 1521, surviving as emblem rather than practice. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Kaminaljuyú built in talud-tablero; Tikal’s Stela 31 records the arrival of Siyaj K’ak’ in 378; Copán’s founder of 426–427 wears Teotihuacan goggles; Cholula, Xochicalco, Cacaxtla and Tula took its profile and its serpent; the Aztecs made it their place of origin and built temples in its style beside the Templo Mayor; and modern Mexico made it the emblem of the pre-Hispanic past.
Ludwig van Beethoven · Music
9.1 · Tier V
The work reorganised what a multi-movement work could be. It showed that one continuous span of contrasting movements could replace the sonata plan, and a fugue could open a work as its ground rather than close it as proof of learning. Delayed influence is credited and discounted: the late quartets were thought incomprehensible for decades, and much of the reach is shared with them. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the redirection is documented but diffuse. Wagner made the work central to his account of Beethoven; the slow fugue opening Bartók’s Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta is often set beside it; the continuous form passed on through many channels; and the film A Late Quartet (2012) is built on it.
Francisco Goya · Visual art
9.0 · Tier V
The work is published, so force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force is a reorganisation of possibility: the canvas turned the painting of war from glory to atrocity, made the victim, not the victor, the subject of history painting, and made the faceless killer an image. The reach is real but came late, and delayed influence is credited and discounted. The line through war photography and the anti-war poster is diffuse and counted lightly. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Manet saw the canvas in Madrid in 1865 and answered it within a few years in the Execution of Maximilian, in several versions of 1867–1869, and Picasso’s Massacre in Korea of 1951 cites it directly.
Francesco Borromini · Architecture
9.0 · Tier V
Standing since 1641, so force and reach are scored together, in its own tradition and region, the church-building of Catholic Europe. The intrinsic force is a reorganisation of what a church wall is, a continuous moving surface rather than planes with an order applied; of what a plan is, generated from geometry rather than from the orders; and of what cheap materials can carry. Discounted because Rome itself followed Bernini, because the line was repudiated from the 1750s to the 1900s, and because the modern re-reading is delayed influence. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Bernini’s Sant’Andrea al Quirinale, an oval set the other way on the same street, which reads as an answer; Guarini’s San Lorenzo and Holy Shroud chapel, then Vittone; Hildebrandt, the Dientzenhofers, the Asams, Neumann and Zimmermann, the late Baroque of Central Europe.
Fyodor Dostoevsky · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
The field is Russian prose of the nineteenth century and, as Russian prose entered it, the European novel. The force is a reorganisation of what a novel could hold: it made a self-divided consciousness, arguing against reason and against itself, the narrator; it put philosophy inside a voice rather than in a debate between characters; and it gave the century’s quarrel with utilitarian progress its most durable form. In Dostoevsky’s own work it is the hinge to the great novels, Raskolnikov’s theory and the Grand Inquisitor both foreshadowed here. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the anti-hero’s monologue that runs through Gide, Camus’s The Fall, Ellison’s Invisible Man, whose narrator lives underground, and Bellow’s Dangling Man; the existentialist and religious philosophy of the next century; and Bakhtin’s poetics. That reach came after the author’s death, not in 1864, and its delay is discounted.
Francisco Goya · Visual art
8.9 · Tier IV
The series reorganised what an image of war could be, from triumph or lament to evidence without a side, and made the print series a vehicle of conscience. It reached no one for half a century and redirected nothing in its own decade; the delay is discounted, and holds the figure below works that moved their field at once. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Otto Dix’s Der Krieg of 1924, fifty etchings with aquatint, takes its format, technique and stance directly from it; Käthe Kollwitz’s prints of war; the Chapman brothers’ Great Deeds Against the Dead of 1994, the sculpture of plate 39, and Insult to Injury of 2003, a reworked set of the prints themselves; and the moral frame within which the war photography of the twentieth century was made and argued.
Masaccio · Visual art
8.9 · Tier IV
On view for about its first century and a half and again since the nineteenth, so force and reach are scored together, and the interruption is counted. The intrinsic force is a real reorganisation of what a painting could be: perspective worked out for architecture made to build a pictorial space in which figures, building and viewer share one measure, with a sacred subject held in it at full gravity. The discount: from the late 1560s it was hidden for about three centuries, and the Brancacci Chapel carries a share of the painter’s reach this wall does not. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: open in a principal church where the next generations of Florentine painters worked; Alberti’s treatise on painting in the 1430s, though a direct debt is not documented; Piero, Mantegna and Leonardo; central perspective as the governing order of Italian painting.
Katsushika Hokusai · Visual art
8.9 · Tier IV
Weighed within its own field, the Japanese print; force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force: the series, with this sheet at its head, made landscape a leading genre of the commercial print, and showed that one sheet could hold nature as protagonist and the human as its measure; the blue it carried became the colour of the print for a generation. The discount: the sheet’s widest reach is as an emblem, on a banknote, on passports, in an emoji, fame rather than pressure on a field, and its force on European painting was shared with a hundred other sheets. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the series extended for demand; Hokusai’s own hundred views; Hiroshige’s Tōkaidō within two years, which took the genre over, and his waves off Satta after it; from the 1860s, Monet and van Gogh, the whiplash line of Art Nouveau, Rivière’s thirty-six views of the Eiffel Tower, Debussy’s cover of 1905.
Akira Kurosawa · Film
8.9 · Tier IV
Released in 1954, so force and reach are scored together. The force: the film reorganised what an action film could be, a long and legible battle built from many angles, a team assembled by tests, a death given weight by slow motion, and the period film turned to the question of class. The charge against the force: the grammar was Hollywood’s and the western’s, intensified rather than invented. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: John Sturges remade it as The Magnificent Seven in 1960, six years on, and that film had sequels and a remake of its own in 2016; the gathering of the team became a standing plot in war films, westerns, heist films and animation; and the slow-motion death was carried into the violence of Arthur Penn and Sam Peckinpah.
George Frideric Handel · Music
8.9 · Tier IV
Messiah made the scriptural oratorio without drama a public concert work, sacred music outside both church and stage, and set the chorus as the voice of a whole people. It did not reorganise musical language. Delayed influence is credited and discounted: London was cool for seven years, until the Foundling Hospital performances. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the oratorio tradition after Handel formed around this work. The Foundling performances and the Westminster Abbey Commemoration of 1784 made Handel the first composer of a living canon; Mozart’s arrangement of 1789 carried the work into German practice; Haydn’s The Creation, Mendelssohn’s St Paul and Elijah and the Victorian oratorio followed in its line; and the amateur choral society in Britain and America was built round it.
Gian Lorenzo Bernini · Visual art
8.9 · Tier IV
On view since 1652, so force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force is a reorganisation of the sacred interior: a total work of the arts in which a vision happens in real light before the viewer, with the ecstatic body made a sanctioned subject of religious sculpture. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: across the Catholic church interior for about a century, from Bernini’s own Cathedra Petri in Saint Peter’s and his Blessed Ludovica Albertoni, to the theatrical altars of Roman and Central European Baroque; the Asam brothers’ altars and Tomé’s Transparente in Toledo are usually traced to it, by inference. Neoclassicism broke the line, and reach is held under force.
Friedrich Nietzsche · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
The field is German literature and thought of the nineteenth century, and the book pressed on both. Its intrinsic force is a reorganisation of what philosophical writing could be: the thinker as poet and prophet speaking in persona, and a new rhetoric of German prose after Luther and Goethe. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Richard Strauss’s tone poem (1896) and Mahler’s setting of the midnight song in his Third Symphony; Stefan George’s circle, Rilke, Thomas Mann, Musil, Benn and German Expressionism, which took up its rhetoric; Shaw’s Man and Superman (1903), Yeats, D. H. Lawrence and Kazantzakis; and, in thought, the existentialists and Heidegger. The reach has a dark side, in the book’s claiming by National Socialism, which is reach and not credit. Held below the top because much of the reach runs through the ideas more than the form, which few could imitate without parody.
Donatello · Visual art
8.8 · Tier IV
The field is Florentine sculpture from the 1430s to the 1450s. The intrinsic force is great: the bronze reopened the freestanding nude, and with it the statue as an autonomous body in space rather than a member of a building, a reorganisation of what sculpture could be after antiquity. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Verrocchio’s bronze David for the Medici, a direct answer; Michelangelo’s marble David, the colossal answer, which made the subject the emblem of the republic; Cellini’s Perseus standing on Medusa in the Loggia, the same pattern of victor over a severed head; the small bronze and the collector’s nude; and through them the nude as the central subject of European sculpture. Discounted a little for delay and privacy, since it stood in a family courtyard before it stood in public, and for its eclipse by Michelangelo’s; below Las Meninas at 9.5 for that eclipse.
Luigi Pirandello · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
The field is the European drama of the twentieth century, entered from the Italian theatre. Intrinsic force: the play reorganised what a stage may admit about itself, making the conditions of performance, actor, director, audience, rehearsal and curtain, the matter of the drama. Held below the very top because Chekhov and Brecht moved the century’s stage as far by other roads, and because part of the reach is a manner, the play within the play taken as a device, rather than the play’s depth. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Georges Pitoëff staged it in Paris in 1923, Max Reinhardt in Berlin in 1924, and it was played in New York in 1922; its author followed it with two further plays of the theatre within the theatre, won the Nobel Prize in 1934, and his name became an adjective in several languages.
Arnold Schoenberg · Music
8.8 · Tier IV
The work reorganised what vocal chamber music could be: a new voice, an ensemble used as a palette, and the proof that atonality could carry strict forms and wit as well as outcry. In the music of its decade only The Rite of Spring moved the field as far. It is held below the summit because much of its harmonic reach passed through Schoenberg’s later twelve-tone works, and the Sprechstimme has few true heirs. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: immediate and lasting. Berg took Sprechstimme into Wozzeck and Lulu. In 1967 Peter Maxwell Davies and Harrison Birtwistle founded the Pierrot Players, later the Fires of London, on its ensemble, and that formation became the standard of new music, written for by the hundred.
Federico Fellini · Film
8.8 · Tier IV
The film reorganised what a feature could carry. It made the artist’s paralysis a subject for the feature film, showed that a film could move through present, memory and fantasy with no seam and without losing its audience, and gave the language an adjective, “Felliniesque”. The reach is shared: Godard’s Contempt, of the same year, opened the film about filmmaking too. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the redirection is documented, from Mazursky’s Alex in Wonderland (1970), which puts Fellini on screen, through Fosse’s All That Jazz (1979) and Allen’s Stardust Memories (1980), built on its frame, and the musical Nine (1982) and its film (2009), to director’s-crisis films as late as Iñárritu’s Bardo (2022).
Roman, under Vespasian and Titus · Architecture
8.8 · Tier IV
Standing since AD 80, so force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force: the amphitheatre made monumental, free-standing and complete, a building that could seat a city by rank and move it in and out, and that fixed the arcaded, storeyed elevation as the face of Roman public building. It is a synthesis carried to its limit rather than a first stroke, which holds the force below the reach. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the Renaissance took from it the superimposed orders on arcades, a lesson read by Alberti and his successors; the modern stadium descends from it in its plan, its raked bowl, its numbered entrances and its awning; and its name has become a common noun, coliseum.
Mary Shelley · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
The field is the English novel of its century and, through it, the fiction of Europe and America. The intrinsic force: the book reorganised what the novel of terror could be about, joining the Gothic to the scientific and the philosophical, and it established the scientist whose experiment escapes him, a story that did not exist before it in this shape. Held below the top because its reach runs as much through the myth, carried by adaptation, as through the novel’s method, and the redirection of literary fiction proper is narrower than that of genre. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it is widely held the first novel of science fiction (Brian Aldiss’s case in Billion Year Spree, 1973), with a line through Wells’s The Island of Doctor Moreau and Stevenson’s Jekyll and Hyde; the stage took it within five years (Presumption, 1823) and the cinema made it a founding myth (Edison’s short of 1910, Whale’s film of 1931); and its name entered common speech for any creation that turns on its maker.
Bob Dylan · Music
8.7 · Tier IV
The field is the popular music of the mid 1960s, folk and rock together, and the intrinsic force is large: the record showed that the rock song could carry a lyric of the density and ambition of poetry, and that a songwriter’s words need not serve a cause or a romance to hold a public. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the Byrds’ Mr. Tambourine Man opened folk rock as a form within months; the Beatles and others turned toward words of this kind in the records that followed; and the singer-songwriter as the author of whole albums descends in large part from this record and its two successors. Held below Highway 61 Revisited at 9.3, where the long electric song made the decisive break, and because part of what moved the field was the career and the singles.
Masaccio · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
The field is Florentine painting of the 1420s, and force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force is a reorganisation of what a painted narrative could be: bodies with weight, a single light, a measured space, and the story given in that space, the programme of Renaissance painting stated whole on one wall. The discount is real: part of the reach belongs to the chapel as a whole, and the perspective it spread was Brunelleschi’s. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the chapel became the place where Florentine painters of the following generations learned their art; a drawing by the young Michelangelo after the figure of Peter from this fresco survives; and the grave figures in daylight of Piero della Francesca descend from it.
Georges Seurat · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
Published, so force and reach are scored together, in the field of French painting of the 1880s and the avant-garde after it. The intrinsic force: a reorganisation of colour and of the picture’s construction, the first canvas to apply a stated optical system at the scale of a history painting, and the founding work of a movement that Fénéon named in its first year, Neo-Impressionism. The discount: the school was soon codified and narrowed, and its reach in painting passed largely through Signac’s system rather than through the canvas. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Signac, Pissarro for a time, Cross, Luce, Van Rysselberghe and the Belgians of Les XX, where it was shown in 1887; Van Gogh’s Paris canvases of 1887; Matisse’s Luxe, calme et volupté of 1904, out of which Fauvism came; the divisionism of the Italian Futurists, Delaunay and Mondrian’s early work; and, in public culture, Sondheim and Lapine’s Sunday in the Park with George of 1984.
Huang Gongwang · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
Force and reach are scored together, in the field of Chinese landscape painting from the fourteenth century on. Intrinsic force is high: the scroll is the fullest statement of the Yuan reorganisation of landscape around the brush and the scholar’s mind, against the Song view of the world. The discount is that much of the reach belongs to Huang’s manner rather than this scroll alone, and that outside East Asia it is small; but this scroll is the named source of the later copies, so the reach is in part its own. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Shen Zhou copied it in the fifteenth century; Dong Qichang set Huang at the head of the orthodox lineage of the Southern School; the Four Wangs, above all Wang Yuanqi and Wang Hui, made his manner the standard of the Orthodox school, which held at court and among the literati into the twentieth century.
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe · Architecture
8.7 · Tier IV
Published since 1929, so force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force is the first built statement of space made by planes under a slab, with ornament replaced by material and the building made its own exhibit: the first stroke, not a summation, for the Brick Country House was paper. Discounted because the reach ran through Mies’s career and the photographs, the postwar reach belongs in part to Farnsworth and Seagram, and the pavilion’s fabric was absent when its influence was greatest. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the canon of the 1930s, entered on a handful of photographs; Mies’s own line, Tugendhat (1930), Farnsworth (1951), Crown Hall (1956), Seagram and its plaza (1958) and the Neue Nationalgalerie (1968); Johnson’s Glass House (1949) and the Californian steel houses; the corporate lobby and plaza, where the chair became the sign of modern authority; and the adjective “Miesian”.
Martin Scorsese · Film
8.7 · Tier IV
Released in 1990, so force and reach are scored together. The force: the film replaced the operatic gangster picture with a sociological one told at speed, with pop music and narration, and that became the grammar of American crime cinema and television for a generation. The reach is demonstrated and direct. Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs (1992) and Pulp Fiction (1994) took its talk and its sudden violence; Paul Thomas Anderson’s Boogie Nights (1997) took its rise and fall over a decade of songs; David Chase built The Sopranos (1999) on its New Jersey cousins and drew on its cast; Scorsese himself returned to the method in Casino (1995) and The Wolf of Wall Street (2013). Held below the top because the redirection was of one genre, not of the medium.
Édouard Manet · Visual art
8.5 · Tier IV
Published, so force and reach are scored together, in the field of French painting from the 1860s. The intrinsic force: it reorganised what a large painting could be. After it the contemporary figure could take the god’s place in the museum format, a picture could show itself as made, of flat patches and quotations, and the Salon’s authority to say what painting was could be refused in public. The discount: the reach is shared with Olympia, shown in 1865, which carried as much of the shock, and much of the debt is to Manet’s practice over a decade rather than to this canvas. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the young painters who became the Impressionists gathered round Manet in the 1860s; Monet’s outsize Déjeuner sur l’herbe of 1865 to 1866 answers it by name; Cézanne painted his own versions; the Salon des Refusés, with this as its scandal, became the founding legend of the modern avant-garde; and Picasso’s variations of 1959 to 1962 treat it as an origin.
Jackson Pollock · Visual art
8.5 · Tier IV
Published, so force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force is a reorganisation of what a painting could be: an image made without contact, without figure and without composition, by a process the canvas records, at a scale where the painting becomes a place. The discount: the reach belongs to the poured paintings of 1947 to 1950 as a body, and partly to Hans Namuth’s photographs of the act, more than to this canvas, which is credited as their largest and densest statement. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Frankenthaler’s soak-stain, and through her Louis and Noland; Kaprow and the Happening; the Gutai group in Japan, which named him; the process and anti-form work of the late 1960s; Warhol’s parodies; and the general view that New York painting took the lead with these canvases.
Jackson Pollock · Visual art
8.5 · Tier IV
Published, so force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force: the 1950 canvases reorganised what a painting is, the record of an act rather than the picture of a thing, a field rather than a composition, a line that bounds nothing, the floor rather than the easel; this canvas and One are its two fullest statements. The discount: the reach belongs to the four 1950 canvases and the drip period together, not to this one, and no school of drip painting followed; the method was a dead end and a licence for everything else. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Rosenberg’s canvas as “an arena in which to act” (1952); Frankenthaler’s soak-stain of 1952, and through her Louis and Noland, so that colour-field painting descends from the floor and the unprimed canvas; Informel and Gutai; Kaprow’s “The Legacy of Jackson Pollock” (1958), and from it the Happenings, performance and process art; and The New American Painting (1958–59), which carried these pictures to Europe.
Daniel Defoe · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
Intrinsic force: the book is a principal founding act of the English novel as circumstantial realism, a long prose fiction of one ordinary life told as true, by which Richardson, Fielding’s quarrel with Richardson and the realist tradition after them are measured; Watt’s The Rise of the Novel begins with it. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: a genre named after it, the Robinsonade, from Wyss’s The Swiss Family Robinson (1812) to Ballantyne’s The Coral Island (1857) and Verne’s L’Île mystérieuse (1875), and through Ballantyne to Golding’s Lord of the Flies (1954); Stevenson’s Ben Gunn in Treasure Island; Tournier’s Vendredi (1967) and Coetzee’s Foe (1986), which write against it; and, outside literature, Marx’s political economy. Held below the top: the novel would have come without it, and Don Quixote stands earlier in the field.
Miles Davis · Music
8.4 · Tier IV
The field is the jazz of its decade and its meeting with rock and funk. The intrinsic force is large: the record reorganised what a jazz ensemble could be, with rhythm as a dense field rather than accompaniment, electric instruments as the norm, collective improvisation over rock grooves, and the record built in the studio as composition. Part of that force is shared with In a Silent Way and with the rock and funk it took in, which holds it short of the top. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: its players founded the bands that made the next decade of jazz, Weather Report (Zawinul and Shorter), the Mahavishnu Orchestra (McLaughlin), Return to Forever (Corea), with Maupin on Herbie Hancock’s Head Hunters; a wide sale for a jazz record and a rock audience at the Fillmore halls and beyond; a studio method taken up far outside jazz; and a reaction, the neoclassical return of the 1980s, that defined itself against it.
Elvis Presley · Music
8.3 · Tier IV
The field is popular music of the mid 1950s, the long-playing record above all. The intrinsic force is large as a fact and real as a made thing: the album reorganises no musical possibility the Sun singles had not already reorganised, but it put that reorganisation on the long-playing record and made the rock and roll album a viable form, with a sleeve that became a model for what such an album should look like. Much of the reach is the singer’s, owed as much to “Heartbreak Hotel”, the Sun singles and television as to this record, and it is discounted to the unit; discounted, it remains very large. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the major label’s album turned toward young listeners; the sleeve imitated directly by The Clash’s London Calling (1979) and a model for the rock album cover; and the voice heard on it, which a generation of British and American musicians named as their first impulse. Few records changed their field so much on their own account.
William Faulkner · Literature
9.1 · Tier V
The field is the American novel of the 1930s, in English. The force: the book reorganised what a historical novel could be, making the reconstruction of the past by interested voices both its subject and its form, and setting the colour line at the root of a nation’s founding story. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: its reach is largest outside its own language and region, in the founding sagas of Latin American fiction, where García Márquez named Faulkner a master and the Buendías’ founding of Macondo is a cousin of Sutpen’s Hundred; in Carlos Fuentes and Mario Vargas Llosa; in Glissant’s Caribbean reading; and at home in Toni Morrison and the Southern novel after it. Held below the top because much of that reach runs through the whole Yoknapatawpha cycle, with The Sound and the Fury taking a large share, and because in 1936 the book moved few readers, and reach so delayed is discounted.
Alban Berg · Music
9.1 · Tier V
Intrinsic force and achieved reach are scored together. The force is real: the work showed that a post-tonal language could sustain an evening of music drama and hold a general audience, and that absolute forms could carry dramatic time. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it became the model for serious modern opera. Peter Grimes is often set beside it; Zimmermann’s Die Soldaten, the operas of Henze and Reimann and much of the century’s literary opera run from it, as does Berg’s own Lulu. Reach was delayed by the Nazi ban and by the general resistance to atonality, and much of the field after 1950 left opera altogether. In its field, the opera of the 1920s, it stands first.
Claudio Monteverdi · Music
9.1 · Tier V
The Vespers is the hinge of sacred music between the Renaissance and the Baroque: the first work to show that the whole Office could be given to the concerted style, with solo voice and obbligato instruments, and still stand on the chant. Every concerted psalm of the Italian seventeenth century is in its line of possibility. No performance in its own time is documented, how much of what followed is this print’s and how much Venice’s cannot be separated, and a delay of three centuries is credited and discounted. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Monteverdi’s own Selva morale e spirituale (1641) and the Venetians after him; Schütz’s Psalmen Davids (1619) near it; and from the 1930s the work on which the early-music movement made its public case and tested its arguments about pitch, forces and liturgy.
Euripides · Literature
9.0 · Tier V
The field is Attic tragedy and the Greek poetry of the fifth century. The intrinsic force is high: tragedy turned on the household and on a woman’s interior, with the gods withdrawn to an ending that judges nothing, a real reorganisation of what the form could hold, though part of a larger turn that other plays of Euripides carry too. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: at Rome, Ennius’ Medea, Ovid’s lost Medea and Heroides 12, and Seneca’s Medea, through which the figure reached the Renaissance stage; then Corneille’s Médée (1635), Cherubini’s opera (1797), Grillparzer’s trilogy, Anouilh, Jeffers, Pasolini’s film (1969) and Christa Wolf’s novel (1996). Held below the top because much of the reach runs through Seneca and the myth rather than this play’s form.
Jonathan Swift · Literature
9.0 · Tier V
The field is English literature of the 1720s, the decade of Defoe’s novels, Pope’s Dunciad and Gay’s Beggar’s Opera. The force: the book made prose satire into a whole fictional world with its own measures, and turned the new realist first-person narrative against the credulity that narrative asks of its reader; it is the summit of the Augustan satiric project in prose. Held below the top because what it redirected was satire and the fantastic voyage more than the novel’s main road, which Defoe and then Richardson set. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: John Gay wrote to Swift within weeks that it was read “from the cabinet-council to the nursery”; Voltaire’s Micromégas (1752) and the philosophical tale descend from it, and so does a line of dystopian and satirical fiction through Orwell; it has been a children’s classic since the eighteenth century, filmed and adapted repeatedly; and English took “Lilliputian” and “Yahoo” from it.
Franz Kafka · Literature
9.0 · Tier V
The field is prose fiction of the 1910s, the decade of Death in Venice, Swann’s Way, Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. The force is a real reorganisation of possibility: prose fiction was shown able to take one impossible fact as given and work out its consequences in realist detail, without explanation, so that the fantastic became a means of telling the truth about ordinary life rather than an escape from it; of that method this book is the type. The discount is twofold: the reach was delayed, coming after Kafka’s death and after the war, and part of what the word Kafkaesque names rests on the novels. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it is among the most read and most taught works of fiction of its century; García Márquez spoke of it as the book that showed him what fiction could be allowed to do, and the line of the fantastic told plainly runs through his work and beyond; Philip Roth’s The Breast (1972) answers it by name; and Nabokov taught it as a masterpiece.
Alexander Pushkin · Literature
9.0 · Tier V
The field is Russian literature of the 1830s and the century after. The intrinsic force: the poem made the poor clerk a tragic subject of the highest poetry and set him against the state in one structure, and made the city a protagonist with a myth and a fate. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Gogol’s Petersburg tales and “The Overcoat” (1842) take the anonymous clerk into prose; Dostoevsky’s Poor Folk and The Double (both 1846) and Crime and Punishment inherit the clerk, the city and the madness, The Double most closely; Bryusov’s poem to the Bronze Horseman (1906) and Bely’s Petersburg, in which the statue enters a room, rewrite it openly; Akhmatova’s Poem without a Hero and Mandelstam’s Petersburg poems live inside its myth; Benois’s illustrations made its images a visual canon, and Glière’s ballet (1949) staged it. The window into Europe of its Introduction is in the language. Discounted for the late and censored printing, and for a reach that runs within Russian culture more than across Europe.
Lucretius · Literature
9.0 · Tier V
The field is Latin literature of the first century BC, with Ennius behind it and Greek didactic, Empedocles and Aratus, and Epicurean prose before it. The intrinsic force: the poem made Latin a language of philosophy and of natural science in verse, bending terms for what Latin had never said, and set the sublime of reason against the sublime of the gods; nothing in Latin before it reorganised the possible so far. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it moved Virgil decisively; Ovid wrote that its songs would perish only on the day the earth is destroyed; and after 1417 it fed early modern atomism, materialism and the long English philosophical poem. Held at 9.1 because that second reach was delayed, credited and discounted: for a millennium the poem moved almost no one.
Ludwig van Beethoven · Music
9.0 · Tier IV
The work reorganised what a piano sonata could be: in scale, in tonal law, and in putting the old learned fugue at the summit of the new genre’s argument. Its reach is concentrated in the sonata rather than spread across music, and the late style’s deepest influence ran through the quartets as much as through the sonatas; both are discounted, as is the delay. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: delayed, then decisive. Little heard for a generation, it became through Liszt the proof text of the piano sonata as a major form. Liszt’s own Sonata in B minor and the early sonatas of Brahms stand in its line, and the large Romantic sonata after it is unthinkable without its example. The line is credited, not each link.
Franz Kafka · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
The field is literature in German of the twentieth century, and the European novel of that century. The force is a real reorganisation of possibility: a novel whose world is governed by a law it never states, given in transparent prose, in which the realist surface becomes the medium of a metaphysical and social condition. That is a mode the century’s fiction did not have before Kafka and could not do without after. The discount is twofold: the influence is posthumous and came largely after 1945, and Der Process and Die Verwandlung carry more of the reach than this book. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: through Kafka’s books together, the adjective kafkaesque in many languages and a line of writers who took the mode from him, Camus, Borges and Kundera among them; for this book singly, the pattern of the village under an unreachable authority, and Michael Haneke’s film of it (1997).
Plato · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
The field is Greek prose of the early fourth century BC, Attic oratory, history and the new Socratic literature, and with it philosophy as it was then forming; the work is weighed on literature and thought both. Its intrinsic force: it made philosophy a way of life answerable to a divine command rather than to the majority, set its first-person justification in public before the city, and made the examined life and the knowledge of one’s ignorance the measure of what philosophy is. Achieved reach, named: it fixed the image of Socrates for antiquity and after; it stands behind the Stoic and Cynic exempla, the Socrates of Cicero and Seneca, and the Christian apologists, Justin Martyr setting Socrates beside Christians condemned for impiety and taking the genre’s name, Tertullian’s Apologeticum after him, Newman’s Apologia pro Vita Sua centuries later; then Montaigne on death, and the modern defence of conscience and free inquiry against the state, from Mill’s On Liberty, which invokes the trial, to King’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail”, which names Socrates and the gadfly. Held at 9.1 because much of that reach belongs to the figure of Socrates more than to this text, and is shared with the Phaedo, the Crito and the Socrates of other hands.
Jalal al-Din Rumi · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
A published work, so force and reach are scored together. The field is Persian poetry of the thirteenth century and, through it, the devotional literature of the Persianate world. The reach is named and particular: the reading life of an order whose lodges spread from the Balkans to Egypt; commentary in Ottoman Turkish, Indian Persian and Qajar Persian; Jami, who by tradition called it the Qur’an in the Persian tongue; Iqbal, who named Rumi his guide in Asrar-i Khudi (1915) and Javid Nama (1932). Held here because the force is a culmination rather than a reorganisation. The didactic masnavi was Sana’i’s form and Attar’s, and after Rumi it did not take a new course so much as stop beside him: later mystical poets, Jami among them, wrote under it rather than from it. Fame through paraphrase is presence, not pressure.
Joseph Conrad · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
The field is the English novel at the turn of the century and, through it, modern fiction in English and beyond. The intrinsic force: the book made the short novel a vehicle of moral and political knowledge, made the unreliable teller and the framed telling central to modern fiction, and set the image of the journey to the interior that later fiction used to read empire. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Eliot took “Mistah Kurtz” and “he dead” for the epigraph to “The Hollow Men” (1925), and had wanted Kurtz’s last cry for The Waste Land before Pound dissuaded him; Fitzgerald’s Nick Carraway is a Marlow; Greene, Naipaul (A Bend in the River, 1979), Tayeb Salih (Season of Migration to the North, 1966) and Achebe wrote with it or against it; Welles meant to film it in 1939, and Coppola did, as Apocalypse Now (1979). Held below the highest figures because it reorganised a manner and an image more than the novel’s whole form, which Joyce and Proust did more to change.
Modest Mussorgsky · Music
8.9 · Tier IV
Intrinsic force and achieved reach are scored together. The force is great: the work reorganised what opera could be, with speech-shaped declamation as the norm, harmony freed from functional progression by modal and folk practice, the people as protagonist and history as chronicle. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande bears its declamation and its non-functional harmony; Ravel and Stravinsky took from it; Shostakovich re-orchestrated it and built operas and symphonic irony on its model; Prokofiev’s War and Peace follows its chronicle form; the Russian historical opera after it stands on it. The reach was wide and late, and the world first met the work in another man’s edition: delayed influence is credited and discounted.
Nikolai Gogol · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
The field is Russian literature of the 1840s. The force: with The Overcoat of the same year, this is where the Russian prose tradition turns, from Pushkin’s clarity to a grotesque realism of the provinces and the office, the line the critics then called the natural school and Chernyshevsky later named the Gogol period. It is held below the top because its reach outside Russian was slowed by its untranslatability, and the larger European redirection came from the novelists it made possible. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Dostoevsky’s first novel was greeted as the work of a new Gogol; Saltykov-Shchedrin’s satire, Sologub’s The Petty Demon, Bely’s prose and Bulgakov stand in its line; Nabokov wrote a book on its author; and its landowners’ names became common nouns in Russian.
J. R. R. Tolkien · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
The field is the novel of its decade. The force is a real reorganisation of possibility: the book showed that an invented world, with its history, languages and geography, could be the full object of serious fiction, and that the heroic could be written at length, without irony, in the twentieth century. Much of what followed copied the surface (the map, the dark lord, the company of races) rather than the vision, and the literary novel itself went on largely unmoved. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the campus paperbacks of 1965, the unauthorised Ace edition and the authorised Ballantine, made it a mass book; the commercial genre of secondary-world fantasy was formed in its image, from Terry Brooks’s The Sword of Shannara (1977) onward, and its shape still governs that genre; and it reached music, games and film.
Vincent van Gogh · Visual art
8.9 · Tier IV
Published, so force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force: the canvas reorganised what a landscape could be, nature painted as felt rather than as seen, from memory and invention, with the mark as the record of force. That is the founding move of Expressionism, and this is its extreme instance. The discount: the canvas was in private hands until 1941 and seen by almost no one in the painter’s lifetime, so its reach in painting belongs to the late manner as a whole, and this picture became its emblem after the fact. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the Fauves after the Paris shows of 1901, the Brücke painters, Munch’s resemblances, Soutine, and the painters of the gesture after them; and since 1941, as public image, the poster, the song of 1971 and the projected wall, until it became the public’s idea of a modern painting.
Gabriel García Márquez · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
The field is the novel in Spanish of the twentieth century and, as this book carried it there, the novel of the world. The force: it gathered the Latin American new novel into one narrative any reader could follow, and showed that a single town and family could carry a continent’s history in a mythic register without loss of political edge, the marvellous not ornament but the means of telling a history the official record denies. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the book made the Boom a world event and fixed “magical realism” as a name and a mode across literatures; it opened a road for Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1981), Allende’s La casa de los espíritus (1982), whose family chronicle across generations comes directly from it, and novelists from Africa to China, Mo Yan among those who have named it; and the McOndo anthology of Fuguet and Gómez (1996) defined a generation by its reaction against Macondo, which is reach too. What holds the axis there is that the force synthesizes more than it reorganizes. The method was prepared by Rulfo and Carpentier, the Boom was under way before 1967, and part of the reach is the reach of a mode that became a formula and a marketing category, not of the book alone.
Hafez · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
The field is Persian poetry of the fourteenth century, and with it the lyric of the Persianate world from the Balkans to Bengal. The intrinsic force is the ghazal’s completion: after the Divan the form in Persian was measured by it, and it showed that the lyric could carry dissent, metaphysics and eros in one couplet without choosing. That is a reorganisation of what the ghazal could do, built on Sa’di’s achievement rather than against it, and it is held at 9.1 because the force perfected a form more than it founded one. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Jami and the Timurid and Safavid poets wrote in his shadow; the Indian style of the Mughal centuries answered him; the Ottoman court read him with commentary; and Hammer-Purgstall’s German version of 1812 and 1813 gave Goethe the West-östlicher Divan of 1819.
Alexander Pushkin · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
The field is Russian literature of the first half of the nineteenth century and, through it, the European novel. The force: the book founded the realist Russian novel, in verse, before Russia had a prose novel to speak of, made the contemporary Russian scene a fit subject for high art, fixed a literary Russian of conversational ease, and set the pattern of a gifted man who cannot act beside a woman of greater moral strength than he. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Lermontov’s Pechorin descends from Onegin directly, and the line of superfluous men runs through Herzen, Turgenev’s Rudin and Goncharov’s Oblomov; Tatiana stands behind the heroines of Turgenev and Tolstoy; Dostoevsky argued with the book in public. Beyond Russia it runs through Tchaikovsky’s opera (1879), the translators, and Vikram Seth’s The Golden Gate (1986), a novel written whole in Onegin stanzas. What holds it here: the book had heirs as a literature but almost none as a form, since the novel in verse did not become a kind, and its reach outside Russian is narrow and runs largely through other works and other media, because the poetry does not cross.
Samuel Richardson · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
The field is the European novel of the eighteenth century. The force: Clarissa showed that the novel could be a tragedy of the inner life at epic length, and that the letter could give consciousness from inside without a narrator. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Diderot’s Éloge de Richardson (1762) set it beside Homer; Rousseau’s Julie, ou la Nouvelle Héloïse (1761) takes its form and its virtuous heroine; Laclos’s Les Liaisons dangereuses (1782) takes its rake correspondents and makes them the whole book; Sade’s Justine reads as its inversion; Goethe’s Werther owes its epistolary inwardness to the line it began; Austen’s novels of a young woman’s choice of husband descend from Richardson; and Fielding wrote to praise the fifth volume. Held below the top because the English line soon turned to Fielding’s and Sterne’s narrators.
Nikolai Gogol · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
The field is Russian prose of the 1840s. The intrinsic force is a reorganisation: the meanest official became a subject that could bear the whole weight of a story, and a comic narrating voice became an instrument of moral seriousness. Held below the top because Pushkin had opened the subject, and Gogol’s own tales the manner. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Dostoevsky’s first novel, Poor Folk (1846), answers the story directly, since its clerk, Devushkin, reads “The Overcoat” and is wounded by it; the figure of the little man runs on through Russian fiction for the rest of the century; and the story founded a theory of narration, in Eikhenbaum’s essay of 1919, on which the narration in a speaking voice that Russian criticism calls skaz is still studied.
Honoré de Balzac · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
The field is the French novel of the nineteenth century and, as it spread, the European novel. The intrinsic force is high: this is where the realist novel of society becomes a system, a fictional world with its own population, economy and history, which characters leave and re-enter, and the linked cycle descends from it. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Zola’s Rougon-Macquart takes the cycle and the milieu as its method; Dostoevsky, who had translated Eugénie Grandet, gives Raskolnikov a version of the question Rastignac puts to Bianchon in the Luxembourg, whether one would kill a mandarin in China by a wish in order to be rich; Henry James wrote on Balzac as the master of the novel; Proust and Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha stand in the line. Held below the top because the reach is shared with the Comédie humaine as a whole, and Illusions perdues carries the young man further.
Virgil · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
The field is Latin poetry of the late Republic, set against the Greek it inherited, and European literature after it. The intrinsic force: the book refounded a minor Hellenistic form as a mode able to carry politics, elegy and prophecy, and gave Latin a hexameter of new softness and finish between Lucretius and the Aeneid. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the whole European pastoral descends from it, through Calpurnius Siculus and Nemesianus, the medieval eclogue, Petrarch’s and Boccaccio’s Latin bucolics, Sannazaro’s Arcadia, Spenser’s Shepheardes Calender, Milton’s Lycidas and Pope’s Pastorals, to the painters’ “Et in Arcadia ego”; and the fourth poem made Virgil a prophet to the Christian centuries and a guide Dante could choose. Held below the top because the reorganisation was of a mode.
Chinua Achebe · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
The field is the novel in English of the twentieth century, and within it the literature of Africa as it entered that language. The intrinsic force: the book showed that the African novel in a colonial language could tell an African world from within, in its own idiom and dignity, in a form at once the West’s and not; a reorganisation of possibility. It was not the first African novel in English (Tutuola, Ekwensi) or in French (Camara Laye’s L’Enfant noir, 1953), and that holds it below the top. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it became the founding text of modern African literature by common use; it opened the African Writers Series, which Achebe edited and which published a generation of writers; Ngugi, Adichie and others have named it; it is the book most often taught as the beginning of postcolonial fiction; and it changed how the West’s own novels of Africa are read.
Bob Dylan · Music
8.8 · Tier IV
The field is the rock album, which in 1966 was still largely a set of singles. The intrinsic force is high: the record showed that a rock album could hold a sustained visionary lyric at length, across two LPs and a side-long song, and that the session craft of Nashville could carry city surrealism. That widened what the form could hold. Some of its means were the previous year’s, and some of the reach belongs to the singer’s records of 1965 as much as to this one; that is discounted. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: within three years the double album was the ambitious record’s format, the long, image-crowded love song became a standard of the singer-songwriter, and the turn of rock and folk singers to Nashville is commonly traced to these sessions.
Sappho · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
The field is Greek poetry of the late seventh and early sixth centuries BC: Homeric and Hesiodic hexameter, the iambus and elegy of Archilochus and Tyrtaeus, Alcman’s choral song, and the Lesbian monody shared with Alcaeus. The intrinsic force is high: the poems make erotic first-person lyric a form capable of thought, and with Alcaeus fix the stanza that bears her name. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: she was counted among the nine lyric poets of the Alexandrian canon; Catullus 51 and Horace’s Sapphic odes, among them Odes 1.22 and the Carmen Saeculare, carried the stanza into Latin, where it became a hymn metre of the Church in “Ut queant laxis”, source of the sol-fa syllables; it passed into the vernaculars, Swinburne’s “Sapphics” among them; Leopardi, Baudelaire, H.D., Pound and Carson wrote from her; and her name and island gave modern languages their words for love between women. Discounted: much of the medieval reach ran through Latin, not her text.
Akira Kurosawa · Film
8.8 · Tier IV
Released in 1950, so force and reach are scored together, in the cinema of the 1950s. The force: the unreliable image made a structure, a period film turned into an argument about knowledge. Part of it is Akutagawa’s and is discounted. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the Golden Lion at Venice in 1951 and an honorary Academy Award in 1952 opened Western exhibition to Japanese cinema, and Mizoguchi, Kinugasa and Ozu followed through that door; the structure was taken up in Martin Ritt’s remake The Outrage (1964), Zhang Yimou’s Hero (2002), Ridley Scott’s The Last Duel (2021) and many films and television episodes told by contradicting witnesses; and the title became a name used in courts and classrooms. Discounted a little, since part of the reach is a door opened, reception more than form.
The Clash · Music
8.8 · Tier IV
The field is the rock album of its decade’s end, punk and what followed it. The intrinsic force: the record showed that punk’s energy and its politics could carry the whole inheritance of popular music, from rockabilly to reggae, without losing either, and so ended punk’s quarrel with the past on punk’s own terms. Little was invented; the force is in the breadth and the conviction, and the reach is wider than the reorganisation. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the record became the type of the punk band’s maturity and of the eclectic political rock album, a standard against which later bands measured breadth; its mixture of punk and Jamaican music was carried through the next decade in Britain; and in America it became a touchstone of rock criticism.
Laurence Sterne · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
The field is English literature of the 1760s, the decade of Rasselas, The Vicar of Wakefield, Smollett and The Castle of Otranto. The force: a reorganisation of what the novel could be at the moment it had just become a form, showing that the narration itself, its time, its reader and its page, could be the novel’s subject. Much of the reach was delayed, which the rubric credits and discounts: for a century the novel’s main road went elsewhere. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: an immediate sensation in London in 1760, and across Europe soon after; Diderot’s Jacques le fataliste is built on it; Goethe and Jean Paul admired and used it; Machado de Assis’s Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas (1881) avows the free form of Sterne; and the line runs through Joyce, Woolf and Shklovsky to the metafiction of the twentieth century.
Arthur Rimbaud · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
The field is French poetry of the nineteenth century and, by its reach, modern poetry in Europe and the Americas. The intrinsic force is very high. The book reorganised what a poem can be: a prose poem with no narrator and no anecdote, the image freed from discourse, and free verse in French. The reach was delayed: the book came to the field some fourteen years after it was written, and redirected it within a decade, and the delay is credited. A tenth is held back because much of the reach runs through the legend of the poet as well as through this book. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Gustave Kahn and the Symbolists of the vers libre took it up at once; Claudel credited Rimbaud with his conversion; the Surrealists made Rimbaud a precursor; Saint-John Perse and René Char wrote in its line; in English John Ashbery translated it and the New York poets read it as a source; and Benjamin Britten set pieces of it as Les Illuminations in 1939.
The Beach Boys · Music
8.8 · Tier IV
The contest is with the pop single and with the band’s own formula: the teenage pop record is answered with a whole album of adult doubt in orchestral dress. The intrinsic force is high. The record showed that the pop album could be a unified emotional statement, that a producer could use the studio and hired players as a composer uses an orchestra, and that pop harmony could carry ambiguity; Spector and the Beatles had each shown part of this, and this record joined them. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it founded the line of chamber and orchestral pop that runs through the decades since, and set the measure of the producer as author in popular music, though its reach came slowly in its own country.
Michelangelo · Architecture
8.8 · Tier IV
Open since 1571, so force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force is very high: the vestibule reorganised what the classical vocabulary could do, so that the orders could be handled expressively, as members under tension, set into walls, layered, broken and recombined, rather than as a fixed grammar; and its stair is the first monumental stair conceived as a sculpted, flowing body filling its room. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the licences of Florentine and Roman building in the later sixteenth century; through Michelangelo’s Roman work and those who studied it, the Baroque, Borromini above all, and the Baroque stair; and the vestibule put to work again in the twentieth century against modernism’s simplicity. The reach passed as a manner, not as a type others could reproduce.
Miles Davis · Music
8.8 · Tier IV
The force reorganised what improvisation could be built on. The record replaced the chord sequence with the scale and the dense change with the long stretch of space, and showed that the result could be lyrical and widely heard. The credit is shared: Milestones, Russell and the two Evanses came first, the more radical turn of 1959 was Coleman’s, and part of the reach travels as an image of jazz rather than as a technique. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: modal jazz as a practice of the 1960s, in Coltrane’s “Impressions”, built on the frame of “So What”; Herbie Hancock’s Maiden Voyage (1965); the playing of McCoy Tyner and Wayne Shorter; Evans’s trio with LaFaro and Motian; Davis’s later groups; three standards.
Jean d'Orbais, Jean le Loup, Gaucher de Reims and Bernard de Soissons · Architecture
8.8 · Tier IV
Force and reach are scored together, in the Gothic of thirteenth-century France and the Europe that followed it. The intrinsic force: bar tracery, which reorganised the possibility of the window and became the medium of the Rayonnant; the façade as a screen of glass and figures; the most complete sculptural programme of its century, in which the classical body returned to the Gothic figure. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the tracery ran through Paris, to the nave of Saint-Denis, the transepts of Notre-Dame and the Sainte-Chapelle, and across northern Europe; Westminster Abbey, rebuilt from 1245, took its chevet and tracery; the Reims workshops are seen at Bamberg. Held from the top: Chartres made the larger turn, and Amiens shares the reach.
Claude Debussy · Music
8.8 · Tier IV
Published, and so scored on force and reach together. The field is the orchestral music of the 1900s, beside Mahler’s middle symphonies, Strauss’s Salome and Schoenberg’s Pelleas und Melisande. The force is real: the work reorganised what orchestral form could be built from, colour, texture and continuous transformation instead of thematic development, at the scale of a symphony. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Ravel’s orchestra, Stravinsky’s early ballets, Varèse, Messiaen, Boulez’s orchestral writing and the spectral composers stand in its line, the line credited, not each link; beyond concert music, the orchestral sea of film scoring is heard through it. Held from the top because the cool premiere delayed the reach a little, and part of it is shared with the Prélude and Pelléas.
James Boswell · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
The field is English prose of the eighteenth century, where the book has few equals in reach. Its intrinsic force is large: it reorganised what a biography could be in English, from monument to the record of a living person, and its method of conversation reported in scene was a new possibility in prose. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the full nineteenth century Life descends from it, Lockhart’s Life of Scott (1837 to 1838) most directly, and the Victorian life and letters; Froude’s Carlyle carried its frankness into scandal; the essays of Macaulay (1831) and Carlyle (1832) fixed its place; Strachey’s revolt against the Victorian Life was a revolt against what came from it. And Johnson himself is now read through it.
Edvard Munch · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
Published, so force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force: with van Gogh’s late canvases, the motif is a founding statement of Expressionism, the picture as the direct record of an inner state, figure and landscape deformed by it; and of the painters of that turn, Munch was the one present in Berlin from 1892. The discount: in his lifetime the image travelled chiefly through the lithograph of 1895 and the other versions, not this board, which stayed in Norway; the field it moved belongs to the motif and to the Frieze of Life, of which this is the emblem. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the Brücke painters after 1905, Kirchner and Nolde among them; in Vienna, Schiele and Kokoschka; and through the century the scream as the figure of the modern subject, whose public fame counts only lightly.
Robert Frank · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
Published, so intrinsic force and achieved reach are scored together, in the field of documentary and street photography of the 1950s, in America and beyond. Intrinsic force: a reorganisation of what a documentary photograph and a photobook could be, from an illustration of a stated subject to a personal, oblique, sequenced poem, in which the photographer’s eye is the instrument and imperfection is meaning. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the American street photography of the next generation, Lee Friedlander, Garry Winogrand and Diane Arbus, shown together at the Museum of Modern Art in New Documents (1967), is widely held to descend from it; the road picture and the American road book after it; and the photobook as an author’s sequence, now a form of its own. Held at 9.1 rather than higher because the turn was shared with Klein, and Evans had begun it.
Friedrich Nietzsche · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
The field is German prose and European philosophy of the late nineteenth century. The force: the book reorganised what philosophy could take as its object, the value of values and the philosopher’s psychology, and what form it could take, and it set a measure for German prose that Heine had begun. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: with the Genealogy of Morals it gave Freud’s psychology, Weber’s sociology of religion, Foucault’s genealogy and the whole of twentieth-century suspicion their first model. The reach is shared with Thus Spoke Zarathustra and the Genealogy, and part of it belongs to the misreading of the posthumous papers, not to this book; the figure is discounted for that. The reach came after 1890, not on publication, and is credited as delayed.
Gustave Eiffel · Architecture
8.7 · Tier IV
Scored on force and reach together. The intrinsic force: height nearly doubled at a stroke, by a prefabricated iron structure assembled in about two years with an accuracy that let its parts meet in the air; and an engineer’s structure, with no ornament doing the work, set up as the monument of a capital. Some of it was in hand: the company’s piers, and the iron halls. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the tower type, from Petřín (1891) and Blackpool (1894) to Tokyo Tower (1958); the lattice mast and pylon of radio and power; the avant-garde, who made it the emblem of modernity; Tatlin’s Monument to the Third International, drawn to outrise it. Its line into building is narrower than its image: the tall building went by the steel frame, not by the tower.
John A. Roebling and Washington Roebling · Architecture
8.7 · Tier IV
Scored on force and reach together, in American building and engineering of its decades. The intrinsic force is large: the long-span steel suspension bridge made buildable over a great tidal river, on foundations sunk under compressed air, with cables spun in place from steel wire. Some of it was in hand: Roebling’s own system, and Eads’s caissons and steel at St. Louis; and the stays were not followed. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: across the same river the Williamsburg (1903) and Manhattan (1909) bridges; then the George Washington (1931) and the Golden Gate (1937), the suspension bridge as the long crossing of its century. Beyond engineering, it made the engineer’s structure acceptable as a monument, the line Mumford drew toward modern architecture.
Lu Xun · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
The field is Chinese literature of the twentieth century, and the intrinsic force is the reorganisation of it: the book showed that the vernacular could carry a literature of the first rank and that the short story could be the instrument of a nation’s examination of itself, and nearly every possibility of modern Chinese fiction, the satire of the village, the native soil story, the intellectual’s confession, the ironic narrator, is here in germ. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the native soil fiction of the 1920s took its village from “My Old Home” and “Storm in a Teacup”; Ah Q and 阿Q精神 entered the language as names for a habit of mind; Mo Yan and Yu Hua have named Lu Xun as the source they write against and from; in Japan Takeuchi Yoshimi built a reading of modernity on him, and Ōe Kenzaburō called him a master. The field is one language’s, which is why the figure stops at 9.1.
Jacopo Barozzi da Vignola and Giacomo della Porta · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
The field is the Catholic church of the later sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, in Rome, Europe and the mission lands. The intrinsic force is a synthesis rather than a first stroke: the single-nave church existed at Mantua, and the Gesù made it the answer to a new liturgical demand and gave it canonical proportions, chapels and light; della Porta’s front, two orders joined by scrolls on Alberti’s precedent at Santa Maria Novella, fixed a type; Gaulli’s vault reorganised ceiling painting. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Sant’Ignazio in Rome, Saint Michael in Munich, Saints Peter and Paul in Kraków, and churches across Europe, the Americas and Asia followed the plan or the front or both, and the scrolled front of two storeys became the commonest church front of the Catholic world for two centuries. Held below the top because the reach was carried by an order’s network as much as by the building.
Donato Bramante · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
The field is Roman and Italian architecture at the start of the sixteenth century, and the European classical tradition that came from it. The intrinsic force: it fixes the High Renaissance at its outset, the ancient order and the centralised domed plan made the authoritative language of building, and it opens Bramante’s Roman work, Saint Peter’s among it; a real reorganisation of possibility, though small in body. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: immediate and long. Serlio and Palladio made it a canonical model in print, Palladio setting it beside the ancients. The domed drum ringed by a colonnade runs through Wren’s dome at Saint Paul’s, Soufflot’s Sainte-Geneviève in Paris, Gibbs’s Radcliffe Camera, Hawksmoor’s Mausoleum at Castle Howard and the dome of the Capitol in Washington, and the round garden temple and memorial of three centuries follow it. Held from the top because the force is a synthesis on a small scale.
Bureau of Reclamation, with Gordon Kaufmann · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
The field is the large dam and the public work of its century, in America first and then the world. The intrinsic force: the dam made the high concrete dam possible at the scale of a river system, with methods of placing and cooling mass concrete that became standard, and it showed that infrastructure could be made a national monument by leaving it bare. Its form was not new, which holds it below the top, and the movement against large dams later argued with this type, a delayed counter-reach that belongs to the record. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Grand Coulee and the Bureau’s later dams; the big-dam era across the world, carried abroad by the Bureau’s own engineers, to Aswan and the great dams of Asia; public works treated as architecture, as on the Tennessee Valley Authority’s dams; and the American Southwest remade on its water and power.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
Intrinsic force: the book reorganised what a novel could be about, the formation of a self in a society, told as process, with the hero’s errors as the plot. The field is the European novel of its century, and few works of the period moved it more. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it is the founding work of the Bildungsroman, a term coined in its wake by Morgenstern and fixed by Dilthey; the German line runs through Novalis’s Heinrich von Ofterdingen, written against it, Stifter’s Der Nachsommer, Keller’s Der grüne Heinrich and Mann’s Der Zauberberg; Carlyle’s translation carried it into English, where it bears on Sartor Resartus and on the novels of formation to Joyce’s Portrait; Flaubert’s L’Éducation sentimentale is its negation; and Mignon alone fed Schubert, Schumann, Wolf and Thomas’s opera.
Umayyad, under al-Walid I · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Intrinsic force: the building fixed the monumental congregational mosque. Enclosure, courtyard ringed by porticoes, a broad hall of aisles parallel to the qibla, an axial transept with a dome before the mihrab, tower minarets: before it there was no such type at this scale. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: within its own field, Islamic building in Syria and the lands west of it, the plan was answered directly at Aleppo; the square tower minaret of Syria passed to North Africa and al-Andalus; the mosque was the standard against which Umayyad Córdoba measured itself; and the transept leading to the mihrab recurs across the western Islamic world. The reach is broad and continuous within one tradition. It did not redirect several traditions at once, and it shares the founding of Umayyad architecture with the Dome of the Rock.
David Bowie · Music
8.5 · Tier IV
The contest is with the rock album as a vehicle of song and persona, and with the singer’s own previous records. The intrinsic force is high: the record joined a funk rhythm section, treated drums and synthesiser to the European electronic and ambient languages inside a mainstream rock record, and showed that the rock album could leave the song for long stretches and keep its public. Kraftwerk and Eno had the languages; the reorganisation was in carrying them into rock’s centre. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Joy Division first named themselves Warsaw after the eighth track, the processed drum became a sound of the next decade, Glass carried it into the concert hall, and later left turns by established bands were measured against it.
Henri Matisse · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
Intrinsic force is a real reorganisation of possibility. The canvas made Fauve colour a means for large, composed, figurative painting, not only a method for sketches, and set out the decorative ideal of colour, contour and flat ground that runs through Matisse’s career to the cut-outs and through much of the century’s painting after him. The discount is for hiddenness: from the 1920s the canvas was at Merion, in a foundation that did not lend, and its later reach ran more through Dance and his other work than through itself. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the ring of dancers became Dance for Shchukin; Picasso saw the canvas in the Steins’ rooms, and Les Demoiselles d’Avignon is widely read as his answer; Derain’s Golden Age and the Fauve bathers followed.
The Beatles · Music
8.4 · Tier IV
The field is the album of the 1960s, the most contested decade the popular album has had. The intrinsic force is large: the record helped turn the pop LP from a set of singles and covers into a work heard as one, of original songs with a common sound and an inward lyric, and carried the sitar into the pop mainstream. Little was invented here; Dylan had the lyric turn, and others reached the album idea in the same months. The force is in doing it at the centre of the field. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the group’s next records built on it, Norwegian Wood opened a vogue for Indian instruments in Western pop, and the groups of 1966 turned to the album as the unit, though the larger reorganisation came on the records that followed.
Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers with Gianfranco Franchini · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Standing since 1977, so force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force is a reorganisation of possibility: the cultural building turned from temple to open, serviced frame; structure and services made the expressive matter of architecture; the public building given to a square and to movement. Part of that force is the built realisation of others’ drawings, which holds it below the top. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: high-tech as a movement runs from here, to Rogers’s Lloyd’s building in London (1986) and Foster’s Hongkong and Shanghai Bank (1986), with Arup and Rice the engineers of such work; the cultural building as urban event, the line through the grands projets of the 1980s to Bilbao, begins here; and the French state’s habit of making its museums by open competition was set by it. The style has receded; the type has not.
Kraftwerk · Music
8.4 · Tier IV
The field is the popular music of the 1970s, rock, funk and disco, in Europe and America. The intrinsic force is high: the record showed that a pop album could be made of machine rhythm and synthetic timbre and still be lyrical, that repetition could carry a whole side, and that the electronic could be humane and European rather than novelty. Part of that force was already in Autobahn, and is discounted. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Afrika Bambaataa and the Soulsonic Force’s Planet Rock (1982) took the title track’s melody over the rhythm of the band’s later Numbers, and from it came electro and a branch of hip hop; Bowie answered with V-2 Schneider on “Heroes” (1977); the synthesiser-pop generation took the record as a model. Part of the reach belongs to the band’s whole run.
Frank Gehry · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Standing since 1997, it is scored on force and reach together. The force is a real reorganisation of possibility: the building showed that free curved form could be designed, documented, priced and built at public scale through one continuous digital chain from model to fabrication, and the computed, curved architecture of the decades since stands on ground it proved. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: very wide, in architecture and far outside it. The term “Bilbao effect” entered urban policy, cities across the world commissioned signature cultural buildings hoping to repeat it, and the museum became the reference case, for and against, in every debate on architecture and regeneration since. Much of that reach is imitation and policy, and much of the imitation failed.
Jasper Johns · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
Published, so force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force: the painting reorganised what a painting could be, a given image rather than an invented one, the sign as subject, a picture coextensive with its support, the hand present but impersonal; it closed the authority of the gesture in New York as surely as any single canvas could. The discount: the reach belongs to the flags, targets and numbers together, shown at Leo Castelli’s gallery in 1958, and is shared with Rauschenberg’s combines of the same years. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Stella’s black paintings of 1958 to 1959 took from the flags the stripe and the deductive relation of image to edge, and through Stella the line runs to Minimalism and the shaped canvas; Pop took the given image and the commonplace sign, in Warhol, Lichtenstein and Oldenburg; Conceptual art took the question of what an object is.
Danny Boyle · Film
8.3 · Tier IV
The field is the cinema of the 2000s. The film’s force lies in a combination made to hold: the running infected, the emptied capital and consumer video in a commercial feature. None was invented here, and what moved was one genre’s creature and look rather than what film can do; that limit stands. Together they changed how a film of plague could look and move. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the fast infected became the genre’s norm, in the Dawn of the Dead remake of 2004, in World War Z and in much game and television design; the decade’s revival of the genre, Shaun of the Dead and The Walking Dead among it, is commonly dated from it; and after the Dogme films, it widened what digital cameras were thought fit for.
William Shakespeare · Literature
9.1 · Tier V
The field is English drama of the 1600s. The force: tragedy moved from the court and the state into a marriage and a bedroom without loss of height, and the villain made the play’s author, who stages the action to an audience he has made complicit. It is held below Hamlet and King Lear, which redirected tragedy itself; this play redirected where tragedy could be set. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the intelligent, confiding villain who stages the action runs on through the tragedy after it; Rossini (1816) and Verdi and Boito (1887) made it opera; Orson Welles filmed it (1951); Ira Aldridge in the nineteenth century and Paul Robeson in the twentieth made the role a site of contest; Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North (1966) answers it; and “the green-eyed monster” is in the language.
Leo Tolstoy · Literature
9.0 · Tier V
The field is Russian prose of the nineteenth century, and European fiction of the 1880s beyond it. The intrinsic force is great: the book made the dying of an ordinary man, rendered from inside his body and his consciousness, a subject of the highest art, and made the novella its form; satire and a metaphysical interior are joined in one short book, and what a death in fiction could be was reorganised. Held below the top because the reach runs as much through ethics and medicine as through the novel, and because Tolstoy’s own novels moved the Russian field further. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Heidegger’s footnote in Sein und Zeit (1927); Kurosawa’s Ikiru (1952), built on it; and its long use in the teaching of medicine and of care for the dying.
Ralph Ellison · Literature
9.0 · Tier V
The field is the American novel of the 1950s. The intrinsic force: the book moved the Black American novel out of naturalist protest into the full range of modernism, comic, mythic and surreal, and showed that the condition of a Black man in America could be the subject of the most ambitious American novel of its decade without being reduced to a case. Held below the higher figures because its reach outside the United States is narrower than Faulkner’s, and its method was turned, not founded. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the National Book Award for Fiction in 1953; a title that passed into ordinary speech for the social invisibility of any group; and later African American fiction, Toni Morrison, Charles Johnson, Ishmael Reed in parody, Colson Whitehead and Paul Beatty, writing in its line or against it.
James Joyce · Literature
9.0 · Tier V
The field is the short story in English, and within it Irish fiction. The intrinsic force is a reorganisation of what a short story could be: one action or state, given without comment, turning on a perception and closing before resolution, in a narration shaped by its characters’ speech; and a book of stories made one work by a city and the stages of a life. Held below the top because Chekhov shares the credit, because the reach was delayed, the book having sold poorly, and because much of it ran through Ulysses. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the Irish story after it, in Frank O’Connor, Seán Ó Faoláin, Mary Lavin, John McGahern and William Trevor, works in its light and against it; the linked book of stories follows within a decade, in Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio (1919) and Hemingway’s In Our Time (1925), though direct debt is argued, not documented; and the quiet ending on a recognition became the common form of the twentieth-century literary story.
Anonymous · Architecture
9.0 · Tier V
Standing for some thirteen centuries, so force and reach are scored together, in the shrine’s own tradition. The intrinsic force is a reorganisation of what a permanent sacred building could be: permanence held by recurrence. It fixed the canonical form of native sacred architecture in Japan. Reach stands below force: most Japanese shrines follow other styles, the nagare style above all, so the form was revered more than copied, and much of its reach abroad came through a modernist reading the shrine did not offer. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the shinmei style spread to shrines across Japan; renewal on a cycle is practised at other great shrines in their own forms; from Taut and Gropius to Tange, Ise and Katsura became the native proof of modern principles; and in heritage theory it changed what authenticity can mean.
Alfred Hitchcock · Film
9.0 · Tier V
Released in 1958, so force and reach are scored together. The force: the film turned the studio thriller into erotic tragedy, made the spectator’s identification its subject, and gave cinema a device, the track-out, zoom-in shot that still carries its name. The redirection came late, through the critics and then the filmmakers, and is credited and discounted. Held at the figure because the reach is diffuse: the film became a pattern for others to quote, not the redirection of a genre or an industry. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Chris Marker’s La Jetée (1962) restages the redwood trunk; Brian De Palma remade its plot in Obsession (1976) and its premise in Body Double (1984); Spielberg used the shot in Jaws (1975), and it became standard grammar; Lynch’s Mulholland Drive (2001) and Petzold’s Phoenix (2014) are open heirs.
Fan Kuan · Visual art
9.0 · Tier V
Force and reach are scored together, within the work’s own field, Chinese monumental landscape, and the force stands above the reach. The painting fixes the Northern Song host-mountain composition at its fullest: one frontal massif over a human foreground, cut off by mist. Guo Ruoxu set Fan Kuan beside Li Cheng and Guan Tong as a model for a hundred generations. The discount: before the twentieth century the reach ran mostly through “Fan Kuan” as a style, while this scroll sat in collections few could see. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Guo Xi’s complaint that Guanzhong painters copied Fan Kuan alone, Li Tang’s Wind in Pines (1124), the Yuan, Ming and Qing revivals of the manner, and the scroll’s modern standing as the emblem of Chinese painting.
Attar · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
The field is Persian poetry of the twelfth century and, within it, the Sufi didactic masnavī, then barely two generations old. Its intrinsic force: the poem made the mystical masnavī a narrative of the soul’s journey, with a single plot and an ending that is its argument, which Sanāʾī’s anthology of teaching had not been. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Rumi, by every account, revered ʿAṭṭār and built his Masnavī in the same metre and the same method of tale and gloss; Jāmī and the Timurid poets drew on it; Navāʾī answered it in Chagatai with his Lisān al-ṭayr (1499); it was adapted in Turkish, and copied in illustrated manuscripts; in Europe came Garcin de Tassy (1863), FitzGerald, and the stage version of Peter Brook and Jean-Claude Carrière (1979). Held below the top because in its own tradition Rumi’s Masnavī outgrew it.
Aeschylus · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
The field was Attic tragedy of the fifth century and the poetry of the gods behind it, Hesiod above all. The intrinsic force is high: the play remade a minor theodicy into a drama of power and conscience, and established that a tragedy could be made of resistance alone, without action. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: within antiquity it is modest and hard to trace; the reach is delayed and enormous. The Romantic Prometheus comes out of this text: Goethe’s poem (1774), Byron’s “Prometheus” (1816), Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound (1820), written as an answer to it, Mary Shelley’s subtitle, and Marx’s foreword to his dissertation, which quotes the play’s hatred of all the gods. Delayed reach is credited and discounted, and much of it is the myth’s rather than the play’s form.
Plato · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
The field is Greek prose and philosophy of the fourth century BC, and the thought of Europe after it. The force is very high: it founds the theory of rhetoric as the leading of souls, sets out collection and division as the method of dialectic (265d to 266b), and is the first sustained argument about what writing does to the mind. Achieved reach is scored with it: Aristotle’s Rhetoric answers its demand for a rhetoric grounded in the hearer’s soul; Mann gives Aschenbach’s fevered thoughts in Death in Venice as Socrates instructing Phaedrus under the plane; the critique of writing is a founding text for media theory and deconstruction. What holds it there is that on love its reach is shared with the Symposium and often gives way to it, on rhetoric much of it runs through Aristotle, and its later fame lies where the size of the scholarship can stand in for reach.
Fyodor Dostoevsky · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
The field is the Russian novel of the 1870s and, as Russian fiction entered it, the European. The force: the book made the political novel a vehicle of metaphysics, showed that terrorism and conspiracy could be the matter of tragedy rather than of melodrama or tract, and gave the novel of ideas the figure of the idea that possesses its holder. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it stands at the head of the twentieth century’s novel of revolution and terror, which answered it in agreement or against it, in Conrad’s Under Western Eyes and The Secret Agent, Bely’s Petersburg, Camus’s The Just Assassins and his adaptation, and the political fiction after the Russian Revolution that read it as the book which had seen it coming. Held below the top because the larger reorganisation of Dostoevsky’s novel was made in Crime and Punishment and The Idiot before it and The Brothers Karamazov after; this book applies that form to politics.
Dante Alighieri · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
The field is Italian literature and, through it, the European lyric. The force is a new kind of book: a sequence of lyrics made into the history of a soul. The Commedia names its author as the one who drew forth “le nove rime” (the new rhymes, Purg. XXIV), beginning with Donne ch’avete. Held from the top because much of its reach runs through the Commedia and through Petrarch; delayed influence is credited and discounted, and the book was not printed until 1576. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Boccaccio’s transcription and his life of Dante; Petrarch’s Rerum vulgarium fragmenta, which made a lyric sequence of one life and one dead beloved the dominant form of the European lyric for three centuries; and the nineteenth-century revival, in Rossetti’s translation (1861) and paintings, Charles Eliot Norton’s translation (1867) and T. S. Eliot’s Dante (1929).
Samuel Beckett · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
The field is the French novel at mid-century and, through Beckett’s English, the novel in English. The intrinsic force is very high: the book found the limit of the novel, what remains when everything but a voice is taken away, and after it fiction had to know the limit was there; every later novel of pure voice is measured against it. Two things hold the axis here. Beckett’s reach runs at least as much through Waiting for Godot as through the trilogy, and none of the play’s is credited to this book; and the book is a terminus few could follow, so its influence works as a limit more than as a model, diffuse and hard to trace. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: published by the house of Robbe-Grillet and Sarraute, it stood beside the new novel without being of it; it entered thought through Blanchot; J. M. Coetzee wrote his doctorate on Beckett’s English fiction; and Luciano Berio set passages of it in the third movement of Sinfonia (1968 to 1969).
William Shakespeare · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
The field is English drama of the 1600s and, for reach, European and world literature after. The intrinsic force is real but bounded: the play perfects the romance and fuses the court masque into public drama, yet it culminates a mode rather than founding one, and did not reorganise drama as Hamlet reorganised tragedy. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the Dryden and Davenant adaptation, The Enchanted Island (1667), was among the most played works of the Restoration; Browning’s “Caliban upon Setebos” and Auden’s The Sea and the Mirror answer it; from Renan’s Caliban (1878) and Rodó’s Ariel (1900) through Lamming, Césaire and Retamar, Caliban and Ariel became the names of a continent’s argument with itself; and Huxley took his title from Miranda.
Emily Dickinson · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
The field is poetry in English of the nineteenth century, and with it the American lyric that begins there. The intrinsic force is very great: with Whitman she made one of the two founding reorganisations of American poetry, and hers showed that the short lyric could carry metaphysical and psychological argument at full pressure in a borrowed hymn metre, with the line and the mark of punctuation themselves made meaning. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: nothing in her lifetime; from 1890 a large readership for the regularised poems; Amy Lowell and the Imagists claiming her; Hart Crane’s sonnet addressed to her; Copland’s twelve settings (1950); Paul Celan’s German; her compression in Moore, Bishop and Plath, and in Rich and Howe; and an editorial history, from Johnson to Franklin to the facsimiles, that changed how poets’ manuscripts are edited. The poems as written reached the field only in 1955, and the century’s great redirection of poetry ran through free verse rather than the quatrain; both are discounted.
Anton Chekhov · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
The field is Russian and European drama at the turn of the century. The force: with the three plays before it, a reorganisation of what drama could do, by action through indirection, an ensemble without a protagonist, subtext and pause carrying what speech withholds, and tragicomedy as a native register. This play is that method at its most complete and most widely performed. Held below the top because the force is shared with The Seagull, Uncle Vanya and Three Sisters, and the first rupture was The Seagull’s. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Shaw subtitled Heartbreak House (1919) a fantasia in the Russian manner on English themes and named Chekhov in its preface, and the ensemble acting of the Moscow Art Theatre, with Stanislavsky’s system, grew in part from staging him.
Samuel Beckett · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
The field is the novel in French and in English of the mid twentieth century. The force is a reorganisation of what a narrative voice can be: a teller who does not know, who invents and annuls, whose authority is the subject of the novel; with it the book closes the road that ran from realism through Joyce. What holds the axis here is that the reach runs through the trilogy and through Beckett’s name, much of it carried by Godot and by L’Innommable, so this book’s share is an estimate; and the voice it opened is now widely imitated as a manner without its stake. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the Minuit list built around it, and the new novel that followed, Robbe-Grillet, Pinget, Simon and Sarraute, took Beckett as forerunner; Bernhard’s monologue novels, Coetzee, who wrote his doctoral thesis on Beckett’s prose, Auster, Kelman and Banville descend from the trilogy.
Thomas Pynchon · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
The field is the postwar novel in English, and the book reorganised what it could hold after Joyce, taking the war, applied science, corporate power and the counterculture into one encyclopedic structure. Within three years Edward Mendelson’s essay on encyclopedic narrative (1976) set it in the line of Dante, Rabelais, Cervantes, Goethe, Melville and Joyce. The reach was immediate, not delayed: it reached its field at once and redirected the systems novel within a decade, and no discount applies. What holds it there, and not higher, is that its reach has run chiefly through one lineage of the novel, rather than reorganising the whole field as Ulysses did. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the systems novel of the following half century descends from it, cyberpunk took up its paranoid technological sublime, and “Pynchonian” names a mode.
Anonymous · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
The field is Japanese literature of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the age of the warrior houses, with the court tradition of The Tale of Genji and the waka anthologies as the standing measure. The force: it made the war tale into high literature, fixed its form, its language and its ethic of pathos, and gave the Japanese imagination its picture of the warrior in defeat. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the Taiheiki follows its model; a large part of Zeami’s warrior plays take their matter from it (Atsumori, Tadanori, Kiyotsune, Sanemori, Yashima); kōwaka, jōruri and kabuki rework its episodes; and modern fiction, film and the schoolroom keep it at work. Within its language only Genji reaches as wide. Held below the top because its reach beyond its language is narrow, and part of its force is the gathering of a form others began.
Bertolt Brecht · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
The field is the German drama of the twentieth century and, through the Berliner Ensemble, the theatre of the world. The force: the play is the epic theatre’s demonstration that its method could carry a play of full tragic size, and it is the work by which that method is most often known. Held where it is because much of the reach belongs to Brecht’s method and company as a whole, of which this play is the flagship rather than the only carrier. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the Berlin production of January 1949 founded the Berliner Ensemble; its guest performances in Paris and in London in 1956 changed the French stage, through Planchon and Barthes, and the British, through the generation of Edward Bond, John Arden and later Caryl Churchill; and the play has been made new by many hands, among them Tony Kushner’s version for Meryl Streep in New York in 2006.
Rogier van der Weyden · Visual art
8.9 · Tier IV
Published, so force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force: the panel made emotion, particularised in each face, the subject of Netherlandish painting, and showed that the new oil technique could carry pathos as fully as it carried light and surface. It set a mode beside van Eyck’s: not the world observed but grief embodied. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: copied within a decade in the Edelheer triptych of 1443 in St Peter’s, Leuven; reproduced and adapted through the century in the Netherlands, Germany and Spain; collected by Mary of Hungary and Philip II; its figures and motifs taken up by Bouts, Memling and the painters of Castile, and by Netherlandish carvers. Held below the top because its reach, wide in its century, did not reorganise painting’s possibilities for later centuries in the same measure.
John Coltrane · Music
8.9 · Tier IV
The field is jazz, and the contest is with the jazz record as an evening’s tunes and with the music’s place as entertainment. The force is real: the record made the extended devotional work a form a working band could carry, and set the modal quartet’s intensity to a declared spiritual purpose. Its elements were the quartet’s own, and that holds the force from the top. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it founded the line called spiritual jazz, through Pharoah Sanders and Alice Coltrane; it crossed into rock with Santana and McLaughlin’s version of 1973; it became for musicians the type of the jazz album as a single statement; and its title entered other musicians’ songs. Kind of Blue, which changed what improvisation is built on, reached further.
Gustave Flaubert · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
The field is the French novel of the nineteenth century and, through it, the European novel. The intrinsic force is high: the book reorganised what a novel could be about, time passing, a life without shape, history as the inattentive live it, and how a novel could move, by ellipsis and juxtaposition rather than plot. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the reach is real and was delayed. The book failed on publication, and its influence came through the novelists who made it a model, Proust in his novel of time, Joyce, and later the nouveau roman in its suspicion of plot. Delayed reach is credited and discounted. It is held below the kind of reach that made the novel of free indirect style a norm, and below the top, because its direct imitators are few: its pressure is felt as a permission more than a school.
Vladimir Nabokov · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
The field is the twentieth-century novel in English and the European novel it drew on. The force is a reorganisation of what the novel could do with a monstrous narrator: it proved that the most seductive voice in a book can be the case against itself, and made the reader’s aesthetic pleasure the matter on trial. Its reach in narrative form is narrower than that of the modernist works that rebuilt the novel itself, and that holds it below the top. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the eloquent unreliable narrator after 1955 descends in large part from Humbert, beginning with Nabokov’s own Pale Fire (1962); its American publication in 1958, with the trials over Lady Chatterley’s Lover and Tropic of Cancer soon after, belongs to the change in what Anglophone publishing could print; and its title entered the language.
Albrecht Dürer · Visual art
8.8 · Tier IV
The intrinsic force: the print reorganised what an engraving could be, an autonomous image of thought equal to painting in ambition, and what melancholy could mean in images. With the other two Meisterstiche it set the summit of the burin, a command northern engravers long measured themselves against. It pressed less on painting, the centre of its field, than on prints and ideas, and that holds it at 9.0. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the source image of melancholy genius for Romantic and later culture; the colossal Melencolia that ends James Thomson’s The City of Dreadful Night; the magic square Thomas Mann gives Adrian Leverkühn in Doctor Faustus; and Panofsky’s work on the print, which helped found iconology.
Li Bai · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
The field is Chinese poetry of the eighth century, the High Tang, and the Chinese tradition after it. The force: he made the poet’s freed self, transported, ironical and unbowed, a possibility of the lyric, fused Daoist transcendence with the drinking song, and brought the quatrain to a height the tradition sets beside Wang Changling’s and no higher. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: with Du Fu he is one of the two names by which Chinese poetry is measured, the immortal of poetry to Du Fu’s sage; the line of bold and unrestrained verse through Su Shi runs from him; he is read in the kanshi of Japan and in Korea and Vietnam; and through Fenollosa’s notes, Pound’s Cathay (1915), half of it his, helped make English free verse. Held a step down because his manner was inimitable and few could build on it; later Chinese poets learned their practice from Du Fu.
Albert Camus · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
The field is the French and European novel of the twentieth century. The force is high: the book showed that a novel could render a consciousness from outside and make the refusal of interiority its moral subject, and that a short, plain récit could carry a philosophy without stating it until its last pages. Part of that force is a transfer from American prose, and it is discounted for that. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it is among the widest of any novel of its century, and it was immediate. The book set the type of the existential novel and of the outsider as a figure; Barthes’s degree zero made it the reference point of the neutral style that the nouveau roman would argue with; and it is still answered by novels, as in Daoud’s, and taken up by film, as in Visconti’s of 1967, and by song.
Olivier Messiaen · Music
8.8 · Tier IV
Intrinsic force and achieved reach are scored together. The work and its preface set out a rhythmic language, and in the first movement ran rhythm and harmony as separate cycles: parametric thinking before the word, a reorganisation of what a European composer could take rhythm to be. It made birdsong a material and a sacred slow movement of a new type. Discounted because much of the reach runs through the teacher and his later works. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: through Messiaen’s Conservatoire class from 1941 the rhythmic thinking passed to Boulez, Stockhausen and Xenakis; the Liturgie’s method is the seed of Mode de valeurs et d’intensités (1949); and the combination became an ensemble type, with Tashi formed around the work in 1973.
Umayyad, under Abd al-Rahman I · Architecture
8.8 · Tier IV
Force and reach are scored together, in the building’s own tradition and region: the Islamic building of al-Andalus and the Maghreb, and the Christian building of Iberia that answered it. The intrinsic force is a reorganisation of the western Islamic mosque. The two-tier arcade, the alternating voussoir, the horseshoe arch in its rectangular frame, the lobed and interlaced arch and the ribbed dome were each made canonical here, and the mihrab chamber with its gold became the model of the western mihrab. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Madinat al-Zahra in the same decades; the mosque of Bab al-Mardum at Toledo; the Aljafería at Zaragoza; the Almohad mosques of Tinmal, Marrakech and Seville; ribbed domes at Torres del Río and Almazán; and the Nasrid Alhambra, at the end of the line.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart · Music
8.8 · Tier IV
Intrinsic force and achieved reach are scored together. The force is real: the work showed that German, sung and spoken, in a popular theatre, could hold the whole range of opera, and it gave German opera its founding model of the serious and the comic in one drama, with the sacred brought onto the stage without liturgy. It is less a reorganisation of operatic means than Don Giovanni or Wagner. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the line runs through Beethoven’s Fidelio, a Singspiel with spoken dialogue and an ending in light; Weber’s Der Freischütz, of forest, night and trial; Wagner’s Parsifal, a brotherhood, a temple and a trial; and Strauss’s Die Frau ohne Schatten (1919), consciously its successor. Goethe and Schikaneder both wrote sequels.
Titian · Visual art
8.8 · Tier IV
On view since 1518, so force and reach are scored together. The force: in one work it ended the Bellinian altarpiece as the Venetian norm and made colour and light the means of the monumental figure, a reorganisation of what was possible in Venice and an answer to Rome on equal terms. The reach runs first through the same church and the same painter, then through the city, then through the altar of the vision on a cloud across Catholic Europe. Correggio’s dome at Parma is contemporary and independent, and is not counted. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Titian’s own Pesaro Madonna, a few metres away, which carries the same revolution into the sacred assembly itself; Tintoretto and Veronese, heirs of the dynamic altar; Annibale Carracci’s Assumption in the Cerasi Chapel (1600–1601); and Rubens’s Assumptions for Antwerp.
Radiohead · Music
8.8 · Tier IV
The contest is with rock’s promise of transcendence through volume. Its precursors are answered on consolation: the record declines Floyd’s release, the Heads’ irony and Bowie’s transformation, and offers accuracy in their place. The force reassembled what existed rather than inventing it, joining the guitar band to art-rock length and sequence, electronic texture and avant-garde strings; it reorganised what a mainstream band was allowed to carry, not the art, and that holds the axis short of the top. The reach carries it to its figure. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: British guitar music after 1997 turned from Britpop toward falsetto melancholy, the record became the measure of the ambitious rock album for a decade, and its reach crossed into jazz and reggae.
Louis-Ferdinand Céline · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
The field is the French novel of the twentieth century and, through translation, the Western novel after 1932. The intrinsic force is high: the book reorganised what narrative French could be made of, showing that the spoken language could carry a full novel of the world without condescension, and it set the tone of the modern anti-war and anti-colonial novel, the victim who refuses heroism. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Queneau’s project of a spoken French; Sartre’s La Nausée (1938), whose epigraph is drawn from Céline’s play L’Église; Henry Miller, who acknowledged him; the Beats, Kerouac and Burroughs among them; Joseph Heller, who credited the book behind Catch-22; Bukowski; and later French writers down to Houellebecq. Held a step below the highest figures because part of the influence passes through Céline’s later prose rather than this book alone, and because the author’s politics have shadowed the reception.
Henry Fielding · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
The field is English prose fiction of the eighteenth century, and the European novel as it took form. The force is a reorganisation of what the new form could be: with Richardson’s, Fielding’s is one of the two founding models of the English novel, with its omniscient and commenting narrator, its plot of total design, a whole society across the classes from gamekeeper to peer, and comedy as a means of moral knowledge. Held below the top because the Richardsonian line of inwardness proved the stronger in the European novel after it, and Cervantes made the larger rupture before it. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Smollett and Sterne answered it at once, Sterne by turning its narrator into a game in Tristram Shandy; Scott called Fielding the father of the English novel; Thackeray measured his own constraints against it in the preface to Pendennis; Dickens’s David Copperfield reads it as a boy; and George Eliot’s narrator descends from its narrator.
Hans Scharoun · Architecture
8.7 · Tier IV
Scored on intrinsic force and achieved reach together, in the field of the concert hall and of postwar European architecture. The intrinsic force is a real reorganisation of possibility: the first large concert hall built round the music, its plan and section derived from listening and seeing rather than from a type. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: delayed by some two decades, then near total in its type. From the 1980s the surround or vineyard hall became the norm for major new halls, among them Suntory Hall in Tokyo (1986), Walt Disney Concert Hall (2003), the Danish radio’s concert hall in Copenhagen, the Philharmonie de Paris and the Elbphilharmonie (2017). The shoebox persists beside it, but every new hall answers the question Berlin posed. Beyond the concert hall the reach is narrower: Scharoun’s organic, asymmetric modernism did not redirect the mainstream, though it returned in later free-form building. The delay is credited and discounted.
Théodore Géricault · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
Published, so intrinsic force and achieved reach are scored together, in French painting between David’s school and Romanticism. The intrinsic force is a reorganisation: a history painting could be made of a news event, of victims rather than actors, of a public wrong, at the full scale of the genre, with the suffering body as its subject and no consolation offered. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Delacroix, who knew the picture in the making, answered it in The Barque of Dante (1822) and The Massacres at Chios (1824); French Romanticism dates its arrival from it; Courbet’s monumental scenes of ordinary men and the habit of giving the disaster of the day the altarpiece’s scale run back to it; and it became the popular type of the catastrophe picture, down to the Pogues’ Rum Sodomy and the Lash (1985). Discounted because the reach is of a programme as much as a manner, and the painter died at thirty-two, before he could lead a school.
Seljuk and later builders · Architecture
8.7 · Tier IV
The intrinsic force: the congregational mosque reorganised round a court of four iwans with a domed sanctuary on the qibla axis, and two dome chambers that are statements in brick of structure and geometry. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the plan became the governing type of the Iranian congregational mosque for eight centuries, carried through the Ilkhanid, Timurid and Safavid mosques of Iran and Central Asia, at Yazd, Herat and Samarkand and in the Shah Mosque of the same city, and the domed chamber became the standard sanctuary. The discount: whether Isfahan was the first four-iwan mosque or the most prominent early one is uncertain, and the scheme had a separate life in madrasas.
Vittorio De Sica · Film
8.7 · Tier IV
Released in 1948, so force and reach are scored together, in the cinema of the 1940s. The force: with Rome, Open City it is the defining work of the movement that showed what narrative film could do without, actors, sets, plot and resolution; Rossellini’s share is discounted. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: first in the first Sight and Sound critics’ poll (1952); Satyajit Ray’s account that seeing it in 1950 decided him to make Pather Panchali with non-professionals on location; the Indian parallel cinema, the Iranian cinema of Kiarostami, Panahi and Majidi, Cinema Novo, Ken Loach, the Dardenne brothers; Beijing Bicycle (2001), built on its premise. Few films of its decade moved more of world cinema.
John Donne · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
The field is the English lyric of the 1590s to the 1630s, and behind it the European Petrarchan lyric. Intrinsic force is high: a real reorganisation of what an English lyric could be, a speaking mind arguing in a made stanza with figures drawn from all knowledge. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: within a generation the manner had a school, Herbert carried it into the sacred lyric, and Carew, King, Cowley, Crashaw, Vaughan and Marvell followed, Carew’s elegy crowning Donne king of “The universal monarchy of wit”. Then the Restoration turned to Jonson’s line and to Dryden’s, and the influence slept for most of a century. Its second reach came through Grierson and Eliot, and it shaped modernist poetics and the whole method of the New Criticism. Delayed influence is credited and discounted: the eighteenth-century eclipse, and a succession in English verse after 1660 that ran through Jonson more than Donne, hold the axis at 9.0.
Auguste Rodin · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
Shown in 1898, so intrinsic force and achieved reach are scored together, in the field of European sculpture of the 1890s and the decades after. Intrinsic force: a reorganisation of what a public statue could be, from description to presence, from finish to the evident hand, from likeness to expressive mass. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the plaster drew artists to Meudon; Steichen’s photographs of 1908 made it an image of modernity before any bronze existed; the line through the expressive and reduced figure runs to Brancusi, who worked briefly in Rodin’s studio, to Lehmbruck, to Matisse’s sculpture and to Giacometti’s tall figures; and the crisis of the monument, which this work announced, is a theme of the century. Discounted because the reach was partly delayed, with no bronze until 1939, and because some of it belongs to Rodin’s practice as a whole rather than to this figure.
Wassily Kandinsky · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
Published, so force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force: with Composition VI of the same year, this is the fullest statement of the first abstract painting, a canvas that claims for non-representational painting the scale, ambition and subject of the history painting, and so reorganised what a large painting could be. The discount is on reach. What redirected the field was Kandinsky’s practice and above all his writing, his teaching and the works collected in the West; this canvas was in Moscow from early on, and its own reach is delayed and borrowed. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: carried with the oeuvre, On the Spiritual in Art and the Blaue Reiter Almanac, the Bauhaus from 1922, lyrical abstraction, the collection on which the Guggenheim was founded and through it Gorky and the Abstract Expressionists, and the musical and spiritual claim for abstract art.
Titian · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
On view in princely and then public collections for nearly five centuries, so force and reach are scored together, and the reach stands above the force. The force: it reorganised the reclining nude from an idyll into an address, a body in a room that returns the viewer’s look. The pose was Giorgione’s, which holds the force below the top. Reach is credited only where the line runs through the waking gaze and the interior, and there it is unbroken. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Titian’s own Danaë pictures and Venus with an Organist series; Goya’s Maja desnuda and Ingres’s odalisques in its line; Manet’s Olympia (1863), built on it, pose, bed, hand and servant; and, through Olympia, the founding argument of modern painting.
Horace · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
The field is Latin poetry of the late Republic and the Augustan age, entered from the Greek lyric past. The intrinsic force: the odes made Latin lyric exist as a sustained art and established the ode as a form at once reflective, civic and private, a reorganisation of possibility rather than an accent. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: in Latin few followed at his height, and the reach is in what came after, Prudentius and the Christian hymn taking his metres, then Petrarch, the Neo-Latin poets, Ronsard and the Pléiade, Jonson, Marvell’s “Horatian Ode”, Milton’s version of 1.5, Klopstock and Hölderlin, Leopardi, Carducci’s Odi barbare, Housman and Auden; and the phrases entered European speech. Discounted because much of that reach came late and through imitation of a manner.
Virginia Woolf · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
The field is English prose and criticism of the twentieth century. The intrinsic force: the book reorganised the question of literary history, from who wrote well to who could write at all and under what conditions, and it joined a materialist account of art to a reading of form: the sentence, the novel’s plasticity for women, the anger that bends a page of Jane Eyre. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it became the founding text of feminist literary criticism in English, read and argued by name by Showalter, by Gilbert and Gubar, by Moi and by Walker; Shakespeare’s sister, the room of one’s own and the looking-glass are idioms beyond the academy; and the recovery of women writers that followed in the 1970s, presses and anthologies alike, took it as a charter. Held below the top because the field it moved is criticism and argument more than the art of the essay, and because Wollstonecraft and Mill stood before it.
Auguste Rodin · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
The intrinsic force is a reorganisation of sculptural possibility: the partial figure, the fragment as finished statement, the cast multiplied and recombined, the surface as an event under light, frame and base dissolved, all worked out on one object as a system. Delayed influence is credited and discounted: the whole was not seen whole in Rodin’s lifetime, nor in bronze until the late 1920s. But the extracted figures are the Gates’ own, and the language they carried was made on the portal, so their reach is its reach. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: The Thinker, The Kiss, Ugolino, The Three Shades, Fugit Amor and The Crouching Woman carried the Gates’ language out, and through Rodin it bears on Bourdelle, Claudel, Lehmbruck, Matisse and, by reaction, Brancusi.
Federico Fellini · Film
8.6 · Tier IV
Released in 1960, so force and reach are scored together. The force is real: the film made the long, episodic portrait of a society through a drifting witness into a form for a feature, and gave the modern city of celebrity its image before the thing had a name. It is held below the reach because its year also brought L’avventura and À bout de souffle, which moved the grammar of film further. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the redirection is documented, and it runs outside cinema. Fellini’s own 8½ (1963) is built on its figure and its method; Sorrentino’s La grande bellezza (2013) openly remakes its form and its Rome; and the photographer’s name gave paparazzi to many languages, as the title became an idiom.
Luo Guanzhong (attributed) · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
The field is Chinese prose fiction of the Ming and after, and through it the literatures of East Asia. The intrinsic force is the founding of a form: the book made the historical romance, and with Water Margin it established the long vernacular novel in Chinese, changing what a written fiction could hold. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the line of romances on every dynasty that followed it in the late Ming and Qing; a Manchu translation under the early Qing; the Korean and Japanese reception, with Yoshikawa Eiji’s retelling of 1939 to 1943; the Thai Sam Kok made under Rama I; the repertoire of Peking opera; and its place among the four classic novels by which the others are read. What holds it here is that its force founded a genre and a popular imagination more than it reorganised the novel’s inner means.
T. S. Eliot · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
The field is poetry in English in the 1910s. The intrinsic force is a reorganisation of possibility: “Prufrock” showed that English verse could hold the city, the nerves and the self-consciousness of a modern mind in a voice at once lyrical and ironic, and it set allusion, juxtaposition and the unresolved persona as methods. Held below the top on two counts: the larger reorganisation, the one most poets answered, was The Waste Land (9.1 on this desk), and the method was French before it was English. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: a threshold text of English modernism, printed in 1915 and gathered here in 1917, from which Pound’s advocacy and the Egoist’s circle took Eliot’s manner, before The Waste Land; with Pound it ended the Georgian mode’s authority; the generation of Auden and the American poets of the mid-century learned the ironic, self-observing voice from it; and its phrases entered the common language.
Catullus · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
The field is Latin poetry of the first century BC, with Greek lyric and Alexandrian poetry as its inheritance. The intrinsic force: the book reorganised what Latin poetry could be about and in what voice, and the subjective love poem, the beloved under a pseudonym, the course of a love told in a sequence, and the couplet used for personal feeling, as Latin elegy would use it, begin here for us. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Propertius, Tibullus and Ovid build Roman love elegy on it, and Ovid places him among the dead poets in his elegy for Tibullus; Martial takes him as the model for the epigram; Virgil turns a line of 66 into Aeneas’ words to Dido in the underworld, and Dido owes much to Ariadne in 64; from Pontano and Johannes Secundus through Jonson and Campion to Tennyson, Yeats and Zukofsky, the kiss poem and the lover’s self-address descend from him. Discounted because some of what is credited to him belonged to a circle whose work is lost.
Stanley Kubrick · Film
8.6 · Tier IV
Released in 1971, so force and reach are scored together. The force: the film fixed the look of the screen dystopia for a generation, white interiors, pop-art furniture, concrete walkways, and made the counterpoint of classical music and violence a device others have used ever since. Its iconography, the bowler, the white suit, the single eyelash, passed into punk and into pop performance; David Bowie opened his Ziggy Stardust concerts with Carlos’s Ninth. Heirs are open: Trainspotting (1996), with its charming criminal narrator; Natural Born Killers (1994); Fight Club (1999); Haneke’s Funny Games (1997), which answers it. The redirection is credited and discounted: the film reorganised style and tone more than it reorganised what a film could argue. Held at the figure for that reason.
Willem de Kooning · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
On view since 1953, so force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force: the canvas showed that the gestural field of abstraction could carry the figure, and that the figure could be its subject without a return to depiction, and so broke the opposition the decade had set up between abstraction and image. The discount: much of the reach belongs to the Woman series and to the painter’s manner as a whole, and this canvas is its first and fullest statement. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: in New York painting of the 1950s it was immediate, in Joan Mitchell, Grace Hartigan, Larry Rivers and the second generation, whose common hand on Tenth Street was his; further, in Pop, which took the commercial smile into painting, in German Neo-Expressionism, and in painters of flesh since, Jenny Saville and Cecily Brown among them, who name him.
Ornette Coleman · Music
8.6 · Tier IV
The record reorganised what jazz improvisation could be built on: not by replacing the chord with the scale, as modal jazz did the same year, but by showing that the soloist need not be governed by a harmonic frame at all. The intrinsic force is very great. The discount is on reach: it is shared with Coleman’s other records of 1959 to 1961, and free jazz remained a minority practice beside the modal and post-bop mainstream. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the line runs to Free Jazz, recorded in December 1960, to the later Coltrane, to Albert Ayler, to the Chicago musicians of the AACM and the Art Ensemble, and to European free improvisation; Cherry, Haden and Higgins carried it through their own long careers; and “Lonely Woman” became a standard.
Walker Evans · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
Published, so intrinsic force and achieved reach are scored together, in the field of American photography and the photographic book. Intrinsic force: a reorganisation of what a photograph and a book of photographs could be, the documentary style made the medium’s own art and the sequenced book made its principal form. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Robert Frank’s The Americans (1958 and 1959) took its plan, its subject and its sequence from this book; Lee Friedlander, Garry Winogrand and Diane Arbus were shown as heirs of the plain style in the Museum’s New Documents (1967); the colour work of Stephen Shore and William Eggleston in the 1970s stands in its line; Ed Ruscha’s books of gas stations and apartment buildings and the Bechers’ typologies carry its deadpan record of the built vernacular. Held at 9.0, not above, because the reach is concentrated in one medium.
Henri Matisse · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
Intrinsic force is near the top: the canvas proved that pure colour and a flattened, rhythmic figure could hold a wall at the scale kept for history painting, and that decoration could be painting’s highest claim rather than its servant. In the West it travelled through reproduction and the canvas of 1909, but what travelled is the composition this canvas realises, and its reach is credited here. The discount is that the line of large decorative colour runs through Matisse’s whole decorative project as well as through one canvas. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the Russian avant-garde of the 1910s saw this canvas in Shchukin’s house, a reach its own; the Barnes mural, the cut-outs and American colour-field painting carry it with the rest of the project.
Le Corbusier · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
Seen and used since the 1950s, so force and reach are scored together, in the field of the architecture of the state in the century of decolonisation and of Indian modern architecture. The intrinsic force is a reorganisation of possibility: a modern government monumental without classical dress, raw concrete carrying civic dignity, and climate, shade, screen, air and water, generating the forms of a public building. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Louis Kahn’s National Assembly at Dhaka takes up the capitol as a sculpted precinct of concrete and light; Indian modernism follows in Balkrishna Doshi, who worked on these buildings in the architect’s office, in Charles Correa, Achyut Kanvinde and Raj Rewal, and in a generation’s public works; brise-soleil and raw concrete monumentality pass into civic building from Japan to Boston and Latin America. Held below the top because the turn to béton brut was the Unité’s, and the plain was not followed.
Le Corbusier · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
Seen and published since 1931, so force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force is the complete built statement of a reorganisation of what a house is: frame, not wall; route, not rooms; car, sun and roof taken into the plan. The reorganisation was begun in the Dom-ino and at Garches, so the house is the summation more than the first stroke. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: immediate, wide and lasting — the International Style as defined in 1932, and the white modern house in Europe and the Americas; pilotis, ribbon window and roof terrace as a world idiom, though that line runs through the doctrine as much as through the house; the later modern villa as an answer to it, from the New York Five to Koolhaas’s Villa dall’Ava at Saint-Cloud.
Dziga Vertov · Film
8.6 · Tier IV
Released in 1929, so force and reach are scored together, against the cinema of the 1920s. The force is very large: the film reorganised what a documentary could be, a self-reflexive essay on its own perception, and what montage could do without words or story. On release it was attacked, little followed it in Soviet cinema, where the turn to socialist realism closed the road, and sound overtook its silent rhetoric within a few years. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the reach came a generation late, in the cinéma vérité of the 1960s, the Dziga Vertov Group, the essay film and the reflexive documentary, the abstract city film from Koyaanisqatsi (1982) on, the montage of the music video, and the theory of new media that took it as a model. Delay discounts it, and it runs more through filmmakers and theorists than through the general form of cinema.
Joy Division · Music
8.6 · Tier IV
The field is the album of the 1970s, which holds Low, Horses and Marquee Moon. The intrinsic force is high, and it is a consolidation of unusual completeness: the record fixed post-punk’s sound as a whole language, space, dread, a melodic bass as lead, machine-steady drums and a baritone set close, and showed that rock after punk could be slow, cold and inward and still hit hard. Most of its devices were others’ first, and much of it descends from Low, which stands a tenth above it. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the record set the sound from which much of the next decade’s dark rock and gothic music drew, gave its producer’s method to a generation of independent records, and returned, a delayed reach credited at a discount, as a model in the post-punk revival after 2000.
Claude Monet · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
On view since 1927, so force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force is a reorganisation of what a painting could be: an enclosing field with no horizon and no frame, the painting become a room, the brushwork carried to the edge of the abstract decades before abstraction took the same field. French painting had moved on when the rooms opened, and the reach came with the next generation. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: from the 1950s painters and critics reread the rooms through Abstract Expressionism, and the cycle was claimed as an ancestor by the painting that followed, Abstract Expressionist and colour-field alike; and the painted environment became a type, of which the Rothko Chapel is the plainest heir.
Frédéric Chopin · Music
8.6 · Tier IV
The field is piano music and the concert music of the 1830s. The intrinsic force is a reorganisation of what a short piano piece could be and of what a set of them could hold: the autonomous prelude and the cycle of fragments, with the harmony of No. 2 and No. 4 far ahead of its decade. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the set made the prelude a central Romantic and modern genre, and the line runs through Alkan, Scriabin’s 24 Preludes, Op. 11, Rachmaninoff, Debussy’s two books, Busoni, Shostakovich and Messiaen, the line credited, not each link; and No. 4 and No. 20 passed into common musical life far beyond the piano.
Augustine of Hippo · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
The field is Latin prose of late antiquity, Christian apology and Roman history writing, and with them the thought of the West. The intrinsic force is a reorganisation of possibility: history read as one story from creation to judgement, and the political order relativised by a society not of this world. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Orosius’s Seven Books of History against the Pagans written at Augustine’s request as a companion to its early books; Otto of Freising’s Chronicle of the Two Cities of the 1140s taking its title and frame; Dante’s Monarchia arguing against the political reading it fostered; the allegorical reading of the millennium (XX.7 to 9) that became the Western church’s; Bossuet, Löwith, Arendt, Markus, Niebuhr and Milbank. Held off the top because its reach on poetry and fiction is diffuse and shared with Scripture.
Lewis Carroll · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
The field is English literature of the nineteenth century, and the book entered it through its literature for children. The intrinsic force is a reorganisation of what a book for children could be: freed from instruction, it made play, nonsense and a child’s sceptical intelligence its matter, and it made nonsense a narrative form rather than a verse game. It is held at nine, short of the summit works, because it moved a branch of the field and fed the rest without reorganising the novel or the poem, and because its widest reach came seventy years on, credited and discounted for the delay. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the line of English and American fantasy for children runs through it, it is among the most quoted books in English, and its reach left the children’s shelf. The Surrealists claimed Carroll as a precursor, and André Breton gave him a place in the Anthologie de l’humour noir (1940); Joyce worked him into Finnegans Wake; Nabokov translated the book into Russian (1923); and logicians took it up as a common stock of examples.
Thomas Malory · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
The field is English literature of the fifteenth century, and with it European Arthurian romance at its end. The force is high: the first English prose narrative of the first rank, the book that turned the French cycle into the English Arthur and showed that English prose could carry a tragedy of state at epic length. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: through Caxton’s printing it became the English matter of Britain, read in the sixteenth century, when Ascham attacked it in The Scholemaster (1570) as “open mans slaughter and bold bawdrye”, and after its revival in 1816 and 1817 the main source of Tennyson’s Idylls of the King, Morris, Swinburne, Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee, Beardsley’s drawings, T. H. White, Steinbeck and Boorman’s Excalibur. Held off the top because the matter’s force was French before it was Malory’s.
Robert Johnson · Music
8.5 · Tier IV
The intrinsic force is one guitar made to do a band’s work, bass, rhythm and answering voice at once, and the blues made the speech of a single troubled interior. The force is shared with his sources, Patton, House and Skip James among them, and is synthesis as much as invention. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Muddy Waters and Elmore James carried the sides into Chicago from the 78s; the LP reached the young English and American players of the 1960s; Cream’s “Crossroads” (1968), Led Zeppelin’s borrowing from “Traveling Riverside Blues” and a long line of covers followed. Few records of the century redirected so much music. The delay, twenty-three years, and the sharing hold it below Kind of Blue and Low at 9.1.
Public Enemy · Music
8.5 · Tier IV
The field is hip hop and the popular record of the late 1980s. The intrinsic force is very large: the record showed that a hip hop track could be composed from noise and from many sources at once, that the producer could work as a composer of collage, and that the form could carry political speech at full force and still be heard. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the political rap of the next years ran through it; the Bomb Squad carried the method west in Ice Cube’s AmeriKKKa’s Most Wanted (1990); rock and industrial bands took its density and attack, and a later rock band took the name Prophets of Rage; it stands at or near the head of hip hop’s canon. Discounted: the sampling law that followed within a few years closed much of the dense method, so the reach travels as stance and sound more than practice, and the credit for collage is shared.
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Intrinsic force is high, short of the highest. The reorganisation of possibility, a tower as a steel frame hung with glass, belongs to Mies’s earlier towers and to Lever House; what this building added was the proof that the type could carry monumentality, and the setback plaza as a civic form. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it became the model of the corporate tower in every city that built one; the New York Zoning Resolution of 1961, with its bonus for plazas, made its gesture a rule, and the city’s privately owned public spaces descend from it; its plaza became the ground of William H. Whyte’s study of how people use small urban spaces; and Johnson’s later turn against the type, with the postmodern reaction, defined itself against it. The force is a perfection more than an invention.
Philip Glass and Robert Wilson · Music
8.5 · Tier IV
The field is opera and concert music of the 1970s, and the intrinsic force is large: the work reorganised what an opera could be, an evening of music, image and movement on equal terms, without story, in the language of repetition, and it brought minimalism, until then a music of lofts and galleries, into the opera house at full theatrical scale. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it made Glass an opera composer, with Satyagraha (1980) and Akhnaten (1984) completing the trilogy of portraits it began; it opened the road by which John Adams’s Nixon in China (1987) and post-minimalist opera reached the major houses; and it made Wilson’s theatre of images an international form. Discounted because much of that reach runs through Glass’s later, more conventional operas, and the mainstream took its sound more than its form.
R.E.M. · Music
8.5 · Tier IV
The field is American rock of the early 1980s, and the independent and college-radio rock then forming. The intrinsic force is a template set against the dominant sound of its year: the chiming arpeggio, the melodic bass, the submerged voice and the regional mystery, joined so as to show that a guitar band could be both obscure and widely loved. The force was a refusal as much as a reorganisation: it changed what a guitar band could sound like and still be heard, not what a rock song could be, and the band’s later career is not credited to it. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the record is widely credited as a founding document of American alternative rock, its reach runs through the 1990s, where later bands named it among their sources, and it stands as a reference in that music’s histories.
Constantinian, Crusader and later builders · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
The intrinsic force: with Constantine’s other foundations the church founded the monumental architecture of the Christian holy place, and its rotunda over a tomb set the type of the martyrium. The Crusader church carried Western Romanesque east more than it redirected anything. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the Dome of the Rock answered the rotunda on the Temple Mount; copies run through a millennium of European building, in the round churches at Cambridge and Northampton, the Temple Church in London, Neuvy-Saint-Sépulchre, Santo Stefano in Bologna, Alberti’s Rucellai shrine in Florence and Görlitz; and Richard Krautheimer made them the founding case of medieval architectural copying. The reach is of a symbol copied by a few attributes, more than of a form copied whole.
Andy Warhol · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
Published, so force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force: the painting reorganised what a painting could be made of and how, the photographic image transferred mechanically, repetition as composition, the celebrity and the commodity as subject, the hand replaced by a process whose errors are the expression; it is the fullest single statement of the Marilyns of 1962. The discount: the reach belongs to that year’s silkscreens together, the Marilyns, the soup cans, the Elvises and the disasters, more than to this object, and the move to silkscreen was shared that year with Rauschenberg. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: among the widest of any painting of its decade, through Richter’s photo paintings and Polke’s raster pictures within a year or two, the Pictures Generation and the appropriation art of the 1970s and 1980s, and the celebrity image as the common material of later art, advertising and design.
João Gilberto · Music
8.4 · Tier IV
The intrinsic force is that the record constitutes a style. The batida, the voice at speaking level, the harmony of Jobim’s songs and the short form together reorganised what Brazilian popular song could be, and the record is the founding document of bossa nova, not one record within it. The discount: much of the reach abroad travelled through Jobim’s songs and later records rather than this LP, and Jobim shares the credit. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: in Brazil the generation of Caetano Veloso, Gilberto Gil, Chico Buarque, Edu Lobo and Nara Leão started from it, and Tropicália defined itself against and through it; abroad the style entered jazz and pop within five years, through Stan Getz, Charlie Byrd and Getz/Gilberto (1964); two of its songs became standards.
The Strokes · Music
8.4 · Tier IV
The field is the rock album of its decade. The intrinsic force is a return made exact: the record showed that the lean guitar band of the 1970s could be played with a new precision and heard as present rather than as revival, and it reorganised little beyond that. The stronger part is the timing: it changed what rock could be in 2001, in a decade of nu metal, post-grunge and polished pop. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the record is placed high whenever its decade is counted and three of its songs remain in broadcast and use. It is commonly credited with opening the guitar-band revival of the following years, in New York and in Britain; that credit is reported, not verified here. What holds it is that much of its reach was of an image, a look and a city.
Jackson Pollock · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
The field is painting in New York and Europe at mid century, Abstract Expressionism in its decade. The intrinsic force is a reorganisation of what a painting is: from a composed image to a field without hierarchy, from a made picture to the trace of an act, from the easel to the floor; this canvas, with Autumn Rhythm and One: Number 31, 1950 of the same year, is that reorganisation at full scale and full command. The discount: the reach belongs to the poured paintings as a body, and much of it was carried by Hans Namuth’s images of the painter at work rather than by any single canvas. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Frankenthaler’s stained canvas and the colour field painting of Louis and Noland; Kaprow’s happenings, and through them performance; Gutai in Japan; the all-over and process work of the 1960s; and New York’s claim to the centre of painting.
Led Zeppelin · Music
8.3 · Tier IV
The field is the rock album of 1969 and the years after. The intrinsic force is a codification: the record took the heavy blues that Cream, Hendrix and Truth had opened and fixed its grammar, the riff as song, the drummer as an equal force recorded in a live room, hush and assault in one track, the guitar break as set piece. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: hard rock and heavy metal took this record as a template, from Deep Purple’s In Rock (1970) through the riff rock of the 1970s and Aerosmith to Van Halen’s solo showpieces in the line of Heartbreaker, and later the sampled Bonham drum sound in hip hop; Whole Lotta Love became the riff of riff rock.
Joseph Paxton · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
Field: British and European building in the mid nineteenth century, and the tradition of the public building after it. The intrinsic force is a reorganisation of possibility: a large public building conceived as a kit of standard manufactured parts, built by system and schedule, its order generated by a module, its enclosure glass; the architecture of production rather than of masonry. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: immediate and lasting. It became the type of the exhibition building, answered at once in New York in 1853 and in Munich’s Glaspalast in 1854, and in the exhibition halls of Paris after; it shaped railway sheds, markets and arcades. Its delayed reach is larger: modernism claimed it as the first building of the new age, and the curtain wall, the modular grid and prefabricated construction descend through that claim, which runs partly through historians and is discounted.
Anonymous · Literature
8.3 · Tier IV
Two fields. In medieval Arabic literature the reach was slight: the work lived outside adab, unrecorded by the critics, in manuscripts for reciters. The second field, entered through Galland in 1704, is world literature, and there the reach is among the largest of any single work. The force: a frame tale made into a machine for survival and suspense, with nesting as a narrative principle and the city of merchants and craftsmen as the ground of marvel. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the oriental tale of the eighteenth century, Montesquieu, Voltaire’s Zadig, Beckford’s Vathek; Dickens, Stevenson’s New Arabian Nights, Proust; Borges, Calvino, Barth, Rushdie; Mahfouz’s Arabian Nights and Days (1979); Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade (1888); Pasolini’s film (1974). Charged: the delay, and a share owed to Galland’s added tales.
Filippo Brunelleschi · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Force and reach are scored together, in the field of Florentine, then Italian and European building from the fifteenth century on. The intrinsic force: by common account the first public building in which the language of antiquity and a governing module were made the whole architecture, the arcade on columns under an entablature and the grey and white articulation its maker then carried through his later churches. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the square itself was built to answer it, a loggia opposite copying it bay for bay and the portico of the church at its head closing the square in its manner; another Florentine hospital front copies it; and the arcade on columns became the courtyard and portico of the Italian Renaissance. Held below the top because the force is shared with its maker’s later works.
Brian Eno · Music
8.1 · Tier IV
The field is the instrumental and electronic music of the late 1970s, and the popular record as an object. The intrinsic force is high: the record proposed music as a property of a space and a mode of attention rather than an event, and it supplied a name and a theory as well as an example. The method was shared with Discreet Music and the minimalists, the concept with Satie, so part of the force is synthesis and naming. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: “ambient” became the name of a genre and then of a practice, through the ambient house and chill-out rooms of the late 1980s and early 1990s, Aphex Twin’s Selected Ambient Works 85-92, decades of drone records, generative systems, and the playlists of focus and sleep. Part of the reach travels as a word, and part runs back to the earlier record; a tenth under Low.
Sex Pistols · Music
7.9 · Tier III
The field is rock music of the 1970s, above all in Britain. The intrinsic force is in the stance, not the means, which are old: the record changed what a singer could sound like and what a rock record could say about the state, and showed that players of modest technique could command the medium through a producer. The discount is attribution. Much of the reach belongs to the band, its concerts of 1976 and its singles, which had done their work before the album appeared; the album is the record of that force, not its first carrier, and it stands level with Unknown Pleasures at 9.0 and a tenth below London Calling at 9.1. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: British punk, the independent labels and post-punk took this band as their starting point at once, and the British rock vocal changed after Rotten. That prompt reach sets it above Fun House and Horses, whose reach was delayed or left the musical language where it was.
Andy Warhol · Visual art
7.8 · Tier III
Published, so intrinsic force and achieved reach are scored together, in the field of American painting of the early 1960s. The intrinsic force is a reorganisation of what a painting could take as its subject and how it could be made: the mass-produced image at its own scale, the series of near-identical units, the suppressed hand, the work as product. With Lichtenstein’s paintings of 1961 and 1962 it is the founding statement of Pop, and the one that became its emblem. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Pop in America and Britain; the serial and the repeated in the decade’s painting and sculpture; appropriation from the 1970s on; the relation of art to brand and market, and much commercial design after it. The discount: much of the reach belongs to the silkscreen practice that followed and to Pop as a movement, and part is shared with Lichtenstein, Johns and Duchamp before them.
Euripides · Literature
9.2 · Tier V
The field is Attic tragedy, and Greek drama as a repertory for the centuries after. The force is high: the fullest dramatisation of the genre’s own god, and a reorganisation of what a god in tragedy could be, agent, actor and director at once. It did not redirect Attic tragedy, which was ending; its reach is delayed, credited and discounted, and it redirected the modern idea of the Dionysian. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: a repertory staple in antiquity, when the actor Jason of Tralles played Agave with the head of Crassus at the Parthian court (Plutarch, Crassus); a Byzantine passion play, Christus Patiens, built from its lines; and, later and wider, Nietzsche’s Dionysian, the Cambridge ritualists, Mann’s Death in Venice, Henze’s The Bassarids (1966), Soyinka’s The Bacchae of Euripides (1973), Schechner’s Dionysus in 69, and Girard.
Sailendra · Architecture
9.2 · Tier V
Force and reach together; the field is Javanese and Southeast Asian Buddhist building. The intrinsic force is a reorganisation of what a stupa could be: a relic mound made into a mountain one walks through, a mandala put into three dimensions, and narrative relief raised from a panel to a curriculum. Nothing in Buddhist architecture before it is like it in conception, and nothing after it in scale. Held below the top because Central Javanese stone building ended within a century of the work and the reach beyond Java is conjecture. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Prambanan, the Shaiva answer, dedicated in 856, carries the Ramayana along a balustrade read clockwise, this building’s method taken over by the rival faith; and the East Javanese temples of the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries carry narrative relief on terraced bodies, the terraced mountain returning at Sukuh and Cetho on Lawu.
James Joyce · Literature
9.1 · Tier V
The field is the novel in English and Irish writing, and the language of modernism. The force is the largest reorganisation of what a prose fiction can be made of: the word made polyphonic, and a book given to a sleeping mind. What holds it down: it did not redirect the novel at large as Ulysses did, and its heirs, mostly in the avant-garde, music and theory, often imitate a manner more than they extend a method. Delayed influence is credited and discounted. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Beckett’s essay on Dante, Bruno, Vico and Joyce in Our Exagmination (1929), a title the book echoes (III.3); Murray Gell-Mann’s quark, taken from “Three quarks for Muster Mark!” (II.4); and a long passage through literary theory.
Virgil · Literature
9.1 · Tier V
The field is Latin poetry of the late Republic and the Greek and Latin didactic tradition behind it. The intrinsic force: the poem brought the Latin hexameter to a finish Lucretius had not, and set the didactic poem’s centre in the meaning of work rather than in the system taught. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it founded the georgic as a mode; Ovid’s Orpheus, in the tenth and eleventh books of the Metamorphoses, is written against it; Columella completes it; Boethius’ Orpheus metre descends from it; the English eighteenth century made the georgic a governing kind, with Dryden’s translation, Addison’s essay, Philips’ Cyder, Thomson’s Seasons and Grainger’s Sugar-Cane, and France had Delille’s translation (1770). It reaches on to Fallon’s and Ferry’s versions and to Heaney. The reach has been carried in the shadow of the Aeneid.
George Eliot · Literature
9.1 · Tier V
The field is the English novel of the nineteenth century, and the novel in English after it. The force: the book set the measure of psychological realism in English, a whole community shown through several consciousnesses at once by a narrator able to think in essays without leaving the scene, with a moral seriousness the English novel had not claimed so fully; and it widened what the realist novel could think about, science, vocation and marriage as mutual ignorance. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: James, who resisted it, wrote The Portrait of a Lady in its shadow; Woolf and Leavis named it the mature English novel; its narrator’s manner runs through later English and American realism to the present. Held below 9.0 by the width of the reach, since it redirected the novel in English more than the European novel, and its force is the perfection of a form more than a new one.
Virginia Woolf · Literature
9.1 · Tier V
The field is the English novel of the 1920s. The intrinsic force: the book showed that a novel’s time could be redistributed by the weight of consciousness, a decade made a corridor and a dinner a world, and it made a woman artist’s finished work the resolution of a family novel. What holds it below the top is that the decade’s reorganisation of the novel was made first by Ulysses (1922) and by Proust, and this book perfects and turns a method more than it founds one. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Auerbach made it the type of the modern novel in Mimesis; the revaluation of Woolf from the 1970s made it a central text of feminist criticism and of the modernist syllabus; and Toni Morrison’s master’s thesis (Cornell, 1955) read Woolf beside Faulkner.
Friedrich Hölderlin · Literature
9.0 · Tier V
The field is German poetry from about 1800 and the century after, and the charge is that the body moved almost nothing in its own century. Intrinsic force is very high: the late hymn reorganised what the German lyric could do, and the modern German long poem rests on it. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Rilke’s “An Hölderlin” (1914) and the Duino Elegies, and Trakl’s late poems, were written in the light of Hellingrath’s edition; the George circle took them up; Celan’s “Tübingen, Jänner” in Die Niemandsrose (1963) ends on Hölderlin’s word “Pallaksch”; and for Heidegger, Benjamin and Adorno the hymns were a field of argument. The reach was delayed by a century and in English runs mostly through translation; the discount for both holds the axis just under 9.0.
Hieronymus Bosch · Visual art
9.0 · Tier V
Force and reach are scored together, and the force stands well above the reach. The work made the fantastic a complete pictorial mode, an invented world painted with the naturalism of the real one, and made the altarpiece carry a secular vision that leaves its meaning open. No earlier panel had done either at this scale. The reach is real, and late: from 1593 the picture was in the Escorial and seen by few. Delayed influence is credited and discounted. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the Bosch manner in Antwerp, Bruegel’s use of its vocabulary, and the decisive redirection in the twentieth century, through the Surrealists and popular culture.
Charles Dickens · Literature
9.0 · Tier V
The field is the English novel of the mid nineteenth century. The force: a novel of a whole society organised around an institution, the city shown as one connected system and told from two incompatible vantages, a real reorganisation of what the social novel could hold. Its reach is wide in kind but often diffuse in particular, and the reach of the author is easily taken for the reach of the book; that holds the axis below the top. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Bucket stands at the head of the police detective in the English novel, before Sergeant Cuff in Collins’s The Moonstone (1868); critics have set Kafka’s court in The Trial beside this one; and the city novel as network, and the systems novels of the twentieth century, are traced to it by critical tradition rather than proven descent.
Richard Wagner · Music
9.0 · Tier V
Intrinsic force and achieved reach are scored together, in the field of opera and orchestral music of the 1880s and the generation after. The force is real: the work showed that harmony could carry moral topography, that a stage work could move at the pace of ritual, and that the orchestra could be one blended, veiled instrument rather than a sum of sections; its Act II chromaticism lies near the edge of tonality. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the reach is large and diffuse. Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande defines itself against it and through it; Mahler, Strauss and the early Schoenberg drew on its sound; its Grail reached poetry through Verlaine’s sonnet, whose line on children’s voices in the dome Eliot set into The Waste Land. Discounted because much of what passed on came from Wagner as a whole and from Tristan first, and because Bayreuth kept the work rare until 1914.
Virginia Woolf · Literature
9.0 · Tier V
The field is the English novel of the early twentieth century, and with it the European modernist novel. The intrinsic force: the book made the free indirect style a means of moving across a city’s minds with no narrator’s frame, made a single day carry a whole life by the past dug out behind each person, and set the private mind and the public wound, the war, the doctors and the state, in one structure without a plot to join them. What holds it below the top: Ulysses made the novel of the day first and at larger scale, and Woolf’s own To the Lighthouse and The Waves carry the method further. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it became, beside Ulysses, the type of the modernist novel of one day; Cunningham’s The Hours (1998, filmed in 2002) and Ian McEwan’s Saturday (2005) take it as their model; its multiple focalisation is now a plain technique of the novel; and some of that reach is Woolf’s, credited across her books more than to this one.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart · Music
9.0 · Tier V
The force is real: the work made the ensemble the engine of character and plot in comic opera, and showed that buffa could hold the moral weight of seria without losing its speed. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the redirection runs through Mozart’s own Don Giovanni and Così fan tutte; through Rossini’s comic finales; through Verdi’s Falstaff, whose ensembles and closing fugue look back to this model; and through Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier, whose Marschallin and Octavian are the Countess and Cherubino retold. It helped make the idea of a standing operatic repertory, as one of the earliest operas never to leave it. Held below the top by its genre: opera buffa declined after Rossini, and the next century’s main line, Wagner’s, ran from elsewhere.
Jorge Luis Borges · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
The field is twentieth-century fiction in Spanish, and with it, as Borges entered it through translation from the 1950s, the world’s short fiction. The intrinsic force: with Ficciones, the book reorganised what short fiction could hold, making metaphysics, theology and erudition the matter of narrative and the story a mode of thought. Charged: much of this reach belongs to Borges’s fiction as a whole, and the larger share to Ficciones; this book is the second instrument of one rupture. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the writers of the Latin American Boom wrote in its light, and Cortázar, García Márquez and Fuentes named Borges as a liberation of the language; Calvino, Eco, whose blind librarian is Jorge of Burgos, Perec and the postmodern fiction of the 1960s and after drew on it; and the Aleph passed as a name and an image into common use, in Coelho and in writing about the internet.
Umayyad, under Abd al-Malik · Architecture
8.9 · Tier IV
Standing since 691 to 692, so force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force is a reorganisation: the first monument of Islamic architecture, which showed that the new faith would build in splendour, and would make its image of ornament and writing rather than figure. Its form is borrowed, which holds the force down. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the Great Mosque of Damascus continued its mosaic within a generation; Quranic epigraphy as the voice of architecture, and aniconic ornament in place of the image, became governing principles of building across the Islamic world; the domed shrine became a type; and Christian Europe took it for the Temple of Solomon, as the Templum Domini and in pilgrim prints. Its octagonal plan was seldom copied, which holds the reach.
Juan Rulfo · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
The field is the novel in Spanish of the twentieth century, and within it the Latin American novel. The intrinsic force is high: the book showed that the matter of the rural, Catholic, post-revolutionary countryside could be carried by the most advanced modernist form without losing its speech, and that the dead, the fragment and the broken calendar could be native rather than imported. Charged: the reach runs largely through one generation and one region of the novel, and the Boom’s debt is often told as a story more than shown in method. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: García Márquez’s own account of reading it twice in a night and coming to know it by heart, which made it the named precursor of Cien años de soledad; Fuentes and others of the Boom writing of it as a foundation; and a Mexican novel that after 1955 did not return to the realism of the Revolution novel as it had been.
Arthur Rimbaud · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
The field is French poetry of the nineteenth century, and through it the poetry of Europe. The force is high: the book reorganised what the prose poem could do, a whole book, one consciousness, an argument and a drama of voices, and made the poet’s critique of his own art a subject of the poem. The reach was delayed, and it is shared. Almost no one read the book before 1886, and much of Rimbaud’s influence runs through the Illuminations, the letter of the seer and the figure of the poet who stopped, so that this book carries only its part of it. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: from 1886 the Symbolists took Rimbaud as a master; Claudel followed, then the surrealists, the long line of the first-person prose poem of crisis in French and beyond, Henry Miller’s The Time of the Assassins, the Beat poets, and much of later popular culture’s idea of the poet.
Giacomo Leopardi · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
The field is the poetry of Italy and, beyond it, the European lyric of the century. Intrinsic force is high: a reorganisation of the Italian lyric in its central form, the canzone libera, in its matter, a lyric of argument without a god, and in its lexicon of the indefinite and the remembered. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: in Italy the twentieth century defined itself through him, in Ungaretti’s lectures and his Sentimento del tempo (1933), in Montale and Saba; beyond Italy the reach is named and particular, Schopenhauer citing him in 1844, Nietzsche praising the prose, Beckett’s Proust (1931) taking its epigraph from A se stesso, Lowell’s Imitations (1961), Calvino’s lectures on exactitude. Held below 9.0: Carducci and Pascoli admired him without taking his form or matter as their method, much of the reach came a century late, and abroad it was particular rather than formative.
Michelangelo · Visual art
8.9 · Tier IV
The intrinsic force is high. The group fixed what an idealised monumental marble of the dead Christ could be, and showed that the finish and anatomical command of antique sculpture could carry a devotional subject without loss of feeling. It made Michelangelo’s name in Rome before the David. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it became the definitive image of its subject in Catholic art, copied and reproduced without end, and the standard against which later carved Pietàs were set. Held at 8.9 because its pressure on sculpture as a field was less than its fame: it perfected an idealising mode more than it reorganised possibility, and the maker’s larger redirections of sculpture came after it.
Raphael · Visual art
8.9 · Tier IV
The work is public, so force and reach are scored together, in the field of Roman and Italian painting of the 1510s and 1520s. The intrinsic force is high: it reorganised what an altarpiece could hold, two times and two spaces in one dramatic field, and moved the High Renaissance toward the agitated composition and dark light of the following generations. The discount: its first reach ran through the painter’s school and the academy rather than a new idea of painting, and others carried the lower zone’s force further. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Giulio Romano and the Roman workshop carried its figure types and chiaroscuro into Mannerism; Rubens copied and adapted its lower zone; for about three centuries the academies held it, by repute, as the greatest painting in the world and taught from it; a mosaic copy stands over an altar in Saint Peter’s; and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood of 1848, by Holman Hunt’s account, took its name from rejecting this picture above all.
Toni Morrison · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
The field is American fiction of the 1980s, in English. The force: the book reorganised how fiction could hold slavery, moving it from the record of events to the interior of the enslaved and to the haunting of the free, and it made the historical novel carry a supernatural presence without losing its claim to truth. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: within two decades it was the most taught American novel of its period; the New York Times Book Review’s survey of 2006 named it the best work of American fiction of the previous twenty-five years; the novel of slavery after it, Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad, Jesmyn Ward’s novels, Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing, writes in its light; and Morrison’s Nobel Prize in 1993 rested heavily on it. Held below the top because the reach is concentrated in American letters and in the academy, and the larger reorganisations of the novel’s means lie elsewhere.
Jacques-Louis David · Visual art
8.9 · Tier IV
Published, so force and reach are scored together. The field is French painting of the 1790s and the history painting after it. The intrinsic force: the canvas reorganised what a history painting could be, a contemporary political death given the form of the sacred and reduced to one body and an empty field; it is the model of the modern image of the political martyr. The delay is charged: the canvas was withdrawn after Thermidor and largely unseen until the later nineteenth century, and delayed reach is credited and discounted. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the studio replicas and the state’s use of the image in 1793; Baudelaire’s essay of 1846; Baudry’s Charlotte Corday of 1860, answering it; Munch’s paintings of the death of Marat; Picasso’s drawings; and the pictures and photographs of the political dead that take its pose.
Alessandro Manzoni · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
The field is Italian literature of the nineteenth century and, as Italian prose entered it, the European historical novel. The force: in its own field a reorganisation with few equals in any modern literature. It made the novel the central form of Italian prose, and its revised language became a working model of the national standard; Manzoni’s report on the unity of the language (1868) followed from it. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: in Italy the reach is the widest a novel can have, answered by Verga’s humble protagonists, by Fogazzaro and De Roberto, by Tomasi di Lampedusa’s Il Gattopardo and by the found manuscript of Eco’s Il nome della rosa (1980), and Verdi wrote his Requiem for the first anniversary of Manzoni’s death (1874). Beyond Italy the reach is narrower: it did not redirect the European novel as Scott did, and that width holds it below the top.
Yasujirō Ozu · Film
8.9 · Tier IV
Released in 1953, so force and reach are scored together. The force: the fullest statement of a grammar that reorganised what narrative cinema could do without, which is movement, climax, villainy and plot. Part of that force belongs to Ozu’s earlier films, and it is discounted. The reach was delayed, then wide, and within art cinema rather than popular film: the film reached London in 1958 and the United States in 1972, and inside Japan the New Wave of the 1960s defined itself against Ozu. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Wim Wenders’ Tokyo-Ga (1985), Hou Hsiao-hsien and the Taiwanese cinema of the 1980s, Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Still Walking (2008), built on this film’s shape, Abbas Kiarostami’s Five Dedicated to Ozu, Yōji Yamada’s remake Tokyo Family (2013), and the slow cinema of the last three decades.
Jan van Eyck · Visual art
8.9 · Tier IV
Field: Netherlandish painting of the 1430s and the European portrait after it. On view in great collections since the sixteenth century, so force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force: the full-length secular portrait in an interior, and the image as a witnessed record of a moment in private life, a real reorganisation of what a portrait could hold. The discount is privacy and delay: the panel left Bruges early for a court and a royal collection, and its early reach cannot be separated from van Eyck’s manner as a whole. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the convex mirror taken up by Petrus Christus and Quentin Massys; the panel in the Spanish royal collection, where Velázquez worked with it in view, and the mirror of Las Meninas, widely read as an answer to it; the Pre-Raphaelites in London after 1842; Panofsky’s essay; and its place as a set text of art history.
Johann Sebastian Bach · Music
8.9 · Tier IV
The work reorganised what a variation set could be: from a sequence of ornamentations to a cyclic architecture with a law, a ladder and a return. Delayed influence is credited and discounted: the work was little played in public for a century and a half, and its reach is more of performance than of composition. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the great variation cycles stand in its line, Beethoven’s Diabelli Variations of 1823 first among them, then Brahms, the line credited, not each link; Glenn Gould’s recording of 1955 made it the central keyboard record of its age and redirected how Bach is played on the piano. The field is Western keyboard music.
Victor Hugo · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
The field is the French novel of the nineteenth century and, as the book entered it, the European novel. Its force: it made the social novel of the poor into an epic, and showed that the popular serial, with its suspense, coincidence and pursuit, could carry history, theology and political argument at full scale. That reorganised what the popular novel could hold, though not the literary novel’s method: the formal line of the French novel ran through Flaubert, not through Hugo, and that keeps the axis from the top. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: translated in its first year; read by the Russians, Dostoevsky above all; a model for the social novel in many literatures. The long line of stage and screen versions is presence, weighed under The Imperishable, not here. Reach outstrips force.
Stendhal · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
The field is the French novel of the nineteenth century and, through it, the European. The intrinsic force is a reorganisation of possibility: with Balzac, Stendhal made the novel the instrument for reading a society through the inward life of one person set in a precise historical moment, and Auerbach dates modern realism from the two of them. The analytic interiority, ambition and love dissected in a man’s own thought, was new in its precision. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: delayed, it came. Taine, Zola and Bourget made Stendhal a master of the realists and the psychologists; Nietzsche named him; Tolstoy acknowledged a debt; Girard built a theory on him; the later novel of the outsider before a court is in his line. Delay is credited and discounted, and the larger institutional force of the realist novel in France was Balzac’s and Flaubert’s.
Le Corbusier · Architecture
8.8 · Tier IV
The intrinsic force is very high: from the modern movement’s own leader, proof that reinforced concrete could make plastic, expressive, site-bound and sacred form, which made the free curve and the battered mass respectable again after the 1920s. Reach is broad and well evidenced, though diffuse, and is discounted a little: much that followed took the look without the discipline, and the turn shares its credit with his other late work. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the chapel opened the sculptural and expressive strand of postwar architecture; it set the terms of mid-century sacred building in Europe and beyond, where curved, top-lit churches led by light multiplied; and Stirling’s essay of 1956 made it the hinge of a debate on rationalism in British and American criticism.
Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
The field is the comic in English, and through it the literature of its language in the 1980s. The intrinsic force is very high: the book showed that the serial comic could carry the architecture and moral seriousness of a novel without leaving its own means, and that those means, grid, panel, gutter and the counterpoint of word and image, could be the instrument of thought. Charged against it: the reach most immediately taken was its surface, violence and grimness in the mainstream superhero comic for a decade after, which Moore himself regretted, and its reach into prose literature beyond the comic is real but narrower. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: with Maus and The Dark Knight Returns it made the graphic novel a shelf in bookshops and comics a subject of literary criticism; it won a Hugo Award in 1988, in a category given once; it is the one comic on Time’s list of 2005 of the hundred best English-language novels since 1923; it opened the American industry to the British writers who followed; and it was adapted for film and for television.
David Foster Wallace · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
The field is American fiction of the late twentieth century. The force is a reorganisation of what the encyclopedic novel was for: the systems novel, which had held its characters at a satirical distance, was made to carry sincerity, compassion and a moral seriousness the generation before had treated as naive, while keeping all its learning and comedy. What holds it below the top is that the reorganisation finished what Pynchon began rather than starting it, and that much of the reach runs through the manner more than the vision. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the book became the emblematic novel of its generation; it fixed the footnoted, maximal, discursive manner on a generation of American writers and on literary journalism; the turn away from irony that it argued became a common position in American fiction after it; and it stands on Time’s list of 2005 of the hundred best English-language novels since 1923.
Francis Ford Coppola · Film
8.8 · Tier IV
Released in 1979, so force and reach are scored together. The force: the film turned the war film from record or protest into a descent through a culture’s appetite, and showed that sound could carry a film’s structure as much as image. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the Vietnam films that followed worked in its shadow and against it, among them Platoon (1986) and Full Metal Jacket (1987); in Jarhead (2005) marines watch the Kilgore assault before their own war; and Kilgore’s line on napalm and the assault to Wagner are fixed in common speech and in parody. The force stands a step below the reach, because the frame was borrowed.
Chantal Akerman · Film
8.8 · Tier IV
Released in 1975, so force and reach are scored together, against the cinema of its decade. The force is a reorganisation: of what narrative cinema could include, the unedited hours of domestic work; of how long it could hold a shot and still tell a story; and of who could be its subject. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: delayed and discounted, then wide inside art cinema and the academy. The film became a founding work of a feminist cinema and of the slow cinema that followed, in film theory from the late 1970s and in durational filmmaking from the 1990s. The 2022 poll that placed it first is recognition, not reach, and is not weighed. Held below the top because for twenty years the film was hard to see, and much of its reach is indirect.
U2 · Music
8.8 · Tier IV
The contest is with the stadium rock of its year: bright production is answered with space, and uplift with doubt and atrocity. The force is a synthesis of ambient production, American roots forms and political songwriting at stadium scale, and it reorganised what the largest rock band of its day could carry; its elements, the production above all, were already in the band’s previous record, and that holds it from the top. The reach is wide and documented. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: number one in Britain and the United States, the first two singles at number one in America, the Grammy for Album of the Year, and three decades of the spacious, earnest stadium anthem, with The Edge’s delayed guitar as a common language.
Steven Spielberg · Film
8.8 · Tier IV
Released in 1993, so force and reach are scored together. The force: the film reorganised what a mass-audience picture could attempt with the Holocaust, and showed that a studio epic could be shot as if it were the archive, in black and white, at length and in several languages. It did not reorganise film form; its grammar is inherited, and that holds it below the films that changed what cinema could do. The reach is the larger part, and it runs both ways: the Holocaust film after it was made in its wake or built against it, and its photography passed into the war film. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Kamiński’s desaturated war photography passed through Saving Private Ryan (1998) into the common grammar of the war film; The Pianist (2002) and later Holocaust features work in its wake; Son of Saul (2015) and The Zone of Interest (2023) are built, in their method, against its way of showing, which is redirection too; and the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation, founded by Spielberg in 1994, followed from it.
Nathaniel Hawthorne · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
The field is American literature of the nineteenth century, with the English-language novel as its wider ground. The force is a demonstration: that American fiction could reach the first rank by a means of its own, the psychological romance organised on a symbol, rather than by imitating the English novel of manners, which the country’s thin social fabric could not support. The book made the moral history of the Puritan settlement a subject for serious art and made interior guilt a novel’s whole action. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Melville’s turn to the symbol in the year after it, with the dedication of Moby-Dick as witness; James’s long engagement with Hawthorne; the American tradition of romance later critics traced through Faulkner; and direct answers in John Updike’s A Month of Sundays (1975), Roger’s Version (1986) and S. (1988). Held below the top because its reach in the European novel is slight, and the reorganisation it made was of one national literature.
Robert Browning · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
The field is English poetry of the nineteenth century and after. The intrinsic force: the book makes the dramatic monologue a form able to carry history, theology, aesthetics and marriage, and makes difficulty and colloquial roughness available to English verse. This book and Dramatis Personae carry that line more than any other Victorian book. Held below 9.0 because the turn began in the earlier books, and part of the credit is theirs. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Pound took the persona method from Browning, in Personae, and opened the second Canto with the debt, “Hang it all, Robert Browning, / there can be but the one ‘Sordello’”, though the poem he names is not this one; Eliot’s “Prufrock” and “Portrait of a Lady” descend from the monologue of the self-betraying speaker; Hardy, Frost’s dramatic narratives and Robert Lowell follow, and the persona poem runs on to the present.
Georges Bizet · Music
8.7 · Tier IV
Intrinsic force and achieved reach are scored together. The force is in subject, not form: the work put the urban poor, desire without sentiment and a killing in the street onto the lyric stage in music of full art, and showed that tragedy could be made from the low as well as the high. It did not reorganise musical form. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it is the nearest operatic ancestor of verismo, taken up by Mascagni’s Cavalleria rusticana (1890) and Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci (1892); Nietzsche made it a polemical standard; after Glinka and Lalo, it fixed the French musical image of Spain, from Chabrier’s España (1883) to Debussy and Ravel; and its heroine passed into film, dance and theatre.
Wong Kar-wai · Film
8.7 · Tier IV
Released in 2000, so force and reach are scored together, and the field is the cinema of its decade. The intrinsic force is a grammar of longing made from repetition, slow motion, music and framing, and the demonstration that a love story can be carried with its central events absent. It perfected a manner more than it reorganised what cinema could do, and that keeps force a step below reach. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it is wide, wider than most art films reach. The film’s look and its slow motion on music passed into a generation’s film, and beyond film into advertising and music video, which is noted as breadth and not weighed; Wong’s own 2046 answers it; and its standing among critics has risen since its release.
Elia Kazan · Film
8.7 · Tier IV
Released in 1954, so intrinsic force and achieved reach are scored together, in the cinema of the 1950s. The intrinsic force is a reorganisation: the film made the inward, behavioural acting of the New York stage the centre of a prestige Hollywood picture, and joined it to location realism and a working-class subject, changing what an American film performance and an American social film could be. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: eight Academy Awards; the performance as the standard for a generation of American actors, Dean, Newman, De Niro and Pacino among them; the speech in the taxi quoted and restaged, at length in Raging Bull; the corrupt union and the informing witness as a lasting American plot. Streetcar began the change; this film carried it furthest.
Claudio Monteverdi · Music
8.7 · Tier IV
Intrinsic force and achieved reach are scored together. The force is near the top: the field was the music drama of its decade, and the work reorganised it, showing that the Florentine experiment could carry a whole drama with every resource of music, from recitative to orchestral colour. It is the work by which opera became an art and not a learned trial. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: in its century it led to Monteverdi’s own later stage works and stood behind the Venetian opera he served, though the public theatres of Venice took their shape from other models and the score was seldom heard after its first years. Its largest reach came after 1900. It is the oldest opera in regular repertory and a founding test of the historical performance movement. Delay is credited and discounted.
Anonymous · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
The field is the vernacular literature of western Europe about 1100, which held almost no long secular poem. The force is high: the first great chanson de geste and in effect the model of its genre, showing a vernacular capable of epic and of tragedy. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: through the legend and its later versions the poem fathered the Matter of France, about a hundred chansons de geste, the Pseudo-Turpin chronicle, Konrad’s German Rolandslied, the Norse Karlamagnús saga, the Spanish ballads of Roncesvalles, and in Italy a line running through Pulci and Boiardo to Ariosto’s Orlando furioso and down to the Sicilian puppet theatre, with the Roland statues of German market towns beside it. Since 1837 the Oxford text has been the founding text of French literature as taught. Held below 9.0 because so much of the reach passed through other versions while this text lay unread.
Giovanni Battista Piranesi · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
The intrinsic force is a real reorganisation of possibility: the cycle showed that an architectural image need not describe a buildable space, that perspective could be turned against itself, and that a print could hold an interior larger than the world. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the Romantic imagination, through Coleridge and De Quincey; the Gothic literature of the dungeon; Victor Hugo’s drawings; the visionary architects, Boullée among them; Escher’s impossible stairs; Eisenstein’s film theory; set design for the cinema; Borges’s City of the Immortals; and a novel of 2020 that takes the maker’s name for its title. The reach is wide and long. The discount: printmaking itself passed more through Rembrandt and Goya, and much of the reach is to the idea of the Carceri rather than to particular sheets.
Christopher Wren · Architecture
8.7 · Tier IV
Standing since 1711, so force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force is high but synthetic: the building gave the English classical tradition its monumental model and its definitive dome, and the three shells reorganised how a dome’s interior and exterior could be designed apart, a reorganisation narrower than its reach. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the English Baroque of Hawksmoor, Archer and Gibbs, grown in its works and from its office; and the dome as the model of the classical dome for two centuries, traced in Soufflot’s Panthéon in Paris, St Isaac’s in St Petersburg, the dome of the United States Capitol and the state capitols after it, and civic and religious buildings across the English-speaking world.
John Ford · Film
8.7 · Tier IV
Released in 1956, so force and reach are scored together, and the field is the cinema of its decade. The force: the film reorganised the Western from within, showing that the genre’s central figure could be its indictment without the genre being abandoned. Its formal means were not new, which holds the force below the reach. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: delayed and then overwhelming, among the widest of any American film. Taxi Driver (1976) rebuilds its rescue of a girl from her captor, and Schrader’s Hardcore (1979) its plot; the burned homestead of Star Wars (1977) and Wenders’s Paris, Texas (1984) answer it; the revisionist Western after 1960 is in its debt. The reach was not immediate, and the delay is discounted.
Richard Strauss · Music
8.7 · Tier IV
Intrinsic force and achieved reach are scored together. The force is real: the work pushed tonal harmony toward its breaking point in a public, successful stage work, made the orchestra an instrument of psychology at a speed and detail Wagner had not attempted, and made the one-act music drama of extreme states a genre. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Strauss’s own Elektra (1909) followed directly, and the one-act drama of extreme states after it, Schoenberg’s Erwartung (1909), Zemlinsky’s Wilde operas, Schreker, Bartók’s Bluebeard’s Castle (1911), and later Berg’s Lulu, a second girl as the object of every gaze. Discounted because Strauss himself turned back after Elektra, and because Schoenberg’s break, not Strauss’s, became the field’s decisive event.
Ancient Egyptian · Architecture
8.7 · Tier IV
The field is the precinct’s own tradition and region: Egyptian temple building, reaching up the Nile into Kush. The intrinsic force: the Hypostyle Hall made the columned hall a colossal basilican nave lit by a clerestory, and the precinct is the fullest statement of the Egyptian temple as a state institution. Force is held because the hall enlarges an idea its tradition already had. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the Ramesside temples of the west bank took the raised nave into their halls; the Kushite kings enlarged the temple of Amun at Gebel Barkal with courts and a hypostyle on the Theban model; Edfu, Dendera, Kom Ombo and Philae keep the sequence whose largest statement this is, discounted for what descends from the tradition alone; and beyond the region, obelisks in Rome and Istanbul and the Egyptian Revival.
John Bunyan · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
The field is English literature of the later seventeenth century, where Milton stands above it on force. The force is high: a plain prose narrative of an ordinary man’s inner and outer life, in dialogue and incident, set down before the English novel existed, which reorganised allegory as a story to be followed rather than a scheme to be decoded. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: edition after edition from 1678, translation into a very large number of languages through the missionary presses, two centuries as a household book of English and American Protestants, and named descendants: Little Women, its chapters framed on the stations (“Playing Pilgrims”); Thackeray’s Vanity Fair, which takes its title; Hawthorne’s “The Celestial Rail-road”; the copy Huck finds on the Grangerfords’ table; Lewis’s The Pilgrim’s Regress; and the plain narrative prose from which Defoe worked.
Ernest Hemingway · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
The field is fiction in English of the 1920s. The intrinsic force is the first full statement of a method that reorganised English prose in the twentieth century: the plain declarative sentence, the omitted subject, dialogue that says what the speakers will not, and a book of fragments that meets the century’s violence in its own grammar. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: very wide, and shared with the novels that followed. The style made here passed into American fiction across the century, from the hard-boiled school to Raymond Carver and the minimal story of the 1980s, and to Denis Johnson’s Jesus’ Son, which inherits this book’s linked form outright. The montage of vignette and story is less imitated than the sentence. Held below 9.0 because the culture credits much of the reach to Hemingway’s novels as much as to this book, and the reach includes a vast amount of mannerism.
Spike Lee · Film
8.6 · Tier IV
Field: the cinema of the 1980s. Intrinsic force: the film put Black urban life, its speech and its music, at the centre of American cinema as a subject of tragedy and politics rather than of crime or comedy, and showed that a film could be a polemic and a popular entertainment at once without resolving the polemic. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the wave of Black American films of the early 1990s, Boyz n the Hood (1991), Juice (1992, directed by Dickerson) and Menace II Society (1993), and the studios’ willingness to finance them; the one-day neighbourhood film made a form; the hip-hop anthem made part of a film’s form; its standing as the reference for every film about police violence since. In a decade of the blockbuster, few films changed more what could be made. Some of the opening belongs to She’s Gotta Have It (1986), which came first.
Charles Baudelaire · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
The field is French poetry of the nineteenth century and the European lyric after it. The force: the book made the prose poem a form a major poet could stake his work on, and fixed its two modes, the lyric reverie and the urban parable. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Rimbaud’s Illuminations and Une saison en enfer; Mallarmé’s prose poems, later gathered in Divagations; Lautréamont’s Chants de Maldoror in part; Huysmans, whose Des Esseintes prizes the form in À rebours; Max Jacob’s Le Cornet à dés (1917), whose preface argues with the line of Bertrand and Baudelaire; Reverdy, Ponge, Michaux and Char; in English, Wilde’s Poems in Prose and the American prose poem; and in thought, the flâneur and the crowd in Benjamin. Held just short of 9.0: much of the reach is shared with Les Fleurs du mal and with Bertrand, and the form it founded has stayed a minor genre beside verse and the novel.
Paul Gauguin · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
Before the field for more than a century, so force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force: the canvas shows that a painting can carry the largest philosophical subject in flat, non-naturalistic colour, with sources from outside Europe on equal terms with the Bible, and with its meaning held open. That is a real reorganisation of what the grand decoration could be. The discount: the reach belongs to the late Gauguin as a whole, and above all to the posthumous showings in Paris in the first years of the century, more than to this canvas, which went into private hands after 1898. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the Fauves, the Nabis, the German Expressionists, Picasso’s turn to sources outside Europe and the century’s whole recourse to the so-called primitive took Gauguin as their precedent, and this canvas is his most ambitious statement and the one most cited.
Salvador Dalí · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
Published, so force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force: the canvas fixed the second mode of Surrealism, the dream painted as fact, in its most legible form, and added a new image, the soft hard object, to the stock of painting. It is not a reorganisation of what painting is; it is a decisive statement inside a mode others had begun. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: in painting, the illusionist strand of Surrealism and its descendants, the painters of the fantastic and the dream, and Dalí’s own much imitated manner; in the public world, Surrealism’s arrival in America, and the soft watch become the public’s sign for Surrealism and for dream itself, carried by Dalí’s later work in film and in commerce. The reach into what painters did is narrower than the reach into what the public saw, and the first weighs more.
Frank Lloyd Wright · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
The intrinsic force is a real reorganisation of the museum: the building as a single space of movement, and the museum as an architectural event in its own right. The spiral had precedents in Wright’s projects and Le Corbusier’s, which holds the force short of the top. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: wide, and partly oblique. The ramped gallery itself was seldom copied, because its faults were plain. What spread was the museum as signature building, an institution known by its architecture, a line that runs through the museum building of the late century and through the foundation’s own later branches; the atrium as a public room seen from every level; and the late return of curved, free form to public building. In its field, the museum and the American public building of its decade, it moved the type.
Marvin Gaye · Music
8.6 · Tier IV
The field is soul and the popular album of its decade. The intrinsic force is high: the record showed that a soul singer inside the hit system could make an album as one statement, produced by himself, on public subjects, and keep both his public and his label, and it made the album, not the single, the unit of serious Black popular music. Credit is shared: Mayfield, Hayes and Sly Stone were moving the same way in the same years, and Stevie Wonder’s turn at Motown came alongside. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Motown’s ceding of creative control to its artists, whose great result is Wonder’s records of 1972 to 1976; the conscious soul album of the 1970s; Gaye’s own later records; and a line to neo-soul and political hip-hop, which has sampled and cited it continually.
Henri Matisse · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
Published, so force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force: the canvas reorganised what colour could do in a picture, from describing a surface to constituting a space, and what an interior could be, a field in which objects are ranked by being drawn or coloured; with the other interiors of 1911 it marks the furthest point of decorative painting before abstraction. The discount: nearly four decades of delay, and a reach shared with Matisse’s late work and the cut-outs. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: seen and scorned in 1912 and 1913, then kept in the painter’s studio and a London club, it became after 1949, in New York, a source for the painters of the colour field; Rothko’s attention to it is reported by the museum and by his circle, and the line runs to Newman, Kelly and the stained fields of the 1950s and 1960s.
The Beatles · Music
8.6 · Tier IV
The field is the album of the 1960s. The intrinsic force is real: the medley showed that a rock side could be a suite made of fragments, a form later bands took up at length; the record set a standard of warm, finished studio sound for the decade after it; it brought the synthesiser into the making of songs. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force, and the reach is very large: “Here Comes the Sun” became one of the most heard songs of its century, the medley form recurs through the art rock of the 1970s, and the record’s sound and its sleeve became models. What holds it: the record perfects more than it reorganises, and stands below Revolver and Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band at 9.4, which made the larger reorganisations.
My Bloody Valentine · Music
8.6 · Tier IV
The field is the record’s own tradition, guitar-based independent rock. The intrinsic force is high, and it carries the figure: the record reorganised what the electric guitar is, a source not of riffs and lines but of timbre and weather, whose pitch can be bent as a whole and whose feedback can be played as a keyboard. That is the record’s own invention more than a reassembly. What holds the axis below the force alone is the reach. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the redirection came narrower and later, through the shoegaze bands, dream pop, post-rock and the blackgaze of the 2000s and 2010s, after the British press mocked the scene in 1992 and grunge and Britpop overran it; delayed, it is credited and discounted.
Pink Floyd · Music
8.6 · Tier IV
The field is the rock album as one work, the art-rock tradition after Sgt. Pepper. The intrinsic force is real and is the smaller part: the record joined that tradition’s long-form ambition to plain songs and a stated subject, and made loops, synthesiser and found speech serve one argument without losing the listener. Little was invented; the force is the integration. It is held from the top because the reach is larger than the reorganisation: a tenth under OK Computer at 9.0, half a point under Revolver at 9.4. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the record made the whole album, not the single, the unit a generation bought and played, set a standard of studio sound, fixed the art-rock album as a mass form, and gave punk something to define itself against.
David Lynch and Mark Frost · Film
8.6 · Tier IV
Released from 1990 to 2017, so force and reach are scored together. Intrinsic force: the series showed American network drama that a serial could carry an auteur’s style, a novelistic town and an unexplained cosmology, and The Return that a series could contain an hour of experimental cinema and a narrative that refuses its audience’s wish. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it is wide and direct on television. The X-Files (1993) drew on it openly and cast from it; Northern Exposure and Picket Fences followed its tone; the murdered-girl serial, The Killing in Denmark and America, Top of the Lake, True Detective, is its genre; Riverdale is built on it. Held below the top because the serious American serial owed as much to cable economics and The Sopranos, and the film’s own reach on cinema is narrower.
Leon Battista Alberti · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Standing for more than five centuries, it is scored on force and reach together. The intrinsic force is a reorganisation of the church: building of wall, pier and vault on the Roman model in place of column and arcade, the aisle replaced in the structure by the chapel, one unit carried from front to choir, a giant order across the height of a front. The field is the church of the Italian Renaissance and the Catholic church that inherited it. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Bramante’s coffered barrel vaults and piers for St Peter’s answer it; the nave without aisles, between chapels and piers, became the congregational church of the Counter-Reformation, in Vignola’s Gesù in Rome and its descendants across Europe and the Americas; the temple front over the arch runs on into Palladio’s church fronts. Part of the reach is delayed and mediated, through Bramante and the treatise.
The Beatles · Music
8.5 · Tier IV
The field is the album of the 1960s. The intrinsic force is high: the record showed that a rock album could be an anthology of popular music, separate voices rather than one statement, an experimental collage beside a music hall song; it reorganised what the double album could be, and turned rock from studio artifice toward the played and the bare. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the sprawling double became a recognised form, measured against this one; “Revolution 9” brought tape collage to a larger audience than any record before it; its songs entered the general repertoire, “Blackbird” above all. The claim for “Helter Skelter” as a source of heavy metal is more asserted than shown, and discounted. It stands below Revolver and Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band at 9.4, which reorganised the album itself.
Pirro Ligorio · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force: the villa reorganised what a garden could be, from a place of planting with fountains to a hydraulic theatre composed in water, sound and movement across a whole hill. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it became the type of the Italian water garden; the water theatres of the villas of Frascati, the hydraulic gardens of northern Europe, and through them the water parterres and cascades of the Baroque, Versailles (8.9) and Caserta (8.2) among them, stand in its line; its organ fountain was famous across Europe within the century; and it remains the reference for the Renaissance garden. Held below 9.0 because the line is shared with other gardens of its decades, and the debt of the largest Baroque gardens is mediated.
Robert Smithson · Visual art
8.5 · Tier IV
On site since 1970, so force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force: with Double Negative it is one of the two founding works of land art and the fuller statement, sculpture reorganised as site, process and duration, a work whose condition is change and whose material is the place. The discount: the reach belongs partly to the movement and to Smithson’s writing rather than to this coil alone, it was carried for decades by images while the object lay under water, and it was not first. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it became the emblem of earthworks and of site-specific art; Nancy Holt’s Sun Tunnels (1973 to 1976), De Maria’s The Lightning Field (1977), Turrell’s Roden Crater and the environmental and ephemeral work of America and Europe stand in its field, and through the essay it entered the theory of sculpture.
Louis Le Vau and André Le Nôtre · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force: château, interior and garden integrated into one axial composition at the scale of a landscape, the garden the principal statement; the first complete jardin à la française, and the model of a ruler’s seat. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: within weeks of the fête the king had taken the makers, and their next work, Versailles, carried the method to the scale of a state and through it across Europe for a century. The reach is real, since no intermediary invented the method. It is discounted because most of it passed under Versailles’ name, and because the house, as against the garden, redirected less.
Richard Wright · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
The field is the American novel of its century. The intrinsic force is a reorganisation of what an African American novel could be and whom it could address, from the plea to the indictment, with a Black protagonist’s mind at the centre of a bestseller. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Ann Petry’s The Street (1946) and Chester Himes’s If He Hollers Let Him Go (1945) follow directly; Baldwin’s “Everybody’s Protest Novel” (1949) and “Many Thousands Gone” (1951) and Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952) were written in argument with it, so that the two other great Black writers of the next generation defined themselves against it; Howe’s “Black Boys and Native Sons” (1963) made it the dividing line of the tradition; the Black Arts writers of the 1960s claimed it. Held below the summit because its reach of form was smaller than its reach of matter and stance.
August Sander · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
Published, so intrinsic force and achieved reach are scored together, in the field of European documentary and portrait photography of the 1920s and after. Intrinsic force: the founding statement of the typological portrait, the photographic survey of a whole society as one work, and with Atget and Evans the ground of documentary as an art. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Walker Evans reviewed Antlitz der Zeit and took its sober frontality into American Photographs; Diane Arbus studied Sander and turned his frontal address on her own city; the industrial typologies of Bernd and Hilla Becher are acknowledged descendants, and through them the Düsseldorf school and the frontal portraits of Thomas Ruff and Thomas Struth; Richard Avedon’s In the American West; Rineke Dijkstra and Judith Joy Ross. Held below 9 because much of the reach was delayed until after the war.
Günter Behnisch and Frei Otto · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Seen since 1972, in the field of the long-span roof and the public building, in Europe and beyond. The intrinsic force is very high: the roofs showed that a permanent public roof of great extent could be found from its forces and built as a net in tension, joined structural calculation to computation as no earlier building had, and made lightness and transparency the language of a state’s chief building. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: wide and specific in engineering, narrower in architecture at large. Schlaich’s practice and its cable nets and grid shells, the tensile and membrane stadium roofs that followed across the world, the canopies of tension over airports and pavilions, and computed form-finding as a method descend from it; Otto’s line reaches into the parametric architecture of the 2000s, and his Pritzker Prize of 2015 recognised it. But the mass of building did not follow, and the stadium returned to the rigid bowl.
Katsuhiro Otomo · Film
8.4 · Tier IV
The field is the cinema of the 1980s. Intrinsic force: the film showed that animation could carry adult apocalyptic cinema at the craft of the best live action, and reorganised what a feature animation could be outside Japan, where the medium had stood for children. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it is very wide. Released in the United States by Streamline from 1989, it opened the market for Japanese animation abroad, and the adult anime features that followed, Ghost in the Shell (1995) among them, travelled on its path. Beyond animation it is taken up by makers: Chronicle (2012) takes its plot of a boy’s power and rage; Stranger Things (2016 onward) draws on it; and Kaneda’s sliding stop is quoted in films from animation to Nope (2022). Held below the top because its force reorganised one medium and its market more than what cinema as a whole could do.
Constantin Brâncuși · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
Published, so force and reach are scored together, in the field of European sculpture of the 1920s. The intrinsic force is a reorganisation of sculpture toward the single essential form and the finished surface, carving and polishing in place of modelling, a motion embodied by an object with no image in it. Much of the reach is shared with the series and the oeuvre, and is discounted on this bronze; Minimalism looked more to the Endless Column. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Isamu Noguchi worked in Brâncuși’s studio in 1927 and carried the lesson into a career; Hepworth and much British sculpture of the 1930s took up the pared organic form; the court case made abstract sculpture legally a work of art in the United States; and the streamlined form ran on, real and diluted, into the design of the century.
Christopher Nolan · Film
8.4 · Tier IV
Field: the cinema of the 2000s, so force and reach are scored together. Intrinsic force: the film showed that a superhero picture could carry a crime epic’s scale and a political argument, and could end in defeat. That is a real reorganisation of what the genre was permitted, if less of what film could do. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the dark, grounded reboot became a studio template for a decade, in franchises far from comics; IMAX photography for narrative features spread from it; and its Joker set the terms for every later one, including Joker (2019). The limit stands: the genre’s dominant course after 2008 went another way, through the shared universe Iron Man opened the same summer, and much of the imitation took the darkness as a surface.
Utagawa Hiroshige · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
Weighed within its own field, the Japanese landscape print; force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force: the series is the last great reorganisation of the form before the Meiji era ended the tradition’s first life, and its upright composition of near and far became a language. The discount: much of the reach is shared with Hokusai and with the Japanese print at large, and is charged so. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: in 1887 van Gogh copied Plum Park in Kameido and Sudden Shower over Shin-Ōhashi in oil, and the cropping and flat colour of the prints run through his Paris and Arles work; Whistler’s Nocturnes, above all Old Battersea Bridge, are widely traced to Hiroshige’s bridge views; Monet collected Hiroshige, and the Japanese bridge at Giverny is in that line; the cut foreground passed through Degas, Toulouse-Lautrec and the Nabis into the poster, photography and graphic design.
Barnett Newman · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
On view, so force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force is a real reorganisation of what a painting is: a field to be stood in rather than a picture to be looked at; division without composition; a whole in which no part balances another. The discount: the reach belongs to Newman’s zip paintings as a body and was delayed most of a decade, and this canvas is the most cited of them, not the first. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: in American painting after 1950, delayed and then decisive, through the colour-field painting of Louis and Noland’s stripes, Frank Stella’s early work, and Minimalism, whose makers claimed Newman as the father of the non-relational object; and beyond them, the large single field became a common form of museum painting.
Metallica · Music
8.4 · Tier IV
The field is heavy metal and its new extreme form, thrash, in the 1980s. The intrinsic force: the record showed that the speed and aggression of thrash could carry long, composed forms, dynamic contrast and harmonic ambition without softening, at a level of execution the genre had not reached. Little was invented here that Ride the Lightning had not begun; the force is the perfection and the scale. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the record took thrash from the clubs and the tape-trading circuit into the mainstream without radio or video, set the standard against which the genre’s records of the following years were measured, and is commonly credited as a starting point for progressive metal. Its reach outside metal is narrower.
Steve Reich · Music
8.3 · Tier IV
Published and performed, and so scored on force and reach together; the field is concert music of its decade, chiefly American, with its reach beyond. The force is the work’s own: it reorganised minimal music from a process for small forces into a harmonic form an hour broad, and showed that pulse and repetition could carry harmonic motion and radiance without development. It is the hinge between early minimalism and what came after. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: John Adams’s Shaker Loops (1978) and Harmonium (1981) and the postminimal generation, the Bang on a Can composers among them, stand in its line, the line credited, not each link; beyond concert music it is a common reference for electronic, ambient and rock musicians. Held below Low and Kind of Blue, at 9.1 each, because part of the redirection belongs to minimalism as a whole and to Reich’s earlier works.
Mughal court painters · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
The field is painting in India in the 1560s and 1570s, and the Mughal court’s in particular. The intrinsic force is a founding: the cycle is the project in which Mughal painting was made out of Persian training, Indian painters and Indian subjects, in a workshop the emperor built in order to make it, a real reorganisation of what was possible in its field. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the workshop trained on the Hamzanama went on to the great illustrated histories and epics of Akbar’s reign, and through them the line runs to the painting of Jahangir and Shah Jahan and into the sub-imperial, Rajput and Pahari courts. Held below 9.0 because the reach is regional, and went through the workshop more than through the dispersed, little-seen folios.
Michael Jackson · Music
8.2 · Tier IV
The field is popular music of the early 1980s, divided by format and by race on radio and on the new music television. The intrinsic force reorganised less what a song could be than what a pop record could be for: a single object built to cross every format at once, made to a standard of production that became the industry’s, with Billie Jean and Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’ carrying a real force of rhythm and arrangement. The short films and the televised performance did much of the redirecting, and they are not the record; that share is discounted. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the record set the model of the blockbuster album, singles drawn from it one after another for a year or more, carried a Black artist to the centre of every format, set the sound of pop production for a decade, and gave the dance floor its standards.
Cindy Sherman · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
Published, so intrinsic force and achieved reach are scored together, in the field of American art of the late 1970s: the turn from conceptual and performance art to the image, and the place of photography and of feminism within it. The intrinsic force is a reorganisation of what a photograph by an artist can be: from document to staged fiction, from portrait to the critique of identity, from fine print to a copy without an original. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the series became the emblem of the “Pictures” generation and of the theory of postmodern art, and its reach runs through staged and constructed photography, the artist as many selves, the teaching of photography and of feminist art, and the vocabulary of the self-made image. Discounted because some of that reach belongs to the generation and to the artist’s later work.
René Magritte · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
Published, so force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force: the picture reorganised what a painting could be about, making the relation of image, word and thing its subject, and showing that a painting could state and test a proposition. The discount: the reach belongs partly to the word paintings as a group, and it came late, through Magritte’s rise in the 1950s and 1960s, the American exhibitions and Foucault; it is credited and discounted for delay. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: conceptual art’s use of language against the image, of which Joseph Kosuth’s One and Three Chairs (1965) is the plain descendant; Marcel Broodthaers, who took up the sentence and the denial in his fictive museum; and beyond painting, advertising and graphic design, where the picture is quoted as often as any image of its century.
Emily Brontë · Literature
9.1 · Tier V
The field is the English novel of the 1840s, and the European novel beyond it. The intrinsic force is very high: the novel showed that a story could be told with no authorial moral centre at all, that the Gothic could be made realist and the realist Gothic, and that a passion could be the subject of a novel without being punished or redeemed. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: in 1847 it moved nobody, and the reach, delayed and so discounted, came after 1850, rose through the late century and became wide in the twentieth. It redirected the novel’s myth more than its form: Heathcliff became the type of the dark lover in fiction and film, in du Maurier’s Rebecca and a great part of the romance tradition, and Maryse Condé’s La Migration des cœurs (1995) rewrites the book in Guadeloupe and Cuba. The nested narration had less direct issue. Force near the top, reach a step below it.
Matthias Grünewald · Visual art
9.1 · Tier V
On view since 1516, so force and reach are scored together. The force is high: the work showed that the body’s deformation, and colour freed from description, could carry the sacred to its height. The reach is late. In its own century it redirected almost nothing: it stood in a provincial hospital church, the painter had no school, and Dürer’s line won. Delayed reach is credited and discounted, and that holds the axis lowest, beside one other. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the German Expressionists after the Munich showing of 1917–1919; Dix’s triptych Der Krieg (1929–1932), with its predella; Picasso’s Crucifixion drawings (1932); Hindemith’s Mathis der Maler; Ernst’s Temptation of Saint Anthony (1945); Sutherland’s Northampton Crucifixion (1946); and Karl Barth, who kept a reproduction of the Crucifixion over his desk.
Chola, under Rajaraja I · Architecture
9.0 · Tier V
The temple has stood for a thousand years, so force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force is a reorganisation of what a temple in its tradition could be: the sanctum tower at the scale of a state, the temple as the visible centre of a realm’s economy, the gateway raised toward the monumental. The redirection was immediate and then turned, and reach stands below force. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Rajendra I answered within a generation at Gangaikondacholapuram, a little lower and more curved; Darasuram and Tribhuvanam kept the plan, smaller; then the gopurams of Chidambaram, Madurai and Srirangam answered by inversion, a type Thanjavur’s own gateways began, while the summit over the god was not followed.
John Milton · Literature
9.0 · Tier V
The field is English poetry of the seventeenth century, and with it the European pastoral elegy since Theocritus. The intrinsic force: the poem took a worn convention and made it the vehicle of vocation, theology and public anger, and showed that English verse could be irregular in the Italian manner and still be monumental. After it the elegy was the place where a poet tested his calling against death. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Shelley’s Adonais (1821) and Arnold’s Thyrsis (1866) are written in its line; the elegiac tradition through Tennyson measures itself against it; “fresh woods, and pastures new” passed into the language, and Thomas Wolfe took a novel’s title from it. Held below 9.0 because its reach runs largely within one genre, and the larger pressure Milton put on the field came later, with Paradise Lost.
Gustav Mahler · Music
9.0 · Tier V
Intrinsic force and achieved reach are scored together. The force is real: the work made the song-symphony a form of its own, showed that a large orchestra could be written as chamber music, used heterophony and the pentatonic as structure inside the Austro-German tradition, and ended a symphonic work on an open chord. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: real and concentrated. Zemlinsky’s Lyric Symphony (1923), with its two alternating voices, stands in its line; the Schoenberg circle studied it, and Schoenberg’s arrangement for chamber ensemble is a record of the study; its open ending is often set at the threshold of the modern. The field is narrow, and the main roads after it, serial and neoclassical, ran elsewhere.
Samuel Beckett · Literature
9.0 · Tier V
A published work, so intrinsic force and achieved reach are scored together. The field is European drama after 1945. The force is high: the play takes the theatre of waiting its author had made and drives it to a form without even the hope of an arrival; it reorganises what a stage can hold as the unit of a play, a room, a body, a game; and it makes the theatre’s own conventions a subject. Held here because the reach is shared with Godot, which carries most of the credit for the turn of the 1950s; Endgame is the play that proved the turn was not a single success. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Pinter’s rooms and servants, Thomas Bernhard’s tyrannical invalids and their attendants, the later stage of Sarah Kane and much European director’s theatre are hard to conceive without it, and it is taught and played as one of the two central plays of the postwar stage.
Anonymous · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
The field was the cuneiform literature of Mesopotamia in Sumerian and Akkadian, and the scribal culture of the second and first millennium Near East that read it. There was no wider literary field: the work is older than Homer and than the written Hebrew Bible. Intrinsic force is near the first rank: the reorganisation of episodic heroic song into a single life shaped by a question, the first long poem known to make a hero’s search against death its whole action. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: within its field the reach is demonstrated, copied and taught across a millennium, translated beyond Mesopotamia, a standard text of its scribal schools. What holds the figure there is the reach beyond it. For about two thousand years the work redirected nothing. The links that have been drawn are argued rather than shown: the Flood narrative stands close to Genesis 6 to 9, but the older poem of Atrahasis stands nearer as a common source, and links to the Odyssey and to Achilles and Patroclus have been argued, by M. L. West among others, and doubted. The delayed reach since 1872 is wide in name and thinner in particulars, and is credited at a discount.
William Faulkner · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
The field is the American novel of the twentieth century. The intrinsic force is high: the book made race the central subject of the high modernist American novel, showed that a white Southern writer could enter the consciousness of a man undone by the colour line without sentiment or minstrelsy, and fused the means of modernism, memory, interior time and counterpoint, with a plot as public as a lynching. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the book stands with Faulkner’s other major novels behind the Nobel Prize for 1949, behind the Southern novel that followed, Flannery O’Connor’s and Cormac McCarthy’s, and behind the novel of the colour line, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man and Toni Morrison’s. Held below the top because that reach is in large part the reach of the author’s whole body, not of this book alone.
Fernando Pessoa · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
The field is Portuguese poetry of the twentieth century and, through translation, the European and American lyric. The intrinsic force is a real reorganisation of what a poet could be: the lyric “I” made explicitly a fiction and multiplied, decades before that became a theoretical commonplace. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: in Portugal it is decisive, Pessoa standing with Camões as the national poet and later poetry from Sophia de Mello Breyner and Jorge de Sena on written in his shadow; José Saramago’s O Ano da Morte de Ricardo Reis (1984) takes a heteronym as its hero; Antonio Tabucchi made him a subject of fiction and of translation into Italian; Paz’s essay set him before Latin America, and Harold Bloom’s The Western Canon (1994) placed him with Neruda among the heirs of Whitman. The reach was delayed and is discounted for it: it came after the decisive decades of modernism, and the modernist lyric in English, French and German did not take its direction from him.
Rainer Maria Rilke · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
The field is German poetry of the first half of the twentieth century and, through translation, the European and American lyric. The force is a real reorganisation of what a long lyric could do in modernity: a poem could build its own metaphysics and its own myth without a creed and still speak with the authority of the old elegy. It renewed Hölderlin’s form more than it broke it, and German poetry’s technical course after 1922 ran more through Trakl, Benn, Brecht and Celan than through the elegies; that holds it below the top. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Heidegger’s “Wozu Dichter?” (1946) shaped the philosophical reading of poetry; the cycle runs through English and American poetry in translation; and the angels of Wenders’s Wings of Desire (1987) are its descendants. The reach was to sensibility more than to method.
James Joyce · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
The field is the novel in English of the 1910s. The intrinsic force: the book showed that a novel could be built from the stages of a consciousness rendered in its own idiom, without an authorial frame, and that a narrative voice could be saturated with a character’s language while staying in the third person. That reorganised what the novel of development could be and what free indirect style could carry. What holds it below the top is that the larger reorganisation was Ulysses, and much of the reach credited to Joyce runs through that book. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the book became the model of the artist’s coming of age for the century after it, in English and beyond; Dylan Thomas named a book for it, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog (1940); its aesthetic theory and its credo of “silence, exile, and cunning” entered the self-understanding of modernist and later writers; and it made Joyce’s name to Pound’s circle and to English readers before Ulysses.
Thomas Mann · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
The field is the German novel of the twentieth century and the European novel of ideas. The intrinsic force is large: the book showed that the novel could take the intellectual crisis of Europe, its science, medicine, politics and religion, as its action without ceasing to be the story of one young man; it made duration a subject, turned the Bildungsroman against its own premise, and made the sanatorium a figure for a civilisation. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force, and it is particular. It made Mann the representative German writer of his generation; his own Doctor Faustus is built on its method; Hesse’s Glasperlenspiel takes up the pedagogical province on a height; the sanatorium novel became a kind, and Olga Tokarczuk’s Empuzjon (2022) answers it openly. What holds it here: it did not change how novels are written, Broch and Musil made the essayistic novel beside it and owe it little, and much of its later presence is homage rather than redirection. It completed and summed the nineteenth century novel more than it opened a new one.
William Faulkner · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
The field is the American novel of its century, and the modernist novel in English as it entered it. The intrinsic force: the book made the novel of many short first-person stations into a portable form, and showed that the methods of high modernism could carry poor rural people, and laughter, without condescension. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the descent claimed for it, the novel of a funeral or a wake told in many voices and the many-narrator family novel, is argued rather than settled, and the cases most often named are García Márquez’s first novel, La hojarasca (1955), and Graham Swift’s Last Orders (1996), whose debt was argued in public. Held below the top because much of Faulkner’s reach runs through the whole of his Yoknapatawpha work, and through The Sound and the Fury and Absalom, Absalom!, so that this book’s own share is real but not the largest.
W. B. Yeats · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
The field is poetry in English in the 1920s, a field Yeats shared with The Waste Land (1922) and Pound’s early Cantos. The intrinsic force: the book showed that rhyme, stanza and the public voice could carry the full modern matter, civil war, a faith collapsing, sexuality in age, so that the modern was not only the fragment. That is an alternative modernism, and its reach is named: Auden’s middle style learned from the late manner this book set, and his elegy of 1939 is to its poet; the early Larkin was Yeatsian before he turned away; Roethke, and later Heaney, Mahon and the Irish poets after them, wrote in its shadow and against it. What holds the axis is where the reach lies and where the field went. Much of it is owed to Yeats’s late work at large rather than to this book, and the main course of poetry in English after 1922 ran through Eliot and Pound; this book held a field that The Waste Land moved.
Andrei Rublev · Visual art
8.9 · Tier IV
Published, so force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force is high: the panel reorganised the Old Testament Trinity from a story into the defining image of the Trinity in Russian painting, and fixed a manner, the circle, the light palette, the gentleness of figure, that Russian icon painting followed for generations. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: copies and derivatives fill the tradition; beyond Russia the reach is real but late, coming after the uncovering of 1904 and the cleaning of 1918 to 1919, through Russian modernism’s rediscovery of the icon, through Orthodox and then ecumenical theology, and through Tarkovsky. Within its own tradition and region it is the summit. Held below the top because it did not redirect the painting of Europe at large, and its reach outside its tradition came five centuries late.
Giuseppe Verdi · Music
8.9 · Tier IV
Intrinsic force and achieved reach are scored together. The force is real: the work made continuous music drama Italian, with the voice still sovereign, and showed that Shakespeare could be set at tragic pace without the reduction of Rossini’s Otello of 1816, which the Italian stage had known for seventy years. It redirected Italian opera more than the art as a whole: the German and French lines of the next generation ran from Wagner. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it opened the road to Falstaff (1893); its continuous acts, conversational declamation and commenting orchestra passed to Puccini and the verismo composers; it made the Italian libretto a literary form, on Boito’s model; and its title role became the summit test of the heroic tenor.
Vladimir Nabokov · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
The field is the novel of the 1960s, which the book entered in 1962, so force and reach are scored together. The force is a real reorganisation of possibility: the book showed that a novel could take the form of a critical edition, that its plot could live in the margins, that the reader’s work of reconstruction could be the experience, and that a text could be built as a web of cross-references to be read out of order. Two things hold it below the top: the reach is shared with Borges, whose fictions came first, and much of what followed took the manner of the apparatus more than the book’s grief. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the book is a founding text of the metafiction of the 1960s and after, beside Borges and Barth; the annotated, footnoted and apparatus-built fiction that followed descends from it in part; and it is regularly cited as a forerunner of hypertext.
Ustad Ahmad Lahauri · Architecture
8.9 · Tier IV
Standing since about 1653, so force and reach are scored together, in its own field, Mughal and Indo-Islamic building in South Asia. The intrinsic force is a reorganisation of the garden tomb. The tomb left the garden’s centre for the river’s edge, marble and sandstone became a hierarchy of rank, and the whole ensemble, down to a twin with no use, was put under one law; it set the canon of the white marble imperial tomb. But it completed more than it opened. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the reduced replica at Aurangabad, the Bibi ka Maqbara, in the 1660s; Safdarjung’s tomb at Delhi in the 1750s; the tombs and pavilions of the successor courts; the Indo-Saracenic style, ending in the Victoria Memorial at Calcutta; and the most reproduced image of any building.
F. Scott Fitzgerald · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
The field is American fiction of the 1920s and the novel in English of its decade. The force: the book showed that the American social novel could be short, lyric and symbolic without losing its satire, joined Conrad’s observing narrator to American material, and made the self-made man and his dream a tragic fable. T. S. Eliot wrote to Fitzgerald that it was the first step American fiction had taken since Henry James. Held below the top because the force renews more than it reorganises, the reach runs through the myth more than the method, and Hemingway and Faulkner redirected the American sentence and form more. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: from the 1950s the central novel of the American century in teaching and imagination; second on the Modern Library’s list of 1998; Holden Caulfield’s book in The Catcher in the Rye; a pattern of dreamer and witness taken up by Roth, Hollinghurst and Joseph O’Neill; and “Gatsby” a common noun.
Fyodor Dostoevsky · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
The field is Russian literature of the 1860s, the decade of Fathers and Sons, Crime and Punishment and War and Peace. The force: the holy fool made the hero of a modern novel, and the scandal scene made into structure. In its decade and language it is not the book that moved the field most: War and Peace redirected the novel itself, and within Dostoevsky’s own work the greater redirection belongs to Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov. The force is very high and the reach narrower than the force. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the novel of the saintly innocent in a corrupt world runs on after it; Hesse took it as a key to his age; Kurosawa moved it to postwar Hokkaido (Hakuchi, 1951); and Myshkin became, for the twentieth century, the type of the good man’s failure.
Franz Kafka · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
The field is German-language prose fiction of the 1910s and the European short story. The intrinsic force is a model fixed for the century: the modern parable of power, an apparatus described from inside its own logic in a flat procedural voice, which reorganised what fiction about state violence could do. The discount is twofold. The reach is shared with Kafka’s whole work and is hard to separate from that of Der Process and Die Verwandlung; and it was delayed, coming largely after 1945. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the story is among Kafka’s most anthologised and most taught; Philip Glass made an opera of it (2000); and it stands behind a line of fiction on torture and empire. The figure rests on the force of the procedural parable and on reach that belongs to this story, and it stands below the disclosure and the myth for the reach it shares.
Caravaggio · Visual art
8.8 · Tier IV
On public view in Rome for four centuries, so force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force is high: the canvas reorganised the history painting of a miracle, making the sacred event private, unwitnessed and naturalistic, with light as the only supernatural agent. The discount is that the reach belongs first to the manner and to the Contarelli Chapel, and no single later picture answers this one as Goya answers Las Meninas. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the manner spread within two decades to Naples, Utrecht, Seville and Lorraine, painters from Rubens and Ribera to Rembrandt answered the sacred scene in darkness and one light, and this canvas, in a public chapel at the main northern entry to Rome, was a principal place to see it.
Jalal al-Din Rumi · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
A published work, so force and reach are scored together. The field is Persian poetry of the thirteenth century, and with it the lyric of the Persianate and Islamic world after it. The intrinsic force is very high: it showed what the ghazal could hold of ecstasy, of music and of a real person, and no Persian lyric after it could be quite so courtly again. Against it: the line of the Persian ghazal runs from Sa’di to Hafez, who learned more from Sa’di and Khwaju than from Rumi; the ecstatic manner was in some ways a summit without a school; and much of Rumi’s reach is the Masnavi’s and the Mevlevi order’s. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the Mevlevi poets of Ottoman Turkish, Sheikh Galib among them, wrote in its manner; Iqbal’s Persian ghazals take Rumi as their guide; Rückert’s Ghaselen (1819) were made after it, and through them Hegel’s Aesthetics took Rumi as the type of pantheistic poetry; Nicholson and Arberry carried it into English.
Jean Racine · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
The field is the French tragic stage of the 1660s, and European tragedy after it. The intrinsic force is high: the play established the Racinian tragedy, passion as fate in pure verse, and ended Corneille’s command of the French stage; the next decade, Britannicus, Bérénice, Bajazet, Mithridate, Iphigénie and Phèdre, unfolds from it. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the model of French classical tragedy through Voltaire; Ambrose Philips’s English version, The Distrest Mother (1712), a stage success in its century; Rossini’s Ermione (1819); the chain of unrequited love as a structure later comedy and fiction keep reusing; and Baudelaire’s “Le Cygne”, which joins Virgil’s widow and Racine’s in modern poetry. Held just under the force because the reach is mostly within French, and much of it passes through Phèdre.
Franz Kafka · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
The field is German-language prose of the early century and, by reach, the short form in every language after it. The intrinsic force is the brief parable without a key made a form for serious fiction, and the book holds three or four of its defining instances. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Vor dem Gesetz opens Orson Welles’s film of The Trial (1962), told over Alexandre Alexeieff’s pinscreen images; J. M. Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello lectures on Red Peter, the ape of the report; and the report has a stage life of its own. Delayed influence is credited and discounted: the book drew little notice in 1920, and its reach came after Kafka’s death and largely through his name. Held below 9.0 because much of what moved the field moved it through Der Process and Die Verwandlung, and the reach of Vor dem Gesetz is shared with the novel it belongs to.
William Wordsworth · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
The field is English poetry of the nineteenth century, and with it European Romanticism. The intrinsic force stands near the top: the poem reorganised what a long poem could be about, making the growth of a mind sufficient matter for epic, and it set the pattern that the Romantic and modern novel of the artist’s growth would follow, the circuitous journey from childhood vision through crisis to a recovered vocation. The reach is discounted for delay. The poem was unknown to the generation it would most have shaped, whose Wordsworth came through Lyrical Ballads, the Poems of 1807 and The Excursion. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: published in 1850, and the 1805 text only in 1926, the poem reached furthest in the twentieth century, in a criticism that made it the central Romantic text, in the poetics of memory and in the autobiographical long poem. Delayed influence is credited and discounted, and the figure does both.
Geoffrey Chaucer · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
The field is English poetry of the late fourteenth century and, beyond it, the vernacular narrative of Boccaccio and the French. Its intrinsic force: it showed that English could sustain a long narrative in the high style, with philosophy, psychology and comedy in one verse; it brought rhyme royal to its full power; and it made the inner life of two lovers, followed day by day, the substance of a narrative poem as no English poem had and few European ones. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: rhyme royal became a principal stanza of English narrative and complaint for two centuries (Lydgate, Hoccleve, James I’s Kingis Quair, Henryson, Shakespeare’s Lucrece), and Criseyde’s story passed through Henryson to Shakespeare. Held below the top because much of Chaucer’s reach runs through The Canterbury Tales, and the poem’s psychological method waited for the novel.
Henry David Thoreau · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
The field is American and English prose of the nineteenth century. The force is high: the book made the long first-person account of a life in nature a form of moral and philosophical argument, which no book in English had done at this pitch, and its sentences became a standard of American prose. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it is the source of the American nature-writing line, of much of the simple-living and environmental tradition, and of a style. The political reach to Tolstoy, Gandhi and King runs mainly through “Resistance to Civil Government”, a separate essay, and is not credited here. Its reach into fiction and poetry is smaller than that of the largest American books of its decade, and it came about forty years late, credited with that discount.
Plato · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
The field is Greek prose and thought of the early fourth century BC, rhetoric, the sophists, Socratic literature and the poets, and through them Western literature and philosophy both. The force: it constitutes the quarrel of philosophy and rhetoric as a quarrel, defining rhetoric against a standard of knowledge and putting the case for the stronger man in its classic form, so that both sides of a long argument take their terms from it. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Aristotle’s Rhetoric; Cicero’s synthesis of eloquence and wisdom, made against it; Quintilian’s good man skilled in speaking; the humanists’ defence of rhetoric; Nietzsche’s Callicles; the modern debate on propaganda, which still uses its words, flattery, pandering, the cook and the doctor. Very wide, but within Plato’s work the Republic carries the same argument further, and the dialogue’s reach often runs through it.
John Keats · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
The field is English poetry of the nineteenth century, and the lyric in English after it. The intrinsic force: the body made the ode the principal English form of the meditative lyric, and fixed the lyric of sensuous perception thinking its way toward mortality, a real reorganisation of what the short poem could carry. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: large but delayed. Keats died with little standing; the reach begins with Milnes’s Life of 1848 and runs through Tennyson, the Pre-Raphaelites and Hopkins into Owen, Yeats and Wallace Stevens, and through the New Critics, who used the Urn to define the poem as an object; Fitzgerald took Tender Is the Night from Nightingale. Held at 8.8 because the delay is discounted, and reach that belongs to Keats’s legend is not credited to these six poems.
Jean Renoir · Film
8.8 · Tier IV
The field is the cinema of the 1930s. The intrinsic force is the fullest working, before Citizen Kane (1941), of staging in depth with a moving camera, a grammar in which the frame holds a society rather than a person; with it the ensemble film of interlocking stories, and farce and tragedy mixed at full strength. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: delayed, since the film was banned, cut and largely unseen for twenty years, and discounted for that; then very wide from 1959, when the reconstruction became a touchstone of the French New Wave and of the criticism that followed Bazin. Robert Altman’s ensemble films carry it openly, Gosford Park (2001) most of all. Held a step down by the delay, and because part of the force belongs to Renoir’s films before it.
Andrei Tarkovsky · Film
8.8 · Tier IV
The field is the cinema of the 1970s. Intrinsic force: the film made duration and stillness the substance of a genre film, science fiction made of a landscape, three men and time, and set the model of the long contemplative take Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the slow cinema of Béla Tarr, Aleksandr Sokurov and Apichatpong Weerasethakul; the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. video games; and the words “stalker” and “the Zone” as they were taken up for the Chernobyl exclusion zone and those who enter it. The games and the words count as presence more than as a moved field, and a share of the reach belongs to Tarkovsky’s work as a whole.
Anonymous (Neolithic and Bronze Age) · Architecture
8.8 · Tier IV
The field is the monument building of Neolithic and Early Bronze Age Britain. The intrinsic force is very high: the monument reorganises what a ceremonial monument could be, shaped stone joined like timber and raised into a lintelled ring, from materials gathered across the island. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: within its field it drew the landscape to itself for a millennium, the Bronze Age barrow cemeteries crowding the ridges in sight of it; but the lintel and the trilithon were never built again in prehistoric Britain. The delayed reach, credited with its discount, is long: it founded British antiquarianism and much of archaeoastronomy and gave archaeology the word “henge”. Some of the rest is fame, which is presence and not pressure on a field.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart · Music
8.8 · Tier IV
The work fused Baroque counterpoint, Classical drama and a sombre orchestral colour into a setting of the Mass for the Dead that addresses a listener as much as a liturgy: a real reorganisation of what a requiem could be. Its influence was immediate, so little is delayed. What holds the axis is the force, made from known means and standing below the reach it achieved. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the Requiem passed from a single office to the concert hall and the state funeral; the dramatic requiems of the nineteenth century, Cherubini’s, Berlioz’s and Verdi’s, and its consoling ones stand in its line; and its completion became the founding case for the problem of finishing a dead master’s work, argued through every case since.
Jonathan Swift · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
The field is English prose of the eighteenth century, and satire in English after it. The force: the pamphlet fixed the deadpan ironic proposal as a form, the method of following an accepted premise to an unbearable conclusion in the voice of its believers, and showed that irony could be the most serious instrument of political argument rather than its ornament. Held below the higher figures because what it moved was a method more than the shape of literature, and the larger turns of the field in that century were made by the novel. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: for a pamphlet the reach is extraordinary. Its title became a phrase in the language for any monstrous or satirical proposal, it is the model invoked whenever deadpan political satire is discussed, and its method runs through later satire in prose, on the stage and on the screen.
Francesco Borromini · Architecture
8.8 · Tier IV
Force and reach are scored together, in the field of Baroque church building in Italy and the Catholic north. The intrinsic force is a reorganisation of possibility: a building whose plan, wall and vault are generated from one figure and run continuous, so that space is shaped as a single plastic body rather than assembled from bays and a cupola; San Carlo’s turn carried to the dome and the crown. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: in Rome it was limited, for the classical party prevailed and Borromini founded no school there; its reach went north and late, through Guarini’s star-vaulted domes in Turin, through the Bohemian and Franconian Baroque of the Dientzenhofers and the line that runs to Vierzehnheiligen (8.6), and through the spiral spires traced to it, Thurah’s at Vor Frelsers Kirke in Copenhagen the best known; in the twentieth century Moretti and Portoghesi took the geometry up again in Italy. The reach is real, diffuse, shared with San Carlo and delayed, and is discounted for it.
Roberto Bolaño · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
The field is the novel in Spanish at the turn of the century and, with the translation, the world novel of the early twenty-first. The force: it ended the hold of magic realism as the form expected of the Latin American novel abroad, showed that the total novel could be written as a record of atrocity rather than a fable of a people, and put the killings of women on the border at the centre of world literature. Held below the top because part of the turn began with Los detectives salvajes (1998), and because the span is short. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Natasha Wimmer’s English of 2008 made Bolaño, with that earlier novel, the most discussed foreign novelist in English for some years; the book is ranked in many surveys among the most important novels of this century; and the younger Mexican and Latin American novelists of violence write after it.
Albrecht Dürer · Visual art
8.8 · Tier IV
Intrinsic force: with its companions the plate is where engraving became capable of the tonal and tactile range of painting, and it showed that a small sheet, printed many times, could carry a grave and complex meditation at the height of a painted altarpiece. That changed what a print could be. Held below 9.0: much of that redirection belongs to Dürer’s output as a whole and to the other two plates, not to this one alone. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the three plates were models of the engraver’s craft for centuries; the image passed into German letters and thought, through Nietzsche and Thomas Mann; and it was taken up, against its own sense, in German nationalist imagery.
Anonymous · Architecture
8.8 · Tier IV
Force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force: the chapel constitutes the glass cage and the building as reliquary in their most complete form, and fixes the type of the princely relic chapel. It spread as an emblem of royal sanctity as much as a model, so reach stands above force. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the type took the building’s name, in the Saintes-Chapelles of Vincennes, begun under Charles V in 1379, of Bourges and Riom for Jean de Berry and of Châteaudun and Chambéry; St Stephen’s Chapel at Westminster, begun in 1292, took up the two-storey palace chapel; and the Rayonnant court style made it its emblem.
Béla Bartók · Music
8.8 · Tier IV
The field is concert music of the 1930s, with Stravinsky’s Symphony of Psalms (8.9) beside it. Intrinsic force is high: the work reorganised what an orchestral piece of moderate size could be, making percussion and keyboards structural rather than coloristic, stage space an element of form, and a single-subject cyclic design hold a whole work without a programme. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the reach is real but diffuse. Its antiphonal and spatial writing stands among the precedents for later spatial music, through many channels; its Adagio entered film, above all through Kubrick’s The Shining (8.6) of 1980, and through it later horror scoring. It did not redirect a school as The Rite of Spring (9.2) did, and it led to Bartók’s own Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion of 1937 more than to a tradition.
Anonymous · Architecture
8.8 · Tier IV
Force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force: the first cathedral built at the scale the High Gothic would take as its norm, the classic statement of the two-towered harmonic front, and the Rayonnant transept façade. What holds the axis below the top is that the elevation the age followed was Chartres’s, not this one. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the west front fixed a type followed in the region and beyond; the transept fronts of Jean de Chelles and Pierre de Montreuil carried the Rayonnant across Europe; Hugo’s novel made the building the cause of the French movement to preserve monuments; and the campaign of Lassus and Viollet-le-Duc made it the founding case of modern restoration and the ground of the Dictionnaire, whose rationalist reading of Gothic reached Gaudí and the structural modernists.
Johannes Vermeer · Visual art
8.8 · Tier IV
Force and reach are scored together within Dutch painting and the European townscape, and the force stands above the reach. The force: the painting reorganised what a townscape could be, not a record of a place but an image of light on a place, the town pushed into a band and paint laid in separate touches a century and a half before anyone else did so. The discount: in its own century it moved almost nothing. Vermeer founded no school, and the townscape painters of the 1660s, van der Heyden and the Berckheydes, descend from Saenredam. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: public from 1822; the picture through which Thoré rediscovered Vermeer for the modern eye; Proust’s chapter; the camera obscura writers’ and the photographers’ claim on it, and Hockney’s; a change in what painting could attend to, two centuries late.
William Blake · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
The field is English literature of the late eighteenth century, with the European reception of Milton and Swedenborg behind it. The intrinsic force is a real reorganisation: the book set the moral worth of energy and desire against restraint, inverted the polarity of good and evil inside Christian myth, and made the reading of Satan as the hero of Paradise Lost a thesis, a position the Romantic reading of Milton would take up. It also made the illuminated book a form in which the poet controls every stage of the made object. Delayed influence is credited and discounted. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: scarcely read until Gilchrist’s Life (1863) and Swinburne’s essay (1868); Yeats and Ellis’s edition (1893); Frye’s Fearful Symmetry (1947); Huxley’s The Doors of Perception (1954), titled from plate 14, through which the phrase passed into the counterculture; and Ginsberg, who by his own account dated his vocation to a vision of Blake.
Søren Kierkegaard · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
The field is the literature and thought of the European nineteenth century, Danish first. The force is high: the book reorganised the possibility of writing about belief, setting the single individual against the universal and making faith a passion, not a stage in a system. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Kafka’s parables of Abraham, in a letter to Klopstock of 1921, and his reading of Kierkegaard in his diaries; Sartre’s anguish of Abraham; Camus’s critique of the leap; Auden’s essays; Levinas and Derrida. The charge is delay. In its own century and language the book moved little, the Copenhagen Hegelians absorbing it barely at all, and its reach came more than half a century late; delayed influence is credited and discounted. Some of the later reach belongs to the authorship as a whole, and only what is plainly this book’s own is counted: Abraham, the knight of faith, the suspension of the ethical.
Charlotte Brontë · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
The field is the English novel of the nineteenth century, with Dickens, Thackeray and later Eliot and Hardy in it. The intrinsic force: the book made the inner life of an obscure woman, told by herself with full passion and full moral authority, a ground the novel could stand on; Austen’s heroines are seen and judged, and Jane judges. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the female novel of education in the first person, the governess novel, the Gothic romance from Rebecca (1938) to the mass paperback, Wide Sargasso Sea, and much of the feminist criticism of the 1970s, which took Jane and Bertha as its ground. Held below the top because the reorganisation is of voice and claim within the realist and Gothic forms, not of the novel’s form itself, which Eliot and Flaubert moved further, and because part of the reach is into genre, where the moral argument thins.
Romanesque builders; Obradoiro facade by Fernando de Casas Novoa · Architecture
8.7 · Tier IV
The field is Romanesque and later Iberian building, and the pilgrimage roads that ran to it. The intrinsic force is high: the fullest surviving statement of the pilgrimage church, the Pórtico at the summit of Iberian sculpture of its century, and the Obradoiro as the culminating work of the Compostelan Baroque. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the plan type travelled along the roads in common with Toulouse, so its reach is shared; Mateo’s workshop and followers carried the Pórtico’s manner across Galicia and León; the Obradoiro set the high mark for Galician Baroque in granite; and the building is the terminus that organised the roads, though that reach belongs to the cult as much as to the stones.
Émile Zola · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
The field is the French novel of the nineteenth century and, by its reach, the European novel of industrial society. The force is a real reorganisation of what a novel could hold: Germinal set the model for the novel of labour and of the strike, and for the crowd as protagonist. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: broad and lasting, a book read in France as the Zola novel, translated into most written languages and filmed by Capellani (1913), Allégret (1963) and Berri (1993); its reach outside France is plain in general and is not argued here in particulars. Held below the top because the form it set was a method more than a revolution of the novel’s means, and the larger change in the field was naturalism as a whole.
George Gordon, Lord Byron · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
The field is European poetry of the early nineteenth century. The force: the poem made a new kind of long poem possible, the conversational, self-interrupting epic of contemporary life in which the narrator’s improvisation governs the form, and showed that comic verse could carry a whole society and a war. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Pushkin took its manner into Eugene Onegin, begun in 1823, and through Onegin the form passed to Lermontov’s comic narrative poems and, a century and a half later, to Vikram Seth’s The Golden Gate; Musset’s Namouna answers it in French; Auden’s Letter to Lord Byron (1936) addresses it directly and borrows its manner. In its field it is the chief model for the narrative poem as conversation. What holds it here: European Byronism owes more to Childe Harold, Manfred and the tales; in English the manner had few strong heirs before Auden; and much of its reach runs through one great intermediary, Pushkin.
Stanley Kubrick · Film
8.7 · Tier IV
Released in 1964, so force and reach are scored together. The force: the film made the nuclear end of the world sayable as comedy inside a studio picture, and showed that black farce could take state policy as its subject while the policy was in force. It reorganised tone and subject more than the grammar of film, and in the decade of Psycho, L’Avventura, 8½, Persona and 2001 that keeps it below the top. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the reach is wide, and it began at release, running through the American black comedy and military satire of Catch-22 and M*A*S*H (both 1970) to the political satire of In the Loop (2009) and Don’t Look Up (2021), which takes its structure openly, with the War Room become a common reference. Beyond film, “doomsday machine” in the language of strategy and journalism is noted as breadth, not weighed.
Ingmar Bergman · Film
8.7 · Tier IV
Published, so force and reach are scored together. The film showed that a feature could put the largest questions directly, in allegory, and hold an international audience; with Wild Strawberries the same year, it made a director’s name a reason to see a film. Force is held below reach, because the reach is largely to the emblem, not the grammar. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the redirection is documented in Woody Allen’s Love and Death (1975), which ends with a dance with Death; in Death brought to supper in Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life (1983), played at board games in Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey (1991) and stepping out of a screening of this film in Last Action Hero (1993); and in the film’s place as the type of the art film.
Sylvia Plath · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
The intrinsic force is high: the book made a new lyric voice possible, a woman speaking violence, triumph, black comedy and ritual at once, in short lines driven by sound. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the book fixed the figure of the confessional poet in the public mind, became the most read book of verse of its generation in English, and was present across the women’s movement of the 1970s. Anne Sexton’s later books answered it; Ted Hughes’s Birthday Letters (1998) is a book of answers addressed to Plath; Louise Glück’s early books absorbed it and refused it; Carol Ann Duffy’s monologues in women’s voices and later spoken verse take up its address to an audience. Held at 8.8 because part of the reach is the legend’s, and imitation of the manner has been common and weak.
Ingmar Bergman · Film
8.7 · Tier IV
Released in 1966, so force and reach are scored together. The film joined the psychological drama to the reflexive avant-garde and made the breaking of the image a dramatic event. But its parts were already in play, in Resnais, Godard, the avant-garde and Bergman’s own Prison, and the force reassembled more than it invented. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the redirection is documented in Altman’s Images (1972) and 3 Women (1977) and in Lynch’s Mulholland Drive (2001), and the film has held its place in film schools and film theory since 1967. Counted as direct borrowing rather than as a grammar diffused through art cinema, that reach is narrower than a medium-founding work’s, and it did not change what popular film does.
David Lynch · Film
8.7 · Tier IV
Released in 1986, so force and reach are scored together. The force made a grammar of the suburban uncanny and carried the surreal into the American mainstream. It did this by joining parts already present, Hitchcock, Buñuel, noir and Lynch’s own earlier film, and the force reassembled more than it invented. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Twin Peaks (1990) carried the film’s world into television and changed what television drama could carry; “Lynchian” entered the language; the suburban gothic that followed bears it plainly, in Happiness (1998), American Beauty (1999) and Donnie Darko (2001); the old pop song laid over violence, sincere and ironic at once, became an idiom of the 1990s; and Hopper’s Frank became a template for the villain whose evil is regressive and comic.
Antoni Gaudí · Architecture
8.7 · Tier IV
Field: church building and Catalan architecture from the 1880s, and the European building of its decades. The intrinsic force is very high: a structure found by form rather than drawn by rule, the equilibrated column, ruled-surface geometry as a means of building free forms, at the largest scale a church has attempted in modern times. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: delayed, then wide, and discounted as delayed. In its own decades its reach was mostly Catalan, and the modern movement set it aside. Later it ran through the shell builders, Candela’s hyperbolic paraboloids and Isler, through Frei Otto’s form-finding and through Calatrava, and through the computational design its own completion helped to found; as the image of Barcelona it reshaped a city. Much of that reach runs through Gaudí’s whole work, which holds the figure.
Henry James · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
The field is the novel in English of the later nineteenth century. The intrinsic force is high: the book moved the novel’s action inward, making a single consciousness the theatre of the plot and its climax an act of reflection, and it did so in a long, social, fully plotted book, not a sketch. That is a real reorganisation of possibility, a hinge between Eliot and the modernists. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it is the James novel most read and taught; it stands in F. R. Leavis’s The Great Tradition (1948) as central to his line; Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth and The Age of Innocence work in its wake; and the fiction of consciousness of Conrad, Ford and Woolf runs through James, of whom this is the first full achievement. Held under 9.0 because the larger break came in James’s late novels, The Wings of the Dove, The Ambassadors and The Golden Bowl, and the book’s reach runs in part through them.
Claude Lanzmann · Film
8.7 · Tier IV
Released in 1985, into the cinema of the 1980s. The intrinsic force is a reorganisation of what documentary could do without, the archival image, the commentary, the score, and of what it could do instead: testimony in the present at the place, at a length that is part of the argument. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the film gave the event its name in French and in much of Europe; it set the terms of the argument over representation that met Schindler’s List (1993) and Son of Saul (2015); Rithy Panh’s S-21 (2003) and Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Act of Killing (2012) stand in its line. The length kept its popular reach narrow, and much of its influence passed through argument about it.
Franz Liszt · Music
8.7 · Tier IV
The work is the fullest statement of a real reorganisation: the multi-movement plan collapsed into one form by double function and thematic transformation. It showed that the piano sonata could survive Beethoven by changing what a sonata is, and its intrinsic force runs above its reach. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Reubke’s Sonata in B flat minor of 1857, by Liszt’s pupil, followed it directly; the double-function single movement passed into later music, though much of that reach runs also through Liszt’s symphonic poems and the Wanderer Fantasy, and the sonata’s own share cannot be separated; and it became the summit test of Romantic pianism, which is reach in performance. The field is the piano and instrumental music of the 1850s.
J. M. W. Turner · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
Shown in public and in the national collection since the bequest, so intrinsic force and achieved reach are weighed together, in the field of British and European painting of the 1840s. The force is a real reorganisation of possibility: the picture showed that a painting could be built as an all-over field of force round a point, without a horizon, and that the experience of seeing could be the subject of a landscape. The discount is real: the reach is the late manner’s as much as this canvas’s, and part of it is retrospective. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Ruskin’s defence of the picture in the first volume of Modern Painters (1843), which made it a test case in the argument over truth to nature; French painters in London in 1870 and 1871 who met the late manner, a debated line to Impressionism; a twentieth century that made it the emblem of late Turner as forerunner of abstraction.
Michelangelo Antonioni · Film
8.7 · Tier IV
Released in 1960, so force and reach are scored together. The field is the cinema of its decade, crowded that year with Breathless, La Dolce Vita and Psycho. The force is a real reorganisation of possibility: a feature could drop its plot, make duration and empty space its matter, and hold an audience on a woman’s attention instead of on events. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: second in the Sight and Sound critics’ poll of 1962, behind Citizen Kane; the dead time and the figure in an indifferent landscape became a grammar for Wenders, Akerman, Tarr, Tsai Ming-liang, Hou Hsiao-hsien, Ceylan and Martel. Part of the force is shared with Rossellini, and part of the reach belongs to the trilogy and Blow-Up; both are discounted.
Bruce Springsteen · Music
8.7 · Tier IV
The field is rock in 1975, and the contest is with its retreat into the confessional ballad, the progressive suite and glam. The force is restoration more than reorganisation: the record restored rock’s grand, romantic scale and its claim on the American myth of the road, and made the long street song with characters a rock form, from elements it inherited. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it reached number three in the United States; the line later called heartland rock runs through it; the epic, working-class anthem of piano and saxophone it set became a common language that bands drew on for decades; and it made its maker the figure of American rock. That reach is this record’s sound and form, not the earlier albums’.
Zhang Zeduan · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
Force and reach are scored together. The force: the scroll showed that a whole city, its economy and its crowd, could be the subject of one sustained work, and set a standard of observation for the panoramic genre scroll that nothing in its tradition surpassed. The reach was delayed and ran through copies, but it made the city scroll a type; the discount is that the original was seen by few and the main current of Chinese painting after the twelfth century turned to literati ink landscape, away from what it did. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: versions under its title made in large numbers from the Ming, above all in Suzhou; the Qing court’s rebuilding of it in 1736; Xu Yang’s Prosperous Suzhou (1759) among the city scrolls in its line; its modern standing as a national image.
Duccio di Buoninsegna · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
The field is Italian painting about 1310, and Siena’s above all. The intrinsic force is the reorganisation of the Byzantine image into a narrative and humane painting of persons, at the scale and in the most public form a city could commission: a founding statement of one of the two schools from which Italian painting descends. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Simone Martini’s Maestà of 1315 answers it directly in the council chamber of the Palazzo Pubblico; Ugolino di Nerio’s Santa Croce altarpiece and the narrative spaces of Pietro and Ambrogio Lorenzetti work from its types, and the Sienese tradition through Sassetta and Giovanni di Paolo after them; many later Sienese Maestàs take its form; and Sienese line and colour pass by way of Simone to Avignon and the International Gothic. Held below the top because the main line, through Masaccio, runs from Giotto.
Radiohead · Music
8.7 · Tier IV
The first precursor answered is the band’s own previous album, and the answer is a refusal of the consolations it offered. Inside mainstream rock the force is real: a guitar band at its peak released a record of texture, programmed rhythm and the voice as one instrument among others. Outside rock it reorganised less, because the electronic language existed at Warp and the established band’s left turn existed in Bowie and Talk Talk. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the record made the electronic turn respectable for the guitar bands of the following decade, made the withheld release a model, and became the reference by which later left turns are judged.
Fyodor Dostoevsky · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
The field is Russian prose of the mid nineteenth century, and beyond it the literature of imprisonment. The force: it made the prison a subject for serious literature as a whole society seen from inside, and showed that testimony could carry the weight of a novel; and in Dostoevsky’s own work it marks the turn from the young writer of Poor Folk to the author of the great novels, where the criminal, the people and resurrection become his matter. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it stands at the head of a line that runs through Chekhov’s Sakhalin Island (1893 to 1895) and Tolstoy’s Resurrection (1899) to Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962) and The Gulag Archipelago, and Shalamov’s Kolyma Tales; Russian writers of the camps have named it as their precedent. Held below 9.0 because the line it founded is a line of subject and witness, not a reorganisation of the novel’s form.
Gian Lorenzo Bernini · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
Force and reach together, in the field of seventeenth-century Roman and Catholic building and the European tradition of the monumental square. The intrinsic force: the square reorganised what a forecourt and a city space could be, making the edge permeable, the figure an oval and the crowd itself the subject of the architecture; with the Campidoglio it is one of the two models of the designed piazza in Rome. What holds the axis: the reach is of an image and a type more than of a method that changed how buildings were made, narrower than the Pantheon’s at 9.7 or the Villa Rotonda’s at 9.4. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the freestanding curved colonnade before a church became a type, the colonnaded embrace recurs in palace, civic and memorial forecourts for three centuries, and the square remains the reference for the planned gathering place.
Francisco Goya · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
The work is published, so force and reach are scored together, in European printmaking and in Spanish art from the 1790s. The intrinsic force is a reorganisation of what a print could be: the satirical print made a vehicle of the nocturnal and the unconscious, aquatint made expressive rather than reproductive, the artist’s own imagination set at the centre of the image as its problem. The discount: the set was withdrawn in 1799 and little seen in Spain for decades, and much of the reach belongs to the set and to late Goya. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Delacroix copied from the Caprichos, Baudelaire wrote on Goya’s fantastic prints, Redon answered this night in his lithographs À Goya of 1885, the Surrealists claimed it, and its title has entered common speech.
Ernest Hemingway · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
The field is the novel in English of the 1920s and after. The intrinsic force is a real reorganisation of what novel prose could do: the book carried the style of the stories into the novel, and showed that a whole novel could be built on omission, on dialogue and on the declarative sentence, with the feeling held beneath the surface. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: few novels of the century redirected more prose. The hard-boiled novel of Hammett and Chandler, the American war and postwar novel, and the minimal story of Carver and those after him descend in part from it; it named and shaped a generation’s idea of itself, and its fiesta changed a Spanish town. What holds it below the top is that much of the reach belongs to Hemingway’s style as a whole, made first in the stories and shared with them, and that the decade’s largest reorganisations of the novel were Joyce’s and Woolf’s.
Salman Rushdie · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
The field is the novel in English of the late twentieth century. The intrinsic force is large: the book moved the Indian novel in English from a minor province of English letters to one of its centres, by showing that English could be written from inside the subcontinent’s languages and that the novel of a nation could be comic, epic and marvellous at once. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the generation that followed wrote in the room it opened, Amitav Ghosh, Vikram Seth, who wrote against its manner, Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things, Kiran Desai and Rohinton Mistry in their different ways, and beyond India Zadie Smith’s White Teeth and the British fiction of migration; the academy of the 1980s and 1990s defined the postcolonial novel largely around it. Discounted: its reach was partly a reach of manner, often imitated thinly, and its methods came from Grass and García Márquez.
Thomas Jefferson · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
Standing since the 1820s, so intrinsic force and reach are scored together. The field is American building and the college campus. The intrinsic force is a reorganisation of what a university is in space, from a building to an ordered landscape of buildings round a green with the library as its head, and a classical public architecture for a republic, carried from Jefferson’s Virginia Capitol into a whole ensemble. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the axial green closed by a domed library became a governing type of the American campus, most plainly at Columbia, where McKim, Mead and White set Low Library at the head (1895 to 1897), and on many campuses after; the Lawn and the Rotunda became the image of the campus itself. Held short of the top because the reach is mostly American, Union College came first, and the progeny took the image more often than the village.
Fritz Lang · Film
8.6 · Tier IV
The field is the cinema of the 1930s, and the sound cinema above all. The intrinsic force is a working grammar of sound at the moment the medium had none, made in the first years of sound in Germany: offscreen sound, the sound bridge, the identifying motif and silence as a dramatic instrument; and with it a new genre, the hunt for a compulsive killer seen partly through his eyes. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: immediate and unbroken, through the police procedural, the serial-killer film from Peeping Tom (1960) and Psycho (1960) to The Silence of the Lambs (1991) and Zodiac (2007), Joseph Losey’s remake (1951), and, through Lang and the German émigrés in Hollywood, film noir. Held where it is because the organised city and the master criminal belong to Lang’s silent films.
Eugène Delacroix · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
On view on and off since 1831, so force and reach are scored together, in French Romantic history painting of the 1830s. The intrinsic force: the canvas fused allegory and reportage in one modern space and made the political image of the street at history scale; after it a contemporary uprising could be painted as myth without leaving the street. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the figure became the working pattern for Marianne; Daumier’s Republic of 1848 and much of the century’s republican imagery follow it; the boy of the barricades in Hugo’s Les Misérables of 1862 is commonly linked to the boy with the pistols; the striding Liberty runs on into posters, coins and the banknote of 100 francs. The discount: the reach is chiefly in political iconography, wider than painting itself, while painting’s next step, the realism of Courbet and Manet, dropped the allegory this canvas depends on.
Charles Dickens · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
The field is the English novel of the nineteenth century. The force: the book set down, for the novel in English, the remembered childhood as a world seen from inside the child, and made the life of a writer told by himself a central form; its force stands a little below the works that remade the novel. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Dickens’s own Great Expectations returns to the form and turns it against itself; Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man takes up the life of the writer from childhood; Salinger opens The Catcher in the Rye by refusing “all that David Copperfield kind of crap”, reach by negation; and Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead (2022) remakes it whole.
Odo of Metz, under Charlemagne · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
Force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force: the founding monument of Carolingian architecture, the first great vaulted stone building north of the Alps since antiquity, the built statement of the renewal of empire in the West; it changed what a northern ruler could build and what a building could claim for him. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: copied as the palace chapel, in the lost chapel of Charles the Bald at Compiègne; a source for the westwork and the throne gallery; and the coronation church of the German kings from 936 to 1531, whose authority every later king sought. Held below the top because the reach was more as emblem than as type: the centralised plan stayed a special case, and the basilica the norm.
Ivan Turgenev · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
The field is Russian literature of the nineteenth century and, through Turgenev, the first of its novelists read widely in the West, the European novel. The intrinsic force: the book made the new man a subject for the novel, fixed the type in a single figure, and showed that a novel could take a political generation as its matter without becoming a tract. Its formal force is smaller, and that holds it below the top: the reach runs through its subject and its type more than through any reorganisation of what the novel could do. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the book gave “нигилист” (nihilist) its currency in Russian and then in European speech; Chernyshevsky’s What Is to Be Done? (1863) wrote its new people against Bazarov; the book set going the anti-nihilist novel of Pisemsky and Leskov that culminates in Dostoevsky’s Demons (1871 to 1872); and the problem of the generations became a frame for later fiction and thought.
Pablo Neruda · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
The field is poetry in Spanish of the twentieth century, Spain and the Americas together. The intrinsic force is high: the book reorganised what a lyric in Spanish could hold, so that after it the poem could take in the unclean, the material, the industrial and the bodily with no decorum to rank them, and it stands with Trilce, Lorca’s Poeta en Nueva York and Aleixandre’s La destrucción o el amor among the peaks of the Hispanic avant-garde. Neruda’s widest redirection was carried by a later book, the Canto general, and is kept off this figure. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: in Madrid in 1934 and 1935 the poets of the Generation of 27 hailed it, and Lorca’s public introduction of Neruda in 1934 and the joint homage that followed set it at the centre of Spanish poetry’s turn toward impurity; in English, through Robert Bly, W. S. Merwin and James Wright, “Walking Around” and “Sólo la muerte” fed the deep image poetry of the 1960s.
Juan Bautista de Toledo and Juan de Herrera · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
Standing since 1584, force and reach are scored together, in the field of building in Spain and the Spanish world. The intrinsic force: a court style founded in one stroke, ornament renounced, granite and proportion made the language of the crown and the church. Within its field this is redirection, not influence. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the manner that took Herrera’s name governed royal and much church building in Castile for more than a century, in his own cathedral at Valladolid, the exchange at Seville and the Plaza Mayor of Madrid; it crossed to the viceroyalties; and the royal monastery-palace was answered at Mafra and in the Habsburg plan for Klosterneuburg. Beyond the Iberian and Habsburg world its reach is small.
Erwin von Steinbach and others; spire by Johannes Hültz · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
Force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force: the screen front and the openwork spire with its stairs reorganise what a Gothic west end and tower could be, and the building is one of the two or three summits of the Gothic in German lands. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the ordinances of Regensburg in 1459 set its lodge at the head of the masons’ lodges of the Empire; its drawings and masters carried its practice to Ulm, the circle of Prague and Cologne; its spire was for two centuries a measure for every builder who saw it; and Goethe’s Von deutscher Baukunst, written of this front, opened the Gothic revival in German letters, which shaped the completion of Cologne Cathedral (8.5). Its reach beyond the Rhine and the Empire is less direct.
Stanley Kubrick · Film
8.6 · Tier IV
The field is the cinema of the 1980s, and force and reach are scored together. The force is real: the film made horror a form for a director’s full command, showed that dread could be built in light, symmetry and duration, and made the Steadicam a horror instrument. It perfected and enlarged a line that Rosemary’s Baby and Don’t Look Now had opened rather than founding one, and that holds the force a step down. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: in its own decade horror went to the slasher, not to this model, and the reach came later and is very large, in the slow, formal art-horror of the 2010s, in Doctor Sleep (2019), built on the film’s hotel rather than the novel’s, in the hotel rebuilt in Ready Player One (2018), and in a corridor grammar and a score of concert modernism borrowed constantly. The delay is discounted.
Paul Cézanne · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
Published, so force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force: the late canvases from Les Lauves reorganise what a landscape is, from a view of a place to a constructed field of colour planes in which depth and surface hold together, a real reorganisation of possibility and the founding instance of the line that runs to Cubism and to abstraction. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the retrospective at the Salon d’Automne in 1907, after the painter’s death, which Braque and Picasso saw; Braque’s landscapes at L’Estaque of 1908, which take the passage and the faceted plane straight from the late landscapes; Picasso’s landscapes at Horta of 1909; Mondrian’s sequence of trees and dunes; and Fry’s formalism. The discount: this reach belongs to the late manner and the mountain series together, and the Philadelphia canvas was one carrier of it among several rather than its singular source.
Bong Joon-ho · Film
8.6 · Tier IV
Field: the cinema of the 2010s and early 2020s, so force and reach are scored together. Intrinsic force: a social allegory made to work as an exact popular thriller, changing genre at its centre without losing its audience; real, and a perfection of Bong’s method more than a reorganisation of possibility. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it is unusually large for seven years, and of an unusual kind. The first film not in English to win Best Picture changed what American distribution and awards would admit, and the film stands at the head of a wave of class satires in which the rich are a household and the poor work inside it (Triangle of Sadness, The Menu, Saltburn). The limit stands: the reach outruns the force, much of it is industrial, and seven years are discounted.
Ridley Scott · Film
8.6 · Tier IV
Released in 1982, so force and reach are scored together, against the cinema of the 1980s. Intrinsic force: the film reorganised how cinema imagines the future and the city, as dense, decaying, multilingual, lit by advertising and soaked in rain, and joined it to the noir inquiry into what a person is. Its force lies in the image and the world more than in narrative grammar, which holds it from the top. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the film failed on release and grew through video and repertory, and its look and question passed into cyberpunk at its founding, into Japanese animation, Oshii’s Ghost in the Shell (1995) above all, into Dark City (1998), The Matrix (8.2), Minority Report (2002) and Ex Machina (2014), and into Villeneuve’s Blade Runner 2049 (2017). The delay is discounted, and breadth outside film is noted, not weighed.
Agesander, Athenodoros and Polydorus of Rhodes (attributed) · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
On view since 1506, so force and reach are scored together. The field is late Hellenistic and Roman sculpture of its own decades. The intrinsic force is high but culminating: the pathos style brought to its most concentrated statement rather than a new possibility. The same workshop’s groups at Sperlonga are its nearest answer in antiquity, and Pliny’s praise is the reach in its own time that is documented. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: delayed about fourteen centuries, and then among the widest of any single sculpture. Michelangelo’s Slaves, Titian’s caricature of the group as apes, Rubens, Bernini, El Greco; the Belvedere canon by which the academies measured the body, and the casts in all of them; Lessing’s founding text of aesthetics, which takes its name. The delay is credited and discounted.
The Smiths · Music
8.6 · Tier IV
The record is the fullest statement of a model: a guitar band whose guitarist orchestrates and whose singer writes as a literary persona, comic and wounded at once, on an independent label. The band’s first singles set the model, and much of the reach travels under the band’s name; that shared force is what holds the figure below the top. But this is the record that fixed the model as the standard of the album, and the descent from it is documented and wide. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the British independent guitar music of 1986 to 1990, which took this record as its measure; Britpop, whose guitarists named Marr as a model; the confessional, ironic male voice in indie rock in Britain and America; the indie album as a literary object.
Arcade Fire · Music
8.6 · Tier IV
The field is the rock album of its decade, indie rock above all. The intrinsic force is the join: the record set the orchestral and folk instruments of the 1990s fringe inside the size and sincerity of the stadium anthem, and showed that an independent band could make that join without irony and be heard widely. Little was invented; the force is in the temperature and the scale. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the many-voiced anthem it helped make common became a manner of the years that followed, Wake Up and Rebellion (Lies) remain in broadcast and use, and the record is placed high whenever its decade is counted. Its further reach, in sales, endorsements and later bands, is reported and not verified here. What holds it is that much of what followed copied the shout rather than the method.
Radiohead · Music
8.6 · Tier IV
The contest is with the band’s own records and with the means by which records reached listeners. The intrinsic force is a consolidation, not a reorganisation: the record joins the band’s electronic and band languages into a warm, songful whole, better than anyone had, without opening a new possibility in the music. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the release from the band’s own site, with no label and at the buyer’s price, became a reference point for the industry within months, the surprise release announced days ahead owes something to it, and the warm, string-lit, rhythmically subtle band record became a model, with Reckoner and Weird Fishes/Arpeggi widely covered and cited.
Christopher Marlowe · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
The field is the English drama of the late 1580s and early 1590s, just turned by Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy and by Tamburlaine, and beyond it the European tradition of the Faust story. The force is the first English tragedy of a damned mind seen from inside, in which the soliloquy becomes the instrument of a consciousness in time, and the stage’s first tragic hero whose ruin is spiritual rather than political. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the inward tragic soliloquy that Shakespeare carried into Macbeth and Hamlet, and the Helen line echoed in Troilus and Cressida, where Helen “is a pearl, / Whose price hath launched above a thousand ships”. How far the play, and not the Faust Book, carried the story into the German line that runs to Goethe’s Faust is not settled; that reach is discounted. Held below the top because Tamburlaine made the larger rupture on the English stage.
The Doors · Music
8.5 · Tier IV
The field is the rock album of 1966 and 1967. The intrinsic force is real: the record made a rock band an instrument of dark theatre, organ-led and bassless, with a singer who performs a persona of transgression as a rite, and it showed that a debut could end in long improvised drama. It took the blues and the cabaret song into the same night. That reorganised tone and the singer’s role more than musical language, whose means were common, but tone and role are what the field took from it, and the taking was large. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force, and it carries the axis over the bar: Light My Fire, in an edited form, went to the top of the singles chart; the singer as shaman passed to Iggy Pop, to punk’s theatre and to the gothic rock of the late 1970s and 1980s; and the organ-led dark rock band became a type.
Knut Hamsun · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
The field is European fiction of the late nineteenth century. The intrinsic force is high: the book reorganised what a novel could be made of, turning the movement of a mind from moment to moment into the subject and the plot into its by-product, a decade and more before the high modernists. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it is one of the founding books of the modernist novel of consciousness; Kafka, Hesse, Thomas Mann, Gide, Henry Miller, Bukowski and Auster are named among its readers and debtors, and Henning Carlsen’s film of 1966 carried it again. Held below the top because much of the redirection is shared with Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground, which came first on near ground, and because the influence ran as much through the persona as through the form.
Ernest Hemingway · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
The field is the short story in English of the 1920s, and, through translation, the short story in the European languages after it. The intrinsic force: the book established that a story could carry its subject in omission and dialogue, and “Hills” and “The Killers” became the standard demonstrations of the method. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the reach is very wide. The hard-boiled crime story and the film noir took the gunmen’s manner from “The Killers”; the minimal story of Raymond Carver and those after him descends from “Hills”; the writing seminar has taught the method of omission from these pages for decades. Held below the top because the turn had been made in In Our Time, and the reach of the method is shared with that book and with The Sun Also Rises; but the pieces through which it travelled are mostly here.
Giorgione · Visual art
8.5 · Tier IV
Published for five centuries, so force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force is a real reorganisation of possibility: the canvas makes landscape and atmosphere what a picture is about, and makes figures presences in it rather than actors in a story. It is a founding case of the Venetian poesia, of tonal painting in oil as the instrument of feeling, and of the small enigmatic picture for the private collector. The discount: the picture hung in a private house and was known to few, and its reach belongs to the painter’s manner and to the Giorgionesque as a whole, of which it is the emblem. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Titian’s early work, the Pastoral Concert in the Louvre, Palma Vecchio, the Campagnolas’ prints, the pastoral landscape of the next three centuries, and by way of the Concert, Manet.
Samuel Johnson · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
The field is English letters of the later eighteenth century, criticism and biography above all, with poetry as the object. The intrinsic force is the founding of the critical biography of English writers as a form, and the setting of the terms in which English poetry from Cowley to Gray was judged for a century; the Cowley made “metaphysical” the name of a school, where Dryden had used the word of Donne alone. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Boswell’s Life of Johnson turns the method on its author; the Romantic critics, Hazlitt’s Lectures on the English Poets (1818) among them, wrote against its standards; Eliot from 1921 and Leavis reversed its verdicts while keeping its terms; and the university study of English inherited its canon of the period and its joining of life to work. Against a higher figure: on poetry itself it worked as resistance more than redirection, and its reach outside English is small.
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Shown as a model at the Museum of Modern Art in 1947 and standing since 1951, so force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force: the house as pure structure and void, the glass pavilion made a dwelling, an open, universal space brought to the scale of a house; a real reorganisation of what a house can be, carried to its limit. Held below the top because much of the reach of Mies’s American work runs through Lake Shore Drive, Crown Hall and the towers rather than through this house, Johnson’s house shares its reach, and the field was moved by a type more than by a single act. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: wide and lasting in the modern house. Johnson’s Glass House at New Canaan (1949) was drawn from the model of 1947; the steel-and-glass houses of the California Case Study programme followed the type; and the glass pavilion house became an international model, answered as late as Sejima and Ito.
Frank Lloyd Wright · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Seen and published from 1910, so force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force is the most complete built statement of a reorganisation of the house: space flowing round a hearth instead of rooms; walls as screens and planes rather than an enclosing box; the house tied to its ground by the horizontal; furniture, glass and light designed as one with the structure. It is the summation of a decade more than its first stroke, which holds it below the top. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: real and wide, though shared with the oeuvre; through the Wasmuth publications of Wright’s work in Berlin, in 1910 and 1911, the Prairie house reached Europe, where De Stijl and the young modernists read it; at home it stands behind the low, open, horizontal American house of the century, the ranch house included, though that line runs through many hands.
Kenzo Tange · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Scored on intrinsic force and achieved reach together, in Japanese architecture and in the large-span public hall of its century. The intrinsic force is high: it joined the most advanced tensile structure of its moment to a Japanese monumental sense without pastiche, made a tension roof a building of state rather than of utility, and gave the decade its clearest answer to how Japan could be modern and itself. Held below the top because its reach in structure was shared with a wider movement and its progeny abroad is diffuse. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it made Tange the first Japanese architect of world standing; it opened the field to the generation of Maki, Isozaki and Kurokawa; it is a fixed point in histories of Japanese modernism; and it stands in the line of hung and tensile roofs for the halls of later Games.
Gérard de Nerval · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
The field is French literature of the mid nineteenth century, crowded with Hugo, Baudelaire and Flaubert. The intrinsic force is high: the sonnets reorganise what a French lyric can carry, private myth, syncretism, a key never given, and “Sylvie” reorganises what a short novel can do with memory. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Proust, in Contre Sainte-Beuve, made “Sylvie” a lesson in the colour of memory, and the debt runs into the Recherche; Breton, in the first Manifesto of Surrealism (1924), found in the dedication a word for what he meant and cited it; Eliot set the line of the Prince of Aquitaine among the fragments that close The Waste Land (line 430); the hermetic sonnet after Baudelaire, Mallarmé’s among it, stands in its line. The reach is narrower than that of Les Fleurs du mal.
Wu Cheng'en (attributed) · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
Intrinsic force is high: the book made a kind. Lu Xun named the novel of gods and demons (神魔小說) after it, and it is the founding work; it showed that the vernacular chapter novel could carry allegory, satire and comic fantasy at once, beside the histories and the bandit saga. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the sequels and answers of the Ming and Qing, among them Dong Yue’s Xiyou bu (1640), a dream of Monkey, and the gods-and-demons novels that followed; the opera stage, where Monkey plays have run without a break; Wan Laiming’s animated Havoc in Heaven (1961 to 1964), the television series of 1986, Japanese manga and television from Tezuka to Toriyama’s Dragon Ball, Maxine Hong Kingston’s Tripmaster Monkey (1989), Gene Luen Yang’s American Born Chinese (2006) and the game Black Myth: Wukong (2024). What holds it below 9.0: the reach is wider than it is deep within literature, and the main line of the Chinese novel ran through the Jin Ping Mei and the Dream of the Red Chamber, not through it.
Robert Wiene · Film
8.4 · Tier IV
Released in 1920, so force and reach are scored together, in the cinema of the 1920s. The intrinsic force is a reorganisation of possibility: the film showed that the screen could present a subjective world rather than record an objective one, and that a feature could be built on an unreliable narrator. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it stands in the eyes of the world as the founding work of German Expressionist cinema, and its success abroad opened foreign markets to German film; the shadow, the somnambulist and the mad doctor passed into the horror film, through Universal’s cycle of the 1930s, and the lit and slanted city into film noir. The charge: the full painted style had few direct successors and was largely abandoned, and Murnau and Lang worked in other manners.
Mirak Mirza Ghiyas, under Bega Begum and Akbar · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Force and reach are scored together, in the field of Mughal and Indo-Islamic building. The intrinsic force: the first mature monument of Mughal architecture, which fixed the dynastic tomb as a domed, ninefold, four-fronted mass on an arcaded plinth at the centre of a charbagh, in red sandstone and white marble. That reorganised what a tomb in India could be, by synthesis rather than by invention of parts. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: very high in its field. The line runs to the tomb of Abd al-Rahim Khan-i-Khanan at Delhi; to the Taj Mahal (8.9) at Agra, which takes the plan, the double dome, the plinth and the garden and surpasses them; to the Bibi ka Maqbara at Aurangabad and Safdarjung’s tomb at Delhi. The Mughal garden tomb starts here. Held below the top because much of the reach passes through the Taj, which eclipses it, and the type did not travel far beyond the Mughal world.
Bertolt Brecht · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
The field is the German theatre of the 1920s and, beyond it, the musical stage of the century. The force: the work showed that a play with music could argue rather than charm, that song could interrupt rather than express, and that the popular idiom could carry a political critique into a commercial theatre. A large share of the reach is Weill’s music, which the unit includes and which is weighed here rather than credited whole to the text; the reach into dramatic writing proper is Brecht’s and is large. The fame of the Moritat as a popular song is presence, not reach, and counts only under The Imperishable. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it was the great theatrical success of the Weimar years; it led directly to Mahagonny and to Brecht’s later epic practice; the Brechtian song entered the musical through Blitzstein, Kander and Ebb’s Cabaret (1966) and Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd (1979); and the play was rewritten by Havel as Žebrácká opera (1975) and by Soyinka as Opera Wonyosi (1977).
Sly and the Family Stone · Music
8.4 · Tier IV
The field is the soul, funk and rock of the early 1970s, and this is one of the records that turned it. The intrinsic force is a real reorganisation of possibility for funk and soul: it showed that the groove could be slow, dry and unresolved, that a machine could carry a number one hit, that a lead singer could withdraw into the mix, and that a pop record could be made by one man layering himself. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: critics draw a line from this record to Prince’s one-man, machine-driven funk, to D’Angelo’s Voodoo (2000) and the neo-soul around it, and to the later bedroom record. The figure stays below Low and Kind of Blue because the reach was partly shared with What’s Going On and partly delayed into the 1990s.
Ralph Waldo Emerson · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
The field is American letters and thought of the nineteenth century, and the English essay. The intrinsic force is great: the book gave American prose a voice of its own, independent of English models, moved the essay from the moralist’s reflection to prophecy, and made the self, unmediated by church or inheritance, the ground of authority, a reorganisation of what American writing could do. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Thoreau, Emerson’s friend and lodger, whose Walden (1854) is self-reliance put to an experiment; Whitman, whose Leaves of Grass of 1855 answers Emerson’s call for an American poet; Dickinson, who read him; Nietzsche; William James and Dewey; and a large vulgar progeny in American self-help and New Thought, which the axis does not credit. What holds it: much of this reach belongs to Emerson’s work at large, to Nature and the addresses as much as to this book, and is credited here only in part.
Giorgio de Chirico · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
Published, so force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force: a reorganisation of what a figurative painting could be in the decade of Cubism and abstraction, showing that perspective and the legible object could carry the irrational without distortion of the object, and opening the dream image as a mode of painting. The discount: the reach belongs to the whole Paris body of 1911 to 1917, and the most famous testimony attaches to other canvases. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the metaphysical painting of Carrà and Morandi at Ferrara; the Surrealists, who reproduced and collected the early canvases and made this girl with her hoop an emblem; Ernst’s painted spaces of the early 1920s; Tanguy; Magritte’s displaced objects; Dalí’s long shadows and tilted plains; the stilled cities of the Neue Sachlichkeit and the Italian Novecento.
Peter Jackson · Film
8.4 · Tier IV
The field is the cinema of the 2000s, and the films reorganised what popular cinema could undertake. They made high fantasy a genre of prestige, proved that a story in several parts could be planned and shot as one work, made digital crowds an ordinary instrument, and made performance capture a form of acting, with Serkis’s Gollum the case that changed the argument. The force lies in industry and technique more than in film’s ways of meaning, which holds it short of the top. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: eleven Academy Awards for The Return of the King, Best Picture among them, the first such recognition for fantasy; the planned multi-film franchise as the studio model of the decades after; performance capture in Avatar (2009) and the Planet of the Apes films (2011 to 2017); the fantasy series that followed; a film industry in New Zealand.
Raymond Hood and the Associated Architects · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Intrinsic force: high. The complex reorganised what a downtown commercial building could be, from the tower on its lot to the planned multi-block ensemble with public open space, transit joined below, service underground and a mixed programme of offices, theatres, broadcast, shops and gardens; the slab anticipated the postwar office slab. The field is American and then international urban building of the twentieth century. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the corporate or civic centre built as a coordinated group round a plaza runs through the postwar decades, at home and abroad; the plaza as a private gift to the street entered New York's zoning of 1961, though the Seagram Building weighs more there; and the complex's own team carried the method on, Wallace Harrison into the United Nations Headquarters and Lincoln Center. Discounted because much that followed took the formula without the quality.
Pearl Jam · Music
8.4 · Tier IV
The field is the rock album of the early 1990s. The intrinsic force is a fusion: the record joined classic-rock form to the seriousness and subject matter of the Seattle underground, and carried both to the largest audience. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: with Nevermind, released weeks later, the record moved American rock from the glamour of the 1980s to the Seattle sound; Eddie Vedder’s baritone and its earnest anguish became the model for a decade of rock radio, widely imitated; and it sold in numbers few rock albums of its decade matched. Reach is the larger part. Held from the top: much of it is imitation that diluted rather than extended, the credit for the turn is shared with Nirvana and Soundgarden, and the force did not reorganise what rock could do.
Aretha Franklin · Music
8.4 · Tier IV
The field is the singing of American popular music in 1967. The intrinsic force is a new standard for what a singer could do and be: a gospel voice of full power and technical command, leading from the piano, adult and self-possessed, in place of the girl-group singer or the supper-club stylist. That is a real reorganisation of possibility, built on Charles and Cooke and shared, in “Respect”, with Redding’s song. Part of the reach belongs to Franklin’s Atlantic years as a whole and is discounted to this record, where the reorganisation first happened. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: “Respect” taken up within months as a song of the civil rights and women’s movements; the soul singer as preacher and the melismatic gospel lead, which shaped Chaka Khan, Whitney Houston, Mariah Carey and the vocal pop of the decades after.
Roberto Rossellini · Film
8.3 · Tier IV
Released in 1945, so force and reach are scored together, in the cinema of the 1940s. The intrinsic force: the film showed that a feature could be made from the streets, the present and the people within months of the event, and that melodrama could be carried by that surface; a reorganisation of possibility, though built partly from elements already in use. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: with its Grand Prix at Cannes in 1946 and its success in the United States it carried Italian neorealism abroad, opened the way for Paisà, Bicycle Thieves and Umberto D., passed into the location film and the use of non-professionals, and stands at the origin the new cinemas of the 1950s and 1960s named. It also began Fellini’s career as a writer. Held below the top because much of the later influence passed through De Sica and Rossellini’s later films more than through this one.
Jack Kerouac · Literature
8.3 · Tier IV
The field is the novel of the 1950s. The force is real and bounded: the book made the novel a vehicle for spontaneous confession and for a subculture told from within, and set an improvising voice against the well-made novel of its decade; but its forms, the picaresque and the autobiographical rhapsody, are older than it. The reach far exceeds the force, and much of it runs through a way of living rather than a way of writing: that is the limit, and the figure keeps it. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it gave the Beat Generation its public face; it shaped the counterculture of the following decade and the road narrative in fiction, film and song, from the road film to Hunter S. Thompson’s road books; later records and films of the American road inherit the myth it made; and it fixed a pattern of the American journey for generations of young readers, among the widest reach of any novel of its decade.
Jackson Pollock · Visual art
8.3 · Tier IV
Published, so intrinsic force and achieved reach are scored together, in American painting in New York in the late 1940s. Intrinsic force: among the first canvases of the poured method, which reorganised what a painting could be: no easel, no composition, no drawn contour, the field all-over, the picture the trace of an act, and foreign matter admitted to the surface. Few moves in the century’s painting reorganised more. The discount: the reach belongs to the poured paintings as a whole, its emblems became the large fields of 1950 rather than this canvas, and in 1947 the method was being found across several canvases at once. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it redirected New York painting within a few years; Rosenberg’s action painting (1952) and Greenberg’s all-over field took it as their case; Kaprow’s essay on Pollock’s legacy (1958) led to the Happenings; then process art and anti-form, stain painting, and Gutai in Japan.
Walter Gropius · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
Published and visited since 1926, so force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force: the first large public building in which the new architecture was carried through a whole institutional programme, turning the school, and the civic building, from a symmetrical block into a composition of volumes shaped by use and joined by circulation, with the curtain wall at public scale. It sums steps taken at Fagus and elsewhere as much as it strikes first. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the emblem of the modern movement within a few years, shown in the International Style exhibition of 1932; and after 1945 the asymmetric school, college and civic complex of separate wings, glass for work and walls for rooms, a common model in Europe and beyond. Discounted because the school’s teaching and émigrés carried much of what is called its influence.
Quentin Tarantino · Film
8.3 · Tier IV
Released in 1994, so force and reach are scored together, against the cinema of the 1990s. Intrinsic force: the film showed that broken chronology, dialogue as main action and genre pastiche could carry a popular film, and it gave American crime cinema a new grammar of talk before violence and comedy inside horror. It perfected and enlarged a manner as much as it reorganised possibility, which holds it from the top. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the Palme d’Or at Cannes in May 1994 and the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay; the success that made Miramax the model of independent production as a commercial category; a wave of imitators within five years, crime films built of chatter, chapters and needle drops, in America and in Britain; existing recordings used as score made a common practice. The successors borrowed the surface more than the meaning, and that is discounted.
Fritz Lang · Film
8.3 · Tier IV
The field is the cinema of the 1920s: Battleship Potemkin, Sunrise, The General, Napoléon, The Passion of Joan of Arc. The intrinsic force: the film established the science-fiction feature as a monumental form and the designed city as a subject of the screen, a synthesis of expressionist design, mass choreography and invented effects more than a reorganisation of film language. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it is among the widest of its decade, through the laboratory of Frankenstein (1931) and its descendants, the robot that runs to C-3PO in Star Wars (1977), the vertical, stratified city of Blade Runner (1982) and nearly every dystopian city since, the figures of the mad scientist and the machine-woman, and use far beyond film, in posters, advertising and music video. Reach outruns force here, and the force is chiefly visual.
Lana Wachowski and Lilly Wachowski · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
Released in 1999, so force and reach are scored together, against the cinema of its decade. Intrinsic force: the film reorganised what the American action film could hold, putting philosophical argument at the centre of a blockbuster, making Hong Kong wirework a studio norm, and fusing digital and practical effects into a new grammar of slowed time. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: bullet time was imitated at once across action films, parodies and games; Yuen Woo-ping’s method passed into American productions; the long coat, the green code and the choice of pills became common currency; sequels, animation and games followed; and the idea of simulated reality entered ordinary speech. Few films of the decade redirected so much. The force is synthesis more than a new possibility, which holds the axis below the top.
Damien Hirst · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
The field is its own region and decade: British art of the 1990s, and the international art of spectacle that followed. The intrinsic force: it made the real body, the large dead animal, a sculptural material, and made spectacle and the market part of a work’s meaning; after it the vitrine and the specimen became a common grammar. The discount: the moves were prepared by Koons and by the readymade, so the reorganisation is narrower than its fame. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the emblem of the Young British Artists, the centre of Sensation at the Royal Academy in 1997, the image by which a generation of art was named, and a turning point in what contemporary art could be worth. Its reach in the art that came after is diffuse rather than specific; in its region and decade, nothing redirected the field more visibly.
Piet Mondrian · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
Field: European painting of the 1920s and 1930s, abstract and avant-garde. The intrinsic force: the method this canvas stands for is a real reorganisation of possibility, showing that a painting could be a structure of pure relations with no object, and that such a structure could be exact rather than decorative. The discount is the unit: most of the reach belongs to the method and the series from 1921 onward, and to De Stijl, and the canvas’s fame as their best known instance is presence, not proof. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: very wide and documented, in Concrete art and Max Bill, in the abstraction carried to New York, in hard-edge and Minimal painting, and in architecture, typography and graphic design.
Wu-Tang Clan · Music
8.0 · Tier IV
The record reorganised what a hip hop record could sound like and what a group could be. It made rawness a method, the loop rough, the mix murky, the beat built from very little, and with Illmatic and other New York records of the next year it returned the centre of the music to New York. It showed that a collective could be a federation of distinct voices with a shared mythology and business. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the members’ solo careers, the grim Queensbridge sound, loop-based underground production into the 2010s, the crew as label, and martial lore as a lasting vocabulary in rap. The force was shared with its contemporaries.
George Lucas · Film
7.9 · Tier III
The field is the cinema of the 1970s, and here force and reach are unequal. The intrinsic force is real but narrower: the film did not reorganise what a camera, a cut or a narrative could do, but it reorganised what an effects picture could be, with motion control, a worn design and sound built as a world rather than laid in, and it made the sincere popular myth possible again. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: with Jaws (1975) it turned the American studios toward the summer blockbuster, the franchise and merchandising; Industrial Light and Magic and its descendants made the effects of the next half-century; its sound pushed theatres toward Dolby and multichannel exhibition; and it formed generations of filmmakers. The reach is industrial and popular more than artistic, and the field it redirected moved partly away from the cinema the decade had made, a cost to the art as well as a change in it.
Jean Racine · Literature
9.1 · Tier V
The field is French literature of the seventeenth century, and European tragedy. The intrinsic force is the completion of a form: the play is the proof that the rules of French classical tragedy could carry the deepest passion, and it set the terms by which the form was measured; that is perfection more than reorganisation. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: within France it is decisive and continuous, the model of eighteenth century tragedy, in whose shadow Voltaire and Crébillon wrote, the source of Rameau’s Hippolyte et Aricie (1733), the touchstone of French verse and of the tragic actress, read in every French school; beyond France, Lowell’s and Hughes’s versions and Britten’s Phaedra (1975) carried it into English. Held near the bar because the English and German traditions turned from Racine to Shakespeare, and the form it perfected did not outlive the eighteenth century.
Khmer, under Suryavarman II · Architecture
9.0 · Tier V
Standing for nearly nine centuries, so force and reach are scored together, in the temple’s own tradition and region. The intrinsic force is a reorganisation of possibility: the temple set the classical canon of Khmer architecture, fusing the temple-mountain and the galleried enclosure into one type and making the relief gallery an instrument of ritual. Held below the top because Khmer stone temple-building ended within three centuries, so the line it redirected was short, and the Thai prang descends from Khmer towers in general, not from this one. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: its contemporaries and successors built in its manner, so that its name is the name of a period, the Angkor Wat style; and the Bayon and the foundations of Jayavarman VII answered it by turning away, which is reach too.
Cormac McCarthy · Literature
9.0 · Tier V
The field is the American novel, and within it the Western. The force: it turned the novel of the West from a story of settlement and justice into an epic of the violence beneath settlement, in a prose claiming the authority of scripture, and after it the literary Western could not be written in innocence. The case for reach at forty-one years: neglected for a decade, the book rose into the canon of American fiction and has held its place, a delay credited and discounted. The span cannot show whether that reach will widen, and it is bounded now: the book has not redirected the novel at large, and its imprint on later screen Westerns is mostly asserted, not documented. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: places among the runners-up in the New York Times Book Review’s 2006 survey of the best American fiction of the previous twenty-five years and on Time’s 2005 list of the hundred best English-language novels since 1923, and a register among the most imitated in American fiction.
Euripides · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
The field is Attic tragedy of the fifth century, and Greek and European drama after it. The intrinsic force is real: the divided will made the action of a tragedy, a woman’s struggle with desire rendered from inside her reasoning, and a whole action bound to the mechanics of speech, the intermediary and the written word. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force, and it is specific: Aristophanes turned the oath line against Euripides in Frogs, within a generation; Ovid wrote Phaedra’s letter in the Heroides; Seneca rewrote the play as Phaedra; Racine built Phèdre (1677) on it and named Euripides as his source, and through Racine the story runs to Rameau’s Hippolyte et Aricie (1733), D’Annunzio, Jeffers and Sarah Kane’s Phaedra’s Love (1996). What holds it in the high eights is the channel: most of that reach passes through Seneca and Racine rather than from the play itself, and the larger reorganisations of Attic tragedy were made elsewhere.
William Faulkner · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
The field is the American novel and the composite novel of linked parts. The intrinsic force is high: the book reorganised what the American novel could do with the plantation past, making a ledger the novel’s source document and testing the white heir’s repudiation until it fails, and the composite novel gained in it one of its most cited models. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: “The Bear” became one of the most taught and anthologised American fictions of the century and shaped the wilderness and hunting narrative after it, while the reach of the book as a book is narrower, and partly hard to separate from Faulkner’s whole work, for which the Nobel Prize of 1950 was given. Together they sit above the gate and below the force of The Sound and the Fury or Absalom, Absalom!.
Carl Theodor Dreyer · Film
8.9 · Tier IV
Released in 1928, so force and reach are scored together, in the field of Murnau, Lang, Eisenstein, Gance, Chaplin and Keaton. The intrinsic force is very high: the film showed that cinema could be built from the human face alone and could carry inner life without the stage’s voice, and it is one of the few films of its decade that changed what a performance on film could be. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the fire, the censor and the commercial failure narrowed the reach, and the film’s grammar was rarely followed whole. It came through particular heirs: Bresson’s Procès de Jeanne d’Arc (1962), an answer to it; Godard’s Vivre sa vie (1962), in which Nana weeps watching it; Bergman’s faces, Persona above all. The field was moved more by Eisenstein and Murnau than by this film.
Giuseppe Verdi · Music
8.9 · Tier IV
Intrinsic force and achieved reach are scored together. The force: the work showed that serious opera could take a contemporary private life, without history or rank, and make tragedy of illness, money and a family’s respectability, held in melodramma’s own forms. That is a real reorganisation of possibility, carried more by subject and tone than by structure. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the line to verismo and to Puccini is direct, La bohème above all, whose consumptive heroine dies in a cold room with her lover; the fallen-woman heroine runs on through Massenet’s Manon and Puccini’s Manon Lescaut; and the role became the measure of the lyric soprano. Discounted because the reorganisation of Italian form was more Verdi’s later work and Wagner’s than this one’s, and because much of what travelled was Dumas’s subject.
Igor Stravinsky · Music
8.9 · Tier IV
Intrinsic force and achieved reach are scored together, in a field, the concert music of 1920 to 1940, where the neoclassical turn was the main contest. The force is high: the work showed that the anti-expressive, objective idiom of neoclassicism could carry the sacred at full weight, and that a modern composer could write liturgical gravity without Romantic religiosity or archaism. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it is real and lasting, more in choral and sacred music than across the field. The modern psalm setting and the objective sacred style run from it as a line, and its orchestra without violins, with two pianos, became a resource. But the reorganisation of the field in Stravinsky’s name belongs mainly to The Rite of Spring and to neoclassicism as a whole, and this work holds a part of it, not the whole.
Charles Dickens · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
The field is the English novel of the nineteenth century, in which Dickens was himself the largest force. The force: the book made the novel of education a novel of disillusion and self-judgement, showed that a first-person narrator could carry an unsparing moral account of himself without the author’s comment, and, in a novelist known for sprawl, set a standard of construction for the serial novel. It perfects and turns the form more than it reorganises it, and the larger reorganisations in Dickens’s work lie in the panoramic novels, Bleak House first; that holds the axis below the top. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: among the most widely taught English novels; rewritten by Kathy Acker (1982), Peter Carey (Jack Maggs, 1997) and Lloyd Jones (Mister Pip, 2006); filmed by David Lean (1946) and Alfonso Cuarón (1998).
Robert de Luzarches, Thomas and Renaud de Cormont · Architecture
8.9 · Tier IV
Force and reach are scored together, in French cathedral building of the thirteenth century and the Gothic that took its lead from it. The intrinsic force: the classic statement of the High Gothic cathedral, the formula of Chartres and Reims carried to its most consistent and tallest complete form, with a west front that set a measure for the sculptured portal; a synthesis carried to its limit more than a reorganisation of possibility. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the choir of Cologne, begun in 1248, takes the Amiens choir as its model; Beauvais answered its height and failed; the upper choir belongs to the first Rayonnant; and the nineteenth century taught the style through it, after Viollet-le-Duc. What holds the axis: within its century the lead passed quickly to Saint-Denis and the Sainte-Chapelle, and the giant cathedral had few heirs after Cologne.
Chola bronze casters · Visual art
8.9 · Tier IV
The field is South Indian bronze and the Saiva image in the eleventh century. The intrinsic force is high and in part borrowed: the cast is among the fullest realisations of the type that reorganised the Indian image of the god, making a theology into one figure and fixing it, but the reorganisation belongs to the type’s formation, a step before this cast. The reach of this particular cast is narrower than the type’s, canonical in scholarship, an exemplar more than a source; credited for the type, discounted for the cast. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the Chola Nataraja the image of Shiva in the Tamil country for a millennium and cast still to the same canon at Swamimalai; the emblem of Indian art in the West through Coomaraswamy’s essay “The Dance of Shiva” of 1918 and through Rodin’s writing on the Saiva bronzes; a Nataraja given by India in 2004 standing at CERN.
Guo Xi · Visual art
8.9 · Tier IV
Force and reach are scored together, in the field of Chinese landscape painting of the later eleventh century. Intrinsic force is high. The work turns the monumental landscape from a fixed object into a living, mutable field, and it is the fullest painted statement of the theory set out in the Linquan gaozhi, which became a founding text of landscape theory. Reach is substantial and discounted: it was regional, and it ran more through the treatise than through the painting. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the Li-Guo manner, which dominated northern landscape through the Jin and into the Yuan and reached Korea, and the treatise, whose standing outran the painting’s.
Francis Ford Coppola · Film
8.9 · Tier IV
Released in 1974, so force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force: it made a second film a counter-statement to its first, and showed that a studio epic could carry a double time scheme and a strand not in English. The cost to reach is that almost all the influence is shared with The Godfather (1972), whose share is larger; this film’s own is the sequel and the braid. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it was the first sequel to win Best Picture, it has stood for half a century as proof that a sequel can equal its original, and the braided prequel-sequel, the gangster epic as national history and the long-form crime family of later television descend partly from it.
Insular · Visual art
8.9 · Tier IV
In view since its making, so force and reach are scored together, in Insular book painting in Ireland and Britain. The force is high: the summa of the Insular style, a whole codex made one field of ornament, figure and script, with almost no page left plain. The reach is late. The Insular tradition was cut short by the Viking age and passed over by Carolingian art, and no later manuscript can be shown to descend from this one. Delayed influence is credited and discounted, and the discount is heavy. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the Celtic Revival of the nineteenth century, which took its ornament for a national style in metalwork, print and memorials; Joyce’s use of the Tunc page in Finnegans Wake; and The Secret of Kells (2009).
Herman Melville · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
The field is American fiction of the mid-nineteenth century and the short tale as Poe and Hawthorne had made it. The intrinsic force is high: the story changed what a short fiction could hold at its centre, not a mystery to be solved, as in Poe, nor an allegory to be read, as often in Hawthorne, but an opacity that will not resolve, set in an ordinary office and told as comedy. It reached a possibility that the fiction of the absurd, in Kafka and Beckett, later reached by other roads; the resemblance is not influence and is not counted as reach. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: delayed, after seventy years in which the story was little read, and the delay is discounted; since the revival, a fixture of the teaching of American literature, a documented descendant in Enrique Vila-Matas’s Bartleby y compañía (2000), and the formula taken into philosophy and political theory as a figure of refusal. Held below 9.0 because its reach into later fiction is harder to document than its fame suggests.
Pedro Calderón de la Barca · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
The field is the literature of Spain and the European stage of the seventeenth century. The force is high: the play is the culmination of the Spanish comedia, the work in which the popular form proved it could carry philosophy without ceasing to be theatre, and it set the model of the drama of ideas that ruled the Spanish stage for the rest of the century. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: within Spain it was continuous until eighteenth-century neoclassical criticism turned against Calderón; abroad it came through German Romanticism, in the Schlegels, Goethe’s staging at Weimar, Grillparzer’s Der Traum ein Leben and Schopenhauer’s citation of its line on man’s greatest crime, and later Hofmannsthal’s Der Turm. Delayed reach is credited and discounted; it did not redirect European drama as Shakespeare or the French classical stage did.
William Gaddis · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
The field is the novel of the 1950s. The force is high: the book is the first full American attempt after the war at the encyclopedic, allusive, satirical novel about systems of value, and it holds in 1955 much of what the American novel of the 1960s and after would do: the counterfeit culture, the paranoid web of coincidence, the polyphonic party, the novel aware of its own status as a made thing. The force carries the axis over the bar; what holds it near the bar is reach. The reach came late and ran underground; which of its successors drew on it directly is argued rather than shown; and in a decade that also holds Lolita, its redirection of the field is narrower than its force. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the book stands as an acknowledged ancestor of the encyclopedic American novel; Gaddis is named among the inheritance of the encyclopedic novels that followed, Infinite Jest among them; and that reach came through writers and devoted readers, long after the years in which the book could first have redirected the field.
W. B. Yeats · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
The field is English poetry of the twentieth century, a field The Waste Land redirected. The intrinsic force: the book showed that the traditional stanza and the ballad could carry metaphysics, politics and sex in one modern voice, against the free-verse settlement of the 1920s, and “Byzantium” became the century’s model of the visionary poem in rhyme. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Auden’s elegy for Yeats (1939) answers this late manner; Theodore Roethke’s late poems take the trimeter song and the body’s argument from Words for Music Perhaps; “The Choice” and the phrase “Great hatred, little room” became common property in Irish writing and argument. What holds the axis is that the reach is shared with The Tower and the last poems, and that it lies in the lyric of affirmation and the late style, not in a reorganisation of the art.
David Lynch · Film
8.8 · Tier IV
Released in 2001, so force and reach are scored together. The force: a feature that made dream logic its whole structure rather than an episode, and set the key to its own reading late and small. The reach is real and can be traced. The puzzle film of the following decade owes it a grammar, and its way of withholding the key was taken up in art cinema and in long-form television, where the unexplained became a mode rather than a lapse. Heirs are open: Aronofsky’s Black Swan (2010), Villeneuve’s Enemy (2013), Mitchell’s Under the Silver Lake (2018), and Lynch’s own Twin Peaks: The Return (2017). On that record it clears the gate. Held below Persona (8.8) and Vertigo (9.0), which count it among their own heirs, because the redirection is of a sector, the ambitious art film and the drama series, and not of the industry it describes, which went on choosing girls.
Ambrogio Lorenzetti · Visual art
8.8 · Tier IV
The field is Italian painting of the fourteenth century. The intrinsic force is very high: the cycle reorganised what a wall could be about, opening painting to secular political argument, to the life of the contemporary street and to landscape as a subject in itself. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: civic allegory followed in Italian town halls; the landscape and the city view had few successors on this scale within the century, the plague of 1348 and the change in Sienese painting after it cutting the line short; the panoramic landscape returns only in the fifteenth century and in the north, where the calendar pages of the Très Riches Heures (8.6) are a neighbour, how far an heir being argued; and late, the cycle has become the image by which political theory pictures the republic. Delayed and indirect reach is credited and discounted.
Samuel Beckett · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
The field is the drama in English and French of the twentieth century. The intrinsic force is that the play makes a technology the medium of self-confrontation and makes listening a dramatic act, and it shifts the Beckett stage from the universal figure to the dismembered personal memory, the line that runs to Eh Joe, That Time, where three recorded voices of one man play to a silent face, Not I and the late short plays. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it is among the most staged short plays of its century, a standard vehicle for great actors in old age, and the recorded self passed into later solo performance and memory theatre. Held here because the theatre took from it a device and a mood more often than a reorganisation of possibility, a reach inside the larger reach of Godot.
Byzantine, under Bishop Ecclesius and Justinian · Architecture
8.8 · Tier IV
Force and reach are scored together, in sixth-century Byzantine building and its Italian province. The intrinsic force: the double-shell octagon carried to its most dissolved, vertical and screened form, and in the presbytery the fullest surviving statement of the imperial image placed in the liturgy, the picture by which Justinian’s court is still seen. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: large and narrow. Charlemagne’s palace chapel at Aachen, consecrated in 805, takes its octagon, ambulatory and gallery from San Vitale, and Einhard records marbles and columns brought from Ravenna; through Aachen the type passed to Carolingian and Ottonian palace chapels and westworks, Nijmegen, Ottmarsheim and Essen among them. But Aachen dropped the exedrae, the building’s own turn; in the East the church was provincial and redirected little; and the image reached further than the building.
Louis Kahn · Architecture
8.8 · Tier IV
Force and reach are scored together, in the field of the modern government building and the architecture of South Asia from the 1960s to the 1980s. The intrinsic force is high: the building reorganised what a capitol could be outside Europe and America, neither imported glass nor revived dome but a modern monument of mass, light and water, answerable to its climate, and it is the strongest reply to Chandigarh. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: in South Asia it stands beside Chandigarh as the measure of the modern public monument; internationally it is a measure of monumentality more than a type that was followed, since few capitols were built after it on its terms. Delayed influence is credited and discounted.
Kenji Mizoguchi · Film
8.8 · Tier IV
Released in 1953, so force and reach are scored together, in the cinema of the 1950s. The force: the fullest demonstration that the long take and the moving camera could hold the real and the supernatural in one space, and that a period film could be a fable of art. Part of it belongs to Mizoguchi’s earlier films and to the door Rashomon had opened at Venice two years before, and it is discounted. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the Silver Lion at Venice in 1953, and the veneration of Mizoguchi by the critics of Cahiers du cinéma in the later 1950s, which shaped the French New Wave’s idea of mise en scène and changed how a generation of filmmakers understood the camera. The reach stayed within art cinema and criticism, narrower than Rashomon’s, and the figure is held there.
Martin Scorsese · Film
8.8 · Tier IV
Released in 1980, so force and reach are scored together. The force is a reorganisation of how violence is staged in narrative film: as subjective experience, built in the cutting room from speed, sound and silence rather than shown as contest. It fixed, too, a model of performance as bodily transformation. Its field is the staging of violence and the craft of the actor, not the grammar of narrative film. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the boxing film since is commonly read in its shadow, from The Fighter (2010) to Creed (2015); the actor’s weight gain became a recognised practice and a byword; and the cutting of violence, carried by Scorsese and Schoonmaker into Goodfellas (1990), shaped a generation of crime films.
Dionysus Flambouras · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Scored, by the convention this page has kept for an unpublished work, on intrinsic force alone; achieved reach is not scored, because none can yet exist. The force is high. The cetology takes Melville on his own ground and reaches an original result, that classification is custody. The tower answers Kafka by making the institution blameless and total. The bookcase in the first volume fights the canon in invented titles and shelves the narrator’s condition with Kafka’s petitioners. The shield, the games, the black ferry and the blazon take Homer, Dante and the courtly catalogue as objects to be entered, not cited, and the blazon is answered in the beloved’s own hand. Held where it was: on this axis the summit belongs to works that founded traditions rather than answered them, and an answer, however strong, is not yet a redirection.
Kalidasa · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
The field is the Sanskrit literature of its centuries: the two epics, Bhāsa’s dramas, the fragments of Aśvaghoṣa’s, the Nāṭyaśāstra and the courtly lyric. The intrinsic force is the setting of a measure: after Kālidāsa the Sanskrit drama and poem were measured against him, and the tradition’s own verse puts this play first among plays and its fourth act first in it. That is the consummation of a form more than its reorganisation, which holds the force a step down. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it runs through two literatures. In India, the model of the nāṭaka, and a story continuously retold, by Tagore and in cinema, V. Shantaram’s Shakuntala (1943) among the films. In Europe, Jones’s Sacontalá; or, The Fatal Ring (1789) and Georg Forster’s German (1791) made it the first major Sanskrit work most European readers met; Goethe wrote his epigram on it and modelled the prologue of Faust on its stage manager’s; Gautier’s ballet Sacountala (1858) and Alfano’s opera followed.
Safavid, under Shah Abbas I · Architecture
8.8 · Tier IV
Force and reach are scored together, in the building’s own tradition: the Iranian mosque and the lands that built in its manner. The intrinsic force is a culmination more than a refounding. The mosque fixed the Isfahani mosque as a type: the four-iwan court, the portal with paired minarets, the turquoise double dome, the haft-rangi skin, and the mosque as a façade of the city. The elements existed; the synthesis on a civic square is its own. Outside Iran the line is weak, and that is charged. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: in Isfahan, the Masjed-e Hakim and the Madrasa of the Shah’s Mother, whose dome and minarets answer this one; in Qajar Iran, the Shah Mosque of Tehran, Agha Bozorg at Kashan, the Sepahsalar and Nasir al-Mulk at Shiraz, four iwans, haft-rangi and blue domes; and in the twentieth century the Isfahani manner as the national idiom of Iranian religious building.
Anonymous · Architecture
8.8 · Tier IV
Standing for some thirteen centuries, so force and reach are scored together, and the reach carries the axis. The intrinsic force is the lesser part: Hōryū-ji did not bring the Buddhist temple to Japan, for Asuka-dera and Shitennō-ji came first, and its reorganisation is the asymmetric precinct and the refinement of the first imported style. What holds the axis below the top is that force and a short direct line: the side-by-side plan had little immediate succession, and Tang-derived building at Yakushi-ji and Tōdai-ji overtook the style. Delayed and indirect influence is credited and discounted. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the temple became the origin of the Japanese tradition as it is understood, the touchstone of Watsuji’s Pilgrimages to Ancient Temples (1919), the school of the master carpenter Nishioka Tsunekazu, who carried its methods to the West Pagoda of Yakushi-ji, and the cause of the Law for the Protection of Cultural Properties of 1950.
Johannes Brahms · Music
8.8 · Tier IV
The work showed that the most rigorous Baroque variation form could carry a Romantic symphony’s tragic weight, and that a symphonic movement could be made from an interval rather than a melody. It reorganised what the past could be in a symphony: not quotation, but law. Delayed influence is credited and discounted. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the reach is real and documented, but not the field’s main line, for the symphony after 1885 went through Mahler and Bruckner. It ran through the Second Viennese School, by Schoenberg’s own account of developing variation, and through the twentieth-century passacaglia, Webern’s Passacaglia, Op. 1 (1908), Reger, Shostakovich and Britten, a line shared with Bach.
Francisco Goya · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
The work is published, so force and reach are scored together, in European painting from the 1820s on and Spanish painting first. The intrinsic force is very high: a painting may be private, unprogrammed and governed by the painter’s own dread; the mark may be raw; horror may be the whole of the image. The picture moves from the myth to the psyche, the claim Expressionism made generations later. The discount is heavy. For more than fifty years it moved nothing, because nobody saw it, and much of what is credited to it belongs to the Black Paintings and late Goya as a whole. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: through the Prado since 1881 and through reproduction it has become the emblem of that manner, claimed as a source by Expressionism, by the Surrealist taste for the monstrous and by the modern imagery of horror.
D. H. Lawrence · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
The field is the novel in English of the first decades of the twentieth century. The force: with Joyce and Woolf, this is one of the books in which the English novel turned inward, and the one that turned it toward the body, the unconscious and sexual relation rather than toward consciousness and its stream; it reorganised what the novel of love could hold, and set industrial modernity and erotic life on one axis. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Leavis’s canon placed Lawrence at the head of the English novel at mid-century and this book at his peak; its frankness about sex and about love between men was taken up by the fiction and criticism that followed; and it became a set text across the universities. Held below the top because its manner has had fewer heirs than Joyce’s or Woolf’s, and Lawrence’s standing fell from the 1970s.
Auguste Rodin · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
Shown in 1889, so force and reach are scored together, in the field of European public and figurative sculpture of the 1880s and after. Intrinsic force: the decisive reorganisation of the public monument, from the pedestal and the hero toward the ground and the many, from celebration to the bearing of cost. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the group stands at the start of the line by which the monument came down to the viewer’s ground, and its anti-heroic, collective and grieving manner is a precedent behind much modern memorial sculpture, through the mourning figures of Lehmbruck and Kollwitz to memorials set at ground level later in the twentieth century. The discount: much of that reach belongs to Rodin’s work as a whole, the Gates, the Balzac, the partial figure, and the line to particular memorials is more often asserted than documented.
Anton Chekhov · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
The field is European drama around 1900. The intrinsic force is high: with the other three major plays, Three Sisters reorganised what a play could be, by subtext, the group protagonist, the action of not acting, and the comic and the grievous inside one scene. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the Moscow Art Theatre’s practice, and Stanislavsky’s system with it, was formed in staging these plays; Shaw subtitled Heartbreak House a fantasia in the Russian manner and named Chekhov in its preface; Brian Friel made his own Three Sisters (1981) and later wrote Dancing at Lughnasa on a household of sisters in a closed place; Wendy Wasserstein’s The Sisters Rosensweig answers it by name. Charged: much of that reach is Chekhov’s theatre as a whole, and the first impact was The Seagull’s.
Rainer Maria Rilke · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
The field is the German lyric of the twentieth century and, through translation, the English. The intrinsic force is high: the book constitutes the Dinggedicht as a mode of modern lyric, and it is the strongest proof in German that a poem could be an object made of attention. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: in German the thing poem became a lasting option, taught as such, and “Der Panther” is the type case in German schooling; in English the poems drew versions from poets of the first rank, Robert Lowell in Imitations and Randall Jarrell among them, and the attentive object poem of mid century English and American verse is in part in their debt. That debt is shared with Imagism and with William Carlos Williams, who came to the same ground by other roads, and Rilke’s widest reach runs more through the Elegies, the Sonnets and the Letters to a Young Poet than through this book.
Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky · Music
8.7 · Tier IV
Intrinsic force and achieved reach are scored together. The force is a reorganisation: the symphony’s ending made open to failure and extinction, which changed what a symphonic finale could mean. After it, a symphony could end by dying. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the line runs through the symphonies that close in slow decline or in the dark, Mahler’s Ninth with its Adagio dying away, the Russian symphony through Rachmaninoff and Myaskovsky to Shostakovich, and Sibelius’s First (1899), whose idiom owes much to Tchaikovsky. The line is credited, not each link; not every later quiet close descends from this one. Reach is set below force because the field of the 1890s was crowded, and the waltz in five and the divided lament had few heirs.
Louis Kahn · Architecture
8.7 · Tier IV
Force and reach are scored together, in the field of American architecture of the 1960s and the modern research building. The intrinsic force is a reorganisation in two registers. In the laboratory, the service floor made the research building a long-lived frame with changeable rooms, answering the problem Richards had raised. In architecture at large, the building showed that modern construction could carry monumentality, silence and permanence without historicist ornament, as the International Style was exhausting itself. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the court became one of the most reproduced images of modern architecture, and the line of Kahn’s concrete runs to Tadao Ando, to Mario Botta and to a broad later monumental modernism. Much of that reach is Kahn’s whole work, not this building’s alone.
Andrei Tarkovsky · Film
8.7 · Tier IV
Released in 1975, so force and reach are scored together, in the cinema of the 1970s. The intrinsic force is high: a demonstration that a narrative film could be organised by memory and association alone, with the self as structure rather than character, and that private recollection and public newsreel could share one grammar. That is a reorganisation of possibility. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: slow to reach the West, the film’s form, a remembered childhood of fragments as the structure of a feature, runs on through art cinema, most openly in Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life (8.8) of 2011. The discounts: much of the reach belongs to Tarkovsky’s work as a whole rather than to this film; it stayed within art cinema; and the delay was long.
William of Sens and William the Englishman; nave by Henry Yevele · Architecture
8.7 · Tier IV
Force and reach are scored together, in the field of church building in England and northern Europe from the twelfth century to the fifteenth. The intrinsic force: the choir is the first major fully Gothic building in England, a real reorganisation of what English building could do; the Trinity Chapel and Corona fix a model of the eastern shrine chapel; the nave is a summit of the Perpendicular. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: dark marble shafting against pale stone passed into English Gothic, and the authority of the mother church gave its forms weight. But English Gothic took its own road, at Wells Cathedral (8.4) and Lincoln Cathedral (8.5), rather than the French manner of the choir, and the Perpendicular was set before the nave. The widest reach belongs to the place: the greatest pilgrimage of medieval England, known across Europe.
Built for Fujiwara no Yorimichi · Architecture
8.7 · Tier IV
Force and reach are scored together, in the field of Japanese building and sculpture from the eleventh century on. The intrinsic force: the hall constitutes the Pure Land as architecture and garden in one, and its image fixes a sculptural canon. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Jōchō’s style and his joined-wood method became the norm for Buddhist sculpture for generations; the Amida hall in a pond garden spread across the provinces in the next century; in the modern period the hall became a national emblem, on the ten-yen coin and the ten-thousand-yen note, and travelled, to the Hōōden at the Chicago exposition of 1893 and a replica in Hawaii. Outside Japan its reach as a model for building is slight.
Leonardo da Vinci · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
Before painters for more than five centuries, so force and reach are scored together, within Italian painting of the 1480s and the High Renaissance that followed. The intrinsic force is high: the first large altarpiece in which the figures are unified as one group in one atmosphere, modelled by shadow and composed as a pyramid of interlocking glances and gestures; the sacra conversazione taken out of architecture into nature, a reorganisation of the devotional image. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the pyramidal Madonna group with the infant Baptist became the formula of Raphael’s Florentine Madonnas, the Madonna of the Meadow and La Belle Jardinière, through Leonardo’s work in Florence more broadly; Milanese painters around Leonardo took the faces, the shadow and the grotto. The discount: the reach is shared with the London version, which stayed in the chapel, and with the Adoration and the later cartoons.
Caravaggio · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
The field is Roman painting of the first decade of the seventeenth century. The intrinsic force is a real reorganisation of the altarpiece: the sacred event brought forward to the plane of the church, cast with common people, cut out of its setting by darkness, and built as a single sculptural block. The discount: much of the painter’s reach is the reach of his manner as a whole, already carried by the Contarelli canvases, and this canvas’s share of it is a consolidation’s. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Rubens painted his own version of it; it was among the most admired and copied of the painter’s works in the seventeenth century and set a model for the devotional pictures of his followers; its seizure for the Musée Napoléon put it before French painters.
Anton Chekhov · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
The field is the drama of Europe in the 1890s: Ibsen, Strindberg, Hauptmann, and the Russian stage of Ostrovsky. The force: with The Seagull, this play reorganised what a play could be, an action without a centre, carried by subtext, pause and indirection, in which the crisis changes nothing. Held below the top because the reach belongs in large part to Chekhov’s four plays as a body, and The Seagull and The Cherry Orchard carry more of it by name. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the Moscow Art Theatre made its method in these plays; Shaw subtitled Heartbreak House “A Fantasia in the Russian Manner on English Themes”, and its household of idle and disappointed people is this one’s; Malle’s film and Hamaguchi’s are built on this play alone.
Henrik Ibsen · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
The field is European drama of the late nineteenth century, into which Ibsen’s realist prose plays entered as the main force of change. Intrinsic force: the play makes a tragedy of character out of a protagonist the audience can neither like nor fully read, with the plot carried by subtext and objects, and in that it points past the social problem play toward the drama of interiority that Chekhov and Strindberg would make. Held below the top because the reorganisation of the field belongs more to Ibsen’s realist cycle as a whole, and to A Doll’s House and Ghosts first, than to this play singly. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it entered the repertory of the major European theatres within a few years, drew Shaw’s book in its first year, and gave the modern stage one of its defining roles.
Anonymous · Architecture
8.7 · Tier IV
Force and reach together. The intrinsic force is high: Stupa 1 is the fullest surviving statement of the early Indian stupa, dome, railings, terrace, summit and four carved gates standing together, and its gates are the summit of the early school of stone narrative relief in central India. What holds the axis below the top is that the reach is mediated: the type is older than Sanchi and travelled through many sites, so what this stupa itself passed on is harder to show, and the site lay out of use until 1818. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the type it most fully exemplifies crossed Asia, through Amaravati and Gandhara, Sri Lanka, South-east Asia and the pagoda; and its delayed reach, credited and discounted, made it the standard image of ancient Indian Buddhist building.
Federico García Lorca · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
The field is Spanish poetry of the twentieth century, and through Lorca the poetry of the Spanish-speaking world. The force: the book showed that the popular and the avant-garde could be one poem, that the oldest Spanish form could carry modern metaphor without losing its people, and it set a register, moon, knife, horse, green, the night of the civil guard, that remade what the Spanish lyric could sound like. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: probably the most widely read book of Spanish poetry of its century, known by heart in Spain and Latin America, set to music again and again, and so imitated that “lorquismo” became the word for the imitations; through translation it made Lorca one of the most read poets of the century in any language. Held below the top of the eights because the reach was in large part a manner, and the deeper reorganisation of Spanish verse was shared with the whole generation of 1927.
Lorenzo Ghiberti · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
The field is Florentine and Italian sculpture of the second quarter of the fifteenth century. The intrinsic force: the doors made the narrative relief a pictorial space and brought perspective, landscape and the antique figure into the most public work of bronze in the city; they are the high point of the Renaissance narrative relief and set its terms. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: later Florentine relief and the crowded narratives of the Quattrocento painters stand in their line; Michelangelo’s praise, reported by Vasari, fixed them as a touchstone; Rodin’s Gates of Hell, from 1880, answers them as a portal of bronze narrative; casts stand on and in buildings across the world. Held below the top because the decisive steps in the field were made beside them, by Donatello and Masaccio, whose David and Holy Trinity stand at 9.2 here, and the doors were in part a summation, conservative in their grace by the time they were hung.
The Cure · Music
8.7 · Tier IV
Force and reach together. The album made the gothic and post-punk vein widescreen and lush without losing its darkness, and showed that a band at its commercial peak could release a long, slow, sad record and be rewarded, with “Lovesong” at No. 2 in America and the album at No. 3 in Britain. That reorganised one strand of rock, not the field, and holds it from the top. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: dream pop, shoegaze, alternative metal, where Deftones are often named, 1990s American alternative rock and the goth and emo revivals draw on it, and “Lovesong” was covered by 311 and Adele. Part of the reach belongs to the band, and it is discounted.
Prince Hachijō Toshihito and Prince Toshitada · Architecture
8.7 · Tier IV
Standing since the 1660s, so force and reach are scored together, in the villa’s own tradition. The intrinsic force: it is the fullest statement of the sukiya-shoin and the stroll garden as one sequence, and it proved that a palace could be made of the tea house’s restraint without losing rank. In the Edo period its reach was limited by privacy, and how far it was copied before 1900 cannot be shown. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: in the twentieth century Katsura became the central reference of modern Japanese architecture, in Tange’s work and writing and in Isozaki’s answer, and through Taut and Gropius it became for international modernism the proof that its principles were old — a delayed influence, credited and discounted, and partly a projection onto the villa.
August Strindberg · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
The field is European drama of the nineteenth century, and Swedish literature within it. The force is high: the play and its Preface together are the most complete statement in drama of naturalism, and the one-act chamber form it uses reorganises what tragedy could be, three people, one room and an offstage world pressing on it, with no act to break the pressure. Held below the top because the reach is shared with Ibsen, who moved the same field further, and because Strindberg’s own later swerve, the dream plays, redirected the next century more than this did. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Antoine’s Théâtre Libre staged it in Paris; Strindberg built his Intimate Theatre (1907) on the chamber play it began; O’Neill named Strindberg his master in his Nobel lecture.
Joseph Heller · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
The field is the American novel of war and of institutions. The force is high: the book showed that the war novel could be told as farce without losing its dead, and that the novel of institutions could be made of logic loops, and it is one of the books that made the black humour of the 1960s a recognised mode. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the war comedy of the Vietnam years works in its key, on the page in Richard Hooker’s MASH (1968) and on screen in Altman’s film of 1970; Tim O’Brien’s Going After Cacciato (1978) carries its deserter’s flight and its dream logic; the comic-horror war of Gravity’s Rainbow shares its moment and its method. And its title entered English as a common noun, reach of a rare kind, though presence more than influence. What holds the axis there is that the reorganisation was of a genre and a mode, not of the novel.
Daniel Libeskind · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
Standing since 1999 and open with its exhibitions since 2001, so force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force is a reorganisation of what a museum building can be: architecture as narrative and memory, absence as programme, the visitor’s movement as the meaning. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the void as a memorial figure recurs, to the reflecting absences of the National September 11 Memorial; the museum building as an experience to be undergone rather than a frame became common; Libeskind’s own commissions followed, the Imperial War Museum North, the Military History Museum at Dresden, the master plan for the World Trade Center; and the angled, slashed manner spread widely, often as style without the argument, which discounts the reach. Bilbao shares the credit for the museum as icon, and delayed influence is still arriving.
Le Corbusier · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
Built and published since 1960, so force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force: the fullest statement of the late béton brut at the scale of an institution and a community, and a real reorganisation of the monastic house, section in place of cloister as the order of the life, light by calibrated devices, the building held off its ground from a level top. Part of the idiom was set at Marseille and Ronchamp, which holds the force short. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: wide among architects and lasting, a model for the brutalist colleges, halls and civic buildings of the 1960s and 1970s, Boston City Hall among the most cited; the ondulatoire, the light cannon and the cell with its loggia taught to a generation; the reference for religious building after it. Reach runs more through architects than through the wider culture.
Gustave Courbet · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
Published, so intrinsic force and achieved reach are scored together. The intrinsic force: the canvas made the artist’s own milieu and life a subject of public painting at the highest scale and turned the studio picture into a manifesto of the artist’s social position; the pavilion that housed it made the independent exhibition a weapon, the first by a painter of his stature against the state’s. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the group portrait of the modern artist and his allies runs from here to Fantin-Latour’s Homage to Delacroix (1864) and A Studio at Les Batignolles (1870) and to Bazille’s studio of 1870; Manet’s private pavilion of 1867 and the independent exhibitions of the 1870s follow the pavilion’s example. Discounted because much of the reach belongs to the whole Realist campaign, and the canvas was little seen between 1855 and 1920.
Mikhail Lermontov · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
The field is Russian literature of the nineteenth century, the most consequential century any modern literature has had. The intrinsic force is high: the first Russian novel of interior life in prose, whose sentences set a standard of clarity and economy that Russian prose then measured itself against, and which stands with Eugene Onegin, which it answers, among the foundations the century’s prose descends from. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: within Russian literature the reach is very large, through the line of the superfluous man in Turgenev and Goncharov, the self-anatomising consciousness that Dostoevsky turned inside out in the Underground Man, Tolstoy’s officers in the Caucasus, and Chekhov’s duel and his idle intelligentsia, each taking something from this book. Abroad the reach is narrower than that of the great Russian novels it made possible, and that is the margin below the top.
Gillo Pontecorvo · Film
8.6 · Tier IV
Field: the cinema of the 1960s, the decade of Godard, Antonioni, Bergman and 2001. The intrinsic force is strong: the film made the reconstruction of recent history in the grammar of the newsreel into a form, and the collective protagonist and the system as subject into a political cinema that argues rather than preaches. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Costa-Gavras’s Z (1969) and State of Siege (1972, written by Solinas), the Third Cinema of Latin America and Africa, Pontecorvo’s own Burn! (1969), and the docudrama through Paul Greengrass’s Bloody Sunday (2002) and United 93 (2006); beyond film, the study of insurgency in military colleges. Held short of the top because that reach lies chiefly in one genre, and cinéma vérité was a parallel source.
Joseph Haydn · Music
8.6 · Tier IV
Published, so intrinsic force and achieved reach are scored together. The force is real: the work made the oratorio a concert genre of the Viennese style and a German public institution, joined Handel’s choral weight to the symphonic orchestra, and in the Chaos reorganised what an introduction could do. Its influence on composition beyond the genre is narrower than the Ninth’s: the tone-painting was both imitated and mocked. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: within a few years the work was heard across Europe, in London in 1800 and in Paris that December; with Messiah it became a founding work of the amateur choral society and the music festival in the German lands and in England through the nineteenth century; and it stood behind the oratorios that followed, Haydn’s own Die Jahreszeiten and Beethoven’s Christus am Ölberge among them.
Martin Scorsese · Film
8.6 · Tier IV
Released in 1976, so force and reach are scored together. The force: the film made the first-person study of a dangerous solitary a mainstream American form, and fused Bresson’s austerity to a genre film’s violence. It stands below the reach because the swerve was prepared. The reach outside cinema, in Hinckley, is a grim proof of force, but not the field moved, and it is not weighed. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Schrader’s own line of solitary men, from American Gigolo (1980) and Light Sleeper (1992) to First Reformed (2017) and The Card Counter (2021); Scorsese and De Niro’s The King of Comedy (1982), its comic twin; Nightcrawler (2014) and You Were Never Really Here (2017); Joker (2019), built openly on both, with De Niro in it; and the line at the mirror, in common speech.
Frank Lloyd Wright · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
Seen and published since 1938, so force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force is a real reorganisation of a house’s relation to its ground: the modern structural tray, which in Europe lifted the house off the land, is used here to fuse it with rock and water, the strongest answer to the International Style from inside modern building. It was not a doctrine, no site is this site, and its reach is more to an idea and an image than to a copied form. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: large and real in American building, where it restarted Wright’s late career, and with it the Usonian house and the late public works; set the American terms of organic modernism, the house of stone, glass and cantilevered decks opened to a wooded or hillside site; and became the best-known house in America, its image travelling far beyond architecture.
Louis Kahn · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
Force and reach are scored together, in the field of the museum. The intrinsic force is a real reorganisation of what a museum is: the room against the open plan, daylight engineered as the medium of display, the services withdrawn from the rooms into a structure of their own; and a late demonstration of mass, light and archaic order after the International Style. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the daylit museum since, above all Renzo Piano’s, at the Menil Collection of 1987, at the Beyeler and in the Kimbell’s own pavilion; Tadao Ando’s museum facing it across the street in Fort Worth. Held below the top because much of Kahn’s reach runs through Salk, Dhaka and his teaching, and the museum is a narrower field than the house or the city.
Don DeLillo · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
The field is American fiction of the late twentieth century. The force is a reorganisation of what the domestic novel could hold: the book made the mediated consumer environment the ground of a metaphysical novel written as comic domestic realism, and joined the systems novel to the family novel, bringing the encyclopedic satire into a household, a supermarket and a station wagon. What holds it below the top is that Pynchon and Gaddis had begun the reorganisation, and the book’s form is not itself new; its reach outstrips its force, as the most widely taught statement of a turn others began. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the National Book Award for Fiction for 1985; its place as the set text of American postmodern fiction in the university; and a coinage, “the airborne toxic event”, that passed from the book into common use.
John Fowler and Benjamin Baker · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
The field is the long-span bridge and the steel structure of the industrial nations from 1880. The intrinsic force is high: it proved steel for the largest structures, made a codified wind load a condition of design, showed the balanced cantilever as a long-span system, and gave the engineer’s structure a public standing as an object of beauty and trust. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: steel became the material of great bridges and frames; the cantilever was carried on to the Quebec Bridge, Howrah and many railway crossings; and its image entered the modern movement’s case for the engineer. But the line was short: after the Quebec collapses of 1907 and 1916 the suspension bridge took the long span, and no larger cantilever followed.
Joy Division · Music
8.6 · Tier IV
The record reorganised what a post-punk group could sound like: the rhythm section as lead, the guitar as atmosphere, the synthesizer inside rock without novelty, and space itself as an instrument. It made gravity and slowness available to a form built on speed. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the dark post-punk and goth of the early 1980s; New Order’s electronic turn, which grows out of “Isolation” and “Decades”; Hannett’s production and Saville’s design as models for independent records; and the post-punk revival of the early 2000s. The credit is shared with Unknown Pleasures, and the share of fame that came through the death is discounted.
Francis Bacon · Visual art
8.5 · Tier IV
Published, so force and reach are scored together. The field is British and European figurative painting of the 1940s. The intrinsic force: the picture broke the wartime neo-romantic consensus in a single showing and put the human figure back at the centre of serious painting as a body under pressure; by common account, postwar British painting begins with it. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Bacon’s own work, the triptych his defining form for four decades and the screaming heads of the 1950s; the figurative painting later grouped as the School of London, which defined itself against abstraction partly in his wake; and a long afterlife in images of the body in pain. The discount: much of the reach belongs to the later work, the international field of 1945 to 1960 went mostly to abstraction, and no school followed the method.
Anonymous · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Field: the Gothic of England and northern Europe in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. The intrinsic force is high: St Hugh’s Choir is a strong case for the first building of a distinctly English Gothic rather than imported French work, and its vault, arcading and shafting reorganised what a Gothic church in England could be; the Angel Choir is a founding monument of the Decorated style. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the nave’s tierceron vault was taken up across English building and stands behind the many-ribbed vaults of the Decorated period, Exeter’s nave most famously; the ten-sided chapter house on one pier heads a family of English polygonal chapter houses; the Angel Choir was answered across England. Abroad the reach is indirect; it is chiefly national.
Eugenio Montale · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
The intrinsic force is high: with Ungaretti’s L’allegria, the book reorganised the possibilities of the Italian lyric after D’Annunzio, establishing a poetry of objects that carry a state of mind, which Montale later related to Eliot’s objective correlative, and a discursive, argued lyric in the traditional line. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the generations after, Sereni in Gli strumenti umani, Caproni, and later Zanzotto and Pasolini, define themselves with or against Montale, and Italian critics name a period manner after him; abroad, Robert Lowell’s versions in Imitations (1961) and the translations of Arrowsmith and Galassi carry it. Held at 8.7 because the Nobel of 1975 crowned the whole work, and the international reach rests partly on the later books.
Peter Paul Rubens · Visual art
8.5 · Tier IV
The field is Flemish painting and the northern altarpiece of the 1610s, and force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force: with the Raising of the Cross, it is the founding statement of the Flemish Baroque; it fixed how a northern altar could hold Italian monumental figure painting, and it set the Antwerp altarpiece for a generation. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Lucas Vorsterman’s engraving after the central panel, which carried it across Europe; Rembrandt’s Descent from the Cross of 1633 for his Passion series, built on that print and answering it; van Dyck and Jordaens, who came out of Rubens’s Antwerp; and copies and adaptations on altars across the Catholic north. Held below the top because the Raising shares the force, and Caravaggio’s Entombment, behind both, holds the deeper reorganisation.
Jane Austen · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
The field is the English novel of the nineteenth century, which the book enters near its start. The force: it fixed a form for the novel of courtship and manners in which character is revealed through dialogue and a free indirect voice, irony replaces moral commentary, and the plot is an education of judgment. That reorganised what the domestic novel could do, though the method is shared with Austen’s other books and goes furthest in Emma. The literary line of the novel of consciousness and manners, through George Eliot, Henry James, Forster and Woolf, runs through Austen as a whole more than through this book. The reach was delayed, modest in 1813 and widening after the Memoir of 1870, a delay credited and discounted. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the antagonistic lovers, the proud rich man and the quick poor woman, became the template of the romance genre, from Georgette Heyer’s Regency novels to the mass-market romance and its rewritings.
Naguib Mahfouz · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
The field is the Arabic novel of the twentieth century. The intrinsic force is high: the trilogy is generally taken to have established the realist novel as a major form in Arabic, the book that showed the language could hold a society’s whole life at length. It did not invent the Arabic novel; Zaynab, Tawfiq al-Hakim and Mahfouz’s own Cairo novels of the 1940s came before it. It gave that novel its realist classic at full scale, a book to build from and to argue against. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: within Arabic it set the model of the Cairo family saga and of the novel as the record of national history, and it stands at the centre of the work for which Mahfouz received the Nobel Prize in 1988, the first to a writer in Arabic. Its reach outside Arabic is a reach of reading, not of influence on the form.
Michelangelo Antonioni · Film
8.5 · Tier IV
Released in 1962, so force and reach are scored together. The field is the cinema of the 1960s, and the intrinsic force is high: the film shows that duration, architecture and absence can carry a narrative’s conclusion, that a feature can end by withdrawing its story, and that a city can be photographed as a protagonist’s condition. With L’Avventura it changed what European art cinema believed a film could leave out. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: wide within art cinema and narrower beyond it; filmmakers have named Antonioni’s trilogy as a formation, and the emptied place and the held shot have been read as a source of the slow cinema of later decades. Much of the reach is shared with L’Avventura, which made the decisive break, and that is discounted.
Karl Friedrich Schinkel · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Opened in 1830 and published by its maker, so force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force is high: here the public art museum takes its definitive form as a building type, a civic front, a central domed hall, galleries in sequence round courts, an institution set opposite the state, for a type then barely thirty years old. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the colonnade and rotunda museum became the model for public museums through the nineteenth century in Germany, Britain and America; the Museum Island grew behind it; and in the twentieth century it was answered directly by Mies van der Rohe, in the podium and column hall of the Neue Nationalgalerie, and by Stirling’s Neue Staatsgalerie in Stuttgart, whose open rotunda is a reading of Schinkel’s. The discount: other public museums were begun in Munich in 1816 and in London in 1823, so the founding of the type is shared.
Alain Resnais · Film
8.5 · Tier IV
The field is the cinema of the 1960s, a decade of great formal departures, among them L’Avventura, 8½ and Persona. Released in 1961, so force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force is high: the film showed that a feature could be built on time without chronology, on image and sound without a referent, and that the mental present could be the whole of a film’s tense; it is among the strongest cases of a real reorganisation of possibility in the decade. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the film became a fixed point in the history of art cinema and in film theory, and the byword for the impenetrable art film. That reach is considerable but diffuse, a permission more than a school, and parts of the decade’s modernism moved in other directions.
Joni Mitchell · Music
8.5 · Tier IV
The field is the singer-songwriter album of the early 1970s, crowded in the year of this record. The intrinsic force is real: the record showed that the popular song could carry a woman’s first-person account of love, failure and choice, unsoftened and including her own faults, and that it could do so with an art of harmony and phrasing her peers did not have. That reorganised what a song could say and who could say it. It is held near the bar because the means were shared, the confessional turn in poetry and the examples of Dylan and Cohen, and another singer-songwriter record of the same months reached many more listeners. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the record is named as a source by singer-songwriters across five decades, by the women songwriters of the 1990s and the 2010s explicitly, and A Case of You and River became standards; the reach is in songwriting and voice, less in recorded sound.
Tawaraya Sōtatsu · Visual art
8.5 · Tier IV
The field is Kyoto painting in the decades after 1600, and force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force is high: the work reorganised what a gold screen could do with figures and void, and it stands among the founding works of what was later called Rinpa, with its decorative design, bold placement and flat gold, and its swerve from academic painting. The wider spread of that manner runs chiefly through Kōrin, and its passage into European design is credited to the school, not to this work. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Ogata Kōrin, about a century later, copied the screens closely, and Sakai Hōitsu, about a century after him, copied Kōrin’s copy, a lineage made by copying one image across three generations.
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Intrinsic force is high: the hall realised, at an institution's scale, the clear-span room whose structure stands outside it and whose use is left open, and with it a public building as one ordered volume rather than a set of named rooms. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: large and demonstrated. Mies pursued the type through the unbuilt Convention Hall project of 1953, the Bacardi project for Santiago de Cuba and the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin, finished in 1968, its last and largest statement. The clear-span shed with its structure shown ran on into the work of his American followers and of the high-tech architects, among them the Sainsbury Centre, and the flexible, undetermined hall became a commonplace of postwar building. Discounted because much of that reach belongs to his American work as a body, and the type was already in the Farnsworth House.
Billy Wilder · Film
8.5 · Tier IV
Released in 1944, so force and reach are scored together, in the cinema of the 1940s. The intrinsic force is a synthesis with a hard edge: it joined the confessional voice-over, the low-key photography of the studio crime film and the amoral clarity of the hard-boiled novel, and made the murderer the narrator and the audience his accomplice, which changed whose story the crime film could tell. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it is one of a handful of films of 1944 on which the noir cycle of the next decade was built, and the template for its most repeated story, lovers who kill for money and turn on each other. It opened the screen to Cain (Mildred Pierce, 1945; The Postman Always Rings Twice, 1946); its confession and its light through blinds passed into the common grammar; Body Heat (1981) returned to it directly. The axis stands above The Third Man and Chinatown, and below the top because the reach is to a genre, not to the whole art.
The Rolling Stones · Music
8.5 · Tier IV
The field is the rock album of 1970 to 1972. The intrinsic force is the smaller part: the record fixed a model of the rock band as a roots ensemble, hard rock, country and soul played by one group with horns and session players, and showed that the band’s darker matter could sit inside its swagger. The larger turn had been made on the band’s records of 1968 and 1969. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Brown Sugar became a template riff of rock radio; the Muscle Shoals sessions helped make that studio a destination for rock bands; Wild Horses and Dead Flowers passed into the country-rock and alternative-country repertoire; and the band’s own label and emblem set a model for a group owning its imprint, a reach that is partly business.
H. G. Wells · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
The field is English prose fiction of the 1890s, and within it the scientific romance as it then stood. The intrinsic force is a reorganisation of possibility, not an accent: the book made time a dimension a fiction could travel in by machine, and so made possible a body of fiction that did not exist before it, and it founded the evolutionary far future and the dying earth as subjects for serious narrative. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the time machine as a device across the twentieth century, in Heinlein’s “By His Bootstraps” (1941), Bradbury’s “A Sound of Thunder” (1952) and the BBC’s Doctor Who from 1963; the far future and the dying sun in Hodgson’s The Night Land (1912), Stapledon’s Last and First Men (1930) and Clarke; the two-species society in later dystopia. The scientific romance is often dated from this book. Held below Frankenstein’s 9.2 because the reach runs mainly within genre fiction, and the literature at large was not redirected by it.
Buscheto and Rainaldo · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
The field is Italian Romanesque of the eleventh and twelfth centuries. The intrinsic force is high: the building founded a regional style, the Pisan Romanesque, whose banded marble, blind arcades with lozenges and gallery façade were not joined before it. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the style spread across Tuscany, to Lucca and Pistoia, to Pisa’s dependencies in Sardinia and Corsica and along the Tyrrhenian coast; it shaped the baptistery and the campanile beside it; and its gallery façade became a type, answered for two centuries. In its field it is one of two or three determining buildings, with St Mark’s Basilica and the Lombard churches. It sits below 9.0 because it did not redirect building beyond Italy and the Tyrrhenian islands.
Pérotin · Music
8.4 · Tier IV
Intrinsic force and achieved reach are scored together. The force is great: the work reorganised what written polyphony could hold, from one voice over a chant to four, coordinated by rhythm and consonance, at a scale no notated music had reached before it, and a later theorist calls such works the best, in a tradition that rarely kept its makers’ names. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: within the liturgical polyphony of about 1200, the Paris repertory spread across Europe, its sources now in Florence and Wolfenbüttel, and the modal and discant practice the work shares with the Magnus liber led to the motet and measured notation. But four-voice organum itself was nearly a dead end, three voices remained the norm for two centuries, and the work’s own reach is hard to separate from its school’s.
Katsushika Hokusai · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
Weighed within its own field, the Japanese woodblock print and painting of the 1830s; force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force: with its series, the reorganisation of the commercial print around landscape, and in this sheet the reduction of a landscape to one form and two or three colours, a mountain as a pure shape. The discount: much of the reach belongs to the series and to The Great Wave, not to this sheet, though it is the series’ purest statement and the type of the single mountain set alone. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the landscape print a principal genre at once, with Hiroshige’s Fifty-three Stations of the Tōkaidō within a few years and his own Fuji series later; Japonisme in Europe from the 1860s; Rivière’s Thirty-six Views of the Eiffel Tower in 1902; the emblem of Japan.
Piet Mondrian · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
Field: abstract painting in New York and Europe in the 1940s. The intrinsic force: a reorganisation of the grid, from a structure that divides to a field that pulses, and of colour, from an infill to the structure itself; with Victory Boogie Woogie, the last move in the century’s most rigorous programme of abstraction. The discount: much of the painter’s reach belongs to the compositions of the 1920s and 1930s, not to this canvas. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: at the Museum of Modern Art from 1943, before the postwar New York generation; carried by the American abstract artists around him; claimed as a source by the all-over field, the optical painting of the 1960s and the grid of Minimal art, with Krauss’s essay “Grids” (1979) taking Mondrian as its type; and very wide in design and the image of the modern city.
U2 · Music
8.4 · Tier IV
The contest is with the band’s own martial sound, and the force is the record’s own: a band built for arenas made space, decay and room sound the substance of its songs, not their decoration, and the production its successor consolidated was made here first. What holds the figure here is that it reassembled a language Eno and Lanois had already made, and that the change lay within U2’s course more than the field’s, so much of the reach travels under another record’s name. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: The Joshua Tree (1987) carried the method to a world audience with the same producers, and Achtung Baby (1991) was made with them again; Lanois took the atmosphere into Peter Gabriel’s So (1986), Robbie Robertson’s first solo album (1987) and Bob Dylan’s Oh Mercy (1989); and Bad at Live Aid, in July 1985, is widely taken as the moment the band reached the largest scale.
Prince and the Revolution · Music
8.4 · Tier IV
The field is the popular music of the 1980s, rock, R&B and dance pop, then sharply divided on radio and in the market by race. The intrinsic force is real and smaller than the reach: the record joined funk, rock guitar, synthesiser pop and gospel in one voice, and When Doves Cry showed that a dance record could subtract its foundation and keep its floor. The Minneapolis sound it carries was set on earlier records, and what belongs to the film or to the artist’s career is discounted. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the record carried a Black artist’s guitar rock and funk to the top of the white rock audience as well as the R&B one, set a model of the soundtrack album as a star’s statement, made the drum-machine and keyboard sound of Minneapolis a sound of the decade, and gave the field a standard in its title song.
Pieter Bruegel the Elder · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
Field: Netherlandish painting of the 1560s and the genre painting that followed. The intrinsic force is high: with The Peasant Dance, the panel constitutes the large-figure peasant subject as a picture in its own right, a type that did not exist before it in this form. The discount: much of the reach belongs to Bruegel’s peasant pictures as a group and to his prints, not to this panel alone, and its own visibility was limited by its long life in an imperial collection. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Pieter Brueghel the Younger and the workshop copied and varied the subject for decades; Vinckboons, Brouwer, Teniers the Younger, van Ostade and Steen built the Flemish and Dutch peasant and tavern genre on the ground it opened; and Rubens, who owned Bruegels, answered with his Kermis.
Aldous Huxley · Literature
8.3 · Tier IV
The field is fiction in English of the 1930s, and beyond it the dystopian novel. The force: the book reorganised the possibilities of that form by showing that tyranny could be soft, consensual and pleasant, and this has been one of the form’s two poles since. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Huxley wrote to Orwell in 1949, on reading Nineteen Eighty-Four, that infant conditioning and narcotics would prove more efficient instruments of rule than the boot, and the two books have been read as a pair ever since; Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985) is built on that pairing; the debates of bioethics on cloning and enhancement use the book’s name as a term of art; and its title is a phrase of ordinary speech in many languages. Its reach outran its decade. What holds the axis there is that its force lies in conception, not in the form of the novel, which it left where it found it.
Aristophanes · Literature
8.3 · Tier IV
The field is the Greek literature of the fifth century BC, with Attic drama at its centre, and the European tradition of literary judgment that grew from it. The force is high. The play is the first sustained work of literary criticism in European literature, and it frames judgment as a contest between an older and a newer art, a moral and a technical standard: a reorganisation of what could be said about poetry, not an accent. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the opposition it fixed, Aeschylus grand and Euripides clever, decadent and corrosive, shaped the ancient lives of the poets, the Alexandrian view of tragedy and, two millennia on, Nietzsche’s account of Euripides as the death of tragedy; Plato’s and Aristotle’s arguments over what poetry does to citizens join a quarrel this play staged first; and its descendants in form run from Lucian’s dialogues of the dead to the quarrels of ancients and moderns. Its reach within comedy itself is smaller.
Ovid · Literature
8.3 · Tier IV
The field is Latin poetry of the Augustan age, and behind it Greek and Latin literature to that date. The intrinsic force is a new genre made at one stroke, the verse letter of a mythical or historical figure, and a new stance towards the inherited stories, told from the margin by those they used. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: wide and lasting. A school text through the Middle Ages, the book shaped the female complaint in medieval poetry, Chaucer’s Dido and his Legend of Good Women, Boccaccio’s Fiammetta, the troubadour and courtly epistle; it founded the heroical epistle of Drayton’s England’s Heroical Epistles, Pope’s Eloisa to Abelard and a long European line of héroïdes; and it lives again in modern retellings of myth from the women’s side. Held below the higher figures because much of the reach runs through a sub-genre and the classroom, and the Metamorphoses carries the larger share of Ovid’s redirection of the field.
Aghlabid builders · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
Standing since 836, so force and reach are scored together, in the field of the mosque of the Islamic West. The intrinsic force: the building fixed the Maghrebi congregational mosque, the hypostyle of aisles running to the qibla wall, the T-plan with its two domes, the heavy square minaret facing the hall across the court, the mihrab as a framed showpiece. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: within a generation a mosque at Tunis followed it closely; the T-plan became the norm of the western mosque; and the square tiered tower became the Maghrebi and Andalusian type, through the Almohad towers of the Koutoubia (8.2) and the Giralda (8.4, with its cathedral). What holds it: Córdoba (8.8), contemporaneous and grander, shares that reach, and the eastern Islamic world went its own way.
William Thornton, Benjamin Latrobe, Charles Bulfinch and Thomas U. Walter · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
Force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force is moderate: the building is a synthesis rather than a reorganisation of possibility, and its true inventions are local, Latrobe’s masonry vaults and American orders, which helped found a national classical architecture and a profession, and Walter’s dome, a large public dome in cast iron in its own decade. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: after 1866 the domed capitol with a central rotunda and balanced chambers became the type of the American legislative house; most state capitols of the next sixty years follow it, many by name; the domed government building travelled with American influence abroad, the Capitolio of Havana among the plainest instances; and the word capitol took this building’s form as its meaning in American use. The reach is long and still felt; the force behind it is assembled more than original.
Patti Smith · Music
8.3 · Tier IV
The field is the rock of the mid-1970s, and the contest is with the craft of arena and progressive rock and with the male singer’s persona. The intrinsic force is high: the record joined poetry to garage rock on equal terms, made a woman the possessed centre of the rite, and was one of the first albums from the circle around CBGB, ahead of the debuts of the Ramones and Television. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Michael Stipe, Morrissey, PJ Harvey and Kim Gordon are among the musicians who have named it formative, and the poet-singer of punk and post-punk descends from it more than from any other single record. The musical language did not move; punk’s sound was made elsewhere. It stands above Remain in Light at 8.5 and below Low at 9.1.
François Truffaut · Film
8.3 · Tier IV
The field is the cinema of the 1950s, so force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force is real: a first-time director with little money, real locations and a child actor made a personal film that stood with the best of its year, and a critic’s theory of the director as author was shown to be practicable. It is partly shared, since the New Wave’s force is spread across Breathless (9.3), Hiroshima mon amour and this film, and the formal break belongs more to the other two. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the prize at Cannes in 1959 made the New Wave public and exportable and opened French production to dozens of first features; the line runs through the Doinel cycle and Ken Loach’s Kes, and the closing freeze frame became one of the most imitated endings in film.
Thomas Carlyle · Literature
8.3 · Tier IV
The field is English prose of the nineteenth century, fiction and non-fiction together. The intrinsic force is high: a new kind of book, the philosophical fiction with a fictive source and an ironic editor, a new English prose, and the first and lasting map of the Victorian crisis of faith in three stations, No, Indifference and Yea. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Emerson arranged its American publication, and New England Transcendentalism took much of its language from it; Thoreau and Whitman read it; Dickens dedicated Hard Times to Carlyle; Ruskin called him master; the gospel of work became a Victorian commonplace. Held below the gate by a hair: part of that reach belongs to Carlyle’s whole work rather than this book, and its formal line, to the invented sources of Borges and Pale Fire, is delayed and indirect.
H. H. Richardson · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force is high: the church reorganised what an American public building of masonry could be, with mass, colour and the round arch in place of the Gothic and the classical, and the building as one heaped volume rather than an assembly of styled parts. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: in 1885 a poll of architects in the American Architect and Building News named it the finest building in the United States; the manner took its maker’s name and spread through the 1880s and 1890s to courthouses, libraries, churches, stations and city halls from New England to the West; and through Root and Sullivan, and through Sullivan to Wright, the lesson of mass ran on. The style fell within two decades to the classicism of the Chicago fair of 1893, and much of the deeper reach ran through Richardson’s later, plainer works.
The Who · Music
8.2 · Tier IV
The field is the rock album of the late 1960s and early 1970s. The intrinsic force is high: the record showed that the synthesiser could be a rhythmic engine inside hard rock rather than an effect, that a four-piece at full weight could be set against a sequenced pattern without losing either, and it set a model of the large, heavy, melodic rock album as an arena form, recorded with a clarity that became a standard of the hard-rock sound. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the arena rock of the decade and later rock that took in the synthesiser drew on it; the two bookend songs became fixtures of broadcast, stadiums and television; punk defined itself partly against the grandeur it stood for. The songs stayed songs, and much of the reach is a sound and two anthems rather than a method. It stands level with Sticky Fingers, of the same year, at 8.7: the force here is greater than that record claims for itself, and the reach narrower than its template riff, studio and repertoire. It stands below Led Zeppelin IV, at 9.4, whose reach as a primary source for the hard rock and heavy metal that followed is wider.
Steven Spielberg · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
Field: the cinema of the 1970s, so force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force is a synthesis more than a reorganisation of possibility: the film brought Hitchcock’s grammar of suspense, the withheld threat and the killer’s point of view, to a creature picture at full craft, and its sources are plain. The reach is as wide as any film’s of its decade, and it is largely industrial and generic: what it redirected was how Hollywood is run, more than what film can do, which is why the figure stops short of the films that changed the art itself. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the wide release sold by a national television campaign, which the industry took as its model; the summer blockbuster as a season and a system; the creature and survival film after it, Alien (1979) among them; and the two-note motif, become the common sign of approaching danger.
Jasper Johns · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
Published, and on view since 1958, so force and reach are scored together, in the field of New York painting in the middle 1950s. Intrinsic force: a reorganisation of what a painting could be, an object that is also a common sign, painted with all the care of the gesture and none of its confession, and joined to real objects taken from a body. The discount: the first move belongs to Flag, and some of the force is shared with Target with Plaster Casts of the same year. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Johns’s first one-person show, at Leo Castelli’s gallery in New York in 1958, changed the conversation of New York art in a season; Pop took the given sign, Minimal and Conceptual art took the object that is its own image, and Stella’s black paintings are on record as a response to Johns’s flags. How much of that reach is owed to this work rather than to the campaign cannot be fixed.
Louis Sullivan and Dankmar Adler · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
The field is the American tall building of the 1890s. The intrinsic force is a real reorganisation of possibility: the tall frame building given a form of its own, a single vertical unit with a base and a termination, its ornament placed where the composition needs it rather than everywhere. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the tripartite tall building, base, shaft and capital, governed American practice for forty years, from the Guaranty Building in Buffalo, which refined it, through the Chicago and New York towers of the 1900s and 1910s, and the vertical expression of the frame runs on into the Gothic and setback skyscrapers. Discounted for the shares owed to the Guaranty and to Sullivan’s essay of 1896, for parallel work in Chicago, and for the International Style, which cut off his ornament within a generation.
William Gibson · Literature
8.1 · Tier IV
The field is science fiction and the American novel of the 1980s. The force is high within the genre: the book reorganised what science fiction could take as its matter, information, the network, the corporation and the modified body, and its manner, street level, saturated and unexplained, and it named the movement that followed. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the cyberpunk movement, consolidated in Bruce Sterling’s anthology Mirrorshades (1986); Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash (1992); the words “cyberspace” and “the matrix” carried into common use and into the Wachowskis’ film The Matrix (1999); and a long line of later fiction, film and games. Held below the summit band because its pressure on the literary novel outside its genre was smaller and less direct than on popular culture, and much of its reach is a vocabulary and a look rather than a method.
Tarsila do Amaral · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
The field is Brazilian and Latin American modern art of the late 1920s. The intrinsic force is a real reorganisation of possibility: an image that made the cannibal the founding figure of a national modernism and gave the programme of devouring the European avant garde a body before it had a text. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the painting prompted Oswald de Andrade’s Manifesto Antropófago of 1928, which organised a movement; the painter’s own Antropofagia of 1929 followed from it; the idea redirected Brazilian culture again in the 1960s through Hélio Oiticica, Lygia Clark’s generation, Caetano Veloso and Tropicália, and in the 1998 Bienal. The discount: much of this runs through a text, and outside Latin America it redirected little in painting. In its field, little stands above it.
Claude Monet · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
Published, so intrinsic force and achieved reach are scored together. Intrinsic force: the claim that a rapid notation of light, shown as finished, is a picture, which reorganised what exhibition painting could be; real but not singular, since the handling was shared by a group and had precedents, Monet’s own among them. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the canvas gave the movement its name, the movement redirected painting in France and beyond for two generations, and the canvas is the emblem of that turn in every history of it. The discount: the redirection was done by the group’s work as a whole, and by Monet’s later series more than by this canvas, which painters did not take as a model as they took La Grenouillère or the Rouen façades. Its reach runs through the word, and is discounted, not refused.
Bram Stoker · Literature
8.1 · Tier IV
The field is fiction in English of the 1890s and, beyond it, the literature of the supernatural. The intrinsic force is real and bounded: the book did not reorganise the novel; it consolidated a form and fixed a figure, joining the vampire tale, the invasion story and the documentary novel into a pattern of lasting use. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: among the widest of any novel of its decade, and particular. Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922), an unauthorised adaptation suppressed after Florence Stoker’s suit; the Deane and Balderston play and Universal’s film of 1931; Hammer’s Dracula (1958); Stephen King’s ’Salem’s Lot (1975), which King has said is built on it; Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire (1976); Kostova’s The Historian (2005); and the later fiction of the vampire, in which the book’s rules are the grammar. The reach exceeds the force, and the force holds it below nine.
Walter Gropius and Adolf Meyer · Architecture
7.8 · Tier III
The field is German and European building of the early twentieth century, and its own tradition, the industrial building. The intrinsic force is strong: the open glass corner and the wall as skin reorganised what a load-bearing building could look like, in 1911, years before the frame and the curtain wall were common, and made the factory a field for architecture’s first claims. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: large and documented. Gropius carried the open glazed corner to the model factory at the Werkbund exhibition in Cologne (1914) and to the workshop wing of the Bauhaus at Dessau (1925 to 1926), and through the Bauhaus and his later teaching the curtain wall and the dissolved corner entered the common language of the century. Discounted because part of the reach runs through historiography, and part of the curtain wall’s lineage through other channels, American and Dutch industrial building, Behrens, Mies.
Helen Frankenthaler · Visual art
7.8 · Tier III
The field is American abstract painting of the early 1950s. The intrinsic force is a real reorganisation of possibility: the stain made a new kind of painting, colour as the structure, image and ground as one, the open field without gesture as the dominant sign. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland, brought to the studio by Greenberg in April 1953, took the method from this canvas, and Louis’s Veils and Unfurleds and Noland’s circles and chevrons are its direct descendants; with them came the Washington Color School and the painting Greenberg gathered as Post-Painterly Abstraction in 1964; and the painter’s own sixty years of staining. Discounted because that programme later lost authority, and because Rothko and Newman reached the colour field by other routes.
William Blake · Literature
9.0 · Tier V
The field is English poetry of the late eighteenth century. The intrinsic force is very high: the book made the short lyric carry social prophecy without leaving the child’s or the nurse’s voice; it made the paired book a form; and it made the illuminated book, words and image as one object made by one hand. Delayed influence is credited and discounted. In its own years the book moved nothing: the copies were few, the readers fewer, and the redirection of English poetry in that decade came from Lyrical Ballads (1798), not from Blake. Force near the top, reach late. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: after Gilchrist’s Life of 1863, the Pre-Raphaelites, Swinburne and Yeats; in the twentieth century Allen Ginsberg; the artist’s book, which descends from the illuminated one; and The Tyger and London, now among the most anthologised poems in English.
Ludwig van Beethoven · Music
9.0 · Tier V
The force is real: the work made the Mass a concert drama of belief, set the whole Ordinary as one argument, and showed that archaism could serve the most advanced music of its age. The field is sacred music for chorus and orchestra in the 1820s. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the reach is real, and narrower than the force. The concert mass and requiem of the century stand in its line, Liszt’s Gran Mass, Bruckner’s F minor Mass, Brahms’s German Requiem as sacred music for the concert hall, Verdi’s Requiem with its war of voice and orchestra, and its modal writing and older counterpoint fed the historicist turn in church music. But it was revered more than imitated, few took its road directly, and the line from Haydn’s late masses would have run on without it.
Anonymous, under King Lalibela · Architecture
8.9 · Tier IV
Force and reach are scored together, in the field of Ethiopian and north-east African Christian building. The intrinsic force is real: the complex constitutes the rock-hewn church in its most complete form, the monolith released and multiplied into a sacred quarter below ground, a reorganisation of what a church could be made of and how it is approached. Reach is narrower than force. It did not redirect building beyond Ethiopia, and within it the main line of church building turned afterwards to the round church and later to the Gondarine manner, so the tradition it crowned did not long continue at its scale. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: later monoliths in Lasta answer it; and Lalibela became the second holy city of Ethiopian Christianity, the site of its greatest pilgrimage and an emblem of the nation.
Virginia Woolf · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
The field is the English novel of the twentieth century and, through it, modernist prose fiction in Europe and America. The intrinsic force is high: the book proves that a novel can be built from soliloquy and lyric interlude alone and still hold six lives and their time, a reorganisation of what the form allows. What holds it below the top is the distance between that force and its descent. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the book became the type of the poetic novel and of the polyphonic novel of voices, it stands behind later books that lay many interior voices side by side, and it is taught as the extreme term of English modernism; but its direct line of heirs is thin beside Mrs Dalloway or Ulysses, and later novelists more often admired it than built on it.
Herman Melville · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
The field is American fiction, and with it the fiction of law and judgment. The force is a reorganisation of what a short narrative could argue: the trial as moral philosophy, positive law set against natural justice, and neither allowed to win. The reach was delayed thirty-three years by its maker’s death, and delayed influence is credited and discounted. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Benjamin Britten’s opera (Covent Garden, 1951, libretto by E. M. Forster and Eric Crozier); a Broadway play by Coxe and Chapman (1951); Peter Ustinov’s film (1962); Claire Denis’s Beau Travail (1999); and a central place in the study of law and literature, from Robert Cover’s Justice Accused (1975) on. Held near the bar because its pressure on later fiction, as distinct from opera, film and jurisprudence, is less documented.
Thomas Mann · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
The field is the German novel and the European novel of the artist. The intrinsic force is high: the book reorganised what the novel of the artist could carry, from a life to a civilisation, and made the description of imaginary art a full-scale fictional method. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Adorno’s Philosophie der neuen Musik (1949) appeared beside it as a twin work; the book’s thesis entered postwar German argument over the culture that preceded the catastrophe; Schoenberg’s dispute with Mann made the method itself public; and later music novels write in its line, most openly Richard Powers’s Orfeo (2014), whose composer and whose cultural indictment answer it. What holds it here, the second lowest of the twelve: the reach is real but narrower than the force. The postwar German novel by and large went another way, and Grass, Böll and Johnson wrote from below, not through genius.
Pieter Bruegel the Elder · Visual art
8.9 · Tier IV
Field: Netherlandish painting of the 1560s, Antwerp above all. Force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force is the reorganisation of one subject and a contribution to another: the biblical narrative told through the world as it is worked, and the architectural fantasy fused with the world landscape. That is real, and it is not a reorganisation of what painting could be. The discount: the panel spent most of its life in imperial keeping, and Bruegel’s larger reach in painting belongs to the peasant scenes and the Months, not to this panel. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the round, Roman, mountain-sized tower became the type of the subject, and it has stood for Babel since, in illustration, cinema and posters.
Johannes Brahms · Music
8.9 · Tier IV
The work reorganised what a requiem could be: a concert work of consolation on words the composer chose, addressed to the living, free of the liturgy and of dogma, carrying a composer’s largest statement without the Mass. Its reach is wide in standing and diffuse in descent; it did not redirect its field as Beethoven’s Ninth redirected the symphony. Requiems on chosen vernacular words, or without the Dies irae, followed in the next century, Delius’s, Hindemith’s on Whitman and Britten’s War Requiem among them, though their debts to this work alone are contested. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the concert requiem of chosen consolation became a form, and this work entered the repertory of choral societies everywhere.
T. S. Eliot · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
The field is poetry in English in the twentieth century. The intrinsic force is plain: the poem showed that a modernist could write a long philosophical and religious poem without narrative and without fragment, that abstraction and plain statement could stand in verse beside the most intense lyric, and it made the meditative sequence in movements available to English poetry again. The reach is narrower than the force: the main line of poetry after 1945, in Britain and still more in America, moved away from Eliot’s late manner rather than through it, and much of the influence is on readers rather than on the form of later poems. The Waste Land moved the field more; this poem consolidated, and was resisted. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it is among the most quoted poems of the century in English, its closing lines have passed into public and liturgical use, and later meditative and religious poets wrote under it.
Ming, under the Yongle Emperor · Architecture
8.9 · Tier IV
Standing for six centuries, so force and reach are scored together, in the palace’s own tradition and region, Chinese and East Asian palace and official building. The intrinsic force is that of the definitive and surviving statement of the Chinese imperial palace; but the reorganisation it represents was largely made in the plans it followed, and the palace at Nanjing is lost rather than surpassed in idea. Held below the top because the type it perfected ended with the empire in 1912. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the Qing took the palace over whole rather than build anew, and governed from it for 268 years; its practice stands behind the official building codes of the Qing; and in the twentieth century it became the reference for the history of Chinese architecture and for a national style.
Euripides · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
The field is Attic tragedy of the fifth century and the drama of Europe that inherited it. The force is real: the play made the sufferings of the defeated, and of women in war, a full tragic subject without a hero’s action, and showed that tragedy could be built from lament and endurance alone. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: in antiquity Seneca’s Troades took the material to Rome and through it to the Renaissance stage; the great reach is delayed, in the twentieth century, where the play became the theatre’s model for answering war, in Franz Werfel’s version (1915), Gilbert Murray’s translation staged against the First World War, Sartre’s Les Troyennes (1965), Cacoyannis’s film (1971) and a long run since. Delayed reach is credited and discounted, and Medea and the Bacchae shaped Euripides’ reception more.
Anonymous · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
The field is Old English poetry and the Germanic heroic tradition, from the eighth century to the eleventh. The force is high: the longest and most ambitious poem in the language before the Conquest, the one full heroic epic in the Germanic vernaculars of its age, and a reorganisation of the heroic lay into a poem of history and judgment. Reach in its own field is near nothing: nothing shows the poem shaping anything for some eight centuries. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: delayed and discounted, it founded Old English studies, shaped the idea of an English epic beginning, and through Tolkien gave modern fantasy its dragon on the hoard, the cup stolen from the sleeping dragon passing into The Hobbit; Gardner’s Grendel (1971) and Heaney’s translation (1999) carried it further.
Giovanni Bellini · Visual art
8.8 · Tier IV
The field is Venetian painting of the later fifteenth century. The intrinsic force is high: the panel reorganizes what a devotional image may be. The saint and the landscape are of equal weight, the miracle is light, and the natural world is itself a bearer of sacred meaning. The discount is reach, real but diffuse: much of the Venetian development that followed ran through the painter’s practice as a whole and his workshop rather than through this panel as a named model, and the panel was long in private hands rather than in public view. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it stands at the start of the Venetian line in which landscape and light carry meaning, and it is a touchstone for the study of landscape in Renaissance painting.
Thomas Mann · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
The field is German prose fiction of the early twentieth century, beside Kafka, Rilke’s Malte and Musil. The intrinsic force: the book showed that a novella could carry Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy and Plato’s Phaedrus as working structure, and it fixed the modern type of the artist undone by beauty. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Visconti’s film (1971) and Britten’s last opera (1973) were both made from it; Aschenbach passed into the common vocabulary of writing about art and eros; and Mann’s own The Magic Mountain was conceived in 1912 as its comic counterpart, so that the major novel grew from it. The case against: it did not reorganise the form. Kafka redirected the shorter fiction of the century; Mann’s novella confirmed a high manner rather than opening a new one, and its influence on writers is diffuse and hard to name book by book.
Gustave Flaubert · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
The field is French prose fiction of the nineteenth century, and the short story in Europe. The force: the book showed that the short tale could carry the full weight of the impersonal art, that a servant’s life could be written with the gravity given to a saint’s, and that three historical registers could be held by one prose; it set a standard for the story as a made object. Held where it is because the reorganising force in Flaubert’s field was Madame Bovary, and this book perfects more than it redirects. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Maupassant, Flaubert’s pupil, worked in its light; Gertrude Stein’s Three Lives (1909) was conceived from “Un cœur simple”; Wilde’s Salomé (1891) drew on “Hérodias” among other sources; and the line of the modern story through Joyce’s Dubliners is commonly traced to Flaubert’s method, the book one source among several.
William Gaddis · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
The field is the novel of the 1970s. The force is high: the book is a real reorganisation of what the novel of money and institutions could be, a social novel with the narrator removed and the economy rendered as its own noise; with Gravity’s Rainbow it defined the American novel of systems. The force carries the axis over the bar; what holds it near the bar is reach. Its form, the novel told wholly in unattributed dialogue, was not taken up as a method, and the field’s redirection in that decade is credited more to Pynchon and to other novelists, in America and in Europe, than to this book. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the National Book Award for Fiction in 1976; its standing among novelists as a model of the corporate and financial novel; and its subject, the economy of paper, become one of the central subjects of American fiction in the decades after it.
Isaac Babel · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
The intrinsic force is high. The book reorganised what a short story about war could hold: lyric, atrocity and comedy in two pages, with the narrator’s moral failure as the subject. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: in Russian the field was the Soviet prose of the 1920s, and Babel’s line there was cut by his death and by the withdrawal of his books for nearly two decades, while Soviet prose after 1934 went the other way. Outside Russia the reach is wider and particular; Trilling’s introduction of 1955 set the book at the centre of an American reading of the Jewish writer among men of violence. Reach is strongest in the short story and narrower beyond it, and the broken Russian line is charged against it.
Don DeLillo · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
The field is American fiction at the end of the century. The force is high: the book showed that the encyclopedic systems novel could be joined to the realist novel of family and neighbourhood and carried as elegy, and that the history of half a century could be told backward through an object; it is the fullest attempt of its decade at the novel of the nation. The force carries the axis over the bar; what holds it near the bar is that the reach is a standing more than a redirection: no school or practice can be shown to have turned on it, as the later literary Western turned on Blood Meridian, and White Noise remains the more widely taught statement of DeLillo’s turn. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: a finalist for the National Book Award for 1997; a place among the runners-up in the New York Times Book Review’s survey of 2006 of the best American fiction of the previous twenty-five years; the prologue’s standing as one of the most read and taught pieces of American fiction of the 1990s; and its part in the arguments about the large social novel that followed.
Machado de Assis · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
The field is the literature of the Portuguese language and the novel of the nineteenth century. Intrinsic force is high, about 9.0: a real reorganisation of what the realist novel could do, made in 1880, before the modernists it seems to anticipate, by subordinating plot to a narrating consciousness that is the book’s subject and its suspect. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: in Brazil decisive, the book dividing Machado’s career and Brazilian fiction in two, the national novel after it unthinkable without it, and in Portuguese generally at the head of its century beside Eça; outside the language real but delayed and largely indirect, from Grossman’s translation of 1952 to two new English translations in 2020. Reach about 8.2. It did not redirect the European novel.
Mimar Sinan · Architecture
8.8 · Tier IV
Force and reach are scored together, in the field the building entered: Ottoman and Islamic building of the sixteenth century and after. The intrinsic force is high: the definitive statement of the Ottoman imperial mosque as the summit of a charitable foundation, the dome cascade, the four-minaret court and the terraced precinct fixed in one complete image at the capital. The reach is narrower than the fame. The plan was not the one successors followed: the Sultan Ahmed Mosque and the Yeni Cami took the Şehzade’s four semidomes, and the decisive next step was Sinan’s own Selimiye; outside Ottoman lands it redirected little. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the silhouette became the emblem of the classical style and the image of an Ottoman imperial mosque, answered in Sinan’s later work, in imperial mosques of the next century and in revival mosques of the twentieth and twenty-first.
Thomas Mann · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
The field is the German novel of its century and, through it, the European. The intrinsic force is large: the book gave the German language a social novel of European rank, which German realism, Fontane apart, had not quite produced, and it made the family chronicle a novel of ideas without leaving the chronicle. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it made Mann, and the Nobel committee of 1929 named it as the reason for his prize; it became the type of the generational novel of decline, the book later family sagas are measured against; and its leitmotif method passed into Mann’s later work, where the larger reorganisation was made. What holds it here: its force is consummation more than redirection. It completed the nineteenth century family novel rather than changing how novels are made, and the claims of direct descent in other literatures are comparison, not proved acknowledgement.
Anonymous · Architecture
8.8 · Tier IV
In use since its first stage, so force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force is a real reorganisation of what Romanesque structure could do: rib vaults over every span, pointed transverse arches and concealed bracing assemble, by 1133, most of the structural means of the Gothic. The structural lesson was not taken: the great English churches of the next generation kept timber roofs, and the Gothic came to England from France. A descent to the Île-de-France is unproven; delayed influence is credited and discounted. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: in its own field, Anglo-Norman and northern British Romanesque, the debt usually traced is of ornament and pier type, incised cylinders and chevron of its kind in Dunfermline’s nave and other northern churches.
Terrence Malick · Film
8.8 · Tier IV
Released in 2011, so force and reach are scored together. The film showed that a picture with stars and studio distribution could hold the cosmos and a single family in one structure, with prayer for narration, and it fixed a grammar of roving wide-angle camera, natural light, broken scenes and whispered voice-over. Part of that manner was its maker’s already, from The Thin Red Line. What holds the figure here is time: fifteen years cannot yet show how much of the reach will pass as a style. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Lubezki carried the manner into Gravity (2013), Birdman (2014) and The Revenant (2015), winning three consecutive Academy Awards for cinematography; the look and the whisper are reported to have passed into advertising and music video, often as surface; and a cosmic frame for domestic grief became available to later films, David Lowery’s A Ghost Story (2017) among them.
Ingmar Bergman · Film
8.8 · Tier IV
Released in 1982, so force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force is high within its field: the film made the case that the art film could hold the scale and warmth of the nineteenth-century novel without loss of seriousness, and it joined the television serial and the cinema feature in one work of an auteur, after Fassbinder’s Berlin Alexanderplatz (1980). Forty-four years have let the reach show, and with the force it clears the bar. What holds it there and not higher is that it crowned a career more than it redirected a medium; the films that changed what cinema could do came earlier, Bergman’s among them. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the film became the reference for the European family-gathering film, with Arnaud Desplechin’s Un conte de Noël (2008) its plainest descendant, and it stands behind the later idea of a director’s long version for television.
William Blake · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
The field is English poetry of 1800 to 1830 and the Romantic long poem, The Prelude, Prometheus Unbound and the Hyperion poems among it, all wrestling Milton. The intrinsic force is high: the poem makes the struggle with the precursor the subject of the epic itself, and makes the illuminated book a form of epic, a reorganisation of what a long poem could be about and how it could be made. In its own century it moved almost no one: four copies, and no contemporary poet learned from it. Delayed influence is credited and discounted. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: through Gilchrist and the Ellis and Yeats edition to Yeats’s own system; through Frye to a whole criticism; through Bloom to a theory of poetic influence for which this poem is the model. The Preface, set by Parry in 1916, became an English national hymn, but that is four quatrains, not the poem.
Mikhail Bulgakov · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
The field is Russian literature of its decade, and the book entered it in 1966 and 1967 though it was made in the 1930s; delayed influence is credited and discounted. The force: a reorganisation of what the Russian novel could do after socialist realism, restoring the fantastic, the metaphysical, the comic devil and the religious subject to a literature that had been forbidden them, and showing that satire, scripture and romance could be one form. Discounted for the delay: the field of the 1930s never felt it, and its reach in the West has been as a classic more than as a model. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: in Russia it became one of the most loved novels of the century, its phrases proverbs, and later Russian fiction of the fantastic and the grotesque runs through it; abroad it entered the international novel.
Andrea Mantegna · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
The field is Italian painting of the later fifteenth century, with the painter’s circle in Padua and Mantua. The intrinsic force is high: the picture makes the viewer’s bodily position the subject of a devotional image, and it fixes a type, the supine body foreshortened from the feet, that painting did not have before as a finished image. The discount is for delay: the canvas’s reach in its own decade was small, and Mantegna’s wider influence ran through his engravings, his work at Mantua and his antique manner rather than through this picture. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Annibale Carracci’s Dead Christ answers it directly; Rembrandt’s Anatomy Lesson of Dr Jan Deijman (1656, a fragment) takes up its foreshortened corpse; Pasolini’s Mamma Roma (1962) ends on a shot composed after it; and the photographs of Che Guevara’s body (1967) have been read against it, by John Berger among others.
Pierre Choderlos de Laclos · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
The field is the French novel of the eighteenth century and, through it, the European novel. The force: the book closed the age of the novel in letters by showing everything the form could do and turning it against its own premise, and it set a measure for the novel of strategic psychology, in which every gesture is calculated and observed. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Stendhal read it closely; Baudelaire’s notes; Gide and Malraux in the twentieth century; Heiner Müller’s Quartett (1980); Christopher Hampton’s play (1985), with Stephen Frears’s Dangerous Liaisons (1988) after it, Miloš Forman’s Valmont (1989), and Roger Vadim’s modern version (1959) before. Charged: the reach was delayed and muffled by the book’s condemnation through much of the nineteenth century, and it ended a form rather than opening one.
Thomas Hardy · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
The field is the English novel of the late nineteenth century. The force: the book claimed for a farm labourer’s daughter, sexually used and socially condemned, the full height of tragedy, set her inside an indifferent cosmos instead of a moral providence, and took the Victorian novel’s sexual reticence as an object of attack rather than a condition of writing. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: with Jude the Obscure (1895) it stands at the hinge where the Victorian novel gives way to the modern; Lawrence’s novels of sexuality and the land descend from it, by his own long engagement; the twentieth century’s tragic regional novel and novel of the wronged woman take it as their type. How far its controversy loosened magazine and library censorship is not settled. Held below the top because its force deepens realism rather than reorganising the form.
Hugo van der Goes · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
The field is Netherlandish and Florentine painting of the 1470s and 1480s. The intrinsic force is a real reorganisation: a Netherlandish altarpiece at monumental scale, its humble figures given the gravity of the principal ones and its still life the weight of a sacrament. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: specific, early, and documented in the paintings. The triptych reached Florence in 1483, and Domenico Ghirlandaio’s Adoration of the Shepherds for the Sassetti Chapel in Santa Trinita, of 1485, answers it with shepherds drawn from Hugo’s; the shepherd type and the Flemish still life enter Florentine painting in the years after. In the Netherlands the reach is harder to name, since the work left the region on completion. Real and specific, but concentrated in one city and one generation.
Franz Kafka · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
The field is German-language prose of its century. The force is real: the story reorganised the artist’s parable for that century, making the artist’s isolation a matter of incapacity rather than election and the audience a market that cannot verify what it buys. It is the clearest single statement of a theme that runs through late Kafka, in the trapeze artist of “First Sorrow” and the singer Josefine. The discount is that its reach is part of Kafka’s reach as a whole: the larger redirection belongs to The Metamorphosis, The Trial and The Castle, and the story deepened a mode they founded. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it is among the most anthologised and taught stories in any language, a stock figure in writing on the artist and on asceticism, and a source named by writers from Auster to the critics of performance art, where the fasting body exhibited for a public became a practice.
Flannery O'Connor · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
The field is American short fiction of the mid twentieth century. The intrinsic force is high. The book showed that the grotesque comic story could carry metaphysical and religious weight without irony at its expense, and that a writer could make violence sacramental in a secular literary culture; that changed what the Southern story, and the American story, could be about. Where Hemingway’s In Our Time (8.6 on this desk) had remade the prose of the American story, this book remade its matter. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the reach is wide and lasting, the title story and “Good Country People” fixtures of anthologies and of teaching, and O’Connor’s example running on through later Southern writing. What holds the axis is that the reach is strongest in American letters and in English; outside them her standing is real, but narrower.
Simone Martini · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
The field is Italian painting of the 1330s. The intrinsic force is high: the fullest statement of Sienese Gothic line set against Giotto’s mass, a demonstration that sacred narrative could be carried by contour, gold and psychological tension rather than by weight and space. The discount is real: much of the reach is the painter’s whole art and the Sienese school’s rather than this panel’s alone, and the line that won the next century in Florence was Giotto’s, then Masaccio’s, not this. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Simone’s own move to Avignon carried his manner north; the line and gold of the International Gothic run from this current, and the panel is counted its chief Italian source among panels; its reach as a prototype for later Annunciations is widely held, though not traced here. One strong current redirected, not the art’s main course.
Samuel Beckett · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
The field is the French novel of the mid twentieth century and, through Beckett’s English, the novel in English after modernism. The intrinsic force is high: with its two neighbours the book reorganised what a novel could be, a voice in a room with the world receding, plot reduced to the effort to make one, the narrator’s authority dissolved into his inventions. Held at the bar and a little above it because the reach belongs chiefly to the trilogy and to Godot, and Molloy and L’Innommable are cited as the decisive books more often than this one; its share of the redirection is real, but a share. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the new novel claimed Beckett as forerunner; the line runs through Bernhard, Coetzee and later European prose of the single voice; Beckett received the Nobel Prize in 1969; and the trilogy is read and taught across languages.
Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
The field is the comic in English in the late twentieth century, and beyond it the historical novel and the literature of London. The intrinsic force is real: the book showed that a comic could be a work of historical research and speculation at the length of a novel, with its sources open, and that the medium’s grid could carry a theory of time; it is one of the two or three works that made the term graphic novel mean more than a label for the shelf. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it is taught and cited as one of the major works of its form; it shaped the documentary and historical graphic novel that followed, and the London writing that took Moore’s and Sinclair’s map of the city as given; it was widely translated and loosely filmed in 2001. Held below the top because its reach lies mostly within comics and London writing, and within comics the redirection of the form is shared with Maus and with Watchmen.
Andrei Tarkovsky · Film
8.7 · Tier IV
The field is the cinema of the 1960s. Intrinsic force: the film reorganised what the historical film could be, a national epic made out of a refusal of epic, with a hero who watches and duration and weather as content. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: delayed by the suppression, entering the West from 1969 and the Soviet Union from 1971, it ran wide within art cinema, to the medieval mud of Aleksei German’s Hard to Be a God (2013), the long takes of Béla Tarr and Aleksandr Sokurov, Lars von Trier’s dedication of Antichrist (2009) to Tarkovsky, and slow cinema since. Discounted: the delay, and the share belonging to Mirror, Stalker and the director’s name.
U2 · Music
8.7 · Tier IV
The force is real: the record showed that an arena band could take electronic texture, dance rhythm and irony into its sound and make them carry sincerity, a reorganisation of what such a band could do. It reorganised the materials less; they came from Berlin, Manchester and the industrial underground. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the reinvention record by an established act became a type, with this album as the model most often invoked; its sound and mode passed into Zooropa (1993), Pop (1997) and the Zoo TV staging, and on into the arena rock of the next two decades.
Aeschylus · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
The field was Attic tragedy in its first generation and the poetry of the Persian Wars: Simonides’ epigrams and elegies, Phrynichus’ two plays. The force is real: the play makes the defeated enemy the subject of tragedy and makes history bear the weight of myth. That it is the first tragedy to survive whole is a fact of transmission, weighed under The Imperishable, not of pressure. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: within tragedy historical drama did not follow, and the myth play won; but the play’s image of Asia, luxurious, lamenting and despotic, against free Greece shaped Greek and then European thought on the East, from Timotheus’ Persians to the eighteenth century, and Shelley, in the preface to Hellas (1822), named it his model. Said took it as a source of the orientalist tradition. The reach is wide but partly unwilled, and much of it is the reach of a prejudice; that holds the axis off the top.
Anonymous · Architecture
8.7 · Tier IV
Force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force is high: Bourges is a real reorganisation of the Gothic church, a second answer to the High Gothic cathedral set against Chartres, with unified space, a stepped section and a light structure. Its reach is real but narrower. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: its section and spatial idea were taken up in the choir of Le Mans, from 1217, at Coutances, and in Spain at Toledo, begun in 1226, and in parts at Burgos. But the main line of French and European Gothic followed Chartres and Reims, and the type of Bourges remained a family, not the norm. In its field it is the great alternative that did not prevail.
Raphael · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
The work is public, so force and reach are scored together, in the field of Italian painting of the second decade of the sixteenth century and the altarpiece after it. The intrinsic force is a real reorganisation of the altarpiece, from a sacred interior to a vision coming toward the worshipper, achieved with the fewest means. The discount: for about two centuries it hung in a provincial monastic church and reached painting chiefly through copies and prints, and the visionary altarpiece of the Baroque had other sources too. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: once in Dresden it became the measure of the Madonna for German and Russian taste through the nineteenth century, shaped the Nazarenes’ idea of Raphael and the Romantic doctrine of the inspired painter, and gave popular imagery its two putti, reproduced without end. Much of that last is fame, which is presence. Wide reach in taste and thought; narrower redirection of the art.
Sandro Botticelli · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
On view in some form since the fifteenth century, so force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force: the revival of the ancient gods as the subject of large painting, given the seriousness of sacred art, and a linear style that set Florentine grace against the coming High Renaissance of mass and space, a real reorganisation of possibility. Reach in its own decade was modest: the panel hung in a Medici house and villa, seen by few, the High Renaissance followed Leonardo’s modelling rather than this line, and Botticelli fell out of fashion for three centuries. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the delayed reach, credited and discounted, through Ruskin and Pater, the Pre-Raphaelites and Burne-Jones, and Warburg’s iconology.
Gian Lorenzo Bernini · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
The field is Roman sculpture of the 1620s, and force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force is a reorganisation of what marble could narrate: the climax of a story in the instant of change, the illusion of different matter in one stone, the viewer’s movement made the unfolding of the event. With the Proserpina and the David, it set the terms of the Roman Baroque in sculpture. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Bernini’s later works and his large shop carried its lessons to Rome’s churches and through his followers to Europe; the transformation of matter in marble became a Baroque and Rococo virtuoso tradition; Canova’s mythological groups answer it. Much of that reach runs through Bernini’s whole art rather than this group by name, and the classical reaction of Duquesnoy and Algardi, then of the eighteenth century, contested it.
Édouard Manet · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
Published and shown, so force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force: the canvas reorganised what a mirror in a picture can do, from a device of completion to a device of contradiction, and it set modern commercial leisure and the person who serves it at the scale of history painting. The reach is real and narrower than the force. The move to the modern subject and frontal address belongs to Manet’s work of the 1860s, and the redirection of painting in the 1880s and after runs through Cézanne, Seurat and those who followed them more than through this canvas. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the double space of the mirror runs on into later picture-making about the viewer’s position; Jeff Wall’s Picture for Women of 1979 answers it directly; and through T. J. Clark it stands as a founding text of the social history of art.
Pieter Bruegel the Elder · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
Force and reach are scored together, and the force stands above the reach. The force: with its sister panels the painting reorganised what a landscape could be in Netherlandish painting, a secular season at panel scale, genre and landscape one subject under one atmosphere. The discount: the panel was in Habsburg hands by the end of the century, so the Dutch winter landscape of Avercamp and van der Neer descends mainly through Bruegel’s other winter pictures, the prints after his designs and his family workshop’s copies, not through this one. Delayed influence is credited and discounted. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: late and the panel’s own, the type of the winter picture in the twentieth century, this composition quoted by William Carlos Williams in Pictures from Brueghel (1962) and by Tarkovsky in Solaris (1972).
Nasrid, under Yusuf I and Muhammad V · Architecture
8.7 · Tier IV
Force and reach are scored together, in the building’s own tradition and region: Islamic and Andalusian building in Iberia and the Maghreb. The intrinsic force is a reorganisation of the western Islamic palace: a court of slender columns with pavilions thrust in, the muqarnas become a whole dome, a building that speaks room by room. It is a culmination more than a refounding; the paradise court, the pool axis and the throne hall are inherited, and Ottoman, Persian and Mughal building went their own ways. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Pedro I’s Mudéjar palace in the Alcázar of Seville, begun in 1364, answers it; after 1492 its idiom passed into Saadian building at Fez and Marrakech; beyond the region came Irving, Jones, the Moorish revival and Escher.
Anton Bruckner · Music
8.7 · Tier IV
The work fixed the symphony as a cathedral of time: blocks of sound set in terraces over some eighty minutes, ending in a cyclic apotheosis. It showed that the symphony after Beethoven could take Wagner’s orchestra and harmony without Wagner’s drama. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the reach is real and largely Austro-German. Mahler and Franz Schmidt worked in the space Bruckner’s late symphonies opened, and Hugo Wolf championed them. Much of the reach belongs to the late symphonies as a group, and the Eighth’s share is not separable from that of the Seventh and the Ninth, though as the largest and most complete statement it carries more than either. The field it entered, Brahms’s Vienna, did not follow it.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart · Music
8.7 · Tier IV
The work reorganised the weight of the symphony, putting its argument at the end, and showed that strict counterpoint could be a symphonic climax rather than an archaism. That is the intrinsic force, and it is high. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the line is real and is credited as a line, through Beethoven’s weighted finales and fugal finales to the finale-symphony of the nineteenth century, and through the work’s place in teaching the classical style. It is discounted because the reach is general, not documented as a redirection: the symphony after 1800 was shaped above all by Haydn’s London symphonies and by Beethoven, and much of this work’s reach runs through Beethoven. The field is the Viennese symphony of the 1780s.
Ivan Goncharov · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
The field is the Russian novel of the nineteenth century, the richest field of its century. The force is a real reorganisation of what a Russian novel could make of the gentry hero: the full portrait of the type the superfluous-man tradition had sketched, and the proof that a book could hold its reader with a hero who does nothing. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: within its language and century large and specific, Dobrolyubov’s essay making the book a public argument on the eve of the Emancipation and its word entering the language. Abroad it is read and admired, and its hero is a reference, but it did not redirect the European novel. A fixture of its field, not a turning point of the order of Dead Souls.
Molière · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
The field is European drama of the seventeenth century, and French comedy first within it. The force: the play made the comedy of manners capable of a moral argument without a solution, and made laughter itself the question; high comedy in Europe, the comedy of a society talking, takes its measure from it. Held below the top because much of Molière’s reorganisation of comedy is shared with L’École des femmes and Tartuffe, and because its reach is as the model of a genre more than as the opening of a new one. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: William Wycherley adapted it as The Plain Dealer (1676); the English comedy of manners, Congreve and later Sheridan’s The School for Scandal (1777), draws on its salon and its portraits; Griboyedov’s Woe from Wit builds on its pattern of the truthful man driven out of society; and Rousseau made it a text of the Enlightenment’s quarrel with the theatre.
Anonymous · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
The field is German vernacular narrative about 1200, and the European heroic epic. The force is high: the first written German heroic epic of book scale, which made the heroic tradition a literary genre beside the romance. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: in its own century it was answered at once by the Klage, and its strophe and manner were taken up by Kudrun and the later Dietrich epics; then came a break of two and a half centuries, and on its recovery the German national epic of the nineteenth century, Hebbel’s trilogy (1861), a frame for Wagner’s Ring, though Wagner drew mostly on the Norse sources, Lang’s two films (1924), and a political myth of loyalty unto death. The delayed reach is discounted, and much of it is use rather than literary redirection.
Alexander Pushkin · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
The field is Russian drama and Russian literature of the 1820s and 1830s. The force is high: the play is the first great Russian historical drama and founded the form in the language, and it changed what a Russian play could hold, the people, the chronicle, prose beside verse, and history understood as opinion. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Mussorgsky’s opera took Pushkin’s scenes and lines into its libretto and carried them to the world stage; Aleksei Konstantinovich Tolstoy’s dramatic trilogy of the 1860s, The Death of Ivan the Terrible, Tsar Fyodor Ioannovich and Tsar Boris, is written in its wake; and “Народ безмолвствует”
(The people are silent) passed into the Russian language as a phrase. What holds it here: outside Russia the play’s own reach is slight and most of its world presence is the opera’s, and its reach as a stage play has been weak, so delayed and indirect influence is credited and discounted.
George Eliot · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
The field is the English novel of its century. The force: the book reorganised what English fiction could do with childhood and with provincial obscurity, putting a mind’s growth and its collision with family law at the centre and ending in tragedy rather than marriage. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Hardy’s tragic novels of provincial life and constrained women, Tess of the d’Urbervilles and Jude the Obscure, work in the same field of a self too large for its place, and Tess and Sue Bridehead are of Maggie’s kind; Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers and The Rainbow carry on the novel of growing up inside a working family and a landscape; the female novel of education of the twentieth century takes Maggie as a starting point. Held below Eliot’s own principal reach, which is Middlemarch’s: this book is a strong second.
Nikolai Gogol · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
The field is Russian drama and comedy of the nineteenth century, and the Russian literature that came after. The force: it made the comedy of the whole social body, with the state itself as protagonist, and fixed a tone, laughter turning to dread, that Russian writing kept. Held below the top by a narrower reach beyond Russia, where the play is much performed and adapted without having reorganised European comedy, and by Woe from Wit standing beside it as the founding comedy. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Ostrovsky’s comedies of merchants and officials; Sukhovo-Kobylin’s trilogy; Saltykov-Shchedrin’s town of Glupov; Dostoevsky’s comic grotesques; Bulgakov, who staged and adapted Gogol; Erdman’s The Mandate (1925) and The Suicide, unthinkable without it; Meyerhold’s production of 1926; and in the language, Khlestakov’s name and the Mayor’s lines as proverbs.
Apuleius · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
The field is Latin literature of the second century and the prose fiction of the ancient world. The intrinsic force is high: the one Latin novel to survive whole, it joined comic picaresque, Milesian tale, fairy tale and religious autobiography in one book, made a beast’s eye a way of seeing a whole society, and wrote the most extravagant Latin prose of its age. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it is discounted for delay, since in antiquity the book drew a few notices and no known imitator, and in the Middle Ages survived in one manuscript line and near silence. From Boccaccio on it is large. He copied it and took the tale of the tub into the Decameron; Boiardo and Adlington translated it; a debt in the picaresque and in Cervantes, the wineskins of Don Quixote among them, is argued; Psyche passed to Raphael’s Farnesina loggia, La Fontaine, the Psyché of Molière and Corneille, Keats, Pater and C. S. Lewis. The reach is real but late and dispersed, which holds it below the top.
John Steinbeck · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
The field is the American novel of the 1930s: Faulkner, Hemingway, Dos Passos, Wright. The intrinsic force is high: the book made the American social novel an epic and a scripture at once, and fixed the form in which a national catastrophe of displacement is told. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: John Ford’s film of 1940, which follows it closely; Woody Guthrie’s ballad “Tom Joad” (1940); Bruce Springsteen’s The Ghost of Tom Joad (1995); Tom’s farewell carried into American political speech; and the book’s standing as the reference novel of the Dust Bowl and of migrant labour, against which later fiction of displacement and farm work is read. What holds it at 8.6: its reach on the art of the novel is narrower than its public reach. Faulkner, not Steinbeck, redirected American fiction, and the book’s literary descendants are fewer than its political ones.
Caspar David Friedrich · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
Shown publicly in 1810, so force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force is high: a reorganisation of what a landscape could be, the subject become the field itself, a near empty field, and the viewer’s relation to it the content. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: an immediate literary response, the Abendblätter text of October 1810, a founding document of Romantic writing on painting; a narrow following in painting, Dahl, Carus, Kersting and a Dresden circle; the painter’s name in neglect from his death in 1840 until the Berlin Centenary exhibition of 1906; and Robert Rosenblum’s Modern Painting and the Northern Romantic Tradition: Friedrich to Rothko of 1975, which made this canvas the ancestor of the field painting of Rothko and Newman. The reach is delayed, and in part a critic’s genealogy rather than a documented debt; it is credited and discounted.
Alfred Tennyson · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
The field is English poetry of the nineteenth century, with the elegiac tradition behind it. The intrinsic force: the poem reorganised what an elegy could be, a long lyric sequence as the record of a mind across time, and it brought the new geology into poetry nine years before the Origin of Species. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it made Tennyson Laureate in November 1850 and set the terms of Victorian public mourning; the sequence of linked lyrics passed to Meredith’s Modern Love (1862) and to Tennyson’s own Maud; Hardy’s Poems of 1912 to 1913 are elegies in its line, and the elegiac sequence of the twentieth century inherits its frame. Its phrases, “better to have loved and lost” (XXVII) and “red in tooth and claw” (LVI), entered the language. Held at 8.6 because the modernists reacted against Tennyson more than they built on him, the redirection is within the Victorian field more than of poetry at large, and Whitman, Hopkins and Baudelaire, its contemporaries, moved the field further.
Jan van Eyck · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
Force and reach are scored together; the field is Netherlandish and European painting of the 1430s and after. Intrinsic force: the panel reorganises two possibilities at once, the donor’s place before the holy (alone, at scale, in one space) and the window onto a continuous deep landscape behind sacred figures, with atmospheric recession. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Rogier van der Weyden’s Saint Luke Drawing the Virgin (Boston, about 1435 to 1440) takes over the loggia, the parapet with two figures seen from behind, the river and the city; through it and other versions the scheme of Virgin and donor in a loggia with a landscape beyond passed into later Netherlandish painting, in Memling and his followers; and the deep landscape through an opening was taken up in Italy as well as the North. Held at 8.6 because much of this reach is shared with The Ghent Altarpiece and van Eyck’s other Madonnas.
Limbourg brothers · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
The field is French and Netherlandish painting and illumination of the 1410s. The intrinsic force is a reorganisation of possibility: the landscape of observed places and seasons, the genre scene of labour, the cast shadow and the snow, years ahead of the panel painting that took up the same world in the Low Countries. The book itself was little seen, unfinished in 1416, completed in Savoy and out of view for most of four centuries, so its reach through its own pages was small, and that is discounted. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it ran through the brothers’ workshop and models, into Parisian illumination after them and the Flemish calendar tradition of the sixteenth century, and so toward the seasons of Bruegel; its late fame as the image of the Middle Ages is presence and counts for little here.
Ernest Hemingway · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
The field is the novel in English of the 1920s and the European novel of the First World War, which in 1929 alone brought Remarque’s Im Westen nichts Neues, Graves’s Good-bye to All That and Aldington’s Death of a Hero. The intrinsic force is high: the book turned the anti-rhetoric of the war into a novel’s whole method, and showed that the plain style could carry tragedy at length. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the passage of chapter 27 on the abstract words is quoted in nearly every account of the war’s literature; the book was Hemingway’s first great commercial success, made the style a model for the novel in English for decades, and passed into film in 1932 and 1957. What holds it here is that much of the redirection of prose is owed to the earlier stories and to The Sun Also Rises, and is credited to those books; this novel extended the reach more than it made the turn.
Joseph Conrad · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
The field is the novel in English in the first decade of the twentieth century. The intrinsic force: the book made the political novel of conspiracy, terror and secret policing a subject for serious fiction in English, joined it to a modernist handling of time and an ironic narrator, and made the spy story a vehicle of moral and political knowledge. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Graham Greene took it as a model for his entertainments and for the seedy, compromised world of his spies; Eric Ambler and, through them, John le Carré inherit its premise that the secret services and their enemies are one trade; Hitchcock filmed it as Sabotage (1936); and the literary novel of terror stands in its line. Held here because it redirected a genre more than the novel’s form, and did less to the whole field than Heart of Darkness.
Wallace Stevens · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
The field is poetry in English of the twentieth century, American poetry first. The intrinsic force is high. The book made a new kind of poem, the comic and philosophical lyric of imagination and reality, and with “Sunday Morning” gave the secular century its great meditative ode; “A High-Toned Old Christian Woman” names the programme: “Poetry is the supreme fiction, madame”. What holds it below the top is that the reach was delayed and in part carried by later books. Harmonium appeared a year after The Waste Land (9.1 on this desk) and in the year of Spring and All, and for a decade it was eclipsed by both. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: its influence came chiefly after the Collected Poems of 1954, through Stevens’s whole work, into Ashbery, Merrill and Jorie Graham and into the critical canon; and the poems of this book are those through which most readers and poets first meet Stevens.
Kurt Vonnegut · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
The field is the literature of the 1960s in American English: Heller, Pynchon’s V. and The Crying of Lot 49, Barth, Barthelme, Mailer, Kesey. The intrinsic force is a reorganisation: the book showed that the testimony of atrocity could be carried by fabulation and comedy rather than by realism, that an author’s failure to tell could be the telling, and that a writer could step into his own novel without collapsing it into play. Held below the top because much of the reach runs through its manner and its refrain, and because Catch-22 had opened the comic war novel first. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it became one of the defining American novels of the Vietnam years; it carried the autobiographical frame and the fractured time of trauma into later war fiction, and its backward raid is acknowledged as an antecedent of Martin Amis’s Time’s Arrow; and it moved the devices of science fiction into literary fiction for a mass readership.
Bob Dylan · Music
8.6 · Tier IV
The field is the singer-songwriter album of the 1970s and the popular song as a vehicle for adult experience. The intrinsic force is real: the record showed that a popular song could carry a narrative broken in time and person, and that the confessional album could be a work of fiction and judgment rather than a diary. It deepened more than it reorganised; the form was there, and the record set its standard, while Highway 61 Revisited, at 9.3, moved the field further. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the record became the measure of the album of a love’s end, a model later songwriters name for writing about a marriage and about time; its songs entered the repertoire of other singers; and it restored its maker’s standing after a decade of uneven work.
Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
The field is Western Desert painting and, beyond it, painting at large. The intrinsic force is high: the large map canvas reorganised what a desert painting could be, from a board for one story to a field for a whole country, and opened the scale at which the movement would later work. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Clifford Possum’s canvases of 1976 to 1980 are the reference for the large ambitious picture in the desert movement, and since 2007 this canvas has been shown and reproduced as the movement’s central image in Australia. Reach in the wider field is real but diffuse, in the reception of Western Desert painting as contemporary art, and no later work it alone redirected can be named.
J. M. W. Turner · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
Shown in public since 1844 and in the national collection since the bequest, so intrinsic force and achieved reach are weighed together. The force is a real reorganisation of what an exhibited landscape could hold: modern technology as a subject of the highest painting, and the canvas as a record of sensation rather than of a view; within British painting of the 1840s nothing else did this. The discount is real. The reach belongs to Turner’s late manner as a whole more than to this canvas, the line to Monet is plausible and not proved for it, and much of the claim on abstraction is retrospective: the picture is the emblem of the late manner more than its single agent. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Monet and Pissarro in London in 1870 and 1871, where they saw Turner; Monet’s Gare Saint-Lazare paintings of 1877, which take steam and the train as their subject; a twentieth century that claimed the late canvases as forerunners of abstraction.
Jean Renoir · Film
8.6 · Tier IV
Released in 1937, so force and reach are scored together, in the cinema of the 1930s. The intrinsic force is a real enlargement of what the war film and the prison film could hold: society behind the lines, class across nations, a sympathetic enemy, carried by a staging in depth that Renoir was developing through the decade and that this film, more than any of his before The Rules of the Game, brought to a world audience. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: refused in Germany, which marked its reach as a threat; made a text of film theory by Bazin and taught for decades. Held a step down because its formal reach passes largely through Renoir’s later work and through Bazin rather than through this film alone.
Anonymous · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
Force and reach are scored together, in the garden’s own field and beyond it. The intrinsic force is high: the most radical statement of the dry garden, reduced to stone, gravel and moss, showing that a garden could be wholly abstract and wholly complete. Reach in its own field came slowly: the dry gardens of Kyoto in the Edo period did not generally follow its austerity, and the delay is credited and discounted. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Japanese garden makers and historians, Shigemori Mirei among them, and Western modernists made it the canonical instance in the twentieth century; it shaped the idea of the Zen garden across the world; and modern minimalism in sculpture, landscape and architecture answered it, Noguchi’s gardens among the clearest.
J. M. W. Turner · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
Published and long seen, so force and reach are scored together. The force is a real reorganisation of what history painting could be: a moral subject of the gravest kind carried by colour and light with the figures nearly gone, the extreme instance of Turner’s late fusion of marine, history and sublime landscape. In its own field, British painting of the 1840s, it moved little directly; the larger reach belongs to the late manner as a whole, which Monet and Pissarro knew in London in 1870 and 1871 and later critics read as a prelude to abstraction. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Ruskin’s chosen exemplar in the first volume of Modern Painters (1843), and so part of the founding of modern criticism of painting in English; answered by name in the literature of the Atlantic slave trade, in Dabydeen’s Turner; discounted for a reach shared with the body of late work.
F. W. Murnau · Film
8.6 · Tier IV
Released in 1927, so force and reach are scored together. The force: the fullest statement of silent art cinema’s visual language at the moment sound ended it, and a union of German method and Hollywood resources that showed a studio picture could carry a camera as free as any in Europe. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: an immediate school at Fox, in Frank Borzage’s 7th Heaven (1927) and Street Angel (1928) and John Ford’s Four Sons (1928); a prize at the first Academy Awards for artistic quality; a style of light and travelling camera that passed into the Hollywood of the 1930s. Sound froze the camera within two years, and much of the line was taken up only later. Delayed reach is credited and discounted.
Robert Schumann · Music
8.6 · Tier IV
Intrinsic force and achieved reach are scored together. The force is real: the cycle made the piano a second protagonist in song, able to contradict the singer and to finish what the singer cannot, and it made the Romantic fragment, the open beginning and the wordless close, a form for the Lied. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: within the Lied, real and lasting. Brahms, Wolf and Mahler wrote in a song world where the piano carries meaning of its own and the postlude can speak last. The reach is shared: with Schumann’s other cycles of 1840, the Eichendorff Liederkreis and Frauenliebe und -leben, and with Winterreise, which came first and stands larger. The field, the German Lied, is narrower than the symphony’s or the opera’s, and the figure clears the gate by a tenth.
Titian · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
The field is Italian painting of the 1520s. The intrinsic force is high: with the other Ferrara pictures the canvas set the terms of the poesia, the large mythological canvas governed by colour, motion and sensual presence, which Titian himself developed in the poesie for Philip II and which became one of the main lines of European painting. The reach is shared with its companions, and the most famous direct copies are of the two now in the Prado, which tempers the share credited here. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the set went to Rome in 1598, where Poussin studied it and built his bacchanals of the 1620s and 1630s on it; Rubens copied the Prado pair and took the rout into his own work; and the leaping god passed into the vocabulary of the Baroque.
Peter Zumthor · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
The field is Swiss architecture of the 1990s, the bath as a type and, through them, international architecture. Intrinsic force: a real reorganisation of what a building is for and made of, the senses and the material made the subject against an architecture of image and sign, and a bath made a sequence of experience rather than a facility. The force is held down by its lineage in Kahn, Scarpa and Lewerentz, and by a Swiss architecture already turning to material. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it became the emblem of the material and phenomenological turn of the 1990s and of the rise of Swiss architecture; the dark stone bath has been answered and imitated in spas and wellness buildings worldwide; the Pritzker Prize of 2009 followed; and atmosphere entered the vocabulary of the schools, though part of that reach runs through the essays as much as through the building.
David Fincher · Film
8.6 · Tier IV
Released in 2007, so force and reach are scored together, against the cinema of its decade. Intrinsic force: the film reorganised what an American studio film about a serial killer could be, from a duel to an epistemology, and showed that digital capture could carry a period film with the density and restraint of photochemical work. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the long investigative procedural that followed on screen, Denis Villeneuve’s Prisoners (2013), the first season of True Detective (2014), Fincher’s own Mindhunter (2017 to 2019), and the true-crime boom in documentary and podcast after Serial (2014), which shares its figure of the amateur who cannot stop, though direct descent cannot be shown. The limits stand: the reach is diffuse, partly shared with Memories of Murder, and delayed influence is credited and discounted.
Sergei Prokofiev · Music
8.6 · Tier IV
The field is ballet and orchestral music of the 1930s, with Stravinsky’s Perséphone and Jeu de cartes and the Soviet dram-ballet beside it. The intrinsic force is real: the work made the full-length ballet a symphonic tragedy carried by leading themes, and showed that a large narrative score could be modern in harmony and lyrical at once. It reorganised the narrative ballet more than it reorganised music. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the score set the model for Soviet narrative ballet, and it became the score on which the Western narrative ballet of Cranko and MacMillan was built. The figure is discounted because the reach runs more within ballet than across the art of composition.
Robert Bresson · Film
8.6 · Tier IV
Released in 1959, so force and reach are scored together, against the cinema of the 1950s. The force: the clearest demonstration that a film can carry inner drama without acting, psychology or suspense, by the arrangement of acts, hands and sound, with theft sequences that changed what an action sequence could mean. Part of that force belongs to A Man Escaped and is discounted. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Paul Schrader took its structure and its last scene into American Gigolo (1980) and Light Sleeper (1992), and its diary and voice-over shape Taxi Driver (1976), which he wrote; the Dardenne brothers, Aki Kaurismäki, Michael Haneke and much slow cinema of the last thirty years work in the tradition it made portable. The reach runs through filmmakers and critics more than through the public.
David Lean · Film
8.6 · Tier IV
The field is the cinema of the 1960s. Intrinsic force: the film made the large-format epic carry an interior, an ambiguous and finally damning study of one man, and made landscape a dramatic agent rather than a backdrop. It perfected the roadshow epic more than it reorganised film; the decade’s reorganisations came from the new waves, and the form it crowned declined within the decade. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it is wide and lasting in the cinema of scale, from the desert of Star Wars (1977) to the widescreen epic of a self-made messiah in Dune (2021), which takes it openly, and in the match cut taught as the type of the transition. The reach clears the bar, but it lies chiefly within epic and spectacle.
Mark Rothko · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
On view since 1971, so force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force is a reorganisation of what a sacred room and a painted room could be: an interfaith sanctuary made entirely by abstract painting, with the paintings commanding the space. In painting itself it redirected little. It is a terminus of the dark monochrome, not a source. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the reach is real and lies mostly outside painting — the contemplative, creed-free room as a type, in meditation rooms, interfaith chapels and the gallery made a sanctuary; the permanent room of art that cannot be moved, though direct descent is hard to show; and Morton Feldman’s Rothko Chapel (1971), a major work in another medium.
Josquin des Prez · Music
8.6 · Tier IV
The field is the polyphonic Mass of Josquin’s generation, around 1500 to 1520. The force is the larger component: the work shows that a whole Ordinary can be generated from one chant through pervading imitation, with equal voices and clear declamation, the method that became the norm of the sixteenth-century mass in Gombert’s generation and in Palestrina’s paraphrase masses. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the reach is real but shared. The redirection belongs to Josquin’s generation and to his motets as much as to this mass; it was printed only in 1539, when the change was already under way; and its later reach lies in the revival and the recording era, not in composition. Delayed influence is credited and discounted, and Josquin’s standing is not counted as this work’s reach.
Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina · Music
8.6 · Tier IV
Scored in its field, the sacred polyphony of the 1560s and its line. The intrinsic force is real: the Mass showed, in the most ambitious scoring of its kind, that six-part polyphony could keep its text audible without giving up the independence of its lines. But that reorganisation was shared with others solving the same problem in the same decade. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: very wide and very long. The Mass became the name of the solution; the legend made it the emblem of church music saved; Palestrina’s style, this work first, was codified by Fux and taught for three centuries; the Cecilian reform of the nineteenth century took it as its banner; Pfitzner built an opera on its making. The reach is discounted because much of it belongs to the legend and to the style, not to this score alone.
Alberto Giacometti · Visual art
8.5 · Tier IV
Published, so force and reach are scored together. The field is European sculpture of the 1950s and 1960s. The intrinsic force: the walking figures reorganised what a figurative sculpture could be after Rodin and after abstraction, a figure that carries the conditions of its own seeing, and this model is that idea’s fullest and most public statement, at life size and in the round. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the Grand Prize at Venice in 1962 and its standing since as the image of the human figure in postwar art; later figurative sculpture that answers it, and the attenuated figure as a type; and a life outside sculpture as an emblem. The discount: the reorganisation belongs to the figures of 1947 to 1950 and the whole late work, sculpture after 1960 turned largely to Minimalism and away from the figure, and a share of the reach is fame.
Thomas Pynchon · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
The field is the American novel of the mid-twentieth century. The intrinsic force is a real reorganisation of possibility: the book is one of the first full statements of the encyclopedic paranoid novel, joining a comic picaresque of the present to a secret history of the century, and making the question whether history has a plot into the novel’s own form. Held below the top because much of the reach was achieved by the later books, which did more fully what this one began, and because Gaddis and Heller shared the opening. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the book made Pynchon’s name; with The Crying of Lot 49 and Gravity’s Rainbow it set the terms of American postmodern fiction; the line through DeLillo, Wallace and the systems novel runs from it; and its Herero material passed into Gravity’s Rainbow and a wider reckoning.
Alejo Carpentier · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
The field is the Spanish American novel of the 1940s. Intrinsic force: with its prologue the book named and demonstrated a way of telling the history of the Americas from inside the beliefs of its peoples, joining the documentary and the marvellous in one register; that is a real reorganisation of possibility, and the new novel and the Boom were built partly on it. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: “lo real maravilloso” became one of the central terms of Latin American criticism; Jacques Stephen Alexis’s Haitian statement of a “réalisme merveilleux” (1956) answers it; the historical novel of the Caribbean that followed, Carpentier’s own El siglo de las luces among it, works its ground; and García Márquez’s way with the marvellous is widely read in its line. Charged: much of the reach is the prologue’s, and the method’s fame passed to later, larger books.
Venetian · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Force and reach are scored together, in Venetian and north Italian building of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries and the tradition that later inherited it. The intrinsic force: the palace fixed the Venetian Gothic elevation, the loggia of pointed arches and quatrefoils over a patterned wall, and gave a republic an image that was not a castle. Held because its first reach stayed largely within Venice’s orbit, and the later one came through a critic as much as through the building. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the elevation became the language of the Venetian palace for a century, through the Ca’ d’Oro, the Ca’ Foscari and many lesser fronts, across the Venetian mainland and down the Adriatic; and, delayed, credited and discounted, a strand of the Victorian Gothic revival, copied outright in Templeton’s carpet factory in Glasgow, 1889.
Ursula K. Le Guin · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
The field is the novel in English of its century, and within it science fiction. The intrinsic force: the book reorganised what science fiction could be for. It made the invented world a thought experiment on the sexes and the state, carried by a love story, and showed that the genre could hold anthropology and philosophy as its matter rather than its decoration. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Joanna Russ’s The Female Man (1975), critically, and Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time (1976) argued with it directly; its pronoun problem is the ancestor of the pronoun of Ann Leckie’s Ancillary Justice (2013); and Le Guin’s essays on it made gender in invented worlds a fixed topic of criticism. What holds the axis is that it moved one province of the novel more than the whole.
George Orwell · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
The field is fiction in English of the 1940s, with political writing across the European languages around it. The force: the book fused a political argument and a work of art without loss to either, and showed that the oldest and humblest literary form could be the decisive intervention on the most consequential question of its decade. It moved the political imagination more than the art of fiction, and the beast fable did not become a living form again after it; its imitators are few, and none is its equal, which holds the axis below the top. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it changed how much of the Western left read the Soviet state; it was translated, smuggled and read in the countries it described; its phrases entered the political language of English and of other languages; and with Nineteen Eighty-Four it fixed the terms in which the century imagined totalitarian power.
Jonathan Swift · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
The field is English prose of the eighteenth century and, through it, European satire. The intrinsic force is a reorganisation of the satirist’s means, not an accent: the book showed that satire could be conducted from inside its object, in an impersonated voice with no correcting frame, and that a book’s whole apparatus could be made to mean. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the Scriblerian line runs from it, Pope’s Dunciad Variorum (1729) with its mock notes most plainly; Sterne took its digressions, its misplaced dedications and its gaps into Tristram Shandy; Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus (1833 to 1834) rebuilt its clothes philosophy; and the line of self-conscious, annotated fiction descends partly from it. Held below the top because its reach runs through learned readers and later writers more than through a general readership, and Swift’s own Gulliver carried the wider redirection.
Paul Celan · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
The field is German poetry of the century, and after 1945 in particular. The intrinsic force is high: through “Todesfuge” the book answered by its existence the question whether poetry in German could be written after the camps, and showed what such a poem would have to do: speak in voices, in a form the culture prized, with the murderers’ art inside it. The axis is held below 9 because the reach runs through one poem more than through the book, and Celan’s formal influence on later poetry comes from his later books. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Anselm Kiefer’s paintings of Margarethe and Sulamith take their titles and their two heads of hair from the poem, and Adorno qualified his dictum in Negative Dialektik (1966), in a passage generally read with Celan in mind.
Luis Cernuda · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
The field is Spanish poetry of the twentieth century, with Spanish America beside it. The intrinsic force: the book made two things possible in Spanish that were not possible before it, the open poetry of homosexual desire as moral argument, and the meditative poem of the English kind, argued, unrhymed and dramatic, in place of the image-driven lyric of 1927. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the Spanish poets of the 1950s, Gil de Biedma, Francisco Brines and José Ángel Valente, took his late manner as their model against both the rhetoric of the Franco years and the social poetry of their elders; the Spanish “poesía de la experiencia” of the 1980s and after claimed him as its father; and Paz’s essay placed him for the Spanish-speaking world. The reach came late, after 1950, and is discounted for the delay; outside Spanish it is real but thin.
John Milton · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
The field is English prose and political argument of the seventeenth century, and beyond it the European argument for a free press. The intrinsic force is high: the speech reorganised the case for liberty of printing around the formation of the reader and the method of truth, and that is the case later liberal argument adopted; Mill’s argument in On Liberty that truth is strengthened by collision with error stands on the ground Milton cleared. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: delayed, and discounted for it. In 1644 the order stood, and Milton later served as a licenser himself. From the eighteenth century it was reprinted and invoked, Mirabeau adapted it in French in 1788, and it became the founding English text of the free press, though much of that reach is the reach of its sentences.
Jules Hardouin-Mansart · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Force and reach are scored together. Intrinsic force: the Dôme completes the French answer to St Peter’s, a classical, scenic, vertical dome no French building had achieved, and fixes the three-shell section with hidden light as a means. It is a synthesis rather than a first stroke, which holds the force below the top. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it set the image of the French state dome, answered in Soufflot’s Sainte-Geneviève, now the Panthéon; it stands in the line of European domes with St Paul’s, though the direction of debt between Wren and Mansart is disputed and is not credited here; and through that line it stands, at one remove, behind the domed capitols and public buildings of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The open crypt, the sarcophagus seen from above, became a type of the state tomb.
J. D. Salinger · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
The field is American fiction in English of the 1950s. The force: the book established the adolescent’s own voice as a literary instrument able to bear grief, social judgment and breakdown, and gave the novel a figure, the alienated youth who refuses the adult world, that it had lacked in that form. What holds it short of the top is that the formal reorganisation was bounded, since Twain had made the vernacular boy’s odyssey a canonical form, and that its influence is easier to document as a voice and a figure than as a change in what the novel could do structurally. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the coming-of-age novel told in a teenager’s idiom, the confessional young narrator and much of what became young adult fiction stand in its line; its voice is audible in novels from the 1950s to the present; the figure passed into film and popular culture; and its notoriety in schools and in the courts is reach too.
Terrence Malick · Film
8.5 · Tier IV
Released in 1973, so force and reach are scored together. The force: the film made a new register for American violence, flat, lyrical and ironic at once, and it founded a mode, the naive voice set against image and landscape, that Malick extended in Days of Heaven (1978) and that a generation borrowed. Much of the wider influence of that mode runs through his later films rather than this one, and it is discounted here. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the reach that runs through this film directly is documented and lasting, in True Romance (1993), which takes its girl’s narration and echoes its Gassenhauer, and in Wild at Heart (1990), Kalifornia (1993) and Natural Born Killers (1994), which work in its line.
Built for Qabus ibn Wushmgir · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
The field is Iranian and then Anatolian building of the eleventh to fourteenth centuries. The intrinsic force is high: the tower makes the monumental tomb a vertical sign rather than a domed chamber, and makes brick alone, without revetment, a sufficient architecture at the largest scale. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: tomb towers spread across northern Iran within decades, at Damghan, Resget and Radkan and in the Kharraqan towers of 1067 and 1093; the Seljuk kümbets of Anatolia carried the type far west; flanged brick shafts appear in the minarets of the period. How much of this follows this building rather than a shared regional type is uncertain, and its severity was not followed: the later towers turned to patterned brick and tile.
Salian builders, under Conrad II and Henry IV · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Force and reach are scored together, in the field of building in the Empire and the Romanesque of the eleventh and twelfth centuries. The intrinsic force: the first monumental vaulted nave of its scale north of the Alps, the giant wall articulation and the bound system brought together, and a dwarf gallery set round a whole building, a reorganisation of what an imperial church could be. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Mainz and Worms, rebuilt as vaulted churches in its wake, formed with it the group of the Rhenish imperial cathedrals; dwarf gallery and bound system became the grammar of Rhenish Romanesque for more than a century; and German nineteenth-century round-arched building took it as an emblem. The line to Gothic ran elsewhere.
Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger · Film
8.5 · Tier IV
Field: the cinema of the 1940s. The force is real: the film made the ballet a cinematic form in its own right, not a filmed performance, joined it to a full-length drama in which the dance carries the meaning, and brought British colour cinema to a degree of design no studio picture had attempted. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: a long run in New York and wide success in America; the extended ballet of An American in Paris (1951) and the dream ballets of the musicals after it; generations of dancers sent to the ballet by it; Martin Scorsese and Brian De Palma among the filmmakers who name it; Black Swan (2010) in its line. It bent a genre more than it reorganised cinema.
Margaret Atwood · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
The field is the English-language novel of the 1980s, and within it the dystopia. The intrinsic force: the book reorganised the dystopia around reproduction, sexuality and a woman’s testimony, and showed that a literary novelist could take the form without apology. That is a real reorganisation of possibility, though of the form’s matter more than its method, which is Orwell’s: the state, the slogans, the ritual violence and the frame that looks back from the future. Held near the bar because much of the reach runs through image and premise rather than through the way novels are written. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the template of the feminist dystopia that followed; “handmaid”, “Gilead” and “Under His Eye” carried into the speech of politics; the red habit worn as a protest costume in several countries from 2017; and a place among the books most taught, and most challenged, in North American schools.
Robert Altman · Film
8.5 · Tier IV
Field: the cinema of the 1970s, so force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force is a reorganisation of form: the film made the network narrative a major form for feature cinema, a whole society in one structure without a centre, and joined it to a sound design that changed what film dialogue could do. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Altman’s own A Wedding (1978) and his later ensemble films; Paul Thomas Anderson’s Boogie Nights (1997) and Magnolia (1999), which declare the debt; the ensemble and network films of the 1990s and 2000s; the practice of radio microphones on many actors at once; the political film of performance and media. The reach is wide among directors and narrower in the public’s sense of what a film is than that of the decade’s popular landmarks, and part of the network line descends from television.
Henri Labrouste · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
The intrinsic force is high: the building reorganised what a public library and a civic interior could be, uniting a rational iron frame with a masonry monument and a legible programme, and it made iron respectable in the monumental register in France. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Labrouste carried the idea on into a second reading room in Paris in the 1860s; the structural rationalists of the French tradition, and the modern histories after them, took the building as a founding instance, and its façade was copied and answered. Delayed influence through the modern canon is credited and discounted. The line runs mostly through scholarship and a few great descendants, not a broad redirection of practice.
Prince · Music
8.5 · Tier IV
The field is the R&B, funk and rock of the mid-1980s and the pop album of its decade. The intrinsic force is real: one musician, largely alone in a studio after the dissolution of his band, holding funk, rock, gospel, psychedelic pop, soul ballad and live band funk at full command on one record, and making the drum machine and the treated voice instruments of feeling rather than sheen. That enlarged what one maker’s record could hold. Charged: much of the field’s redirection by Prince came from earlier records, the record’s public reach in its year was narrower than its predecessor’s, and the reorganisation it made is credited mainly among musicians, though musicians are those through whom a field is moved. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: later R&B and neo-soul, and the self-produced album of a single auteur in R&B and pop, learned from it, and the pitched alter-ego voice became a known device. Force and reach together clear the bar by a tenth.
Kate Bush · Music
8.5 · Tier IV
The field is the pop and rock album of the mid 1980s. The intrinsic force is high: the record showed that one artist, producing herself on a sampling instrument in her own studio, could make a mainstream record whose songs were built from rhythm, sampled sound and texture rather than from band arrangement, and could take a long continuous suite to number one, joined to a woman’s authorship of every element. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the record is commonly credited as a model for the self-producing woman auteur in pop, with Björk and Tori Amos often named, Running Up That Hill became a standard and returned to the top of the charts in 2022, and the album is placed high whenever its decade is counted. Part of the sound was shared, and the influence is of example and persona as much as practice.
Diego Velázquez · Visual art
8.5 · Tier IV
The field is European portraiture of the mid seventeenth century, in Rome and in Madrid. The intrinsic force is high: the canvas carried the state portrait to a pitch of physical and psychological truth that set a standard, and showed that the loose, optical handling of the late Titian could bear the weight of the most official image there is. In its decade the reach was modest; it stayed in a family collection in Rome and redirected no school. Delay is credited and discounted. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the copies made after it; its place behind the nineteenth century’s rediscovery of Velázquez as the painter’s painter; and Bacon’s Study after Velázquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X of 1953 and its fellows, one of the defining images of postwar painting. Force high, reach late and specific.
Rembrandt van Rijn · Visual art
8.5 · Tier IV
On view since 1642, so force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force is a reorganisation of the genre’s possibility: it turned the corporate portrait into a history painting, holding a commissioned group by action and light rather than by rows. The redirection was delayed and partial. The civic guard portrait ended within a generation, as the guilds lost their military role after 1648, and van der Helst’s smooth, legible manner was more often followed; no school was built on it. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: its reach runs through Rembrandt’s standing as the painter of light, the nineteenth century’s discovery of Dutch painting, and its place since 1885 at the centre of the national museum.
Reed and Stem, and Warren and Wetmore · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Intrinsic force: a real reorganisation of possibility. The terminal turned the railway station from a building at the edge of a yard into a stacked node of a city, transport below, a public room at the street and private development in the air above, built as one plan. The field is the American railway terminal and civic building of its century. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: development over railway yards on air rights became a practice, in New York and then elsewhere, down to Hudson Yards; the station as an underground node beneath building, with separated levels and ramps, is the governing type of the great urban stations of the century since; and Penn Central v. New York City changed what an American city may do to protect a building. Held below the top by Penn Station's shared priority and by the short life of the American terminal itself.
David Fincher · Film
8.5 · Tier IV
Released in 1999, so force and reach are scored together. The force is real and bounded: digital effects made an instrument of interiority rather than of spectacle, in the camera that passes through a wall and the apartment labelled like a catalogue, and the unreliable narrator made a matter of the image, not only of the voice. The film gathered the music-video style of its decade and gave it a theme. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the unreliable narrator and the late twist became a vogue in popular film and television, a credit shared with The Sixth Sense (1999); Mr. Robot (2015) is an open heir; and the film’s lines passed into common speech, from the first rule of the club to the “snowflake” insult.
Talk Talk · Music
8.5 · Tier IV
The field is the rock album, and within it the album as a sound-world. The intrinsic force is high: the record showed that a rock band could build an album from silence and the edit, that dynamic range could be a structure, and that a voice could withdraw into the ensemble, a real reorganisation of what the form could be made of. The reach is narrower and came late: the record sold little, changed no practice for several years, and reached musicians more than popular music at large. Delayed, it is credited and discounted. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the term post-rock is reported to have been coined within six years with this record and its successor in view, and later records, Kid A among them, placed the same bet.
Edvard Munch · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
Intrinsic force: a real reorganisation of what a painting could be in the Scandinavia of the 1880s, the surface as the record of feeling and memory rather than of sight. Within its field, Norwegian and Scandinavian painting of that decade, it is the turning point; in European painting it is one source among several of the same turn, beside van Gogh, Ensor and Gauguin. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it is the first work of the painter whose Frieze of Life, The Scream above all, redirected modern painting in Germany and the North, and the painters of Die Brücke took Munch as a father. That reach runs partly through the body of work rather than this canvas alone, and it was delayed: in 1886 the canvas moved no one but its mockers, and its standing as origin was made by the painter’s later fame and his own telling.
Giulio Romano · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Standing for nearly five centuries, it is scored on force and reach together. The intrinsic force is a reorganisation of what classical building could do: it showed that the canon codified by Bramante and Raphael was a language whose grammar could be bent for meaning, and, in the room of the giants, that painting could dissolve architecture into image. The field is Italian and European building and decoration of the sixteenth century. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Primaticcio, who worked at the Te, carried the room of stucco and fresco to Fontainebleau from 1532, and with it a school of decoration that shaped French interiors; the century’s rustic and playful rustication follows from it; Giulio’s own Mantuan works carried it on; and Venturi returned it to theory four centuries later. Held lower because its plan was not copied: its lesson was an idiom, not a type.
Frank Herbert · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
The field is English literature of its century, and within it the science fiction novel. The force: Dune reorganised what a science fiction novel could hold, making a whole planet’s ecology, economy and faith the engine of its plot, and set the standard of world-building against which later work in the field was measured. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Star Wars (1977) takes from it a desert planet, moisture farming, a mystical order with a controlling voice and a galactic empire, borrowings widely noted and plain on the screen; the planetary ecologies of later science fiction, in Ursula Le Guin and in Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars books among others, are written after it; and Westwood’s Dune II (1992) set the form of the real-time strategy game. What holds the axis there is the field: Dune moved its genre and the popular imagination far more than it moved literary fiction.
Jorge Luis Borges · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
The field is the essay and criticism in Spanish of its century, and through translation the criticism of the West. The intrinsic force is a reorganisation of what an essay of literary criticism could be, short, speculative, impersonal and fictive in method, and a turn of the theory of tradition from the author to the reader. Charged: much of the reach runs through the fictions, which carry the same ideas more powerfully and were read first, and Eliot’s “Tradition and the Individual Talent” holds a share of the central idea. Delayed influence is credited and discounted. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: through Labyrinths (1962) the essays reached the generation of theory; Foucault’s preface is the clearest case; the reader-response and intertextual criticism of the following decades cites “Kafka y sus precursores” often; and the Latin American essay after Paz reads with this book in hand.
W. H. Auden · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
The field is poetry in English in the twentieth century. The intrinsic force: the book established a modern idiom for the public elegy and the civic poem, conversational and unconsoling, and showed that a major poet could set the cabaret song and the comic ballad beside the ode without loss of seriousness, a reorganisation of what a serious book of poems could hold. Held below the top because that reorganisation is of tone and stance more than of form, and Eliot and Yeats remain the field’s larger movers. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Brodsky’s “Verses on the Death of T. S. Eliot” takes its form and stance from the Yeats elegy, which Brodsky named as decisive for him; William Carlos Williams’s “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus” answers the Brueghel that “Musée” made a subject; and the ekphrastic poem of the later century runs through “Musée”.
Hayao Miyazaki · Film
8.4 · Tier IV
Field: the animated feature and the cinema of the 2000s. Intrinsic force is high: the film showed that a hand-drawn feature could run two hours on a child’s attention without a villain or a song, and could hold the sacred and the economic in a fairy tale, at the moment the American model was turning to computer animation. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the Golden Bear and the Academy Award carried animation into the festival cinema and Japanese animation into the world’s, and for a generation outside Japan the film became the door to Ghibli and to anime as art. The limit stands: its manner has been admired more than imitated, and its field was moved chiefly within animation.
Paul Cézanne · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
The work is published, so force and reach are scored together, in French painting of the 1890s and the figure painting after it. The force: the figure in a genre scene reorganised, the body built by the same constructive means as a landscape or a still life, and the series a demonstration that a subject could be pursued by reduction rather than invention. The discount: much of the reach belongs to the painter’s work as a whole, above all the late landscapes, still lifes and bathers and the retrospective of 1907, and among the five canvases it is shared. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the Cubist painters, for whom his figures counted as his still lifes did; Léger’s La partie de cartes of 1917, which answers the subject directly; and the series’ place as the emblem of his figure painting and a standard demonstration of form built in colour.
Kyivan Rus builders, under Yaroslav the Wise · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Force and reach are scored together, in the field of Rus and East Slavic building and of the Orthodox world. The intrinsic force: the cathedral constituted the monumental church of Rus, the princely metropolitan cathedral, many-domed, galleried and pyramidal, with a choir gallery for the court and a dedication to Holy Wisdom. It is the founding statement of that tradition, the seat of the metropolitans of Rus and the mother church of the land. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the type was taken up directly in the Sophias of Novgorod, 1045 to 1050, and Polotsk, from about 1044 to 1066; the stepped composition and the princely gallery passed into churches of Kyiv, Chernihiv and the north; and the Baroque rebuilding is a principal monument of the style later called Cossack or Mazepa Baroque. Held at 8.6 because Rus building soon went its own ways, and the reach stays in the Orthodox east.
Alvar Aalto · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
The field is European modern architecture between the wars and, within it, Nordic building and hospital design. The intrinsic force is a real reorganisation of possibility: proof that functionalism could be made humane at the scale of the body without giving up its frame, its plan or its light, and that a building could be designed whole, from site to door handle, around a person rather than a programme. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the building made Aalto an architect of international standing; it set a model for sanatoria and later hospitals; its furniture, through Artek, founded in 1935, carried bent wood into the modern interior across the world; and the humane modernism that Nordic architecture made its own descends partly from it. The reach is held where it is because the type died with the disease, and because much of the later influence ran through Aalto’s own later work, which is not credited here.
Stevie Wonder · Music
8.4 · Tier IV
The field is the soul, rhythm and blues and pop of the 1970s. The intrinsic force: the record showed at the largest scale that a soul album could be the work of one author who wrote, played, arranged and produced, joining jazz harmony and the synthesiser to the popular song, and that such a record could hold the centre of popular music. Part of that force belongs to the earlier records and to Gaye, and the record consolidates more than it reorganises. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the self-made records of Prince, the harmonic ambition of Michael Jackson’s records with Quincy Jones, the neo-soul of the 1990s and the sampling of hip-hop, which built two of its best-known records on this one, stand in its line, and several songs passed into the standard repertoire.
Nine Inch Nails · Music
8.4 · Tier IV
The field is the rock and electronic album of the 1990s. The intrinsic force is high: the record joined industrial noise and sampling to song, dynamics and an album-length argument, and showed that the harshest sounds of the underground could carry a concept album and a mass audience. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it carried industrial rock into the mainstream, shaped the heavy and electronic rock that followed in the 1990s, including bands its makers produced, and set a standard for the studio as a place to build sound rather than record it; and Hurt became, through Cash, one of the most widely known songs of its decade. The reach is large and partly diluted in imitation, and part of the force was shared with Ministry and the industrial pioneers.
Television · Music
8.4 · Tier IV
The field is the rock album of the later 1970s, punk and the music that followed it. The intrinsic force is a reorganisation of the instrument’s grammar: the record showed that rock guitar could leave the blues behind without leaving rock, and that two guitars could play as equals in composed counterpoint rather than as lead and rhythm. The reach was slow and lay among musicians, the public reach was small, and much of the influence travels as a general idea of clean, interlocking guitars rather than as the record’s own method; delayed reach is credited at a discount, and that keeps the figure near the bar. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the record is commonly credited with shaping the guitar playing of post-punk and of the alternative and indie rock that followed, and later bands from the 1980s to the 2000s name it among their models.
Voltaire · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
The field is French prose and European satire of the eighteenth century. The force: the book made the conte philosophique a form of the first rank and fixed a template, the innocent driven through the world’s catastrophes against a philosophy the world refutes, and it showed that a short comic narrative could carry a decisive argument in metaphysics and ethics. Held below the top because it did not reorganise the novel’s possibilities as Don Quixote or Tristram Shandy did; its form was a dead end as much as a model, and its heirs are scattered rather than a line. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the name of Pangloss became the English word Panglossian, used even in biology, in Gould and Lewontin’s “Panglossian paradigm” (1979); the last line became a proverb; and Leonard Bernstein made the book an operetta (1956).
Roman, under Hadrian · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
The field is Roman imperial building and the tradition that inherited Rome. The intrinsic force is a reorganisation of what a great house could be: the residence as a landscape of separate worlds on turning axes, with a geometry of carved space, segmented domes and curves set against curves that late Roman building carried further. It is a synthesis taken to an extreme more than a first stroke, since Nero and Domitian had begun it. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: its curved geometry belongs to the line that leads to the late Roman centralised hall, though the influence is diffuse; from the sixteenth century it was a quarry of form, for Piranesi, the picturesque garden of fragments, Le Corbusier, Kahn and Rowe and Koetter. Delayed, wide, a reservoir more than a lineage.
Kenzo Tange · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
The intrinsic force is a reorganisation of what Japanese public building could be after defeat: modern, democratic in its open ground, monumental without imperial ornament, and joined to native precedent. It also set a new possibility for the memorial, an axis to a preserved ruin in a living city with a museum as its gate. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: within its field, Japanese and Asian building of the twentieth century, very large; it is the founding work of the public line of postwar Japanese architecture, running through Tange’s later buildings, Yoyogi among them, to the generation of his students and the Metabolists; it gave Japan its first international modern statement at the CIAM in 1951; and the preserved ruin on a civic axis, the museum as threshold, has been widely answered, though the descent of later memorials from it is often diffuse.
Antoine Watteau · Visual art
8.3 · Tier IV
The field is French painting of the 1710s. The intrinsic force is the creation of a genre, the fête galante, entered by an academy as a category of its own, and with it a turn from the hierarchy of history painting toward a small-scale painting of feeling, colour and touch: the Rubeniste side of the quarrel made a new kind of picture. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Lancret and Pater, then Boucher and Fragonard and the Rococo across Europe; then a second reach, delayed and credited at a discount, through the Goncourts, Baudelaire’s Un voyage à Cythère, Verlaine’s Fêtes galantes and Debussy, and painters from Delacroix to Renoir who studied Watteau’s colour. The discount: much of the reach belongs to the painter’s whole work and the genre, and Neoclassicism refused the line for two generations.
Claude Monet · Visual art
8.3 · Tier IV
Shown since the 1890s, so force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force: the series made the set of variations on one motif, worked through time, a form of painting, and carried it to the most monumental subject available, where the Haystacks had used a rural one; and it moved painting toward the surface as a material record of process, the motif dissolved into colour and touch. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Roy Lichtenstein’s Rouen Cathedral set of 1969 answered the series directly in Benday dots, and the serial practice of the twentieth century, in painting and photography, names the Rouen and Haystack series as its usual source. The discount: much of the reach is shared with the Haystacks, which came first, and with the Water Lilies (8.6).
Bruce Graham and Fazlur Khan (Skidmore, Owings and Merrill) · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
The field is the tall building, above all in America in the second half of the twentieth century, and through it the tall building everywhere. The intrinsic force is high: the braced tube made the outer frame of a tower its main structure against the wind, and efficient enough to carry a hundred storeys of mixed use in one shaft; with Khan’s other tube systems, the framed tube before it and the bundled tube after it, it changed what height cost. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: wide and documented in its field. The tube systems became standard knowledge of supertall structure, expressed diagonal bracing recurs on towers across the world from the later 1970s, and the mixed-use supertall became a common type. The reach is shared with Khan’s sequence of towers.
Ridley Scott · Film
8.3 · Tier IV
Released in 1979, so force and reach are scored together, against the cinema of the 1970s. The intrinsic force is a fusion: the film joined the industrial, lived-in future to the body horror the decade was discovering, and gave the screen a creature and a design language, Giger’s biomechanics, without precedent in it. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it begat a franchise of its own and a whole line of crew-and-creature films; its worn spacecraft set the look of screen science fiction for decades; its surviving woman became, through its sequel, the armed heroine of the 1980s; and its influence on games, comics and design remains direct. Held at 8.6 because the force was a synthesis and an elevation of existing forms more than a new grammar of cinema, and the field it moved was genre film more than film as such.
Thelonious Monk · Music
8.3 · Tier IV
The field is jazz of 1956 and 1957. The intrinsic force is real: the record made composition, not the blowing session, the governing matter of a small-group album, and showed that a writer’s idiosyncrasy of harmony, accent and form could bind first-rank players and be heard by a public. The credit is discounted twice: it is shared with Monk’s whole work, so that what was redirected was redirected by Monk more than by this album, and the reorganisation of jazz in its decade belongs more to Kind of Blue and to Ornette Coleman. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Monk’s standing turned, and the residency at the Five Spot with Coltrane followed in 1957; “Pannonica” and “Bemsha Swing” entered the repertory; the title track became the emblem of difficult jazz composition, with later composer-led small groups in its line.
Charles Rennie Mackintosh · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
Field: British and European architecture of 1895 to 1910, and Scottish building. The intrinsic force is high: a public institution organised by use and light rather than by style, a synthesis of vernacular mass and modern frankness, and in the west wing a geometry that reorganised what a façade could be. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: real and partly delayed. In its decade the Glasgow Style went to the Continent, where Mackintosh’s showing at the Vienna Secession in 1900 bore on Hoffmann and the Wiener Werkstätte, though more through interiors and furniture than through this building. In Britain it had little direct following before the First World War; its reach came later, in Pevsner’s placing of Mackintosh among the pioneers and in its standing since as a model for architects and schools. Delayed reach is discounted.
Nan Goldin · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
Published, so intrinsic force and achieved reach are scored together, in the field of American and international art photography of the late 1970s and the 1980s. Intrinsic force: a real reorganisation of possibility. It made the flash-lit colour snapshot of one’s own circle a serious form, and made the slideshow with music a way photography could be shown as a work. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the diaristic colour photography of the next generation, Wolfgang Tillmans, Ryan McGinley, Corinne Day and Jack Pierson, works in the space it opened, and the look passed into the fashion photography of the 1990s called heroin chic, which Goldin herself disowned. The reach is wide and specific. Held at 8.6 because the turn was shared with Clark and others, and some of the reach is a look borrowed rather than a method continued.
Ancestral Puebloan builders · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
The field is Ancestral Puebloan building of the ninth to twelfth centuries in the Four Corners and the San Juan Basin. The intrinsic force is high: Pueblo Bonito is the fullest and longest built of the canyon great houses and the type of the Chacoan great house, with its planned room blocks of several storeys, core-and-veneer masonry, enclosed plaza, great kivas and cardinal orientation. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the Chacoan system carried great houses with these features across a large region, from Aztec and Salmon in the north to sites far to the south and west, linked by roads, and this house is its central exemplar. After Chaco the region turned to other forms, and beyond its world the house has been a reference more than a model.
Indian builders (Gupta and later) · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
The field is Buddhist and Indian building across Asia from the sixth century. The intrinsic force: the temple fixed the tower temple as the monument of a site of revelation, and gave the Buddhist world a single image of its centre. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it was copied by name, as Mahabodhi or as the vajrasana type, in the Mahabodhi temple at Bagan, Wat Chet Yot at Chiang Mai, the Zhenjue Si at Beijing and the Mahabuddha temple at Patan, and in small models taken home by pilgrims; it set the type of the five-tower vajrasana pagoda in China. Its reach is that of an emblem more than a structural model, and its part in the Hindu tower temple cannot be separated from a common development, which holds it below the top.
Michelozzo · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Intrinsic force: the building fixed the type of the Renaissance city palace, a regular block round an arcaded court, rusticated and storeyed, closed by a classical cornice. Every element had precedent; the reorganisation lay in assembling them into a model clear enough to copy. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: in Florence the type was answered within the century, in the Strozzi palace above all; Alberti’s pilastered Rucellai front was a rival answer to the thing answered; the type passed to Rome; and in the nineteenth century the Florentine palace became the model for clubs, banks, libraries and commercial blocks across Europe and America. Discounted because it founds its line rather than crowning it.
David Fincher · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
Released in 1995, so force and reach are scored together, against the cinema of its decade. Intrinsic force: the film reorganised the serial-killer thriller as a moral design in which the audience’s appetite for the next body is implicated, and set a look, darkness, rain, decay, the murder as tableau, new to the studio mainstream. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it is very wide, the cycle of killer thrillers of the late 1990s; television in its image, from Millennium (1996) to the forensic procedurals of the 2000s; Saw (2004) and its sequels, built on a killer who designs his victims’ punishment; the vogue for the twist ending it shares with The Usual Suspects (1995); and Cooper’s titles, which remade their craft. Much of the reach is in lesser work: imitation is reach, but it is not the field raised.
Almohad builders, under Abd al-Mu'min and Yaqub al-Mansur · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
The field is western Islamic building from the twelfth century on. The intrinsic force is high: with an earlier Almohad mosque, the Koutoubia constitutes the Almohad mosque and fixes its minaret as a complete type, the proportioned square shaft with its ramp, its graded faces, its sebka and its lantern, a reorganisation of the square minaret into a monument. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the Giralda at Seville, begun in 1184, and the dynasty’s great tower at Rabat, begun in the 1190s and left unfinished, follow it directly; the minarets of the Marinids, the Saadians and the Alaouites keep its scheme down to modern Moroccan mosques; and the Giralda, as a cathedral’s bell tower, carried the type into Spanish and colonial building. What holds it: the force is shared with the Córdoban precedent, and the hall’s influence is its type’s.
Steven Spielberg · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
Field: the cinema of the 1990s, so force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force is concentrated but real: the landing reorganised how combat is shown on screen, the camera placed among the men, image and sound made to fail as the senses fail, the war film’s clear geography given up. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the television series Band of Brothers (2001) and The Pacific (2010), produced by Spielberg and Hanks; the look of combat in the war films that followed; and the first-person war game, where Medal of Honor, which Spielberg devised, and the early Call of Duty took its beach and its palette. Within a few years the look was a convention. What holds the figure below the top is that the force is one sequence and one manner; the film’s narrative and moral form redirected nothing.
New Order · Music
8.2 · Tier IV
The field is the post-punk and new-wave album of the early 1980s, and the meeting of the rock band with electronic dance music. The intrinsic force: the record showed that a guitar band could join sequencers and dance rhythm to its own playing and keep its melancholy, rather than becoming a synthesiser act, and in Your Silent Face and Age of Consent it made two templates of that joining. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the fusion of indie rock and dance that ran through the next decade in Britain is commonly traced to this band, and this record is often cited as the point where it found its manner. Much of that reach travels through the singles, which are not on the record.
Can · Music
8.2 · Tier IV
The field is the rock and experimental music of Europe and America around 1970. The intrinsic force is high: the record showed that a rock band could build long works from one held rhythmic pattern and from edited group improvisation, with the drummer’s figure as the composition and the voice as a texture, and it carried the methods of tape music into a band’s working practice. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the West German bands grouped as krautrock are measured against Can, and against this record above all; post-punk took its discipline of bass and drums, Public Image Ltd among others; and the loop-based music of the following decades is often traced to Liebezeit’s playing. Much of that reach is the band’s rather than this record’s alone, it was slow, and it ran among musicians more than the public. It stands below Low at 9.1.
Radiohead · Music
8.2 · Tier IV
The field is the album of the 1990s, the decade of Nevermind, Loveless and the electronic records that reorganised dance and rock. The intrinsic force is a refinement: the record did not reorganise what the rock album could do but perfected an available language, guitar rock of anxious beauty with a rich texture and an exposed male voice. The reach is larger than the force and ran mainly through British rock; the band’s next record carried the turn further, and many who followed took the manner without the risk. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: by wide report, the falsetto ballads and arpeggiated minor-key guitars of British bands through the following decade descend most directly from Fake Plastic Trees, High and Dry and Street Spirit.
Dashiell Hammett · Literature
8.2 · Tier IV
The field is the American novel of its decade, and the detective novel in English. The force: the book showed that the detective story could carry a serious moral argument, and that a prose of surfaces, the objective method it shares with Hemingway, could make a genre plot into a novel. That reorganised what the crime novel could be. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Raymond Chandler took Hammett as his founder and said so in “The Simple Art of Murder” (1944), and Philip Marlowe descends from Spade; Ross Macdonald’s Lew Archer takes his surname from Spade’s partner; the private eye as a man of code in a corrupt city, through Chandler, Macdonald, Spillane and their successors, is Spade’s figure; the deceiving client passed into film noir, which John Huston’s version of 1941 helped found; and the French série noire took the American hard-boiled school as its model. What holds the axis at 8.6 is shared credit: much of the reach belongs also to Red Harvest and the Black Mask school, and what was reorganised was a genre more than the novel at large.
Gerrit Rietveld · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Standing and published since 1924, so force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force is a real reorganisation of the house: space made continuous rather than boxed, the wall made a plane rather than an enclosure, the plan made changeable by those who live in it. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: early and wide among the makers of the modern house in Europe; the planar, open-cornered composition that runs through Mies’s work of the later 1920s, though that line runs through De Stijl as a whole as much as through this house; and the flexible upper floor as a precedent for later small houses and housing. The bounds are plain: the coloured planar house had almost no succession, Rietveld’s own later work moved away from it, and Le Corbusier’s white volume, not the coloured plane, became the period’s idiom.
Woody Allen · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
Field: the cinema of the 1970s. Intrinsic force: the film reorganised the romantic comedy around the failed relationship, the confessional narrator and the intellectual couple, and showed that a mainstream comedy could carry the devices of the art cinema and an unhappy ending and prevail with them. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: four Academy Awards for 1977, Best Picture among them, ahead of Star Wars (7.9); Allen’s own next fifteen years of personal films, which follow from it; Annie’s clothes and her “la-di-da”, which passed into fashion and common speech; and a genre whose grammar it set, though how much of the later relationship comedy and the comedy of direct address descends from it is argued rather than settled. The limit: it did not reorganise cinema at large, as The Godfather (9.0) and Taxi Driver (8.6) did; its force is one genre’s grammar.
Moisei Ginzburg and Ignaty Milinis · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
The field is Soviet housing and the collective dwelling of the twentieth century, and the European housing slab it fed. Intrinsic force is high: the first built statement of the interlocking split-section slab with internal streets, joining cell, corridor and communal service in one system, a real reorganisation of what a block of flats is. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: at home the line was cut off within five years, as Soviet architecture turned to classicism, though the Stroikom cells shaped housing of those years; abroad it reached through Le Corbusier, who knew Ginzburg and the Moscow work, into the Unité d’habitation, whose interlocking section and interior street descend from it, and through the Unité into the slab housing of the postwar decades. That reach is delayed and mediated, and it is discounted.
Victor Horta · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Intrinsic force is high. The house is among the first built works of Art Nouveau architecture, and it is the one that showed the idiom whole, plan, structure and ornament as one, not ornament applied to a conventional box. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Hector Guimard, after meeting Horta in Brussels in 1895, recast the Castel Béranger in the new manner, and through him the entrances of the Paris Métro followed; within a decade the idiom ran through Nancy, Vienna, Glasgow, Riga, Turin and in part Barcelona. Against that, the movement it opened was brief, roughly 1893 to 1910, and was rejected by the modernism that followed. Its lasting reach runs through the freed plan, exposed structure and total design, a lineage diffuse and shared with others.
Walter Pater · Literature
8.1 · Tier IV
The field is English prose and criticism of the nineteenth century, and the poetry and fiction that took their aesthetics from it. The intrinsic force is high: the book reorganised what English criticism could be for, from judgement of the object to the cultivation of the subject, and gave the aesthetic movement its scripture. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Wilde, who in De Profundis named it in substance as a book that had shaped his life, and whose “The Critic as Artist” and The Picture of Dorian Gray are built on its Conclusion; Gerard Manley Hopkins, Pater’s pupil; Yeats; Joyce, whose epiphanies and Stephen Dedalus’s aesthetics descend from the moment and the flame; Virginia Woolf’s moments of being; Wallace Stevens; and in art history the Botticelli revival and the cult of the Mona Lisa. Eliot’s attack in 1930 measures the pressure still felt. The discount: its claims on art history were superseded, and the influence travelled chiefly through one page and one sentence.
Jackson Pollock · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
Field: American and émigré painting in New York in the 1940s. Intrinsic force: a reorganisation of scale and centre. The canvas proved that an abstract or near-abstract picture could hold a wall with no subject, no focal point and no reference outside its own rhythm, and that the mural’s size could be detached from the mural’s purpose; the large canvases of the New York School took up that format. The discount: for most of the decades of influence the canvas was in Iowa, far from the New York circuit, and the reach that followed ran chiefly through the poured paintings; delayed and indirect influence is credited and discounted. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: seen in Guggenheim’s house by the circle that mattered, it was taken by its admirers, Greenberg first among them, as the sign that Pollock was the painter of his generation, and it put him at the centre of the field.
The Stooges · Music
8.1 · Tier IV
The field is rock in its own years, and the contest is with the polished, expanding rock album. The intrinsic force is high: the record showed that the raw intensity of a band playing at full force could be the whole content of an album, and that rock could take free jazz’s abandon without its harmony. That is a real reorganisation of what a rock record could be. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: punk in New York and London, and Detroit’s heirs, drew on the Stooges, and this record’s live sound and its turn to noise were taken up again by hardcore and noise rock; the Damned recorded 1970 as I Feel Alright on their first album in 1977. The reach is delayed, and shared with the band’s first record and with Raw Power.
Massive Attack · Music
8.1 · Tier IV
The field is the British and American album of the turn of the 1990s where hip hop, dance music and soul meet. The intrinsic force is real: the record showed that the sample-built track could carry a whole album of slow, dark, interior music for listening, and that a British crew could speak in its own voice over it; it joined hip hop, dub and soul in one sound, with the strings of the concert hall at its height. Part of that force is shared with Soul II Soul. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the sound the press called trip hop followed directly, in Bristol first, in Portishead’s Dummy (1994) and Tricky’s Maxinquaye (1995), the second by a voice of this record; the slowed, sample-built records of the decade’s middle years, from Mo’ Wax and others, moved its way; and Unfinished Sympathy became a model for strings over a break. The genre was soon a commodity and faded, and the reach outside Britain was narrower.
Harriet Beecher Stowe · Literature
8.1 · Tier IV
The field is the novel in English and its public life. The intrinsic force is less than the reach: the book reorganised what a novel could do in public, not what a novel could do as an art, and the writers who answered it mostly answered against it. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it provoked a genre written to refute it, the anti-Tom novels of 1852 to 1854; it fixed the protest novel as a form later writers had to work inside or against, and Baldwin’s essay names it as the ancestor of Native Son; Ishmael Reed’s Flight to Canada rewrites it; Toni Morrison’s fiction of slavery is in part an answer to its way of telling; and Tolstoy, in What Is Art?, named it among the highest examples of religious art. Reach near the summit, force well below.
Sei Shōnagon · Literature
8.1 · Tier IV
The field: Japanese vernacular prose and poetry of the tenth and early eleventh centuries, with the Chinese letters of the Heian court behind them. The force is high. The book is the founding work of zuihitsu, prose that follows the brush, and with the opening seasons and the lists it gave Japanese prose a form for the judging self that it had not had. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Hōjōki (1212) and above all Tsurezuregusa, which names the Pillow Book, stand in its line; the zuihitsu ran through the Edo period to the modern Japanese essay; and “okashi” became one of the two words by which the Heian aesthetic is described, set against Genji’s “mono no aware”. Held below the top because Genji redirected more, and abroad its reach has been admiration more than redirection.
Ray Charles · Music
8.0 · Tier IV
The field is American popular music of the early 1960s, country and rhythm and blues together. The intrinsic force is real and bounded: the record showed that the line between the two markets could be crossed at their centres, by the leading Black singer of the day, and that a country song could become an urban standard without losing its stance. Its musical means were not new, and that holds the force short; the string sound of Nashville, which belongs to others, is not credited here. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: a best-selling album, number one on the album chart for many weeks; I Can’t Stop Loving You a number one single; a sequel the same year; and country songs made the repertory of soul and pop singers, on a path later records walked from both sides.
Marcel Duchamp · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
Published, so force and reach are scored together, in the field of European and American painting from 1912 to 1915. The intrinsic force is two real reorganisations: time and motion admitted into the Cubist figure, which Balla and Boccioni shared the same year, and the nude refused, which is the canvas’s own. The discount is that the painter’s lasting reorganisation of art came after it, in the readymade and the Large Glass, and much of the reach claimed for this painting belongs to its maker. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: in Paris it was turned away and its influence was modest; in New York, at the Armory Show of 1913, it became the single image of modern art for the American public, mocked, caricatured and remembered, made its painter’s name in America and drew Arensberg and the New York circle to him. Wide and real, and more on the public than on painters.
Robert Capa · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
Published, so intrinsic force and achieved reach are scored together, in the field of European and American photojournalism of the 1930s. Intrinsic force: the image fixed what a war photograph is for, the moment of action and death seen from inside, and fixed the photographer as witness under fire; it is the decisive single case of the turn the small camera made possible. Some of that force is the decade’s, and is discounted. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it made its maker’s name within a year, carried Life’s idea of the war picture, set the measure for combat photography from the Second World War through Vietnam, Capa’s own Normandy frames among it, and made the authenticity of the war photograph a question the field has argued since. Part of the reach is presence as emblem rather than redirection.
Jules Verne · Literature
8.0 · Tier IV
The field is the French novel of the 1860s and 1870s, and with it the adventure and scientific fiction of Europe and America. The intrinsic force is large: with Voyage au centre de la Terre and De la Terre à la Lune, this is the book that made fiction of scientific possibility a major form, and it is the strongest of them, the machine plausible, the voyage an instruction, and a protagonist of real moral weight at its centre. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: H. G. Wells’s scientific romances came after it and against it; Hugo Gernsback’s Amazing Stories reprinted Verne, and the American genre of science fiction named him a founder; the name Nautilus passed to the first nuclear submarine, USS Nautilus, in 1954. Its reach on the literary novel proper is thinner, and that holds the axis short of the top.
Gordon Bunshaft (Skidmore, Owings and Merrill) · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
Field: the American office tower and the commercial building of the mid-twentieth century, and through it the corporate building worldwide. The intrinsic force is real and partly shared: the glass slab and the curtain wall were not Lever’s inventions; its own reorganisation was the joining of a sealed glass tower to a lifted block and a ground given to the public, and the image of the corporation it made. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: among the widest of any building of its decade; imitated at once in New York and in every commercial centre after; the pattern of the curtain-wall headquarters for two decades; a manner the firm carried round the world; a plaza that entered the zoning law. The discount: Seagram, answering it across the avenue, took much of that reach.
Leo Tolstoy · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
The field is Russian prose of the nineteenth century, which the book closes, though it reached print in 1912. The force is high: it remade the Caucasus theme of Russian literature from romance into an anatomy of empire, and showed that the panorama of a whole society, from emperor to a peasant mother, could be held in a short book by placing one chapter at each seat of power. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is reach, narrower and delayed: posthumous, first printed cut, and overshadowed by War and Peace and Anna Karenina, the book redirected less than its force warranted. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it holds a place in the later Russian literature of the Caucasus, it was read anew as a book of the present during the Chechen wars, and its standing among writers in English has risen since Bloom.
Rembrandt van Rijn · Visual art
8.8 · Tier IV
Published; force and reach together, within Dutch and European history painting from the 1660s on. The intrinsic force is a real reorganisation of what a history painting could do: a narrative subject turned into the stillness of an inward event, carried by the handling as much as by gesture, the late manner’s achievement in perhaps its fullest instance. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the canvas was in Saint Petersburg from the eighteenth century and seen by few painters until the nineteenth; the late manner redirected painting chiefly through the nineteenth century’s discovery of it and through the etchings, and that reach belongs to the late work as a whole. This canvas’s own reach lies in devotional and theological culture, as the image of the parable. Delayed and diffuse; at the gate exactly.
Rashtrakuta, under Krishna I · Architecture
8.8 · Tier IV
Some twelve centuries have passed, so force and reach are scored together, in the field of the temple architecture of the Deccan and of India in the eighth century. The intrinsic force is very high: the work is the summit of Indian rock-cut architecture, a reorganisation of what excavation could make, from a room in a cliff to a whole free-standing temple complex. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the method could hardly be repeated; the Jain excavators at Ellora answered it in small, in the cave known as the Chhota Kailasa and in the court shrine of the Indra Sabha; the structural temple went on without it, and rock-cut architecture dwindled after it. A summit, not a turning point: the gate is met at its edge.
Anna Akhmatova · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
The field is Russian poetry of its century, the field of Blok, Mandelstam, Tsvetaeva and Pasternak. The intrinsic force is high: the cycle made the poem of witness, the private lyric voice taking on the mourning of a nation under terror, into a form with its own authority, and showed that the lyric could carry the Terror without becoming propaganda or report. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: delayed, and therefore discounted. The cycle reached its first Russian readers in samizdat and tamizdat from the 1960s and in print at home only in 1987; by then it was the canonical poem of the Terror, read in schools after 1991, and beyond Russia a touchstone for the poetry of witness in many languages, its prose preface quoted again and again. Wide in reception, narrower in formal descendants, and its redirection of what poets wrote is hard to separate from its moral standing; the axis stands at the gate, not above it.
Anonymous · Architecture
8.8 · Tier IV
Force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force is high: the vertical monastery is a real reorganisation of what a Benedictine house can be, and the Merveille stands among the strongest Gothic monastic buildings of its age. Reach in building is narrower than the fame: the Mont founded no type that took its name, and neither Norman Romanesque nor French Gothic turned on it. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the Mont as the head of the sanctuaries of the archangel; the seat of the Order of Saint Michael from its foundation by Louis XI in 1469; and an image of the fortified sacred rock that the West has never stopped drawing, presence more than redirection and credited only in part. Field: Norman and French monastic building, eleventh to thirteenth centuries.
Tintoretto · Visual art
8.8 · Tier IV
Force and reach are scored together, in the field of Venetian painting in the 1560s. The force is a real reorganisation of the large narrative picture: the sacred event as a crowded, simultaneous, dramatically lit field built for immersion, its centre made by light and height rather than by isolation. The discount is that the reach belongs to the painter and to the whole Scuola more than to this one canvas, and that much of what followed in the Baroque came by Caravaggio and the Carracci, not by Tintoretto. The axis reaches its gate and no more. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the San Rocco cycle, with this wall its most famous canvas, as a school for painters who came to Venice; El Greco, there about 1567 to 1570, carrying its light and its crowded verticals into his own work; Rubens, who studied and copied Tintoretto; and Ruskin, who made it the touchstone of Venetian painting for nineteenth-century English criticism.
Joseph Conrad · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
The field is the novel in English of the century’s first decade, and the political novel in Europe. The intrinsic force is high: the book made the invented state, held whole with its history and its economy, a form of the novel, and it set foreign capital at the centre of a novel with a reach no earlier book had. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it is real and named, and narrower than that of Heart of Darkness. Graham Greene’s and V. S. Naipaul’s novels of the post-colonial republic, A Bend in the River among them, work in its line; Juan Gabriel Vásquez’s The Secret History of Costaguana (2007) answers it by name; the Latin American novel of the dictator and the company has been read beside it, though direct debt there is argued rather than shown, and it is credited here only as kinship. Its reach has run through novelists and critics more than through readers at large, and the axis stands exactly at the bar of the Epochal Gate.
Hans Holbein the Younger · Visual art
8.8 · Tier IV
Published, so intrinsic force and achieved reach are scored together, in the field of European portraiture and of painting about point of view. Intrinsic force is high: the panel put two points of view into one picture and made the viewer’s position part of the meaning, more than a century before Las Meninas made the same move another way. The discount is delay: the panel stood in the Dinteville house at Polisy and passed through private hands until 1890, so painters could not answer it as they answered Velázquez. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the best-known image of anamorphosis in the West, a founding case for Baltrušaitis and Lacan, a fixture of the study of Renaissance self-fashioning and of the history of science, and a model for later art about where the viewer stands.
Diego Velázquez · Visual art
8.8 · Tier IV
The field is European painting of the 1650s and the Spanish school, with force and reach scored together. Intrinsic force is high: the canvas reorganises what a mythology can be, a history painting hidden inside a scene of labour, and carries painting toward atmosphere and motion further than any canvas of its decade. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the blurred wheel is cited in histories of the depiction of movement; through the Prado, in the nineteenth century, the canvas entered the education of painters who studied the late manner, Manet among them, though most of that reach belongs to the late manner as a whole, with Las Meninas its main carrier. It moved little in its own century. Delay is credited and discounted. At the gate, not above it.
Herman Melville · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
The field is American prose fiction of the mid-nineteenth century, and the literature of slavery within it. The intrinsic force is high: the tale reorganised what point of view could do in fiction, making a narrator’s blindness, and the reader’s complicity in it, the object of the work; it joined a documentary record to fiction as structure, not as source; and it wrote about slavery without the sentimental or polemical frame every rival used. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: delayed, and then real. The tale was barely noticed in 1855 and 1856 and was lost with Melville’s reputation until the 1920s; since then it has been one of the most taught American short novels, Ralph Ellison set its last exchange as an epigraph to Invisible Man (1952), and Robert Lowell made it a play in The Old Glory (1964). The delay is credited and discounted: the redirection came seventy years late, and much of its pressure falls on criticism rather than on fiction.
Anonymous · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
The field is Old Norse-Icelandic prose of the thirteenth century, the sagas of Icelanders and of kings at their height, and beyond it medieval European narrative, to which the saga was unknown. The intrinsic force is high: the largest and most fully integrated of the family sagas, showing that the form could carry the tragedy of a whole society, its law, its faith and its foreign reach, in one architecture. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: within its language decisive, copied by hand for centuries and become the Icelandic national classic, with Jónas Hallgrímsson’s “Gunnarshólmi” (1838) making Gunnarr’s turning back a figure of the nation; beyond it delayed and narrower, through Dasent’s translation of 1861, in a reach that belongs largely to the sagas as a body.
Piero della Francesca · Visual art
8.8 · Tier IV
Field: Italian painting of the mid-fifteenth century. Published, so force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force is high: a demonstration of the new perspective as a means of meaning rather than of display, and a reorganisation of how a narrative can be composed, with the subject moved off the centre. The discount is reach, narrow and slow in its own field: a small panel long out of wide view redirected little directly, and its early influence cannot be separated from the painter’s perspective as a whole. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: late and large, from the early twentieth century a touchstone for painters of stillness and of constructed space, and for the discipline of art history itself. Delay is credited and discounted, and the figure sits at the gate.
Ming, under the Yongle Emperor · Architecture
8.8 · Tier IV
Force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force is high: the precinct is the summation of the Chinese state altar, the most complete statement the tradition made of the imperial rite in space, and the round hall is a real reorganisation of the timber hall. Reach is limited by the work’s own law: the worship of heaven was the emperor’s alone, so the precinct could not be copied within the empire. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the precinct stood as the model of the imperial rite, and the round hall on its white terrace became the emblem of Beijing. Wide presence is presence, not redirection, and is credited only in part. Field: Ming and Qing ritual and palace architecture.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
Intrinsic force is high. The novel reorganises what the novel of marriage could do: a narrator of scientific detachment, a psychology of desire stated as law, the unspoken adultery made visible in a child. It anticipates the cool, symbolic realism of the later nineteenth century and the psychological novel of the twentieth. The reach is real but narrower than the force: the book did not redirect the European novel as Werther redirected feeling, or as Flaubert would redirect the novel of adultery. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: in German the novel stands at the head of the novel of marriage and adultery, and later German novels of marriage are commonly read against it; Thomas Mann wrote on it; Benjamin made it the occasion of his method; and outside German the phrase “elective affinities” passed into common speech in several languages.
Rainer Maria Rilke · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
The field is German lyric poetry of the twentieth century, and with it the modern European sonnet. The force is high: the sequence showed that the sonnet could carry a modernist metaphysics without irony, and that a strict form could hold a poetics of flux. With the Elegies it completes Rilke’s turn from the seen thing to the inner world. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the reach is wide in readership and translation and narrower in redirecting practice. German poetry after 1945 turned away from the Orphic and the hymnic, and the sequence’s heirs in form are fewer than its admirers. In English its reach runs through translation, and is real: it changed what a sonnet sequence in translation could be asked to do. Force near 9.0 and reach nearer 8.0 meet at 8.5.
Percy Bysshe Shelley · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
The field is English poetry of the early nineteenth century and the European poetic drama after Goethe. The intrinsic force is high: the poem makes a classical myth carry a modern theory of revolution and of mind, and makes the lyric the instrument of a drama of history. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Browning’s early poems, Pauline above all, are steeped in Shelley; Swinburne’s choruses and Hardy’s The Dynasts, with its overworld of Spirits, draw on it; Yeats counted it among his sacred books; and the Victorian socialists, Eleanor Marx and Edward Aveling’s “Shelley’s Socialism” (1888) among them, read it as political scripture. Charged: from Eliot and Leavis onward Shelley’s standing fell, and the poem’s reach in the twentieth century was narrower than that of The Prelude or Keats’s odes. The gate is met at the line and no higher.
Robert Bresson · Film
8.7 · Tier IV
Released in 1966, so force and reach are scored together, against the cinema of its decade. The force: a narrative feature whose centre is an animal that never becomes a character, and a tragedy of the Passion told without an overt religious image, Bresson’s method at its most complete. Much of that force belongs to the earlier films and is discounted. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: wide inside art cinema, and delayed. Much of Bresson’s line, through Schrader and the Dardenne brothers to Haneke and Kelly Reichardt, runs through Pickpocket and is not credited here. What belongs to this film is narrower: Jerzy Skolimowski’s EO (2022), built openly on it, the animal as witness in later art cinema, and Godard’s casting of Anne Wiazemsky the next year. It moved what films could centre more than how films were made.
Béla Tarr · Film
8.7 · Tier IV
Released in 1994, so force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force is high: the film showed that a narrative feature could take the length of a novel and the tempo of lived time, and hold. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: with Tarr’s later films it became the founding object of what critics came to call slow cinema; Gus Van Sant has named Tarr’s influence on Gerry (2002) and the films after it; Lav Diaz’s long films work in its line; László Nemes was Tarr’s assistant before Son of Saul (2015). Beyond festival and cinematheque the reach is small, and what it shares with Tarkovsky, Angelopoulos and Tsai Ming-liang is discounted. It stands at the bar, not above it.
Sophocles · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
The field is Athenian tragedy of the later fifth century, the form at its height and the story already told by Aeschylus. The play made the long endurance of a single suffering figure, held in view, the substance of a tragedy, and made the false report and the delayed recognition a full dramatic structure; Aristotle’s interest in recognition belongs to the same field. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the play is the source most later Electras worked from, through Crébillon (1708) and Voltaire’s Oreste (1750) to Hofmannsthal’s Elektra (1903) and Strauss’s opera on it (1909), Giraudoux’s Électre (1937) and Yourcenar’s (1954), with O’Neill’s Mourning Becomes Electra (1931) drawing on the whole story; and Aulus Gellius records the actor Polus carrying his own son’s ashes in the urn scene. Held at the gate because its force refines the form more than it reorganises it.
Neolithic builders · Architecture
8.7 · Tier IV
The field is the passage tomb tradition of Neolithic Ireland and Atlantic Europe, and the building has stood in view since 1699, so force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force is the tradition at its fullest, with Knowth, and a real reorganisation of what a tomb could do: the dead bound to the year by an engineered aperture. Ancient reach is bounded and largely inferred: the Boyne tombs are the climax of the Irish tradition, which ended within a few centuries, and contact with Orkney, where Maeshowe also takes a midwinter sun, is argued and not proved. That holds the axis at the gate exactly. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the mound drew later monuments round it, the Great Circle among them, and later peoples into its myth; the solstice tomb became the emblem of prehistoric Ireland and a starting point of archaeoastronomy, and its triple spiral a national sign.
Venetian builders · Architecture
8.7 · Tier IV
Force and reach are scored together, in the field of Venice, the lagoon and the Adriatic, and of the Latin West’s relation to Byzantium. The intrinsic force: the church carried the Byzantine domed cross and the mosaic programme into the West at full scale, and made the accreted spoil façade a model of civic splendour. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: in Venice the church set the measure of sacred building for centuries; Codussi’s domed churches at the end of the fifteenth century answer it; the mosaic workshop it trained lasted into modern times; Saint-Front at Périgueux has been tied to it; and through Ruskin it fed the neo-Byzantine revival. The reach is regional.
Giuseppe Verdi · Music
8.7 · Tier IV
Intrinsic force and achieved reach are scored together, and the force is the larger. The work showed that a requiem could be a full dramatic structure in the theatre’s language without losing its rite: no requiem before it had been a single dramatic structure of this kind. It fixed the image of the large concert requiem as an event of terror and consolation. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it became, with Mozart’s, the most performed requiem in concert life, and its Dies irae became the sound of judgement far beyond the concert hall. But the field did not follow it closely. Brahms had already turned the requiem another way in 1868, Fauré turned it inward against this model, the line to Britten’s War Requiem (1962) is shared with others, and Verdi’s own later sacred music went elsewhere.
Albrecht Dürer · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
Shown and known, so force and reach are scored together, in the field of German and Northern painting about 1500. The intrinsic force is high: the panel reorganises what a self-portrait could be, no longer a record or a signature figure in a crowd but an autonomous image of the artist as a subject of the highest seriousness. The frontal Christ schema itself, too sacral to imitate, was not taken up. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the artist’s self-image as a major work travelled with Dürer’s fame north of the Alps, and after 1805 the panel became the emblem of the nineteenth-century cult of Dürer and of the artist as genius, a reach carried by his name as much as by this panel.
Toni Morrison · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
The field is the American novel of the 1970s. The force is high: the book showed that African American vernacular legend, oral history and the supernatural could carry the whole structure of a serious American novel, and that the history of a Black family in the twentieth century could be told as an epic quest. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction in 1977; the standing it gave Morrison, in her own judgment and her readers’; and a line that runs through her own Beloved into later fiction that makes folk myth and the ghost load-bearing in the Black family novel, Gloria Naylor’s Mama Day (1988) and Jesmyn Ward’s Sing, Unburied, Sing (2017) among them, with Colson Whitehead’s literalised metaphor in The Underground Railroad (2016). Held at the bar because much of that reach is shared with Beloved, which carried it further, and because the turn to folk myth was not this book’s alone: Ishmael Reed wrote in the same decade in which Zora Neale Hurston was rediscovered.
Bruce Springsteen · Music
8.6 · Tier IV
The field is the rock and singer-songwriter album of the early 1980s, an age of growing studio gloss. The intrinsic force: the record showed that a major artist’s home recording could be the finished work, that the demo’s rawness was a form, and that a rock star could return to the folk ballad without pastiche. It reorganised the relation between sketch and record more than any part of the music. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the record is commonly credited with legitimising the home-recorded album and with a part in the later lo-fi and Americana traditions; Cash and many others took up its songs. Much of that reach was delayed and diffuse, and it moved more musicians later than in its own decade.
Guarino Guarini · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
Force and reach are scored together, the building standing since 1680. The intrinsic force is high: a reorganisation of what a dome can be, from a shell to a lattice of structure and light, and of what a wall can do, pressed inward toward the centre. The field is the Italian and central European Baroque church. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: in Piedmont Vittone carried the open, layered vaults into a regional school of small centralised churches; through the plates of 1686 and the treatise of 1737 the methods reached the Dientzenhofers in Bohemia and Balthasar Neumann in Franconia, whose interpenetrating vaults owe them much. Rome did not follow, nor France, and much of the reach went through the book.
Ernest Hemingway · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
The field is the American novel of the twentieth century and, through its subject, the literature of the Spanish Civil War in every language. The intrinsic force is an extension, not a reorganisation: the book took the clipped manner of the 1920s and showed it could carry a long novel of history, politics and a single consciousness, and it gave the war of the 1930s its central novel in English, with Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia the nearest rival in prose. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Sam Wood’s film of 1943 with Gary Cooper and Ingrid Bergman, a long line of later war novels with a guerrilla or partisan hero, and Donne’s phrase returned to the language. The film is reach, not force. Force and reach together meet the bar and no more; the book does not reorganise possibility as the early stories did.
Maya · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
The field is Maya and Mesoamerican building of the Terminal Classic and Early Postclassic, Yucatán above all. The intrinsic force: the culminating form of the Maya radial pyramid, fused with a feathered serpent programme that joined the Maya lowlands to central Mexico, fixing the image of Chichen Itza as a centre of that wider world; strong, but a synthesis of elements in hand rather than a reorganisation of what a temple could be. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: real and regional. The Temple of Kukulcan at Mayapan is a smaller version of it, and the Postclassic Yucatec temple took up its serpent columns and radial type in part. The collapse of the Mesoamerican world cut the line; the modern reach, as an emblem of Mexico and of the Maya and a source of the Maya Revival of the 1920s, is presence more than redirection.
Roman Polanski · Film
8.6 · Tier IV
Field: the cinema of the 1970s. The intrinsic force is strong: the film made the detective story a vehicle for the hidden history of a city and for the failure of inquiry itself, in a classical form so complete that it became a standard. It perfected the genre more than it reorganised what film could do. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the period colour noir that followed at once, Farewell, My Lovely (1975), and the neo-noir line after it, Body Heat (1981), L.A. Confidential (1997) and Inherent Vice (2014); Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988), built on its plot of a city’s transit and land; a sequel; a screenplay taught in the schools; and a last line in common speech. The reach lies largely within its genre and its craft.
Luis Buñuel · Film
8.6 · Tier IV
Released in 1972, so force and reach are scored together. The force is in the form: the film showed that a feature could be built of frustrated narrative and unsignalled dreams and still play as comedy to a wide audience, a real expansion of what a commercial art film could do. Its means were the surrealists’ and Buñuel’s own, and it consolidated more than it reorganised. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film in 1973 and its commercial success carried late surrealism further than any film before it; the title passed into the language as a phrase; and the later comedy of the dining rich, Östlund’s among it, stands in its line. Direct debts are diffuse, and it did not redirect a medium.
Jacques Tati · Film
8.6 · Tier IV
Released in 1967, so force and reach are scored together, and here they part. The field is the cinema of the 1960s. The intrinsic force is among the highest of that decade: a reorganisation of what film comedy and the wide frame could do, the gag made democratic and spatial, the viewer made the editor. Reach was delayed and narrow at first: the film failed in its own year, was cut, was seen in 35mm and mono for decades, and reached its standing only after the restoration. Delayed influence is credited and discounted. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Roy Andersson’s tableau comedies, Elia Suleiman’s deadpan, Otar Iosseliani’s films, and Sylvain Chomet’s The Illusionist (2010), made from a Tati script. Force stands near the top and reach well below it; the figure sits between them.
José Saramago · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
The field is the novel in Portuguese and, beyond it, the late twentieth-century novel in translation. The force is limited: the book did not reorganise the possibilities of the novel, since its means were Saramago’s already and its allegorical form had been Camus’s. What it did was show that the philosophical fable could still hold a large readership at the end of the century, in a manner that refused realism’s names and dates. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the most widely read of Saramago’s books, followed three years later by the Nobel Prize; translated into many languages, filmed by Fernando Meirelles in 2008, staged and taught; a template for the novel of contagion and collapse that has recurred since; and a world readership for Portuguese fiction it had not held since Pessoa. Reach is the larger part, and it is a reach of reading more than a redirection of how novels are written.
R.E.M. · Music
8.6 · Tier IV
The contest is with the rock of 1992, loud, young and angry, and with the band’s own jangle. The force is real: an alternative band at mass scale made a quiet, adult record about death and showed that rock’s new audience would take one, which widened what the form could carry at that size. Held from the top: the means were the singer-songwriter’s and the band’s previous record’s, and little changed in how music was made. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: number one in Britain, six singles and sales in the millions; Everybody Hurts became a public standard of consolation; and the reflective, string-lined album by a rock band at its height became a model, though its line of descent is asserted more than documented.
W. G. Sebald · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
The field is German-language fiction of its decade and, as the book was received chiefly in English, European fiction. The force: the book showed that a novel could carry the Holocaust by indirection, through architecture, documents and the failure of memory, and that the essay, the photograph and the novel could be one form. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it is the best known of Sebald’s books; “Sebaldian” entered English critical vocabulary; and the photo-text novel and the walking, digressive narrator of memory are visible in the fiction written after him. Held lower because the reach is largely the reach of Sebald’s whole manner, made before this book, and because twenty-five years is too short to know whether the redirection holds.
The masons under Ismaila Traoré · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
Force and reach are scored together, in the field of the earthen architecture of the western Sahel and of the mosque in West Africa. The intrinsic force is that of the tradition’s monument, the largest and most complete statement of the middle Niger’s mosque: a synthesis carried to its limit, not a reorganisation of possibility. Reach stands above force, though part of it runs through a colonial style rather than through the guild, and the field’s older mosques had set the type. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the building became the type of the style called Sudanese; the colonial administration took it as the model for public buildings across its territories; and it is the one image of African earthen building known everywhere, the reference for the revival of building in earth.
Stanisław Lem · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
The field is the novel of its language and its decade in Europe, and with it science fiction in every language. The intrinsic force is high: the book reorganised what the novel of the alien could be, from the alien as enemy or teacher to the alien as the limit of knowledge, an object against which human science and human love are tested and found to be human; and it showed that science fiction could carry the weight of the philosophical novel without leaving its genre. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: within science fiction it is the type of the unknowable other, the book later novels of the alien are measured against; it was made a Soviet television film (1968), filmed by Tarkovsky (1972) and by Soderbergh (2002), and made an opera by Detlev Glanert (2012). Held at the gate rather than above it because its reach outside science fiction runs more through Tarkovsky’s film than through the novel, and its redirection of the novel at large is slighter than of its genre.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
The field is German poetry of the early nineteenth century, and with it European poetry’s relation to the literatures of the East. The intrinsic force is a reorganisation of possibility: a lyric book made as a dialogue with a foreign classic, and the practice from which Goethe’s idea of world literature grew, the word he would use in 1827. Held at the gate because the reach is narrower than that of Faust or Werther, and in German poetry the main line ran through Romanticism and Heine. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the German lyric of the East in the next generation, Rückert’s ghazals and versions and Platen’s ghazals; a vogue that ran down into second-hand orientalism; Schubert’s two Suleika songs, Schumann’s settings and Hugo Wolf’s Divan songs; and Iqbal’s answer from Lahore, Payam-i-Mashriq (1923).
Zora Neale Hurston · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
The intrinsic force is large: the book showed that a Black woman’s interior life, in her own idiom, could be the whole matter of a serious novel, and it made the vernacular an instrument of narration rather than a quoted specimen. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Alice Walker’s essay “In Search of Zora Neale Hurston” (Ms., 1975) and her novel The Color Purple (1982) take Hurston as their ancestor; the book is the founding text of the recovery that made a Black women’s literary tradition a field of study, and it reorganised the canon of the Harlem Renaissance around itself. Held at the bar because that reach was delayed by nearly forty years: in its own decade the book moved little, and Wright’s line of protest fiction prevailed.
Werner Herzog · Film
8.5 · Tier IV
Released in 1972, so force and reach are scored together, against a cinema of the 1970s crowded at the top. The intrinsic force is a reorganisation of what an epic could be made with: grandeur won by exposure to an actual place and actual danger rather than by construction, and a historical film played as hallucination. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it was the international breakthrough of its director and, with Fassbinder and Wenders, of the new German cinema abroad; it began the partnership of Herzog and Kinski; the river journey to a madman returns at far greater scale in Apocalypse Now (1979), and Herzog’s own Fitzcarraldo (1982) answers it. Held at the bar: the reach ran through a few large successors more than through a change in common practice.
Anselm Kiefer · Visual art
8.5 · Tier IV
Published, so intrinsic force and achieved reach are scored together, in the field of European and American painting of the early 1980s, the years of the return to history. Intrinsic force: it showed that painting could take up the destruction of the Jews not by depicting it but through matter, architecture and a borrowed line of poetry, and that a German painter could do so through the forms of the perpetrators; with Innenraum it is the fullest statement of that possibility. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the painting of history in charred matter at the scale of architecture, the memorial thinking of the following decades, and the international standing of German painting, carried in America by Kiefer’s retrospective of 1987 to 1988. Discounted because the reach belongs to his work of 1981 to 1983 as a whole, and for the short span.
Robert Louis Stevenson · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
The field is the prose fiction of nineteenth-century English. The intrinsic force is moderate to high: the book did not reorganise the novel, but it made the double the property of the modern popular imagination and gave psychology a name before psychology had one. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890) takes up the respectable face and the secret life; the scientist who transgresses becomes a line in later science fiction and horror; the split self of the horror film runs from the silent versions through Rouben Mamoulian’s film of 1931 and after; the later literary double in English, Conrad’s “The Secret Sharer” (1910) among it, stands in the line, though no direct debt can be stated; and the title is used in English of anyone with two natures. Delayed and diffuse reach is credited and discounted. What holds the axis at the bar is that much of the reach is presence in the culture rather than redirection of literature.
Anonymous · Visual art
8.5 · Tier IV
Force and reach are scored together. The force is very high: the cave shows that drawing with modelling, recession, motion and composition existed in Europe about 36,000 years ago, at the start of the record, and that reorganised the account of what early art could be. Reach is the difficulty. In its own field and age none can be shown: no line runs from these walls to Lascaux or Altamira, and the later visitors left marks, not answers. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: since 1994 the cave broke Leroi-Gourhan’s chronology of art advancing by stages, shaped the shamanic theory of Clottes and Lewis-Williams, published in 1996, is the subject of Herzog’s Cave of Forgotten Dreams (2010), and set the model of the full facsimile at Pont d’Arc. On image-makers since, the reach is thin.
Bertolt Brecht · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
The field is the drama of the twentieth century in German and in Europe. The force: the play made the history play an instrument of argument about the present, made science a subject for the serious stage, and set the moral frame in which the story of the scientists and the bomb has since been told. Held where it is because Brecht’s reorganisation of the theatre is carried more by the epic plays and by his theory than by this one, the most traditional of his major works, and its reach outruns its force a little. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it is among the most produced of Brecht’s plays in German and in English, in Laughton’s version of 1947, in the Berliner Ensemble’s staging of 1957, in Joseph Losey’s film of 1975, and in translations by Howard Brenton and David Hare for the London stage.
Frank Lloyd Wright · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Published since 1908 and in the Wasmuth portfolio of 1910, so force and reach are scored together. The field is American and European building of the century’s first decade, and church building in particular. The intrinsic force is a real reorganisation of possibility: interior space treated as the material of architecture, the building composed of interlocking volumes, the service structure housed in hollow piers, monolithic concrete made a finished architecture. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: through the Wasmuth publication it reached the Dutch and German avant-gardes, Robert van ’t Hoff’s concrete villa at Huis ter Heide (1915 to 1919) its clearest answer, though the line runs through the portfolio of a whole decade as much as through this building; in America it shaped Wright’s later public work and, at length, Kahn. In church building it found few direct followers.
Billy Wilder · Film
8.5 · Tier IV
The field is the cinema of the 1940s and 1950s. Intrinsic force: the film turned the studio’s self-portrait from celebration or cautionary romance into gothic and autopsy, carried the noir confession into the voice of a dead man, and made the industry’s own past a subject of horror. That is a real reorganisation of what Hollywood could say about itself, though the grammar it used was classical. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the Hollywood picture about Hollywood after it, The Bad and the Beautiful (1952) among them; the ageing-star gothic of What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962) and its cycle; Wilder’s own Fedora (1978); a stage musical by Andrew Lloyd Webber (1993); lines in common speech. The force and the reach meet the bar together, and do not pass it.
Tadao Ando · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
The field is Japanese architecture of the 1980s and the modern sacred building worldwide. Intrinsic force: a real reorganisation of what a church can be made of, a dark box and one cut, with the sign of the faith made by structure as absence. The force is held down because it is a synthesis: Le Corbusier’s and Kahn’s concrete and light and the Japanese tradition of shadow had made most of the moves, and this building carried them to their purest form. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it became the emblem of Ando’s architecture as the Pritzker Prize of 1995 and a global practice followed; its cross of light has been answered or copied in chapels in Japan, Korea, China and the West; and exposed concrete with light as its only ornament became an international idiom of the 1990s, though that line runs through the architect’s whole work.
Gerhard Richter · Visual art
8.5 · Tier IV
Published, so intrinsic force and achieved reach are scored together, in the field of European and American painting of the late 1980s. Intrinsic force: the cycle showed that painting could take up a recent political trauma, from its media images, without heroics or allegory, and made the grey history picture painted from photographs a serious form for the end of the century; inside German painting it was the decisive answer to the mythic history painting of the same decade. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the grey, blurred painting of history and violence from photographs in the 1990s and 2000s descends from Richter’s method, of which this cycle is the fullest statement on history, and the cycle entered literature through DeLillo. Discounted because that reach is hard to separate from his photo-painting as a whole, and for the short span.
Kendrick Lamar · Music
8.5 · Tier IV
The field is hip hop and the popular album of the 2010s. The intrinsic force is the larger part: the record showed that a major-label rap album could be built with a jazz band, a structural poem and free passages, could carry the history of Black American music as its sound, and still be widely heard. What holds it at the bar is that in eleven years the main course of rap did not follow its method, and that part of its reach is its maker’s later career. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Alright became a chant of the protests against police killings that followed, sung in the street, and the Los Angeles jazz players of the record, Kamasi Washington and Thundercat above all, reached a wide audience in its wake, though their own work shares that credit.
Terrence Malick · Film
8.5 · Tier IV
Released in 1978, so force and reach are scored together. The force: the film reorganised what a narrative film could make of light, landscape and voice, and showed that a studio picture could carry its story almost wholly by image, season and an oblique narration. The discount: much of the later reach passed through The Thin Red Line and The Tree of Life, which made the manner famous, and in its own decade the film was respected more than followed. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Almendros’s natural and twilight photography became a standard reference in the teaching of cinematography, and the elliptical voice-over over landscape became a manner, in David Gordon Green’s George Washington (2000), Andrew Dominik’s The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007) and David Lowery’s Ain’t Them Bodies Saints (2013), and far beyond film, in advertising.
Bernardo Bertolucci · Film
8.5 · Tier IV
The field is the cinema of the 1970s, which it opens. The intrinsic force is high. It showed that the art film could take the political past in the full means of spectacle, with design, colour and light as the vehicle of thought; that the historical film could be told through a mind’s disordered memory; and that a filmmaker of the Godard generation could return to classical form without losing his modernity. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: wide among makers, and long. Storaro’s light carried on to Apocalypse Now (1979) and much else, Scarfiotti’s design to Scarface (1983), and Bertolucci’s own Last Tango in Paris and 1900 follow from it. Held at the bar because the reach lay in style and craft more than in what films set out to know, and it reached the public less than it reached its makers.
Pierre Chareau and Bernard Bijvoet · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
The intrinsic force is high: a real reorganisation of possibility, the industrial component made into a craft vocabulary, structure and services left frankly visible, the dwelling conceived as a kit of moving parts within a frame, the envelope as a luminous membrane. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: delayed, then real. From the 1930s to the 1950s the house had little consequence; its field, French and European domestic modernism, was led by Le Corbusier and the white villa. From the 1960s, through the critics and architects who rediscovered it, it became a source for the British high-tech generation and its successors, for the translucent wall, and for the expressed joint and the house as instrument. Delayed influence is credited and discounted, and the joint figure stands at the bar.
Talk Talk · Music
8.5 · Tier IV
The field is the album of the 1990s. The intrinsic force is high: the record is a full reorganisation of what a rock group’s album could be, improvisation edited into composition, silence used as structure, the band turned into something nearer a chamber ensemble playing in a church. It pressed further than its predecessor and left the song nothing to stand on. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the record and its predecessor are reported to stand at the founding of what was called post-rock in the following years, and later records, Kid A among them, placed the same bet. The reach was delayed, ran through musicians and critics rather than the public, and is shared with Spirit of Eden; delayed influence is credited and discounted.
Johann Sebastian Bach · Music
8.5 · Tier IV
The intrinsic force is high: the set reorganises what one bass instrument can be, proving it able to carry harmony, counterpoint and a whole suite alone. The reach came late. In its own century the field did not move: the suites circulated in copies, and solo writing for the cello did not follow their model. Delayed influence is credited and discounted, as the rubric directs, and the reach is the work’s own, made audible by a performer. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: after 1900 Pablo Casals made the set the foundation of the solo cello repertoire, and it has stood there since. The field is music for strings alone, and force and reach together stand at the gate.
Nirvana · Music
8.5 · Tier IV
The field is the rock album of the 1990s, and the border between the underground and the mass market. The intrinsic force is real: the largest band in its field delivered an abrasive, unvarnished album to a major label and kept its public, and set a standard of recorded rawness, drums in their room and voice undoctored, against the polished alternative rock that came after Nevermind. Much of the band’s redirection of the field belongs to that record, not to this one, and none of it is counted here. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the record reached the top of the American chart, its singles stayed in broadcast, and it became a model for bands meeting a large audience on underground terms, with Albini’s methods carried into the major-label world after it.
Ovid · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
The field is Latin poetry of the Augustan age and the elegiac tradition it closed. The intrinsic force: the book founds a kind, the poetry of exile in the first person, in which the poet’s displacement and his language are the subject; nothing in Greek or Latin before it does this at length. In Book 2 it makes the first extended defence of a poet against the state in Roman verse. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the later Latin exile poems, the medieval reading of the exiled Ovid, Du Bellay’s Regrets, Pushkin’s verses to Ovid, Mandelstam’s Tristia (1922), which takes the title, and Brodsky, Malouf’s An Imaginary Life and Ransmayr’s Die letzte Welt. Much of the reach runs through the legend of Ovid at Tomis rather than the text, and is credited at a discount.
Frida Kahlo · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
Shown since 1940, so force and reach are scored together, and the field is the painting of Mexico, and the painting near Surrealism, at the end of the 1930s. The intrinsic force: it made the self-portrait a place for a woman’s interior, her body and her inheritance, at a scale and with an anatomical literalness that painting had not given that subject, and it did so outside both muralism and Paris Surrealism, which claimed her and which she refused. It redirected little in its own decade. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: delayed some thirty years and belonging largely to her work as a whole, with this canvas as its emblem, it runs through Chicana art of the 1970s and after, feminist and autobiographical art of the body, the identity-based painting and photography of the 1980s and 1990s, and the double self-portrait as a type. Delay is credited and discounted; much of the reach is a persona’s and a face’s, and fame is not influence.
Egyptian (Early Dynastic) · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
The field is the art of the Nile valley at the turn from the Predynastic to the First Dynasty. The intrinsic force is high: the object assembles at one stroke, and at full clarity, most of the conventions Egyptian two-dimensional art would keep for three thousand years: register and ground line, hierarchic scale, the composite figure, image and hieroglyph integrated, and the smiting king. Here the axis discounts. The palette was buried in a temple deposit, and in antiquity it was one instance of a shared state art, not a model copied; it did not redirect the field by being seen. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the smiting pose repeated on temple pylons into the Roman period, carried by the convention and not by this stone; and a modern reach that is very wide, as the image by which the beginning of the Egyptian state is taught.
J. G. Ballard · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
The field is fiction in English of the 1970s. The intrinsic force is a real reorganisation: the book showed that the novel of the near future could be written without a future, that pornography could be a vehicle of social analysis rather than a genre, and that the technological landscape could be the subject of the novel’s interior life. Held at the bar rather than above it because much of the reach runs through Ballard’s whole work rather than this book, and is concentrated in subculture and theory: the general field of English fiction did not turn. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: David Cronenberg’s film of 1996 and its Special Jury Prize at Cannes; Baudrillard’s essay, which made the novel a text of theory; a line into cyberpunk and the fiction of the body and the machine; and the adjective “Ballardian”.
Parmigianino · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
The field is Italian painting of the 1530s and 1540s, in Emilia and beyond. The intrinsic force is high: the picture is the most concentrated statement of the maniera as an ideal, elongation, artifice and spatial paradox made the programme of a sacred image, and it reorganises what an altarpiece could be asked to do. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Bedoli in Parma; the elongated canon of the School of Fontainebleau, through Primaticcio and Niccolò dell’Abate; the courtly elegance of Bronzino’s generation; and the single image by which the period is named in every account of Mannerism. Discounted because much of the reach passed through the painter’s manner, drawings and prints rather than this panel, and because demands for clarity curbed the line after 1560.
Matthias of Arras and Peter Parler; completed by later hands · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force: Parler’s choir constitutes a real reorganisation of Gothic possibility in Central Europe, the vault a continuous net over the whole vessel rather than a sequence of bays, the rib freed from structure into figure, sculpture turned to portraiture. Held at the gate rather than above it, because English vaulting had gone first and the completion moved nothing. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the lodge carried the manner across the region, in Parler’s own choir at Kolín and in the work of the family and their circle elsewhere; the net and star vaults of late Gothic Bohemia, Austria, Saxony and Poland descend from it, through Benedikt Ried to Annaberg; and the Beautiful Style in sculpture owes the lodge much.
Hou Hsiao-hsien · Film
8.4 · Tier IV
Field: the cinema of the 1980s. The force is a demonstration that a national trauma could be told without spectacle, by the fixed observation of a family, with the event withheld and the languages carrying the politics: a real reorganisation of how cinema can hold history, set against both the epic and the docudrama. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the first Golden Lion for a film from Taiwan; a domestic success for an art film, which opened public discussion of 1947 on the island; and a long-take historiography that passed into the work of later Chinese-language directors and the international art cinema of the 1990s. That last line is diffuse rather than named, and it holds the axis at the bar of the Epochal Gate, not above it.
Charles Barry and Augustus Pugin · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force: the building made Gothic a style of the modern state and of secular public building at the largest scale, carried an exact Perpendicular from the church to the nation, and fixed the clock tower as a civic emblem. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: its reach runs through the Gothic town halls of Victorian Britain; through parliament buildings that answered it, at Ottawa, by Fuller and Jones from 1859, and at Budapest, by Steindl from 1885 to 1904; and through the clock towers of the empire and beyond. It is bounded: the High Victorian Gothic that followed left the Perpendicular for Italian and French models, the Battle of the Styles was lost at the Foreign Office, and most legislatures of the century built domed classical capitols. In its own century’s Revival it is the summit and the emblem more than the turning point.
Japanese, under Emperor Shōmu · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
The field is Japanese Buddhist building and image-making, and the East Asian tradition behind it, from the eighth century on. The intrinsic force is the consummation of the Nara state’s Buddhism: a temple made the religious centre of a realm laid out as a network, with the largest hall and cast figure of its age. What holds the axis at the bar is that the scale itself was never attempted again, so the work stood as a summit rather than a model copied, and that Chōgen’s system, taken whole, barely outlived him. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the temple’s weight in Nara is part of why the court left the city in 784; the colossus was answered by the Great Buddha of Kamakura in the thirteenth century and by Hideyoshi’s at Hōkō-ji in Kyoto, since lost; and the Daibutsuyō entered the Japanese vocabulary, absorbed into the mixed styles that followed.
Talking Heads · Music
8.4 · Tier IV
The field is the art-rock and new-wave album of its years, and the rock band’s relation to African music and the dance floor. The intrinsic force is the larger part: the record showed that a rock band could build tracks from layered, repeating rhythms rather than write songs, with the words set inside the music, a way of making that later pop made common, here done by hand. It is held at the bar because part of the force was shared with Fela and Eno’s own collage, and its public reach was narrower than its reach among musicians. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the record is commonly credited with shaping the art-funk and dance-rock that followed and with opening the path of the rock album built on African sources, and Once in a Lifetime became a standard.
Otto Wagner · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Scored in the field of Central European building of the early twentieth century. The intrinsic force is high: this is one of a handful of buildings in which the problem of a modern architecture, frame, skin, glass, a new metal and a public building without historical dress, was solved in built form before 1914, alongside Behrens’s turbine hall and a few others, and in its hall it is as complete as any of them. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: real and documented in its own region, through the circle and pupils of Wagner’s school, among them Plečnik, Kotěra, Hoffmann and Olbrich, in Vienna, Prague and Ljubljana, and through the histories, which placed it among the pioneer works. Its reach to the movement after 1918 was indirect; that generation learned chiefly from Germany, Holland and Paris.
Unknown court painters (Heian period) · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
The field is Japanese painting of the twelfth century and the narrative handscroll in East Asia. The intrinsic force: the earliest surviving monument of Japanese narrative painting, and the fullest statement of the court style of illustrated narrative, the native manner seen complete in technique, in viewpoint and in its treatment of figure and feeling. The discount: the precursors are lost, so how much is reorganisation and how much the best survivor of a practice cannot be known. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the scrolls were held privately for centuries, so their reach ran largely through the tradition they stand for, which by way of Tosa painting, the Genji albums and screens and the Rinpa painters governed how Japanese painting showed the court for seven centuries; in the modern period they became the emblem of Heian art.
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Seen and published since 1930, so force and reach are scored together, in the field of the European and then the international modern house. The intrinsic force: the house showed that the free plan could be lived at full domestic scale, and that modernism could be luxurious as well as austere, its materials precious and its craft exact; it is the summation of Mies’s European work. Held at the bar because much of the reach runs through the Pavilion and through Mies’s name, and the house itself was nearly invisible behind the Iron Curtain for forty years. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: real and partly delayed. The house was published at once and shown in the Museum of Modern Art’s exhibition of 1932; the Brno and Tugendhat chairs passed into production; and the open living room behind a glass wall became the type of the postwar modern house, through Mies’s own later work, through Philip Johnson’s Glass House and through the American modern house.
Robert Maillart · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Standing ninety-six years, it is scored on intrinsic force and reach together, in the field of the concrete bridge of the twentieth century. The intrinsic force is high: a reorganisation of what a concrete bridge can be, the arch read from its forces and freed from imitation of stone, and the mature statement of a system that changed reinforced-concrete design. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it came late and through history and teaching, through Giedion and through Billington’s teaching in America, and it is of the principle more than the form. The three-hinged hollow box as such was little copied; what spread was the principle that structure is the art. Within its field it is a work the story cannot be told without. The delayed reach is credited and discounted, and the axis meets the bar at the line.
Interpol · Music
8.4 · Tier IV
The field is the rock album of its decade. The intrinsic force is a restoration made present: the record showed that the dark, slow post-punk of the early 1980s could be played in the 2000s as a living language rather than as revival, and that an independent band could hold long, slow songs as a first record. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the record is placed high whenever its decade is counted and is still heard whole by listeners of its kind. It is commonly placed among the New York records that opened the decade’s guitar revival, and credited with the darker post-punk revival that followed in Britain and America; that reach is reported, not verified here, and by the same report ran among listeners of one kind more than the wide public. What holds it is that the force was a restoration, and reorganised little.
Rembrandt van Rijn · Visual art
8.3 · Tier IV
The field is Dutch portrait painting of the 1630s, and force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force: the canvas reorganised the group portrait, the commission type on which much of Dutch painting lived, from a register of faces into a scene of unified action, and made the corpse and the act of knowing its subject. That is a reorganisation within a genre, not of painting as a whole, and The Night Watch carried the turn further. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it made Rembrandt’s name in Amsterdam and brought the portrait commissions of the following decade; in his own work it leads to The Night Watch and the Syndics; anatomy and clinic pictures answer it into the nineteenth century, Eakins’s Gross Clinic above all; and it became the image of the early modern anatomy in histories of medicine.
Philip Roth · Literature
8.3 · Tier IV
The field is American fiction of the 1960s. The intrinsic force is large: the book showed that the obscene comic monologue could be a serious novel, that sexual frankness could be the vehicle of moral comedy rather than its scandal, and that a community’s idiom could be turned on itself from inside without apology. It changed what a mainstream American novel could say aloud. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it was the publishing event of 1969, a bestseller and a public quarrel at once; it fixed the Jewish mother and the guilt-ridden son as types in American comedy, film and television; the comic confessional novel of appetite and ethnic guilt that followed writes in its light; and it shaped Roth’s own career, which spent decades answering it. Held at the bar and not above it because its reach runs more through a voice and a type than through a method others took up as a form.
Hayao Miyazaki · Film
8.3 · Tier IV
Field: the cinema of the 1980s. Intrinsic force is real: the film showed that a drawn feature could hold ordinary time, an unnamed illness and a child’s attention without plot machinery, and could make a creature whose meaning lies wholly in his presence. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the film defined Studio Ghibli, whose emblem Totoro became, and through Ghibli much of what Japanese and then world animation took as its serious mode; animators at Pixar have named it a touchstone, and Totoro appears as a tribute in Toy Story 3 (2010). The limit stands: its pressure on live-action cinema was indirect, and its influence on children’s films outside animation, though real, is harder to trace. It meets the bar and does not pass it.
Giuseppe Terragni · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
The intrinsic force is high: a real reorganisation of possibility within its field. It showed that the modern frame could carry the gravity, proportion and civic presence of the Italian palazzo without ornament, and that a front could be composed as a layered field of frame and plane in depth rather than a skin round a box. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: strong within architecture, narrower beyond. It is the canonical building of Italian Rationalism and a fixed point of the century’s teaching; the postwar Italian return to type and the city, in Aldo Rossi and the Tendenza, and the American formalism of the 1960s and 1970s, in Eisenman and the New York Five, both took it as a source. But its reach was delayed and filtered by its politics, and it did not change how ordinary buildings are made.
Nick Drake · Music
8.3 · Tier IV
The field is the singer-songwriter and folk album of the early 1970s. The intrinsic force is real if contained: the record did not reorganise what an album could do, but it showed how far a record could be stripped and still hold, and how the guitar could be a second voice rather than a support. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: at release it moved almost no one, and the rubric discounts delayed influence as it credits it; from the 1990s it became a model for the quiet, solo, close-recorded record, and later lines of intimate song are measured against it. That reach is wide and late, and the rediscovery that carried it was wide as well. Part of it is shared with Drake’s work as a whole and with the story of his life, and that part is discounted with the delay. What remains is this record’s own, and it brings the figure to the gate and no higher.
Michelangelo Antonioni · Film
8.3 · Tier IV
Released in 1966, so force and reach are scored together. The field is the cinema of the 1960s, crowded with Godard, Bergman, Fellini and Antonioni’s own trilogy. The force: a thriller made about the medium’s own means, the photograph, its enlargement and the act of looking, and art cinema’s open ending carried into a popular release. It transposed and perfected more than it invented, since L’Avventura had already let a film refuse its plot. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the Grand Prix at Cannes and a box-office success; a release without the Code seal, one of the events of the Code’s collapse before the ratings of 1968; a direct line to The Conversation (1974) and Blow Out (1981); and an image of Swinging London that has stood for the decade since. Together they reach the bar, narrowly.
Sergio Leone · Film
8.3 · Tier IV
Released in 1966, so force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force is that the film carried the Italian western from a successful formula to an epic form with history in it, made the extended standoff timed to music a unit of film grammar, and made the score a lead instrument rather than a support. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the three-way standoff is a set form named and quoted across action cinema since, from Hong Kong to Tarantino; the main theme and “The Ecstasy of Gold” passed into general culture; the revisionist American western, Peckinpah’s and Eastwood’s own, drew on its cynicism and stretched violence. The reach is shared with the two films before it, and the film reorganised a genre and its techniques rather than what cinema could say. It meets the gate exactly.
Wes Anderson · Film
8.3 · Tier IV
The field is the cinema of the 2000s, so force and reach are scored together. Intrinsic force: the film fixed a complete style, the composed frontal tableau, the chaptered book, the chosen pop soundtrack, the ensemble of depressed prodigies, and showed that such a style could carry a large studio cast and real grief at once; less a reorganisation of what film could do than the maturing of a manner into a mode. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it is wide and demonstrable. The film is named as the template of the American comedy of melancholy eccentrics that followed, its look passed into advertising, fashion and design, and the style it first stated in full remains a recognised term in criticism and popular culture. The limit: much of what was taken was decor and tone.
Bill Evans Trio · Music
8.3 · Tier IV
The intrinsic force is a real reorganisation of the small group’s internal law: the piano trio as three soloists who accompany one another, heard most fully here, in public, at its height. The credit is discounted three ways: the reach belongs to the trio and its four records together, not to this album alone; Waltz for Debby, from the same day, is the more heard of the two; and jazz in 1961 was moved harder by Coleman and Coltrane. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the modern piano trio descends from it, in Keith Jarrett’s Standards trio, the trios of Herbie Hancock and Chick Corea in their way, Paul Bley’s and Brad Mehldau’s and most since; bassists after LaFaro, Eddie Gomez and a generation of players, took his freedom as given; and Paul Motian’s coloured time became a school.
Arvo Pärt · Music
8.3 · Tier IV
The intrinsic force is real: tintinnabuli reorganised what a concert work could be made of, two triads and a scale, voice set against voice by rule, silence as structure. But the force belongs to the method and its years, and this work’s share is one of several; Fratres and Cantus in Memory of Benjamin Britten carry as much. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the reach is wide and documented. The ECM album that carries this work’s name opened the label’s New Series in 1984, and a catalogue of new sacred and still music grew from it. What critics called holy minimalism, with Górecki and Tavener, whose turns were parallel and not derived, entered the concert hall and the cinema, and Silentium became a stock of film and dance.
The White Stripes · Music
8.3 · Tier IV
The field is the rock album of the early 2000s. The intrinsic force is real: the record showed that a two-piece blues band, with no bass guitar and no gloss, could make a mass rock record in the digital years, and it made restriction a public value. Its materials were old, and its reorganisation is of scale more than of possibility. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the record stands among the central records of the garage revival of its years, with the band’s own White Blood Cells and The Strokes’ Is This It (2001) before it, and the riff of Seven Nation Army passed out of rock into the stadium, where crowds have sung it for two decades.
Miguel de Cervantes · Literature
8.2 · Tier IV
The field is Spanish prose fiction of the early seventeenth century and, through it, European short fiction. The intrinsic force: the book founded the original novella in Castilian, as it claimed, and showed that the short tale could carry social observation and a theory of its own making, not only an anecdote or an erotic trick; in the Coloquio a narrative form criticises itself in the act of narration. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the century’s vogue for the novella in Spain, with Lope de Vega’s Novelas a Marcia Leonarda and María de Zayas in its wake; Middleton and Rowley’s The Spanish Gypsy (1623) and plays by Fletcher and his collaborators; Hoffmann’s sequel for Berganza (1814); Preciosa made a play with Weber’s music; the young Freud and Silberstein writing as the two dogs. Held below the top because the long novel redirected more, and wider.
F. W. Murnau · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
Released in 1922, so force and reach are scored together, in the cinema of the 1920s, the decade of Caligari, Battleship Potemkin, Metropolis and The Passion of Joan of Arc. The intrinsic force: it put the supernatural into the real world of the camera, made a horror film from landscape, nature and plague, and founded the vampire film. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: death by sunlight, which is not in Stoker, became the vampire’s law in the century’s fiction; Orlok’s image recurs in Salem’s Lot (1979) and much since; the shadow on the stair is among the most cited shots in film; Herzog and Eggers remade it. Held at the bar because the reach was delayed by suppression and narrow outside the genre, and some of its neighbours reorganised film form more.
Shona builders · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Force and reach are scored together, in the field of building on the southern African plateau and its region from the thirteenth century. The intrinsic force: a real reorganisation of possibility in that field, the free-standing dry-stone enclosure as the architecture of rule, carried here to a scale and finish that fixed it as the type. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: some hundreds of stone-walled zimbabwe sites across the plateau, a tradition running from the fourteenth century through the Torwa state’s Khami and the decorated walls of Naletale and Danangombe into the seventeenth century and later. Held at the bar: Mapungubwe began the pattern, the reach did not leave the region, and the fame of a name and an emblem earns nothing here.
Metallica · Music
8.2 · Tier IV
The field is heavy metal and its new thrash of the early 1980s. The intrinsic force is a reorganisation of what the genre’s album could be: the record showed that thrash could hold an album’s length and range, with dynamics, ballad, instrumental and long multi-section songs, without giving up its weight. It was made from inherited languages, but the joining was this record’s, and what the band’s next record perfected, this one began. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: within metal it is high and documented, since Master of Puppets (1986) took its plan almost track for track, the decade’s thrash took up its long forms, its fourth-track ballad and its instrumental, and the band’s path to the commercial centre began here. Outside metal its pressure is slight.
Li Chun · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Standing since about 605, scored on force and reach together, in the field of Chinese bridge building and stone construction. The intrinsic force is high, a real reorganisation of what was possible: the flat stone arch with opened spandrels is a new structural type, the economy of the arch shown by taking material out. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the type was answered in its own region, the open-spandrel stone arch became a recurring Chinese type into the twentieth century, and Chinese engineers then cited this bridge as the ancestor of their own open-spandrel arches. Outside China no influence is shown: Europe’s arches of the kind are an independent invention, and the bridge’s Western fame, which came in the twentieth century, is credited as delayed reach and discounted.
Ilkhanid, under Öljaitü · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Field: Iranian and wider Islamic building of the fourteenth century and after. The intrinsic force is high: the building showed that the brick domed tomb could be raised to monumental scale on a lightened, double-shelled, galleried structure, and it fixed the type of the dynastic domed mausoleum as the centre of a royal foundation. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the reach is real but mediated. The Ilkhanid joining of brick, tile and great dome passed into Timurid building, and through the Timurids into the Mughal tomb, from Humayun’s Tomb to the Taj Mahal, where the domed royal tomb as the centre of a world returns. The line runs through many hands, each redirecting it, and the double shell of the later tradition is more developed. Claims of reach beyond that line are unproven and earn nothing.
James Brown · Music
8.2 · Tier IV
The field is the rhythm and blues and soul of the early 1960s and the popular live album. The intrinsic force: the record showed that the live album could be the definitive form of a performer rather than a souvenir, and that a Black rhythm and blues revue, recorded in its own theatre before its own audience, could be issued whole and hold its listeners. It stands at the bar and not above it because the force is in format more than in music, and Brown’s larger redirection of the field came later. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: a large commercial success for a King album; by common account, radio stations played whole sides; it carried Brown to a wider audience; and it made the live album a central form in soul and rock, from his own later Apollo records to the rock live records of the late 1960s and 1970s.
John Barth · Literature
8.2 · Tier IV
The field is the American novel of its decade. The force is real: the book showed that the American novel could leave realism by going backward, through pastiche of an older form, and that the historical novel could take the record itself as its target. With Heller’s Catch-22 (1961) and Pynchon’s V. (1963) it stands at the opening of what American criticism of the 1960s called black humour and later postmodernism, and it is the eldest of the three. Held below the top because the redirection is shared with them, was carried in part by Barth’s essay “The Literature of Exhaustion” (1967) and by his later fictions, and because the novel’s own descendants are easier to assert than to document. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: a reputation through the 1960s that made Barth a central figure of the period, and a recognised place as precursor of Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon (1997) and of the comic historical travesty in American fiction.
William Hogarth · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
The field is English painting and printmaking of the 1730s. Intrinsic force: with the Harlot, the series founded a kind, the modern moral subject in sequence, which no British painting before had attempted, and it put English satire on the walls and in the print shops of a broad public; through its timing it is tied to the first legal protection of an artist’s designs in Britain. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Hogarth’s own Marriage A-la-Mode and Industry and Idleness; the graphic satire of Rowlandson and Gillray; serial narrative in prints; Fielding’s prose; and, taking this series as structure and title, Ninette de Valois’s ballet The Rake’s Progress (1935), Stravinsky’s opera (1951), Hockney’s etchings (1961 to 1963) and Grayson Perry’s tapestries (2012). Discounted because the founding move belongs to the lost Harlot paintings.
Sumerian, under Ur-Nammu and Shulgi · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
Force and reach are scored together, in the field of Mesopotamian temple building and the regions that took it up. The intrinsic force: the building, with its sisters in Ur-Nammu’s programme, fixed the ziggurat as a type, a designed stepped tower with a baked skin and a monumental stair, out of the accumulated platform. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: ziggurats were built and rebuilt for some fifteen centuries after it, at Dur-Kurigalzu, at Chogha Zanbil in Elam and at Babylon, and Nabonidus restored this one as an ancient model; in the twentieth century its name passed to the setback form. Held at the bar: the force is shared with a programme, the later reach runs mostly through Babylon, and the modern reach is to a word and a silhouette.
James Cameron · Film
8.1 · Tier IV
Field: the cinema of the 1980s. Intrinsic force: the film reorganised what a low-budget genre picture could hold, joining slasher, chase and apocalyptic science fiction in one taut structure, and made the relentless machine pursuer a form of its own. It did not reorganise what film could do outside its genres. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the action and science-fiction cinema of the following decade in its pacing and its night-blue look; Cameron’s own career, from Aliens (1986) to Terminator 2 (1991) and beyond; the screen persona of Schwarzenegger; the unkillable pursuer of later films; a franchise; a line in common speech; and a name for machine catastrophe used in public argument. The limit is the kind of reach: much of it lies in popular culture and the franchise, and within film it is generic more than formal.
Alfred Stieglitz · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
Published, so intrinsic force and achieved reach are scored together, in the field of American and European art photography of the 1900s and 1910s. Intrinsic force: a photograph that is at once a fact of society and an arrangement of modern forms, made by the leading pictorialist; a reorganisation of what an art photograph could be, from the made to the found. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it is the image by which the histories of photography mark the turn to straight modernist photography, and Stieglitz’s own later work, Strand’s pictures in the last numbers of Camera Work and the American straight tradition through Weston and Evans stand in its line. Discounted because the redirection belongs to the circle and to Strand as much as to one plate that waited four years, and because much of its later reach is presence, the image endlessly reproduced and often misread.
Antonio da Sangallo the Younger; Michelangelo; Giacomo della Porta · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
Standing since 1589, so force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force: the Florentine palace block, the Roman orders and a scale no private house in Rome had approached, joined in one building, with Michelangelo’s cornice and upper court the first statement of a freer grammar in a Roman house. The force is a synthesis carried to its limit, not a first stroke. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it became the measure of the Roman palace. The astylar front, carried by windows, quoins and a great cornice, was the model for Roman palaces of the following century and was revived across Europe and America in the nineteenth, most directly in Charles Barry’s Reform Club in London (1837 to 1841), and through it in clubs, banks and civic palaces.
H. P. Lovecraft · Literature
8.1 · Tier IV
The field is fiction in English of the twentieth century, and within it the tale of terror. The intrinsic force is high: the body reorganised what horror could be about, moving it from sin and the supernatural to the cosmic and the indifferent, and it invented a shared and open myth that other writers could enter. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: in his lifetime the correspondents who wrote in his myth, Clark Ashton Smith, Robert E. Howard, Robert Bloch and Frank Belknap Long; then Stephen King, Ramsey Campbell, T. E. D. Klein, Thomas Ligotti, Caitlín R. Kiernan and the New Weird of China Miéville and Jeff VanderMeer; Borges, who dedicated “There Are More Things” to his memory; the answering novels of Victor LaValle and Matt Ruff. Held at the bar because reach into the main line of the novel is slight, and much of it was delayed and owes to Derleth.
Abraham Darby III; designed by Thomas Farnolls Pritchard · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
Field: British and then European bridge building, and the iron construction that grew from it. The intrinsic force is high: the bridge proved that cast iron could carry a public structure of large span and stand, and so opened the road to iron and then steel as structural materials. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: real and quick, though indirect. Iron bridges of greater span and far less weight soon followed; the iron frame passed into mills and markets, and by the middle of the nineteenth century into halls of glass and iron. But its own method was a dead end: no one copied the carpentry joints or the mass, and its successors corrected it rather than followed it. Its reach is that of the first proof, not of a model answered.
Robert Venturi · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
The field is the modern house and, through it, architecture at large. The intrinsic force is a real reorganisation of possibility: symbol, convention, history and contradiction, all expelled by modern orthodoxy, taken back into a building, and the building shown to be coherent under their rule. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: wide and fast, and since contested. The gable and the split pediment became a signature of American postmodernism, in Charles Moore, Robert Stern and Michael Graves, and in Philip Johnson’s AT&T Building with its broken pediment; the reading of ordinary building as sign, developed with Denise Scott Brown as the decorated shed, rests on this house; the postmodern house became a type. Discounted because much of that reach ran through the book more than the house, and postmodern classicism was repudiated within two decades. What lasted, the licence to use symbol and history, is large.
Oscar Niemeyer · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
Field: modern architecture in Brazil and Latin America in the mid twentieth century, and modern church building. Intrinsic force is a real reorganisation of possibility: the church showed that reinforced concrete could be a sculptural, curved, regional language rather than the international grid, and that a sacred building could be a single shell. Niemeyer himself treated Pampulha as the beginning of his architecture. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: large within its field. Pampulha, with the church as its emblem, made Brazilian modernism a recognised school, and its line runs through Niemeyer’s own later work to Brasília and through the shell churches and curved concrete of Latin America and beyond. It did not redirect architecture as a whole; its reach is wide, but secondary to that of the masters it swerved from.
John Constable · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
Published, so intrinsic force and achieved reach are scored together, in landscape painting in Britain and France from 1815 to 1835. The intrinsic force is a reorganisation of the large landscape, from the composed ideal to the observed particular, with the broken touch and the white fleck as the means of light. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: this is the canvas that crossed the Channel. Shown at the Paris Salon of 1824 with View on the Stour near Dedham, it won its painter a gold medal from Charles X and was seen by the young Romantics; the Barbizon painters, Huet and Rousseau among them, drew on Constable, and through them ran the French outdoor tradition that led to Impressionism. Discounted because in Britain the reach was slow and Constable founded no school, and because much of it belongs to his sketches and to the group of 1824 rather than to this canvas alone.
Bernd and Hilla Becher · Visual art
7.9 · Tier III
The field is European and American photography from the 1960s to the 1980s, and the body is published, so force and reach are scored together. Intrinsic force: a real reorganisation of photographic possibility, the serial typology made the work, the impersonal document made art, photography made to stand with sculpture and conceptual art. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: New Topographics (1975) placed the makers beside Robert Adams, Lewis Baltz and Stephen Shore and helped set the deadpan of American landscape photography; the Düsseldorf school of Andreas Gursky, Thomas Struth, Thomas Ruff, Candida Höfer and Axel Hütte grew from their teaching; the Golden Lion for sculpture (1990) marked photography’s entry on sculpture’s terms. Discounted because much of that reach belongs to the whole practice and to the teaching, not to the water towers alone.
William Blake · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
A published work, so force and reach are scored together. The force is a real reorganisation of possibility: poem, picture and printing made one act by one hand; an epic made of a mind rather than a story; an invented myth made the instrument of prophecy against the mill, the war and the moral law. Delayed influence is credited and discounted. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: almost no readers in Blake’s lifetime; Yeats’s edition with Ellis in 1893; Frye’s criticism, grown from the prophecies, redirecting a field through Anatomy of Criticism (1957); Alan Moore’s Jerusalem (2016). But most of Blake’s reach runs through the Songs, and the hymn “Jerusalem” comes from the preface to Milton, not this book, and is not credited.
Sophocles · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
The field is Attic tragedy and the Greek literature of its century and after. The force is high and bounded. The play made the end of a life its whole action, joined tragedy to cult as no surviving play had at this length, and set the pattern of the late work that returns to its maker’s first matter and transfigures it. But it came at the end of the form, written as Athens neared defeat and produced only after its author’s death, and it closed a tradition more than it opened one. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it is modest beside the Tyrannus or Antigone, since Aristotle builds on the Tyrannus and not on this; and the later reach is real and thin: the “not to be born” ode, a commonplace with Theognis behind it and a long life after; Mendelssohn’s incidental music (1845); Yeats’s version (1934); Eliot’s The Elder Statesman (1958), which rewrites it; and The Gospel at Colonus (1983).
Sophocles · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
The field is Attic tragedy of the fifth century and, through it, the drama of Europe. The force is high. The play gives the fullest early form of what would be called the Sophoclean hero, the man who will not yield, alone against friends, gods and time, and it makes a suicide in view and a drama after the hero’s death into usable possibilities. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it is narrower than the force. The type passed into the tradition chiefly through Oedipus Tyrannus and Antigone; the later Ajaxes, Ovid’s debate over the arms and the Ajax of Troilus and Cressida, come from the epic story more than from this play; and the play’s return to the stage is recent. Its place in the Byzantine schools kept it read, but it redirected less than its two famous siblings.
El Greco · Visual art
8.8 · Tier IV
Seen in its church since 1588, so force and reach are scored together. The force is high: a group portrait, a funerary altarpiece and a vision made one canvas, two pictorial laws in one field, a real reorganisation of what an altarpiece could hold. The reach is what holds the axis lowest of the twelve. In its own field it had little following beyond the painter’s Toledo workshop, and Spanish painting went toward the naturalism of Ribera and Zurbarán; the reach came about three centuries late, and belongs largely to the painter’s work as a whole. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the El Greco revival of the later nineteenth century, Meier-Graefe’s Spanish journey, the painters who looked to Toledo, and Picasso’s Evocation (The Burial of Casagemas) of 1901, a burial below and a heaven above, its direct answer.
Caravaggio · Visual art
8.8 · Tier IV
Force and reach are scored together, in the field of Italian and Mediterranean painting of the early seventeenth century. The intrinsic force is great: the canvas reorganised what a history painting could do with space, making emptiness an agent and the figure group a small event in an indifferent place, and it made a martyrdom a procedure. The discount is that the painter’s reach across Europe came from his Roman pictures of a decade earlier, not from this one. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the canvas hung in Malta, an outpost, seen by the knights and the painters who came there; his Sicilian pictures, the Burial of Saint Lucy and the Raising of Lazarus, carry its void further; and its wider reach came late, through the twentieth century recovery of the painter.
Benjamin Britten · Music
8.8 · Tier IV
Intrinsic force and achieved reach are scored together, and they part. The force is high. The work showed that a liturgical setting could be set against itself, and that a public commemoration could be a work of accusation and mourning at once. The reach is wide in presence and narrow in composition. Concert music of the 1960s was moved by Ligeti, Penderecki, Stockhausen, Berio and the minimalists, not by this work. It is the lowest Pressure on Tradition among the requiems on the desk, below Mozart’s at 8.8, Brahms’s at 8.6 and Verdi’s at 8.5. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the work made the modern commemorative oratorio, which interleaves liturgy with secular witness and is now a standard form for the anniversaries of war.
Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds · Music
8.8 · Tier IV
The contest is with the late-career rock record, and the force is real. The album shows that a veteran band’s whole idiom can be given over to one subject and come out as a liturgy, and that a record of private grief can be built at double-album length on ambient means. It reorganised what such a band could carry more than the art itself: Walker and Talk Talk had already made the elder’s ambient turn. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: across seven years the record has held its standing as the peak of the band’s trilogy, and the singer’s later work answers to it. The force carries the figure; what holds it below the bar is that redirection of other artists is not documented.
Sultan Muhammad · Visual art
8.8 · Tier IV
The field is Persianate painting of the 1520s and after. The intrinsic force is near the top: by common consent this is the summit of early Safavid painting and the clearest single statement of the synthesis on which Persian painting of the sixteenth century rests. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the painting was seen and honoured in its own field, singled out by Dust Muhammad within twenty years; the workshop that made the manuscript trained Mir Sayyid Ali and Abd al-Samad, who carried Persian practice to India and to the founding of Mughal painting, though that is the workshop’s reach more than this page’s; and from 1568 the book sat in the Ottoman palace, out of the field’s sight for more than three centuries. Its standing is in large part a twentieth-century recovery, and delayed influence is credited and discounted.
Inca, under Pachacuti · Architecture
8.8 · Tier IV
Built some 576 years ago and known for 115, so force and reach are scored together; the field is Inca and Andean building. The intrinsic force is a reorganisation of what a settlement could be: a town planned as a continuation of its topography, the rock finished rather than removed, the water the plan’s spine; within the Inca estate it is the most complete instance and the most extreme. Held below the gate because within its own field the redirection cannot be shown: the site was late in a tradition the conquest ended within a century, and no building the record holds answered it. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: since 1911 it has become the emblem of Peru and of pre-Columbian America, a reference for every architect who sets building to land, and the subject of Neruda’s Alturas de Macchu Picchu of 1945; that reach is delayed, credited and discounted, and is to an image more than to a copied form.
Krzysztof Kieślowski · Film
8.8 · Tier IV
Released, so force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force is real: the trilogy made the European art film of the 1990s carry metaphysics through colour, music and chance when that cinema was thought exhausted, and it is the fullest statement of the late Kieślowski, though part of the force belongs to Dekalog and Véronique. What holds the axis below the bar is reach: it moved art cinema, not the grammar of film, and network narrative had other sources, among them Altman’s Short Cuts, which shared Blue’s Golden Lion. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Iñárritu and Arriaga’s Amores perros (2000) and 21 Grams (2003); Tykwer’s Heaven (2002) and Tanović’s L’Enfer (2005), from scripts of the trilogy its makers planned next; saturated colour as a structural key in art cinema since; and Preisner’s music performed beyond the film.
Virginia Woolf · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
The field is English fiction of the late 1930s and the 1940s. The intrinsic force is high: the book reorganises what an English novel of the nation could do, putting history, theatre and audience inside the novel and making the common voice its matter, at the moment the nation was about to be tested. What holds the axis at the foot of the twelve, with The Inevitable, is reach. The book stands high in its field but did not set its course; it did not redirect the novel as Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse or The Waves did, and much of its influence travels as part of Woolf’s whole. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the book is studied, taught and cited across the criticism of Woolf and of the English novel at war, and its pageant has become a model for thinking about history and community in fiction.
Baldassare Longhena · Architecture
8.7 · Tier IV
Standing since 1687, so force and reach are scored together. The field is church building in Venice and in the Baroque. Intrinsic force is high: the church reorganised what a Venetian church could be, centralised, sculptural, scenographic, composed for movement and for the city’s distant views, and it is the defining building of the Venetian Baroque. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: within Venice and the Veneto, and across the Venetian Adriatic, Longhena’s manner was carried on by his school, and the church fixed the image of the city’s waterfront for every later view. But as a type it was little followed. The great centralised domed churches of the later seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in Rome, Vienna and London answer Michelangelo and Borromini more than Longhena, and the scroll-buttressed drum was rarely taken up beyond the region. Strong in its field, narrower in reach.
Rembrandt van Rijn · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
Force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force is great: a reorganisation of what a picture of two people could hold, intimacy given the gravity of history painting, and paint made a substance with its own physical presence, which no Dutch painter of the 1660s attempted at this pitch. The reach is real but delayed and diffuse. In its field it redirected nothing: taste went to Lairesse and the classicists, and the late manner had no school. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the reach came from the nineteenth century, through Van Gogh’s documented admiration, the painters of material surface after him, and the late Rembrandt as a model of a painter’s freedom; much of it belongs to the late work as a whole, of which this canvas is the emblem.
Pontormo · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
The field is Florentine painting of the 1520s. The intrinsic force is high: with Rosso’s Volterra panel it is the founding statement of the first Maniera, a painting in which the conventions of space, light and narrative are suspended for colour, line and feeling, and it showed that an altarpiece could be made from them. The discount: Rosso shares the founding, much of the Maniera’s later course runs through other works, and the panel’s long eclipse delayed its reach. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Bronzino, Pontormo’s pupil, whose cool enamelled figures and stacked compositions descend from it; the Florentine Maniera after him; the twentieth century, in which it became one of the images by which Mannerism was named and defended; and Pasolini’s La ricotta (1963), which restages it as a tableau vivant beside Rosso’s Deposition.
Caspar David Friedrich · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
Published, so force and reach are scored together, in the field of German and European landscape of the 1820s. The intrinsic force is very high: the canvas reorganises what a picture of catastrophe could be, the event removed, the figure removed, nature presented as an order of planes and the human as a trace in it, and nothing in the landscape of its decade goes so far. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: on its own decade it is not shown to have reached the field at all, and the painter’s standing was falling; after his rediscovery it became one of the defining images of the Romantic sublime, and Robert Rosenblum’s Northern Romantic genealogy of 1975 gives it a place before abstraction. Strong force, late and partial reach.
Mexica · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
The field is Mexica sculpture of its decades. Intrinsic force: within it the statue is the fullest statement of the composite body at colossal scale; whether it redirected that tradition cannot be shown, because the tradition was cut off within a generation or two. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: delayed, and credited and discounted as delayed. Its finding in 1790, with the Sun Stone and León y Gama’s book, is a beginning of the study of the Mexica past; it became an emblem of the indigenous past in Mexican national culture and of the museum that holds it; it pressed on Mexican modernism, and on Chicana thought through Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera. Real reach, mostly as emblem and inspiration, not a reorganisation of what sculpture can do.
Albert Camus · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
The field is French literature of the 1950s. The force: the book turned the existential novel inside out, from the absurd hero of L’Étranger, innocent in a world that condemns him, to the guilty man who makes his guilt a power, and it brought the moraliste tradition and the Dostoevskian monologue into one implicating form. What holds the axis below the bar is that its reach is more conceptual than formal: in the same decade Beckett’s French trilogy and the nouveau roman redirected the practice of the novel, and this book did not, and its followers are easier to name as a posture than to document as a school. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the figure it built, the judge-penitent, passed into the language of criticism and of political argument as the name of a recognisable posture; the book is continuously read and translated, a set text for the problem of confession and bad faith; and later confessional monologues addressed to a silent listener stand in its line.
Vasily Grossman · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
The field is the Russian novel of the twentieth century and, as the book reached readers, the European novel of the war and the camps. The intrinsic force is high: the book reopened the Tolstoyan epic to the truth the Soviet novel had closed, and made the Holocaust and the Soviet camps one subject, which no novel had done at that scale. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it is delayed and discounted. Written by 1960, the book reached no reader until 1980 and Soviet readers until 1988, when it arrived in the glasnost years as one revelation among many, beside Solzhenitsyn, who had already moved the field. Its reach since has been real, in France from the 1980s and in English from the 2000s, but it did not redirect the novel of its own time, because its time never read it. That delay holds the axis a tenth below the bar.
Stanley Kubrick · Film
8.7 · Tier IV
Released in 1975, so force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force is high: the film reorganised what a period film could look like, establishing that the past could be lit as it was lit and composed as it saw itself, and it made its tempo a statement in an industry built on pace. The reach is real and narrower than the force. The film did not redirect the main current of Anglo-American studio cinema, as 2001 did science fiction, and much of its standing arrived late, through critics and filmmakers rather than the films that immediately followed; delayed influence is credited and discounted. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: its candlelight and daylight became a reference point for cinematographers, and its look runs through a strand of painterly period drama since.
Donatello · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
The field is Florentine sculpture of the middle fifteenth century. The intrinsic force is high: the figure established that the Renaissance command of anatomy could serve the ascetic and the ugly, not only the heroic, and made the penitent a confrontation at the scale of life; with the late bronzes it marks its maker’s turn from the ideal toward expression. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the wooden Magdalen in Santa Trinita, Florence, given to Desiderio da Settignano and finished by Benedetto da Maiano, answers it directly in type and medium. Beyond Florence the reach is diffuse: later polychrome penitents share its programme without a line that can be traced from it, and its modern standing as a forerunner of expressionist sculpture is presence more than demonstrated influence. The particular reach is regional, and it holds the axis a tenth below its gate.
George Eliot · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
The field is the English novel of the nineteenth century. The force is high: the book carries the English psychological novel further into dread and moral fear than any English novel before it, and puts Jewish history inside the English novel as a matter of vocation and not of caricature. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Henry James built The Portrait of a Lady (1881) in part on it, and Leavis’s argument that Isabel Archer descends from Gwendolen and Osmond from Grandcourt is generally accepted; the novel was read among early Zionists and cited in the movement’s literature; the novel of marriage as imprisonment owes it a share it shares with others. Held below the gate by a tenth because it did not redirect its field; it opened a line that few followed.
Gunnar Asplund and Sigurd Lewerentz · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
The field is the cemetery and funerary architecture of Northern Europe in the twentieth century, with landscape architecture as a whole. The intrinsic force is high: the work showed that landscape could be the primary medium of a building programme, the funeral route composed as one sequence of ground, path and structure, and its crematorium set a type for the crematorium of several chapels gathered at one threshold. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: real, and bounded. It became the reference point of Nordic funerary building and a touchstone for those drawn to landscape as architecture; Lewerentz carried its lessons into his later cemetery work in Malmö; the inscription of 1994 made it a measure of twentieth-century landscape. Outside the Nordic countries no line of descendants is traced as specifically as those that followed the Villa Savoye or the Sydney Opera House, and fame lends nothing. Force above reach.
James Baldwin · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
The field is American fiction of the mid twentieth century. The intrinsic force is high: the book showed that the Black American novel could take the church, the family and the inner life as its ground and its language, in a high style drawn from scripture and the pulpit, when Wright’s naturalism and Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952) defined the field. The reach is real but shared: much of Baldwin’s redirection of the field was done by his essays and by Giovanni’s Room (1956), and Invisible Man, a year earlier, did more to reorganise the form. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: writers of Black family and church life from Toni Morrison on stand in its line, and it is among the most taught American novels of its decade.
William Faulkner · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
The field is the American and English-language novel of the 1940s. The intrinsic force is high: the book fuses the American comic tale with high modernist prose, so that a horse auction can carry a judgment on an economy, and a tradition of the store and the trade becomes a vehicle for tragedy and myth. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the name Snopes entered American speech as a common noun for a kind of rising, shameless acquisitor, evidence that the book’s figure passed into use, which few novels achieve; but the novel redirected the form less than Faulkner’s experiments of 1929 to 1936, which changed the novel in several languages. Together they hold the axis a tenth under the gate.
Natsume Sōseki · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
The field is the Japanese novel of the twentieth century, and through translation the modern novel in Asia. Intrinsic force: the book fixed for modern Japanese fiction the novel of the private conscience as a national form, against the naturalists’ confession of the flesh: a self that examines itself under the pressure of modernity and finds nothing to stand on. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it became the most read serious novel in modern Japanese, a set text of the national language curriculum in the high schools for decades; and it set terms, the betrayed friend, the self-accusing letter, a friend’s suicide at the centre of a young man’s life, that later Japanese fiction returned to, though a line of descent is easier to assert than to document. Held a tenth below the gate because its reach is above all that of a national text read, more than of a form others took up; the larger reorganisation was Sōseki’s whole work and the language he helped make, and abroad the book is admired more than it has redirected.
Anton Chekhov · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
The field is Russian prose fiction of the later nineteenth century, then the short fiction of Europe. The force: the novella showed that the novel of ideas could be compressed to this length and argued without a spokesman, through structure and a reversal, and it carried Chekhov’s art from the comic and lyric story toward the social and philosophical matter of his last decade, the matter of “My Life”, “In the Ravine” and “The Bishop”. Held below the bar because its reach is a case of the larger reach of Chekhov’s stories as a body, and the debate-novella it perfected was not a new form. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the title became a Russian byword for the madhouse and for a society that confines its sane, and the story is widely staged in adaptation.
Gislebertus · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
Scored in the field of Romanesque portal sculpture. The intrinsic force is high: one of the most complete realisations of the Burgundian Judgment, with an expressive range and a terror of execution that reorganise what a tympanum could make a viewer feel, and a signature that claims the work for a maker. In its own decade and region it stands among peers more than above them: Vézelay’s Pentecost portal is the larger reorganisation of the tympanum’s subject, and Moissac and Conques are parallel rather than derivative. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: a programme the Gothic Judgment portals of Saint-Denis, Chartres, Paris and Bourges took up in a calmer, more legible idiom that turns away from this manner, so that its manner was not the line that followed; and, later and particular, the modern idea of the Romanesque sculptor as an artist, from the monograph of Grivot and Zarnecki in 1961 on, which rests on this portal more than on any other and is discounted for depending on the name.
Jean Racine · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
The field is French tragedy of the seventeenth century and the European classical stage after it. The intrinsic force is high: this is the play in which Racine showed that the Roman political subject could be done by psychology rather than by heroic deliberation, and it set the model of the tyrant play as the study of a mind becoming monstrous; with Andromaque it ended Corneille’s primacy in the eyes of the next generation. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Voltaire praised it and wrote Roman tragedy of this kind; it became a set text and a school of acting at the Comédie-Française; its tyrant stands behind later Nero dramas and the political psychology of the French stage. Held short of the bar because Racine’s European reach runs chiefly through Phèdre and Andromaque, and outside France this play moved little that can be named.
Sandro Botticelli · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
Published for centuries, so force and reach are scored together, in the field of Florentine and Italian painting of the 1480s. The intrinsic force: with the Primavera, the canvas established the large mythological painting as an independent genre and the classical nude goddess as a subject in her own right, carried by ancient sources, a real reorganisation of possibility. Reach in its own field and decade is weaker than the fame: the High Renaissance followed Leonardo’s volume and atmosphere, not Botticelli’s line, and the decisive line of the Venus runs through Venice, through Giorgione and Titian. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the delayed reach, credited and discounted, through Pater’s essay of 1870, the Pre-Raphaelites and Burne-Jones, the line of Art Nouveau, Warburg’s iconology and Warhol’s Details of Renaissance Paintings.
Tibetan, under the Fifth Dalai Lama · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
The field is Tibetan and Himalayan Buddhist building and the courts that looked to Tibet; after more than three centuries, force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force: the palace fixed in one building the image of the Tibetan theocratic state and gave the dzong and monastery tradition its largest and most complete statement; no later Tibetan building challenged it as the seat of power. Held lower because in its field it is the summit of a tradition more than its redirection. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the Qianlong Emperor’s Putuo Zongcheng temple at Chengde, built from 1767 to 1771 and called the Little Potala, took its massing, its colours and its name to the summer capital of the Qing; beyond the region, the palace became the image of Tibet.
J. M. W. Turner · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
Force and reach are scored together, and here they stand apart. The force: within British and European marine and landscape painting the picture enlarges what a contemporary subject could carry, making an industrial errand into tragedy and letting colour, not figure, bear the meaning; Turner’s late manner achieves that enlargement as a whole, and other pictures of his push further. In the culture the image became the type of the old order hauled away by the new, a reach very large and weighed in full. The redirection of painting is real but runs through the late manner more than through this canvas. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the picture on the Bank of England’s twenty-pound note issued in 2020 and the setting of a scene in Skyfall (2012); a shared redirection of the field.
Balthasar Neumann · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
The field is German and Central European church building of the 1740s, the Franconian and Bohemian Baroque and the Rococo. Intrinsic force: the culminating reorganisation of the longitudinal church by interlocking curved spaces, the crossing dissolved and the centre moved to the shrine; with the Wieskirche, the measure of the Rococo pilgrimage church. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: consecrated in 1772 as taste turned to neoclassicism, the church was followed by few buildings; Neumann’s own Neresheim carried the idea further, and the line ended within a generation. Its later reach is as an exemplar, in the histories of architecture and the modern interest in space as the medium of building, not as a model built from. Force above reach; the gate is not met.
Yasujirō Ozu · Film
8.6 · Tier IV
Released in 1949, so force and reach are scored together, in the field of the cinema of the 1940s. The force is high. The film fixed the grammar of Ozu’s postwar cinema, the style and the subject he made in variations for fourteen years, and it showed that a feature could be built on ellipsis, objects and stillness rather than on continuity and event. The reach is real but late, and partly shared: in Japan the film was honoured at once and shaped Shochiku family drama; abroad, Ozu was barely shown until the 1960s and 1970s, and when his reach came much of it was carried by Tokyo Story and by the body of the work, not by this film alone. Delayed influence is credited and discounted. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Hou Hsiao-hsien, Wim Wenders, Hirokazu Kore-eda, Aki Kaurismäki and Jim Jarmusch among the filmmakers who came after, which holds the axis a tenth below the gate.
Diego Rivera · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
The field is mural painting and American art of the 1930s. The intrinsic force is the fullest single statement in paint of industrial modernity, the factory given the dignity and the programme of a sacred cycle; no mural before it held the industrial system whole. The discount is that the reach belongs largely to a movement rather than to this cycle alone, and that the field it moved was itself overtaken within fifteen years, when American painting turned to abstraction and the public mural lost its centre. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the cycle stands at the head of the American public-mural movement of the decade, the New Deal mural projects among it; it is the work by which the presence of the Mexican muralists in the United States is known; and its imagery of the line has become the image of American industry.
Charles Mingus · Music
8.6 · Tier IV
The intrinsic force is high: the record is a real reorganisation of what a jazz album could be, a composed and edited whole in which the improvisation is part of the composition and the studio part of the band. The reach is real and harder to trace. No school descends from it as modal playing descends from Kind of Blue, it gave the repertoire no standards, and the turn to the studio as instrument came into general practice by other routes. Delayed and diffuse influence is credited and discounted, and the force is weighed above the reach. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the record stands among the models for extended composition in jazz and for later writing for the large ensemble; it is studied by jazz composers; and the repertory bands that carry Mingus’s music carry its material.
J. M. Coetzee · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
The field is the novel in English of the late twentieth century. The intrinsic force is high: the book changed what the South African novel after 1994 could be, from a novel of resistance to one of reckoning without consolation, and set the terms in which the end of white standing could be written. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it is wide in criticism and teaching, and particular in two fields, as a reference text for the post-apartheid writing that followed and the case on which much of the argument over representing the new South Africa was fought, and as a founding novel of literary animal studies beside The Lives of Animals. It made Coetzee the first writer to win the Booker twice and stood close behind his Nobel of 2003: presence, not reach. What holds the axis a tenth below the gate is that no run of later novels it redirected can be named with certainty.
Philip Roth · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
The field is the American novel of the late twentieth century. The force: the book restored the large social novel of American history to a central place in literary fiction at a time when its rivals were the systems novel and the minimalists, and it joined the chronicle of a decade to a frame that admits its invention without becoming play. The force is real, but it renews the realist social novel rather than reorganising possibility, and reach outstrips it. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for 1998; a place among the five leading titles of the New York Times Book Review’s 2006 survey of the best American fiction of the previous twenty-five years, and on Time’s 2005 list of the hundred best English-language novels since 1923; the opening of the late phase of Roth’s work; and a redirection of later novels that is asserted more than documented.
Mamluk, under Sultan an-Nasir Hasan · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
The intrinsic force is high. The building is the largest and most fully integrated statement of the Cairene funerary madrasa, and it showed what the type could hold at the scale of a congregational mosque. Its own tradition took the lesson partly and turned from the scale, so it stood as a summit more than a turn, and reach stands below force. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: later Mamluk patrons kept the cruciform court, Barquq’s complex nearest to it, but built compact foundations; its portal and stone ornament were followed in part; and the late reach is long, in the mosque of al-Rifa’i raised opposite in answer to it and in the neo-Mamluk architecture of modern Egypt.
William Makepeace Thackeray · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
The field is the English novel of the 1840s and the Victorian realist novel after it. The force is real: the book made the panoramic social novel without a moral centre, organised by money and rank rather than by a hero’s progress, and it carried Fielding’s ironic narrator into the Victorian novel as a moral instrument. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Charlotte Brontë dedicated the second edition of Jane Eyre (1848) to Thackeray; Trollope wrote his life for the English Men of Letters (1879), and the social panorama of Trollope’s novels stands in his line; and Becky stands, in a comparison often made though the debt is not documented, behind Wharton’s Undine Spragg. Held below the gate because the reach is narrower than Dickens’s, and the Victorian novel’s moral inwardness ran rather through George Eliot.
Virginia Woolf · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
The field is the English novel of the 1920s. The intrinsic force: the book showed that a fantastic biography could carry an argument about sex, history and the self; it made fluid identity the subject of a novel when the available models were the case history and the tragic invert; and it joined literary history and fiction in one comic form. That is a real reorganisation of possibility, but a lighter one than the books on either side of it: the larger force in Woolf’s field was Mrs Dalloway and To the Lighthouse, and in the decade Ulysses. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Sally Potter’s film with Tilda Swinton (1992); stage versions by Robert Wilson, by Sarah Ruhl and by Neil Bartlett in the West End (2022); Olga Neuwirth’s opera at the Vienna State Opera (2019); Preciado’s film; and a line of fiction from Angela Carter and Jeanette Winterson to Jeffrey Eugenides and Ali Smith. Much of that reach came forty years late or more, which is credited and discounted.
Terry Gilliam · Film
8.5 · Tier IV
Released in 1985, so force and reach are scored together, in the cinema of its decade. Intrinsic force: the film showed that a dystopia could be built from obsolescence and comedy rather than a gleaming future, gave a design language of ducts, retro machines and paper that became a visual idiom, and made an ending that refuses rescue the meaning of a fantasy film. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Jeunet and Caro’s Delicatessen (1991) and The City of Lost Children (1995), the Coens’ The Hudsucker Proxy (1994) and Proyas’s Dark City (1998) are commonly placed in its line, and its release became the standing case of director against studio. Held a tenth below the gate: its reach is a strand in its decade, not a redirection as Blade Runner (8.6) was.
Graham Greene · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
The field is the English novel around 1940 and, within it, the novel of faith in any language. The intrinsic force: the book made the theological novel a major form in the English fiction of its century, gave it the pace and the world of the thriller, and set a man’s soul against a modern state’s ideology without allegory. The whisky priest entered the language. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Shusaku Endo’s Silence (1966), whose apostate priest under persecution answers Greene’s; Mauriac’s preface to the French translation, which carried the book into French Catholic letters; the later Catholic and political novels of Brian Moore and others; Greene’s own The Heart of the Matter and The End of the Affair, which extend it; John Ford’s film The Fugitive (1947), much altered. What holds the axis there: the force renews and joins more than it reorganises, and in the wider field the century’s turns were made elsewhere.
Hart Crane · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
The field is American poetry of the twentieth century and, more narrowly, the modernist long poem in English. The intrinsic force is high. The Bridge is the major counter-statement to The Waste Land, the attempt to show that the modern long poem could affirm, could be lyric throughout and could make a national myth out of machines, and it kept open the visionary Romantic line that high modernism had closed. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Bloom’s criticism made Crane a central figure; poets have kept him as a touchstone, and Tennessee Williams took the epigraph of A Streetcar Named Desire from Crane, though from “The Broken Tower”, not this book. But the book did not redirect its field as The Waste Land or Pound’s Cantos did; its influence ran through the line rather than the form.
Robert Frost · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
The field is poetry in English in the early twentieth century. The intrinsic force: the book showed that the speaking voice of ordinary people could be the whole substance of serious verse, in strict metre and without the diction of poetry, and that the dramatic dialogue could carry tragedy in a kitchen. That reorganised the possibilities of the narrative and dramatic poem, and offered a modernism of voice and plain fact parallel to Pound’s and Eliot’s. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the line of plain-speech dramatic verse runs from this book through Randall Jarrell’s monologues and Robert Lowell’s narrative poems of the 1940s and 1950s, and on to Seamus Heaney and Paul Muldoon. Charged because the main current of modernist reach ran through Pound and Eliot, and Frost’s school is a counter-current; and much of his reach is through the later books and the whole career, which this unit does not own.
Ife · Visual art
8.5 · Tier IV
The work is old and was long unseen outside Ife, so force and reach are scored together, delayed influence credited and discounted. The intrinsic force is high: a reorganisation of what a head could be in its region and centuries, and the summit of copper casting in West Africa before the modern era. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Benin tradition holds that its brass casting came from Ife, which, if accepted, makes these heads the source of the region’s largest casting tradition; Ife is the reference point of Yoruba art’s account of its own origin; and after 1938 the heads overturned the European assumption, voiced by Frobenius in 1910, that such work could not be African, and reorganised the history of African art written after them. Discounted for the uncertain Benin link and for a reach that changed scholarship more than art.
Seamus Heaney · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
The field is poetry in English in the 1970s, and poetry in Ireland since Yeats. The intrinsic force is high: this is the book in which a poet of the Troubles first made the conflict a matter of deep time and ritual, and it set the terms in which a generation argued about what poetry owes to violence, whether to mythologise or to report, whether the poet witnesses or connives. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the answering poetry of Ciaran Carson and Paul Muldoon is in part a reaction against its method, and the bog poem became a recognisable kind in Irish and British verse. But it did not reorganise poetry in English as Life Studies or Ariel did, nor redirect Irish poetry as Yeats did. Strong regional and period reach, moderate beyond.
Hayao Miyazaki · Film
8.5 · Tier IV
Released in 1997, so force and reach are scored together, and the field is the cinema of the 1990s. The intrinsic force is a demonstration that a drawn film could carry a historical tragedy without a villain, for adults, at epic length, and that animation could be the means of a serious national film and not a genre beside one. It synthesised more than it reorganised: Nausicaä and Takahata’s work had done much of it in smaller rooms. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the film broke Japan’s box-office record and moved the place of animation in the national cinema, and it was the film by which much of the world outside Japan first took Miyazaki as a director rather than a maker of children’s films. That redirection was concentrated in animation and in Japan; against the whole cinema of its decade the reach is strong but not the widest, and the figure stands a tenth below the bar.
Andrea Palladio · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Standing since about 1610, so force and reach are scored together, in the field of Italian and Venetian church building of the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The intrinsic force is high: with Il Redentore and an earlier Venetian front, the church settled the problem of the classical church front by interlocked temple fronts, and brought the vault and window of the Roman baths, and a screened choir, into the classical church. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Venice answered it across the water, in the Redentore and in the scenographic churches of the next century, Longhena’s Salute among them, which take up the church as a front on the water. Beyond Venice the interlocked fronts passed into the Palladian and neoclassical church fronts of northern Europe and America, but largely through the published Palladian manner, the villas and the Quattro Libri, where the Venetian churches do not stand; and much church building after 1600 followed Rome, and the front of Il Gesù, instead.
Luciano Laurana and Francesco di Giorgio Martini · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Intrinsic force is high: the courtyard set a standard of proportion and of the resolved corner for the arcaded court; the Torricini put a palace front into the landscape as an image; the whole showed a residence holding a state, a library and a court society in one ordered building. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Bramante and Raphael were both born in Urbino; through Castiglione the court became Europe’s model of courtly life, a reach that runs through a book as much as through fabric; the corner was taken up widely. But the Roman High Renaissance descends as much from Florence and Bramante’s own work, and the towers and the studiolo were admired more than imitated.
Kamāl ud-Dīn Behzād · Visual art
8.5 · Tier IV
The field is Persian painting of the late fifteenth century, and the intrinsic force is high within it. The page is the fullest statement of what Behzād did to the Persian painting: architecture as narrative structure, figures as individuals in a navigable space, the page as one fabric of text and image. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: under the Safavids the manner passed to Tabriz, where Sultan Muhammad and the painters of the Shahnama of Shah Tahmasp worked in its wake; Behzād’s name was the standard invoked by Dust Muhammad and Qadi Ahmad in the sixteenth century; and Bukhara painting, and through it and the Safavid painters Mughal painting, drew on the Herat school. The discount: the reach is the master’s and the school’s, carried by a manuscript seen by few, and it went little beyond the Persianate world before modern times.
Nayaka builders (and earlier) · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
The field is the Dravida temple of South India in the Nayaka centuries and after. The intrinsic force is real: the temple-city in its most complete and most urban form, the gopuram raised to govern a city’s skyline, the temple of goddess and god given monumental equality. But the reorganisation of possibility was collective, shared with Srirangam, Chidambaram and Tiruvannamalai, and Madurai is its summa more than its source. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the painted gopuram of Madurai became, for India and the world, the image of the South Indian temple; temples of the diaspora answer it; and within the tradition it set the standard of what a great temple of the region looks like. Yet Tamil Nadu’s own state emblem takes the gopuram of Srivilliputhur: the type redirected the field, and this is its best-known instance.
Luis Buñuel · Film
8.5 · Tier IV
Released in 1961, so force and reach are scored together. The force is a reorganisation of what anticlerical satire could be in cinema: the plainest realist grammar shown to carry blasphemy further than any surrealist device. It fixed one image, the beggars’ Last Supper, that the medium has quoted since, and it stands as a hinge in Spanish cinema, though direct debts are hard to prove. Held below the bar because it redirected less of world cinema than the Bergman, Fellini and Ozu films of its years, and part of its reach was the reach of scandal. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the shared Palme d’Or, the scandal, and Buñuel’s late European period, from Belle de jour to Cet obscur objet du désir, launched on its success.
Pagan builders, under King Kyansittha · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Force and reach are scored together, in the field of Pagan and Burmese temple building. The intrinsic force: the temple fixed the mature Pagan gu, symmetrical, four-faced, double-ambulatory, terraced and crowned, closing the early Mon phase in one monument and reorganising what a Pagan temple could be in plan, light and height. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it was answered within decades by the great temples of the next reigns, Thatbyinnyu and Dhammayangyi, the second taking its double ambulatory, and later by Sulamani and Gawdawpalin, and the terraced temple under a curved tower remained a Burmese type. Its reach beyond Burma is slight, and the region’s later building turned largely to the solid stupa.
Burgundian Romanesque builders · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Force and reach are scored together, in French Romanesque of the twelfth century. The intrinsic force is high: the narthex portal, a cosmology of mission at a threshold, is among the most ambitious programmes of its century, and the bright groin-vaulted nave changed what a Burgundian interior could feel like. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: its influence on later portals and naves runs through Burgundy and along its roads rather than across Europe; another church turned the century toward Gothic; and its later reach, as the founding case of French state restoration, belongs mostly to the history of conservation and is credited lightly.
Guru Arjan; rebuilt and gilded under Maharaja Ranjit Singh · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
The field is Sikh sacred building and the north Indian architecture of its centuries. The intrinsic force: the building fixed the gurdwara as a type, a house for the Granth open on all sides, and joined it to the sarovar, so that the Sikh place of worship has had a figure ever since; and under Ranjit Singh it gave the late Mughal and Rajput idiom a new language of gilt copper and inlay. The force is moderate as architecture: a new programme in a known vocabulary. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: total within the field, where gurdwaras across the Punjab and the diaspora take its dome, kiosks and gilding, the takhts at Patna and Nanded were gilded in its likeness, and the gilt shrine on water is the emblem of the faith; small beyond it.
William Kentridge · Visual art
8.5 · Tier IV
Published, so intrinsic force and achieved reach are scored together, in the field of South African art of the late 1980s and 1990s and of drawing and the animated film shown in the gallery in the same years. Intrinsic force: a real reorganisation of possibility. The cycle made drawing a medium of time, made the animated film a serious form of contemporary art, and showed a political art working through the conscience of the complicit rather than the poster of the resistance. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: these films became the visual art by which the end of apartheid was seen abroad, they shaped how drawing and the moving image were taken up in the gallery in South Africa, and Kentridge’s later operas, installations and processions grow from them. Discounted because the reach is recent, lies largely within one maker’s practice and one country’s reception, and cannot be named in particular later works by other hands.
Carol Reed · Film
8.5 · Tier IV
Released in 1949, so force and reach are scored together, in the cinema of the 1940s. The force is a synthesis, not a reorganisation: postwar location realism, an expressionist camera and a score that broke the thriller’s conventions, carried to a finish its sources did not reach. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the Grand Prix at Cannes in 1949; Karas’s theme a hit record around the world; the ruined or divided European city as the setting of the Cold War thriller; the canted frame passed into the common grammar of suspense; first place in the British Film Institute’s poll of 1999. It perfected a manner more than it redirected the field: its successors borrowed its look, and few changed what they did because of it.
Yasunari Kawabata · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
The field is the Japanese novel of the twentieth century, and through translation the modern novel as the West first read it from Japan. Intrinsic force: high. It is a defining achievement of the lyrical line, the book in which modernist technique and classical aesthetics were fused into a form Japanese fiction could keep. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: in Japan it is a school text and the touchstone for Kawabata’s line of fiction; Seidensticker’s English of 1956 was one of the first books by which the West read the modern Japanese novel; the Nobel Prize of 1968 named it first of the three novels it cited, with Thousand Cranes and The Old Capital; and its opening sentence is among the most famous in the language. Held a tenth below the gate because its pressure is felt as a model of tone, a sensibility confirmed, more than as a reorganisation particular later works can be shown to have built on.
Thomas Pynchon · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
The field is American fiction of the 1960s in English: Heller, Vonnegut, Barth, Barthelme, Bellow and Pynchon’s own V. The intrinsic force is real: the book gave the anti-detective novel its compact American form and made paranoia an epistemology for the novel, a way of asking how a culture of information can be known at all. Held a tenth below the bar because much of the reach belongs to Pynchon’s work as a whole, with V. and Gravity’s Rainbow carrying the larger reorganisation, and because this book concentrates a method rather than founding one. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it became the most taught of Pynchon’s books and, for many readers and syllabi, the usual entry to American postmodern fiction; its figure of the quest for an undecidable conspiracy passed into later fiction; and the post horn has become a sign beyond the book.
Hilary Mantel · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
The field is the historical novel in English. The intrinsic force is high: the book showed that the historical novel could be written from inside a mind in the present tense without pastiche or costume, and that a canonical English subject could be reopened by perspective rather than by new facts. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it changed the public figure of Thomas Cromwell in Britain, visible in Mike Poulton’s stage adaptations for the Royal Shakespeare Company (2013 to 2014) and the BBC television serial (2015), and argued with by historians, Diarmaid MacCulloch’s Thomas Cromwell: A Life (2018) entering a field the novel had reopened to the general reader; and it raised the standing of literary historical fiction in British publishing and prizes. Its influence on the form of later novels is widely asserted and not shown book by book, and is not counted.
Louis Kahn · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Force and reach are scored together, in the field of the library and of American building in its decades. The intrinsic force is a real reorganisation of the type: the library rethought from the reader outward, readers at the light, books in the shade, a centre given to the collection as a presence; and, with Kahn’s other late works, the turn from the curtain wall back to mass, material and the room. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: considerable among architects, through Kahn’s late work as a whole more than this building alone; the return of load-bearing brick and of monumental concrete in the 1970s and 1980s, in Botta, Ando and many campus buildings; a lesson cited in the teaching of daylight. In the library type itself the reach is narrower: libraries since have mostly gone to open floors, glass and mixed collections.
Polykleitos the Younger (attributed) · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force is high: the most complete realization of the Greek theatre and the form brought to its canonical proportion. Ancient reach is narrower: the field turned to the Roman theatre, which closed the circle and raised the stage wall, and no redirection of later building by this theatre in particular can be shown. Pausanias’s praise records esteem, not influence. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: since its excavation it has stood as the exemplar of the ancient theatre for scholars and architects, it shaped the modern revival of Greek tragedy in the open air and the festival that grew from it, and its bowl stands behind many modern open-air theatres and arena plans. Delayed influence is credited and discounted.
George Bähr · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force is high: the building proves that a Lutheran preaching church could be a monument of the first rank and a domed central church, and it set a stone dome on the skyline of a Catholic court city. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it became a reference for later Protestant central and gallery churches in Saxony and North Germany, and the stone bell became the image of Dresden itself. But it did not redirect European church building, which followed other models after it, and its type had few heirs of its scale. Reach stands below force.
Paul Thomas Anderson · Film
8.5 · Tier IV
Released in 2012; the field is the cinema of the 2010s, so force and reach are scored together. The force is high: a major American film showed that a period drama of the largest scale could be built on two performances and a refused plot, and it made 65mm a medium for the face. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Phoenix’s performance, a body bent around its own damage, set a standard of physical acting by which critics measured others; the film topped critics’ polls of its year and is a reference for the American art film of the decade after; its 70mm exhibition was part of a revival of photochemical large format. The limit stands: it led that revival only in part, no line of later films takes its method openly, and it did not change the grammar of the medium.
Johann Sebastian Bach · Music
8.5 · Tier IV
The intrinsic force is high: the set showed that the Italian concerto could hold any combination of voices and the full weight of German counterpoint, and in No. 5 it made the keyboard a soloist, a real reorganisation of possibility. Delayed influence is credited and discounted. The set lay unpublished and, as far as is known, unplayed for more than a century, so it redirected nothing in its own decade, and the keyboard concerto that followed came through Bach’s Leipzig harpsichord concertos and his sons, not through this manuscript. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the reach is of the twentieth century, through neoclassicism and above all the historical-performance movement, for which the set became a standard proving ground.
Giacomo Puccini · Music
8.5 · Tier IV
Intrinsic force and achieved reach are scored together. The force is real but bounded: the work established a model for intimate realistic opera, ordinary people, a city, money and illness, in a quick conversational texture with lyrical expansion, and showed that an episodic shape could hold a tragedy. It perfected a manner; it did not reorganise opera’s possibility as Tristan or Pelléas did. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Charpentier’s Louise (1900) and the Italian lyric operas of the next decades stand near it; its joining of speech and melody passed to operetta, the Broadway musical and the film score; Jonathan Larson’s Rent (1996) carried it into a new medium; its numbers became test pieces of the lyric voice. Much of that reach is shared with Puccini’s output as a whole.
Godspeed You! Black Emperor · Music
8.5 · Tier IV
Its field is independent instrumental rock. The intrinsic force is the fullest statement of a possibility: the rock ensemble as orchestra, the album as four symphonic movements and field recording as structure. Most of those elements stood already in the band’s debut and its precedents, so it reorganised by completion more than invention, and much of the descent runs from the band’s work as a whole. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the slow crescendo of massed guitars and strings became a convention of the following decade, and this became the record by which its genre is measured, though successors took the crescendo, not the frame.
Euripides · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
The field is Attic tragedy of the late fifth century, and the European theatre that took up Greek tragedy from the Renaissance. The force: the most thorough of the late plays in turning heroic myth into a drama of indecision and political fear, character set against role, the tradition later drama and New Comedy took from Euripides as a whole. It does not reorganise the possibilities of tragedy as the Oresteia or Oedipus do. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: first prize at its production; Erasmus’s Latin with Hecuba (1506); Lady Jane Lumley’s English version, among the first of a Greek drama; Racine’s Iphigénie (1674); Gluck’s Iphigénie en Aulide (1774); Schiller’s translation; Cacoyannis’s film (1977).
Barma and Postnik Yakovlev (attributed) · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Standing since 1561, so force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force is high: in its own tradition and century the building showed that the Russian stone church could be a clustered, towered composition led by its exterior, and it fixed the tent and the pillar church as a national language. The reach is real but uneven, and keeps the figure below the bar: the full cluster of nine churches was never repeated, and the main redirection came three centuries late, credited and discounted for the delay. Its presence as the emblem of Moscow and of Russia is fame, and earns little. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: tent churches through the later sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries; and the Russian Revival of the nineteenth century, which took it as its model, most visibly in the Church of the Saviour on the Spilled Blood in St Petersburg.
Adam Lock and others · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Field: English building of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. The intrinsic force is high: a real reorganisation of the Gothic system into an English idiom, and later a spatial experiment in the eastern arm. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the Early English line as a whole, with Lincoln and Salisbury, redirected English building, and the early church heads a West Country school; the fourteenth-century eastern arm belongs to the English Decorated work that historians have connected with the later Gothic of Central Europe, a connection that is argued, and one whose credit Wells shares with other English churches of its century, Ely among them; the image-screen front was answered in England, not abroad. Wells moved its field, as one of several buildings doing so, not the one.
Oscar Niemeyer · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Intrinsic force is high. The building showed that a cathedral could be a single structural figure in concrete, and that the threshold could be made the work’s meaning by sinking the nave: a real reorganisation of possibility for the church as a type. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: narrower than its fame. It is among the most recognised church buildings of its century and the image of Brasília to much of the world, and within Brazilian and Latin American modernism it stands with Niemeyer’s other buildings for the capital as a defining work of its decade. But no line of later cathedrals can be named that took its form or its entry, and the redirection of church building after 1960 came more from Ronchamp and from the Council than from this work. Fame is not reach.
Octavia E. Butler · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
The field is the American novel of 1979 and American science fiction. The force is high: the book reorganised what the novel of slavery and speculative fiction could do with each other, and set the pattern of a modern consciousness thrown into the historical wound. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the novel became the most taught of Butler’s books and a staple of American school and college syllabuses; it is a founding text for the criticism and practice later called Afrofuturism and for the neo-slave narrative as a field of study; Tananarive Due and N. K. Jemisin have named Butler as a model; and later speculative novels of slavery, Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad and Coates’s The Water Dancer among them, are commonly read in her line, though no attribution to this book in particular is documented and nothing here rests on one. The graphic novel of 2017 and the television series of 2022 are presence, not reach. Strong in its lane, the reach is narrower than the gate asks.
Lars von Trier · Film
8.4 · Tier IV
Released in 1996, so force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force is strong: the film showed that the handheld, actor-led, unpolished image could carry a spiritual melodrama of the largest scale, that the cinema of transcendence could be made in the grammar of television drama, and that raw style could serve the sublime as well as realism. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it stands just before the Dogme 95 films and is commonly placed in their line, The Celebration (1998) and The Idiots (1998) among them; it opened the Golden Heart films and von Trier’s later cinema of suffering women; it set a pattern for handheld European art cinema through the next decade; and it made Emily Watson’s career. The reach is largely within art cinema, and part of it belongs to the Dogme manifesto, signed in 1995.
Andrea del Verrocchio · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
The field is the public monument in bronze. The intrinsic force is real: the group put the Renaissance equestrian monument into motion and conflict, and with Donatello’s rider at Padua it set the terms on which the genre was revived; after it a bronze rider could be a drama and not a statement of rank. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Leonardo, Verrocchio’s pupil, took the moving horse into his Sforza and Trivulzio projects; the problem of the horse in motion runs on to the later bronze riders of Florence, Madrid and Saint Petersburg, though those lines run as much through the Marcus Aurelius and Giambologna; and casts of the group served as models for study through the nineteenth century. The discount: the reach stays within one genre, which later art largely left.
Almohad builders; cathedral by Gothic masters · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Force and reach are scored together, in the field of the Almohad west, Castilian and Andalusian building and the Spanish world. The intrinsic force: the Giralda is the summit of the Almohad minaret, and the church the largest Gothic cathedral built, a statement of what a mercantile chapter could raise. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Hernán Ruiz’s belfry made the Giralda a model copied for four centuries, in Spain and in the Americas, down to towers built on its image in the United States in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries; and the cathedral was the metropolitan see over the first dioceses of the Indies. Held short because the church’s force is scale more than reorganisation, and much of the reach is the tower’s image.
T. S. Eliot · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
The field is poetry in English of the 1920s and after. The intrinsic force is real and bounded: the poem showed that the fragmentary method of The Waste Land could be contracted almost to silence, and that liturgy, nursery rhyme and Dante could be set in the same short lines as one incantation; it gave the generation after the war its most exact name for its condition. That widened a manner more than it reorganised a form. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the closing lines are among the most quoted in English poetry; the phrase “hollow men” passed into the language; the poem is quoted across later literature, music and film, best known in Kurtz’s reading of it in Apocalypse Now (1979). Its reach in poetry is hard to separate from The Waste Land’s, and much of the reach is of a phrase, not of the poem’s art.
Roman, under Diocletian · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
The field is the Roman imperial and late antique building of the Mediterranean. The intrinsic force is substantial: the palace is the largest and best preserved statement of the late Roman palace as a fortified, axial, ceremonial enclosure, and its arcades on columns are among the clearest early instances of an idea that Early Christian, Byzantine and Romanesque building would make general. The force is shared: it is one of a family of tetrarchic works, not their origin. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: in its own region it made a city, and the Dalmatian Romanesque of Split and Trogir grew from it and against it; in Europe it came late, through Adam’s Ruins of 1764 and the Adam style, delayed and at second hand.
Jorge Luis Borges · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
The field is literature in Spanish in the mid twentieth century and, through translation, the literature of the West. The intrinsic force is real: the book made the very short prose piece, the parable, the false citation and the prose poem a single instrument capable of philosophical weight, and joined it to a classical lyric in one volume. That is an enlargement, not the reorganisation Ficciones had made some fifteen years before, and much of its force is the earlier book’s applied small. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the map fable entered philosophy, cartography and the theory of simulation; “Borges y yo” became the model for a whole family of texts on the divided self; and the Spanish American minificción, Monterroso and those after him, names Borges’s brief pieces among its sources.
Anthony Burgess · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
The field is the English novel of the early 1960s, and the dystopian novel in English. The force: the book made an invented language the medium of a whole narration rather than a curiosity within one, and it put the teenage delinquent, a figure of the newspapers of its decade, at the centre of a philosophical novel about the state and the will. That reorganised from the inside what the dystopia could do. Discounted: a large share of the reach runs through Stanley Kubrick’s film of 1971 rather than through the text, and the book’s influence on the novel itself is narrower than its fame. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the book became one of the standard dystopias in English, taught beside Huxley and Orwell, and its argot passed into later fiction in invented dialects and into the vocabulary of popular culture.
Athenian (architect unrecorded) · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Standing since 406 BC, so force and reach are scored together. The field is Greek temple building and the classical tradition that inherited it. The intrinsic force: a real reorganisation of what a temple could be, a building made to compose unlike parts across levels in answer to a site, and the Ionic order carried to its most refined Attic statement. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the reach is of the parts more than of the idea. The capitals of the north and east porches became a type of their own in the Greek Revival, and the korai porch was reproduced, at St Pancras New Church in London (1819 to 1822) among other places. The composition itself, the asymmetric temple, had no following in antiquity and was answered only much later and loosely. Reach stands below force on the composition and above it on the details.
Francis Ford Coppola · Film
8.4 · Tier IV
Released in 1974, so force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force is strong: the film made sound the subject and the narrative instrument of a feature, made a thriller out of an interior, and carried the European art film’s alienated protagonist into an American studio release without diluting it. It perfected and transposed a premise more than it reorganised what film could do. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it stands at the head of the decade’s films of surveillance and paranoia beside The Parallax View (1974) and Three Days of the Condor (1975); De Palma’s Blow Out (1981) answers it directly; The Lives of Others (2006) takes up the listener changed by what he hears; and Murch’s work helped establish sound editing as authorship. The reach lies within a lineage and a craft rather than across the field.
Henryk Górecki · Music
8.4 · Tier IV
Published, so both components are scored together, in the field of concert music of the 1970s. The intrinsic force is real and shared. The work showed that a symphony on the largest scale could be built of slow modal consonance and lament, without irony, from inside the European avant-garde that had forbidden it; but Pärt’s tintinnabuli, the American minimalists and Górecki’s own Second Symphony made the same turn. Sales and popularity are not reach in composition, and they are discounted. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the recording of 1992 made it the best-known symphony by a living composer, changed what record companies thought contemporary music could sell, and made holy minimalism, with Pärt and Tavener, a category; its influence on film and on later postminimal and ambient music is real, diffuse, and shared with Pärt.
Paul Auster · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
The field is American fiction of the 1980s. The intrinsic force is real: the trilogy made the metaphysical detective story, until then a game at the edges of the novel, into a readable literary novel with the momentum of a thriller, and showed that the postmodern questions of authorship and identity could be carried by plain prose and an emotional undertow rather than by display. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the trilogy made its author’s name and became one of the most widely read American literary works of its decade in Europe, where it was translated widely; it set the template for the literary novel built on genre forms emptied of their solutions; and its graphic adaptation by Paul Karasik and David Mazzucchelli (1994) is itself a landmark of its medium. What holds the axis is that the force refined a mode it did not found, and that the reach was stronger abroad than in the American field it entered.
Joel Coen and Ethan Coen · Film
8.4 · Tier IV
The field is the cinema of the 1990s. Intrinsic force: the film showed that the crime film could be played as a comedy of regional manners without losing its horror, and that its hero could be decent, ordinary and competent rather than wounded or ironic, against the decade’s run of stylish killers. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it is wide, the prize for direction at Cannes and two Academy Awards; Marge Gunderson as one of the most recognised figures of the decade’s film; the speech of the region fixed in common culture; snowbound and small-town crime films after it, A Simple Plan (1998) above all; and a television anthology from 2014 built on its tone, region and claim. Held below the gate because it perfected its makers’ manner more than it reorganised what film could do, and its reach lies largely within the crime film.
Richard Linklater · Film
8.4 · Tier IV
Field: the cinema of the 2010s, so force and reach are scored together. The force is real and distinct. The film showed that the duration of production can be the material of a fiction feature, and that a narrative can be built from the absence of event: a reorganisation of what a feature might hold, done once and at full scale. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it is wide in attention for a small film, through the Silver Bear for direction at Berlin, a Best Picture nomination, an Academy Award for Patricia Arquette, a large audience for an independent and a lasting place in discussion of time in cinema; it is narrow in redirection, since a method that costs twelve years has almost never been repeated.
Alfred Hitchcock · Film
8.4 · Tier IV
Released in 1954, so force and reach are scored together. The force: the film made a suspense picture into a model of film spectatorship, showing in a commercial form that the viewer’s looking could be subject and instrument at once. It perfected a manner more than it reorganised what film could do, and much of that reorganisation was its maker’s, across many films. The reach is wide, but it runs as much through criticism and teaching as through practice, and successors took the premise more often than the form; these hold the axis short of the bar. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the line of films about a watcher who sees a crime, Blow-Up (1966), The Conversation (1974), Brian De Palma’s Body Double (1984), Disturbia (2007) and The Woman in the Window (2021); a television remake in 1998; the courtyard of windows as a standing image in popular culture and parody; and, through Mulvey, a place in the founding argument of a school of film theory.
The Flaming Lips · Music
8.4 · Tier IV
The field is the alternative and indie rock of the late 1990s. The intrinsic force is real: the record showed that an indie band could be maximal, orchestral and sincere, without irony and without losing its audience, and it set a sound, Dave Fridmann’s huge, saturated drums under keyboards and voice, that a lineage of production carried forward. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: that drum sound passed into later records, the album is placed high whenever its decade is counted, and Race for the Prize and Waitin’ for a Superman stay in circulation. The reach is real and lies mostly among musicians and critics; the public reach of the album itself was modest, and the credit for the turn is shared with older orchestral pop. Held below the bar on that sharing.
Alfonso Cuarón · Film
8.4 · Tier IV
The intrinsic force is real: the film showed that the unbroken take, carried by a mobile camera, could make action an ordeal rather than a spectacle inside a studio picture, and that a dystopia could be made from the present’s own images. It perfected a manner more than it reorganised what film could do. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the long take became the signature of prestige action in the decade after, in Cuarón and Lubezki’s own Gravity (2013), in Lubezki’s work with Iñárritu on Birdman (2014) and The Revenant (2015), in Sam Mendes’s 1917 (2019) and in the one-take fight of television drama; the worn present became the look of later dystopias. That reach is wide and demonstrable. Held a tenth below the gate because it lies in technique and look more than in what later films came to say.
Denis Villeneuve · Film
8.4 · Tier IV
The field is the cinema of the 2010s. The intrinsic force is real: the film showed that studio science fiction at scale could turn on language, grief and the structure of time rather than on battle, and carry a reveal that is an argument rather than a trick. It belongs to a cohort, Gravity, Interstellar, Ex Machina and Annihilation, that made a reflective science fiction commercial, and it is the most interior of them. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: a wide box office for its kind, eight Academy Award nominations including Best Picture, logograms and heptapods passed into common reference, and a direct line to its director’s Blade Runner 2049 (2017) and Dune (2021). Held below the gate because it perfected a forming mode rather than reorganising film form.
Joseph Haydn · Music
8.4 · Tier IV
The set enlarged what the Classical quartet could hold, a Fantasia, fugal variations, minuets at a scherzo’s tempo and distant keys for slow movements, without changing what a quartet was: the founding reorganisation had been made by Haydn’s own Op. 20 and Op. 33. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Beethoven composed his Op. 18 quartets in Vienna within about two years, after his lessons with Haydn, and the Presto minuet passes straight into his scherzo; the set stood as the model of the mature quartet for the nineteenth century, and is the most played of Haydn’s sets. Reach is discounted where it is the reach of Haydn’s quartets as a body, and where the Emperor’s fame is the hymn’s.
The Smashing Pumpkins · Music
8.4 · Tier IV
The field is the American rock album of the 1990s, the alternative rock that followed Nevermind. The intrinsic force is in the joining: the record showed that an alternative band could reach for the scale of 1970s hard rock and the textures of shoegaze in one sound, and it set a standard of dense, polished guitar production. Little was invented, the reach is mostly American, and the band’s largest effect came with its next record, so the record consolidated more than it redirected. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the record broke the band to a large American audience, its three singles stayed in broadcast, and its massed guitar sound is heard across the alternative rock of the later decade and in the revivals of shoegaze since.
George Miller · Film
8.4 · Tier IV
Field: the cinema of the 2010s. The intrinsic force is high: against the shaken, incoherent cutting of the action film of its decade, the film showed that very fast cutting could be wholly legible, that practical stunt work at vast scale could carry a studio picture, and that a franchise film could be authored, near wordless and centred on a woman. It perfected and enlarged the action film more than it reorganised what cinema could do. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: an exceptional critical standing for an action film; ten Academy Award nominations, Best Picture among them, and six wins; wide citation as the reference for action editing and stunt practice; a prequel, Furiosa (2024). Studio practice after it largely kept to digital spectacle.
Massive Attack · Music
8.4 · Tier IV
The field is the music of the 1990s made from samples, bass and the studio, British above all, and its border with rock. The intrinsic force is real: the record carried the sampled, bass-led form into the weight and darkness of rock, made the loop and the live band one instrument, and set a sound of menace and space that much later production took up. The redirection of the field belongs more to the group’s first record, and the force here is a deepening. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the record reached the top of the British chart, Teardrop became one of the decade’s most used and most covered tracks and was carried into broadcast as a television theme, and the record’s sound passed widely into film and television scoring and into electronic music with guitars.
Vakataka · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
The field is the work’s own: painting in South Asia and Buddhist Asia. The intrinsic force is high: these walls are the fullest surviving realisation of classical Indian painting, and nearly everything else of that tradition is lost. Reach in its own time cannot be measured: the style is shared with Bagh and runs parallel to Sigiriya and the Buddhist painting of Central Asia, but what derives from Ajanta rather than from a common tradition now lost is unproven, and is given nothing. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: from the nineteenth-century copies onward the caves became the image of Indian classical art and a source for Abanindranath Tagore and Nandalal Bose, an influence delayed by more than twelve centuries, credited and discounted.
Dorothea Lange · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
Published, so intrinsic force and achieved reach are scored together, in the field of American documentary photography of the 1930s. Intrinsic force is moderate: the image does not reorganise what photography can do; it concentrates what the documentary project was doing into one frame of complete authority. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it became the emblem of the Depression and of the government file, the image by which that project is known; it fixed the form of the humanitarian icon, the single mother and child of a crisis, which photojournalism has sought ever since; and it is the reference case in the teaching and criticism of documentary ethics. Discounted because much of that reach belongs to the project and to a genre that existed before it, and because reach as an emblem is partly presence.
James Ensor · Visual art
8.3 · Tier IV
Published but long unseen, so force and reach are weighed apart and then together. The intrinsic force is high: the canvas reorganises what a large modern painting could be, with mass society as subject, the grotesque as the mode of seriousness, unmixed colour as the medium of judgment and the crowd as protagonist. The discount is real: the picture was not seen in public until 1929, by which time Expressionism had happened, and Ensor’s effect on Nolde, on Die Brücke and on the Belgian Expressionists ran largely through his prints, his other mask pictures and his name. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the mask crowd of Nolde’s religious pictures and the processions and carnival crowds of later Expressionist and Neue Sachlichkeit painting stand in its line, credited late and discounted.
Edward FitzGerald, after Omar Khayyam · Literature
8.3 · Tier IV
The field is English poetry of the nineteenth century, with translation as its border. The intrinsic force: a new English stanza; a new model of translation as recreation, the source taken as material for an English poem, which the desk judges carried on in the twentieth century’s versions, Pound’s Cathay among them; and the first English poem to make unbelief a pleasure rather than a wound. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Swinburne took the stanza, varied, for “Laus Veneris”; the poem made the West’s image of Persian poetry for a century; and its lines became titles, O’Neill’s Ah, Wilderness! and Christie’s The Moving Finger. Its wide presence, the Omar Khayyam Club of 1892 and illustrated editions without number, is presence, not reach. It moved taste more than it moved the art: no school of English poetry grew from it.
Romano-Egyptian painters · Visual art
8.3 · Tier IV
The field is the painting of Roman Egypt and the Roman world in the first to third centuries. The intrinsic force is high: the body carried the Greek painted portrait into the Egyptian tomb and made of it the most sustained practice of individual likeness in ancient painting, frontal and direct. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: within its centuries it shaped funerary practice in one province and moved no wider field that can be shown; in the later panels the frontal stare and enlarged eyes point toward the earliest icons, and the encaustic icons at Sinai are widely held to descend from the same tradition, a line argued and not proved; and from the 1880s exhibition, study and Euphrosyne Doxiadis’s book of 1995 carried it into the modern idea of ancient painting.
Chris Marker · Film
8.3 · Tier IV
Released in 1962, into a decade crowded with reorganisations, so force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force is real: a film built from stills and narration that remained cinema, and a form for the time loop, the traveller who witnesses his own death, so exact that later science fiction has been measured by it. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Terry Gilliam’s 12 Monkeys (1995) is an acknowledged feature-length adaptation; the loop and the remembered death passed into the genre; the film is a fixed text in film teaching, and the essay film, gallery art and the photo-film draw on it. Held a tenth below the bar of the Epochal Gate: as a short it reached the wider audience chiefly through others, and its method was rarely followed.
Francisco Goya · Visual art
8.3 · Tier IV
Published, so force and reach are scored together, in the field of court portraiture in Spain and Europe about 1800. The intrinsic force: the last great royal group portrait of the old regime is also the one that takes the genre’s apparatus apart from inside, keeping its regalia and removing its rhetoric, so that the state portrait could afterwards be read as a document of persons. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: within the field it redirected little, since the genre ended with the old courts and the Napoleonic invasion, and Goya’s own later work carried his consequence. Its reach is in later painting’s understanding of the official portrait: the nineteenth century’s return to Goya, Manet among those who studied him in Madrid, and Fernando Botero’s The Presidential Family of 1967, which answers it by name. Wide as an emblem, narrower as redirection.
Abbas Kiarostami · Film
8.3 · Tier IV
The field is the cinema of the 1990s. The intrinsic force is the demonstration that a feature could be made from one request in a moving car, motive and outcome withheld and the fiction broken at the end, and that this minimum could carry a life and a death. Much of that force belongs to Close-Up and the Koker films, and it is discounted here. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the Palme d’Or made Kiarostami’s the most visible name in world art cinema at the decade’s end and fixed Iranian cinema in international attention; the car as stage passed into his own Ten (2002) and Jafar Panahi’s Taxi (2015), and the long take over landscape into the slow cinema that followed, Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s among it. The reach is wide within art cinema, narrow beyond it, and shared with the director’s other films.
Edward Hopper · Visual art
8.3 · Tier IV
Shown since 1942, so force and reach are scored together, and the field is American painting of the early 1940s. The intrinsic force: it fixed the image of the modern city at night as a place of exposure and solitude, and did so with the means of a realism the avant-garde was about to abandon; in painting it reorganised little, since its means were the painter’s own of a decade before. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: most of it lies outside painting, in film, where the lit window seen from the dark street became a stock frame of noir and after, though the influence between the painter and the cinema runs both ways and cannot be proved for this canvas alone; in the staged photography of the later century; in Segal’s diner tableaux and the realism that returned in the 1960s and 1970s; and, very widely, as public image. Fame is not influence, and much of the reach is as emblem. Held below the gate.
Auguste Rodin · Visual art
8.3 · Tier IV
The field is European sculpture from 1880 to 1910. The intrinsic force is moderate to strong: the figure recast the contemplative figure as one of effort, put a modelled, light-breaking surface on a public monument at heroic scale, and stands for the extraction of a part from a larger work, which Rodin made a method. In sculpture its reach is real but shared, since what later sculptors took from Rodin came more from the fragments, the Balzac and the Walking Man than from this figure. In the culture at large its reach is wider than that of any sculpture of its century, and that is presence as much as pressure, credited only in part. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Brâncuși, Matisse and Lehmbruck, the partial figure and the surface as process, drawn mostly from other works; and the type of the thinking man, which became this one, in monuments, in images and in parody. Below Fountain at 9.5 and The Large Bathers at 9.4, which moved their field more.
Haruki Murakami · Literature
8.3 · Tier IV
A published work, so force and reach are scored together. The field is Japanese fiction after the war and, since the book’s reach was global, the international novel of the 1990s. The force is real and bounded: the book brought the repressed history of Japan’s war on the continent into the popular literary novel and joined it to a private quest in a manner of surreal suburban realism, a reorganisation of what Murakami’s mode could hold; but the mode was his own already, and the history had been written by others. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: this is the book by which Murakami was received abroad as a serious novelist, after Norwegian Wood had made his fame in Japan; it has been translated widely; and the manner it brought to maturity has been taken up by novelists across the world. Reach is the larger part, and the force holds the axis a tenth below the gate.
Jackson Pollock · Visual art
8.3 · Tier IV
Field: painting in New York in the early 1950s. Intrinsic force: high. The canvas is a full statement of the poured field at mural scale, among the last, and adds a reorganisation of its own, the re-entry of structure into the all-over, which is a real possibility opened. The discount: the reorganisation that moved the field, the pour itself, belongs to 1947 to 1950 and was absorbed before this canvas was shown. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: shown at the Sidney Janis Gallery in 1952 and again in 1954; in private hands through the 1950s and 1960s, when the painter’s influence ran through Kaprow, the stain painters and the reaction against him, but ran through other canvases; then in Canberra from 1973, far from the field it entered. Its largest reach lies outside painting: the purchase made it the best known painting in Australia and a lasting argument about public money and art. That is presence, and is credited only slightly.
Tadao Ando · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
The field is Japanese and wider late-modern domestic architecture. Intrinsic force: a real reorganisation of what the small urban house could be in Japan, a minimum dwelling that answered density not with economy of means alone but with an enclosed void, and a demonstration that bare concrete cast in place could carry a domestic, nearly contemplative register. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the house made its architect’s name and his idiom, the concrete wall, the grid of tie holes, light admitted from above or from a court, which became among the most imitated architectural manners of the late century worldwide; it is a standard instance in Frampton’s account of critical regionalism; and the inward-looking court house on the tight Japanese lot became a continuing line in Japanese residential architecture. Discounted because the reach runs largely through his later and larger buildings, and the type had antecedents in the nagaya and in Kahn.
Michael Mann · Film
8.3 · Tier IV
Released in 1995, so force and reach are scored together, against the cinema of its decade. Intrinsic force: the film reorganised what a crime picture could hold, giving it the breadth of an epic and the exactitude of procedure, and made a style of the nocturnal city that Mann carried further in Collateral (2004). Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the street battle became the standard by which film gunfire and urban action are judged; a line of crime epics and heist films took its plan of crew against squad, Den of Thieves (2018) most openly; its heists passed into video games; and the coffee shop became a template for the scene between adversaries. The reach is broad within the crime and action film and narrower beyond them, which holds the axis below the gate.
Norman Foster (Foster and Partners) · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
Standing since 1986, it is scored on force and reach together, in the field of the office tower. The intrinsic force is high: a real reorganisation of what an office tower can be, with the core at the edge, the structure out, the ground given back, an atrium and daylight at the centre, and global prefabrication at architectural precision. With Lloyd’s, of the same year, it made High-Tech a mode for the corporate tower. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: real but bounded. The hung structure itself was hardly copied; it was too costly and its premise too particular. What spread was the atrium tower, the edge core, the sky garden and the daylit centre, Foster’s own Frankfurt tower of 1997 most directly, the headquarters as public gesture, and the High-Tech tower in Asia.
Hellenistic · Visual art
8.3 · Tier IV
On view since the nineteenth century, so force and reach are scored together. With the Pergamon Altar it is the height of the Hellenistic figure in motion, and it made the base a scene and an outside force the shaper of the figure, a real reorganisation of what a free-standing statue can be. In its own field and region, the Hellenistic world, reach is undocumented: it stood in an island sanctuary. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: after 1884 it became the emblem of the classical figure in motion; Marinetti’s manifesto of 1909 set a racing car above it, “plus belle que la Victoire de Samothrace”; Boccioni’s Unique Forms of Continuity in Space (1913) is commonly read as an answer. Reach delayed two thousand years, and mostly as image, is credited and discounted.
Kanye West · Music
8.3 · Tier IV
The field is hip hop and the popular album of its decade. The intrinsic force is high: the record showed that a mainstream rap album could be built as a maximal art object, on progressive-rock sources, long forms and choral and orchestral scale, and still be the event of its year; it reset what a rap album’s ambition could look like. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the reach is large but shared. Nicki Minaj’s verse on Monster made a career, and the record stands near the top whenever its decade is counted. But much of the maker’s reach in sound runs from 808s & Heartbreak, whose sung melancholy shaped the decade more directly, and the maximal turn is hard to separate from his influence in general.
Oscar Wilde · Literature
8.3 · Tier IV
The field is the English and European stage from the 1890s on. The intrinsic force is that of the purest statement in English of a comic mode in which language is the action and seriousness the butt, fixed as a model; it does not reorganise what drama can do, as Ibsen and Chekhov did in the same decade. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the dialogue comedy of Noël Coward, Private Lives among it, and the comic prose of P. G. Wodehouse descend from it; Joe Orton’s Loot and What the Butler Saw work its inversion of decorum into darker farce; Tom Stoppard’s Travesties (1974) is built on an amateur production of the play in Zurich; and Bunburying entered the language. Held below the bar because the redirection stayed within comedy and within an inherited line.
Philip K. Dick · Literature
8.2 · Tier IV
The field is American fiction of the 1960s, with its science fiction as the field the book entered first. The force: the book showed that the genre’s furniture could carry an ontological fiction of the first seriousness, in which the reality of the world, and not its future, is the subject, and with The Man in the High Castle and the books around it, it moved the genre’s centre of gravity from the extrapolation of technology to the instability of the real. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Stanislaw Lem’s essay on Dick set him against the genre he wrote in, and a line of films of unreality, from The Matrix to Abre los ojos and Inception, turns on its premise of a sustained false world in which the dead do not know their state. What holds the axis below the gate is that much of that reach runs through Dick’s whole body and not through this book alone.
David Cronenberg · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
Released in 1983, so force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force is high: the film made the horror film a means of thinking about the medium, fused body horror with a theory of the image, and showed that a feature could give up a stable frame of reality inside a genre picture. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: a cult that grew from a commercial failure into continuous presence, a place in the teaching of film and media, a reach real and lasting through genre and art horror, and a phrase, “the new flesh”, taken into criticism as a name. Held a tenth below the bar because that reach ran mostly through genre and art horror, and its pressure fell on what the cinema could be about more than on its form.
George Orwell · Literature
8.2 · Tier IV
The field is English prose of the 1930s, the literature of the Spanish war in all its languages, and political reportage after it. The force: the book set the pattern of the honest witness against his own side, and showed that reportage could carry a moral argument about truth itself at the level of literature. It is discounted for delay, since its reach came after 1950, and for breadth, since within the art of the Spanish war For Whom the Bell Tolls and Guernica are larger cultural facts; it is held below the bar. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it is the hinge of Orwell’s own later work, the falsified history of Nineteen Eighty-Four and the essay “Looking Back on the Spanish War” growing from it; and it shaped the anti-Stalinist left’s account of the Spanish war after 1945.
Umberto Boccioni · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
The field is European sculpture of the 1910s. The intrinsic force is high: a reorganisation of the figure, from a mass with a contour to a form continuous with its space, and the clearest single statement of that idea in its decade. The redirection is shared: Archipenko’s voids, Duchamp-Villon’s Horse, Epstein’s Rock Drill and the Vorticists came alongside it, and the larger turn of sculpture into space ran through Constructivism, which took the manifesto’s other path. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: real, delayed and partly emblematic. The figure was barely seen between 1913 and 1931, and its influence is credited and discounted for that delay; its reach since is wide as image, the emblem of Futurism and a figure on a national coin, and image is presence, not redirection. Held below the gate for a field moved jointly.
James Stirling, Michael Wilford and Associates · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
The field is the museum building and the architecture of Europe in the late twentieth century. The intrinsic force is a real reorganisation of what a museum could be: the institution opened as public ground and its classical type reworked as a built argument in plan and section, the strongest building of postmodern classicism and one of the few its critics also admit. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: considerable but bounded. It crowned Stirling’s late career, the Pritzker Prize coming in 1981 while it was building, led to his practice’s later museums, and stood at the head of the German museum building of the 1980s and of the museum as civic set piece; the idea of a museum walked through and round has lasted. But its language was abandoned within a decade, and the main turn in museum building after 1997 went to the free-form envelope.
Bret Easton Ellis · Literature
8.2 · Tier IV
A published work, so force and reach are scored together; the field is American fiction at the end of the twentieth century. The intrinsic force is real: the book brought the extremity of transgressive fiction into the literary novel of manners and joined the consumer satire to horror in one voice, a reorganisation of what the realist novel of money could hold; but it worked with instruments others had made. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it became the defining novel of its decade’s excess, and a touchstone for later fiction of corporate and consumer violence and for what was called blank fiction; its figure passed through Mary Harron’s film of 2000 into a lasting place in the culture, and Bateman remains a common type and image thirty-five years on. The charge: much of that reach belongs to the figure, carried by the film, more than to the novel’s form, which few later novelists took up.
Fela Kuti and Africa 70 · Music
8.2 · Tier IV
The field is African popular music of the 1970s, and the political song across it. The record did not invent Afrobeat, but it is the form’s most potent single instance as a weapon: the proof that a dance record could confront a state by name and carry the confrontation into every street where it was played. That reorganised what popular music in West Africa could dare, more than how it was built. As sound, its reach runs through Afrobeat as a whole, Fela’s body of work rather than this record, and its influence abroad, on Talking Heads and Brian Eno, is shared with his other records. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it was taken up as a chant against soldiers beyond Nigeria, and the state’s answer made it the defining case of music against military rule on the continent.
Richard Linklater · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
Field: the cinema of the 1990s. The intrinsic force is real. The film showed that an American studio picture could take the structure of the hangout, a plotless ensemble in real time, and hold an audience with it, and it refused the teen film’s moral and romantic machinery in the decade of that machinery’s bloat. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the film is the base of the later idea of the hangout film, often named as such; it stands at the head of a line of ensemble youth films and television that took its texture; and its director’s later work grows from it, Everybody Wants Some!! (2016) above all. What holds the axis: the reorganisation is of a genre more than of the medium, and the careers it launched are presence, not redirection.
Bruce Springsteen · Music
8.2 · Tier IV
The field is the rock album of the 1980s and the American song of work and place. The force lies in what the record proved: that a song about economic ruin and the aftermath of Vietnam could be the largest pop record in America, and that a protest song built as an anthem could stand as the case of the misread protest anthem in political music. Its musical idiom, the E Street sound with the gated drums and synthesisers of 1984, belonged to its year. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it set the model for the heartland rock of its decade; The Killers on Sam’s Town (2006) and The War on Drugs, in their synthesiser-lit road songs of the 2010s, built on its sound and subject; and the title song’s use in campaigns has continued to the present.
Gian Lorenzo Bernini · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
The field is Roman sculpture of the 1620s, and force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force is high: with this group and the two that followed it in the same years, marble was reorganised as a medium for the instant and for the sensation of substance, and the Mannerist group was turned into Baroque narrative sculpture. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: wide, but shared. The redirection of European sculpture toward the Baroque is credited to the Borghese groups together, and within them Apollo and Daphne is the fuller statement of the instant. This group’s own reach is above all the pressing hand, the touchstone for marble rendered as flesh in the teaching and writing on sculpture since, and later works on the subject, such as Girardon’s group for Versailles, though that owes more to Giambologna. The fame of the detail as an image is presence, and is not credited here.
Muhammad ibn Mahmud Isfahani (attributed), under Timur · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Standing since 1404, the tomb is scored on force and reach together, in the field of the dynastic tomb and the domed building of Timurid Central Asia, Iran and India. The intrinsic force: the compact domed tomb with a high drum and a ribbed outer shell, fixed as the dynastic image of the Timurids, a figure later builders could take whole. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: real, regional and long. The Timurid tombs of Samarkand and Herat that followed take up the high drum and the ribbed shell; the Mughals, who claimed Timur as ancestor, built the dynastic tomb with a double dome on a tall drum, from Humayun’s Tomb (8.4) to the Taj Mahal (8.9). That reach runs as much through Herat and Persian practice, and through dynastic memory, as through this building: a summit of a type more than its first statement.
Frank Sinatra · Music
8.2 · Tier IV
The field is popular vocal music of the 1950s and the new long-playing record. The intrinsic force is considerable: the record showed that a popular album could be a single statement of mood, conceived for its length and heard whole, and that a singer’s interpretation could carry a record of standards as a work. It is widely held among the first concept albums in popular music. The credit is shared: the albums of Sinatra’s Columbia years and his own 10-inch records with Riddle came first, and the format did part of the work. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the Capitol theme album of Sinatra and Riddle became a model, followed by Songs for Swingin’ Lovers! (1956) and Only the Lonely (1958), and the torch album became a form; the line drawn from it to the rock concept album is contested.
David Lynch · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
Field: the cinema of the 1970s. Intrinsic force: the film made a feature-length narrative out of nightmare and industrial sound, and showed that a film’s world could be built from its soundtrack as much as from its pictures. That is a real reorganisation of possibility, but inside a tradition the avant-garde had opened. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it was the defining picture of the midnight circuit, with El Topo and The Rocky Horror Picture Show, and that circuit was a new route of distribution for the American independent film; its sound bed and industrial imagery passed into later horror, into music video and into film, Tetsuo: The Iron Man (1989) among the clearest; and it opened Lynch’s career, whose later work counts here only in part. The reach is wide in art, horror and independent film, and narrower in the main line of cinema than that of Citizen Kane or Chinatown.
The Rolling Stones · Music
8.2 · Tier IV
The field is the rock album of the late 1960s. The intrinsic force is the smaller part: the record brought gospel voices and a choir into hard rock, recast country and the Delta blues inside a rock band’s sound, and fixed a manner, loose, heavy, rooted and sexual, that was a consolidation more than a reorganisation. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the band’s records of these years set the template of the rock and roll band for the decades after, its guitar sound, its stance, its relation to the blues, and Gimme Shelter has become the sound by which a whole culture remembers the end of its decade. But that reach belongs to a run of records more than to this album, and much of it travels as one song. Half a point under The Dark Side of the Moon at 8.9.
Mastodon · Music
8.2 · Tier IV
The field is heavy music in the 2000s, and the intrinsic force is high. The record made a synthesis cohere that had been attempted piecemeal: the weight of sludge, the precision of technical metal, the scope of the progressive concept album and a melodic instinct, in forty-seven minutes with no slack in the playing. It showed that a heavy band could take a literary object and a long form without abandoning brutality. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the record lifted the band from the underground to a major label for its next album, Blood and Thunder remains a fixture of metal broadcast, and drummers and guitarists still learn its parts. No later practice can be shown to turn on this record alone, and beyond metal the reach is small.
Robert Altman · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
Released in 1993, so force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force is real though inherited: the film showed that the literary short story could be the unit of a long film, and that a mosaic of strangers could carry a social diagnosis rather than a public spectacle. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the multi-strand film of strangers became a distinct mode of the decade after it, in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia (1999), whose director has acknowledged Altman as his master, and in the network films of the 2000s, Crash (2004), Babel (2006) and others, most of them lesser; the Golden Lion marked it at once. The form was largely made in Nashville, and that holds the axis a tenth below the gate.
Claude Lorrain · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
Force and reach are scored together, for this canvas and not for the body of work. The intrinsic force is real: the seaports and pastorals reorganised landscape as a vehicle of light and of a remembered classical order, and this is among their most complete examples, but the reorganisation belongs to the body of work and was made before 1648. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Turner’s Dido Building Carthage of 1815 answers this picture directly in its sun, harbour and architecture, and Turner’s will required that picture and his Sun Rising through Vapour to hang beside this canvas in the National Gallery, where they hang. Through Claude more widely came Richard Wilson, the picturesque and Stourhead. Much of that debt is to the painter, not to this canvas.
Edgar Degas · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
Intrinsic force: the canvas fixes the café picture of modern solitude as a type, with the decentred, cropped view as its form, and joins the genre scene to the new painting of modern life without a moral. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Toulouse-Lautrec’s café and bar pictures; Picasso’s absinthe drinkers of 1901 to 1902; Sickert’s café and music hall interiors; Hopper’s figures alone at café and automat tables, which continue its arrangement. That is real reach, named in particular works. The discount is that much of it belongs to the café as a subject and to Degas’s whole decentred method, of which this canvas is one strong instance rather than the source, and so the axis stops just below the gate.
Donald Judd · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
The field is American sculpture and installation of the 1980s. The intrinsic force is high: the installation is the fullest statement of Minimalism’s claim that the work is the object and its space together, and the founding instance of a permanent, artist-made museum for a single body of work in a remote place. The discount: the reorganisation of sculpture was Judd’s work of the 1960s, and this is its culmination rather than its breach, made while the field was moving elsewhere. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Chinati became the model invoked for the permanent single-artist installation in converted industrial buildings and for the remote art destination, and for a generation of artists who sought fixed installation over circulation; Marfa itself became a destination because of it.
Jean-Luc Godard · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
The field is the cinema of the 1960s, a crowded one. The intrinsic force is strong: the film is the fullest statement of collage cinema in its decade, showing that a feature could be built from quotation, fragments of genre and colour as sign while keeping a love story and an ending of real force. It is a summa more than a first: Breathless (9.3) and Vivre sa vie had opened the way. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it stands behind the American outlaw-couple films that followed, Bonnie and Clyde in 1967 among them; behind Leos Carax’s Mauvais Sang and Les Amants du Pont-Neuf; behind Wong Kar-wai’s colour and voice-over and Quentin Tarantino’s collage of genres, lines commonly drawn and sound. The reach is wide within art cinema and the cinephile tradition, narrower beyond it, and the figure stands below the gate for that.
Henry Fuseli · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
The field is British painting of the 1780s and the European art of the decades after, and force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force is real: the picture made the dream and the irrational a subject for exhibition painting, and set the terms of the Gothic image, the helpless sleeper, the demon on the body, the creature at the threshold. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: as an image it is very wide and early, through Thomas Burke’s mezzotint of 1783 and its piracies, the political caricatures that parodied it within a few years, and an afterlife in Gothic fiction, in Romantic and Symbolist painting of the dream, and in the imagery of horror down to film. Within painting it is narrower: Fuseli founded no school, and the main line of Romantic painting ran elsewhere.
Peter Behrens · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
The intrinsic force is high but not total. The hall reorganised possibility, putting the industrial frame forward as architecture, and the AEG work as a whole, buildings, products and graphics designed as one, is a founding instance of industrial design and corporate identity, of which this hall is the emblem. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: very wide. The hall stands in every history of modern architecture as a threshold; Gropius, Mies and Jeanneret passed through Behrens’s office in these years; and the Fagus Works of Gropius and Meyer, begun in 1911, answers it point by point, putting glass at the corner where Behrens put mass. The discount: much of its influence came as a stage to be passed beyond, and its classical half was rejected by those it moved.
Henry Moore · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
The field is British and European sculpture of the 1930s. The intrinsic force is strong: a reorganisation of the carved figure, opened to space and made one with landscape, where direct carving, the lessons of non-European sculpture and biomorphic abstraction met, and among the first full statements of the pierced reclining figure that would carry Moore’s career. The discount is heavy: the reach belongs to the theme and the later bronzes more than to this stone, Hepworth’s piercing ran alongside and was arguably earlier, and the 1929 Leeds figure and the 1939 Detroit elmwood share the claim. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the pierced reclining figure became the leading idiom of public sculpture after 1945, in Moore’s own bronzes, the UNESCO figure in Paris and the British sculptors who followed, on campuses and plazas across the world.
Nick Ut · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
Published, so intrinsic force and achieved reach are scored together, in the field of war photojournalism of the 1960s and 1970s. Intrinsic force is high: this is the form in which the civilian victim, and the child, became a war’s central image in place of the combatant, and after it the power of a war picture is often measured by this one. It did not reorganise what photography can do; the execution in Saigon and the Vietnam work before it had put the instant on the front page. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the photograph of Alan Kurdi in 2015 was measured against it in press comment, and the Facebook case of 2016 made it the test case for platforms. Its effect on opinion about the war is widely claimed and hard to prove, and much of its reach is presence rather than a redirection of later practice.
William Van Alen · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
The intrinsic force: the skyscraper made into an emblem, the crown its whole identity; stainless steel brought to the skyline; the first structure built by people past 1,000 feet. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: real, and bounded. The race it won was lost within a year to the Empire State Building, whose mast answered it, and the Depression and the International Style cut off the line of the decorated setback tower within the decade. Its reach returned late, in the skyscraper as logo and as a crowned figure on the skyline, in the postmodern towers of the 1980s that quoted its crown directly; and it has remained the measure of the skyscraper as a beloved object. In its field, the American tall building of its decade, it is a summit, not a turning point.
Vincent van Gogh · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
Published and on view, so force and reach are scored together, in the field of European painting in the late 1880s. The intrinsic force: a still life painted in one colour key, with the paint as substance, the dark ground of the flower piece abolished and the decorative made the vehicle of intensity. The discount: the reach belongs largely to the painter’s whole Arles work, and within the subject to the series rather than to this canvas alone, and the flower piece after it did not take its key as a rule; its vast popular reach is presence, and is weighed under The Imperishable. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: through the exhibitions after his death and the publication of the letters his colour and touch passed to the Fauves and to German Expressionism, and the sunflowers were among the canvases that carried them; Gauguin answered the picture in his portrait of the painter; the purchase of 1924 gave it a public in Britain.
Toyo Ito · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
The field is Japanese and international architecture since 2000. The intrinsic force is high: a real reorganisation of possibility for the multi-storey building, showing that structure, services and light can be one porous element and that a public building can be an unbounded field. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: strong in its own field, where the work of SANAA, Sou Fujimoto and Junya Ishigami pursues the same field without hierarchy; in structural thinking that fuses frame and service; in Ito’s own later work; and among the buildings cited when he received the Pritzker Prize in 2013. The discounts: it redirected an avant-garde rather than the ordinary building of a century, and twenty-five years is short for a judgment on what came after.
Shreve, Lamb and Harmon · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
The intrinsic force: the tallest building in the world by a wide margin, 1,250 feet of stone and steel raised in about thirteen and a half months from the start of steel; a demonstration that the tall building could be organised as an industrial process; the end of the race for height for a generation. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the record stood thirty-nine years, until the north tower of the World Trade Center passed it in 1970; the building became the world’s image of the skyscraper and the unit by which later towers were measured, and its methods entered the practice of the trade. But the setback tower in limestone ended with it, and when tall building resumed in New York it followed Rockefeller Center and then the glass slab. In its field it is the summit and the measure; it closed a line more than it opened one.
Mike Nichols · Film
8.1 · Tier IV
Released in 1967, so intrinsic force and achieved reach are scored together, in the cinema of the 1960s. With Bonnie and Clyde, released the same year, the film announced to a mass audience what came to be called the New Hollywood: it brought European cutting and an alienated, unheroic young protagonist into an American comedy, and found that its audience was the young. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the film opened the studios to young directors and to a youth audience, the score compiled from pop records became a convention of American film for decades, and its casting changed what a leading man could look like. Much of that reach is shared with Bonnie and Clyde, and the formal borrowings came from elsewhere.
Lauryn Hill · Music
8.1 · Tier IV
The field is the hip hop and R&B of the 1990s. The intrinsic force: the record showed that one artist could carry rap and sung soul at the same height in one voice across a whole album, that hip hop production could be built on live and old-fashioned instruments without losing its weight, and that a woman’s interior life, love, a child, God, could be the subject of a hip hop record of full force. Part of that force was shared with the Fugees, Badu and D’Angelo, and with Blige, who had cleared much of the ground. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the singer who raps and the rapper who sings became a central figure of the next two decades, Drake and Kanye West among those who cite Hill, women in both fields have measured themselves against it, and it was the first hip hop record to win the Grammy for Album of the Year. The reach is strong and lasting, but narrower than that of the field’s epochal works: it confirmed and completed a direction already moving more than it opened one.
Felix Gonzalez-Torres · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
The field is American art of the late 1980s and early 1990s. The intrinsic force is a reorganisation of several things at once: what a portrait can be; how a museum object can be owned, as instructions and an obligation; how participation can carry meaning rather than spectacle; and how political art can work by stealth rather than by statement. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the conservation of variable and replenishable works treats the candy works as a central case, and a generation of participatory and take-away works follows the model, Sunflower Seeds (7.7) among them, which names the candy spills as an ancestor. Discounted because the reach belongs largely to the candy and stack works as a type, of which this is the emblem rather than the sole bearer, and because the span is short.
Buster Keaton · Film
8.1 · Tier IV
Released in 1924, into the cinema of the 1920s, the decade of Murnau, Eisenstein, Chaplin, Lang and Keaton’s own The General (8.5). The intrinsic force is a real reorganisation of possibility: the first feature to take the screen and the spectator as its plot and to make the cut visible as a physical force; with Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera (1929, 8.6) it is the decade’s great film about film, and it came first. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the reach is delayed and discounted. Keaton fell from view in the sound era, and the film’s standing was made by revival from the 1950s and 1960s. The descent is then plain: Woody Allen’s The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985) takes the crossing of the screen whole, and Jackie Chan’s stunt comedy acknowledges Keaton. The reach was more admired than followed.
Algernon Charles Swinburne · Literature
8.1 · Tier IV
Intrinsic force is high. The book reorganised what English verse could say about the body and the gods, and what English metre could do at speed and at length; after it, the triple measure and the dense sound were a possibility every poet had to accept or refuse. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the aesthetic and decadent poets of the 1880s and 1890s wrote in its light, Wilde in his verse, Dowson, Symons and in part the early Yeats; Hardy’s poems kept its debt and named it; the young Pound and the young Eliot learned its music and defined their own against it, Eliot in “Swinburne as Poet”, in The Sacred Wood (1920). Influence by reaction is real influence, discounted. Held below 8.5 because the line it opened ran mainly into the Nineties and stopped there; the twentieth century’s main road went round it.
Ralph Ellison · Literature
8.1 · Tier IV
The field is American criticism and the essay at mid-century, and Black American letters within it. The intrinsic force is high: the book reorganised how Black American culture could be argued, as the vernacular core of an American culture rather than a deviation from it, judged by aesthetic as well as social standards. Charged: the reach is contested, the Black Arts generation reached past it, much of its authority is borrowed from Invisible Man, and Baldwin’s Notes of a Native Son (1955) made some of the same break first and more widely. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the line of Albert Murray’s The Omni-Americans (1970) and Stanley Crouch, built on these premises; Henry Louis Gates’s vernacular theory, in debt to “Change the Joke”; the exchange with Howe as a fixed point of the argument over the protest novel; and the continuous use of the essays in American studies.
Dante Alighieri · Literature
8.1 · Tier IV
The field is the Italian vernacular lyric of the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, the Sicilians, Guittone, Guinizzelli, Cavalcanti and the stilnovisti, with the Occitan lyric behind them. The force: the canzone made capable of philosophy, the Occitan hard style naturalized in Italian, the sestina carried from Arnaut into the Italian tradition, and a form added, the canzone on five words. Discounted because much of the reach passes through Petrarch’s ordered book, and because Dante’s own redirection of the lyric is carried most by the Vita Nuova and the Commedia, which are not this unit. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Petrarch’s Canzoniere takes up the sestina, its stony imagery and the double sestina, and through Petrarch the European sonnet and canzone follow; the sestina’s later life in English and in modern poetry runs through Dante’s and Petrarch’s Italian as much as through Arnaut’s Occitan.
Herzog and de Meuron · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
Field: the museum and the public building of Europe and the world since 1990. Intrinsic force is real and partly shared. The kept power station, the kept void and art at the scale of the city each existed somewhere before, conversion in Paris and the museum as public place at the Pompidou, but Tate Modern joined them at a scale and with a public that remade the type. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: opening three years after Bilbao, it gave the world the other model of the museum as civic engine, the reused industrial monument against the new sculpture; the conversion of power stations, gasworks, granaries and docks into museums followed across Europe and Asia; and the single great hall for commissioned works became a want of museums after it. It made its architects’ career and changed London’s south bank. What holds the axis a tenth below the bar: the force is synthesis more than invention, and the reach belongs in part to the institution and its programme.
John Huston · Film
8.0 · Tier IV
Released in 1941, in the field of the cinema of the 1940s, which also holds Citizen Kane, Casablanca and the neorealists. The intrinsic force is real but bounded: the film fixed the screen idiom of the hardboiled detective, laconic, compromised and alone in a world of liars, and showed a studio that a faithful, dark adaptation with a hard ending could work. It did not reorganise what film could do, as Kane did the same year. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the film is commonly treated as the first American film noir, a claim contested, with Stranger on the Third Floor (1940) and earlier European work set against it; it set Bogart’s screen persona for Casablanca and The Big Sleep and the tough private eyes after him; it launched Huston, began the pairing of Greenstreet and Lorre, and left a plot of thieves chasing a priceless object that is still in use. Wide reach, largely within genre and persona.
Eddie Adams · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
Published, so intrinsic force and achieved reach are scored together, in the field of war photography and photojournalism of the 1960s. Intrinsic force is high: the image set the standard of what one news photograph could do in a war in progress, show the instant of a killing, by an ally, at once, to a whole public; a culmination of the Vietnam press photograph, not its invention. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: with Nick Ut’s photograph of 1972, it became the image of the war; it is a reference case in writing on the photograph of atrocity, Susan Sontag’s Regarding the Pain of Others among it; it framed how later wars were photographed and how armies managed photographers. Held below the gate because much of that reach is presence and political argument, not a line of photographers taking it as their departure.
Steven Spielberg · Film
8.0 · Tier IV
Field: the cinema of the 1980s, the film having been released in 1981, so force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force is a synthesis brought to a pitch: the film took the serial revival Star Wars had begun and fixed the present form of a genre, the action adventure as a chain of set pieces cut for momentum, humour inside peril, a fallible hero, sound and score carrying the action. What holds the figure short of the films that changed the art itself: the turn was its producer’s before it was the film’s, and the field it moved is the popular feature more than film’s possibilities. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: three sequels and a television series; the adventure films of the decade, Romancing the Stone and King Solomon’s Mines among them; later series such as The Mummy and National Treasure; beyond film, the video game of exploration and peril, Tomb Raider and Uncharted, which takes its grammar directly; and the archaeologist adventurer, a stock figure because of it.
Jean Nouvel, with Architecture-Studio · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
The field is the facade and the building of cultural institutions, and the Institut has stood in view since 1987, so force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force: it reorganised what a facade could be, a patterned, responsive and culturally coded skin, in an architecture that had treated the skin as neutral glass or as structure displayed, and it opened a way for Western high tech to address the Islamic world without pastiche. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: large and traceable. The patterned screen became one of the defining motifs of building across the Gulf and beyond, fixed and moving, on towers and institutions and in a generation of parametric screens; Nouvel’s own later work in the region carries it, a perforated dome among it; and the building made his name, a career crowned by the Pritzker Prize in 2008. The reach is partly of a motif rather than of a way of building, and much that followed made the screen decoration.
Arthur Conan Doyle · Literature
7.9 · Tier III
The field is English fiction of the late nineteenth century, popular and literary. The intrinsic force is moderate: the book did not reorganise what prose fiction could do, but took a form already made by Poe and gave it a shape fit for the magazine and the series. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the reach is among the widest of any English book of its decade, and it is named. The pair of detective and admiring narrator governs the genre that followed: Christie’s Poirot and Hastings from The Mysterious Affair at Styles (1920), Chesterton’s Father Brown, written in answer, Rex Stout’s Wolfe and Goodwin; Borges and Bioy Casares wrote in the line, and Eco named his friar William of Baskerville from a later Holmes novel. The series of self-contained stories became the shape of popular fiction. Reach counts; force holds it under the gate.
Queen · Music
7.9 · Tier III
The field is the rock album of the mid-1970s. The intrinsic force is real: the record showed that a rock band could use the multitrack studio to make a choir and an orchestra of four players, and that a through-composed single without a chorus could command the largest public. That reorganised the single and the scale of the studio more than the album, since the revue album was Sgt. Pepper’s and the suite was progressive rock’s. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the stacked vocal and guitar orchestration became a sound of arena rock and later of operatic and symphonic metal, but punk, which turned the field within a year, turned against exactly this grandeur, and much of the reach travels as one song rather than as a model of the album. Those two discounts hold it three tenths below Sticky Fingers and Who’s Next, both at 8.7, and below Born to Run, at 8.8, and The Dark Side of the Moon, at 8.9, whose reach is wider and is carried by the record as well as by its songs.
Aphex Twin · Music
7.8 · Tier III
The field is electronic music of the early 1990s. The intrinsic force is real: the record showed that techno’s machines and grid could make music for private listening, built on melody and atmosphere with the bedroom audible in it, and did so at album length with a consistency the singles and compilations of the period did not. That reorganisation was shared: The Orb, The KLF and Warp’s Artificial Intelligence worked the same ground the same year or earlier. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the record is the founding text named most often for ambient techno, and Boards of Canada, much of the Warp and Rephlex catalogue and later bedroom ambient producers stand on it. The reach is wide among musicians and narrow beyond electronic music.
George Gershwin · Music
7.8 · Tier III
The field is American concert and popular music of the 1920s. The intrinsic force is real and bounded: the work showed that the dance-band idiom and the songwriter’s melody could hold a concerted work and win the concert public; it did not reorganise how music is built, and its means were inherited. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it made Gershwin a concert composer, with the Concerto in F commissioned by Walter Damrosch within the year, An American in Paris and Porgy and Bess; it set the model of symphonic jazz and the crossover concert piece, with Copland’s Piano Concerto (1926) and Ravel’s Concerto in G in its line; and it became the sound of the American city on film and stage. Its reach on jazz itself is slight.
Sophocles · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
The field is Attic tragedy of the fifth century, with Aeschylus and Euripides on the same subject. The force is high. The play reorganised what tragedy could make its matter: a character changing under pressure, with the change itself as the action, and a sufferer whose interior the audience inhabits for most of the play. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it is real and narrower than the force, since tragedy as a living form had little time left to follow it; later antiquity cited it in Dio’s comparison; and the modern reach is literary and critical rather than generative: Fénelon’s episode in Télémaque, Lessing, Gide’s Philoctète (1899), Wilson’s essay, Heiner Müller’s Philoktet (1965), Heaney’s The Cure at Troy (1990). It redirected the reading of suffering and art more than it redirected drama.
David Bowie · Music
8.7 · Tier IV
The field is the rock and art-pop album of the 2010s, and the record of an elder artist. The intrinsic force is real: the record showed that a rock singer of the first rank could set his songs on a working jazz band given full freedom, and that a last record could be built as its maker’s own rite of death. It reorganised its maker’s possibilities more than the field’s; in ten years it has redirected little in the method of rock or of jazz, and part of its reach is the reach of the career it closed. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it raised the standing of its players, McCaslin’s quartet above all, became the type of the farewell album against which later last records are heard, and was the most widely heard of its maker’s late work.
Franz Schubert · Music
8.7 · Tier IV
Published, and scored on both components together. The intrinsic force is high: the work reorganised what lyric sonata could hold in chamber music, made the string quintet a vehicle of symphonic scale, and showed third and semitone relations bearing a whole design. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the reach is delayed and narrow. The quintet stayed unpublished for twenty-five years after its composition, so its first generation never heard it in print, and its reach since lies chiefly in performance and standing: since the mid twentieth century it has been continuously played and recorded at or near the head of its genre. A line of later composers is diffuse. Delay is credited and discounted. The field is chamber music of the 1820s and its successors.
John Soane · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
Intrinsic force is high. With the destroyed halls of the Bank of England and with Dulwich, the house is the fullest statement of a real reorganisation of architecture around 1800: space shaped by light and section rather than by the order, the order reduced to line. Reach is narrower and delayed. Soane had pupils but no school, and English architecture after him went to the Greek revival and the Gothic. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the rediscovery through Summerson; the stripped classicism of the interwar years; the postmodern classicists of the 1970s and 1980s, for whom Soane was a principal ancestor; and the self-made house museum as a type. Discounted for its delay and its narrowness, the reach holds the axis below the bar.
Richard Linklater · Film
8.6 · Tier IV
The field is the cinema of the 1990s to the 2010s. The intrinsic force is a demonstration in two parts: that a feature can be carried by two people talking in real places in long takes with no plot, and that the actors’ ageing can be the medium of a serial work. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Before Sunrise became a reference for the walk and talk romance and for the American independent cinema of conversation after it, the trilogy is the model named when a film returns to the same characters over decades, and Linklater’s own Boyhood (2014), at 8.4 on this desk, extends it. The reach redirected one strand and the idea of the sequel, not what most films do.
Andrea Palladio · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
Standing since 1592, so force and reach are scored together. The field is church building in Venice, the Veneto and the classical tradition after the Counter-Reformation. The intrinsic force is a real reorganisation of the church: the basilica’s façade problem solved in the language of the temple, and the long and central plans joined as a sequence of distinct spaces under one order. It sums Palladio’s path rather than opening it. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: in Venice the front of interlocking temple fronts became a model for later church fronts, and the votive church on the water was answered by Longhena’s Salute, vowed after the plague of 1630, reached by its own bridge of boats and built to a central plan. Beyond Venice the reach ran through the drawings and the name; the Palladianism that crossed to England and America carried the villa far more than the church.
Henry of Reyns and successors; Henry VII Chapel by Robert and William Vertue (attributed); west towers by Nicholas Hawksmoor · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
Force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force: the first full statement in England of the French Rayonnant, chevet, bar tracery and height, fused with an English surface into a court style; and, at the other end of the building, the pendant fan vault, the summit of the Perpendicular. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the bar tracery and the court style passed through the royal masons into English Decorated work, with St Stephen’s Chapel at Westminster taking up the line; the Lady Chapel’s vault ended its line, cut off by the Reformation; and the church gave the type of the national church of burial and of the unknown soldier’s grave, though Paris buried its own the same day. The French cathedrals behind it hold the turning.
José Clemente Orozco · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
The field is mural painting in Mexico and the Americas. The intrinsic force is high: the dome shows that the public mural, the movement’s instrument of national history, could carry tragedy and metaphysics at the scale of the baroque church without becoming propaganda, and that expressionism could work in true fresco at the top of a vault. The reach is real and narrower, and much of what is named abroad runs through Orozco’s earlier frescoes in the United States rather than through this dome; it is credited and, as delayed and indirect, discounted. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: in Mexico the chapel stands at the summit of the mural movement and is a measure for every later muralist; Jackson Pollock’s admiration for the Prometheus at Pomona is documented, and the line from Orozco to the New York painters is argued in the literature.
Krzysztof Kieślowski · Film
8.6 · Tier IV
Published, so force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force is real. The cycle reorganised what television could carry in one structure — ten serious, closed films under one metaphysical scheme — and showed that a moral argument could be built across a cycle rather than inside a single film. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is reach, which runs narrower than the force. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the cycle made Kieślowski’s international career; The Double Life of Véronique and the Three Colours trilogy inherit its method of chance, crossing lives and a governing abstraction; the published screenplays carry a foreword by Stanley Kubrick. Its reach into later multi-strand film is plausible but not shown, and it did not, in any way that can be shown, redirect television.
Mohammad Reza Isfahani, under Shah Abbas I · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
Force and reach are scored together, in the field of Safavid and later Iranian building. The intrinsic force is high: at the start of the Isfahan campaign the mosque fixes the highest standard of the tiled interior and of the dome chamber as one total surface, and with the Shah Mosque, the Ali Qapu and the portal of the bazaar it defines the Safavid style of the capital. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the reach is narrower than the force. The courtless, minaretless mosque of one room did not become the type of the capital; the Shah Mosque across the square, the larger influence, took the four-iwan court; and the mosaic faience was soon replaced by the quicker painted tile. Its later pressure is on the idea of the Persian interior and on tilework, more than on plan or type.
PJ Harvey · Music
8.6 · Tier IV
The field is the rock and alternative album of its decade, above all in Britain. The intrinsic force: the record showed that a major rock artist could make a whole album on national history and war without the heavy sound and the slogans of protest, through irony of form, borrowed sound and a folk idiom, and be heard widely; it recovered the war song for a public that had nearly lost it, and enlarged what the British album could take up. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the record won the Mercury Prize in 2011, Harvey’s second, and was placed at the head of many year-end lists, which is reception; no clear line of records has yet followed its method, and Harvey’s own The Hope Six Demolition Project (2016) continued it. Reach within the field is modest.
Nabataean · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
The field is its own tradition and region, Nabataean, Arabian and Levantine building, with Hellenistic architecture as its source. The intrinsic force is high and carries the axis: the fullest realisation of rock-cut architecture as monumental facade in the ancient Mediterranean world and at its edges, the whole apparatus of a built front cut into the cliff, and among the best surviving witnesses of an Alexandrian built style otherwise largely lost. What holds it is the direct line: Hegra and the other Nabataean necropoleis are siblings more than successors, and after 106 the idiom ended as a living tradition. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: delayed, credited and discounted, and in knowledge and image rather than building, as central evidence for Hellenistic architecture, a figure of the Romantic orient from David Roberts on, and the national image of Jordan.
Achaemenid, under Darius I and Xerxes · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
In view since its making, so force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force is high: a real reorganisation of the Near Eastern palace, the columned hall made monumental, relief turned to concord, many traditions made one imperial style. Reach stands well below it. After 330 BC the line was broken: Parthian and Sasanian building took the vault and the iwan, not the hall of columns. The descents claimed in Mauryan India and in the Iranian columned porch are argued, not proven, and are discounted; the decipherment belongs to the inscriptions, not the architecture. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: within the empire the style was carried to Susa, and Achaemenid art spread with it; since then the reach is modern and emblematic, the Achaemenid revival in Pahlavi Tehran’s public buildings, Parsi fire temples, the celebration of 1971.
Khmer, under Jayavarman VII · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
The field is Khmer building and its region, and force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force is high: a real reorganisation of the state temple, turned to a new religion, a new centre in the round sanctuary, a new sign in the face tower and a new subject in the common life, and set as the hinge of a new city plan. The reach is real but short, and keeps the figure below the bar: within a century monumental building in stone had nearly ceased, and the state turned to Theravada Buddhism and timber. Its later presence as the national image is fame, not redirection, and earns nothing. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the face tower and the temple’s manner governed the building of the reign, from the gates of Angkor Thom to Ta Som and Banteay Chhmar, and name the last great period of Khmer art.
Robert Altman · Film
8.5 · Tier IV
Released in 1971, so force and reach are scored together. The force: the film became the revisionist western’s defining text, in which the frontier is a business and the hero a small man, and it demonstrated a sound design in which dialogue could be layered and lost, which Altman carried into Nashville (1975) and which marked American film of the decade. The reach is credited and discounted: the anti-western was a movement with other founders, and the sound method was taken up chiefly by Altman himself and his heirs. Open descendants: Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate (1980), shot by Zsigmond; Eastwood’s Unforgiven (1992); Jarmusch’s Dead Man (1995); David Milch’s Deadwood (2004), which takes the town-as-business whole; Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood (2007). Held at the figure because the redirection was of a genre already turning.
Charles Laughton · Film
8.5 · Tier IV
Field: the cinema of the 1950s. The intrinsic force is high. The film showed that sound cinema could still speak the silent film’s language of image and artifice, that a thriller could be a fairy tale, and it set the preacher who kills as a figure in American culture. It did not reorganise its decade, which did not follow it, and it founded no school. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: a critical return that came late and is discounted for delay; the speech of love and hate taken by Spike Lee for Radio Raheem in Do the Right Thing (1989); Mitchum’s preacher behind later killers of the Southern Gothic screen, the Max Cady of Scorsese’s Cape Fear (1991) among them; the tattooed knuckles passed into common iconography. The reach is wide in image and narrower in method.
Stanley Kubrick · Film
8.5 · Tier IV
Released in 1999, so force and reach are scored together. The force is real: a star vehicle carries a slow, ambiguous chamber study of a marriage, and a dream logic is sustained across a realistic plot without being marked. It does not reorganise what film can do; it is the last statement of a style Kubrick had built over thirty years. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the masked rite in a country house has become a common shorthand for the secret ceremonies of the powerful, and the film is a reference point for later work in erotic and paranoid ambiguity. The reach is diffuse, and part of it rides on a conspiracy culture the film did not make.
Andrea Palladio; scene by Vincenzo Scamozzi · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
The building has stood since 1585, so force and reach are scored together. The field is Italian and European theatre building of its century and after. The intrinsic force is high: it reorganised what a theatre could be, a permanent civic or academic house in antique form with built perspective, and it fixed the Renaissance’s answer to Vitruvius in a working building. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Scamozzi’s own small court theatre followed within a few years, and it stands behind the ducal theatre of 1618 that took the decisive turn to a framed proscenium and changeable scenery, the model Europe’s opera houses and playhouses followed for three centuries. Its own line was largely closed within a generation; since then it has been a model studied, not followed.
Frank Lloyd Wright · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
The field is American office and corporate building of the twentieth century. The intrinsic force is high: a real reorganisation of the workplace, the clerical floor made a single light-filled room with structure and lighting one system, the company headquarters made a work of architecture rather than a block of floors, and the tapering column offered as a structural type. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the building fixed the corporate headquarters as patronage and image in America, and the tapering, mushroom-headed column was answered later by engineers and architects; but the office that prevailed after the war followed the curtain wall and the open floor of another school, not this room, and the tower’s core and cantilever had more consequence in Wright’s own later work than in the field. Broad in image, narrow in practice.
Carlo Scarpa · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Seen and published since its making, so force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force is high: the precinct shows that late modern architecture could be made of joints, edges, water and craft, that ornament could be generated from construction itself, and that a cemetery could be a public garden. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: after Scarpa’s death the tomb became a touchstone for the tectonic discourse of the 1980s and after, Kenneth Frampton’s critical regionalism among its strands, for architects attentive to material and detail across Europe and in Japan, and for the design of memorial landscapes; it is studied in every serious school. But it redirected a sensibility more than a practice: there is no Brion type, and much of the reach runs through Scarpa’s whole work.
Van Morrison · Music
8.5 · Tier IV
The field is the rock and singer-songwriter album of 1968 and the years after. The intrinsic force is high: the record showed that a rock singer could make an album as a long improvised meditation with jazz players, setting words as incantation inside an open form, and that the result could hold the deepest material of a life. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the record founded no school, and no practice can be shown to have turned on it at once. Its reach came late and runs through individuals: the open-form songs of later singer-songwriters, Morrison’s own later work, and the idea that a rock album may be a single ecstatic utterance. Much of it is the reach of a touchstone, cited more than followed. Delayed influence is credited and discounted, and that holds the figure below the bar.
Luchino Visconti · Film
8.5 · Tier IV
Released in 1963, so force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force is real: the film made the historical epic a means of analysing history as a class settlement, and proved that a super-production could be built on duration, interior time and a ball. It is a culmination more than a reorganisation. The decade was moved by the New Wave, Antonioni, Bergman and Fellini, and this film stood beside them as a great work in a grand inherited form. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 1963; a lasting model for the period film as social anatomy and for the ball as its set piece, with Bertolucci’s 1900 (1976) in the line of the Italian historical fresco; and a political term taken from its title, shared with the novel. The reach lies mainly within one genre and one kind of set piece.
Balthasar Neumann · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Force and reach are scored together; the field is palace building in the German lands of the eighteenth century. The intrinsic force is high: the stair made the culminating room of a palace, under one vault, fused with painting and stucco into one rising work, and the fullest synthesis of French planning, Viennese ornament and Italian painting that the region made. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Neumann’s stairs at Bruchsal and Brühl belong to the same line; the Würzburg team and its ideas spread through Franconian and Rhenish building; Tiepolo carried the painted ceiling of a royal house on to Madrid in the 1760s. But the line closed within a generation, as classicism came and the prince-bishoprics ended. In its field the Residenz is the summit by which the others are measured, a model studied more than followed.
Cormac McCarthy · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
The field is the novel of the 2000s. The force is moderate to high: the book showed that the literary novel could take up the survival narrative whole, without irony or apology, and make it carry an elemental fable of parenthood, and it changed what a popular form could be asked to mean more than how a novel could be built. Held below the bar because the reach runs mainly through a premise and a mood rather than a method, and twenty years cannot show how far the redirection will hold. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2007, Oprah Winfrey’s book club the same year and John Hillcoat’s film in 2009, a reach wide for its decade.
Buster Keaton and Clyde Bruckman · Film
8.5 · Tier IV
Dated 1926, so force and reach are scored together, in the field of the cinema of the 1920s. The force: the film showed that physical comedy could carry the scale and the realism of an epic and stay comedy, and it set the gag inside a world of real mass and danger. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: at release the reach was close to nil, and Hollywood comedy turned to sound and the spoken joke. The reach came later and is discounted for its delay: the critical revival of Keaton from the 1950s, which made this film his monument; the action cinema of the stunt really performed, Jackie Chan’s above all, which has acknowledged Keaton; and with it the long chase on a moving vehicle as a form. The reach is wide, but late.
Gerhard of Cologne and successors; completed by Ernst Friedrich Zwirner · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Force and reach are scored together, in the field of Gothic building in the German lands and, for the completion, of nineteenth-century Europe. The intrinsic force: the choir brought French High Gothic entire to the Rhine, and the drawing set the most complete scheme for a Gothic twin-towered front; but this consummated a reorganisation made in France rather than making one. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: regionally the Cologne lodge and its forms on the Lower Rhine; widely, and late, the completion as the model for finishing the medieval churches of German Europe, the towers of Regensburg and of Ulm, which passed Cologne’s height in 1890, for the Gothic Revival as a national style, and for the standing cathedral works. Delayed and partly ideological reach is discounted.
Olmec · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
Intrinsic force is high. The heads are, as far as anyone knows, the first monumental stone portraiture in the Americas, and they changed what stone, labour and rule could do together in Mesoamerica: after them the ruler’s image in stone is a possibility of the region. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the form was carried from San Lorenzo to La Venta and Tres Zapotes for some centuries; the wider Olmec programme of thrones and stelae stands, by an indirect and argued line, behind the ruler monuments of later Mesoamerica, Izapa and the Maya stelae; the colossal head itself ended with the Olmec; and in the modern field the heads became the emblem of Mexican antiquity before the Aztec and the Maya, which is presence more than a redirection of art. The force is of the first order; the reach falls short of it.
Jean-François Millet · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
Published, so force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force: the canvas fixed how the rural poor could be painted, monumental, faceless, at one with the ground, with dignity in place of anecdote, and the type entered painting’s repertoire. The discount: the reach belongs to Millet’s peasant work as a whole, shared with The Sower and The Angelus, and the larger reorganisation of the field around 1850 belongs to Courbet. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Jules Breton’s gleaners and the French rural naturalists of the 1860s and 1870s; Pissarro’s peasant women; Van Gogh, for whom Millet was the master and who copied him again and again; Seurat’s early drawings of bent workers; and, beyond painting, the image as the emblem of the poor of the land, reaching Varda’s film in 2000.
Akkadian · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
The field is the relief art of Mesopotamia and Iran in the later third millennium BC. Force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force is high: the stele sets a historical event in one continuous landscape with a single directed movement through it, a real reorganisation of what a relief could do. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: within the field it was honoured, since an Elamite king carried it off a thousand years on and wrote his name on it; a line to later royal rock reliefs in the Zagros is proposed but not proved; and Mesopotamian art after Akkad largely went back to registers and presentation scenes, as under Ur-Nammu and Hammurabi. Its modern reach in the history of art is wide, and is presence more than redirection.
Boris Pasternak · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
The field is the Russian novel of the twentieth century and, as the book entered the world, the European and American novel of the Cold War. The intrinsic force is moderate. It showed that the large novel of history could be written in Russian against the state’s account of that history, and that a lyric poet’s prose and a cycle of poems could carry it; but its method renewed the nineteenth-century form more than it reorganised possibility, and the more formative Russian prose of the century, Bulgakov’s, Platonov’s and later Solzhenitsyn’s, took other roads. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: as an event the reach is very large. It made the publication of forbidden Soviet literature abroad a practice, opened the road tamizdat took, and stands behind the reception of Solzhenitsyn and Grossman in the West; David Lean’s film of 1965 carried it to an audience few novels reach. Reach as event outstrips reach as method.
Agnès Varda · Film
8.4 · Tier IV
The field is the cinema of the 1960s. The intrinsic force is high: the film showed that a woman’s consciousness, in real time, could be the whole subject of a feature, and that the New Wave’s freedom of the street could serve interiority rather than play with genre. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the reach is real but delayed and indirect, running through feminist cinema and criticism from the 1970s on, with Chantal Akerman’s real-time study of a woman’s day the descendant usually named, and through the many films that clock a single afternoon. Delayed influence is credited and discounted. Beside it, Breathless (9.3) and L’Avventura (8.8) redirected more of what followed, and the figure stands below the gate for that.
Nicolas Poussin · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
The canvas was made for collectors and has long been public, so intrinsic force and achieved reach are scored together; the field is European painting in the 1630s and the classical tradition after it. Intrinsic force: the canvas fixes the learned, meditative history picture at cabinet scale, the form its painter gave French classicism, and it reorganises the theme of mortality from shock to reflection; real, but within a manner rather than a remaking of what painting could do. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the painter was the model of the French Academy for two centuries, and this canvas is among the works most associated with that authority; the tomb and inscription passed into the elegiac tradition of the eighteenth century; the motto passed into Goethe and Schiller, a reach shared with Guercino. Its place as Panofsky’s case is reach of another kind, credited lightly.
Andrei Tarkovsky · Film
8.4 · Tier IV
The field is the cinema of the 1970s. Intrinsic force is high: the film made science fiction a vehicle for memory, conscience and the sacred rather than for technology, and set a slow, contemplative form against the grandeur of 2001 rather than imitating it. Part of that force is Tarkovsky’s style as a whole, made in Andrei Rublev (8.7) and carried further in Mirror (8.7) and Stalker (8.8), and is discounted. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the Grand Prix Spécial du Jury at Cannes in 1972; Soderbergh’s remake; the line of contemplative and metaphysical science fiction since; and the slow cinema of later decades, which owes Tarkovsky more than any other director, though not this film alone. The reach is real, largely within art cinema and shared with the later films; it redirected a genre’s ambition more than its practice.
Claire Denis · Film
8.4 · Tier IV
Released in 1999, so force and reach are scored together, in the cinema of the 1990s. Intrinsic force is real: the film showed that a narrative feature could be carried almost wholly by bodies, movement, music and landscape, with the story placed in the gaps, and that the male body could be looked at in a feature without irony or exploitation, a reorganisation of possibility within art cinema. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the closing dance has become one of the most cited endings in cinema, and a body-led, sensory art cinema of the next two decades draws on the film, as do Denis’s own later films. The reach was delayed and concentrated, it did not touch popular film, and much of it followed the film’s rise in the critics’ polls, credited and discounted as delayed.
Caspar David Friedrich · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
Published, so force and reach are scored together. The field is German and northern landscape painting of the 1810s. The force: the canvas states, as clearly as any picture, that a landscape is the experience of a subject, and it gives Romantic painting its emblem of the solitary viewer before nature. But the reorganisation belongs to the painter’s work as a whole, is made more radically in the empty field of the Monk, and is gathered here in a more balanced, more conventional composition. Reach is discounted for delay: the painter was neglected from about 1840 for decades. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the later life of the image, real and largely as public image, on book covers and posters and in film frames; and the critical lineage from northern Romanticism to the Abstract Expressionists, which belongs to the oeuvre.
Clint Eastwood · Film
8.4 · Tier IV
Released in 1992, so force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force is that of a closing argument on the western, made by its last major star, in which the genre’s central act is examined and then performed; it changed less what film could do than what the western could say about its own violence. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the film is the reference point for the westerns after it, from Tombstone (1993) to The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007), the Coens’ True Grit (2010) and Logan (2017), and for Deadwood (2004) on television; it fixed the aged gunman as the genre’s late subject. The reach lies largely inside one genre, and outside it the pressure is diffuse: two tenths below the gate.
Wim Wenders · Film
8.4 · Tier IV
Released in 1987, into the cinema of the 1980s. The intrinsic force: a feature-length film poem, a city symphony carried by voice-over and a metaphysical conceit, made with the means of art cinema, which showed that a contemplative film without a plot could hold a wide audience in a decade of narrative consolidation. It perfected and widened a manner, Wenders’s own, Handke’s and the essay film’s, more than it reorganised what cinema could do. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the angels in long coats on the rooftops passed into common visual reference, Wenders answered the film with a sequel and Hollywood remade it, and it stands as one of the last monuments of the New German Cinema. Particular lines of descent into later contemplative cinema are contested and are not credited.
Philip Roth · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
The field is American fiction at the turn of the century. The intrinsic force is real and bounded: the book joined the social novel of race to the novel of the academy and to the political scandal of its year, and brought a writer known for his self-regard to the full public novel, in which America’s history of race is the hidden ground of a Jewish-American life. It reorganised what Roth’s own novel could hold more than what the novel could do. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the PEN/Faulkner Award of 2001; Robert Benton’s film of 2003; translation and teaching; and, since Roth’s death in 2018, its standing as the novel to which arguments about cancellation and the campus are referred. It redirected a conversation more than a form, and few novelists took up its means.
Henri Rousseau · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
Published, so force and reach are scored together. The field is French painting of the 1890s and the avant-garde that grew from it. The intrinsic force is real: the canvas makes a dream image in plain daylight paint, with no symbolist vagueness and no narrative frame, a reorganisation of what an image of the irrational could be, and it stands at the head of the line that runs to de Chirico’s still squares, the Surrealists’ literal dreams and the century’s esteem for the untrained eye. The discount: the canvas was out of sight for about a quarter century after it was made, so the painter’s hold on Picasso, Delaunay, Léger and the Blaue Reiter in his lifetime ran through other pictures. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: taken up at once when it reappeared, it became the emblem of the painter and of naive painting, and a much reproduced image of the dream in modern art.
English embroiderers (probably Canterbury) · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
Force and reach are scored together, in the field of Anglo-Norman and Romanesque narrative art. The intrinsic force is real: continuous secular history at monumental scale, the most ambitious pictorial narrative of its century to survive in the West. The reach is delayed and partial. For some six centuries the hanging was a treasure of one cathedral, and its reach is credited from its rediscovery in the eighteenth century; it is large, but it runs mostly outside the practice of art, and it is discounted for the delay. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the historiography of 1066 and the imagining of the Conquest; Napoleon’s display of it in Paris in 1803 and 1804 and its later political use; replicas and answers, the copy made at Leek and the Overlord Embroidery of the 1970s; and the long claim that it is an ancestor of the strip cartoon.
Luis Barragán · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Seen and published since the late 1940s, and widely only after 1976, so force and reach are scored together and the delay is credited and discounted. The intrinsic force: the clearest built statement that modern abstraction could be joined to enclosure, colour, silence and regional memory, against the transparent, universal house of the International Style; the founding work of Barragán’s mature architecture and of a Mexican modernism with its own voice. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: strong in Mexico, in Ricardo Legorreta and the generation after; strong in the critique of universal modernism after the 1970s, in critical regionalism and the coloured wall as a world idiom; acknowledged by architects as distant as Tadao Ando. Held below the gate because the reach came late, through exhibition and prize as much as building, and what spread was often a manner.
Jean-Luc Godard · Film
8.4 · Tier IV
The field is the cinema of the early 1960s. Intrinsic force: the film shows that a narrative feature can be made as a sequence of distanced essays on its own subject, mixing documentary recitation, philosophy and fiction, while keeping the grip of a story about a woman’s fate. That is a real reorganisation of the possible, though not the first of its kind in Godard. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it is among the films that opened the way to the essay feature, to Godard’s own Deux ou trois choses que je sais d’elle of 1967, which takes the same trade as a figure of the city, and, by a line critics argue and influence of this kind leaves diffuse, to later films of a woman’s labour watched from outside, of which Jeanne Dielman (8.8) is the nearest. The reach is wide among filmmakers and critics, narrower with audiences than Breathless, and the figure stands below the gate for that.
Michael Cimino · Film
8.4 · Tier IV
Released in December 1978, into the American cinema of the 1970s. The intrinsic force is real: the film made the war in Vietnam a subject for the large studio epic, not in combat but in what it did to a town at home, and showed that a long film could spend its first hour on ritual and earn its war by it. It is an enlargement of the epic more than a reorganisation of possibility, and the films that followed took its subject more than its form. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: with Coming Home (1978) it opened the cycle of Vietnam films that ran through Apocalypse Now (8.8), made independently and shot first, Platoon (1986) and Full Metal Jacket (1987); it made the damaged returning veteran a central figure of American film; and its roulette passed into the common vocabulary.
Zhang Yimou · Film
8.4 · Tier IV
The field is the cinema of the 1990s. The intrinsic force: the film brought the Fifth Generation’s use of colour and space to its most rigorous and abstract form, and showed that ritual and architecture alone could carry a political argument. It culminates a movement; it did not begin one. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: with Ju Dou and Farewell My Concubine (1993) it made mainland Chinese cinema a fixture of the festival and art-house circuit for a decade; and its look, saturated colour, symmetrical courts, women under ritual, became a template, and a charge, for the Chinese period film after it, Zhang’s own Hero (2002) and Curse of the Golden Flower (2006) among them. It redirected the reception of a national cinema more than it reorganised what film could do.
Leonardo da Vinci · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
Published, so force and reach are scored together. The field is the Italian portrait of the 1480s and 1490s. The intrinsic force is high: with Ginevra de’ Benci, and before the Mona Lisa, the panel reorganises the portrait from the record of a sitter into the record of a mind in a moment, with head and body set against each other and a light that is the occasion of the turn; it is among the first Italian portraits whose sitter attends to something outside the picture. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: in Milan the painters of Leonardo’s circle took up the turned half-length, but the larger line through Raphael’s Florentine portraits and the High Renaissance portrait runs mainly through the Mona Lisa. The panel left Italy about 1800, so its direct reach after the 1490s is thin, and its fame since the twentieth century is presence, not redirection.
Chen Kaige · Film
8.4 · Tier IV
Field: the cinema of the 1990s. Intrinsic force: the film joined the Fifth Generation’s seriousness to the scale of the international epic, and showed that a Chinese film could carry half a century of national history, queer desire and political trauma to a world audience in one melodrama. It perfected a form more than it reorganised what cinema could do. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the Palme d’Or, a Golden Globe and two Academy Award nominations; an opening of Western distribution to the Chinese period film that the decade followed; a model for the queer Chinese-language film after it, and a standing reference for Peking opera on screen. The limit stands: the decade’s reorganisation came as much from Hou Hsiao-hsien, Edward Yang and Wong Kar-wai, and the epic line it opened bent toward spectacle.
Kazuo Ishiguro · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
The field is the English-language novel of the 2000s. The intrinsic force is real and bounded: the book showed that a speculative premise could be carried in literary fiction entirely by voice and withholding, with the genre’s furniture removed, and that the effect could be moral rather than spectacular. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: one of the most read and most taught literary novels of its decade; the Booker shortlist of 2005; a place on Time’s list of the hundred best English-language novels since 1923 in its year of publication; Mark Romanek’s film of 2010; and a central place in how its author is read. It is cited in the widening of literary fiction toward speculative premises in its decade, beside books by Atwood, Mitchell and McCarthy. What holds it below the gate is that the turn was shared, Atwood had made it first, and the reach is wide as reading and narrower as redirection of how novels are written.
Vincent van Gogh · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
Published and on view, so force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force: with the other late canvases it shows landscape made the direct carrier of feeling through colour and stroke, with perspective and description subordinate to the mark, a real reorganisation of what a landscape could do. The discount: the force is shared with the late work as a whole, and the field’s redirection was by that body, not by this picture alone. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the Fauves and the painters of Die Brücke, from 1905, drew on the late work, though on the body rather than on this canvas; this canvas in particular is the scene Vincente Minnelli’s Lust for Life (1956) places just before the suicide, and the setting into which Kurosawa’s Dreams (1990) walks its painter in the segment “Crows”. That is reach into another medium, and much of it is the legend’s. Fame and reproduction are presence, and count here for nothing.
Hasegawa Tōhaku · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
The field is Japanese painting of the Momoyama and early Edo decades, and here force and reach part. The intrinsic force is high: the screens reorganise what ink painting in Japan could do, turning a borrowed Chinese mode into a monumental art of absence, the emptiness made structural and the subject reduced to air and one kind of tree; no earlier Japanese painting gives the unpainted so much of the work. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the Hasegawa school did not long outlast its founder’s generation, the Kanō held the field through the Edo period, and no line of painters is known to descend from this pair. The reach came late, in the twentieth century, as the emblem of a Japanese aesthetic of mist, emptiness and restraint, cited by painters, designers and writers in Japan and abroad; delayed influence is credited and discounted.
Ming builders (and earlier dynasties) · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force: a frontier made one masonry line across mountains, and the hollow tower as a new unit of defence, the fullest statement of an old idea in the frontier building of its region and centuries. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: within decades of the last campaigns gunpowder armies and the Qing’s incorporation of the steppe made the type obsolete, and it had no successors of its kind; its reach is as an emblem, of China, of walls everywhere and of a nation’s self-image in the twentieth century, and what is credited is that it fixed the meaning of a frontier wall for every later reader. In the art of building the reach is small.
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Scored in the field of post-war German public building and the type of the modern museum. The intrinsic force is high: the fullest realisation of the column-free hall under a single structural roof, the building fixed the image of the modern museum as a pavilion of glass and steel on a podium, and as Mies’s last word it closes an argument he had been making for forty years. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it is real but narrower. The redirection of the field had come before it, from Barcelona, Crown Hall and the Seagram Building; museum building after it, from the Centre Pompidou to the white-box gallery, sought flexible containers by other means; and the later turn against the glass hall as a place for art is in part a reaction to this room. It stands as a reference, and the Kulturforum was built around it.
Roman · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
The field is Roman provincial and imperial engineering and the building that inherited it. The intrinsic force is that of the fullest realisation of the multi-tier aqueduct bridge, a synthesis carried to its limit rather than a reorganisation of what was possible. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: among the aqueduct bridges of the empire, Segovia, Tarragona and Mérida, it stands as their peer more than their model, and nothing shows that later Roman builders followed it in particular. The delayed reach, credited with its discount, is real: from the eighteenth century it became for French and European engineers and architects the image of Roman construction, Pitot built against it, and the arcaded viaducts of the railway age stand in its line, through the type more than through it.
Bernardo Rossellino, for Pius II · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
Force and reach are scored together, in the field of the Italian town and the Italian palace of the fifteenth century. The intrinsic force is high: Pienza is the first Renaissance town centre built whole to one design, and it showed that the humanist city could be made and not only drawn; its palace, opening to a landscape view, is on a common account a step toward the villa of the next century. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: real and diffuse. The square became the type case of the planned square of the Renaissance and is set beside later squares in every account of the type, though as a comparison more than a documented debt; direct imitation is hard to trace, the town stayed a small hill town off the main roads, and the hall church had no Tuscan progeny. Pienza moved the idea of the town more than the practice.
Alvar Aalto · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
Published from 1939, so force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force is a real reorganisation of the modern house in one complete work, from machine to forest, from grid to landscape, from purity to collage: one of the founding statements of a humane, regional and tactile modernism. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: in Finland and the Nordic countries it set the terms of the modern house for a generation; through Aalto’s rise after the war it fed the organic and regional lines of modernism, and later critical regionalism, where it is a standard case. But that reach runs through many works, Paimio, Viipuri, Säynätsalo and the furniture, and through the man’s doctrine as much as through this house, and the line it opened never became a world idiom. In its field, the Nordic house of its century, a summit; beyond it, an exemplar more than a turning point.
Jacob Lawrence · Visual art
8.3 · Tier IV
The field is American painting, and African American art, in the 1940s. The intrinsic force is a reorganisation of what a history painting could be about and who could be its subject, and of what the flat modernist idiom could carry: documentary history, at the scale of a people, in sequence. Against it, American painting at large went the other way in the decade that followed, into abstraction, and the series redirected little of that mainstream. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: within African American art it is foundational; it made Lawrence, at twenty-four, the first widely known Black American modernist; later Black American painters have named him as a model; and its wide presence in schoolrooms and reproduction is presence, not pressure.
Attributed to Domenico da Cortona, under Francis I · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
Force and reach are scored together, in the field of French royal and noble building of the sixteenth century. The intrinsic force is high: the keep reorganises the château round a centred plan and a central stair, makes the self-contained apartment a unit of the great house, and shows that a feudal type can carry a classical plan. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the quadrant apartment entered French planning, by many routes and not by this building alone, and the roofscape in its forest became the emblem of the Loire. But French building after 1540 went through Fontainebleau, Lescot’s Louvre and Philibert de l’Orme toward the regular classical front; the centred keep was not repeated at its scale, and the double helix was rarely imitated.
Federico Fellini · Film
8.3 · Tier IV
Released in 1954, so force and reach are scored together, in the cinema of the 1950s. The intrinsic force is the clearest single statement that Italian cinema could leave neorealism’s social causation and keep its roads and faces, a path Fellini and others took for the next decade; it also gave the innocent at the centre of a film a new depth. The reach is narrower in form than in fame: its successors took its figures and its pathos more than its grammar, and Fellini’s own later films moved the field further. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the Silver Lion at Venice in 1954, the first Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film in that category’s first competitive year, wide international success, and a theme known well beyond the film.
Arnolfo di Cambio (attributed) · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
The field is the civic palace of the Italian communes and Tuscan building from the fourteenth century to the sixteenth. The intrinsic force: the palace fixed the image of the Florentine seat of government, block, gallery and tower, with an authority no rival had, and the tower’s carriage over the gallery made the type an emblem. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the town and governors’ palaces of the Florentine dominion repeat its gallery and tower at a smaller scale; the rusticated block is one root of the Florentine palace of the fifteenth century; and the towered town hall became a civic type of the nineteenth century, with this palace among its models. Held below the gate because the type had been set before it in the same city: it is the summit of a type more than its turning point.
Apichatpong Weerasethakul · Film
8.3 · Tier IV
Released in 2010, so force and reach are scored together, in the field of the cinema of the 2000s and 2010s. The intrinsic force is high: the film made a popular folk cinema of ghosts and an art cinema of duration one language, and showed that a political history could be carried by spirits rather than testimony. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the Palme d’Or put Thai and Southeast Asian art cinema at the centre of the festival world, and the film became a reference for the slow, sensory, animist cinema of the next decade, in Thailand, the Philippines and Latin America, and for the meeting of film and gallery. It redirected art cinema rather than cinema, and much of its influence passes through the director’s whole body of work.
Correggio · Visual art
8.3 · Tier IV
Published, so force and reach are scored together. The field is Italian painting of the 1520s and 1530s. The intrinsic force is high: the canvas reorganises the mythological nude around sensation and atmosphere, makes ecstasy a painted subject, and carries soft modelling and the dissolving edge further than any contemporary. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the reach is real and delayed. In the 1530s Mannerism went another way, and Parma was provincial; the reach came later, through the Carracci and the Bolognese, through the French eighteenth century’s erotic mythologies, where Correggio was a principal model, and in the wide copying of the Loves of Jupiter. The comparison with Bernini’s Saint Teresa is often made; a direct line is unproven and is not counted, nor is the reach of the Parma domes.
Mughal, under Akbar · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
The intrinsic force: the fullest statement of the Akbari synthesis, a court style that made the trabeated Indian stone tradition and the Timurid vocabulary one imperial language, and the open pavilion-palace on courts the form of a Mughal seat. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: within the empire the language passed to the palaces of Agra and Lahore and to Akbar’s own tomb at Sikandra, and the Rajput courts took up the Mughal pavilion, bracket and kiosk, so that the regional palace idiom of the next two centuries carries its stamp; the Buland Darwaza set a measure for the monumental gate. But the main line of Mughal building turned away under Shah Jahan, to marble and the arch, and the later reach is the antiquarian one of the Indo-Saracenic revival and the twentieth-century architects who cite it. A summit of its reign more than a turning of the whole tradition.
Edgar Degas · Visual art
8.3 · Tier IV
The field is French sculpture of the 1880s; the work was shown in 1881, so force and reach are scored together. Intrinsic force is high: a real reorganisation of what a sculpture may be made of and whom it may show, the modern subject and the working body, colour and found material in the fine art, the display apparatus as part of the work. Reach was delayed and diffuse. The wax was seen for one exhibition and then kept from public view for almost forty years, and French sculpture took Rodin’s path, not this one. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the posthumous bronzes, which made the figure one of the best known sculptures of the modern era while undoing its mixture; and a line to later mixed-media sculpture and the hyperreal figure that runs through many works, not this one alone.
Orson Welles · Film
8.3 · Tier IV
The field is the cinema of the 1950s, and the intrinsic force is high. The film carries the American crime film to a baroque end, puts the corruption of law at its centre, and extends the long take and layered sound into genre filmmaking with a force few films of the decade matched; it is often named as the close of the classic noir cycle. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: in the United States it was released low on a double bill and little noticed, while in Europe the French critics above all took it up at once. Its opening shot became a touchstone for the long take, cited by name in the opening take of Altman’s The Player (1992) and followed by many, and the 1998 reconstruction renewed its reach and made the case for restoring films to their makers’ instructions. Two tenths short of the gate because much of its grammar was Kane’s and its reach was delayed.
Italo Calvino · Literature
8.3 · Tier IV
The field is Italian literature of the 1970s and, through translation, the European novel of its decade. The intrinsic force is real: the book showed that a work of fiction could be organised by a combinatorial scheme without becoming a game, that a frame could be the theory of its own stories, and that the city, the subject of the realist novel, could be treated as pure form and still disclose. What holds it below the bar is that its formal method was taken up in later fiction more as an emblem than as a practice, and that its widest reach lies outside the field it entered. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it became one of the most read Italian works of its century abroad, it entered the curricula and the vocabulary of architecture and urban design, and it stands with Borges among the sources of the postmodern novel of ideas.
Alan Moore and David Lloyd · Literature
8.3 · Tier IV
The field is the English-language comic of the 1980s, with the British dystopian fiction of the century beside it. The intrinsic force is a real reorganisation of what a British adventure strip could do: a sustained political argument in the medium, a hero without interior narration, and, with Moore’s other work of those years, a demonstration that a comic could be read as a novel is read. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it was one of the books, collected in the late 1980s beside the famous American comics of 1986 to 1989, that brought the long comic for adult readers into bookshops; and its Guy Fawkes mask became a public sign worldwide. That reach is charged, since it runs through the 2006 film more than the book, the school it helped shape was shaped more by its companions, and its own formal choices were not widely taken up.
Alvar Aalto · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
Intrinsic force: the building shows that modern architecture could make a civic place at the smallest scale out of enclosure, material and ascent, against the free-standing block and the plaza, and so it reorganises what a modern town hall could be. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: within Finland and the Nordic countries it is a touchstone for later town halls, libraries and parish centres in brick and timber; internationally it became a canonical example of the turn away from the International Style in the 1950s and of the later account of critical regionalism, and it is studied in schools worldwide. But it did not reset its field as Villa Savoye or the Sydney Opera House did. Strong force, solid regional reach, a wider reach carried mostly by teaching.
Mark Z. Danielewski · Literature
8.3 · Tier IV
The field is American fiction around 2000 and, beyond it, the book as an object in the first digital years. The intrinsic force is high: the book showed that the printed page could be made spatial and navigable, as hypertext had promised to make the screen, and that the most theory-laden form of postmodern metafiction could carry genre terror to a large popular readership. What holds it below the bar is that the literary novel did not reorganise around it: its method was followed by few, often as manner, and much of its reach is a cult’s rather than a redirection of the field it entered. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it stands at the head of a line of designed, multi-layered print novels, in which Steven Hall’s The Raw Shark Texts (2007) and Doug Dorst and J. J. Abrams’s S. (2013) are commonly placed; and its reach runs outside the literary field, into the horror of the found document and the impossible interior written and passed around on the internet, wide but lateral.
Adolf Loos · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
The field is the European modern house of the interwar years. The intrinsic force is high: this is the fullest built statement of the Raumplan, the other answer of its decade to the question of the modern house, organising space in section and volume where Le Corbusier and Mies organised it in plan. It is a summation more than a first stroke, for the Rufer and Moller houses came first. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: real, but delayed and narrower. The functionalist house of the 1930s followed the open plan, not this; the house itself was closed to the world from 1948 to the 1990s; and the influence of the Raumplan came late, through critics and through architects of the split level and the sectional plan, while it shaped Czech architecture’s sense of itself. Delayed influence is credited and discounted.
Joseph Strauss, Charles Ellis, Leon Moisseiff and Irving Morrow · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
The field: the long-span bridge of the twentieth century and the American public work of the 1930s. The intrinsic force: the longest span in the world for twenty-seven years; the proof that the open mouth of a strait to the ocean could be crossed by one suspension; the steel tower made a figure rather than an engineer’s frame. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: as engineering the line was cut short, for the slender, flexible deck that deflection theory licensed failed at Tacoma Narrows within three years, the field turned to aerodynamic stiffening and the wind tunnel, and this bridge was itself braced; later records, the Verrazzano-Narrows, the British box-girder decks, Akashi Kaikyō, owe it scale more than method. As image its reach is very wide: the suspension bridge in the world’s eye is this one, and the coloured, architectural tower has been answered since. A summit of its line more than a turning point.
Mark Rothko · Visual art
8.3 · Tier IV
Field: American abstract painting in New York in the late 1950s. Intrinsic force: a real reorganisation within that field, the colour field turned from a radiant surface into a dark enclosure, the abstract painting made a set of walls whose subject is the room the viewer stands in, and the frame within the field opened as a threshold. The discount is real: the cycle was not seen as a cycle until 1970, much of its reach passes under the chapel’s name, and the decade’s field was moved more by others. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: chiefly through Rothko himself, in the Harvard murals of 1962 and The Rothko Chapel (8.6), which carried the cycle’s discoveries into a room that was built; through the room at Tate, the type of the single-artist chamber of paintings in low light, imitated in museums since; and through later painting and installation that treat colour as an environment, where the cycle is one source among several.
Ogata Kōrin · Visual art
8.3 · Tier IV
The field is Kyoto painting around 1700, and force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force is a real reorganisation: a literary subject carried wholly by repeated decorative pattern on gold, and the line between painting and design crossed in a major format by a painter of rank. It is the defining statement of what came to be called Rinpa, after Kōrin’s own name. The discount: the reach of this object is narrow and late, and what spread was the maker’s manner more than the screens. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the manner carried into prints, pattern books and the Kōrin pattern in textiles and crafts; Sakai Hōitsu’s revival a century later; and, in the modern period, the screens as the emblem of Japanese decorative painting.
Walter De Maria · Visual art
8.3 · Tier IV
The field is American sculpture and land art of the 1970s. The intrinsic force is high: a real reorganisation of what a sculpture can be, an instrument of time and weather rather than an object of form, met in duration and under conditions the artist sets, with the viewer’s isolation part of the work. The discount: land art as a practice contracted after the 1970s, the work’s influence runs more through an idea of time-bound, site-bound experience than through works made in its likeness, and Spiral Jetty reached further in the field. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: canonical in its field and the work every account of land art turns to, it set, with Dia’s other commissions, the model of the permanent, patron-maintained, single-site work that later projects followed.
Mon and Burmese builders · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
Force and reach are scored together, in the field of the stupa tradition of Lower Burma and Myanmar from the fifteenth century on. The intrinsic force is moderate: the work perfects and enlarges; it does not reorganise what a stupa can be. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the Shwedagon became the model and measure of the great gilded zedi, its profile repeated in pagodas across the country, and the emblem of the Burmese Buddhist world; its platform became the place where a national movement gathered, in 1988 and again in 2007. That last reach is owed to the site and its sanctity rather than the form, and it is credited sparingly. The field moved toward the building; the form did not move the field.
Pre-Pottery Neolithic builders · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
The field is the building of the Pre-Pottery Neolithic of Upper Mesopotamia and its successors. The intrinsic force is high: a real reorganisation of possibility, the monumental built enclosure and the carved megalith at a scale with no known precedent, made, so far as the record shows, before agriculture was established. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: within its field the site stood at the centre of a regional tradition of T-pillar enclosures that lasted some fifteen centuries, at Nevalı Çori, Karahan Tepe and others, though whether it led that tradition or shared in it is not settled. Then the line breaks. Nothing shows the enclosures shaped later architecture, and the site was out of sight for ten thousand years. Its modern reach is large, but on archaeology and the story of the Neolithic, not on building: delayed influence is credited and discounted, and influence on another field discounted further.
Marc Chagall · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
Published, so force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force: the canvas showed that the modern pictorial grammar could carry memory, story and the irrational logic of the dream, before the Surrealists made that a programme, and that a folk and Jewish provincial world could enter the centre of modern art on equal terms. The discount: that reach belongs to the early Chagall as a whole, of which this canvas is the emblem rather than the sole cause; the main lines of painting after 1911, abstraction, Dada, the constructive, went elsewhere; and some of the reach is to sweetened imagery. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the dream picture of Surrealism, the folk modernism of Eastern European and Jewish art, and a broad later line of illustration and magic realist imagery stand in its debt.
Qutb ud-Din Aibak and Iltutmish; upper storeys by Firuz Shah Tughlaq · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
The field is Indo-Islamic building of the thirteenth century. The intrinsic force: the founding monument of the Delhi Sultanate and, with its mosque, of Indo-Islamic architecture, the first great statement of an Islamic building art in north India and the tallest stone tower of its age. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: within a century Alauddin Khalji began the Alai Minar beside it, meant to be twice its girth and never carried past the first storey; the Chand Minar at Daulatabad answered it in the fifteenth century; and the Fateh Burj at Mohali quoted it in 2011. But the free-standing victory tower became no line in Indian building, which turned to the dome, the gate and the tomb.
Ingmar Bergman · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
Released in 1957; the field is the cinema of the 1950s, and force and reach are scored together. With The Seventh Seal (8.7), released the same year, it established the interior art film as a central form, and its own reorganisation was of memory, dream and present in one continuous space, with consciousness as the structure of a feature film. Part of that force is Bergman’s breakthrough as a whole, shared with the other film, and is discounted. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the Golden Bear at Berlin (1958) and international release carried it; Woody Allen built Another Woman (1988) and Deconstructing Harry (1997), the second an old writer’s journey to receive an honour, directly on it; and the life-review film, with the old self present in the past, descends from it. The reach stayed largely within art cinema.
Anselm Kiefer · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
Published and long shown, so intrinsic force and achieved reach are scored together, in the field of German and European painting of the 1970s. The intrinsic force is a reopening: history painting on the nation’s own myth, figurative, large and written, made possible again for a German painter, and the landscape returned to painting as a carrier of history rather than of nature or mood. The discount is that this belongs to Kiefer’s project of 1969 to 1980 as a whole, of which Varus is one of the clearest emblems and not the origin. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Kiefer’s work of these years, shown at Venice in 1980 and widely in Europe and America in the early 1980s, became a centre of the return to painting, of the international reception of German Neo-Expressionism and of the later art of memory. Delayed and shared reach is credited and discounted.
Hellenistic (Roman marble copy) · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
The field is Hellenistic sculpture of the later third century BC, and force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force is real: the Attalid Gauls, of which this is the best known, reorganised what battle sculpture could do by making the defeated enemy the bearer of tragic pathos, and they belong among the works that formed the Pergamene manner later carried to the Great Altar. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the copying itself, since the Romans wanted this image; its place among the canonical antiquities of the Grand Tour, with casts and copies in the academies and great houses of Europe; Byron’s stanzas; and a general debt in the fallen soldier of war memorials. Held below the gate because the force belongs partly to a lost bronze and a lost group, and the later reach is that of an emblem more than a redirection of sculpture.
Anselm Kiefer · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
Published, so intrinsic force and achieved reach are scored together, in the field of German and European painting of the late 1970s and early 1980s. Intrinsic force: a reorganisation of what history painting could be after the Holocaust; painting made of things whose material is the meaning; a German art of mourning made from the signs of German myth; and Celan’s poem, the one most often named as the answer to Adorno’s sentence on poetry after Auschwitz, carried into painting. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the cycle on Celan’s poem became the central example in the literature on art and the Holocaust, and straw, lead, ash and earth in large painting were widely followed. Discounted because the reach is shared with the cycle and the practice, because this is one of several Margarethe canvases, and because the Neo-Expressionist wave it was grouped with faded.
Norwegian builders · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Standing nearly nine centuries, so force and reach are scored together, in the field of timber building and carving in Norway and the wider North in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. The intrinsic force is real: the portal is the most accomplished surviving work of the last animal style, and the church is the earliest standing stave church with a Romanesque arcade in wood, a reorganisation of what a timber church could be, though of a tradition already moving. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the style the portal names ran across Scandinavia and to Ireland and England, but the church is its type site, not its source, and shows the style at its height rather than starting it; the stave form developed after it in Sogn and elsewhere; and the national romanticism of the nineteenth century drew on stave churches and their animal carving for its dragon style. The reach is wide in scholarship and taste, narrower in building.
Geoffrey Chaucer · Literature
8.2 · Tier IV
The field is English and continental vernacular poetry of the late fourteenth century, in which English had not yet a high courtly verse of its own. Its intrinsic force: the poem makes English verse do what French did, in a new stanza, and makes it comic and philosophical at once. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: rhyme royal became the stanza of English courtly and serious verse for a century and more (Troilus and Criseyde, James I’s Kingis Quair, Lydgate, Hoccleve, Henryson, Shakespeare’s Lucrece); the bird-debate passed to Clanvowe’s The Cuckoo and the Nightingale and the Chaucerians; and the Valentine association has passed into general culture, though it is not the main evidence. Held below the bar because the larger redirection belongs to Troilus and The Canterbury Tales, and this poem’s reach runs through them.
Aleijadinho · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
The field is Luso-Brazilian church building of the eighteenth century, and Minas in particular. The intrinsic force is high in that field: the round towers, the sculpted medallion in place of the window and the fusion of soapstone figure with architectural frame changed what a Mineiro front could be. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the type was taken up in Minas, and through the modernists and the heritage service the church became the emblem of the colonial art from which the Brazilian architecture of the twentieth century claimed descent; Niemeyer’s church of Saint Francis at Pampulha, of 1943 (8.0), answers it by name if not by form. Outside Brazil it changed little; that delayed and national reach is credited and discounted.
Jean-Pierre Melville · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
Released in 1967, so force and reach are scored together, against the cinema of the 1960s. The force: the film made the professional killer a figure of solitude and method, and showed that a crime film could be built from procedure, silence and duration with almost nothing said, a real reorganisation of the genre’s possibilities, less of cinema’s. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Walter Hill’s The Driver (1978), John Woo’s The Killer (1989), Jim Jarmusch’s Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai (1999), Nicolas Winding Refn’s Drive (2011) and David Fincher’s The Killer (2023) stand in direct descent, and the silent, gloved, coated killer passed into the common figure of the hitman. The reach lies largely within the crime film, and much of it came late, from the 1980s on, which is credited and discounted.
Martin Amis · Literature
8.2 · Tier IV
The field is English-language fiction of the 1980s, and within it the British novel. The intrinsic force is real: the book brought a scale of voice and a metafictional daring into the British comic novel, and made the satire of money the matter of a high literary style, a reorganisation of what the comic novel of its decade could hold. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it became the defining British novel of its decade’s appetite, and its manner, the virtuoso comic first person and the mixing of high and low registers, was taken up widely by younger British writers through the late 1980s and the 1990s. The charge: much of that reach belongs to the Amis manner, spread across several books, more than to this novel’s form, and the manner’s influence has waned as its decade has receded.
Roman · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
The field is Roman portrait sculpture of the Augustan decades. The intrinsic force is high: the statue gives the definitive form of the image of the princeps and of the imperial cuirassed statue, the classicising portrait that ended Republican verism as the ruling mode. The marble’s own reach is shared and late. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the portrait type that modern scholarship names after this statue, repeated across the empire, and the cuirassed statue with a narrative breastplate, which became a standing type for later emperors, Trajan and Hadrian among them. That reach belongs largely to the type and to the lost bronze; this marble, in a villa, may itself have redirected little before it was buried. Since 1863 it has been the emblem of Roman imperial art in teaching and a centre of the debate on ancient colour, a reach that is real and discounted as delayed.
Brinkman and Van der Vlugt · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Field: European, and in particular Dutch, modern architecture and industrial building of the 1920s and 1930s. The intrinsic force is high: the complex is one of the most complete demonstrations of its decade that the new architecture of frame, glass and function could build the whole of a working plant, not a house or a school. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it became at once a place of pilgrimage for the modern movement, visited and praised from abroad, and fixed the image of the transparent factory in the canon of the Nieuwe Bouwen and the International Style. Its reach on the factory as a type is less certain, since daylight production buildings spread from several sources; its later reach as a model of reuse is real but narrower.
Jonathan Demme · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
Field: the cinema of the 1990s. Intrinsic force is real but bounded. The film took the serial-killer thriller from exploitation to the centre of the industry and made a woman investigator its natural hero; it reorganised the genre’s prestige and point of view more than what film could do. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it is wide and immediate. The decade’s serial-killer cycle followed (Se7en and Copycat, 1995; Kiss the Girls, 1997; The Bone Collector, 1999); the woman agent of the FBI became a fixture of television, Dana Scully of The X-Files from 1993 widely taken as Starling’s descendant; the profiler procedural became a genre of its own; Lecter entered common culture, with three further films and two television series. The reach lies largely within genre and popular culture, and part of it is franchise.
Charles Garnier · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Standing since 1875, scored on force and reach together, in the field of the European theatre of its century and the opera house as a type. The intrinsic force is real: it fixed the opera house as a civic palace of display, the hall one room among the stair and foyers, every function a volume. But it is the culmination of a tradition, not a reorganisation of possibility, and that holds the force down. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: wide and bounded. It became the model of the grand opera house for forty years, in Garnier’s own Salle Garnier at Monte-Carlo (1879), the Theatro Municipal at Rio de Janeiro (1909) and the opera house at Hanoi (1911), and its stair became a type of the ceremonial stair. The modern movement cut the line after the First World War, and it returned as the type later houses departed from.
Josef Hoffmann · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
The intrinsic force is a real reorganisation of the wall. The framed planar surface, the volumes grouped asymmetrically and one geometric law carried from the plan to the cutlery together make the most complete demonstration in its decade that ornament could be reduced to proportion and edge without losing luxury. The house was published and known. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the geometric decorative style that became Art Deco after 1925, of which the house is a source; the luxurious modern interior; Hoffmann’s manner, spread through the Werkstätte to Central Europe and beyond. The reach is substantial and indirect. The stronger line of modern architecture ran through Loos, Behrens, Wright and the Dutch and French work of the 1920s, which rejected the luxury the house was made for.
Bob Rafelson · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
Field: the cinema of the 1970s, entered at its first moment. Intrinsic force is real: the film gave American cinema its alienated, unredeemed lead in a realist register, a man with no project and no arc, and showed that a studio could release such a film to a large audience. It reorganised the American character study more than it changed what film could do. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: four Academy Award nominations, for picture, actor, supporting actress and original screenplay; the making of Nicholson’s screen persona, the gifted man in revolt against his own life; the BBS model of director-led, low-budget studio films that the decade followed; and the diner as a common reference for refusal. The reach is shared with Easy Rider and The Last Picture Show.
Wilkie Collins · Literature
8.1 · Tier IV
The field is the English novel of its century. The force: the book reorganised what a popular English novel could be, making the respectable household the site of crime and the narrative a body of evidence. Its pressure falls on the genre fiction that grew beside Dickens, Eliot and the Brontës, which is large but not the whole field, and beyond its first heirs its reach is diffuse; that holds it below the gate. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it opened the sensation novel of the 1860s, with Mrs Henry Wood’s East Lynne (1861), Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret (1862) and the reviewers’ alarm at “sensation novels”; Collins’s own The Moonstone (1868), built on the same plural witness, stands at the head of the English detective novel; Fosco became a pattern for the genial master criminal; and Sarah Waters’s Fingersmith (2002) rewrites its substitution and its asylum.
Johnny Cash · Music
8.1 · Tier IV
The field is country and popular music of the 1960s. The intrinsic force: the record made the live album a document of a place and an audience rather than a souvenir of a show, and set the condemned and the poor at the centre of a major-label country record; it reorganised less what music was than whom it was for and where it was heard. The musical language itself redirected little, and the outlaw stance had other sources, Merle Haggard’s among them. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it restored Cash’s career and led directly to At San Quentin (1969) and the television years; it gave country the stance the outlaw movement of the next decade built on; prison records followed, B.B. King’s Live in Cook County Jail (1971) among them; and later rock, punk and hip-hop artists have claimed the image it made.
Raymond Chandler · Literature
8.1 · Tier IV
The field is the American novel, and the detective novel inside it. The force: the book is the fullest demonstration that the American detective novel could carry the weight of a serious novel of society, friendship and self-knowledge without ceasing to be a detective novel, and it raised what the genre could ask of itself. Much of the reach belongs to Marlowe and to Chandler’s work as a whole, not to this book alone, and is discounted for that; the field was raised rather than reorganised, which holds it below the gate. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Ross Macdonald’s Lew Archer novels, from The Galton Case (1959), take up its family secrets and its sad, watching detective; Robert B. Parker built Spenser on Marlowe; Michael Connelly and James Ellroy work in its Los Angeles; Haruki Murakami translated it and has said Chandler shaped his narrators; John Banville, as Benjamin Black, wrote The Black-Eyed Blonde (2014) as its sequel; and Robert Altman’s film (1973) remade it as a study of its own decade.
Alexandre Dumas · Literature
8.1 · Tier IV
The field is the popular novel and the plot of revenge. The force is moderate: the book reorganised the possibilities of the popular novel, but not of the novel as an art, as Balzac and Flaubert did; it perfected and fixed a kind. Within French letters it made the roman-feuilleton a form of national reading. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the Count is the pattern of the wronged man returned in disguise to destroy his enemies through wealth and design; Bester’s The Stars My Destination (1956) takes the plot openly; the costumed avenger of popular fiction, the masked vigilante of the pulps and comics, and the long line of revenge thrillers stand on it; it reached the stage in Dumas’s lifetime and has been filmed and serialised in many languages, as far as Japanese animation in Gankutsuou (2004).
Oscar Niemeyer · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
Intrinsic force is real. The building gave a modern state a seat of government with no historical costume and made it the nation’s emblem; it showed that a capital could be built around a single built figure; with the Alvorada’s columns and the Cathedral it made Brazilian modernism a world style. It is held down because the paired expressed volumes were Le Corbusier’s, and Chandigarh was being designed alongside. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: wide in image, narrower in direct descent. The building and its city became the reference for every planned capital and modernist civic centre argued over after 1960, and for the criticism of them; in Brazil it fixed the image of the state for decades. Few later parliaments copied its forms: it is the measure, not the model.
Victor Fleming · Film
8.1 · Tier IV
Released in 1939, so force and reach are scored together, in the cinema of the 1930s. The intrinsic force is a synthesis more than a reorganisation: it fused the Technicolor spectacle, the integrated song and the fantasy narrative into the model of the live-action family fantasy, and made colour a meaning rather than an ornament in one decisive cut; it changed what films would try more than what they could do. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the annual network broadcasts from 1956 into the 1990s made it a ritual for generations of American viewers; its images and lines entered common speech, the man behind the curtain, “not in Kansas anymore”; it is reworked in The Wiz, Return to Oz, Lynch’s Wild at Heart and Wicked; it set the pattern of the portal fantasy. Much of that reach is presence rather than redirection of the medium, and the figure stays below the gate.
Cass Gilbert · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
The intrinsic force: the skyscraper made a monument, the tall office building given the authority of the cathedral and its frame expressed in an unbroken vertical; the tallest structure in the world raised on a riveted frame braced against wind. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: real and wide for two decades, bounded after. It held the height record for seventeen years and set the type of the Gothic skyscraper that followed, the Chicago Tribune Tower and the Gothic towers of the 1920s, the Cathedral of Learning, the collegiate and church Gothic of tall buildings across American cities. Then the setback towers of the late 1920s and the International Style cut off its line, and it became the modernists’ example of what not to do, a reach that is negative. In its field it is the summit and the model; as a turn in the art of building, it is narrower.
Built for Bishop Bernward · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
Force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force: the building is the most complete statement of Ottonian church building, in which the bound system of square module, marked-off crossing and alternating supports becomes a method for a whole plan, one that Romanesque building in the empire then made general. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the square schematism and the marked-off crossing became the norm of German Romanesque; the Saxon alternation spread through Lower Saxony and Westphalia; the plan with two choirs and two transepts went on at Bamberg, Worms and Mainz, though it had a Carolingian line of its own and that reach is shared. Outside the empire the reach is thin, and Gernrode’s priority holds it below the gate.
Henri Cartier-Bresson · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
Published, so intrinsic force and achieved reach are scored together, in the field of European and American photography of the 1930s and after. Intrinsic force is the purest statement of the small-camera instant as an art of exact form: geometry, rhyme and timing found in the street, not made. It is not the reorganisation itself, which belongs to the small camera and to a generation, Kertész, Munkácsi, Brassaï and Cartier-Bresson’s own work of the early 1930s. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the picture became the standard example of the decisive moment, the doctrine named by the English title of its maker’s book of 1952, which governed photojournalism and street photography for half a century and is still taught. Discounted because it came twenty years late, carried by the book and the career more than by the frame.
Wassily Kandinsky · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
Field: European painting from 1910 to 1914, and the move to abstraction. Intrinsic force: with Composition VII, this canvas made non-objective painting a monumental genre, carrying the ambition and scale of the history picture into abstraction, which before the Compositions had been a matter of studies and small canvases; and the essay printed with it in 1913 made it a demonstration, a picture whose method was published. The discount is large. Much of the force belongs to the series and to Composition VII (9.0), the fuller statement, and much to the Improvisations and to On the Spiritual in Art. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the American painters who took abstraction to mural scale in the 1940s knew Kandinsky largely through Solomon Guggenheim’s collection in New York, not through this canvas, which was in Russia; its own reach came by reproduction and by the series’ name.
Burial · Music
8.1 · Tier IV
The field is British electronic and dance music of the 2000s, and the place of the dance record in listening. The intrinsic force is high: the record showed that the rhythms and voices of club music could be turned inward, into music of solitude and memory, without losing their swing, and that a dance producer’s album could be a work heard whole. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the record is commonly credited with turning producers after dubstep toward atmosphere, the pitched voice and the skipping beat, and with shaping the haunted strain of British electronic music since; the credit is claimed more than measured, and it is shared with the first album, the label and a scene of many hands.
Félix Candela · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
Field: the thin shell in twentieth-century building, and modern architecture in Mexico and Latin America. The intrinsic force is high: the clearest demonstration of what the hyperbolic paraboloid could do as figure, and of the free edge as a structural and expressive means, reorganising what a concrete roof could look like when Mexican modernism was otherwise mural and massive. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: real but bounded. It is a fixed point in teaching and in the history of structure; it made Candela’s name worldwide; hypar roofs spread widely in the late 1950s and 1960s, many lesser; and the expressive shell of Sydney and of Saarinen grew in a climate it helped make. But shell building waned within a decade on the cost of formwork and labour, and the later free-form roof owes it homage more than method.
Eva Hesse · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
The field is American sculpture at the close of the 1960s and what followed it. Intrinsic force: high. The work is one of the clearest demonstrations that the serial order of Minimalism could be kept and made soft, translucent, bodily and mortal, a real reorganisation of what sculpture could be in 1969. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: real, but carried in part by Hesse’s body of work rather than by this piece alone; the feminist writing of the 1970s onward made her a central figure, and retrospectives of her work carried her into the account of the period. This work’s own reach is limited by place: it is in Canberra, rarely lent, and known to most through photographs. Delayed and diffuse, credited and discounted, and below the gate.
Patricia Highsmith · Literature
8.1 · Tier IV
The field is American fiction of the 1950s, and within it the crime and suspense novel. The force is a real reorganisation of the genre’s possibilities: the murderer as the reader’s companion and his escape as the ending, done once and with full conviction. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Highsmith extended the figure through four more novels, from Ripley Under Ground (1970) to Ripley Under Water (1991), and made the crime novel’s first serial antihero who is neither detective nor punished; the line of charming or sympathetic killers in later fiction and film runs through him; in France the book shaped a whole idea of the psychological crime novel and of Highsmith as its author; and three screen versions carried it into another medium. What holds the axis below the gate is its object: the pressure fell on a genre and its successors, not on the novel as an art, and literary fiction is not written differently for it.
Leon Battista Alberti · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
Standing since the 1450s, it is scored on force and reach together, in the field of the fifteenth-century Italian church. The intrinsic force is high: the building posed a problem the Renaissance church had not faced, how to give a Christian basilica an antique face, answered it with the triumphal arch, and made the encasing of an old building in a new order a method. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the direct line runs through Alberti’s own later work, the front of Santa Maria Novella and Sant’Andrea at Mantua, where the arch became front and interior together, and through Mantua to the church fronts of the next century. But the building stood unfinished in a fallen lordship, off the main road of patronage, and its heirs learned the arch from Mantua and the treatise more than from Rimini. Force above reach.
Spike Jonze · Film
8.1 · Tier IV
The field is American cinema of the late 1990s and the 2000s, so force and reach are scored together. Intrinsic force: the film showed that an absurd metaphysical premise, played straight in a dingy world, could carry a serious and very funny account of identity and desire, and that a star could lend his own persona as the film’s material. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it launched Kaufman as a screenwriter and Jonze as a feature director; it stands at the head of a line of American films built on conceits about mind and identity, Kaufman’s own Adaptation and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind among them; and it opened the way for films and series in which celebrities play distorted versions of themselves. It redirected a kind of screenwriting and comedy more than what the medium can do.
Ovid · Literature
8.1 · Tier IV
The field is Latin poetry of the Augustan age and, within it, Latin love elegy, which this poem in effect closed: after it and the Remedia, elegy’s lover could not be played straight, and no major Latin poet took up the genre after Ovid. The intrinsic force is real and bounded: it turned a genre’s convention inside out into a comic didactic form, without reorganising what poetry could do. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the reach is large and long. The medieval treatises and allegories of love are commonly traced to it, Andreas Capellanus’ De amore and Jean de Meun’s part of the Roman de la Rose among them, and through them Chaucer; that descent is the usual account, not a matter of record here. It is the reach of a figure and a manner more than of a form, and it runs through intermediaries.
Joel Coen and Ethan Coen · Film
8.1 · Tier IV
The field is the cinema of the 1990s, the decade of Goodfellas, Pulp Fiction, the independent boom and the pastiche crime film. Intrinsic force: the film showed that a crime plot could be emptied and still carry a feature, that a passive hero could hold a comic film, and that genre pastiche could be warm rather than cool. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it is wide and of an unusual kind, a modest first run turned into one of the most durable popular institutions of its decade’s films, and a manner traced in later stoner comedy and in the drifting Los Angeles noir, Inherent Vice (2014) its clearest heir. Held below the gate because the film did not reorganise what film could do, and its reach into how films are made is narrower than its reach into how a film is lived with.
DJ Shadow · Music
8.1 · Tier IV
The field is hip-hop and electronic production of the mid 1990s. The intrinsic force is high: the record showed that the sampler could be a composer’s instrument for a whole album, that a hip-hop producer could make long-form instrumental music with no rapper and be heard as an artist, and that the archive itself could be the subject. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the instrumental hip hop of the following decade, RJD2’s Deadringer (2002), Blockhead and the producers of Ninja Tune and Mo’ Wax, UNKLE’s Psyence Fiction (1998), Cut Chemist and the turntable crews. It shaped a genre and a practice rather than redirecting popular music, and much of it was being done beside it.
Giuseppe Mengoni · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
Field: the arcade and the covered public street in Europe in the late nineteenth century, and the civic building of the new Italian state. The intrinsic force is real and bounded. It raised the arcade from a passage within a block to a civic monument on a cross plan with a domed centre, the summit of the type, but it reorganised the type’s scale and rank rather than its principle, and its iron and glass were already in use. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: wide and long. It fixed the Italian galleria, answered directly by Naples’ Galleria Umberto I (1887 to 1890) and by the galleries of Genoa and Rome; it stood behind the great arcades of the following decades and, through its very name, behind the shopping mall, Houston’s Galleria of 1970 among those that took its name and its glass. Reach above force: a summit more than a turning point.
Neil Young with Crazy Horse · Music
8.0 · Tier IV
The field is the rock record of 1969, a year in which Abbey Road, Led Zeppelin and Trout Mask Replica moved more. The intrinsic force is a sound that was not there before in that form: the heavy, slightly out of true two-guitar band, a lead that values tone and repetition over speed, and the song that opens into a long, grinding search. It reorganises what a rock band could sound like, in manner more than in possibility, and much of its reach runs through Young’s whole career and came decades late. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the Crazy Horse sound became Young’s template through Zuma, Rust Never Sleeps and Ragged Glory; Dinosaur Jr and Sonic Youth took it up openly, and Pearl Jam made a record with Young in 1995; and the riff and dropped tuning of Cinnamon Girl are a known model for heavy rhythm guitar.
Hannah Höch · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
Shown within its first year, so force and reach are scored together, in the field of Berlin Dada and European avant-garde image making of 1919 to 1920. The intrinsic force is high: among the strongest early proofs that photomontage could carry a political argument at the scale of painting, with the press photograph cut against itself as a method others could take up. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: photomontage spread fast, to Heartfield’s political covers, to the Soviet montage of Rodchenko and Klutsis, to Bauhaus and Surrealist practice, but much of that belongs to the medium and the circle. This sheet’s own reach came later and is named: Martha Rosler’s montages and Barbara Kruger’s cut press imagery among it. Credited and discounted for delay and for sharing.
Robert Rauschenberg · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
Published, so intrinsic force and achieved reach are scored together, in the field of American art of the later 1950s, between Abstract Expressionism, the first assemblage and Pop. Intrinsic force: a real reorganisation, painting released from the wall and the frame into the room, the found thing admitted not as a collage element but as a body, the work made a small environment. The discount is real: much of the reach belongs to the combines as a body and to the painter’s later transfer and silkscreen work, and Johns, Kaprow and others moved the same field in the same years. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the combines fed assemblage, Pop’s common object, the happenings and installation art, and the horizontal picture plane became a critical category through this work.
Jasper Johns · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
Published, so intrinsic force and achieved reach are scored together, in the field of American painting in New York in the late 1950s. Intrinsic force: the flags, with Rauschenberg’s combines, reorganised what a painting could take as its subject and how it could stand toward the world: the subject a ready-made sign, the painting an object, the hand kept without being expressive. This canvas’s own share is the built relief, the turned perspective and the repetition, each a step toward the painting as specific object. The discount is large, since most of the reach belongs to Flag and the series, and this canvas is a strong variant within it. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Pop art took the given sign and the series; Minimal art took the object that stands out from the wall and the repetition of identical units; Stella’s stripe paintings of 1958 to 1959 are commonly traced to the flags.
John Wood the Younger · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
The field is British, above all English, urban building of the eighteenth century, and the building has stood in view since it was raised, so force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force is a real reorganisation of possibility for the terrace, the British town’s own type: detached from the street and the square and laid out to a view, so that the crescent becomes a figure a town can be built from. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: wide and named, in Camden and Lansdown Crescents at Bath, John Carr’s Crescent at Buxton, Royal York Crescent at Clifton, Nash’s Park Crescent in London, and crescents at Brighton, Hove, Edinburgh and the spa and seaside towns of the next century. Bounded: the reach is British and in one type, the residential terrace.
Louis Sullivan · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
The field is the American commercial building. The intrinsic force is high: among the clearest statements before 1910 that a steel frame could be shown as a horizontal field of glass, and among the most forceful that ornament and plain structure could stand side by side as two truths of one building. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: real, bounded and delayed. The classicism of the Exposition of 1893 cut the Chicago School off, Sullivan’s commissions dwindled, and the building had few direct heirs. Its reach came later and through history, in the reading of the Chicago frame as a source of the curtain wall, where this facade became a canonical image, and through Sullivan’s ornament carried on by Elmslie, the Prairie School and Wright. Discounted for the historians’ share in that ancestry.
Charles and Ray Eames · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
Published from 1949 in Arts & Architecture and widely since, so force and reach are scored together, in the field of the modern house of mid-century America and its descendants. The intrinsic force is a real reorganisation of how a house could be made: from parts selected out of industrial catalogues rather than designed, the finished building accepting their look; and a demonstration that such a house could be warm, coloured and lived in. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: clear and documented, in its region and beyond. Alison and Peter Smithson wrote of it as a turning point; the British High-Tech house descends from it, and Michael and Patty Hopkins’s own house in Hampstead (1976) answers it directly; the light steel and glass house in California followed. The reach is to a line, not to the idea of the house, and the promise of the factory house for the many was never taken up.
Fleetwood Mac · Music
7.9 · Tier III
The field is the rock and pop album of the 1970s, above all its Californian studio branch. The intrinsic force is modest: the record perfected rather than reorganised the radio-length pop rock song and the album of a band with several writers, and its methods, layered overdubs, close harmony and a dry, present drum sound, were the craft of the Los Angeles studios of its years carried to their limit. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the record set a standard for the polished album-oriented rock of the late 1970s and after, became the model of the breakup album as a category, and its songs and sound have been taken up across generations. The reach is of a sound and a model of craft, and no way of making music can be shown to have turned on it. That holds it four tenths below Sticky Fingers, at 8.7, which fixed a model of the band that others took up, and five below Born to Run, at 8.8, whose sound and form became a common language for decades.
Wong Kar-wai · Film
7.8 · Tier III
Released in 1994, so force and reach are scored together, and the field is the cinema of the 1990s. The intrinsic force is a new grammar of urban romance made from speed, step-printing, voiceover and repetition, and the showing that a film could be built from moods and objects held together by place and chance. It reorganised a manner of filmmaking more than what film could do. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it carried Wong to international attention, Quentin Tarantino’s Rolling Thunder label released it in America, its look and method are visible in Sofia Coppola, Barry Jenkins and a generation of music video and advertising, and Doyle’s handheld style became a common idiom. Some of that reach is the borrowing of a surface, and part of it belongs to Wong’s later films.
Daft Punk · Music
7.8 · Tier III
The field is electronic and dance music of its decade, and the pop that crossed with it. The intrinsic force is real and bounded: the record showed that house could carry pop song, rock solo and sentimental melody without losing its pulse, and that the processed voice could be the lead and the emotional centre rather than an effect; much of the means existed, and the reorganisation was in joining them at full pop scale. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the French electronic music of the following decade, the vocoded and pitch-corrected pop voice of the late 2000s, Kanye West’s Stronger, and the festival dance music of the 2010s, which took the record’s build and release as a grammar. Part of that reach passed through the duo’s live show of 2006 and 2007, which is not this record, and it is discounted.
The Stooges · Music
7.7 · Tier III
Intrinsic force and achieved reach, stated separately. The force is a reorganised possibility: that rock can be made from almost nothing, a riff and a refusal, with boredom and abjection as its matter. It is real but shared. The Velvet Underground had made much of it, and the band’s own next records, Fun House and Raw Power, carry the fuller force of the idea. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: No Fun was taken up by the Sex Pistols, who played it and released it; I Wanna Be Your Dog was covered by Sonic Youth and by many others; and the method of riff and repetition passed into the Ramones and the punk of 1976 to 1977, and later into post-punk, noise rock and grunge. Some of the band’s reach belongs to the later records.
Oasis · Music
7.2 · Tier III
The field is the rock and guitar-pop album of the mid 1990s, British and American. Intrinsic force is small: the record reorganised no possibility of the album or the song. It restored a classic British songwriting manner to the scale of the stadium at the moment American grunge had ebbed, and much of what followed it imitated a manner already old, narrowing rather than opening the field. The figure holds small force against large reach. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the record marked the commercial height of Britpop, set the template for a decade of British guitar bands, from Ocean Colour Scene and Cast through Stereophonics and Travis to the anthem rock of the 2000s, and turned a generation of listeners toward the guitar. It stands three tenths below The Bends, the British guitar record of the same year, whose heirs also took its manner but whose refinement opened a road where this record’s consolidation narrowed one; and a tenth below Siamese Dream, a consolidation of its own field, whose reach was mostly American but whose joining of sounds was its own.
Titian · Visual art
8.8 · Tier IV
The field is Venetian painting of the 1570s and, beyond it, European painting after Titian. The force is high: this is among the furthest points of the late manner, the touch made the carrier of meaning, one of the decisive reorganisations of what oil painting could do. The reach is what holds the axis down. The canvas left Venice and has stood at Kroměříž since the seventeenth century, little seen and seldom reproduced until the twentieth. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the late manner reached Rubens, Velázquez and Rembrandt through other works and through the studio, not through this one; this picture’s own reach began with its recovery in the twentieth century and is late and particular. Delayed influence is credited and discounted. Below the gate.
Pieter Bruegel the Elder · Visual art
8.8 · Tier IV
Field: Netherlandish painting of the 1550s and 1560s, and the macabre tradition. Force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force is high: the panel reorganises the macabre from a sequence into a panorama and from a sermon into a picture of a world at war with its own end, and it holds the moral picture to an observed earth. The discount is heavy. Its long life in Spanish royal hands kept it from the Netherlandish field that followed, and Bruegel’s own reach runs through his peasant and season pictures, not through this. Its wide late fame as an image is presence, credited under The Imperishable. This is the lowest axis for that reason. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the copies and variants made in the painter’s family and workshop carried the composition through the next generation, and no later work can be named with confidence that takes its form from this panel.
Pallava · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
The field is South Indian and wider Indian sculpture of the seventh and eighth centuries. The intrinsic force is high: the relief is a real reorganisation of what a carved field could be, a landscape of the whole created order in one open-air face, with a naturalism of animals unmatched in its tradition, and with the natural rock taken into the meaning. The reach is narrower, and it is the lowest of the twelve. This kind of colossal open-air narrative cliff had few successors, and the workshop’s own second version was left unfinished. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Pallava art as a whole bore on the later temple sculpture of the Tamil country; this face is now an emblem of Indian sculpture and of its site, which is presence and is credited lightly.
Piero della Francesca · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
Field: Italian painting of the fifteenth century and after. Intrinsic force and reach are scored together. The force is high: the fresco showed that the most hieratic of devotional types could be rebuilt whole in the new science of perspective and light without losing its gravity, and that a landscape could carry doctrine; with the Arezzo cycle it is a summit of the still, geometric, light-filled manner that Perugino and Signorelli carried on. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: in its own century and the next a provincial picture, its direct heirs few and none named with confidence; its fame late and literary; and the painters who later learned from Piero learned chiefly from other works. Delay is credited and discounted heavily.
Johannes Vermeer · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
The field is Dutch painting of the 1660s and the European studio picture after it. The intrinsic force is high: the canvas reorganises what an allegory of painting can be, from emblem to lived room, and puts the painter’s act inside the daylight of the genre interior. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: heavily discounted, since Vermeer kept the picture, it passed from his family into obscurity under another painter’s name, and it stayed in private keeping in Vienna until 1940, redirecting nothing in its own century or the next; then delayed and named, in the Vermeer revival after Thoré-Bürger’s articles of the 1860s, in Dalí’s The Ghost of Vermeer of Delft Which Can Be Used as a Table (1934), which takes this painter’s figure from behind, and in the argument of Alpers and her successors. Real, late, and narrower than its force.
Hans Holbein the Younger · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
Force and reach are scored together, in the field of German and Swiss painting of the 1520s. The intrinsic force is high: the panel takes the dead Christ to a limit no later painter went past, a religious image made almost wholly of physical fact. Reach within painting is narrow. The Reformation closed the altarpiece in Basel within the decade, Holbein’s own career turned to the portrait, no school followed, and its descendants in painting cannot be named with confidence. Delayed reach is credited and discounted, and reach through another medium is real but does not redirect its own field. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Dostoevsky, who made it a crux of a novel; Kristeva’s psychoanalytic reading; and its standing as the founding image of the dead body seen without consolation.
John Milton · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
The field is English poetry of the later seventeenth century, and the European Christian epic it closes. The intrinsic force is substantial: the poem redefined the heroic as inward, made a debate into an epic, and gave the brief epic its English model. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: narrower, and later. The eighteenth century took Paradise Lost and largely passed this poem by, and its readers came after, and fewer. Its idea of a mental victory feeds the Romantic interior epic, but through Milton as a whole more than through this poem. In criticism its afterlife is real, from Frye and Lewalski on. It did not redirect what came after as its predecessor did, and that is what holds the axis lowest of the twelve.
Otto Dix · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
Intrinsic force is high. The work shows that the altarpiece, the oldest public form of Western painting, could carry the modern catastrophe at full scale and full finish, and that the old master technique could be turned to witness; within German painting it is the summit of the war picture, and it stands beside Grünewald, its own model. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: real but narrower. Finished in 1932, the year before its painter was dismissed, it began its public life late, in the German Democratic Republic and then in reunified Dresden. It is a fixed point in the history of anti war art, of the Neue Sachlichkeit and of the German use of the triptych for historical catastrophe after 1945; but it did not redirect the field as Guernica did, nor as Dix’s own etchings did. The late start is credited and discounted.
Norman builders, under William II · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
Force and reach scored together. The intrinsic force is high: Monreale is the fullest statement of a whole architecture, the Norman Sicilian synthesis of Greek, Latin and Arab building in its largest and most complete form. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the field is the building of southern Italy and the Mediterranean West in the late twelfth century and after, and there the reach is narrow. The Hauteville line ended within five years of William II’s death, and under the Hohenstaufen the manner was not continued at this scale. The cloister’s inlaid colonnettes belong to a wider southern Italian and Roman practice rather than redirecting it; the bronze doors belong to their makers’ own careers. Its later reach, as emblem and object of study from the nineteenth century to the UNESCO inscription, is presence more than redirection.
Assyrian court sculptors · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
The field is Neo-Assyrian and ancient Near Eastern relief of the seventh century BCE. Intrinsic force is high: within its field these slabs reorganise what a relief could do with an animal body, with space and with sequence, and the dying lioness is a mark in the representation of animals in any ancient art. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: in its own time it is weak. Nineveh fell within about twenty years of the carving, the tradition ended with the empire, and the Achaemenid sculpture that followed took the heraldic and processional path rather than this one. The reach came only after 1853, and being delayed it is credited and discounted: the slabs became a fixture of the modern idea of ancient art and of animal sculpture, though no particular later work can be named that they redirected. Force, with a reach that is late and general.
Vladimir Nabokov · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
The field is autobiography and memoir in the twentieth century, in English and in Russian. The intrinsic force is real: the book showed that a memoir could be built with all the means of the art novel and stand level with it, and it gave English its most exact prose of remembered sensation. What holds the axis at 8.2, level with The Inevitable as the lowest of the twelve, is reach: named in few places, and much of Nabokov’s pressure on the field ran through Lolita and Pale Fire. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: W. G. Sebald set a figure of Nabokov, the butterfly man with his net, through The Emigrants (1992), and its method of memory and exile runs through his books; the Modern Library’s list of the century’s nonfiction put it high; and it is a standard model where the literary memoir is taught.
Paul Thomas Anderson · Film
8.6 · Tier IV
Released in 2007, so force and reach are scored together. The force is real: the film showed that an American studio epic could be built on a single unredeemed figure, in silence and dissonance, and its score of modernist strings and quarter-tone clusters carries the drama rather than accompanying it. The reach is narrower: the film did not reorganise the grammar of cinema or redirect a genre in a way that can be dated, and part of its reach is a quotation. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Day-Lewis’s performance won the Academy Award and became a reference for screen acting; Greenwood became a leading film composer, and his score is widely credited with turning film music toward its register; “I drink your milkshake” passed into common speech; and Anderson carried the method into his next films.
Franz Schubert · Music
8.6 · Tier IV
Scored in the field of Viennese keyboard and instrumental music of the 1820s and what followed. The force is high: a real reorganisation of possibility within the sonata, proof that the largest instrumental form could be governed by song, stillness and colour rather than by Beethovenian dialectic, and a working demonstration of third-related keys at the scale of a whole movement. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: late and diffuse. The sonata was published a decade after it was written and little played in the nineteenth century. Its harmonic practice reached later composers through Schubert’s music as a whole, not through this work alone. Its reach is chiefly in performance: since Schnabel in the 1930s it has been central to the repertory. Delay credited and discounted.
Johann Bernhard Fischer von Erlach · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Scored in the field of Central European church building of the eighteenth century. The intrinsic force is high: the first church to compose its front as an assembly of historical quotations, a building that argues that architecture’s whole past can be drawn on at once, the premise of nineteenth-century historicism and, at a distance, of eclecticism. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the paired triumphal columns were not taken up as a type; church building in Austria and Bohemia after 1740 followed other paths, the Dientzenhofers, Hildebrandt, the Bavarian rococo; the oval plan was common property; and Fischer’s history of architecture of 1721 carried the idea of a world architecture further than the church did. It became the emblem of the imperial style in Vienna, not the turn that redirected its region.
Käthe Kollwitz · Visual art
8.5 · Tier IV
The field is German and European memorial sculpture of the 1920s and 1930s. The intrinsic force is high: the work reorganises what a war memorial can be, from a monument to the cause of the dead into a monument to the grief and debt of those who survive them, and it does so inside the war cemetery itself. The reach is real but diffuse, harder to name in particular than the force. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: some ninety years of visit and commemoration and a large literature on German mourning that reads through this work; against that, the turn from heroic to mourning memorial is shared with Barlach and others of the same years, and the later memorials of mourning have many sources. What is the work’s own is its specific turn: mourners as the monument, kneeling, inside the enemy’s cemetery.
T. S. Eliot · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
The field is poetry in English in the twentieth century. The intrinsic force is high: the poem showed that the modernist instruments could carry belief without irony, made a devotional modernism possible, and is the first statement of the late manner that Four Quartets completes. Held well below its author’s major work because most of what it opened was realised in Four Quartets, which carries the reach, and because it did not redirect the field as The Waste Land did. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it shaped the religious and meditative poetry in English of the decades after it, and its lines have entered general use, “Teach us to care and not to care” (I) above all, quoted of grief and love far outside the church.
Akira Kurosawa · Film
8.5 · Tier IV
Released in 1952, so force and reach are scored together, in the cinema of the 1950s. The intrinsic force is real: a life lived and then disputed in its absence, and the demonstration that a social film about a city office could carry the weight of tragedy. But it is a synthesis more than a reorganisation. Its witnesses come from Kane and Rashomon, how far its subject comes from Tolstoy is contested, and Kurosawa’s larger turns on the field came either side of it. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: a stage musical, and, seventy years on, Living (2022), written by Kazuo Ishiguro and directed by Oliver Hermanus, which sent new audiences back to the original. The reach is moral and narrative, a story retold and a figure invoked, more than a grammar others took up; few films changed what they did because of its form, and the film’s fame outruns what it changed.
Fra Angelico · Visual art
8.5 · Tier IV
The field is Florentine sacred painting of the mid fifteenth century. The intrinsic force is high: the fresco shows that the new perspective and a new plainness could serve a meditative image, and that a sacred subject could be stripped almost to its architecture and two bodies and lose nothing. The discount: it sums up a direction more than it redirects its field, and much of its reach is the painter’s in general. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it stands behind the long line of quiet loggia Annunciations; in the nineteenth century the Nazarenes and the English Pre-Raphaelite circle took the painter as a model of purity, Rossetti’s Ecce Ancilla Domini answering him, though not this fresco alone. Its presence on cards and covers is fame, not reach.
Rembrandt van Rijn · Visual art
8.5 · Tier IV
Intrinsic force and achieved reach are scored together. The force is a real reorganisation of what a self-portrait may be: the painter’s own making shown unfinished at the site of finish, and a sign without a figure set beside a face as its equal. The reach was delayed and is diffuse. The canvas was out of public view for most of its life, now hangs in a house museum rather than a national gallery, and the circles have no line of descendants. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the late self-portraits as a group shaped what self-portraiture became, through Reynolds, the Romantics and Van Gogh, and this canvas is the group’s most reproduced member, but the redirection belongs to the series.
Charlie Chaplin · Film
8.5 · Tier IV
The field is the cinema of the 1930s, and it was moving away from this film’s form. The intrinsic force is great: proof that pantomime and a recorded score could hold a feature against speech, and the fullest fusion of comedy and pathos the medium had then made. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the reach is real and narrow. The film did not redirect the field. The talkie won, and the silent feature did not return beyond Chaplin’s own Modern Times (1936), at 8.3, and a few later exercises. Its reach runs through endings and through the comic tradition: the close that stops on a face, and the clown as a figure of grace, which Fellini’s La Strada (8.3) and Nights of Cabiria (7.7) take from Chaplin. Much of what is credited to it belongs to the Tramp and to Chaplin’s work as a whole, and is discounted.
Marilynne Robinson · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
The field is the American novel of the late twentieth century. The force is real: the book showed that a novel of almost no event could carry metaphysical argument in a first-person voice, that the domestic novel could be turned against domesticity, and that the scriptural and Emersonian sentence could still serve an American novelist at the height of minimalism. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the PEN/Hemingway Award for a first novel in 1981; Bill Forsyth’s film of 1987; and a standing among writers, as one of the books novelists name, out of proportion to its sales. What holds the axis in the low eights is the reach: no second novel followed for twenty-four years, the book founded no school, and its effect on later fiction is easier to assert than to document. Influence carried later through Robinson’s own novels is delayed, and is credited and discounted.
Max Beckmann · Visual art
8.5 · Tier IV
The field: European painting of the early 1930s, German painting under the coming dictatorship, and the modern figure in an age of abstraction. The intrinsic force is real: the work showed that a large allegorical figure painting, in an archaic religious form, could carry the most immediate political and existential matter, against abstraction and against the illustrative realism of the regimes. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the modern secular triptych owes it much, beginning with the nine Beckmann completed after it; Francis Bacon’s debt to him in particular is argued and not proved, and is discounted; in the United States, where the work hung from 1942 and the painter taught from 1947, its weight on figurative painters is real but diffuse. No school followed it, and its reach is named rather than wide.
Octavio Paz · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
The field is poetry in Spanish in the twentieth century, with Vallejo, Neruda, Lorca, Borges and Gorostiza in it, and modernist poetry in the West beyond. The intrinsic force is high: it is the most ambitious long poem in Mexican poetry after Muerte sin fin, it showed that the surrealist current, the classical metre and the pre-Hispanic inheritance could be one instrument, and Paz’s standing as a poet rests on it most. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it made the long, cyclical, unpunctuated meditative poem a live form in Spanish; it set the terms for the dialogue of eros and history in Latin American poetry for a generation; and Paz’s own later long poems, Blanco (1967) and Pasado en claro (1975), extend it. Held well under the force: particular later works it redirected cannot be named as they can for The Waste Land, and its reach in other languages is that of a famous translated poem, not a form others took up. The Nobel Prize of 1990 is not counted.
Sergio Leone · Film
8.5 · Tier IV
Intrinsic force is high. The film turned the gangster film from social chronicle into a work of memory and guilt in the manner of the modern novel, with a structure the genre had not tried. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the mutilated American release meant the film entered its field late and slant; its mark on the later memory-framed, long and mournful gangster film is visible but diffuse, hard to separate from the Godfather films, and the cinema of the 1980s around it was not redirected. Its pressure has come chiefly through the complete version’s reputation, through Morricone’s score, and through the case it made against studio recutting. Delayed influence is credited and discounted.
Dominikus Zimmermann · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Force and reach are scored together, in the field of South German church building of the eighteenth century. The intrinsic force is high: architecture, stucco and fresco fused into one room by two brothers in one campaign, the fullest statement of what Bavarian Rococo church building could do. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it came at the end of the style; within a decade of its consecration Neoclassical taste in Munich and the Enlightenment’s suspicion of pilgrimage had turned against it, and it redirected little that followed. It closed a line rather than opening one. Its later reach is as the type-image of the Rococo for historians and visitors, credited and discounted as delayed influence.
Reginald Ely, John Wastell and others · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Force and reach are scored together, in English building of the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries and its inheritors. The intrinsic force: the chapel is the fullest statement of the Perpendicular and the fan vault at monumental scale, and fixed an image of late English Gothic; but it reorganised little, since the parts it perfected were already in use. Its reach in its own century was cut short, for the Reformation ended large church building in England within a generation. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it stood for English Gothic to the Gothic Revival and to university Gothic in Britain and America, and gave the English choral tradition its best known room and a service copied across the world.
Edward Yang · Film
8.5 · Tier IV
Released in 2000, so force and reach are scored together, and the field is the cinema of its decade. The intrinsic force is a summation rather than a reorganisation: the film gathered what Taiwanese New Cinema had found, the ensemble family, the city as a set of glass boxes, the long take at a distance, and gave it its fullest and warmest statement as that movement closed. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the film became a touchstone of the family ensemble and of the new century’s art cinema, but heirs that took its method rather than its standing are hard to name, Yang made no film after it before his death in 2007, and in Taiwan its presence was long limited. Much of the formal force belongs to his earlier films.
Wang Ximeng · Visual art
8.5 · Tier IV
The field is Chinese landscape painting of the Northern Song and the blue-green tradition after it. The intrinsic force is high: the scroll is the fullest realisation of the blue-green landscape at monumental scale, the proof that the archaic palette could carry the structure of the new ink landscape. The reach was limited and indirect for centuries, the scroll a private and then a palace possession, rarely seen; delayed influence is credited and discounted. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the revived blue-green of the Southern Song in Zhao Boju, the archaism of Zhao Mengfu and the blue-green of Qiu Ying and Wen Zhengming descend from the same programme, though a line from this scroll to them cannot be shown in most cases; and its recent standing as a national image is presence more than redirection.
Gabriel García Márquez · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
The field is the novel in Spanish of the later twentieth century. The force: the book claimed the love story, and love in old age, as subjects for the most serious novel at a time when the Latin American novel of prestige was a novel of history and form, and showed that the realist romance could carry irony, politics, the civil wars, the cholera and the river’s ruin, and moral judgment without abandoning feeling. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the book stands at the start of the turn in Spanish American fiction of the later 1980s and 1990s toward accessible, emotional storytelling sometimes called the post-Boom, beside Isabel Allende; and it fixed the long-delayed love of the old as a recognisable form in world fiction. What holds the axis there is that the reach is real but diffuse. It is not the reorganisation that One Hundred Years of Solitude effected, and no major later work can be named with certainty as plainly its descendant. Strong force, moderate reach.
Dmitri Shostakovich · Music
8.5 · Tier IV
The field is the symphony of the 1930s. The intrinsic force is moderate: the work showed that a large public symphony, tonal and in four movements, could still carry tragedy and doubt in an age of modernism. It did not reorganise what a symphony could be; it reasserted it, with a new undertone. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the reach is large and documented. The work became the model of the Soviet symphony for a generation, the template the state held up and that his later symphonies and those of his Soviet contemporaries answered, and it fixed his idiom, the long slow movement, the sardonic scherzo, the ambiguous march, as one of the century’s recognisable voices, heard after him in concert music and film. Much of that reach is presence and idiom, not a redirection of the form.
Anonymous; Octagon by William Hurley and Alan of Walsingham · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Force and reach are scored together, and here they part. The intrinsic force is high: the Octagon reorganises what a crossing could be, the most original spatial and structural invention of English Decorated building, and the Lady Chapel’s undulating arcade is among the inventions that define that style. The Norman church is powerful but representative. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the Octagon had no true successor, the desk knows no medieval church that took it up as a model, and the timber lantern stayed unique; its lessons passed into admiration rather than into buildings. The Lady Chapel’s manner belongs to a shared Decorated movement whose directions Ely helped set, in a share that cannot be measured.
Workshops of Qin Shi Huang · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
Published work, so force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force is very high: a reorganisation of what sculpture could do in China, and of what a burial could hold, with no equal in scale. The reach in its own field and time is real and reduced. The Western Han kept the funerary army, but at a fraction of life size and with simpler making; life-size naturalistic sculpture did not take hold, the tradition turned back toward the figurine, and later Chinese monumental sculpture drew on Buddhist sources. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the funerary army carried on under the Han in miniature, and the delayed reach since 1974 is large in archaeology, in museum practice and in the world’s image of early China and of the state, and modest on the practice of sculpture. Fame is presence, and is not counted as influence here.
Middle Byzantine builders · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Field: Byzantine building of the tenth and eleventh centuries, above all on the Greek mainland. The intrinsic force: the katholikon is the first full surviving statement of the mainland octagon church, and with its decoration the most complete surviving Middle Byzantine monastic interior in Greece; the smaller church is a model of the Helladic exterior of cut stone framed in brick. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the octagon type was taken up in Greece, at Daphni about 1100 and elsewhere, and the manner of the smaller church’s exterior became the mainland’s common dress for two centuries. But the reach stayed regional. Constantinople and the wider Orthodox world kept the cross-in-square, and whether the type began here or only passed through is uncertain.
Sienese builders; facade by Giovanni Pisano · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Intrinsic force and achieved reach, scored together, in the field of Tuscan and Umbrian Gothic building of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Force: Giovanni Pisano’s facade reorganised what a facade could be in Italy, a sculptural front with figures as actors; the cathedral fixed the type of the Sienese church, banded and domed, and its ambition was a challenge to Florence that Florence answered. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the facade’s lesson passed to Orvieto and through it to the Gothic facades of central Italy, and the banding became the emblem of Tuscan sacred building. But the floor had no successor at its scale, the Duomo Nuovo had none, and the decisive turns in Italian architecture came from Florence. Reach stands below force.
Thomas Eakins · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
The field is American painting of the 1870s, and force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force is high: it is the most serious attempt in American painting of its century to make the modern world, its science and its professions, the subject of a picture at the scale of history, and it does not flinch. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: in its time the canvas moved little, refused the galleries, bought by a medical school and hung there for over a century; Eakins’s teaching at the Pennsylvania Academy carried his realism through Thomas Anshutz to Robert Henri and the Ashcan painters, a reach credited and discounted, since it ran through the teacher more than through this canvas; Eakins answered it himself in The Agnew Clinic; and later it became the picture by which American realism is named, and the centre of a public campaign in 2006 and 2007 to keep it in Philadelphia. That is presence more than redirection.
Antoni Gaudí · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Built and seen since 1912, so force and reach are scored together. The field is Catalan Modernisme, European architecture of the century’s first years and the city house of flats. The intrinsic force is high: a free plan on a frame in a house of flats, a front released from bearing, the building made one sculptured mass and the roof made a place, a reorganisation of what a city block could be. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it is the weaker half. In its own time the house was a dead end; Noucentisme turned from Gaudí within years, he left almost no school beyond Jujol and a few followers, and the modern movement took the free plan from Le Corbusier. The reach came late, through the Surrealists, the rediscovery of the 1950s and the free-formed architecture of the late twentieth century, and it looks to Gaudí in general more than to this house.
Gustave Flaubert · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
The field is French literature of the nineteenth century and, through it, the European. The force: the book made the archive a source of the fantastic and the history of ideas a hallucinated drama, and it set out, before the Symbolists, the decadent repertory of idols, queens, chimeras and monsters. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Redon’s lithographs; the Symbolist and decadent imagination of the 1880s and 1890s; the hallucinatory drama of the “Circe” episode of Ulysses, where the debt is commonly traced; Foucault’s essay, which made it a founding text for theory’s reading of the library and the imaginary. The reach is real but oblique: it ran through painters, a few novelists and critics, not through the form of the novel, where Madame Bovary and L’Éducation sentimentale did the redirecting.
Leo Tolstoy · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
The field is Russian prose of the nineteenth century and the European novel of marriage and adultery. The intrinsic force: the book put the sexual life of marriage at the centre of serious fiction in plain statement, made the marriage plot a case for prosecution, and showed the late Tolstoy’s art in the service of doctrine at its most powerful. What holds it is that the reach was as controversy more than as model: it did not redirect the form of the novella or the novel as the great novels did, its imitators are few, and it moved the argument more than the art. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: an immediate scandal and a public debate on marriage and sexuality in Russia, Europe and America; replies in fiction from Tolstoy’s wife and son; and Janáček’s First String Quartet (1923), named after it.
Anonymous · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Force and reach are scored together, in the field of French Gothic and the Gothic that followed it. The intrinsic force is real: the choir is the terminus of the High Gothic race of height, the point at which the logic of the skeleton was carried as far as it would go. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the race ended here. No one built higher; Cologne, begun in 1248, followed Amiens rather than Beauvais in height and plan, and later Gothic turned to the refinement of surface, the Rayonnant and then the Flamboyant, and to smaller, safer vessels. Its reach is chiefly as a limit and a warning, the standard case in the history of structure of a building that showed where Gothic stops. A lesson is a narrower reach than a model copied, and the transept’s reach is local.
Ernest Hemingway · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
The field is American fiction of the 1950s, and the English-language novel beside it. The intrinsic force is real and bounded: the book showed that the plain style made for the war and the café could carry a fable of near-scriptural shape without losing its plainness, and it fixed the short novel of solitary endurance as a form. It perfected a manner more than it reorganised possibility; the style that moved the field was the style of the 1920s. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the whole book in one issue of Life, the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction of 1953, and the Nobel Prize of 1954, whose citation named it; a school text across much of the world for seventy years; John Sturges’s film with Spencer Tracy (1958) and Aleksandr Petrov’s animated film (1999). What holds it in the low eights is that the reach is cultural more than literary: the American novel of the decade went to Bellow, Salinger, Nabokov and Kerouac, and no school can be shown to have turned on this book.
Gunnar Asplund · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
The field is the public library and the classicism of Northern Europe in the twentieth century. The intrinsic force is real: the building reorganised the public library round open shelves and made the circle of books the image of the institution, and it showed that classicism could be stripped to pure geometry without losing its gravity. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: strong in its region, where it is the defining work of Nordic Classicism and the building the next generation of Scandinavian architects measured themselves against; late beyond it, returning as a reference for the classical and rationalist revival of the late twentieth century. It did not redirect world building as the white villas of the modern movement did. Delayed influence is credited and discounted.
Paul Valéry · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
The intrinsic force is real: Charmes turns the poetics of French symbolism into a poetry of the intellect, and shows that the closed form could carry modern thought. It is a consolidation more than a reorganisation of what poetry could do. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Rilke translated the book into German; Jorge Guillén translated “Le Cimetière marin” into Spanish, and his Cántico carries Valéry’s poetics into the Generation of 27; T. S. Eliot wrote on Valéry and admired him; the idea of the poem as a made object passed into the New Criticism. Within French poetry the main direction after 1922 went the other way, through surrealism to Ponge, Char and Bonnefoy, who wrote partly against him.
Frank Capra · Film
8.4 · Tier IV
Released in 1946, so force and reach are scored together, in the cinema of the 1940s. The film made the alternate world in which a man is shown his absence into a complete dramatic form, and it put despair and the economics of a small town at the centre of a holiday fantasy. In its own decade it carried little: Liberty Films did not survive, and Capra’s career declined after it. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the reach came late, through television in the 1970s and 1980s, and then grew very wide; the “world without me” premise is now a stock form across film and television. Delayed reach is credited and discounted, and it is reach of a pattern more than of a way of making film.
Terrence Malick · Film
8.4 · Tier IV
Released in 2005, so force and reach are scored together. The force: the film made the historical epic lyric, showing that a national founding could be told as perception and loss rather than as event. That is a real reorganisation of the historical film, discounted heavily because the grammar was its maker’s from The Thin Red Line and the new step, its transfer to a founding legend and a love story, is one of degree. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the natural-light frontier film after it, most openly The Revenant (2015), with the same cinematographer; the drift and whisper of much independent and festival cinema since; Malick’s own later films, The Tree of Life (2011) among them, built on this one’s method. Much of that reach runs through the style as a whole and through the earlier film, and this one alone did not redirect the field.
Don DeLillo · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
The field is the American novel of the 1980s. The force is a reorganisation of what the historical novel could do with a recent public event: the book showed that a novelist could take the most documented and contested American crime, admit invention openly, and produce a version with its own authority, in which the inner life of an obscure actor carries the meaning of the public catastrophe. What holds it three tenths below the bar is that the reach is concentrated in one subgenre and in criticism: it did not redirect the American novel at large, and the forms it used were already available. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: a finalist for the National Book Award for 1988; its standing as the defining fictional treatment of the Kennedy assassination; its place among the books by which DeLillo’s standing is reckoned; and its use as a model for the novel of secret history in the decades after, of which James Ellroy’s American Tabloid (1995) is the clearest case.
Philip Roth · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
The field is the American novel of the 1990s. The intrinsic force: the book showed that the comic monologue of an appetitive man could carry elegy, and that the old man’s novel of rage and decline could be written at full pitch rather than in the mode of resignation. But the late run it opened redirected Roth more than it redirected others; no line of later novels can be shown to have turned on this one, and its manner was inimitable by design. Reach that belongs to the author’s career is not credited to the book. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the National Book Award for Fiction in 1995; a standing among critics, and among novelists who name it, as one of Roth’s greatest books; and its place at the head of the late run that followed, American Pastoral (1997), I Married a Communist (1998) and The Human Stain (2000).
Dionysus Flambouras · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
Intrinsic force only; the work is unpublished, and achieved reach is not scored. The contest is with the surveillance novel, and the book wins it by refusal. The genre contract is that footage resolves something. Here a man produces the clip, plays it six times, and does not share it, post it, report it or delete it; he closes the laptop and in none of the years that follow opens the sub-folder again. The precursor entered is Cheever’s “The Enormous Radio”, and the answer is exact: the device no longer leaks the neighbours’ lives into one apartment; the neighbours install it themselves and call it coverage. The figure that waits where things will happen is an original instrument. Held at 8.2 because an exact refusal presses on a genre more than it reorganises the novel.
Rembrandt van Rijn · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
The field is Dutch corporate portraiture of the 1650s and 1660s. The intrinsic force is high: the canvas is commonly taken as the fullest statement of the type, the group made one consciousness in one moment without losing any face, and its address to the viewer is a real reorganisation of the regents piece. The reach is narrower than the force. The corporate group portrait declined within a generation, and the painting closed its tradition more than it redirected what followed; no line of later group portraits can be named that took its form from it. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: its later life is as an image, the model of the burgher board, and a wide popular presence, its figures on the Dutch Masters cigar box through the twentieth century, which is presence rather than redirection and counts only a little.
Elias of Dereham and Nicholas of Ely (attributed); spire by Richard of Farleigh · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Field: English Gothic of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. The intrinsic force: the building constitutes the Early English cathedral in its most complete and unified form, sets the English cathedral free on its green within a close, and carries the English great spire to its limit. As a reorganisation of possibility it is modest: its elements were found elsewhere, and the decisive turns of those years were made at Lincoln and Wells. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: within the medieval field, moderate, the spire answered by the great spires that followed and the chapter house one of a type it did not originate; later, wide, as the textbook instance of its style and a model for the Gothic Revival in England and its colonies, reach discounted for being late and for being reach as an exemplar more than as an invention.
Kongo · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
Field: Central African sculpture of the nineteenth century, its reach followed outward. The intrinsic force is high. Within Kongo practice the nkondi is the most potent and formal kind of nkisi, the Mangaaka the summit of the region’s monumental figure carving, and the type reorganised what a sculpture could be by making use its author. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: within its region the nkondi was a dominant institution in the late nineteenth century, though whether it redirected the practice or crowned it is unclear; it entered European collections as the very type of the “fetish”, and so shaped how a continent’s art was seen and misnamed; and it is answered by African American artists, Renée Stout among them, and by Thompson’s Flash of the Spirit (1983) as a source of diaspora aesthetics. Part of that reach is reach of an idea; delayed influence is credited and discounted.
Denis Johnson · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
The field is the American short story after Carver. The intrinsic force is real and bounded: the book showed that the plain story of the down-and-out could carry visionary transport and theological weight without losing its plainness, and that an unreliable narrator could be the medium of grace rather than only of irony. That widened an idiom more than it reorganised a form. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: one of the most imitated story collections of its decade among American writers and in the writing programmes, with a register, the lyric derelict and the sudden blessing, that passed into later fiction; Alison Maclean’s film of 1999; and a standing that rose after Johnson’s death in 2017. What holds it in the low eights is that the reach is concentrated among writers: it did not redirect the novel or the wider field, and its followers are easier to name as a manner than to document as a school.
Hoysala builders · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
The field is the temple building of its own tradition and century. The intrinsic force is high: as a statement of what figure carving can do to an architectural surface the outer wall stands among the strongest in South Asia, and the twin temple at this scale is a real enlargement of the Hoysala type. The reach is regional and bounded: the school ended with the dynasty, the Vijayanagara builders who followed took another course, and the temple did not redirect South Indian building beyond its region. Its later reach is as a model for the study of craft and an emblem of Karnataka’s heritage. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the Hoysala school ran for about two centuries, through hundreds of temples in the uplands to Somanathapura in 1268, and Halebidu is one of its two summits beside Belur.
Arcade Fire · Music
8.4 · Tier IV
The field is the rock and indie-rock album of its years. The intrinsic force is in the scale and the plainness: the record showed that an independent band could hold a long record of one place together in the plain language of mainstream rock and carry a generation’s complaint about time with it. Earlier bands had shown the form, and the anthemic manner others took up came chiefly from Funeral, six years before; that is not credited here. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the record was widely heard and widely honoured; its winning of the Grammy for the album of the year, on an independent label, was taken at the time as a sign of independent rock’s arrival in the mainstream; and Sprawl II pointed the band toward the dance floor.
Leo Tolstoy · Literature
8.3 · Tier IV
The field is the European novel at the end of the nineteenth century, and the Russian novel within it. The intrinsic force: the book showed that the full machinery of realism could be turned against the institutions of the state as a whole, not one abuse at a time, and that a novel could be a moral act with consequences in the world; it is the century’s most total indictment of law and punishment in the form of a novel. What holds it is the later life of the form: the Russian novel after it took its direction from Chekhov and the Symbolists, not from this book, and its reach runs more through Tolstoy’s moral authority than through the form. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: a European event at publication, translated at once into the major languages and widely read; adapted for the stage, and as an opera by Alfano (1904); filmed again and again; a source for the literature of prison and penal exile, and for the moral authority Tolstoy held for Gandhi and others.
Hermann Hesse · Literature
8.3 · Tier IV
The intrinsic force is a real reorganisation: the confessional novel made into a psychological fantasy with a theoretical insert, and depth psychology and modern popular music brought into the German novel at once. The field is the German novel of the 1920s, which also holds The Magic Mountain (1924), Kafka’s posthumous novels and Berlin Alexanderplatz (1929); against them the reorganisation is less, since the book remakes neither the novel’s language nor its scale. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Colin Wilson built The Outsider (1956) in part on Haller; the counterculture of the 1960s took up the Magic Theatre; and the rock band Steppenwolf took its name from the book in 1967. That reach runs mostly into culture and readers rather than into later novels, and is credited only where named.
John Huston · Film
8.3 · Tier IV
The field is the cinema of the 1940s. Intrinsic force: the film made the adventure picture the vehicle of a moral study of greed, took the American star into contempt and death, and joined location realism to studio storytelling at full scale; it showed what the postwar American film could do outside the city of noir. It perfected a mode more than it reorganised what cinema could do. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the film made Huston’s standing and brought him the Academy Awards for direction and screenplay, with a third to Walter Huston; the line about “stinking badges” passed into common speech and parody; and the three men and their hoard became a pattern for later westerns and thrillers. The reach is wide and lasting, the force narrower.
Luis Buñuel · Film
8.3 · Tier IV
Released in 1962, so force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force is high: the film showed that a narrative feature can rest on an unexplained rule and hold an audience by watching people obey it, a real reorganisation of what a premise may be, and it joined the surrealist inheritance to narrative film in a way L’Âge d’or did not attempt. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: its direct line runs through Buñuel’s late French films, above all The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972), which inverts its premise, and Adès carried it into the opera house. How much of the later cinema of the savage dinner party descends from it directly is contested. It did not redirect the medium’s grammar as the Nouvelle Vague and Fellini’s and Bergman’s films of the same years did.
Akira Kurosawa · Film
8.3 · Tier IV
Released in 1957, so force and reach are scored together, in the cinema of the 1950s. The force: a reorganisation of what a film of Shakespeare could be, the play carried wholly by image, sound and an alien theatrical grammar, and a fusion of the Noh with the moving image that made stylization a resource of the period film, not an ornament. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the film is a fixed text in the study of Shakespeare on screen, its death by arrows is among the most cited deaths in the cinema, and Kurosawa returned to transposed Shakespeare in Ran (1985). The reach is narrow in direction: it redirected Shakespeare adaptation more than the cinema at large, how far later transpositions into other cultures derive from it is not settled, and in its decade it stands behind the director’s own Rashomon and Seven Samurai in what it changed.
Luis Buñuel · Film
8.3 · Tier IV
Released in 1967, so force and reach are scored together, in the field of the cinema of the 1960s. The intrinsic force: the fullest statement of a cinema in which fantasy and reality share one register, carried into a star vehicle and a commercial success, and the demonstration that an erotic film could hold its subject by withholding it. Much of that force belongs to Buñuel’s earlier films and to Resnais, and it is discounted. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the Golden Lion at Venice; Buñuel’s largest commercial success, which opened his late French period; Deneuve’s image and the Saint Laurent clothes passed into common visual reference; and the erotic art film of later decades took part of its standing from this example. How far later films borrowed the unexplained box is not settled. The reach is real, and the film moved its field less than the decade’s founding films moved theirs.
Édouard Manet · Visual art
8.3 · Tier IV
Published, so force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force is real. The canvas shows that history painting could be done in the manner of modern life, of the newspaper, without rhetoric; that the line of executioners could be the subject; that a political charge could be made by costume rather than allegory. It is the link between Goya and the twentieth century’s images of state killing. The reach was delayed and narrow: not shown in France in Manet’s lifetime, then kept in Mannheim, out of the daily view of the Paris canon; French painting of the 1860s and 1870s moved toward landscape and modern life, not toward a modern history painting, and few took up this road. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: a named line rather than a field, in which Picasso’s Massacre in Korea of 1951 answers Goya and Manet together. The force stands above the figure, the reach below it.
Charlie Chaplin · Film
8.3 · Tier IV
Released in 1936, so force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force is real: a film that made the coming of sound its subject and joined the comedy of the body to an argument about industrial labour, when the field had moved to dialogue comedy and the musical. It closed one road more than it opened another: it is the last great work of silent pantomime, and the field did not turn back. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the man in the gears became the common shorthand for the worker under the machine, quoted and parodied for ninety years; its machine comedy is commonly placed in the line that runs to Jacques Tati, and the conveyor-belt routine of I Love Lucy (1952) is often traced to it; the theme later set as “Smile” (1954) lives apart from it. Reach as image is wide; reach as changed practice is narrow.
Diogo de Boitaca and João de Castilho · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
The field is Portuguese and Iberian building of the sixteenth century, and within it the intrinsic force is high. The monastery fixes the Manueline at its largest scale and finest finish, with a hall vault and a transept span among the boldest Iberian vaulting of the time, and it reorganised what a royal foundation in Portugal could look like. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the Manueline was short-lived as a living style, overtaken within decades by the Renaissance and the plain style, and the monastery took in that change itself; its larger reach came late, when the neo-Manueline of the nineteenth century took it as its model and made it the national style. Delayed influence is credited and discounted. Outside the Portuguese world, little followed.
Eladio Dieste · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
The field is modern structure and Latin American building. Intrinsic force is high: the church reorganised what brick could do, from mass in compression to a thin, reinforced, double-curved shell, and it opened a body of building that Dieste and his firm carried for forty years in churches, warehouses, silos, markets and a port building, many with long vaults built on reusable formwork. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: in Uruguay and the Río de la Plata it set a standard and a method, and it entered the canon of Latin American modernism; in the last two decades it has become a reference for research in thin masonry and low-carbon structure. But it did not redirect the world’s building as the concrete shells and the major modern houses did; reinforced-brick shells stayed largely Dieste’s own practice.
Zapotec builders · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
Force and reach are scored together, in the field of the Valley of Oaxaca and southern Mesoamerica from the late Formative to the Classic. The intrinsic force: among the first planned capitals of Mesoamerica, founded on a site chosen and remade for rule, its plaza the stage of a state, its monuments carrying some of the earliest writing and calendar signs in the region. That is a real reorganisation of what a centre could be. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the Zapotec world built in its pattern for a millennium, the temple, patio and altar group and the Zapotec tablero recurring at sites in the valley. Beyond Oaxaca its reach was limited, and it did not redirect Mesoamerican building as Teotihuacan did.
Lina Bo Bardi · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
The field is Brazilian and Latin American architecture of the late twentieth century and the reuse of industrial buildings worldwide. The intrinsic force is considerable: a public institution made from a found factory and a rough new block, against the clean slate and the polished monument alike. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: real but delayed and partly a matter of reputation; it became a reference for turning industrial sites into cultural and social centres, and since the 1990s, more since the 2010s, it has been taken as a model by architects in Brazil and abroad. Delayed influence is credited and discounted. What holds the axis: industrial reuse grew from many sources at once, and the rough concrete idiom was not taken up as a school.
Milan Kundera · Literature
8.3 · Tier IV
The field is the Czech and Central European novel of the 1980s, and through translation the European novel. The intrinsic force is real and bounded: the book made the polyphonic essay-novel readable to a mass audience, joined philosophical speculation to erotic and political narrative without either becoming illustration, and gave the anti-totalitarian novel a register that was neither dissident testimony nor allegory. It renews and popularises a form more than it reorganises possibility, since the reorganisation belonged to Broch and Musil and to Kundera’s previous novel, and a school of novels redirected by it is asserted more than documented. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: one of the most widely read European novels of its decade, translated into most of the world’s literary languages, filmed by Philip Kaufman in 1988, its terms, kitsch and lightness, carried into common critical speech, and its poetics set out for later writers in The Art of the Novel (1986).
Christopher Wren, with Hawksmoor and Vanbrugh · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
Intrinsic force is high. The ensemble is the most ambitious work of the English Baroque before Blenheim, and it showed that an English public building could compose at the scale of Paris and Rome, with domes, colonnades and a vista. Hawksmoor and Vanbrugh worked out their massing here before taking it to Blenheim and the London churches, so the English Baroque’s school was in part this office. Reach is narrower: the English Baroque was cut short by the Palladian reaction of the 1710s and 1720s, which set Greenwich aside as a model to avoid, and the building did not redirect European architecture as the Invalides or Versailles did. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: later axial and institutional planning in Britain and the empire owed it something, and in the English building of its century it is a summit, not a turning point.
Ancient Egyptian, under Amenhotep III and Ramesses II · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
The field is New Kingdom temple building at Thebes. The intrinsic force is high: within the type, Luxor is one of the finest statements of the processional temple, and its colonnade states the processional nave with great purity. It perfects a possibility more than it reorganises one. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the festival temple set the terms for the ritual landscape of Thebes; Ramesses II’s own court and pylon answer Amenhotep III’s work on the spot; the raised central nave of the great hypostyle at Karnak (8.7), built under Seti I and Ramesses II, follows the principle the colonnade states, though the line of descent is argued, not proven, and is credited with discount. Beyond Egypt the reach is diffuse, and Luxor’s share in it, the Paris obelisk apart, cannot be isolated.
Louise Bourgeois · Visual art
8.3 · Tier IV
On view since 2000, so force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force: it showed that monumental public sculpture could carry autobiography and maternal ambivalence, a private and female subject at the scale of the heroic monument, and remain monumental. The discount: what it redirected belongs largely to the oeuvre, the Cells, the confessional sculpture, the artist’s standing for younger artists; and the descent of later giant public figures from it, rather than from Oldenburg and Koons, is hard to show. Fame is presence, and it is weighed here only as reach. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: wide in presence and narrower in redirection, it is the emblem of the artist’s late fame, it opened the Turbine Hall commissions, which made the single spectacular work in a vast hall an institution, and its casts made it one of the most seen sculptures of its decade.
Jørn Utzon · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
The field is Scandinavian and European building of the later twentieth century. Intrinsic force: a real reorganisation of possibility, the proof that prefabricated, additive construction and a free, expressive form can live in one building, each doing what it does best, and that a modern church can be humble outside and sacred inside without monumentality. That synthesis is the heart of what Utzon left after Sydney. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: through Frampton the church became a canonical exemplar of critical regionalism and of tectonic culture, taught in schools everywhere; it shaped Nordic church and civic building; and its light under curved soffits is answered in later work. It redirected discourse more than practice, and did not change what a building could be seen to be.
Neil Young · Music
8.3 · Tier IV
The field is the singer-songwriter and country-rock album of its years. The intrinsic force is modest and real: the record joined the exposed intimacy of the singer-songwriter to the rawness of a garage band and kept both, and showed that a fragile voice and an unpolished recording could carry a major record. James Taylor, Joni Mitchell and the singer’s own earlier records were already on the ground, and it reorganised little. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Southern Man drew a direct answer in Sweet Home Alabama (1974); the title song entered the repertoire of other singers; and the record is widely named as a source for later country rock and for the alternative-country and indie songwriters who prized its unpolished sound.
Hans Puchsbaum and others · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
The field is the Gothic of the Danube lands and central Europe in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The intrinsic force is real but is not a reorganisation of possibility: the cathedral perfected the hall church at metropolitan scale and the single great tower as a drawn, unified spire, and invented neither. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the Vienna lodge stood among the leading lodges of the German lands, its masters, vaults and tower designs passing into Austria, Bohemia, Hungary and southern Germany, and the hall church became the ordinary form of the region’s late Gothic town churches. Outside the region the building is the model of nothing in particular; its fame is that of Vienna’s emblem. Force stands below reach, both within a regional field, and the axis stands well below the gate.
Björk · Music
8.3 · Tier IV
The field is art pop and electronic music of the late 1990s. The intrinsic force is real: the record showed that the orchestral string ensemble and the glitched, distorted electronic beat could be one body rather than a sample laid over a loop, that a pop album could be built on that fusion without a drum kit, and that the voice could be the one organic element between them. That reorganises a small part of the field, audibly here before her later records. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the art pop that joins strings and electronics in the following decades runs through her work as a whole more than through this record singly, and the reach of the All Is Full of Love video is the video’s. The reach is real and diffuse, and its attribution to the maker rather than the record is the discount.
Steely Dan · Music
8.3 · Tier IV
The field is the rock and pop album of the late 1970s. The intrinsic force is a refinement more than a reorganisation: the record showed that jazz harmony, jazz soloists and the full resources of the session studio could be the substance of a popular record that sold in the millions, and it set a standard of finish others measured themselves against. Its means were not new: fusion and the Los Angeles studio sound were established, and the band’s own earlier records had done most of the turning. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: a benchmark of studio craft and recorded sound for the decade after; Peg sampled in De La Soul’s Eye Know (1989), so that the record passed into hip hop; and a harmonic language studied and borrowed by later pop, jazz-pop and R&B musicians.
Wifredo Lam · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
Field: Caribbean and Latin American painting and the international avant-garde of the 1940s. The intrinsic force is high and specific: the picture reorganises the relation of modernism to its “primitive” sources by placing the source in the painter’s own place and people, and it gives Caribbean modernism a founding image that is neither nationalist genre nor imported style. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: held by the Museum of Modern Art in the city where the next generation of painters was forming; central to Lam’s standing in Breton’s and Césaire’s circle; a reference point for Caribbean and Afro-diasporic painting; since the 1980s a type case in the postcolonial revision of modernism. Particular redirection is harder to document, and influence on the New York painters is unproved.
Leonard Cohen · Music
8.2 · Tier IV
The field is the folk and singer-songwriter record of 1967 and the years after. The intrinsic force is real and bounded: the record showed that popular song could carry the grave, devotional and erotic lyric of a serious poet, sung plainly by an untrained voice, and that a whole album could be built in that register. It did not reorganise the music; it reorganised what the words of a popular song could be allowed to weigh, and Dylan had made the larger part of that change first. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: several songs became standards within a few years; Robert Altman built McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971) on three of them; and the grave literary singer who came after measures himself against Cohen. Much of that reach runs through the whole career, and that discount holds the figure.
Antoni Gaudí · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Built and seen since 1914, so force and reach are scored together. The field is Catalan and European building of the twentieth century. The intrinsic force is high: landscape, engineering and architecture made one continuous material under one structural law, and waste and colour made into monumental surface, a reorganisation of possibility within Modernisme and beyond it. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it is the narrower half. The park became a model and an image for later organic and fantastic building and for artists’ gardens, and it shaped how Barcelona and the world imagine Gaudí; the structural method of the leaning columns passed into the line of form-found structures. But mainstream landscape and urban design did not follow it, and much of its reach is as a picture rather than as practice.
John Vanbrugh with Nicholas Hawksmoor · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Standing since the 1720s, so force and reach are scored together, in the field of English building of its century. The intrinsic force is high: the fullest statement of the English Baroque and of Vanbrugh’s grammar of mass, the largest country house of its age in England, and a reorganisation of what a house could say at a distance. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: real but bent. It founded no school; the Palladian reaction, printing its programme from 1715, turned taste against it within a decade, and the heirs were few, Vanbrugh’s own Seaton Delaval and Grimsthorpe and Hawksmoor’s late work. Its reach came by a longer road, through Reynolds and Adam into composition by masses, through the 1709 paper into the case for keeping ruins, and much later into the Edwardian Baroque. Delayed influence is credited and discounted.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe · Literature
8.2 · Tier IV
The field is German poetry of the late eighteenth century, with the classical revival in European letters behind it. Intrinsic force is high: the cycle shows that the classical couplet can carry living experience in German, and it sets the lyric programme of Weimar classicism. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Schiller’s elegies, Der Spaziergang among them, Hölderlin’s Brod und Wein and Mörike’s classical measures stand in its line, and the erotic Rome of the northern pilgrim recurs through the next century. The reach is real but largely German. Outside German it is the reach of a famous work by a famous author, read in translation without redirecting a foreign field, and its delayed influence is little. The force runs ahead of the reach, and the two are scored together at 8.2.
Sebastião Salgado · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
Published, so intrinsic force and achieved reach are scored together, in the field of documentary photography of the 1980s and early 1990s. Intrinsic force: the series is the most concentrated statement of what Salgado’s work as a whole reorganised, the long, self-directed documentary project in black and white with the ambition of an epic, for which Workers (1993) is the full form and Serra Pelada the core. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the pictures fixed the public image of Serra Pelada itself, in Brazil and abroad; they are the centre of Workers, one of the most widely shown photographic exhibitions of its decade; and they became the central case in the argument over aestheticised suffering. Discounted because much of that reach belongs to the career, and no later work is shown to derive from them.
Neutral Milk Hotel · Music
8.2 · Tier IV
The field is American and British indie and alternative music of the late 1990s. The intrinsic force is moderate: the record did not invent a language; it recombined lo-fi recording, psychedelic pop arrangement, folk song and a brass band, and its new thing was a register, an unguarded sincerity and a willingness to be grand on small means. That reorganises tone more than possibility. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the record grew through the internet in the early 2000s, and its earnestness, its brass and accordion and its cracked voice became a template for the indie folk and chamber pop of the following decade. Arcade Fire, the Decemberists and Bright Eyes are commonly named; the pattern is credited, not any single debt. The reach is large and delayed, and is discounted for the delay.
Ilya Repin · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
The field is Russian painting of the 1870s, and force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force: the canvas made the people at their labour a subject fit for the scale and seriousness of history painting, and did so with a portraitist’s individuation that the genre painting before it lacked; it is the founding large statement of Russian critical realism. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: within its field the reach is very large, in Repin’s own career, in the Wanderers’ painting of the people and the whole school’s turn to the large realist canvas, and later, discounted for distortion, in its adoption as an ancestor by Soviet socialist realism. Outside Russia its reach in painting is small; it redirected no European school, and that holds the figure below the gate.
Rainer Werner Fassbinder · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
Released in 1979, so force and reach are scored together, in the field of the cinema of the 1970s. The intrinsic force is real: the film made the history of the Federal Republic available to popular melodrama without consolation, and showed that the New German Cinema’s quarrel with its fathers could fill cinemas. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it was Fassbinder’s greatest commercial success; it opened the trilogy completed by Lola and Veronika Voss and helped set the terms of the German historical film after it, which Edgar Reitz’s Heimat (1984) answers from the other side; and the Sirkian line it carried runs on to Todd Haynes. In a decade of The Godfather and Jeanne Dielman, it reorganised a national cinema more than the medium.
George Gilbert Scott and William Henry Barlow · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Standing since 1868, so force and reach are scored together, in the field of the British terminus and Victorian building. The intrinsic force: the largest span of its time, the shed as one tied arch over a working floor, and Scott’s secular Gothic at its most complete; together the most ambitious terminus of its age. The reach is real and bounded. The span was passed abroad in 1889, the British terminus did not take up the single giant span as a type, and the hotel was the Revival’s last great secular statement, not its turn. What reach came was late, and part of it belongs to the campaign that saved the building. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the rescue of the 1960s helped turn the tide for Victorian architecture in Britain, and the station of 2007 became the model for the restored great terminus as a destination, followed at King’s Cross and elsewhere.
Billy Wilder · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
Released in 1959, so force and reach are scored together, in the cinema of the 1950s. The intrinsic force: the film brought the sex farce to its highest finish in American film and made gender disguise a subject rather than a gag; it reorganised less what film could do than what Hollywood comedy could say. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: its frankness added to the pressure on the Production Code in the decade that followed; the drag comedy that came after, Tootsie and Mrs Doubtfire among many, descends from it, mostly at a lower level; its comic writing is a model for screenwriters; and it is commonly placed at the head of lists of American comedies. What holds it: strong reach, and a moderate reorganisation of the medium’s means.
Bong Joon-ho · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
The field is the cinema of the 2000s, so force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force: the film showed that a genre picture could carry a national history and a political indictment without becoming a thesis, and that comedy and atrocity could share a frame under one law; with Oldboy of the same year it set the terms of the Korean genre renaissance. It perfected a mixture more than it reorganised what film could do. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: within Korean cinema it is wide and can be shown, in the police and serial-killer films of the following decade, The Chaser (2008) among them, and in the director’s own Mother (2009). Abroad the reach is mainly a standing that rose with the director’s later prizes, and it is credited as presence, not as redirection. Held three tenths below the gate.
Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
The field is French painting of the 1810s and 1820s. The intrinsic force is real: the canvas set line against anatomy inside the school of David and made deformation for the sake of the contour a legitimate choice, and it is a founding image of the nineteenth century’s Orientalist nude. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: in its own decade it redirected little, since the Salon of 1819 belonged to Géricault’s Raft of the Medusa, and the quarrel that followed set Ingres against Delacroix through his history pictures more than through this one; later the reach is wide, in the odalisque as a genre through the century, in Manet’s Olympia of 1863, in Degas, in Matisse’s odalisques and Picasso’s Ingres period, and in the Guerrilla Girls’ emblem of the museum nude. Delayed, and shared with Ingres’s line in general, it is credited and discounted.
Thomas Cole · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
Force and reach are scored together, in the field of American painting of the 1830s. The intrinsic force: the picture is the clearest statement of what American landscape could claim, that a view of native ground could bear the moral weight of history painting, and it set wild and settled together as the national subject. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the painters of the next generation who made the panoramic, morally charged view their ground, Asher Durand, Frederic Church, the painter’s pupil, and later Albert Bierstadt, in the great exhibited views of the 1850s and 1860s, worked in the field this canvas helped to define, and it is the standard image of the school’s beginnings. The reach is partly diffuse: the school is the painter’s whole work as much as this canvas, and outside America it redirected little.
Filippo Brunelleschi · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Force and reach are scored together, in the field of Florentine and Italian building. The intrinsic force is a real but modest reorganisation: the system of the Old Sacristy, the domed square and its scarsella in grey stone on white, adapted to a rectangular room and given a classical front. The chapel shows that a centralised bay could govern a transverse space, and it brings colour into that grammar in glazed terracotta. Much of that force is its model’s. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: with the Old Sacristy the chapel became the picture of the Florentine Renaissance in the histories and the schools, and the domed chapel with arms and scarsella recurs in later Tuscan chapels and sacristies; but the type was redirected more by the Old Sacristy, San Lorenzo and Santo Spirito than by this room.
Inca, under Pachacuti and successors · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
The field is Inca and Andean building of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The intrinsic force is high: the walls are the summit of the imperial polygonal manner, the proof of what the state’s masonry could do, and a reorganisation of what a wall could be in the Andes. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the reach was cut short by history, since the state that might have carried the manner on fell within about a century of the walls’ beginning; within that span the manner of Cusco’s imperial works runs through Ollantaytambo and other royal sites, though which led and which followed cannot be dated; after the conquest colonial Cusco was built of the walls’ stone, so that they entered the city’s fabric literally. Beyond the Andes they moved fascination more than building.
Barry Jenkins · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
The field is the cinema of the 2010s. The intrinsic force is a synthesis more than a reorganisation: it carried art-cinema form into a subject American film had treated only in genre, and showed that a queer Black coming-of-age story in the vernacular of the neighbourhood film could be told as lyric. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the Academy Award for Best Picture, with Adapted Screenplay and Supporting Actor, and wide critical consensus at release. Its manner, saturated colour on dark skin, a slowed and pitched-down score, faces in close frontal framing, is widely seen in the American independent and streaming drama that followed, which is noted as breadth and weighed lightly, since part of that manner is Wong’s and Denis’s. Ten years of reach is short, and part of it is prize.
Paolo Uccello · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
Intrinsic force is high. The panels are among the first large demonstrations of what linear perspective could do to a secular narrative subject, and they set the problem of the modern battle picture, how to order a melee, which Piero della Francesca’s battle scenes at Arezzo and, far more forcefully, Leonardo’s design for the Battle of Anghiari took up in other terms. Reach in their own field and decade was limited: they hung in a private room, and Florentine painting followed Masaccio, Fra Angelico and Filippo Lippi rather than Uccello, whose manner was admired as a curiosity. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the delayed reach, real and discounted, is the twentieth century’s, among painters and critics drawn to geometric form and the uncanny, and in writers such as Marcel Schwob and Antonin Artaud, who made Uccello a figure; it reaches the artist’s image more than any work these panels redirected.
David Fincher · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
Released in 2010, so force and reach are scored together, against the cinema of its decade. Intrinsic force: the film showed that the present tense of technology and law could carry tragedy, fused a writer’s cinema of talk with a director’s cinema of control, and put an electronic score at the centre of a prestige drama. It perfected and joined existing manners more than it reorganised what film could do. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the cycle of founder dramas that followed in film and television, Sorkin’s own Steve Jobs (2015) among them, and the later series and films on start-ups, their founders and their frauds; and Reznor and Ross’s scoring, which became a model for dark, synthetic drama scores and made their own career in film. The reach is real and fairly wide, and it lies largely within a genre and a sound.
Antonín Dvořák · Music
8.2 · Tier IV
Published, so force and reach are scored together. Intrinsic force is moderate: the work did not reorganise what a symphony could be. It showed, with great authority, that vernacular and pentatonic material could carry a full Romantic symphony, and it put the national question into the centre of American concert music. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the reach is large and documented in its field. The work set the terms of the American debate about a national art music for a generation and more, and the Largo’s theme became a song, William Arms Fisher’s “Goin’ Home” of 1922, then a hymn and an idiom of film scoring. But the line of influence runs mainly through American music and the nationalist idea; in the wider symphonic field of its decade it redirected little.
Greek colonists of Poseidonia · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Standing some twenty-five centuries, so force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force is high within its field, the Greek temple of the West and the mature Doric: the building shows what the canonical peripteros is, and it is the best-preserved statement of that standard. It was not a reorganisation of possibility in its own century. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: large but delayed by two thousand years. From the 1750s Paestum was one of the sites that taught Europe the Greek Doric, before the temples of Athens were well published; Piranesi’s views and the baseless Doric of the Greek Revival in Britain, Germany and America owe something to it. The reach is delayed, discounted for it, and shared with the site’s other temples and with Athens.
Juan O'Gorman, Gustavo Saavedra and Juan Martínez de Velasco · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
The intrinsic force is high: the building is the most complete realisation of the integration of the arts that Mexican architects and muralists argued for in the late 1940s and 1950s, a whole building surface made figurative in durable material, and it showed what the mural movement could do outside the interior walls of the 1920s and 1930s. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: strong in its own field and region, narrower beyond. It became the emblem of the campus and of Mexican modernism, set the pattern for stone and tile murals on public buildings in Mexico through the following decades, and remains the standard reference for art and architecture integrated in Latin America. Internationally it redirected little, and its mode had few heirs outside Mexico.
Burnham and Root; south half by Holabird and Roche · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
The field is American commercial building from the 1880s to the 1920s. The intrinsic force is high: the north half shows, more starkly than anything before it in that field, that the tall office block can take its expression from its material and mass alone, without historical costume, and that reorganises what such a building could look like. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: real, but crossed. As method it redirected nothing; it was the last of its kind, and its own south half adopted the frame within two years. As example it reached far: the Chicago School’s frankness, Sullivan’s and later the modernists’ claims for ornamentless form, and the histories of the twentieth century cite it again and again. Its influence on taste exceeds its influence on building, and that reach is partly delayed and partly the historians’ construction.
Built for Yajnavaraha · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
Force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force: the narrative pediment, the tiered and recessed frame, and carving deep enough to make stone behave like wood are a real reorganisation of the possibilities of Khmer architectural decoration. Its scheme was not followed at once; the Khleang style that came after was plainer. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the narrative figural relief that Banteay Srei put on the building’s face returned in the eleventh century and grew, in the galleries of Angkor Wat and the pediments of the twelfth century, and the field is Khmer building of the tenth to twelfth centuries, where that reach counts in full. Its place at the start of anastylosis at Angkor is the restoration’s reach, not the work’s, and earns little.
Frank Ocean · Music
8.1 · Tier IV
The field is R&B and hip-hop of its decade. The intrinsic force: the record moved R&B’s voice from seduction to confession and observation, joined the singer-songwriter’s intimacy and the character sketch to contemporary R&B, and showed that a male R&B singer could sing of love for a man to a mass public on a major label. That reorganised what the genre’s first person could say more than how the music was made. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the Grammy for Best Urban Contemporary Album, and a common credit, shared with The Weeknd’s and Miguel’s records of the same years, for shaping the inward, genre-blurring R&B of the 2010s and opening the genre to queer artists. The movement was shared, and the reach that runs through Blonde (2016) is not this record’s.
Han Gan · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
Intrinsic force is high: the sheet shows what horse painting could be, a living animal weighed and feared, made with line and wash, and that standard became the measure in China. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Han Gan’s name became the name of horse painting, and the later masters of the subject, above all Li Gonglin in the Northern Song and Zhao Mengfu in the Yuan, worked consciously in the line said to descend from him. The discount is double. The reach ran largely through the name and the tradition of Han Gan rather than through this one sheet, held in private and imperial collections and seen by few; and the attribution is traditional. Strong in its field, below the gate.
Vladimir Shukhov · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
The field is the tall structure of the engineers in the twentieth century. Intrinsic force is high: weight replaced by geometry, a lattice of straight members made into a doubly curved shell, a high tower raised from within itself. Among the engineering towers of its century it is a peak. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the hyperboloid form returned in steel and concrete across the century, in masts, water towers and late towers, and the lightweight lattice and gridshell tradition and the high-tech architects of the late twentieth century claimed Shukhov as an ancestor. It is discounted: cooling towers reached the hyperboloid independently and are not counted; much of the reach runs through his work as a whole, and much came as rediscovery late in the century.
Harappan builders · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
Force and reach are scored together, in the field of the city. The intrinsic force is high: a city-wide system of covered drains joined to private houses, standardised brick, planned streets on raised ground and a waterproofed public tank together reorganise what a city could be in the third millennium BC, and for urban sanitation the reorganisation was not matched for a very long time. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: within the Harappan world its conventions are shared across a vast area, and Mohenjo-daro, its largest and best known city, is their fullest statement; after its rediscovery in the 1920s it redirected the history of urbanism and of South Asia. Held at 8.2: whether it set the conventions or received them cannot be known, the urban order was not carried on after about 1900 BC, and any line to later temple tanks is unproven.
Henri Matisse · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
Field: European and American painting of the early 1950s. Intrinsic force: a reorganisation of what a picture is made of, colour as cut and placed object rather than applied matter, and of how a figure can be held, as a law of growth in planes; with Memory of Oceania, the strongest single statement of the late cut-outs at mural scale. The discount: most of the reach belongs to the cut-out practice as a whole, to Jazz and the Blue Nudes as much as to this wall, and New York was already moving toward the flat and the all-over without it. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the late cut-outs were claimed by the hard-edge and colour-field painters, by Ellsworth Kelly above all, and their flat, edged colour stands behind much abstraction of the 1960s and behind graphic design since.
Mark Rothko · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
Field: abstract painting in New York in the early 1950s. The intrinsic force, which is the format’s, is a real reorganisation of what a painting could be, made alongside Newman and Still: a field of colour without gesture as the painting’s whole event, set against the gestural branch of the same movement. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Colour Field painting after it, in Louis, Noland and others, in a line that runs as much through Frankenthaler and Pollock; the large field and the painted environment; and a very wide public image of what abstract painting is. The discount is heavy and stated. This canvas did not make the move; it is one of hundreds made within it, from the fourth or fifth year, and its own reach is that of a strong example, not of the source.
Michel Virlogeux and Norman Foster · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
The field is bridge engineering and the public infrastructure of Europe in its decades; standing since 2004, the bridge is scored on force and reach together. The intrinsic force is real: it showed that a multi-span stayed deck could be carried continuously at extreme height on split piers, that such a deck could be launched in steel across a deep gorge, and that a national road could be given the care of an architectural commission without loss to the engineering. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: considerable but diffuse. Multi-span stayed crossings and very high viaducts have multiplied since, and Millau is the reference they are measured against; the partnership of engineer and architect on major infrastructure became a norm. But the multi-span stayed bridge was being built in the same years, and its lessons entered a practice that did not need this bridge to begin.
Charlie Chaplin · Film
8.0 · Tier IV
Released in 1940, so force and reach are scored together. The force is real: a popular comedy at the top of its art turned on a living dictator before the United States entered the war, the most famous man in the cinema staking his public on a political argument, and a comic grammar shown capable of carrying fury and grief. That changed what comedy could be asked to do more than how films are made. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the line of satire on tyrants runs through it to Lubitsch’s To Be or Not to Be (1942), to Mel Brooks and to later films that mock dictators, and the closing speech has had a reach in public life larger than almost any passage of film dialogue. The formal language of cinema was not redirected by it: in the decade of Citizen Kane, neorealism and noir, it is the silent comedian’s art carried into sound, and its influence is thematic and moral more than formal.
J. R. R. Tolkien · Literature
8.0 · Tier IV
The field is English fiction of the 1930s and, inside it, the children’s book and the romance of the marvellous. The force: the book made an invented world with a history, tongues and maps of its own the ground of a popular adventure, and it gave the quest a form used since without end: the company of mismatched travellers, the guide who leaves and returns, the dragon and its hoard, the small hero. Held at 8.2 because much of what followed came by way of The Lord of the Rings, which began as this book’s sequel, and because the book moved a genre more than the novel at large. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: a success from its first year, the root of modern children’s fantasy, and a matter that passed into the games and fantasies of the century, where the halfling of the role-playing game is the hobbit.
Damien Hirst · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
The field is British and European art about 1990. The intrinsic force: it made the death of real creatures, in real time, the material of a gallery work, and set it in the cleanest form the gallery had, the Minimalist case. Less a reorganisation of possibility than a new and much-copied fusion of two available ones, which holds the axis down. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the vitrine of real death became an idiom of the decade; through Hirst’s formaldehyde works, the shark of 1991 first among them, and the art of real material and shock that followed in the 1990s, it shaped what British art looked like for a decade and the market’s idea of what a contemporary work could be. Some of that reach belongs to the maker and to the patronage that carried his generation, not to this case, and is discounted.
Tibetan, under Songtsen Gampo · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
The field is Tibetan and Himalayan building from the seventh century on. The intrinsic force: the Jokhang founds the Tibetan Buddhist temple. It fixes the tsuglagkhang as the house of a principal image within a ring of chapels and a circuit, and it fixes the temple as the centre round which a Tibetan town grows: a real reorganisation of possibility in its field, though the form itself was borrowed. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Lhasa was built round it, the Barkhor became the model of the circuit of the Tibetan sacred city, the temple is the reference point of Tibetan pilgrimage, and the temples of monasteries across the plateau descend from the type it established. Its reach in form is shared with other early foundations and with the great monasteries the Gelug order spread.
Moshe Safdie · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
The field is postwar housing and the architecture of the 1960s, in North America and beyond. The intrinsic force is real: a reorganisation of the multi-dwelling building as a three-dimensional assembly of houses rather than floors of flats, with the garden carried into the air, and the most fully built demonstration of the megastructural and modular idea of its decade. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: as image and argument it was wide and lasting, fixing the stacked-box hill as a type, cited in every history of the period, returned to in the terraced and stacked housing of the 2000s and 2010s and in Safdie’s own later work; as a system it redirected almost nothing, for industrialised box housing did not follow. Delayed influence is credited and discounted.
Ingmar Bergman · Film
8.0 · Tier IV
Field: the cinema of the 1970s, with television as the medium of release. Intrinsic force: the work showed that a television serial could carry a major auteur’s central work, and it set a form for the extended, unsparing study of a couple’s talk, without plot in the genre sense, at a length the cinema did not allow. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: a very large audience in Scandinavia on broadcast; the theatrical cut’s international success, with the Golden Globe for best foreign-language film, and its exclusion from the Academy Awards because it had first been shown on television; a direct line to Woody Allen’s chamber dramas of marriage, to the dialogue-driven couple films of Richard Linklater and Noah Baumbach and to the remake of 2021; and a precedent for the auteur serial that runs through Bergman’s own Fanny and Alexander, Fassbinder and Kieślowski. The reach lies mostly within the art cinema and the prestige serial, not across the medium at large, and the axis is discounted for it.
Bob Marley and the Wailers · Music
8.0 · Tier IV
The field is popular music of 1977, and reggae’s place in it. The intrinsic force is moderate. The record did not reorganise what reggae could be built on; that had been done in Kingston, by the Wailers among others, and by dub. What it showed is that a Rastafarian roots record could hold a militant theology and a pop sequence in one album and reach the centre of the international market. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: five of its ten songs are on Legend (1984), the compilation through which much of its presence travels; One Love has become an anthem of a nation; the rhythm section is studied as a school. Much of that reach is the career and the genre, not this record’s turn, and practice did not change on its account.
Abbasid builders, under al-Mutawakkil · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
The field is Abbasid and early Islamic building of the ninth century, in Iraq, Egypt and the lands between. The intrinsic force is substantial: the mosque fixed the colossal Abbasid congregational mosque as a type, with its brick enclosure buttressed by towers and its outer precinct, and the Malwiya invented a minaret. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the mosque of Abu Dulaf at Samarra, about 859 to 861, repeated the type with a smaller spiral; the Mosque of Ibn Tulun in Cairo, 876 to 879, took the outer enclosure, the brick piers and the outside stair to Egypt; the Malwiya is an emblem of Iraq, quoted by modern builders. But the spiral did not become the minaret: square and later cylindrical towers carried the tradition.
Built for Ashikaga Yoshimasa · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
In the field of Japanese building. The Kannon-den is a variation on a received type, its force restraint. The Dōjinsai is a real reorganisation of possibility: its fixed desk, shelves and fully matted floor are the elements of shoin-zukuri, the manner of the residences of the warrior class in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and its four and a half mats are the measure of the tea room. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: through shoin-zukuri, then sukiya building and the tokonoma, the line runs into the ordinary Japanese house and its modern reading abroad. The discount: the room is the oldest survivor of a development whose lost rooms cannot be weighed, and how much of the reach is its own cannot be shown.
Sofia Coppola · Film
8.0 · Tier IV
The field is the cinema of the 2000s. Intrinsic force: a manner, the romance of mood, a slight story carried by light, choice of songs and performance, showing that an American film of drift and silence could reach a mass audience. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it is wide, an Academy Award for the screenplay and nominations in the principal categories; the decisive turn in Murray’s late career, from comic star to the face of melancholy in the films that followed; a line of mood-romances and lonely-city films, Spike Jonze’s Her (2013) the most often set beside it; and a lasting influence on the soundtrack as curated song rather than score. Held below the gate because it perfected and popularised a register more than it reorganised what cinema could do.
Alfred Hitchcock · Film
8.0 · Tier IV
Released in 1959, so force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force is a consolidation: the wrong-man thriller made into a modern, portable form, the glamorous chase across landmarks built as a chain of set pieces, with a spy plot whose object does not matter, light comedy, a sexual double agent and a hero in a suit. It is a summation more than an invention, and the summation weighs: much of what others took from it is a form the film perfected rather than one it found, though its reach on popular film is among the widest of its decade. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the James Bond films from 1962 onward, commonly traced to it; Charade (1963), with Grant again, and a long line of glamour thrillers; the crop duster, among the most imitated and quoted sequences in cinema; and Saul Bass’s kinetic titles, which helped make the title sequence a form of its own.
Steven Spielberg · Film
8.0 · Tier IV
Field: the cinema of the 1980s. The intrinsic force is real. The film made a child’s inner life the governing perspective of a mainstream spectacle, and fused science fiction with the suburban domestic drama, at a scale and with a seriousness about a child’s grief that the family picture had not attempted. It perfected and fixed a mode more than it reorganised what film could do. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the suburban film of children and the uncanny descends from it openly, in The Goonies and the Amblin productions of the decade, and later in Super 8 (2011) and the television series Stranger Things; the bicycle across the moon became a studio’s emblem. The reach redirected the genre and the business more than the art.
Ray Bradbury · Literature
8.0 · Tier IV
The field is the dystopian novel in English, and beyond it the public language of censorship. With Nineteen Eighty-Four and Brave New World the book is one of the three dystopias by which the English-speaking world names the form. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: its title has entered speech as the name of the burning of books; Michael Moore borrowed it for Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004); the internet’s own standards body named for it the status code 451, for content withheld for legal reasons (RFC 7725, 2016); and it was filmed by Truffaut in 1966 and again in 2018. That reach is wide and particular. What holds the axis is force: the book did not reorganise the possibilities of the novel, and its chief new instruments are the idea of censorship by consent and the book-people who keep texts in their memories.
Diane Arbus · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
Published, so intrinsic force and achieved reach are scored together, in the field of American photography of the 1960s and 1970s. Intrinsic force: the purest statement of a reorganisation of the portrait photograph, frontal, consenting, square, the ordinary made strange by attention; the reorganisation is the body’s, and this image is its emblem. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the frontal and confronting portraits of Rineke Dijkstra and of Mary Ellen Mark, whose pictures of twins are an explicit later instance, and the portrait of the strange ordinary across the later century descend in part from Arbus’s body; and the two identical girls facing the camera in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980) are asserted by critics as a debt to this image, a debt not documented in Kubrick’s words and credited with that discount. Fame lends nothing. Held below the gate because the redirection belongs to the body, and this image carries it as its sign.
Wassily Kandinsky · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
Published, so force and reach are scored together, in the field of abstract painting in Germany and Europe in the early 1920s. The intrinsic force is a real but partial reorganisation: geometric construction joined to expressive, musical and spiritual intent, so that geometry became a language of feeling, against the Constructivist claim that it served utility and against the older idea that feeling needed the free brush. That synthesis was Kandinsky’s own. The discount: abstraction itself belongs to his prewar canvases and to others, and geometric abstraction first to Malevich and Mondrian. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: through the Bauhaus, where he taught form and colour from these principles, and Point and Line to Plane (1926), into teaching, design and the geometric abstraction of the interwar years; through the Guggenheim’s founding collection, which made him the type of non-objective art for an American public; and, more diffusely, into painting after the war.
Wes Anderson · Film
8.0 · Tier IV
The field is the cinema of the 1990s, American independent and studio, so force and reach are scored together. Intrinsic force: the film found a manner, deadpan, frontal, curtain-framed and scored to old records, in which comedy and grief share one tone, and showed a new way to tilt the coming-of-age film toward melancholy and artifice, less a reorganisation of what film could do than the opening of a mode. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it is large and demonstrable. The film made its director’s name and began the manner that became one of the most imitated in American film of the next two decades, in independent film and beyond it in advertising and television, and it began Bill Murray’s turn to deadpan melancholy. The limit: part of that reach belongs to the later films.
Gu Kaizhi (attributed) · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
The field is Chinese figure painting of its own centuries. The intrinsic force: the scroll is the earliest surviving handscroll in which figures act on one another in spaces with some depth, in a line of even tension that later became a named type of brushwork, and it gives Gu Kaizhi’s recorded aim, conveying the spirit through the form, a body that can be pointed to. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the scroll lived in a few collections and was seen by few, so its effect on later painters ran through the reputation of Gu’s manner, through copies, the Beijing version among them, and through the line revived in the plain drawing of later masters. Its reach as the founding object of the history of Chinese painting is real and late, more emblem and evidence than redirection of practice.
Mark Rothko · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
Field: New York abstract painting about 1950, with Pollock, Still, Newman and de Kooning. Intrinsic force: the classic format is a real reorganisation of what a painting could be, from an image or a gesture to a field of colour the viewer stands in; with Newman and Still it founded what came to be called colour field painting, and this canvas is a full and early instance of it, in a warm key. The discount is double: much of the force belongs to the format and its first canvases of 1949, and a canvas in private hands for most of its life did little of the redirecting. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Louis, Noland, Olitski, the Minimal and Light and Space painters and design took from the body of work; this canvas’s own fame is of ownership and price, which is presence, not pressure on a tradition.
Renzo Piano · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
Open since 1987, in the field of the art museum of the late twentieth century, American and international. The intrinsic force is a real reorganisation: the museum as a light-modulating roof over a small, intimate building, its technology made precise and craftlike rather than displayed, its civic presence domestic. The force is partly shared, since Kahn had set daylight and a Texas museum together first. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: considerable and specific. Piano built on the building for three decades, in a line of daylit museums in Europe and America, and through him the engineered daylit roof became a standard answer for the art museum. What holds the axis: the reach runs largely through one architect’s own work and one type of roof, not through building at large.
Joseph Maria Olbrich · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
The field is Central European building at the turn of the century. The intrinsic force: the first public building of the Viennese break with historicism, the built manifesto of a movement, and a new type, the artists’ exhibition house as a flexible hall lit from above behind a symbolic front. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: real and bounded. In its region it opened the decade that followed, in Olbrich’s own work at the artists’ colony in Darmstadt from 1899, in Josef Hoffmann’s buildings and the Wiener Werkstätte, in the Secession style from Prague to Ljubljana and Budapest, and in the exhibition hall as a reconfigurable room. Beyond its region it is a landmark rather than a source; its ornament was refused within a decade by Loos and by Wagner’s Postal Savings Bank, and modern architecture runs more through them.
Kallmann McKinnell and Knowles · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
The field is American civic building of its century. The intrinsic force is a real reorganisation of what an American seat of government could be: the programme read in section, the public ground carried inside, authority shown rather than dressed. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: immediate and wide within its field and decade. The building became the type of the heroic civic and institutional building in the United States of the late 1960s and 1970s, and tiered, inverted concrete city halls, courthouses and campus buildings followed across the country. Its reach is also negative, and large: it became the image of what Brutalism and urban renewal had done wrong, and so shaped the reaction against both. It is discounted because its language came from Le Corbusier and because the redirection it led was cut off by the mid-1970s.
Wang Shu (Amateur Architecture Studio) · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
Standing since 2008, it is scored on force and reach together, in the field of Chinese architecture of its decades and, secondarily, the international discussion of regional modernism. The force is considerable: Ningbo showed that a Chinese public building could be modern without importing an icon and Chinese without quoting a roof, grounding modernity in local craft, material memory and the landscape tradition, and it made salvage a civic language rather than a gesture. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: real and specific. As the building most cited when Wang Shu won the Pritzker Prize, it became the emblem of a turn toward local material, craft and rural memory; reclaimed tile and brick walls and bamboo-formed concrete spread through Chinese practice in the following decade, in museums, campuses and village projects. Outside its field the reach is modest, and the international turn to reuse has other sources.
Joe Rosenthal · Visual art
7.9 · Tier III
Published, so intrinsic force and achieved reach are scored together, in the field of the press and war photograph. Intrinsic force is modest: the image did not reorganise what a photograph can do; it was a superb instance of what the press photograph already did. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it set the model of the iconic war photograph, to which later images are measured, and Thomas Franklin’s photograph of three firefighters raising a flag at Ground Zero in 2001 is a direct echo; beyond photography it generated the Marine Corps War Memorial (Felix de Weldon, 1954), the Seventh War Loan poster, a postage stamp of 1945, and later James Bradley’s book Flags of Our Fathers (2000) and Clint Eastwood’s film of 2006. Much of that reach is use rather than redirection of an art.
Jasper Johns · Visual art
7.9 · Tier III
The field is New York painting at the turn from the 1950s to the 1960s. The intrinsic force is a reorganisation of the gestural field into a field of signs: the brushstroke becomes an object to be named, and the word enters painting not as Cubist fragment or collage but as a label in conflict with what it labels. With Rauschenberg’s combines of the same years, it is one of the hinges from Abstract Expressionism to what followed. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: within Johns’s own work, the turn that leads to the colour names and the grey paintings of the 1960s; beyond it, the cool handling of the sign in Pop and the use of words as the material of a picture in Conceptual art; and the colour-name device, repeated in teaching and in later painting. The discount: most of Johns’s reach belongs to Flag and the targets of 1954 to 1955, and much of this canvas’s fame is its sale of 1988, which marks the market, not the field.
Roy Lichtenstein · Visual art
7.9 · Tier III
Field: American painting of the early 1960s, at the close of Abstract Expressionism. The intrinsic force is the comic painting’s reorganisation of what a painting may take as its source and its mark: the mass-printed image and its mechanical code admitted at full scale into high art. That force is the painter’s move of 1961, which this work states most fully, and it is shared with Warhol’s comics of the same year. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: very wide. The painting became the emblem of Pop in Britain from the Tate purchase of 1966, itself a public argument; the Ben-Day dot and the comic onomatopoeia became a universal idiom of design; and the debate about appropriation and the uncredited source runs to the present. Discounted because much of that reach belongs to the idiom and the painter, not to this canvas alone.
Roman, under Augustus · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
The field is the Roman temple and the classical building that revived it. The intrinsic force is modest: within Augustan building the temple reorganised nothing; it is an excellent instance of a type made in Rome. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the reach is large and delayed, and is credited with its discount. Because it survives whole, it became the type’s teacher once the type was revived. Palladio published it; it informed the French classical tradition; and through Jefferson and Charles-Louis Clérisseau it became the model of the capitol of Virginia at Richmond, designed in 1785, the first major public building of the new United States in the temple form, from which the temple-fronted courthouse, bank and capitol spread across the republic. It is the reach of a preserved exemplar rather than an inventor, and that both lifts the axis and bounds it.
Norman Foster (Foster and Partners) · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
Standing since 2003, it is scored on force and reach together, in the field of the tall office building and of London architecture of its decades. The intrinsic force: the tower made a curved diagrid buildable at height from flat panes and straight members, joined structure, skin and form in one system, and made environmental performance the stated argument of a tower’s shape; but the green tower was Foster’s at Frankfurt first, and the diagrid was not new. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: wide and specific. It opened the City to tall buildings and set the terms of the cluster that followed, each tower given a figure and a nickname; it made the diagrid a standard option for towers, Foster’s Hearst Tower of 2006 among the first; and it fixed the shaped, named tower as the emblem of a financial district.
Albrecht Dürer · Visual art
7.9 · Tier III
The field is German and Northern European art around 1500. Intrinsic force: with the Great Piece of Turf of 1503 the sheet is the clearest early statement in Northern art that a nature study made from observation can stand as a finished image, a real reorganisation of the place of observation in an artist’s work. Its force on painting proper was limited: it redirected a genre, not the art. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the Dürer Renaissance of about 1570 to 1620, in which Hans Hoffmann made copies and variants of the hare and of Dürer’s other animal studies for collectors and for the court of Rudolf II; and the exact natural history illustration of the centuries that followed, which owes it a model, as one ancestor among several. Its later fame as an image is presence, not reach.
Diébédo Francis Kéré · Architecture
7.8 · Tier III
The field is building in rural West Africa and the Sahel, and with it the international practice of building schools, clinics and public buildings in poor regions. The intrinsic force is substantial: one modest work showed that a contemporary architecture led by climate could be made from local earth by local labour with a few cheap industrial parts, and gave the idea a form clear enough to be taken up, the raised, separate, ventilating roof over stabilised earth walls. The reach is diffuse rather than one redirection of a whole tradition, and only twenty-five years old. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: real and wide in its field; the Aga Khan Award of the 2004 cycle, and the beginning of Kéré’s body of work across Burkina Faso, Mali, Kenya and beyond, which the Pritzker Prize crowned in 2022, the first given to an African architect.
Jeff Koons · Visual art
7.8 · Tier III
Published, so intrinsic force and achieved reach are scored together, in the field of New York art of the 1980s, its commodity art and Neo-Geo. Intrinsic force: a real reorganisation, not of what a work can be, which was Duchamp’s, but of what a sculpture can be made of and look like: the consumer object rendered by industrial and luxury fabrication with no trace of the hand, offered for pleasure and unease at once. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it is the emblem of its decade’s sculpture and the founding object of Koons’s own polished balloon animals, and it stands behind the fabricated, mirrored, studio-made pop object of the next thirty years, in Murakami, in Hirst’s luxury objects and in many lesser imitations. That reach is real but runs largely through Koons and the market.
Adrian Smith (Skidmore, Owings and Merrill) · Architecture
7.8 · Tier III
The field is the tall building. The intrinsic force is a real reorganisation of possibility within it: the buttressed core showed that concrete could go past 800 m, and the shaping of a tower against the wind by varying its section was put at the centre of tall-building design. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: wide within its field in sixteen years. The Jeddah Tower, by a later firm of Smith’s own, takes the same three-winged buttressed system higher, and the tapering, wind-shaped supertall is now the type across the Gulf and East Asia. Beyond engineering, the tower made the tallest building the instrument of a state’s or a city’s image in a new region, and Gulf and Asian capitals have followed. The influence is early, untested by time, and in a narrow field.
Nas · Music
7.8 · Tier III
The field is the hip hop of the 1990s and, within it, New York rap. Intrinsic force is moderate and real: the record set a standard of density and observation in the verse against which the decade’s rapping was measured, and showed that an album could be built from several producers’ best work without losing a single voice. It fixed more than it reorganised: Rakim and Kool G Rap had made the verse, and the jazz-loop sound was in place. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the record became the measure of the New York lyric album; Mobb Deep, the Wu-Tang solo albums and Jay-Z’s Reasonable Doubt worked in the space it marked, a long line of later rappers followed, and the many-producer debut became the standard method of the major-label rap album. The reach is strong within its kind and narrower than the field’s epochal works: the record set a standard inside a music it did not redirect, and that holds it below the bar.
The Beatles · Music
7.7 · Tier III
The field is the album of the 1960s, the band’s own later records among it. The intrinsic force is real: the record showed that a beat group could fill an album with its own songs, and made the self-contained, self-writing band the unit of popular music; its twelve-string sound and wider harmony enlarged what a group song could hold. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: within a few years the self-written album became the norm. What holds the figure is attribution: much of that reach belongs to the band and to the film, not to this album, and reach that belongs to the maker is not credited to the work.
Olafur Eliasson · Visual art
7.7 · Tier III
The field is European installation art of the 2000s. Intrinsic force: the work showed that an immersive perceptual environment could hold a mass public in a national museum and that the public itself could be the material, turning the large commission from monumental sculpture toward environment and participation. The discount: the means were inherited, so the reorganisation is of scale, audience and institution more than of what art can be. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the Turbine Hall commissions after it were measured against it; the immersive and participatory installation became a standard museum form across the next two decades; and the image of a crowd photographing itself in a work anticipates the shareable installation. Some of that reach belongs to a broad tendency of which this is the best-known instance, not the origin.
Arctic Monkeys · Music
7.5 · Tier III
The field is the British and American guitar album of the 2000s. The intrinsic force is modest: the record reorganised no possibility of the form; it played a revived idiom with exceptional tightness and gave it a voice of local, vernacular exactness. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the way the band reached its public, through demos passed hand to hand and shared online before any major label, became the decade’s model of how a band could arrive, and the record’s commercial scale made regional speech and close local observation a common manner of British guitar bands for years after. What it redirected was a manner and a market more than a practice, and its reach abroad was narrower. It stands three tenths below Turn On the Bright Lights and Elephant, the first wave of the revival whose field it entered, and below Is This It, the record whose idiom it took; and three tenths above Boxer, whose reach is the band’s rather than the album’s, where this record’s reach is its own.
Michael Graves · Architecture
7.2 · Tier III
The field is American architecture of the late twentieth century, and the building has stood in view since it opened, so force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force: the first major civic building of postmodern classicism, a reorganisation of what a public office building could say, though not of how it is planned, built or used; a force of rhetoric, not of structure. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: immediate and wide. It made Graves a national figure, the Humana Building in Louisville, his buildings for Disney and his designs for household goods following, and for a decade the giant order, the keystone and the coloured base appeared on office blocks, malls and civic buildings across the United States. The reach was short and partly negative: by the 1990s the style was abandoned, and later practice holds the building up as what to avoid.
John Milton · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
The field is English verse and drama of the later seventeenth century and, more widely, the English attempt at Greek tragedy. The intrinsic force is high: the play is the only English tragedy on the Greek pattern that stands with its models, and its choral verse widened what English metre could do. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: real but narrow. It did not redirect the English stage, which it was never meant for. Handel’s Samson (1743) set a libretto drawn from it, and Aldous Huxley took a title from it; the later English tragedies on the Greek model owe it a debt hard to separate from their debt to the Greeks. Most of Milton’s pressure on tradition passes through Paradise Lost, and the narrow reach holds the axis below the gate.
Ancient Egyptian, under Ramesses II · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
The field is New Kingdom temple building in Egypt and Nubia in the thirteenth century BC. The intrinsic force is high: the work made the rock-cut temple monumental, set the colossal seated king as the front of a temple, and fixed the image of Ramesside kingship at the frontier. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is that the field did not follow it into the rock. Its modern fame is the widest of any Egyptian temple, and fame lends nothing. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: reach is bounded and stands below force, for Medinet Habu, and after it the great Ptolemaic temples, returned to the built pylon temple; and the rescue helped to bring about the World Heritage Convention of 1972, but that is the reach of the work’s fate, in a field it did not enter.
Gabriel García Márquez · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
The field is the Spanish American novel of its decade and, beyond it, the novel of the world after the Boom. The force: the book showed that the reporting novel could carry tragedy, and that the inverted detective plot could be turned from the question of who did it to the question of how a town let it be done, a real enlargement of what the short novel could do. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the title passed into everyday Spanish and into other languages as an idiom for any disaster everyone saw coming; the book is set in schools across the Spanish-speaking world; Francesco Rosi filmed it in 1987. What holds the axis there is that it redirected little. The documentary turn of the Latin American novel had other sources, the author’s own great reorganisation of the field was the earlier novel, and no line of later books can be named that took this method as its own. Its reach is presence and idiom more than redirection.
Peter Paul Rubens · Visual art
8.5 · Tier IV
The field is European painting of the 1630s, the Baroque allegory and the image of war. The intrinsic force is high: this is the fullest statement of the allegory of war as catastrophe by the master of the allegorical mode, and it moves the subject from the triumph of a prince to the suffering of a continent. In the same decade Callot’s prints, The Miseries of War (1633), took the realist road; Rubens took the high one. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the late manner, of which this is a central example, passed to van Dyck and Jordaens and later to Watteau and Delacroix. But the line of war images that runs to Goya and Picasso was redirected by their works, not this one, and named descendants of the canvas are few.
Dionysus Flambouras · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
Scored, by the convention this page uses for an unpublished work, on intrinsic force alone; achieved reach is not scored, since the work has had no field to move. The precursors are entered rather than cited: a part titled for Burroughs, a chestnut tree standing where Orwell put one, a final part called Fathers and Sons, Hobbes set against Dostoevsky before the first page. The swerve from Orwell is the substantial one: this state has no Room 101 because it does not need one, and the man it unmakes registers the result as an improvement. But the state that makes its subject grateful is Huxley’s before it is this book’s, and a pharmacology of end-states sold at thirty-five and seventy-nine dollars a dose stands nearer to soma than to the telescreen. A strong misreading on one great precursor’s ground is partly a return to another’s. The force presses on a mode, not on the art.
Built for Bishop Bernard de Castanet · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
The field is French and Catalan Gothic of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. The intrinsic force is high: Albi is the most complete and monumental statement of the southern single vessel, and it shows that a cathedral of the first rank of scale could be built in brick without aisles, flyers or a wall of glass. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: within Languedoc and the Catalan sphere it confirmed a type that others carried on and widened, Girona’s single nave of the next century among them, but its successors are not clearly in its debt; it did not redirect Gothic building as a whole, which went on from the northern model; and its later reach, the admiration of architects for its mass and brick, is diffuse and is credited with no specific debt.
Willa Cather · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
The field is the American novel of the 1910s and 1920s. The intrinsic force is real: the book showed that a novel could be built from remembered images with the furniture removed, that the immigrant farm woman could carry the national story, and that a regional novel could be classical in its shape and its references. That is a reorganisation, quieter than the turns of the decade that followed. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it fixed the Great Plains in American literature and stands behind the western and prairie fiction of the century; its unfurnished method passed into the American lyric novel; it is among the most taught American novels and placed Cather in the curriculum. Charged because the decisive redirections of the American novel in its time were made by Dreiser, Anderson and then Hemingway, Fitzgerald and Faulkner, and its own influence is wide but diffuse.
Robert Penn Warren · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
The intrinsic force is real: the book made the American political novel capable of philosophy, and carried the Southern preoccupation with the past into the modern state, its machine politics, highways and hospitals. That reorganises a subgenre more than the novel itself. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the novel set the type of the American fiction of the Boss and his aide, which runs through Robert Rossen’s film of 1949, which won Best Picture, Carlisle Floyd’s opera Willie Stark of 1981, and later political fiction told by the insider aide, of which Joe Klein’s Primary Colors of 1996 is the best known; and it is the standing classroom text on American political power. Its reach outside the political novel is slight, and Warren’s larger influence on letters came through the New Criticism, not through this book.
Jakob Prandtauer · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Force and reach are scored together, in the abbey architecture of Austria and southern Germany in the eighteenth century. The intrinsic force: the culminating statement of the Austrian Baroque abbey, a monastery made a landscape monument, church, residence and library composed as one figure on a rock; it reorganises how such a house could meet its site more than what a monastery could be. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: regional and largely concurrent, for Göttweig, Klosterneuburg, Altenburg and Herzogenburg were rebuilt in the same decades, some by Prandtauer and Munggenast themselves, so that Melk is the summit of a movement more than its cause; the line was cut by the reforms of Joseph II in the 1780s; and the later reach is as an image, the emblem of the Austrian Baroque, which is presence rather than redirection.
Diego Velázquez · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
The field is European painting of the mid seventeenth century, Spanish above all, with force and reach scored together. The intrinsic force is high: the canvas reorganised the reclining nude into a picture about the look, and carried Venetian colour into a drier, more economical handling. The reach was delayed. It hung in private collections for two and a half centuries, out of view to most painters, and in Spain there was no school of the nude for it to redirect. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: one early answer, Goya’s Maja desnuda, whose debt is argued; the nineteenth century’s turn to Velázquez, to his work as a whole more than to this canvas; and since 1906 a wide reach as an image of the nude and the gaze. Delay is credited and discounted.
Edith Wharton · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
The field is the American novel of the early twentieth century, and beside it the novel in English. Intrinsic force: the book perfected the American novel of manners, showed that a society could be anatomised from within at an ethnographer’s distance, and showed that the historical novel could take a period within living memory as its matter. That is a refinement more than a reorganisation. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the Pulitzer Prize for the Novel in 1921, the first given to a woman; the type of the novel of old New York, set here; and a place as a named model for the American social novel after it, with Fitzgerald, who admired Wharton and sent her The Great Gatsby (8.9), among its readers. But the field was being moved elsewhere in those years, by Joyce, Stein and Faulkner, and the book did not redirect it.
Ottoman builders, under Mehmed II and successors · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Force and reach are scored together, in the field of the Islamic and Ottoman palace. The intrinsic force is high: the palace fixed the Ottoman imperial order in space for four centuries, the model of graded access and the household-state, and is among the fullest statements of the pavilion palace in any tradition. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it set the order of the Ottoman court, and it shaped Europe’s image of the East, the seraglio as a figure in letters, opera and painting, which is reach in imagination rather than in building. Against that, the dynasty itself left it in 1856, the Safavid and Mughal palaces did not follow it, and its type continued an earlier one.
Three Kingdoms Korea · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
The field is the Buddhist sculpture of East Asia in the sixth and seventh centuries. The intrinsic force is the larger half: the pensive figure made a principal image of contemplation, with the body as its whole means, a real reorganisation within its genre though not of sculpture at large. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the Korean pensive figures stand at the source of the pensive images of Asuka and Hakuhō Japan, the Kōryū-ji and Chūgū-ji figures among them, a relation widely argued, though a direct line from this figure is inference; within Korea the type faded after the seventh century. Its recent standing as an emblem of the national collection and of Korean art abroad is presence, credited at most a tenth. Below The Thinker’s 8.4, whose reach is documented.
Paul Thomas Anderson · Film
8.4 · Tier IV
Field: the cinema of the 2020s, so force and reach are scored together, and reach is the weaker by necessity. The intrinsic force is considerable. The film shows that a studio picture of large budget can be original, adult, political and comic at once, when such budgets went almost wholly to franchises; it restores VistaVision to serious use; and it fuses the action chase with political comedy at a scale the decade had not seen. It is more a synthesis of known modes than a reorganisation of what film can do. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: a year allows no evidence of what the film redirected, its prominence on release is recorded and not weighed, and no later film can yet be shown to descend from it.
Gustav Klimt · Visual art
8.3 · Tier IV
Published, so force and reach are scored together, and the field is Vienna and Central Europe in the decade after 1900. The intrinsic force: the canvas is the summit of the Secession’s programme, the full fusion of fine and decorative art in one painting, and as such it closes an argument rather than opening one. In painting its reach is modest: the young Schiele came out of Klimt and turned against the ornament within a few years, Kokoschka swerved away from it, and the modernism that redirected the field in these years went through Paris. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the Wiener Werkstätte’s world of ornament and design, where the reach is real and wide, and an image among the most reproduced of the century, which counts only lightly. Strong force within its tradition, limited reach beyond its decorative line.
John Updike · Literature
8.3 · Tier IV
The field is American fiction around 1960 in English: Bellow, Salinger, Cheever, Kerouac’s On the Road (1957), Roth’s first book, Heller to come. The force: the book showed that the life of an ordinary, inarticulate suburban man could carry lyric and theological weight in a sustained present tense, and it set the frankness of the body inside serious realist fiction. That widened the realist novel more than it reorganised it. Held in the low eights because the reach runs largely through the later Rabbit novels and through Updike’s manner, not through this book’s form. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it made Updike’s name and began a chronicle of one American life in four novels across thirty years, a sequence widely taken as a model of the American novel of the ordinary man; and the present-tense novel became common in later American fiction, though that cannot be traced to this book alone.
Michael Haneke · Film
8.3 · Tier IV
Released in 2005, so force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force is real: the film reorganised the thriller of surveillance into an inquiry into collective guilt, and showed that a European film with Daniel Auteuil and Juliette Binoche could carry an unresolved structure, a hidden ending and no score, and be widely seen. But it refines its maker’s programme more than it reorganises possibility. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the prize for direction at Cannes; a place in the discussion of 17 October 1961 beyond cinema; and a share in the decade’s turn of art cinema toward the static long take, the camera as witness and the unresolved ending, a share arguable in its detail and not this film’s alone. The reach is wide among critics and film-makers, and narrower than the gate requires.
The Smile · Music
8.3 · Tier IV
The field is the guitar-band and art-rock album of the early 2020s. Intrinsic force: two members of a major band remade their song in a trio with a jazz drummer, guitar-forward and rhythm-led, and showed that the drumming of the London jazz scene could carry art rock. That enlarges a manner and opens a door between two scenes. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the record was widely heard and praised, the band continued, and two further records followed in 2024. Held back on reach. The attention that comes from the parent band’s fame is presence on loan, not pressure on the field, and is not credited; no practice elsewhere is traced to this record, and delayed reach cannot yet be credited.
Euripides · Literature
8.2 · Tier IV
The field is Attic drama of the fifth century and the European stage that inherited it. The force: the first extant play to put comedy and death under one roof and resolve toward joy, and to make a domestic marriage the stuff of tragedy, opening a line that runs through Euripides’ own Ion and Helen to New Comedy. That widens what tragedy could hold, really and within bounds. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Plato’s Symposium makes Alcestis the type of love that dies for another; Milton’s sonnet sees his late wife as an Alcestis returned; Lully’s opera (1674), Handel’s Admeto (1727), Gluck’s Alceste (1767); Browning’s Balaustion’s Adventure (1871), Rilke’s poem, Eliot’s The Cocktail Party (1949), Ted Hughes’s version (1999). Wide reach, more as a story than as a form.
Jane Campion · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
Released in 1993; the field is the cinema of the 1990s. The intrinsic force is a demonstration that a period romance could be told from inside a woman’s desire, with the erotic carried by touch and music rather than dialogue, and with the woman’s will rather than her fate as its subject. That reorganised the costume romance more than it reorganised cinema. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the film became a reference point for later films of women’s desire in period dress, a line of descent that is asserted more than demonstrated and is discounted as such. Its prizes and its wide audience are presence, not proof. Four tenths below the gate: its formal grammar was not taken up widely, and the line it opened is a strand of the costume picture rather than of the art.
Eero Saarinen · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Seen since 1965, so force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force is high: a real reorganisation of what an American national monument could be, abstract, structural, at the scale of the landscape, without figure or text. It joins the engineering spectacle, the office of the Eiffel Tower (8.7), to the memorial’s purpose and to modernism’s refusal of ornament, and it made stainless steel a monumental skin. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: moderate. It became the emblem of a city and is the country’s tallest monument, and it stands in the line by which American memorial design turned to abstraction; but it is hard to name buildings it redirected, later arches cite it as an image rather than build on its method, and its structure was an end point more than a school.
Michel Gondry · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
Field: the cinema of the 2000s, so force and reach are scored together. Intrinsic force: the film showed that the mind-game structure of its moment could carry tenderness rather than puzzle, that a high-concept device could be an instrument of feeling, and that practical effects could render an inner world as the industry turned to digital; it joined Kaufman’s metaphysical comedy to Gondry’s handmade image. It reorganised the romance more than it reorganised film. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the screenplay’s Academy Award, a long line of romances and of memory-and-love fictions in film and television placed in its descent, and a place in the decade’s lists and the teaching of screenwriting. The limit: the reach is to premise and tone, imitated more than extended, and it redirected a genre rather than the art.
Rainer Werner Fassbinder · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
Released in 1974, so force and reach are scored together, in the cinema of the 1970s. The intrinsic force is substantial: the film showed that the despised machinery of studio melodrama could carry a precise political analysis without irony at its characters’ expense. It did not reorganise what film could do so much as fuse two existing possibilities. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it gave the New German Cinema one of its first international successes, with two prizes at Cannes in 1974; it became the standard instance of political melodrama; and it is taught wherever Fassbinder and Sirk are taught. The reach is real and lasting but narrow in kind, and much of it is shared with Fassbinder’s whole body and with Sirk’s revival.
Guillermo del Toro · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
Released in 2006, so force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force is real: the film showed that dark fantasy could carry a political tragedy at full weight and without irony, and that a creature film could be made with the seriousness of a historical drama, the strongest single argument of its decade that the genre and the art film are not separate fields. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: a wide international audience for a Spanish-language film, three Academy Awards, and the standing and later course of its maker. Beyond him the redirection is real but diffuse. The decades after saw more adult and historical dark fantasy, but no reorganisation of film practice traces to this film as it does to the works that clear the gate.
Henry Bacon · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force is moderate: the building reorganised little in the art of building; it perfected the Beaux-Arts memorial temple and turned it on its long side. Reach stands well above force, more in civic space than in form. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the memorial fixed the western end of the Mall and completed the plan of the American capital; it set the type of the national memorial as a classical temple holding a figure and texts; and its steps became the place where Americans assemble to petition. Architects after the 1920s did not follow its forms; it was answered more by rejection than by imitation.
Claudio de Arciniega and successors; facade by Manuel Tolsá · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
Force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force is moderate: the metropolitan seat of New Spain states the Spanish type at the greatest scale it reached in the Americas, but its plan is received and its finest invention is a fitting. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: with Puebla it fixed the cathedral type for New Spain, and the cathedrals of the viceroyalty answered it; the Altar of the Kings redirected the Mexican baroque, the estípite spreading from it through the eighteenth century to the Sagrario beside it, to Tepotzotlán and Taxco and across the country; and Tolsá’s completion made the cathedral a model of the Academy’s neoclassicism in Mexico. The field is New Spain and its successors; much of the reach is the retablo’s, and Puebla shares the rest.
Master James of St George, under Edward I · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
The field is the castle of the Latin West in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, and the building of the English crown in Wales. The intrinsic force is high: one of the great statements of the castle as an instrument of state, joined to a planted, walled town as one design, its shooting galleries and King’s Gate among the most developed of their kind. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: with its sister castles in Gwynedd it stands at what is widely held to be the summit of European castle building, and the group shaped how the castle is understood; its own polygonal and banded dress was not much followed; its later reach lies in its afterlife as a symbol and a model for the Romantic and Victorian image of the castle.
Norman Foster (Foster and Partners) · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
The field is European civic and parliamentary architecture, and the rebuilding of historic buildings, in the late twentieth century. The intrinsic force is real. The building showed that a monument charged with a terrible history could be used again by a democracy without either restoring it or effacing it, by setting the new legibly into the old and keeping the wounds; it made a public route over the legislature a built principle; and it placed environmental engineering at the head of a state’s chief building. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: considerable but diffuse. The legible layering of damaged historic fabric became a strong strand in European practice, though its later cases have their own sources; glazed roofs over historic buildings multiplied, Foster’s own among them; and the dome became a model image for transparent government. What holds it: the elements were in play before.
Anselm Kiefer · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
Published, so intrinsic force and achieved reach are scored together, in the field of German painting around 1980 and the international return to figurative painting of those years. Intrinsic force: a real reorganisation of what history painting could do after 1945, the regime’s own spaces painted at the scale of history painting and in the matter of ruin, so that the reckoning with the past became a subject painting could carry without figures or narrative. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the architecture pictures were central to Kiefer’s international reception in the 1980s and to the case that painting could bear history at all, and the burned perspective of a monumental interior became a recognised type. Discounted because the reach belongs to the group and the artist more than to this canvas, and because the field was already moving, with Baselitz, Richter and Polke at work on the same past.
James McNeill Whistler · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
Shown since 1872, so force and reach are scored together; the field is European and American painting of the 1870s, the London and Paris of aestheticism and early Impressionism. The intrinsic force is real and specific: the canvas made the portrait a vehicle for the doctrine that a painting is first an arrangement of tone and colour, and gave aestheticism in painting its most public statement. It reorganised the portrait’s priorities more than what painting could be. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: with the Carlyle portrait it fixed the tonal, near-monochrome portrait taken up by Sickert and the Camden painters and by American tonalism; and the French purchase of 1891 placed it among the first American paintings in the national collection. Popular fame is presence, not counted here. Held below the gate.
Rachel Whiteread · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
The field is British and European sculpture and public art of the early 1990s. Intrinsic force: a real reorganisation of the public monument, made by casting absence, temporary by design, made of an ordinary dwelling and not of a hero, standing for a vanished street. It made negative space a public and architectural language rather than a studio one, and it made the temporary commission in public a form that could carry national argument. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it grows on in the maker’s own later memorial work; the counter-monument and the memorial of absence of the decades since have it among their references; Artangel’s later model of ambitious temporary commissions took its standing from it. The reach is real but chiefly British and memorial, and a line of artists naming it as their starting point is not shown.
Roman, under Caracalla · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
The field is Roman imperial building and the traditions that inherited Rome. The intrinsic force is the imperial bath brought to its canonical form: the great groin-vaulted hall on columns, the symmetrical axial complex with its services below. It is not a reorganisation, since Trajan’s baths had made the type, but its fullest statement. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the Baths of Diocletian followed its plan, larger; its frigidarium type passed into the vaulted hall of late antiquity and, through Michelangelo’s conversion of Diocletian’s frigidarium, into the church; from Palladio and Blouet it became a source book of the axial plan and the vaulted public hall, and the waiting room of Pennsylvania Station (McKim, Mead and White, 1910) was modelled on it. Wide, continuous, and shared with the type.
Built for Tokugawa Iemitsu · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
The field is the sacred and mausoleum architecture of Edo Japan. The intrinsic force is high within it: Nikkō is the definitive statement of the dynastic shrine, and its scale and finish set the standard against which shogunal and daimyo mausolea were measured, Iemitsu’s own Taiyū-in beside it and the shogunal mausolea at Zōjō-ji and Kan’ei-ji in Edo. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: wide in number, for Tōshō-gū shrines were raised across Japan by daimyo and branch houses, many on the joined plan and in a version of Nikkō’s style; but the reach ran within one dynasty’s cult, and after 1868 it reversed, as the Japanese building that went into the twentieth century followed Ise and Katsura, partly against Nikkō.
Wassily Kandinsky · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
Published, so force and reach are scored together, in the field of European painting from 1910 to 1914, the years of the turn to abstraction. The intrinsic force is real: the canvas belongs to the body of work that reorganised what a painting could be, with colour and line as the carriers of content and the object made optional, and it is among the clearest pictures of the halfway stage, where veiling becomes method. The discount is on reach, which belongs to the corpus and is shared with a dozen neighbours; little of it can be traced to this canvas. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Kandinsky’s work of 1910 to 1914, with the treatise, a founding source of abstract painting, and the gestural and colour-led painting that followed, which counts him an ancestor.
Rudolf Steiner · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
The field is European building of its century. The intrinsic force is high: the building showed that reinforced concrete could be modelled at monumental scale as one continuous plastic mass, a possibility the modern movement mostly declined for a generation and which returned at Ronchamp, in Saarinen’s TWA terminal, in Utzon and later in Gehry. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: narrower than the force. It founded a whole school, anthroposophic architecture, carried on in Waldorf schools, clinics and halls across Europe and beyond, and fed the organic building of Erik Asmussen in Sweden and Imre Makovecz in Hungary: a lineage, not a footnote. But the mainstream of its field passed it by, and the later returns to plastic concrete owe it a debt more often asserted than shown.
Ana Mendieta · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
Field: body art and land art in the United States and Latin America in the 1970s. The intrinsic force is a real reorganisation: the series gave the earthwork a person and the body work a ground, and made impermanence and the outline of an absent body into a grammar recognisably its maker’s. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the reach was delayed, and is credited and discounted for that. In her lifetime it was small; after 1987 it widened through feminist, Latinx and diaspora art and writing, and the figure in the earth became a reference point. Its influence on later body and ecological art by women, and by artists of the Caribbean and Latin America, is widely claimed and real in kind, but few particular debts can be named with confidence. The force exceeds the documented reach.
Vijayanagara builders · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
The field is the temple building of south India in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The intrinsic force is high: the temple is the most complete statement of the late Vijayanagara idiom, with the composite pier of colonnettes and rearing yalis, the open performance hall on a high plinth, the marriage hall within the court and the stone chariot. The reach stands below the force. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the idiom, carried by the state’s patronage across its territories, passed to the Nayaka temples of the Tamil country, whose pillared halls and yali piers develop what this temple states. But that reach is the style’s, shared with other royal temples at Hampi, of which this is the finest instance rather than the sole source, and it did not move building beyond south India.
The Velvet Underground · Music
8.0 · Tier IV
The field is the rock album of 1970 and 1971, and the American song after the counterculture. Intrinsic force: the record showed that an avant-garde sensibility could write the plain three-chord radio song and make it say something about ordinary life without irony swallowing it, with means the form already had. Much of the band’s pressure on the tradition was the work of its first record, and what turned on this one turned on its songs more than on the album. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Sweet Jane and Rock & Roll became standards of the rock repertoire, played by bar bands and recorded by Mott the Hoople and Cowboy Junkies among others, and the record’s plain, literate guitar song is commonly placed behind the Modern Lovers, the New York punk of the mid seventies and later guitar pop.
Edward Weston · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
Published, so intrinsic force and achieved reach are scored together, in the field of American photography around 1930. Intrinsic force: the most complete statement of what the straight, large-format, sharply focused photograph of the single object could be, a picture that made the case for the medium’s own kind of beauty against painting’s. It is not the reorganisation itself, which belongs to Strand, Stieglitz and the European new objectivity before it, and to Weston’s work of the late 1920s as a whole. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Group f/64, founded in 1932 by Weston with Ansel Adams, Imogen Cunningham, Willard Van Dyke and others, took the sharp contact print as its creed, and the peppers stand as its emblem; it became the image by which photographic modernism is taught. Presence is great; redirection is real but shared.
Park Chan-wook · Film
7.9 · Tier III
The field is the cinema of the 2000s. The intrinsic force is real and narrower than the reach: the film did not reorganise what film can do, but it joined genre extremity, operatic structure and Greek tragedy in a commercial film with a finish few genre films had, and showed that a Korean genre picture could carry tragedy. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the Grand Prix at Cannes in 2004, under a jury chaired by Quentin Tarantino; with Memories of Murder (2003), the film that carried the new Korean cinema to audiences abroad and prepared the ground later reached by Parasite (2019); the corridor take imitated in action films and television; an American remake; a place in the international vocabulary of the revenge film. Some of that reach is a sensation’s, and it lies largely within genre and festival cinema.
Jordan Peele · Film
7.9 · Tier III
The field is the cinema of the 2010s, so force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force is real: the film made race the structure of a genre film rather than its theme, for a mass audience, and showed that horror could carry social disclosure at the centre of the box office. It was a synthesis of satire, horror and comedy more than a reorganisation of what film could do. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it is wide and fast. Peele named the form the “social thriller”; his own Us (2019) and Nope (2022) followed, with Monkeypaw’s productions, Candyman (2021) among them; a cycle of Black horror followed in film and television, Antebellum (2020), His House (2020), Them (2021), Master (2022); and the Sunken Place passed into political speech. Nine years cannot show whether the redirection lasts, and the figure is discounted for it.
Arnold Böcklin · Visual art
7.9 · Tier III
The field is German-language and European painting of the 1880s. The intrinsic force is moderate: the picture is the defining image of the Symbolist landscape of mood, but it reorganises no means of painting, and its manner was already a decade behind French practice. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: large, particular and named, and mostly beyond painting. De Chirico, who wrote of Böcklin with reverence, took from him directly; Dalí painted a picture after it in 1932; Max Ernst and later H. R. Giger made homages. Rachmaninoff’s Isle of the Dead, Op. 29, of 1909, was made after a reproduction; Reger’s Böcklin Suite of 1913 sets it; Strindberg’s Ghost Sonata of 1907 ends on it. Discounted: it redirected imagery and mood more than painting’s practice.
Rem Koolhaas and Joshua Prince-Ramus (OMA/LMN) · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
The field is public and library architecture of its century, and the American civic building. The intrinsic force is a real reorganisation of possibility: it showed, built and at civic scale, that a programme diagram could generate form, section and structure together, and it remade the library type around the commons rather than the stack. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the central libraries built since have overwhelmingly been civic living rooms open to the street, with the collection one programme among several; the programmatic stack and the shifted-volume section passed into wide practice, much of it through offices led by OMA’s former members, Prince-Ramus’s own REX among them. The discounts: the library’s turn to the commons was in the air and not this building’s alone, and the diagram’s reach is partly of an office and its school.
Peter Gabriel · Music
7.9 · Tier III
The field is the film score of its decade and the crossover record that came to be called world music. The intrinsic force is clear: the record showed that a major film could be scored from non-Western traditions played by their masters and fused electronically, without orchestra or pastiche, and that such a score could stand as an album. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the duduk and the wordless Near Eastern voice became common sounds of the historical and religious epic after it, a line of influence widely claimed and not proved; the label it opened carried its players to a wider public. Part of the force was Hassell’s and Eno’s, and its reach among composers exceeds its public reach.
SANAA (Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa) · Architecture
7.8 · Tier III
The field is the museum and the public building of the early twenty-first century, and Japanese architecture after the 1990s. Intrinsic force: a real reorganisation of the museum plan, the galleries as a field of independent rooms within one open perimeter, with no front and no fixed route, and a new proposal for what a provincial cultural building could be, a park under a roof rather than a landmark. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it became the defining work of SANAA; the dispersed boxes and the field plan recur in the museums and campus buildings of the following decades, in SANAA’s own and in those of a generation of Japanese architects from their offices; and the municipal museum with a free zone has been widely cited. What holds the axis: the shared lineage with Ito’s Sendai, and a reach that runs through a school and a sensibility more than through a whole field’s practice.
Alphonse Mucha · Visual art
7.6 · Tier III
The field is the Paris poster of the 1890s, and in that field the sheet was a turn: the first full statement of what became Mucha’s style, the elongated figure, the contour line, the halo arch, the lettering built into the design, the muted decorative colour. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it won Mucha Bernhardt’s patronage and the run of her posters that followed, among them La Dame aux Camélias, Lorenzaccio, Médée and Hamlet; it set the pattern of his decorative panels and of his commercial work for Champenois and others; it is a founding image of Art Nouveau graphic design across Europe. Much of the later reach runs through the style rather than this sheet, and the field already had its founders in Chéret and Lautrec.
Albrecht Altdorfer · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
The field is German painting of the 1520s and 1530s, and force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force is high: a reorganisation of what a history picture could hold, the deed set inside the globe and the heavens, landscape claiming the main part of a commissioned narrative. The reach is narrower. The Danube School ended with its painters; the Reformation and the Italianate turn carried German painting elsewhere; the panel stayed in the ducal collection, seen by few, and redirected little in its decade. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: late and largely outside the field, a kinship of temper with the later landscape of the sublime rather than a line of descendants, Bruegel’s world landscapes beside it rather than after it, and a large presence in twentieth century thought about history, Koselleck above all. Delayed reach is credited and discounted, to 8.0.
Cormac McCarthy · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
The field is the American novel of its decade and the literature of the American West. The intrinsic force is real: the book showed that the western could bear a metaphysical novel without abandoning its matter, horses, guns, land and the border, and that a philosophical tale could sit inside a picaresque without breaking it; with its trilogy it moved the border into the centre of literary fiction about the West. What holds the axis, level with the lowest of the twelve, is that the force is a deepening of its author’s own practice more than a reorganisation of the field, and that its effect on later writers is easier to assert than to document. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the trilogy as a whole has a wide reach, and the border novel of the last thirty years owes it something, but this book alone redirected less than its predecessor’s sales or Blood Meridian’s influence.
Anonymous · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
Force and reach are scored together, and only part of each can be measured. In its own field, the Vézère of its day, reach is unmeasurable: nothing in the later caves of the region can be shown to derive from it. Against the surviving corpus the force is the fullest monumental composed painting in its tradition; but Chauvet shows composed panels long before it, so it cannot be shown to have opened anything. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: since 1940 the cave fixed cave painting as the origin of art, occasioned Bataille’s book and Blanchot’s essay, made Palaeolithic art an object of structural analysis, and founded cave conservation and the replica cave: influence delayed by seventeen millennia, on a field not its own, credited and heavily discounted.
Chandela builders · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
The field is north and central Indian temple building in the eleventh century. The intrinsic force is high: the most complete realisation of the Central Indian temple with inner ambulatory and clustered spire, the point at which the type is resolved, which fixed for later eyes what the north Indian temple is. Reach stands below force. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the Paramara temples, the Solanki temples of Gujarat (Modhera, 1026) and the Odishan line at Bhubaneswar went their own ways; at Khajuraho later work, the Duladeo, is smaller; the Ghurid conquests after 1192 cut the great campaigns off. Its reach came late, through scholarship and images: the textbook specimen of the Nagara temple, and an emblem of India.
Joel Coen and Ethan Coen · Film
8.6 · Tier IV
Released in 2007, so force and reach are scored together. The force: a prestige thriller that showed the genre could refuse its climax and its score, and that the neo-Western of the border could carry fate as its subject. The reach is real and moderate. The border crime film and the prestige neo-Western that followed are open heirs: Villeneuve’s Sicario (2015), Mackenzie’s Hell or High Water (2016), Sheridan’s Wind River (2017), and in television Breaking Bad (2008–2013), whose New Mexico and whose unhurried killers owe the film a grammar. The Coens’ own True Grit (2010) followed from it. Held well below the gate because what it redirected was a sector of American prestige film and not the form; the withheld climax did not become a convention, and the pursuit thriller went on meeting its villain.
Built for Taira no Kiyomori · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Field: Japanese shrine and temple building from the late Heian period on. The intrinsic force is high: no other shrine of the period takes the residential manner onto the sea and sets its gate in the water, and that reorganises what a shrine could be, a place of passage over a sacred threshold. The reach is narrower. The complex did not found a type, as Ise and the nagare form did. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: its reach is as an image, one of the Three Views of Japan in the seventeenth century and its gate an emblem of the country, which is presence, not redirection, and fame lends nothing. Force above reach, scored together, short of the gate.
Maya, under K'inich Janaab' Pakal and his son · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
The field is Classic Maya building. The intrinsic force is high: a reorganisation of what a temple-pyramid could be, with tomb, stair, conduit and text conceived as one. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: limited in its own field, wide in a later one. Palenque’s manner travelled only regionally; the great funerary pyramids that followed, Tikal Temple I among them, belong to their own lineage and are not shown to answer this one; and the deep crypt with an interior stair is not shown to have been taken up as a type. Its wide reach is modern. The discovery of 1952 redirected Mesoamerican archaeology and, through the panels and lid, the decipherment of Maya history. That is reach on scholarship, not on building, credited with the discount the rubric allows.
Artemisia Gentileschi · Visual art
8.5 · Tier IV
The field is Italian painting of the 1610s and 1620s, the following of Caravaggio in Rome, Florence and Naples. The intrinsic force is high within that field and short of a reorganisation of what painting could be: the canvas carries Caravaggio’s tenebrism and violent instant further into physical truth and gives the woman agency, inside a manner already established. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: in its own century the reach was limited; the composition was repeated and answered in the Caravaggesque circle and in the painter’s own work, and her later career in Naples carried the manner, but no line of painting can be shown to start from this canvas. The delayed reach is large, from the 1970s, as the emblem of the woman artist recovered, and it is credited and discounted as reach in discourse more than in practice.
Senenmut (attributed), under Hatshepsut · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Standing for some thirty-five centuries, so force and reach are scored together, in its field, the royal building of the New Kingdom. The intrinsic force is high: a real reorganisation of the temple as an ordering of landscape, site, cult and procession stepped into one plan, and a programme that made the king’s reign the matter of temple walls on a new scale. What holds the axis lowest is reach. Its own dynasty answered the type once and then left it, and its modern reach is diffuse and delayed, and is discounted. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Thutmose III answered it with his temple beside it; the mortuary temples of Amenhotep III, Ramesses II and Ramesses III went back to the court and pylon on the plain; the divine birth cycle passed to Amenhotep III’s temple at Luxor.
Thomas Pynchon · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
The field is the American novel of the late twentieth century, and within it the historical novel. The force: the book showed that the encyclopedic novel could be turned on the founding of the nation in the founding’s own language, joining the systems novel’s paranoia to the historical novel’s documents and the picaresque’s warmth, and it moved the systems novel toward feeling, through a friendship and a grief at its centre. That force is real, but Barth had anticipated part of it, and so had Pynchon himself. Force outstrips reach. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: a warm critical reception, with critics placing the book at or near the summit of Pynchon’s work; a steady academic literature; a readership narrower than that of Gravity’s Rainbow and no wider public; and a redirection of later fiction that is hard to document, the novel admired more than followed.
Dionysus Flambouras · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
Intrinsic force only, by the convention the desk applies to an unpublished work: achieved reach is not scored, because there has been none to score. The contest is with the code hero, and the book meets him on his own ground, with a trade, a physical discipline and a man who does not explain himself. Its answer is exact: the code is shown to be a commercial position, a discipline a corporation rents for eighteen years and then reads back as misconduct, and at the last a code that can be applied only to demolition. That wins an argument inside the tradition. It does not reorganise the field around it, and the stories are shaped like the books they answer.
Nikos Kazantzakis · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
The field is Greek prose fiction of the twentieth century and, as the book entered it in translation, the European novel of its decade, with the novel of Christ as the narrower field. The intrinsic force is real and bounded: the book made the inner life of a Christ tempted not by evil but by happiness the substance of a novel, written from a sensibility formed by Nietzsche, Bergson and Orthodox monasticism. It did not reorganise how novels are made, and Greek fiction after it largely went other ways; that holds the axis below the summit bar. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: with Zorba the book carried the modern Greek novel to readers abroad, and its premise and its figure of a Christ tempted by happiness were taken whole by Martin Scorsese’s film of 1988. Much of its fame runs through that film and through the scandals around the book and the film, which are presence rather than influence; the line often drawn to later novels of Jesus, Saramago’s and Mailer’s, is asserted more than documented and is not counted.
Christina Rossetti · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
The intrinsic force is high: the title poem reorganises what a narrative poem could be in English in the 1860s, a fairy-tale metre made to carry erotic and sacred weight together, and the lyrics set the standard of the Victorian short lyric of renunciation. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the volume was the first literary success of the Pre-Raphaelite circle, ahead of Swinburne’s Poems and Ballads (1866) and Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s own Poems (1870); Swinburne admired her; the title poem has been reillustrated through the twentieth century and is taught in every survey of Victorian poetry. But the field was English poetry of its decades, and Tennyson and Browning, not Rossetti, redirected it. The force stands near 8.5; the reach nearer 7.5.
Eastern Ganga builders, under Narasimhadeva I · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
The field is the temple building of Kalinga and of eastern and northern India in the thirteenth century. The intrinsic force is high: Konark is the summation of the Kalinga type, its largest and most fused statement, and it reorganised what a temple could be by making the whole an image. The reach in building is narrow, and it holds the axis at the lowest figure on the page with The Inevitable: the temple came at the end of the great campaign of Kalinga building, nothing after it in the region approached it, the Eastern Ganga state declined, and its collapse made it a warning as much as a model. Fame is presence, not influence, and earns only in proportion. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the wheel became the most reproduced figure of Odisha and a national image, the sculpture fed later Odia craft, and abroad the Kalinga style is known through this temple.
Hilma af Klint · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
The intrinsic force is very high: a reorganisation of what painting could be, monumental non-objective painting before the founders of abstraction, with an organic vocabulary and a programme no one else had. The field it entered, Swedish and European painting of the 1900s and 1910s, was not moved; the story of it was. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: nil in that field, for the panels were unseen for eighty years, a delay credited and discounted at its length; and since 1986, above all since 2013, a reorganisation of the history of abstraction rather than its practice, forcing revision of its account of origins, of the place of women in it and of its spiritual sources, with contemporary painters citing it widely. That reach is historiographic more than generative.
Mexica · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
The field is Mexica sculpture at the height of the empire, about 1500. The intrinsic force is high: the fullest statement of the imperial solar monument, gathering calendar, cosmogony and the theology of sacrifice in one disc, and turning the solar disc from a crowning motif into a whole cosmos. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: within its field almost none, since the Conquest came within two decades, the tradition was cut off, the stone was buried and no Mesoamerican successor answered it; then a delayed reach, credited and discounted: León y Gama’s study of 1792, among the founding works of Mexican archaeology; Humboldt’s attention; its central place in the national museum and in the iconography of the Mexican nation; its uptake as an emblem in Mexican and Chicano art and design in the twentieth century. Wide and named, but emblematic more than formative.
Leos Carax · Film
8.4 · Tier IV
Released in 2012, so force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force is real: a film that makes the passing of the visible camera its subject at the moment digital capture replaced film, and shows that one performer can carry the whole range of cinema’s genres as one body’s labour. It is a summation of the medium’s history more than a reorganisation of what film could do. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: wide critical standing from its first showing, a renewal of Carax’s career that led to Annette (2021), and a place in teaching and in writing on digital cinema. What it redirected is hard to name: no line of films descends from it, its manner too personal to be taken up.
Maya · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
The field is Classic Maya court painting of the late eighth century, and force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force is high: the fullest surviving statement of narrative wall painting in the ancient Americas, a reorganisation of what a court image could hold, crowd, battle, rite, women and music, into one continuous cycle. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: in its own field the reach is near nil, since the Usumacinta courts failed within a generation or two, the site was abandoned, and no later Maya art can be shown to descend from these walls. Its reach is modern and particular: it overturned the peaceful Maya of Sylvanus Morley and J. Eric S. Thompson, it stands at the centre of Mary Miller’s work and of every account of ancient American painting since, and through the replicas in the Museo Nacional de Antropología it entered the image Mexico holds of itself. That reach is delayed, and it bears on the understanding of the field more than on art made after it; this is the lowest of the twelve.
Cistercian builders · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force is considerable: the abbey is among the most complete statements of the Cistercian aesthetic of poverty, and letting the ground shape the cloister is a real thought; but it reorganised no possibility the order had not already built in many houses. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: in its own century and region the reach was small, one of three sisters and not their model, fixing no type; from the 1950s it became a reference for modern architecture’s idea of truth to material, light and mass, through Le Corbusier at La Tourette and through photography. Delayed reach is credited and discounted.
Jonathan Glazer · Film
8.4 · Tier IV
Released in 2023, so force and reach are scored together, and reach is the weaker by necessity. The intrinsic force is high: the film makes the perpetrators’ domestic order the subject, the soundtrack the witness and surveillance the camera, and turns a problem argued for forty years, whether atrocity can be represented in fiction, into a form. But Son of Saul made the decisive move eight years before. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: in three years it shows as wide attention to sound design as authorship, and as a discussion of complicity in looking among critics and in schools. Whether later films take up the method is not yet known.
William Blake · Visual art
8.3 · Tier IV
The field is British painting and printmaking of the 1790s. The intrinsic force is a real reorganisation in two respects: the scientific hero turned into a figure of mythic critique, and the painted print made a unique object; the sheet gives the Romantic case against mechanist reason its single image. In its own decade and the next it moved almost no one, for the large prints went to a handful of buyers and were not seen. Delayed influence is credited and discounted. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the recovery through Gilchrist’s life of Blake (1863), the Pre-Raphaelites and after; the Tate; the image as the emblem of reason’s critique on book covers and in argument; Eduardo Paolozzi’s colossal bronze after it in the piazza of the British Library. Its reach in painting proper is modest.
T. S. Eliot · Literature
8.3 · Tier IV
The field is English drama and poetry of the twentieth century. The intrinsic force is the reopening of a possibility thought closed: a modern poet could write serious verse drama that held an audience, and the chorus could speak again in English. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the play began the revival of English verse drama, in Eliot’s own later plays, in Christopher Fry and in Ronald Duncan, and a long tradition of drama in churches and of festival commissions; and one of its lines passed into Burnt Norton (1936). But the revival did not last past the 1950s, the theatre that followed went another way, and the play is admired more than it is followed. Its pressure is real, and local.
Martin Scorsese · Film
8.3 · Tier IV
Released in 1988, so force and reach are scored together. The force is real within the cinema of its decade: the film reorganised what a Jesus film could be, making the Passion an interior drama of doubt and choice and treating the sacred with the realism of its director’s urban films, and it made the religious subject a ground for American auteur cinema. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the director’s own line, in Kundun (1997) and Silence (2016); few films followed its theology, and the most prominent later Passion film, Gibson’s of 2004, is a reaction against its kind of Christ more than a descendant. Its widest consequence was in the argument about blasphemy, censorship and the studios, where it became the case later controversies are measured against. That is reach in the culture more than in the art’s grammar, and the axis weighs the art.
Itō Jakuchū · Visual art
8.3 · Tier IV
The field is Japanese painting of the middle and later eighteenth century. The intrinsic force is high and singular: the largest and most finished statement of a manner that joined Chinese realism, Japanese decoration and an obsessive eye, and that widened what bird and flower painting could be, an act of devotion in thirty parts and a survey of living kinds. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: in its own century it was narrow, since the set hung in a temple and was shown once a year, and the decisive redirection of Kyoto painting came from Maruyama Ōkyo’s naturalism, not from Jakuchū. The reach came late: from the 1970s and through the exhibitions from 2000 on, the set reorganised the canon of Edo painting and is now among the most visited works of Japanese art. Delayed reach is credited and discounted.
Jonathan Glazer · Film
8.3 · Tier IV
The field is the cinema of the 2010s, and the intrinsic force is strong: the film joined vérité capture of an unaware public to abstract genre cinema and a star, and showed that a science fiction film could be built almost without exposition, by image and sound alone. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it is real, and mostly within art cinema. Levi’s score, her first for film, had a wide influence on film music; the void and the sinking floor are widely compared with later images, though no line of descent is shown; and Glazer’s next film, The Zone of Interest, carried the concealed rig into a new subject. The box office was small. Force exceeds reach, and both stop short of the gate.
Robert Smythson (attributed), for Bess of Hardwick · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
The field is the English country house of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The intrinsic force is high in that field: Hardwick carries the prodigy house to its fullest statement, compact, symmetrical, glazed, ordered by height, the hall turned onto the axis, the clearest reorganisation of the English great house between the medieval hall and the classical villa. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: real and bounded. The prodigy house ended as a type within a generation, cut off by Inigo Jones and the Italian model, and Hardwick was little visited and little copied in its own century. The axial hall entered English planning, Hardwick one source among several. Its reach returned late, through the Elizabethan revival of the nineteenth century and through modern architects and historians who read its glass and its compactness as forerunners; delayed influence is credited and discounted.
Medang (Mataram) builders · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
Force and reach are scored together; the field is the temple building of Java and island Southeast Asia in the ninth and tenth centuries. The intrinsic force is high: the largest Hindu temple of Java and the summit of the Central Javanese style, proof that a Shaiva court could answer Borobudur at scale on the same plain within a generation. The reach is limited. The court moved to East Java within about eighty years, and the East Javanese temples follow a slenderer and terraced manner; the work closes a line more than it opens one. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the later reach is as image, the emblem of Hindu Java and the stage of the Ramayana ballet since 1961, presence more than influence.
Wim Wenders · Film
8.3 · Tier IV
Released in 1984, so force and reach are scored together, in the cinema of the 1980s. The intrinsic force is a synthesis: the European art film’s patience joined to the American landscape and the western’s archetype as neither tradition had joined them, and a road film shown able to end in a room, with a monologue as its climax. It perfected a manner more than it reorganised what film could do. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the Palme d’Or in 1984; a look of desert, neon and saturated dusk and a sound of slide guitar that became a common grammar of the American landscape in later film, advertising and music video, noted as breadth rather than weighed; and its standing as the touchstone of the road film. What it redirected in narrative form is harder to name than what it gave to image and sound.
Wang Xianchen; Wen Zhengming (attributed design) · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
Force and reach are scored together, in the field of the Chinese garden of the Ming and Qing and its modern afterlife. The intrinsic force: the largest and most water-centred of the Suzhou gardens, with the classic instance of borrowed scenery and of the sequence of framed views; a summit of its type more than a reorganisation of it. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: in its own century Wen Zhengming’s album made it the garden of record, an exemplar in painting and poetry as well as in ground; in the twentieth century it became, with the Lingering Garden and the Master of the Nets, the principal text by which the Chinese garden was studied and taught at home and abroad. The tradition is collective, and reach is shared among the Suzhou gardens.
Herman Melville · Literature
8.3 · Tier IV
The field is the American and English novel of the mid-nineteenth century. The intrinsic force is high: the book reorganises what a novel can do with character, plot and the reader’s trust, and treats the narrator’s authority as one more confidence to be tested, sixty years before such fiction was written again. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: in its own century, none. Reviewers were baffled, sales were small, and the book was all but unread until the revival of the 1920s; it entered the reading of American literature mainly through the academy after the Second World War, through editions such as Elizabeth Foster’s (1954). Since then critics of the American trickster novel and of postmodern fiction have claimed it as an ancestor, and Ralph Ellison’s shape-changer Rinehart in Invisible Man is often read beside it; no direct line to a later novelist is credited. Delayed influence is credited and discounted, and here the discount is heavy.
Aeschylus · Literature
8.2 · Tier IV
The field is Attic tragedy in its first generation, with Homeric and cyclic epic and choral lyric behind it. The intrinsic force: the play fixed the brothers’ mutual killing as tragic matter, made the descriptive set piece a dramatic engine, and gave Athens the soldiers’ play that the Aeschylus of Aristophanes boasts of, a drama “Areōs meston”
“full of Ares” (Frogs 1021). Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Euripides answered it in the Phoenician Women, where Eteocles will not name the champions at the gates; the Theban tradition runs through it to Statius’ Thebaid and Racine’s La Thébaïde; the shield ekphrasis entered the repertory of epic and tragedy. Held at 8.0: the reach is real, but it was the Oresteia and Prometheus that redirected the field.
Andrei Tarkovsky · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
Released in 1962; the field is the cinema of the 1960s. Intrinsic force: the demonstration that a war film could be built on a child’s inner life, with dream and memory weighed equally with action, and the founding statement of a grammar, long-held images, water and earth as subject, association over plot, that Tarkovsky would carry further. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the Golden Lion and Sartre’s polemic made it an international case in its year; the Soviet poetic cinema of the 1960s followed; Elem Klimov’s Come and See (1985) takes up its child’s war. Discounted: the reach of Andrei Rublev, Mirror and Stalker, which is theirs. In a decade of L’Avventura, 8½ and Persona it opened one current rather than reorganising the field.
Gustave Flaubert · Literature
8.2 · Tier IV
The field is the French novel of the nineteenth century and, beyond it, the European historical novel. The intrinsic force is real: the book made the past a site of estrangement rather than of identification, and showed that a novel could be built of description and image with plot held to a frame, a turn in what the historical novel could be. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: a great success on publication and a fashion in Paris; the iconography and mood of the Symbolists and Decadents, with Moreau’s world its neighbour and Huysmans’s line running through it; operas by Reyer (1890) and, unfinished, by Mussorgsky; Mucha’s image; Pastrone’s Cabiria (1914) and the cinema of antiquity after it; and, as a negative example, Lukács’s whole argument. Held well below the gate because the reach runs mainly into décor, exoticism and spectacle, which are discounted, and because the redirection of the novel as an art came from Madame Bovary, not from this book.
Franz Marc · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
The field is German painting from 1910 to 1914. The intrinsic force is real: the canvas is one of the decisive statements of the Expressionist apocalypse, and the most complete synthesis in German painting of Cubist and Futurist fracture with Expressionist feeling and colour. It showed that the new structural means could carry eschatology. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force, and here it is discounted: the painter died in 1916, the movement was broken by the war, and the picture was out of view, damaged, until 1919. Its later reach is as an emblem, of the Blaue Reiter, of the art before 1914, of the art the Nazis called degenerate, more than as a model; no particular later work can be named that it redirected. Force near 8.5, reach nearer 7.5.
Konstantin Melnikov · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Standing since 1929, so force and reach are scored together, and delayed influence is credited and discounted. The intrinsic force is high: a real reorganisation of possibility for the small house, a load-bearing wall that is also its window system, a plan made of interlocking circles, a house made one sculptural object from the cheapest materials of its day. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: limited and late. The house had no school; Melnikov built little after 1933 and nothing of note after 1937; Soviet architecture turned to Stalinist classicism, and the house was kept out of view for decades. Rediscovery from the 1960s brought it into the canon of the century’s houses and the vocabulary of the cylinder and the patterned, perforated wall, but it redirected no tradition, Russian or European.
John Ford · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
Released in 1940, so force and reach are scored together, and the field is the cinema of its decade. The force: within American studio cinema the film made social realism respectable at the top of the industry, joined a novel of protest to the craft of the best-equipped studio, and brought a documentary photography into fiction. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it fixed the Dust Bowl migrant in the national image, taught later American realism to light poverty without prettiness, made Tom Joad and his farewell a figure that songs and later films returned to, and with Toland’s work for Welles the next year stood as a model of deep, dark photography. Welles’s first film, Italian neorealism and film noir reorganized more; this reach is real and mostly national, and changed what Hollywood would film more than how film is made.
Built for Rao Jodha and successors · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
The field is the fort-palace of Rajasthan and north India, fifteenth to nineteenth centuries. The intrinsic force: the fullest statement of the Rajput fort on the rock, the defensive and the courtly made one figure on one cliff, and carried through four centuries of building without losing the figure. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: considerable and specific. It fixed the seat of a state and the plan of a city round its foot, and as an image it has become, with Amber, the defining figure of the Rajput fort for India and the world. But the forms of the type spread among the Rajput courts in parallel and under Mughal influence, and no line of building is known to have taken Mehrangarh in particular as its model. Reach as emblem exceeds reach as model.
Mudéjar builders, under Peter of Castile, and later hands · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force: Pedro’s palace fixes royal Mudéjar as the court style of Castile, the Islamic palace absorbed whole into Christian kingship, and it is the summit of that line and, in its own region and decade, the Christian answer to the Alhambra (8.7). Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the Sevillian palace house took its courts, stucco, tile and carpentry for two centuries, in the Casa de Pilatos and the Palacio de las Dueñas; Mudéjar carpentry and tile went with Seville’s trade to the Americas, from the tradition more than from this building; nineteenth-century neo-Mudéjar, in Seville above all, took it as a model. Held short because the Moorish revival abroad took the Alhambra as its source, and the line was already running.
Godspeed You! Black Emperor · Music
8.2 · Tier IV
The field is its own tradition, the rock of the 1990s that had turned against the song. The intrinsic force is a reorganisation of what that tradition could carry: an orchestral collective for the quartet, the found voice for the singer, the movement for the track, and a political charge carried without words. What holds the axis is the shape of the reach: the field is narrow, the credit is shared with Slint and Mogwai, and much of the band’s reach runs through the next album. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the crescendo became the genre’s grammar, the slow-build instrumental bands of the next decade followed it, Constellation rose as a label of the Montreal scene, and 28 Days Later fixed the apocalyptic instrumental in film.
Mimar Sinan · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Intrinsic force: the building shows what Iznik tile could do as architecture, a whole skin rather than a framed panel, and it establishes the raised market mosque as a type. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: in tile it is considerable, for the building stands at the head of the great age of Iznik revetment, and the tiled interiors of the following decades, Sokollu Mehmed Pasha, the chambers of the Topkapı harem and at length the Sultan Ahmed Mosque, whose interior is named for its tiles, follow the possibility it opened even where they temper it. In architecture it is more modest: Sinan did not repeat the saturation, and the octagonal baldachin was carried further elsewhere.
Pierre Peysson and Jean de Louvres, under Benedict XII and Clement VI · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Force and reach are scored together, force the higher. The intrinsic force is high for its field, the Gothic palace of fourteenth-century Europe: the largest and most complete statement of the fortified palace as a seat of government, and the standard for papal and princely residence in its century. Its court drew Simone Martini and Matteo Giovannetti and made Avignon a centre from which the International Gothic in painting spread, but that reach belongs to painting and is credited lightly. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the machicolated arcade and the joined fortress-palace recur in the Midi and stand behind later papal and episcopal palaces, and the building closed a tradition more than it opened one.
Miloš Forman · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
A classical-music biography turned into a drama of perception and resentment, with the music given the floor: within the cinema of the 1980s, a prestige film that was not only prestige. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the film renewed the screen life of the composer biography and of the artist’s rival as a subject, and the name of Salieri became a common name for the gifted envier, owed more to the film than to Pushkin. What holds the figure is form. The film reorganised little of how films are made; its influence ran through subject and prestige, the costume picture of the awards season, and the play had already done much of the cultural work before it.
Renzo Piano · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
The field is the cultural building and the architecture of place in the late twentieth century, and building in the Pacific. Intrinsic force: a real reorganisation of possibility, showing that the most technically advanced practice could serve a non-European, oral culture’s idea of dwelling and the passive control of climate at once, and making the collaboration of architect and anthropologist a method. It is held down by its sources: critical regionalism had been named a decade before, and Glenn Murcutt, Hassan Fathy and others had already joined climate and place. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the centre is among the most cited examples of building for an indigenous culture and of passive climatic design in a cultural building; it marked a turn in Piano’s own practice toward timber and place; and indigenous cultural centres in Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific are often measured against it. But no school or type descends from it, and its reach lies mainly in teaching and argument.
Knights Hospitaller builders · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
The field is military building in the Frankish and Muslim Levant of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and the European castle that took from it. The intrinsic force is real: defence in depth in its most complete form, the talus and the commanding inner ward, a fortress made so that a few men equal an army. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the field it entered ended soon after it, the Franks gone from the mainland by 1291, and their opponents, who took it, kept building in their own idiom; its reach into Europe through the concentric castles of the later thirteenth century is argued, not established; gunpowder closed the line within two centuries; and, later and outside the field, it became the exemplar by which the crusader castle is understood.
Teutonic Order builders · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
The field is the castle building of the Teutonic Order and the brick Gothic of the southern Baltic in the fourteenth century. The intrinsic force is real: the castle brought the convent castle to its largest and most complex form, joined to it the most refined secular brick building of the region, and gave the monastic state its capital and its image. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the Order’s later castles and the residences of its officials across Prussia and Livonia looked to it, and the palace’s vaulting and brick refinement entered the vocabulary of the Baltic brick Gothic. Beyond the region its reach lies more in conservation than in building, and that belongs partly to the restorers. Reach stands below force.
Peter Zumthor · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
The field is European sacred and rural building of its century and the architecture of material and atmosphere. Intrinsic force: real and specific. It showed that a contemporary building could take its interior from the burning of its formwork, that a chapel could be made of local means and amateur labour to the highest finish, and that a small private commission could carry as much weight as a cathedral. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it became one of the most reproduced images of architecture of its decade, a reference in the schools and in the turn of much European practice toward material, mass and craft, and burnt and imprinted timber formwork and dark sacral interiors have followed it in a number of small chapels and pavilions. It did not redirect the church as a building type or the practice of large buildings, and the time is too short to show more.
George Saunders · Literature
8.2 · Tier IV
The field is the American short story of the 2010s. The intrinsic force is real and bounded: the book showed that the satirical, jargon-voiced story could carry tenderness without losing its comedy, and made the close third person a place where a debased idiom and a moral act share one sentence. That widened an idiom more than it reorganised a form, and the idiom was the author’s own from the 1990s. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the book was received as an event unusual for a story collection, a bestseller, a finalist for the National Book Award and the winner of the first Folio Prize; its manner became one of the most imitated in American writing programmes; and “Escape from Spiderhead” was filmed in 2022. Much of that reach belongs to a career begun twenty years earlier: the book confirmed a direction more than it redirected the field.
Christopher Nolan · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
Field: the cinema of the 2010s, so force and reach are scored together. Intrinsic force: a large-budget war film made as an experiment in time and sound, whose suspense structure is the whole form; and a case, unusual at that scale, for photochemical large-format film and for exhibition built around it. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: three Academy Awards, for film editing, sound editing and sound mixing, among eight nominations; a sound design and ticking score widely imitated in the trailers and scores of later years; Sam Mendes’s 1917 (2019), a war film built on a formal constraint, commonly placed beside it; and renewed interest in the evacuation itself. The limit stands: it perfected a manner more than it reorganised what film could do, and much of what spread was texture.
Maqsud Kashani (named in the inscription) · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
The field is Persian court carpet weaving of the sixteenth century. The intrinsic force is the fullest statement of the classical medallion carpet: proof that a cartoon at manuscript fineness can be carried across fifty-six square metres without loss of command. That is a demonstration of what the medium can do, not a reorganisation of it, because the system was already in place. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: within its own century its influence cannot be traced; from 1893 its reach has been very wide and is delayed, so it is credited and discounted. It stood at the centre of the Western recognition of the Persian carpet as fine art, it was William Morris’s touchstone, and it became the type by which the classical carpet is known.
Mark Rothko · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
Field: abstract painting in New York in the 1950s and early 1960s. Force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force: the canvas is a strong instance of the reorganisation the format made, painting as an enveloping field of colour at architectural scale, carried here into its darker register; but that reorganisation was made a decade before, and this canvas does not remake it. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the format reached into the colour-field painting of the 1960s, the Minimal reaction against it, the light works of later decades and the idea of a painting as a place of contemplation; the late dark canvases fed directly into the Chapel. The reach is the oeuvre’s, and this canvas is credited as one mature instance among many.
Vincent van Gogh · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
The field is Dutch and Belgian figure painting of the 1880s, and force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force is real and limited: the canvas carried the peasant subject past sentiment into something harsher and more frontal, and set the coarsened, expressive head as a means; but its means of painting were the tradition’s, and it reorganised no possibility of painting as the painter’s own work of the next five years did. In its own decade it moved nothing. Much of its later fame is presence, weighed under The Imperishable, and much of its reach belongs to the Nuenen work as a whole and to the legend. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Flemish Expressionism, Constant Permeke above all, returned to the heavy peasant at the table, and later images of the poor at table have been read beside it; delayed influence is credited and discounted.
Frida Kahlo · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
The field is Mexican painting of the 1940s and the self-portrait tradition. The intrinsic force is a real reorganisation of what a self-portrait may carry, the sitter’s interior and her pain made the subject and stated as built metaphor; it is modest as a reorganisation of the means of painting, which are the retablo’s and the old masters’ polish. In its decade it moved little, overshadowed by the muralists. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: delayed, and so credited and discounted, it runs from the 1970s through feminist art, Chicana and Chicano art, body art and the later self-representation of illness and disability, and this panel is one of the few images by which it travels. Much of the reach belongs to the painter’s figure and her self-portraits as a whole, and fame is not influence.
J. G. Ballard · Literature
8.1 · Tier IV
The field is the English novel of the 1970s, with the speculative fiction it overlapped. The intrinsic force is real: the book carried the “inner space” programme of the British New Wave out of the future and into a near-present London, made the built environment of the welfare state and the private market a subject for fable, and showed that a dystopia needed neither a state nor a catastrophe, only a building. What holds the axis below the bar is attribution. The adjective “Ballardian” and the wider redirection belong to the body of work, with The Atrocity Exhibition and Crash as its sharper breaks, and few schools or practices can be shown to turn on this book in particular. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Ballard’s own late novels of enclosed communities, Cocaine Nights, Super-Cannes and Kingdom Come, rework it; it is a standing reference in writing on architecture and housing; and it became a feature film in 2015.
Geoffrey Bawa · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
Force and reach are scored together, in the field of the public architecture of South Asia in the late twentieth century. The intrinsic force is high: the building showed that a state could build its principal house in a modern regional language that took its roof, its pavilion and its water from its own past, when the capitol was defined by Chandigarh, Brasília and Dhaka; that is a real reorganisation of possibility for public building in South and Southeast Asia. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Bawa’s influence on the architecture of the tropics runs wide, from Sri Lanka through India to Bali and Australia, the pavilion and the floating roof a common language; but most of it ran through his hotels and houses, and few later capitols took the parliament as their model.
Nina Simone · Music
8.1 · Tier IV
The field is jazz, soul and blues albums of the mid 1960s. The force is real and bounded: the record shows that one singer-pianist could carry the field holler, the classic blues, the anti-lynching song and the revival spiritual in a single sequence, and that a spiritual could run ten minutes as a trance on a popular LP. That widened what a Black woman’s blues album could hold, without reorganising the album form. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: “Sinnerman”, among the most used recordings of its decade in film, sampling and dance remixes; Simone’s “Strange Fruit” through sampling; and, as a model for later albums, a reach that runs through her whole body of work. Reach that belongs to one track is credited to the album at a discount.
Billy Wilder · Film
8.1 · Tier IV
Released in 1960, so force and reach are scored together, in the cinema of the 1960s. The intrinsic force is a reorganisation of tone more than of means: the film showed that American comedy could hold adultery, suicide and corporate corruption without breaking, and made the comedy-drama a mainstream form of its own. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: five Academy Awards, Best Picture among them; Jack Lemmon fixed as the American everyman of anxious decency for two decades; the stage musical Promises, Promises (1968); the office established as a moral setting for later American film and television. What holds it: the redirection is of tone and setting more than of the medium’s means, and its decade was moved more by the European new waves and by the dissolution of the studio forms this film perfected.
Sufjan Stevens · Music
8.1 · Tier IV
The field is the indie and alternative music of the 2000s. The intrinsic force is real: the record showed that the small-label folk record could be orchestral, choral, historical and devotional at once, and that a confessional singer could carry a concept album about a place without either swallowing the other. That widened the idiom more than it reorganised it; chamber pop and the concept album were established, and the means were inherited. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: within its field the reach was large, Chicago and Casimir Pulaski Day passed into common use, and the orchestral turn in indie folk later in the decade is commonly traced in part to it. Outside that field it was narrower, and no practice can be shown to turn on it alone. It stands below Remain in Light at 8.5.
Eero Saarinen · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
Seen and used since 1962, so force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force is high: the first airport terminal designed from the beginning for jet aircraft as a single monumental building, arguing that an airport could be civic architecture of the first rank, and making a federal gateway out of structural expression in an age of glass boxes. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: mixed. The mobile lounge was taken up in few places and abandoned as a general system, and the midfield concourse with a train carried the field instead. The image of the terminal as one great hall under one expressive roof persisted, and later great-roof terminals stand in its line by other means and other hands; the debt is real and diffuse. It redirected the image more than the practice.
Antonio Canova · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
The field is European sculpture of the 1780s and 1790s and the century after. The intrinsic force is strong: this is one of the works that defined what a Neoclassical marble of love could be, a reorganisation of the lovers group from massed embrace to open, crossing, suspended form. The reach is named and particular within the tradition and thinner beyond it, because the decisive turns of later sculpture went against Canova’s surface and ideal rather than through them. Fame and reproduction are presence and earn nothing here. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the most famous sculptor of Europe for a generation, this group among the works by which his manner was known, copied and reduced widely, behind a long line of nineteenth century academic lovers groups and Psyche groups, and answered by Rodin’s lovers.
Richard Serra · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
The field is sculpture of the 1990s and 2000s, post-Minimal and at large scale. The intrinsic force is a real reorganisation of what sculpture can be, from an object regarded to a space lived in time, achieved through industrial means, and this room is the strongest single statement of that change, gathered in one place. The discount is double: the reach belongs largely to the series begun in 1996, and particular later works by other sculptors cannot be named with confidence as descending from this room rather than from the series or from immersive installation in general. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the torqued works made Serra the most commanding sculptor of his late generation, and their dialogue with the curved architecture of the decade, Gehry’s building around this room among them, is real and named.
Gerhard Richter · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
Published, so intrinsic force and achieved reach are scored together, in the field of painting in Germany and the West in the 1980s. Intrinsic force: modest as a reorganisation, since the method belongs to Richter’s work of the 1960s and 1970s; what the canvas adds is the meeting of figure and grey field in one image, and a demonstration that tender, finished figuration could be made with full critical seriousness in a decade that doubted it. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: wide as image, one of the emblems of Richter’s figurative painting and of painting from photographs, carried to later painters who work from snapshots in a softened, withholding manner, though no direct descent from this canvas is claimed. Discounted because much of that reach belongs to the method and the career, not to this picture.
Mughal, under Shah Jahan · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
Field: Mughal and later mosque building in South Asia. The intrinsic force is a summation: the congregational mosque set at the head of a planned capital, raised and axial, and the Mughal mosque given its definitive skyline of three bulbous domes and two tall front minarets, at imperial scale and finish. It sums a type rather than reorganising what the type could do. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Aurangzeb’s Badshahi Mosque at Lahore, 1671 to 1673, answers it directly and at a larger scale, and the raised, red and white, three-domed mosque with front minarets was taken up in later mosques of the region. Outside South Asia the reach is slight, and the type was carried further by its successor.
Ansel Adams · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
Published, so intrinsic force and achieved reach are scored together, in the field of American photography of the 1940s and after. Intrinsic force: the summary statement of the expressive straight print, proof that controlled tonal craft could make a documentary instant into an image of the order and weight of a painting, though the reorganisation of possibility belongs to straight photography and to Adams’s work as a whole. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it became the type case of the Zone System, taught in Adams’s technical books and workshops to generations of photographers; it is the photograph most associated with the rise of the fine print as a collected object in the 1970s and 1980s; and it fixed the American West as sublime in black and white. Discounted as presence and pedagogy.
Judy Chicago · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
The field is American art of the 1970s, feminist and general. The intrinsic force is a real reorganisation of possibility, in three parts: the hierarchy of the crafts breached at monumental scale; the collective workshop made an author; the history of women made the content of a major sculpture. The discount: the most influential feminist art of the following decades, Kelly’s, Kruger’s and Sherman’s, moved away from it and often against it, and the later craft revival owes as much to other lines as to this one. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it became the emblem of first-generation feminist art, the field’s argument for two decades was conducted around it, it set a model for collaborative and community-made art and for the return of textile and ceramic to the centre of practice, and its permanent installation founded a museum centre for feminist art.
Elena Ferrante · Literature
8.0 · Tier IV
The field is the European novel of the 2010s. The intrinsic force is moderate to strong: the book reorganises a possibility the Italian novel had left mostly to Morante and to genre, the long, plain, compulsive chronicle of women’s lives in a southern city, with a friendship between women at the centre of history rather than at its edge. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: in presence it is very large, read in many languages and adapted for television, and later novels of women’s friendship are constantly set beside it. What holds the axis at 8.0 is that the reach belongs to the four volumes, not to this one alone, and that fifteen years cannot yet show which particular later works it redirected.
Gerhard Richter · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
Published, so intrinsic force and achieved reach are scored together, in the field of German and European painting of the 1960s: painting after photography and after the readymade. Intrinsic force: the extreme instance of the painted photograph as a reassertion of painting, carried from the document to the nude and to colour, and set openly against Duchamp. The discount: the reorganisation itself, the photograph taken as the model for painting, was made by the photo-paintings of 1962 to 1965, and most of the reach belongs to them as a practice. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: that practice stands behind much of the figurative painting since the 1980s that works from photographs, and this canvas is among its canonical images, the standard illustration of the answer to Duchamp. As a single canvas its reach is an emblem’s: strong as an image, shared as a cause.
Antonio Vivaldi · Music
8.0 · Tier IV
Published, so force and reach are scored together, in the field of Italian and European instrumental music of the 1720s. The intrinsic force is real and bounded: the set showed that the solo concerto could carry an extended programme without giving up its form, and it fixed images, the storm, the birds, the ice, that later descriptive music returns to. The reorganisation of the concerto itself belongs more to Op. 3, which Bach transcribed, than to Op. 8. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Spring was played often at the Concert Spirituel in Paris from the 1720s to the middle of the century; in the twentieth century the set led the Vivaldi revival and the Baroque concerto back into concert life and onto record, and became a test piece of the period-instrument movement. That is reach into performance more than into composition.
Gustav Holst · Music
8.0 · Tier IV
The field is the concert music of its tradition and decade: the European orchestra of 1910 to 1920, with The Rite of Spring, Schoenberg’s pieces, Debussy’s Jeux and Mahler’s late symphonies. Against that field the work reorganised little of what music could do. Its means came from Paris, Vienna and St Petersburg; its achievement was to command them in one legible design. In English music it was larger: it opened the English orchestra to the modern repertory of rhythm and colour. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the reach is documented and wide, though mostly outside the concert hall, where the suite became a template for the orchestral sound of space, war and wonder in film scoring from the middle of the century on. In concert composition it is narrower.
Joseph Beuys · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
Intrinsic force: a real reorganisation of what performance could hold, extending it from the incident to the ordeal of days, from the body alone to a negotiated relation with another species, and from art’s own questions to a nation’s history and guilt. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the action became the emblem of European performance in America and of the artist as healer; Oleg Kulik answered it directly in I Bite America and America Bites Me (1997, New York), playing the dog in a cage; the long durational pieces of cohabitation and the animal works of later performance stand in its line, a line shared with others and credited lightly. Discounted because much of the reach belongs to Beuys’s person, oeuvre and teaching in Düsseldorf, not to this action.
Edward Hopper · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
Shown and bought within a year of its making, so force and reach are scored together, in the field of American painting of the 1930s and the picturing of the American city. The intrinsic force is real and limited: the empty commonplace street made a subject of grave contemplation, and the frieze of shopfronts made a form, which the American Scene painting of the decade claimed. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: a founding picture of the Whitney’s collection from 1931, and so present to American artists for the whole century. Its claimed reach into photography of the vernacular street and into the empty towns of film is widely asserted and not verified here. Much of the reach belongs to the painter’s manner as a whole, not to this canvas.
Richard Rogers · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
Standing since 1986, so force and reach are scored together; the field is British and European architecture of the late twentieth century, and the City office building. The intrinsic force: the complete statement of the office with its services outside, a full-height atrium made the room of an institution, the City’s first modern landmark of world rank. But the division of a building into served and servant parts, shown, was made at the Pompidou, so the force is that of a summation. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: with Foster’s work it fixed High-Tech as the corporate and civic architecture of Britain in the 1980s and 1990s; the atrium office spread widely; Rogers’s own later City buildings answer it; and its listing at Grade I in 2011 changed what a young building can be. The office with its services outside was little copied, for its cost.
Fernando Meirelles and Kátia Lund · Film
8.0 · Tier IV
Field: the cinema of the 2000s, and since the film was released in 2002, force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force: it showed that the American gangster chronicle could be carried whole and at full speed into the poor cities of the south, told from inside with a local non-professional cast, and win the world audience. It reorganised less what film could do than where and by whom. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the television series Cidade dos Homens (2002 to 2005) and its film, from the same makers; Tropa de Elite (2007) and the favela film as a Brazilian genre; the slum epic abroad, Slumdog Millionaire (2008) the plainest heir; the casting workshop as a method. That reach lies largely within the crime film and its style.
Thomas Jefferson · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
The intrinsic force is a real reorganisation of the American house: from the Georgian block to a neoclassical villa drawn from Rome and Paris, the service sunk and the dwelling made a domed temple of the private mind. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: regional and symbolic more than formal. The builders Jefferson trained carried the manner across the Virginia Piedmont, in houses of a Jeffersonian type; the Roman revival in American building owes as much to the same designer’s Capitol at Richmond (1785) and University of Virginia (1817 to 1826), which are other works; and the house’s widest reach is as an image, the founder’s house on the coin and a model for the historic house museum as a national shrine. In its field, the American house of its half-century, it is a turning point of moderate breadth.
Ovid · Literature
8.0 · Tier IV
The field is Latin poetry of the Augustan age, and within it love elegy. The intrinsic force is a reorganisation of the genre, which makes its own premise the object of its wit, and a handling of the couplet that set the standard of Latin elegiac verse for the poets after: Ovid’s own later work, the epigrammatists of the Silver age, the medieval Latin lyric. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the medieval schools read the Amores, and its figures pass into the Latin and vernacular love lyric; Marlowe put the whole into English, and the Ovidian elegy of the 1590s followed, Donne’s above all, with 1.5 behind “To His Mistress Going to Bed”; later came Goethe’s Roman Elegies. Held at 8.0 because the reach passes mostly through the poet’s larger works, and the book ended its genre in Rome more than it redirected the field.
Built for Vimal Shah and Vastupala and Tejapala · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
The intrinsic force is plain: the two great temples constitute the summit of marble carving in the western Indian tradition and fix what a Jain temple interior could be. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: within its field the reach is wide and lasting, for the marble Jain temple of western India in the centuries after it, and the Jain temples built across India and beyond it in the twentieth century, take these interiors as their measure. The reach is bounded. It redirected a regional and sectarian tradition rather than Indian architecture at large; it did not alter structure; Hindu and Islamic building took little from it. Its field is its own, and the reach in that field is real.
Athenian (architect unrecorded) · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
Standing for about two and a half millennia, so force and reach are scored together. The field is Greek temple building and its revival. The intrinsic force is modest: a competent Doric temple of six columns by thirteen, begun at the opening of the Periclean programme and outrun by the Parthenon, whose builders made the period’s real reorganisation of the order; its own departures are small. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: in its own century a group of Attic temples shares its type and manner closely enough that a single architect has been proposed; and because it survived whole it became the modern world’s measured model of Greek Doric, drawn by Stuart and Revett and copied, reduced, in Vienna. That reach rests on survival more than on force.
Yves Klein · Visual art
7.9 · Tier III
Published, so intrinsic force and achieved reach are scored together, in the field of European and American art of the early 1960s, at the turn from painting to the act and the body. Intrinsic force: a real reorganisation of the photograph’s place in art made by action, from incidental record to the work’s sole and constructed body, and a statement of the artist’s body as medium before Fluxus and performance art made it common. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Bas Jan Ader’s Fall I and Fall II (1970), films of the artist falling from a roof and riding a bicycle into a canal, answer the leap directly; the staged photography of the following decades follows. Discounted because much of the turn belongs to the decade at large, and fame as an emblem runs ahead of what it redirected.
Peter Eisenman · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
Standing since 2005, scored in the field of the memorial and of public architecture in its century. The intrinsic force is considerable: the work established, at national scale and at the centre of a capital, that a state’s memorial to its own crime could be an abstract field to be entered rather than an image to be faced, and it fixed the pairing of an abstract field with a documentary centre beneath. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: real and continuing. The memorial field of repeated vertical elements, entered and walked, recurs in memorials built since; the field over a documentation centre has become a type; and in Germany the work ended the long argument over whether there would be a central memorial at all. It is held at 8.0 because the decisive turn in memorial design belongs to Lin, a generation earlier, because Eisenman’s own architecture took little new from it, and because reach of two decades is credited and discounted.
Jean-Michel Basquiat · Visual art
7.9 · Tier III
The field is painting in New York in the early 1980s, between the end of the Minimal and Conceptual decade, the return of the figure and the arrival of graffiti in the galleries. The intrinsic force is real: the painting joins the street line, the diagram and the frontal head on a large canvas in a way that redirects what a figure in painting could be made of, and puts a Black subject at its centre as a matter of course. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Basquiat’s reach on later painting, on figuration with text and diagram and on the place of Black artists in the field is wide and documented, and this head is among its emblematic images. But that reach belongs chiefly to the body of work, which this canvas begins rather than gathers, and some of it is the market’s.
Rem Koolhaas and Ole Scheeren (OMA) · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
The field is the tall building of its century and, nearer, Chinese building since 1990. The intrinsic force is high: it showed that a tower of this scale could be a closed loop, that structure could be expressed as a field of forces on the skin, and that a skyscraper could refuse the race for height. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it became the emblem of the iconic building in China and of OMA’s turn to very large work; its engineering approach, the graded diagrid and the form led by analysis, has been widely taught and followed; looped and gate-shaped towers came after it. But the tall building did not turn, and in China its chief reach has been as the case argued against, official guidance from about 2014 to 2016 discouraging oversized, strange and imported landmarks.
Pallava, under Narasimhavarman II · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
Scored on force and reach together, in the field of the temple of South India. The intrinsic force is real: one of the first structural granite temples of the Tamil country, it carried the storeyed vimana from the carved model into built masonry and gave it an attenuated, soaring proportion. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the line from the Pallava structural temples runs through the early Chola temples to the great vimana of Thanjavur, and the Dravida temple is a built tradition from this reign onward. But the credit for that line is shared, and the larger share goes to the Kailasanatha at Kanchipuram, the reign’s fuller statement; the Shore Temple’s own seaward siting and accreted plan were not taken up. Its reach as the emblem of the Pallava coast is wide.
Jasper Johns · Visual art
7.9 · Tier III
Field: American painting around 1960, at the turn from Abstract Expressionism to Pop and the art of the sign. Intrinsic force: the given-sign method enlarged from an emblem to a territory full of words, and the gesture of the previous generation absorbed into it rather than refused, a move that showed the two could be held in one canvas. The discount is large: the reorganisation that moved the field, the given flat sign, belongs to the flags of the mid-1950s, and much of this canvas’s reach is the reach of that earlier move carried on. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the map became a type in later art, though how far any later map descends from this canvas is not shown; and its pairing of stencilled word and painted field runs on into the word paintings of the decade that followed.
I. M. Pei · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
The field is building in historic settings and the museum of the late twentieth century, and the pyramid has stood in view since 1988, so force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force: the old museum reorganised, from entries at its edges to a central hub below ground, and the demonstration that a modern figure of the plainest geometry could stand at the heart of a classical ensemble without imitating it. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: real and partly diffuse. The central covered hub became a model for museum expansions, the glass-roofed court of the British Museum, opened in 2000, standing in the same line though no descent is claimed; contrast rather than mimicry became the accepted manner of building in old centres, a shift with many authors; and the pyramid became the Louvre’s sign. The glass pyramid spread mostly as image, not as architecture.
Sigur Rós · Music
7.9 · Tier III
The field is the rock and post-rock album of the late 1990s. It showed that the post-rock crescendo could carry orchestral warmth, melody and a lead voice without becoming conventional song, and that a record sung in Icelandic could be heard internationally on the strength of its sound. That widened the idiom more than it reorganised it. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the bowed guitar, the falsetto and the slow orchestral swell became a common language of the 2000s, above all in the scoring of trailers, documentaries and advertising, and the record opened an international path for Icelandic music beyond Björk; much of that is use rather than redirection. It sits below Remain in Light at 8.5 and above Zooropa at 7.4.
Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly · Film
7.9 · Tier III
Field: the cinema of the 1950s. The intrinsic force is the fullest realisation of the integrated MGM musical, dance, song, satire and the medium’s own history in one structure, and a musical that made the studio’s machinery its comedy. It perfected a form more than it reorganised what film could do, and the Hollywood musical declined within the decade. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: a modest success on release, with two Academy Award nominations, for Jean Hagen and for the scoring, and no wins; a reputation that rose from the 1960s; the National Film Registry in its first year, 1989; the title song turned to horror in A Clockwork Orange (1971); a stage musical; The Artist (2011) and La La Land (2016) in its line. The reach is wide as reference and narrower as redirection.
Lev Rudnev · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
The intrinsic force: the defining work of the Stalin high-rise type, the largest and most complete of the seven, making the skyscraper a civic and ideological crown and the university a vertical city; the tallest building in Europe from 1953 until 1990. That is a synthesis more than a reorganisation of possibility. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: within its field, Soviet and Eastern bloc architecture of the 1950s, wide and immediate, with a close follower in Warsaw and the type carried to Riga, Prague and other plans and to exhibition halls in Shanghai and Beijing; the seven towers made Moscow’s skyline, which every later Moscow tower has had to answer; and post-Soviet Moscow quoted it outright. Bounded: the decree of 1955 cut the line off within two years of the opening, the reach ran within one bloc under political direction, and outside it nothing was redirected.
Erich Mendelsohn · Architecture
7.8 · Tier III
The field is German and European building of the 1920s, and the tower has stood in view since 1921, so force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force is real: the one built monument of Expressionist architecture that stands whole, showing that the plastic, dynamic building drawn in the Glass Chain could be built and put to work; bounded by the fact that it could not be built as conceived. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: limited and partly delayed. Expressionism in building ended within a few years, and the field turned to the frame, the white box and the Neue Sachlichkeit; Mendelsohn himself turned his dynamics into the horizontal bands of the Schocken stores and the De La Warr Pavilion, a line that runs through streamline building rather than from this form. Later the tower became the emblem of sculptural modernism, a reference for organic and free-form architects from mid-century on. In its field it is an icon, not a turning point.
Nicholas Ray · Film
7.8 · Tier III
Released in 1955, so force and reach are scored together, in the cinema of the 1950s. The intrinsic force is moderate: the film joins the problem picture to the family melodrama under a wide expressive frame more than it reorganises what film can do. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the reach is very large. The film fixed the image of the American teenager as a sufferer in his own right; its lead’s red jacket, posture and anguish became a figure the cinema and popular culture have used ever since; the teen film, from the late 1950s to John Hughes and beyond, descends in part from it; and Ray’s place in the auteur criticism it fed changed how cinema was read. The discount: much of that reach belongs to the star’s persona and early death, which is fame, not force.
Joan Miró · Visual art
7.8 · Tier III
The field is painting in Paris in the middle 1920s, and Surrealist painting in particular, and force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force: with the canvases around it, a reorganisation of the picture into a field of animated signs, the biomorphic sign made a unit of painting, and an answer to the open question whether painting could be Surrealist at all. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Miró’s sign language and biomorphism passed into Arshile Gorky’s paintings of the 1940s, into Calder’s mobiles and paintings, into the early work of Pollock, Baziotes and Motherwell, and widely into mid-century design and animation. The discount: that reach belongs to the painter’s manner of 1923 to 1927 and to the later Constellations as much as to this canvas, which is the emblem of the manner rather than its single source.
Damien Hirst · Visual art
7.8 · Tier III
Shown since 1993, so force and reach are scored together, in British and international sculpture of the early 1990s. The intrinsic force: it made the opened body of a real animal a viable sculptural material in the international gallery, and the viewer’s passage through it the event of the work. That is a real move, but it extends the tanks and stands on Beuys, on Kounellis’s live horses, on Nitsch’s carcasses and on Bacon; it amplifies more than it reorganises. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the work by which the Turner Prize of 1995 is remembered, an emblem of the generation that dominated British art in that decade, and a fixed point in the argument over what art may be made of. Its reach on later practice belongs largely to the tanks as a group, and is discounted.
César Pelli · Architecture
7.8 · Tier III
The field is the tall building of its decade in Asia and the world, and the towers have stood in view since 1998, so force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force: the record taken out of North America for the first time since the early twentieth century; concrete made a material of the supertall; a regional identity carried in the plan rather than in applied ornament. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: real, wide and shared. The race moved to Asia and the Gulf, to Taipei 101, the towers of Shanghai and the Burj Khalifa, the last on a concrete core and a plan drawn from regional geometry; the identity tower became a type across Asia; the counting of height was revised in its wake. Bounded: the Jin Mao Tower in Shanghai made the same regional turn independently, the race was driven by capital more than by this building, and the bridged pair has had few descendants.
I. M. Pei · Architecture
7.8 · Tier III
The field is American museum and civic building, and force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force: a demonstration that a modern civic monument can be made from a site’s own geometry and a neighbour’s materials, with a precision of stone and concrete few American buildings of the time reached, and that a museum’s centre can be a public court; a real reorganisation within late modernism, not of architecture as a whole. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: considerable in its field. The court museum became a standard pattern of the 1980s and after; the building set a level of finish for institutional modernism; it made Pei the architect of choice for cultural monuments, and it is widely held to have led to his commission at the Louvre. Its reach is into a manner more than a new possibility.
Herzog and de Meuron, with Ai Weiwei and Li Xinggang · Architecture
7.8 · Tier III
Standing since 2008, scored on force and reach together, in the field of the stadium and of building in China and East Asia in the early twenty-first century. The intrinsic force is real: it made the stadium, a type long governed by its roof engineering, into a single sculptural object in which structure is the image, and showed that a structure of apparent randomness could be built at the largest scale. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: wide as image, narrower as model. It became the emblem of the 2008 Games and of the decade of the iconic building in China, and it set the expectation that a host’s main stadium be a national image. Few have followed its structural method; its cost and its steel became a cautionary case; and the official turn in China against outlandish buildings in the decade that followed was in part a turn against works of its kind.
Bridget Riley · Visual art
7.8 · Tier III
The field is abstract painting in Britain and Europe in the early 1960s. The intrinsic force is a real reorganisation: the perceptual effect becomes the whole of the work and the viewer’s eye its medium, with the strictest economy of means, and this panel is the first of the painter’s black and white paintings to do it fully; the line runs directly to Fall and Current. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Riley’s black and white works stood at the centre of the Museum of Modern Art’s The Responsive Eye in 1965, which named Op Art internationally; the manner entered fashion and design within a few years, against the painter’s resistance; later painters of perception and pattern take it as a source. The discount: the reach belongs largely to the series and the movement, Vasarely sharing it, and the movement was brief.
Agatha Christie · Literature
7.7 · Tier III
The field is the detective novel in English and, more widely, the English novel of the 1920s. The intrinsic force is real: the book reorganised what the detective novel could do with its own narration, showing that the reader’s trust in the form was itself material for the plot, and it raised the stakes of fair play for every writer after. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the rules of fair play drawn up by the Golden Age writers in the years that followed, and the Detection Club’s debate over whether the book had cheated; Christie’s own return to the narrator who kills, in Endless Night (1967); a long line of crime fiction and film built on the concealing narrator; and a standing place in the theory of the unreliable narrator. Within the genre the reach is near the top. Outside it, in the year of The Sun Also Rises and a year after Mrs Dalloway, narration was being reorganised elsewhere and at greater depth, and the book’s reach there is a single device.
Marina Abramović · Visual art
7.7 · Tier III
The field is performance and body art of the 2000s and 2010s, in Europe and New York. Intrinsic force: substantial, not reorganising. The work made a durational performance the central event of a major museum and made the public the performer’s partner, but its means had been hers and the field’s since the 1970s. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it carried performance from the margin into museum programming and into common knowledge; it was imitated and parodied widely; it fed into the method of her institute; and its format entered other media, as in the performance film made for Jay-Z’s Picasso Baby in 2013. Reach is discounted, because much of it is fame and the uptake of a format, and fame is presence, not proof of a field reorganised.
Louisa May Alcott · Literature
7.7 · Tier III
The field is American prose fiction of the 1860s, with the literature for and about girls in English within it. The intrinsic force is moderate. The book did not reorganise the novel’s means; it took the domestic tale and made its girls particular, comic and wanting. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the reach is very large and particular. The book founded the family chronicle of sisters as a lasting form for young readers, and its own sequels made the school novel of Plumfield. Jo became a named model for women who wrote: Simone de Beauvoir, in Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter, records finding herself in Jo, and in Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend two girls buy the book and resolve to write. Reach outweighs force; the force does not reach the bar, and the field it moved is narrower than the novel at large.
Akira Kurosawa · Film
8.5 · Tier IV
Released in 1985, so force and reach are scored together, in the cinema of the 1980s. The force is great but consolidating: the fullest statement of a late manner, Shakespeare made Japanese and an epic made a painted, cold, distant pageant, by a master at the end of the era of practical spectacle. It did not reorganise what cinema could do, as the director’s own Rashomon and Seven Samurai had. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it confirmed Kurosawa’s late standing abroad, with four Academy nominations and a win, and it stands as the reference for a Shakespeare tragedy wholly carried into another culture. What holds the axis lowest: the mode it perfected, the vast practical epic with thousands of extras, ended with it; the reach is diffuse and lies inside the battle epic; and few films changed course because of it.
Henry Purcell · Music
8.5 · Tier IV
Intrinsic force and achieved reach are scored together, in the field of opera and English theatre music of the 1680s. The force is real: the work showed that tragedy could be sung through in English and that English recitative could carry it, and within English music nothing like it came for two centuries. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: in its own time the reach was close to none, and English opera went to Handel’s Italian model. Delayed reach is credited and discounted: the revivals from the 1890s, Britten’s edition, and Britten’s English operas, which owe much to Purcell’s word-setting across many works rather than to this one alone. The ground-bass lament it made famous was an emblem it inherited.
Joseph Wright of Derby · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
The field is British painting of the 1760s and 1770s, and force and reach are scored together. Intrinsic force is substantial: the picture establishes that the new science and the people who watch it can carry the moral weight of history painting, a real enlargement of what a painting could be about. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: within the field it redirected little, since the academic hierarchy held, Wright’s scientific scenes had few successors and his own later work turned to landscape, the forge and the volcano; a mezzotint after it carried the image widely in its time; and the twentieth century made it the emblem of the Enlightenment’s experimental culture, on the covers of histories of science. That is emblem more than a redirection of painting. Force near 8.5, reach near 7.3.
Liao builders · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Force and reach are scored together, and here they part. The intrinsic force is high: the fullest statement of the storeyed timber pagoda and of Liao structural carpentry, a reorganisation of what timber could reach, and a height not reached in wood in China since. The reach is narrow. The Liao and the Jin built their great pagodas in brick imitating timber, before it and after it, and not on its model; the storeyed timber pagoda in China did not continue on its line. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the reach came late and in another mode, as the surviving proof of a lost tradition, read by Liang Sicheng in 1933 and by every history since, and as a reference in modern study of timber under earthquake, credited and discounted as delayed.
Alberto Burri · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
The field is Italian art of the 1980s, land art, and the memorial art of the late twentieth century. Intrinsic force is considerable: a memorial that is the site, a ruin sealed rather than restored or replaced, a studio form taken to the scale of a landscape, which reorganises what a memorial over a catastrophe can be. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: thinner than the fame. The work is often set beside the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin (2005) and the field memorials after it, but no documented line of influence can be named; Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial (1982) came first and did more to redirect memorial practice; and the long halt delayed the work’s reach. Strong force, modest named reach.
Cormac McCarthy · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
The field is the American novel of the 1970s, and the Southern novel within it. The intrinsic force is real and bounded: the book carried the inheritance of Faulkner and Joyce to a last full height in the city, showed that the language of the Southern novel could hold the lowest life of the modern South without condescension, and is the summit of its author’s Appalachian manner. But it consummates an inheritance more than it reorganises possibility, and in 1979 the reorganisations of the American novel were being made elsewhere. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: a reach that came late, after Blood Meridian and the Border Trilogy made its author’s name, and is now strong among novelists and readers of literary fiction, with a presence of its own in Knoxville. The delay is credited and discounted, and the reach stays narrower than the force.
Dionysus Flambouras · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
Intrinsic force only, as for every unpublished work on the bench. Achieved reach is not scored. The precursor is McCarthy, and the book enters him on his own ground: the road, the father’s gun, the boy. Its answer is to make the boy the one who acts and the man the one who drives, and to set the state’s file against the road, so that a rule a father taught at twelve, do not steal from neighbours, meets the neighbour who informs. He parks at the building rather than the pumps, walks in, and afterward hears the cooler and the heater and nothing else. Revenge is refused as genre and kept as trade. That answers the master more fully than the earlier draft did; it does not reorganise the field.
Dionysus Flambouras · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
The contest is with Kafka and the first half sustains it seriously: a summons that arrives before its event, a cell nobody remembers being brought into, a request that thanks a man for his flexibility before he has agreed to anything. The swerve is the eighth story, which does what the precursor never permits: a man refuses, pays fully, and is right, and keeps the one thing the panel called adjacent. The second half handles the domestic story with skill and does not contest it. The force reorganises one inheritance, not the field. Following the convention this page applies to an unpublished work, achieved reach is not scored; the mark is intrinsic force alone.
Ptolemaic builders · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
The field is the temple building of Ptolemaic and Roman Egypt. The intrinsic force is high: the temple sums three thousand years of Egyptian temple building, and as the first and most complete of the great Ptolemaic temples it set the canon of its field in plan, enclosure and decorated surface. That field closed within about four centuries, when the temples were shut. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: after the closing the reach is as model and record, not as a tradition redirected; the Egyptian revival in nineteenth-century Europe and America drew on the pylons and cavetto cornices of the late temples, Edfu among them, but as quotation; and the largest reach is in knowledge, for this is the building through which Egyptology understands what a temple was.
David Markson · Literature
8.3 · Tier IV
The field is the American novel of the late 1980s. The intrinsic force is high: the book showed that a novel could be built from isolated declarative sentences, assembled by recurrence rather than narrative, and still carry a life and a grief, a real reorganisation of what the novel’s unit can be. What holds it below 8.0 is reach, which is narrow, delayed and largely asserted. Delayed reach is credited at a discount, and reach that runs through Markson’s own later fragment novels, from Reader’s Block (1996) to The Last Novel (2007), is not credited to this one. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Wallace’s essay “The Empty Plenum” (1990) made the book a touchstone for one line of American experimental writing, and the fragmentary novel and essay of the following decades are often traced to it, a lineage asserted by writers more than documented.
Built for King Kashyapa I · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
The field is the building of Sri Lanka and South Asia in the first millennium. The intrinsic force is high: palace, fortress and garden fused with a natural rock in one axial plan, with landscape gardens of a sophistication rare in their region and century, a true reorganisation of what a royal seat could be. The reach is modest, and it sets the figure below the force. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the capital returned to Anuradhapura; no school of rock palaces followed; the later royal city of Polonnaruwa returns to the plain and the stupa; no line of gardens can be traced with confidence that took these as its model; and the modern reach is that of a national emblem and heritage site, which is presence, not a redirection of building.
Thutmose (attributed) · Visual art
8.3 · Tier IV
Field: Egyptian sculpture of the fourteenth century BC and the Amarna workshops. Intrinsic force is high: the bust is the fullest statement of the late Amarna synthesis of naturalism and ideal. Reach in its own time is little that can be shown: it never left the workshop, it was left behind when the city was abandoned, and the tradition that followed rejected the programme it served, keeping only something of its softness. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: since 1924 it has been the image of ancient Egyptian beauty in design, fashion and the popular idea of Egypt, and the subject of a national claim; presence more than a turn in sculptural practice, credited late and discounted.
Lluís Domènech i Montaner · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
Force and reach are scored together, and here they part. The intrinsic force is high: the hall reorganises what a concert hall could be, a room of light on a frame with a decoration native rather than classical, and it stands with Gaudí’s works as the summit of Catalan Modernisme, for some the most complete single realisation of the movement’s ideal of the united crafts. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Modernisme ended within a decade or two; the Noucentistes who followed in Catalonia reacted against this building; concert halls elsewhere did not take up its daylit room; and the line of the frame and the curtain wall ran through Chicago, Behrens and Gropius, not Barcelona. The reach came late, as reputation and as a model of an integrated, national art: credited, and discounted as delayed.
Chaulukya, under Queen Udayamati · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
Force and reach are scored together, in the field of the stepwells of western India and of Chaulukya building. The intrinsic force is high: the building fixes the stepwell as a monument of royal and temple rank. Reach is the weak half. The great stepwells of fifteenth-century Gujarat inherit the type, the corridor and the pavilion struts, but the line runs through a regional tradition this building shared rather than led, and it lay silted and out of sight for centuries, so its direct pressure on later builders cannot be shown. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the modern reach is presence rather than redirection, the banknote, the World Heritage listing, the image of the stepwell carried abroad; fame lends nothing beyond that, and the delayed influence is small.
Alice Munro · Literature
8.3 · Tier IV
The field is short fiction in English in the 2000s. The intrinsic force is the book’s demonstration that the short story could carry a novel’s span and moral weight without the novel’s bulk, a case Munro had been making for twenty years and here made at full strength. That confirms a reorganisation already made rather than making one: the redirection of the story toward Munro’s form was the work of earlier collections. Reach that belongs to the author is not credited to the book, and reach that came late through the author is discounted. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: “The Bear Came Over the Mountain” became one of the best-known stories of its decade, and Sarah Polley’s Away from Her (2006) carried it to a wide public; the collection stands among the books most often named as late Munro at her height; and the Nobel Prize of 2013, given to Munro as master of the contemporary short story, rests partly on it.
Portishead · Music
8.3 · Tier IV
The field is the popular and electronic album of the 2000s, and the place in it of a returning band of the 1990s. The intrinsic force is real: the record showed that a band with a defined and widely copied sound could dismantle it and rebuild from harsher, older materials, krautrock pulse, analogue synthesiser and post-punk abrasion, without losing its singer’s centre. It reorganised the band’s own possibility more than the field’s. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the record was well received and widely heard, and its drum and synthesiser sound has been studied and borrowed; but no body of later work can be named that it redirected, and the revival of its languages ran through other hands in the same years.
Winslow Homer · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
The field is American painting of the 1890s and its marine and genre traditions. The intrinsic force is high in that field: the canvas turned the American marine from anecdote toward an unconsoled modern condition, and it set a Black figure at the centre of a major painting as no American painter of standing then did. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: in its own tradition a landmark, bought by the Met in the painter’s lifetime and a reference point since; its direct descendants in painting are few, and its strongest answer came a century later, from Marshall. Outside American art it redirected little, and Homer’s wider influence on American realism runs more through the Prouts Neck seas and the watercolours than through this canvas.
Krzysztof Kieślowski · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
Released in 1991, so force and reach are scored together, in the cinema of the 1990s. The intrinsic force: the film made a European art cinema of intuition and correspondence, carried by colour, music and a single performance across two lives, and showed that a film could hold an audience on a relation it never explains. It perfected a lyric mode more than it reorganised what cinema could do. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the direct line is Kieślowski’s own Three Colours (1993 to 1994), made with the same writer, photographer and composer and in the same mode; the film’s look and Preisner’s score became a reference for the metaphysical European art film of the decade; and Jacob’s double performance is a standard of its kind. What holds the axis low is that reach running chiefly through its maker’s next films is narrower than reach that redirects others; beyond that line it is diffuse and hard to show, and it lies mostly within art cinema.
Terry Gilliam · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
Released in 1995, so force and reach are scored together, in the cinema of the 1990s. Intrinsic force: the film put the closed loop, a history that cannot be changed and a hero who knows it and dies inside it, at the centre of a Hollywood star picture, and showed that a mainstream audience would accept an unredeemed end and a psychiatric theme. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it made La Jetée widely known, it stands in the line of the loop films and series that followed, and it was itself carried into a television series from 2015 to 2018. Held below the gate: that line runs as much through Marker, Philip K. Dick and the genre at large, and in its decade Pulp Fiction (8.3) and The Matrix (8.2) moved the field more widely.
Alfonso Cuarón · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
Released in 2018, so force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force is the demonstration that the tools of the spectacle film, large-format digital photography, choreographed long takes and immersive sound, could carry a quiet domestic memoir at full scale. It perfected and redirected a manner more than it reorganised what film could do. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: very wide for a film in Spanish and Mixtec; the Golden Lion and three Academy Awards; a public argument in Mexico on domestic labour and an Indigenous lead; and a streaming company carried to the top of the festival and awards circuit. Much of that reach is institutional, not artistic, and the redirection of later film is not yet shown.
The National · Music
8.2 · Tier IV
The contest is with the loud, rising indie rock of its years, the band’s own previous record among it: this one answers volume with restraint and youth with adulthood. The intrinsic force is real and bounded. It showed that a rock band could make a mid-tempo, drum-led record of adult disquiet and keep its intensity, though Cohen, the Tindersticks and the Blue Nile had shown the register and the means were refined, not new. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the record’s register, restrained, drum-led and literate, was imitated in the indie rock that followed, and the band’s later standing was built on it. What holds it below the eights is that part of that reach is the band’s rather than the album’s.
Deerhunter · Music
8.2 · Tier IV
The field is indie and alternative rock around 2010. The intrinsic force: the record joined the ambient and noise haze of its moment to classic song form with unusual finish, and showed that the haze could serve memory rather than only texture. That refines a direction rather than reorganising possibility; the synthesis of drift and old pop was a shared project of its scene, worked at the same time by its contemporaries. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the record was widely praised in its year and is placed high in lists of its decade within indie criticism, and Desire Lines is still played; no clear line of records took its method from it rather than from the scene it belonged to, and its reach outside indie listeners is narrow.
William Gaddis · Literature
8.2 · Tier IV
The field is the American novel of the late twentieth century. The force is real: the book made the law’s language an instrument of fiction at full length, and showed that the systems novel’s satire of institutions could be carried through the institutions’ own documents; it is the major American novel of litigation. But it extends Gaddis’s own reorganisation rather than making one, and its force is narrower than that of JR, whose method it applies. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the National Book Award for Fiction of 1994; a steady place in the teaching of law and literature; and the admiration of novelists who prize Gaddis. No practice or school can be shown to have turned on this book; the reach of the method belongs to JR, and the legal novel after it went the way of the thriller.
The Kinks · Music
8.1 · Tier IV
The contest is with the rock album of 1968. The intrinsic force is real: the record showed that the rock album could be the voice of a place and a vanished past, small in scale, English in idiom rather than American, and set against the idea of progress that drove its year. That reorganised what the form could address, not how it was made, since its means, music hall, baroque pop, Mellotron and the themed set, were current. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: nothing turned on it at release, since few heard it, and its reach came late, in the English pop that took Englishness as its subject, the Britpop of the 1990s among it, a debt diffuse and often running through the band’s singles.
John Everett Millais · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
Published, so force and reach are scored together, and the field is British painting of the early 1850s. The intrinsic force: the Brotherhood’s programme at its most complete in landscape, the proof that a literary subject could be painted as the record of a real place without loss of feeling. But the reorganisation was the Brotherhood’s, made in 1849 and 1850, and this canvas is its best demonstration more than its turn. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: very wide on the image of Ophelia and of the drowned woman, through Waterhouse, the later Pre-Raphaelites and the Symbolists, and in photography and film since; narrow on painting’s practice, since the line of consequence ran through Paris, and the painter himself left the method within the decade.
Pablo Picasso · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
The field is Paris painting of 1904 to 1906. The intrinsic force: this is the culminating canvas of the Rose Period, the mode’s fullest statement at monumental scale. It stabilised a classicising, melancholy figure painting on an empty ground, but it reorganised no possibility of painting; the field’s reorganisation in that decade came from Fauvism and then from this maker’s next turn. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Rilke’s Fifth Duino Elegy, one of the major poems of the century, is built on it, and the Harlequin and the saltimbanque return through the painter’s own later work and through the circus melancholies of the decades that followed. The reach is real, and lies mostly outside painting’s own direction.
Thai builders, under Rama II and Rama III · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
The field is Thai and mainland Southeast Asian religious building of its century. The intrinsic force: the great prang is the culmination of the prang of the Bangkok period, the type carried to its tallest and its most complete group, and the porcelain manner given its largest single statement. That is real force, but a culmination rather than a reorganisation of what could be built. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the tower became the sign of the city and the nation, struck on the 10-baht coin and present in every image of Bangkok from the river, and the prang after it is measured against it; but the line of the great prang did not continue at this scale, and Thai building turned within a generation toward the European forms of the reigns of Rama IV and Rama V.
Emily Kame Kngwarreye · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
The field is Australian and Aboriginal painting of the 1990s and the international reception of Indigenous art, and force and reach are scored together. The painter’s work as a whole reorganised what was possible, moving desert painting from the coded map to the field of colour and forcing on the art world a question about abstraction, authorship and the contemporary. Earth’s Creation is one of its fullest statements, but the turn belongs to the work of 1988 to 1991 and to the body as a whole. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: for the painter it is real, in Venice in 1997, the national collections and the retrospective of 2023 to 2026 at Canberra and Tate Modern. For this painting it is mostly presence, an emblem of the market’s turn to Aboriginal women painters; no line of artists is shown to start from it.
Anselm Kiefer · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
Published and shown, so force and reach are scored together, in the field of painting in Europe and America in the 1980s. Intrinsic force: the oldest myth of dismemberment and resurrection joined to contemporary technology, in a material painting at the scale of a wall, and Kiefer’s method carried out of German subject matter into the ancient Near East, a direction his later work pursued at length. That is a real reorganisation within his work and a modest one within the field. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: one of his best known works in an American museum and a frequent teaching example, carried by his American retrospective and the large American collections of the late 1980s. Discounted because the reach is mostly Kiefer’s, not this canvas’s, and it redirected no school.
Timurid and Ashtarkhanid builders · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
The field: the Islamic architecture of Transoxiana and its neighbours, fifteenth to seventeenth centuries. The intrinsic force: Ulugh Beg’s madrasa is one of the defining large madrasas of the Timurid age, a royal college built where the city met; the completed ensemble is the fullest statement of the square framed by facing madrasas; Sher-Dor’s portal made the figural emblem public on a religious building. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: real and regional, in the paired madrasas and framed squares of Bukhara, though whether they descend from the Registan or run beside it is not settled. The Registan has since become the emblem of Uzbekistan, but emblem is presence, not reach. The Timurid line’s great reach, to Herat, Safavid Iran and Mughal India, ran more through Timur’s own works and Herat than through this square, and the seventeenth-century campaign summed a tradition rather than redirected it.
Mastodon · Music
8.1 · Tier IV
The field is the metal of the 2000s, and the contest is with the band’s peers in progressive and sludge metal and with metal’s suspicion of clean voices and of seventies forms. The intrinsic force is clear: the record showed that a sludge band could make a full progressive concept album, slow and sung, without losing weight, and do it on a major label with wide success. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the record is commonly placed among the strongest metal albums of its decade, and it is a reference point for the progressive turn in heavy music that followed it. The reach is bounded. That turn was already under way, in Opeth, Baroness, Neurosis and Tool, and no record or band can be named with confidence as having turned on this one. It stands far below Master of Puppets at 8.9.
Denis Villeneuve · Film
8.1 · Tier IV
Field: the cinema of the 2010s, so force and reach are scored together. Intrinsic force: the film is a concentrated model of the serious genre picture of its decade, a thriller with an art film’s tempo, a dread led by sound, and a refusal of catharsis, and that model was taken up. It does not reorganise what film can do. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Taylor Sheridan’s career followed from it, with Hell or High Water (2016) and Wind River (2017), the three films often read as a frontier set; it led to a sequel; it was the step to Villeneuve’s larger films with Roger Deakins and Joe Walker; and its score is often said to have set the sound of later thrillers and trailers, a lineage widely asserted and thinly documented. The reach lies in genre, scoring and careers, not in the form of film.
Honoré Daumier · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
The field is French painting of the 1860s. Intrinsic force: one of the first paintings to make the crowd of modern transport its whole subject, the anonymous public of the city treated with the gravity of history painting, a real enlargement of what a painting of the poor could be. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it was delayed and partly indirect. Daumier’s painting was barely seen by the painters of his decade, and his reach then ran through his lithographs. The paintings were taken up later. Van Gogh’s admiration of Daumier is documented in his letters, and the line of the urban poor in Picasso’s Blue Period, German Expressionism and later social realism is commonly traced to him, though the share of this one canvas cannot be separated. Delayed influence is credited and discounted.
Frederick William Stevens · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
Standing since 1888, so force and reach are scored together, in the field of the public building of British India. The intrinsic force: a powerful statement of a hybrid Gothic for a tropical imperial city, the most complete and assured example of its kind, but a reorganisation of possibility within colonial building, not of architecture at large. The reach is real in its region and slight beyond it: European and American station building did not follow. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the building set the pattern for railway and civic building in Bombay and beyond, Stevens’s own later buildings in the city follow it, and it stood as a model for the public architecture of empire in India until the Indo-Saracenic turn toward Mughal sources.
Ragnar Östberg · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
Force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force is high within its field: the fullest statement of Scandinavian National Romanticism in civic building, a synthesis whose scale and finish no other building of the movement matched. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: real, but bounded and partly delayed. The building was admired across Europe on completion, and its answer is visible in interwar civic building in Britain and the Low Countries, in town halls of brick with towers and courts. At home it came at the end of its line: the Stockholm exhibition of 1930 turned Swedish architecture to functionalism within seven years of the inauguration, and the building founded no school after the 1930s.
Russian carpenters · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
The field is the wooden church of the Russian north, and Russian building beyond it. The intrinsic force: the church is the most complete statement of the multi-domed log church, the pyramid of domes carried to its limit and organised as one figure; it exhausts a type more than it reorganises possibility. The type ended soon after: the eighteenth century built in masonry, and the multi-domed log church was not developed further from this model. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: its reach came later and in another form, as the emblem of Russian wooden architecture, a source for the Russian revival of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and the founding case of an open-air museum and of log-frame restoration.
Federico Fellini · Film
8.0 · Tier IV
Released in 1973, so force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force is a mature, popular form of the cinema of memory as carnival, in which a whole community, its politics and its sex, is remembered at once with tenderness and judgement: the most complete statement of a manner. It perfected rather than reorganised, and the deeper reorganisations of narrative and of the self as subject that Fellini made belong to his work of the early 1960s, not to this film. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the memory film of a town or a childhood that followed is often traced to it, and its title passed into Italian as a common noun for nostalgic reminiscence, a reach beyond cinema that few films achieve. It is reach along one line, not a redirection of the field.
Sidney Lumet · Film
8.0 · Tier IV
Field: the American cinema of the 1970s, a crowded field. Intrinsic force is real but rhetorical: the film made television, and the corporation behind it, the subject of a studio picture in a register of prophetic farce, and gave a writer’s voice a dominance over a major film that few writers had. It did not reorganise how films are made; its grammar is Lumet’s efficient realism, and its invention lies in the script. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Beale’s cry passed into common speech and political use; the film became the standard reference in writing on media for half a century; its line runs through Broadcast News (1987) and The Truman Show (1998); its screenplay is taught. The reach is wide in culture and narrower in cinema.
Donna Tartt · Literature
8.0 · Tier IV
The field is the American novel in English of the 1990s, with the campus novel and the literary thriller inside it. The intrinsic force is real and bounded: the book showed that the literary novel could take back the pleasures of plot and suspense without condescension, that classical learning and an elevated style could be the stuff of a bestseller, and that the campus novel could be tragedy rather than satire. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the book is the acknowledged source of what readers now call dark academia, a mode with its own shelf, and later novels of that mode take it as their model, many of them lesser books. What holds the axis below eight is the kind of the reach: it lies in a popular mode more than in the form of the novel; the major turns of the decade’s fiction were made elsewhere; and sales and a revived readership online are presence, not redirection.
Georgia O'Keeffe · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
Published and on view, so force and reach are scored together, in the field of American painting in the 1920s and the modernism of New York. The intrinsic force is real and moderate: the magnified, cropped flower made the still life an American modern form, near abstraction without leaving the object, and claimed a large scale for a small subject. But the reorganisation was the series’, begun in 1924, and its devices were partly photography’s. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: very wide as an image and as the type of O’Keeffe’s art; taken up in the 1970s by feminist art; a pervasive presence in the visual culture of the flower close-up. Within painting the redirection is hard to show, for the New York painters after the war did not take their field from her. Reach broad and diffuse, force bounded by the series.
Soundgarden · Music
8.0 · Tier IV
The field is American rock of the 1990s. The intrinsic force: the record showed that the heavy, downtuned rock of its scene could carry psychedelic song, Beatles melody and shifting meters, and that a long, slow, dark album could be a mass record without softening. That widened the idiom more than it reorganised it. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the record entered the Billboard 200 at number one, the sound of its downtuned ballads, Black Hole Sun above all, was heard across the alternative metal and rock radio of the rest of the decade, and Cornell’s voice became a model for singers in that field. Held from the top: the particular later records that turned on this one are hard to name, and the reorganisation of rock in those years belongs more to Nevermind and the scene.
Andrew Stanton · Film
8.0 · Tier IV
The field is the cinema of the 2000s, so force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force: the film showed that a mainstream animated feature could carry a long passage without dialogue, could make its leads speak through sound design alone, and could take an ecological and economic satire into the widest family market; with a cinematographer’s counsel on lens and light it moved computer animation toward the look of photography. It perfected and extended more than it reorganised what film could do. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature, and Pixar’s next feature, Up (2009), whose wordless opening montage of a marriage is often placed in its line. The redirection is real but lies largely within animation, and against the whole cinema of its decade that holds the figure just under eight.
Jean-Siméon Chardin · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
The field is French painting of the 1720s, and the still life in Europe after it. The intrinsic force is substantial: the canvas shows that the lowest genre can be painted at the scale and with the seriousness of the highest, and it did so inside the institution that ranked the genres, which received the painter on it. That reorganised the possible for one painter and for the French still life. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: in its own decades it was modest, since it opened a career, and the painter’s later and sparer still lifes and genre scenes carried more of his influence; the French still life after him did not take its violence. Its reach came later and as a single picture: Matisse’s copy, Ensor’s ray of 1892, Soutine’s ray of the 1920s, a station in the line of the opened carcass from Rembrandt’s ox to Soutine. Delayed reach is credited and discounted.
Antoni Gaudí · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
Scored in the field of Catalan and European building of its decades. The intrinsic force is real: the house carried the organic language past ornament on a frame to a whole front modelled as one surface and coloured as one, with no inherited element; it showed that broken ceramic and glass could clothe a city wall; and it is the hinge in Gaudí’s work between the historicist houses and Casa Milà. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it came late and bounded. Within a decade Noucentisme turned Catalan building against Modernisme, and the International Style had no use for it. The reach came through Dalí and the Surrealists, Sert and the rediscovery of the 1950s, the Museum of Modern Art’s exhibition of 1957 and later free-form building, and it belongs to Gaudí’s work as a whole. Delayed influence is credited and discounted.
Ustad Ahmad Lahori (attributed), under Shah Jahan · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
Field: Mughal and Indo-Islamic building in the subcontinent, seventeenth to nineteenth centuries. The intrinsic force is the Shahjahani palace at its most complete and most systematic: a capital fort laid out whole, its idiom fixed as a set of forms that could be taught and repeated. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the later Mughal palaces, the Rajput courts of the eighteenth century, the nawabi buildings of Awadh and the Deccan and the provincial durbar halls took up its baluster columns, cusped arcades, bangla roofs and the audience hall with a raised throne, and later capitals answered its plan of fort and city. But much of that idiom was set at Agra and Lahore in the 1630s and spread through all of Shah Jahan’s building, so the reach is shared; and its part as a national stage after 1947 is presence, not pressure on building.
Nok · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
Force and reach are scored together, in the field of the art of West Africa in the first millennium BC and after. The intrinsic force is high: the body is the earliest known large-scale figurative sculpture of sub-Saharan Africa, a fully formed tradition at its first appearance in the record, and its discovery reorganised what could be said about the antiquity of African art. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: continuity with the later terracottas of the region and with the naturalism of Ife has been argued, from shared details of coiffure and adornment and from geography, but not shown, and no line of descent through the millennium after the figures is demonstrated; since the 1940s the body has stood as the founding object of Nigerian art history and a national emblem. No later work by a named maker can be shown redirected by it, and the reach is discounted below the force.
Grant Wood · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
Shown and bought in 1930, so force and reach are scored together, in the field of American painting of the 1930s. The intrinsic force is moderate: the picture does not reorganise what painting can do; it shows that an old manner can carry a present subject with startling authority, and that the American scene can be painted as icon rather than anecdote. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it made Wood’s name at once, became the founding image of Regionalism beside Benton and Curry, and set the terms of American Scene painting for the decade. Beyond its field the reach of the image is vast, but most of it is quotation and parody, which is not redirection. And the field turned: by the late 1940s its consequential line ran through abstraction, against Regionalism.
Decimus Burton and Richard Turner · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
The intrinsic force is high in its own field. The house showed that a large building could be made of iron and glass alone, without masonry or timber, curved continuously, and that the rolled wrought-iron beam was an architectural member: for the glasshouse and the iron-framed hall of the 1840s, a real reorganisation of possibility. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: palm houses and winter gardens in Europe and its colonies answered it over the following decades, though how much they owe Kew rather than the timber conservatory before it or Turner’s other houses cannot be settled; Burton’s own later temperate house followed at Kew. But the line of iron and glass in public building runs chiefly through the Crystal Palace and its ridge-and-furrow, not Kew’s curve, and the railway shed carried the frame further. The house moved its genre; it did not redirect architecture.
U2 · Music
8.0 · Tier IV
The field is the rock album of its decade. The force is a demonstration: after a decade of irony a veteran band returned to sincerity and was believed, and refined its anthemic idiom into shorter, cleaner, more song-shaped form. Held from the top: it reorganised no possibility, and the renewal was of a career more than of the art. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the record restored the band to the centre of popular attention, its first four songs became among the most broadcast rock of the decade, and its warm, chorus-led stadium register is audible in the arena rock that followed, in Coldplay, Snow Patrol, Keane and The Killers, though much of that debt is to the band’s whole career.
Philip Johnson · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
Intrinsic force is modest and real. The house built first, and showed in a finished work, what Mies had drawn: the dwelling as a single glass room in nature. Its own additions, the grounded symmetrical box, the solid service core and the paired opaque building, are moves the field could take up. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: wide in image, narrower in substance. It was published at once and widely, and with Farnsworth it became the emblem of the glass house; the glass pavilion house, the service core in an open plan and the architect’s own estate as a laboratory followed in its wake, in America above all. But most of that line runs through Mies, whose house is the stronger source, and the Glass House’s own reach is shared and often credited to him. The estate’s later pavilions, and Johnson’s career, carry more of the field’s attention than the house itself.
Daniel Burnham · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
The field is the New York tall building of its decade. The intrinsic force: the skyscraper set free as a figure, seen whole from an open square, its frame making a near-impossible lot habitable at height; and an early, public demonstration that the tall building could leave the financial district and claim the uptown crossings. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: large in image and in the idea of the tower as a city’s emblem, which it helped found, and smaller in building. It did not change how towers were planned, framed or dressed; the wedge plan remained a solution for gore lots, used before and after; its style was soon left behind by the setback tower and then the International Style. Its reach ran most strongly through photography.
Meret Oppenheim · Visual art
7.9 · Tier III
Published, so force and reach are scored together, in the field of Paris and the Surrealist movement of the 1930s and its successors. The intrinsic force is not a reorganisation of what a work can be, since the readymade and the Surrealist object both existed; it is a culmination and a purification of the Surrealist object, the one most others are measured by, and the first major work of the movement to make touch its medium. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: its place in the Museum of Modern Art made it a textbook example of the movement, and the domestic uncanny in later sculpture, the furred and soft objects of later decades and feminist art’s return to the domestic object are often traced to it in general accounts; no particular later work is documented as taking it for its start, and the reach is discounted for that. A wide emblem with diffuse descent.
Gerhard Richter · Visual art
7.9 · Tier III
Published, so intrinsic force and achieved reach are scored together, in the field of German painting of the 1960s and of European painting’s dealings with photography in that decade. Intrinsic force: with Tante Marianne and Herr Heyde of the same year, the canvas made the photo-painting a means of history painting, showing that the impersonal copy of a family snapshot could carry the German past more truthfully than the allegories then on offer; a real reorganisation of what such painting could hold. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the photo-paintings as a body were among the most consequential moves in postwar painting, taken up by painters who work from photographs in many countries, and the German past in German art runs through them. Discounted because much of that reach belongs to the method, to the body of work and to the cycle of 1988, not to this canvas, which hung for decades behind the Iron Curtain and reached the field mainly as a reproduction.
Snøhetta · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
Scored on intrinsic force and achieved reach together, in the field of the European and Nordic civic and cultural building of its decades. The intrinsic force is real and partly shared: it made the walkable roof the whole identity of a national cultural institution, joined it to a working opera, and turned a state monument into public ground at a scale earlier landscape buildings had not reached in a building of this rank; but the roof as public ground had been argued through the 1990s and built before. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: considerable within its field. It is among the most cited buildings of its decade for the cultural building as public landscape; roofs to be climbed and walked have become a common answer in civic commissions since; it made Snøhetta’s name worldwide and led the remaking of Oslo’s waterfront. It redirected practice in a region and a type; it did not reorganise the art.
Sedefkâr Mehmed Agha · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
Force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force is modest: the building reorganises no possibility, but consolidates the classical scheme at the moment the line of great sultanic mosques was ending, and the century after it built few imperial mosques of its order. The reach is larger, and partly of another kind, since it fixed for later builders the image of the classical Ottoman mosque. How much of that is owed to this building rather than to the Şehzade, the Süleymaniye and the type cannot be separated, and it is credited in part. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the stepped cascade with semidomes on all sides repeated in the rebuilt Fatih Mosque after 1766, and in modern state and diaspora mosques, the Kocatepe Mosque in Ankara among them; six minarets taken up again at Çamlıca.
U2 · Music
7.8 · Tier III
The field is the rock album of the 1980s. The record showed that a post-punk band could take on the largest public subjects of its moment, sectarian killing and the nuclear threat, with no irony at all, and make them carry as arena rock; it fused post-punk drum and guitar with the anthem and the hymn, and set faith inside rock without the forms of Christian music. That is a real enlargement of what the decade’s rock could claim, not a reorganisation of possibility: the means were known. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the record made the band an international force, and its big, earnest, drum-led anthem became a manner in the decade’s rock. Part of that reach belongs to the band’s later and larger records, and it is discounted.
Amrita Sher-Gil · Visual art
7.8 · Tier III
The field is Indian painting of the 1930s. The intrinsic force is a real reorganisation of possibility: the canvas showed that modern oil painting, learned in Paris, could take Indian life as its subject without either the academic costume piece or the nationalist revival, and it set the human figure, grave and unidealised, at the centre of that possibility. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the painter’s work as a body is the named precedent for the generation that followed, the Progressive Artists’ Group of Bombay (Souza, Raza, Husain) and painters of the figure such as K. G. Subramanyan and Arpita Singh. But the reach is chiefly the body’s and the name’s; within the body the trilogy of 1937 is the more decisive work, and outside India the reach is late and moderate.
Christopher Nolan · Film
7.8 · Tier III
Field: the cinema of the 2000s and the late 1990s it drew on, so force and reach are scored together. Intrinsic force: the film made subjective time the governing structure of a feature and showed that an audience would assemble a story backwards for itself; it is the purest case of the puzzle film of the turn of the century, beside The Sixth Sense, Fight Club and Mulholland Drive. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: an independent success that ran for months in American cinemas, two Academy Award nominations, a model for the nonlinear thriller in film and television, and a place in the teaching of screenwriting. The limit stands: the reach runs largely through one director’s later films and a genre’s habits, and the force reordered narrative more than it changed what film could do.
Joel Coen and Ethan Coen · Film
7.8 · Tier III
The field is the cinema of the 2000s. Intrinsic force: moderate. The film reorganised no basic possibility of narrative cinema; it perfected a comic, allusive manner its makers already owned, and its formal novelties are a use of music and a process of colour. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it is wide, and much of it lies outside cinema, where it is credited and discounted; the soundtrack album, produced by Burnett, became one of the best-selling records of its decade and is widely credited with a revival of old-time and bluegrass music and with the Americana that followed, and the concert film Down from the Mountain came out of it. Inside cinema the digital finish it used became within a few years the industry’s standard, the film the occasion more than the cause. Its mark on later film narrative is slight.
Apollodorus of Damascus (attributed) · Architecture
7.8 · Tier III
The field is Roman imperial building of its century. The intrinsic force is high: a multi-storey urban complex in brick-faced concrete, a hillside rebuilt as rooms, a cross-vaulted hall on corbels with its thrust carried outward, a real enlargement of what concrete could serve, from palace and bath to the working city. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the cross-vaulted hall belongs to the line that leads to the great vaulted halls of the later baths and basilicas, but the market is one instance in that line rather than its demonstrated source, and descent from it is inference. Through the medieval and Renaissance centuries it was a fortress and a convent, hidden in later fabric, not a model answered. Its reach is chiefly the delayed reach of twentieth-century study, credited at a discount.
Howard Hawks · Film
7.8 · Tier III
The field is the cinema of the 1940s, with the American screwball comedy of the late 1930s behind it. The intrinsic force: the fullest statement in the classical sound film of overlapping, accelerated dialogue, and of the working woman as the equal in speed and competence of the man she spars with. It perfected a manner Hawks had begun more than it reorganised what film could do. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the overlapping-dialogue line that runs to Robert Altman’s sound in the 1970s and to the rapid talk of later American screen comedy and television; the film’s standing as the model of the fast-talking newsroom and of the professional heroine; and the later versions of the property, Billy Wilder’s The Front Page (1974) and Switching Channels (1988), measured against it rather than against the play. The reach is real and lies mainly in comic dialogue and in the image of a heroine; others moved the decade more.
James Cameron · Film
7.8 · Tier III
The field is the cinema of the 1980s, and force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force is real: the film fused the horror film’s dread to the action film’s momentum with a control few had reached, and put a woman at the centre of an action spectacle as its commander, not its survivor. That reorganises a popular genre more than the art of film. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it is very wide and the stronger component: the colonial marine, the pulse rifle, the motion tracker and the hive became a template for combat science fiction, above all in video games, and Ripley here set the figure of the armed heroine for the action cinema that followed. Most of that reach belongs to genre and industry, and the pressure on the decade’s cinema at large is smaller than its imitation suggests.
Pierre Koenig · Architecture
7.8 · Tier III
Built in the programme and photographed in 1960, so force and reach are scored together, in the field of the Californian and American modern house. The intrinsic force is moderate: the house did not reorganise what a house could be, but carried an existing reorganisation, the steel-framed, glass-walled, open-plan house of the programme, to its fullest and most visible demonstration, on a site that showed what lightness could do on the hills. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: wide. Through Shulman’s photograph the house became the image of postwar Los Angeles modernism and of the steel and glass house far beyond the city, and it shaped how the hillside house there was imagined and how modern houses have been photographed and sold since. Its fame grew from the 1980s as the period was rediscovered, and that delayed reach is credited. The reach runs more through image and taste than through the redirection of building.
Frank Gehry · Architecture
7.8 · Tier III
Standing since 2003, it is scored on force and reach together, in the field of the concert hall and the American civic building of its decades. The force is real and partly shared: the hall joined the vineyard room to an envelope of free curved surfaces made buildable by software, and gave an American city a cultural building as its emblem; but the built free-form envelope was shown first at Bilbao, and the room was Scharoun’s. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: considerable and specific. The concert hall since 2003 has largely been a vineyard or surround room in a sculptural envelope, Toyota’s later rooms, in Hamburg and Paris among them, followed this one, and downtown Los Angeles was redirected round it. It is a summit of a turn more than the turn itself.
Alfonso Cuarón · Film
7.8 · Tier III
The field is the cinema of the 2010s. The intrinsic force is real: the film showed that a digital world and live performance could be joined so completely that the long take, once a matter of choreography in a real place, could be built in a virtual space, and that 3D could be composed as depth and peril rather than added. That reorganises a part of the medium’s possibility. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the film opened a cycle of large and serious space films, Interstellar (2014) and The Martian (2015) among them, and set the terms for Cuarón’s own long takes after it; its seven Academy Awards are presence, not proof, and are not weighed. Held below the gate because the redirection lies in technique, in how films are made more than in what they say.
Harold Ramis · Film
7.4 · Tier III
Field: the cinema of the 1990s. The intrinsic force is real: the film made the time loop a narrative form in its own right, a structure in which repetition carries the development of character, and showed that a comedy could carry a moral education without leaving its genre. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the title entered the language as a word for a day that repeats, and the loop became a genre, in part in Run Lola Run (1998) and fully in Source Code (2011), Edge of Tomorrow (2014), Happy Death Day (2017), Russian Doll (2019) and Palm Springs (2020), with many television episodes that name it. What holds the axis six tenths below the bar of the Epochal Gate: the reach is of a device of plot, not a reorganisation of the image or of how films are made.
John Crowley · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
The field is the American novel of its decade, with fantasy in English the part of it the book entered. The force: it showed that fantasy could be a literary novel of the first order, domestic, American, slow and adult, without the apparatus of the secondary world, and it gave the field a model of faerie as something inside the ordinary rather than beyond it. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is that the reach stops largely at the genre’s border: the novel at large did not turn on the book, and what descends from it is a manner within fantasy more than a redirection of fiction, a descent more easily asserted than documented. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the World Fantasy Award for Best Novel in 1982, and a standing among writers and readers of literary fantasy as one of its central books.
Vladimir Nabokov · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
The field is the novel in English of the later twentieth century. The intrinsic force is real: the book showed that the family chronicle could be rebuilt as a counter-world and a machine of memory, that a novel could carry a treatise on time and three languages at once, and it pressed the invented-world novel towards the highest literary seriousness. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the reach is modest for a book of its ambition. The influence of the late Nabokov on later fiction runs mostly through Lolita and Pale Fire; no school or line of novels can be shown to descend from Ada in particular, and none is supposed here. The book is admired and studied more than it is followed.
Gandharan · Visual art
8.3 · Tier IV
The field is Gandharan sculpture of the Kushan period and, more widely, Buddhist image making. The intrinsic force is high: the work shows that the sacred image could carry extreme suffering and stay sacred, and it is the fullest statement of that possibility in its school. The reach is narrower. Within Gandhara the type stayed rare and did not become a norm; the mainstream of Buddhist imagery in India and across Asia went on with the serene, full-bodied Buddha, through Mathura, Sarnath and the art of the routes east. Its standing since the late nineteenth century as the emblem of Gandharan art is real, and it is presence, not redirection; copies and reproductions are the same. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: a statement its school did not follow, and a tradition that kept the auspicious body. Below the rest of the eleven, and above The Swing at 7.4.
Evelyn Waugh · Literature
8.3 · Tier IV
One of the three lowest of the twelve. The field is the English novel of the 1930s. The intrinsic force is a real reorganisation of what the comic novel could hold: the clipped, external, party-and-telephone manner shown able to carry tragedy without softening, and satire shown able to end in horror. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the book is the hinge of Waugh’s own career, between the farces and the gravity of Brideshead Revisited (1945) and the Sword of Honour trilogy (1952 to 1961), which returns to the cuckolded decent man in Guy Crouchback; it stands behind the dry, ironic, dialogue-led English novel of manners after the war, where Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time shares its world and method, and Muriel Spark’s cold comic fatalism is often traced to it, how far being argued. What holds the axis there is that the wider field was not redirected by this book alone: Waugh’s reach is that of his whole manner, and this novel is not the source of a mode.
Johannes Vermeer · Visual art
8.3 · Tier IV
The field is Dutch genre painting of the 1650s and 1660s. The intrinsic force is real and modest: the purest statement of what the Delft interior could do with one figure, light and silence, and a handling of light that extended what paint could do; but it reorganised no genre, and the kitchen maid was a subject before it and after. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: within its decade small, since Vermeer worked slowly for a narrow circle and was nearly forgotten, and the field moved without him; after the revival real and discounted, a defining image of the absorbed figure in the century of Hammershøi’s quiet rooms and of photographic and filmed stillness, and among the most reproduced pictures of its century, used to sell dairy products. Much of that is emblem, not redirection.
Basil Spence · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Force and reach, in the field of British and European church building and war memorial architecture of the mid twentieth century. The intrinsic force: the pairing of ruin and new church is a real reorganisation of how a destroyed sacred building may be answered, and Spence’s gathering of the leading British artists into one commission set a pattern; the church itself reorganises little. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: considerable in memory and patronage, smaller in architecture. The keeping of a ruin beside new work has parallels rather than followers; the commissioning of artists for churches spread in Britain; the cathedral became a model of reconciliation through its ministry, which is use more than architecture. Church building after 1962 largely took the other road, toward the central altar. Reach is credited, the architectural redirection discounted.
Jim Jarmusch · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
Released in 1995, so force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force is high: the film reorganises the western’s relation to its Native figure, the guide as the one who knows and the white hero as the one who misunderstands, and to death, the genre’s ending made a crossing rather than a showdown. Beside the decade’s commercial and revisionist westerns it is a singular object. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it is a lasting cult and critical film, named in later talk of the acid western and of slow cinema, and its Native characters are cited; but it did not redirect the mainstream, and its influence is diffuse rather than traceable in a line of works. Reach is what holds the axis here.
Gustav Klimt · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
Force and reach together, in painting and decoration in Vienna and central Europe in the decade after 1900. The force: the frieze reorganised the mural as a flat field of line, gold and void, carrying a full allegorical programme without perspective or modelled bodies, and it is the hinge of Klimt’s gold period. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Klimt’s Stoclet Frieze in Brussels, 1905 to 1911, which takes up its structure; The Kiss of 1907 to 1908, whose couple in a sealed gold field is this frieze’s last embrace made a picture; the Kunstschau of 1908 and the Wiener Werkstätte’s joining of the arts; the young Schiele and Kokoschka in their first manner. Discounted, because the reach runs mostly through Klimt and his circle, the frieze was hidden for eighty years when it could have reached furthest, and the field soon turned elsewhere.
Luigi Vanvitelli · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
The field is Italian and Bourbon building of the eighteenth century, and the royal palace of Europe in that century. The intrinsic force is high: the work is the summation of the Italian late Baroque palace and the most coherent answer in Italy to Versailles, a real synthesis of the French type with Roman scenography, and an integration of palace, park and water on one axis at a scale few rivals reached. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: limited. It entered its field as the field was closing, the courts of Europe turning to Neoclassical and smaller forms, and no line of great palaces descends from it. Its reach runs through Naples and the south, through Vanvitelli’s school and his son, and through the landscape park’s arrival in southern Italy. It is a culmination, not a turning point.
Lee Chang-dong · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
The field is the cinema of the 2010s, so force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force: the film showed that the art-film mystery of the unsolved disappearance could carry a class argument, and that indeterminacy could be the content of a social film rather than an evasion of it, a thriller whose solution is withheld as honesty about what its hero can know. It perfected a manner more than it reorganised film. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: wide in criticism and short in time, the FIPRESCI prize at Cannes, a place on most lists of the decade’s best, the first Korean film on the Academy’s foreign-language shortlist. Redirection of later films is not shown. It is paired with Parasite (2019) as a Korean film of class, but as a sibling, not a source, and the figure is mostly force.
Ikeda Terumasa · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Force and reach are scored together, in the field of the Japanese castle of its century. The intrinsic force is the fullest realisation of the type, the connected keep group and the layered approach made one work; the reorganisation of what a castle could be belonged to Azuchi. Reach is bounded: within six years of completion the edict of 1615 limited castles to one per province, and little building followed for the castle to redirect. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: since the Meiji years it has been the castle by which Japan and the world picture the Japanese castle, the model invoked by the reconstructions of the twentieth century and the castle of films. That is wide presence more than redirection, and it is credited lightly.
Paul Thomas Anderson · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
Released in 2017, so force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force is moderate and real: the film showed that the heritage picture, a genre treated as safe and middlebrow, could carry a dark comedy of power without breaking its surface, and it made a woman’s poisoning of her husband the solution rather than the crime. It did not reorganise what film can do. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: over nine years it is cited among the period films of its moment that sharpened the costume drama’s edges, and its mark on fashion imagery and on the critical taste for the toxic romance is visible but diffuse. The Favourite (2018) came from another line.
Qing builders, under the Qianlong Emperor; rebuilt under Cixi · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
The field is the Chinese imperial and scholar’s garden of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The intrinsic force is a summation rather than a reorganisation: the imperial lake-and-islands garden joined to a real landscape at the scale of a district, the regional garden traditions gathered into one composition, the tradition carried to its largest built statement but not turned. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: real and bounded. It was one of the great gardens of the western hills and, after 1860 and 1900, the one that stood, so it became the type of the Chinese imperial garden to the world and to China; but the tradition it summed ended with the dynasty, and the gardens that came after took the Jiangnan scholar’s garden, not this one, as their model.
John Milton · Literature
8.1 · Tier IV
The field is English poetic drama and the masque in the 1630s, and English verse of the century. The intrinsic force is real: this is the work by which the masque became a poem that can be read without its performance, and the first full sounding of the blank verse and the argument of temptation that Paradise Lost would carry; Comus’s rhetoric is a first draft of the tempter’s in Eden. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: narrower than the force. The court masque ended with the Civil War, so the swerve redirected no form; what lived was the text. John Dalton’s adaptation with Arne’s music (1738) gave it a long stage life, and the poem was a school of lyric and blank verse for later poets. That is presence more than redirection, and it holds the axis below the gate.
Sawai Jai Singh II · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
The field is Indian and Islamic astronomy and the building of the courts of northern India in the eighteenth century. The intrinsic force is high: the five observatories are the culmination of the masonry instrument, a real reorganisation of how an observatory can be built, and Jaipur is their fullest statement. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: in its own field it is narrow. No one continued the programme; after Jai Singh’s death the observatories fell out of use, and astronomy in India went the way of the telescope. Its later reach is of another kind, as a source of form for modern artists and architects and as an emblem of Indian science. That reach is real, delayed and diffuse, and it is credited and discounted. What holds the axis below the gate is the want of any successor in the field it culminated.
John Ruskin · Literature
8.1 · Tier IV
The field is English autobiography and the memoir after it. The intrinsic force is high in kind: a reorganisation of what an autobiography could be about, perception rather than deeds, faith or argument, and a demonstration that selection and silence could be the method of a life written by its subject. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the book stands in the line that runs to Gosse’s Father and Son (1907) and to the twentieth century memoir of childhood and the eye, Clark’s Another Part of the Wood and Nabokov’s Speak, Memory among it, and Proust’s long engagement with Ruskin is part of its afterlife, though not of this book alone. What holds the axis there is that no later book can be shown to have taken its method from this one rather than from the tradition it belongs to.
Maya, under Jasaw Chan K'awiil I · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
The field is Classic Maya building of the Petén in the eighth century. The intrinsic force: the clearest statement of the Late Classic Tikal temple, a vertical funerary monument standing alone, and the opening of the great programme of building by which Tikal answered its defeat. The type was shared in the Petén, not founded here, and Temple II, raised in the same reign, holds it too. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: direct within Tikal, in the temples that followed in the next generation, the larger Temple IV among them, built to the same type; cut short when the Classic Maya cities ceased building within about a century. Its later reach is as an emblem, the image of the Maya city for the modern world, which is presence and lends little here.
Egyptian (Old Kingdom) · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
The field is private sculpture of the Old Kingdom, and beyond it the long history of the scribe statue. The type this figure belongs to proved one of the most durable images in Egyptian art, carried on through the Middle Kingdom and the New, when high officials had themselves shown as scribes long after the Old Kingdom. That reach belongs to the type. Whether this statue moved the type cannot be said, since it lay in a tomb and was made among others. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: since 1850 the figure has been named and particular in the history of art, a standard of Old Kingdom naturalism, the instance cited for the inlaid eye and the portrait of a man who was not a king. Among later makers its influence is diffuse. Fame is not reach.
Max Ernst · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
Intrinsic force: the picture shows that an automatic, chance technique can carry the gravity of history painting, a real reorganisation of what Surrealist chance could be for. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Ernst arrived in New York in 1941 and stood at the centre of the exiled Surrealists and of Peggy Guggenheim’s Art of This Century, and the young Americans who became the Abstract Expressionists took from that circle the use of chance and of process as content; his oscillation drip technique of the same years is commonly cited in relation to Pollock. That reach belongs to his circle and practice at large more than to this canvas. No later works can be named that answer this picture directly, and decalcomania remained a minor technique. Its wide reproduction as a picture of the war’s Europe is presence, not reach.
Gustav Klimt · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
Published and shown, so force and reach are scored together, in the field of Viennese and Central European painting from 1900 to 1915. The intrinsic force is real and partial: the fusion of figure and abstract ornament, of portrait and decorative scheme, reorganises what a portrait could be, and it is carried here to its extreme instance. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Schiele’s and the young Kokoschka’s early work answer the gold manner and turn from it; the Wiener Werkstätte and Art Deco design carried the ornamental programme on. But the main reorganisation of European painting in the same decade went through Paris, where Les Demoiselles d’Avignon is of 1907 and owes this nothing, and the gold manner closed with Klimt himself. The later reach is overwhelmingly in reproduction and design, which is presence, not pressure. Strong force, narrow reach in painting.
Vladimir-Suzdal builders, under Andrey Bogolyubsky · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
Intrinsic force: the church distils the Vladimir-Suzdal synthesis of Byzantine plan, Romanesque wall and white stone into its purest single statement, and shows that the cross-in-square church can be a vertical figure, a real but bounded reorganisation within a school whose main moves were made by the cathedrals round it. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the line runs on to the carved walls of Vladimir in the 1190s and to the white-stone tradition the Moscow builders later claimed as their inheritance, and the nineteenth and twentieth century revival drew on the school. But the Mongol conquest cut the school off within decades, and the church’s reach as image exceeds its reach as model.
Chamberlin, Powell and Bon · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
The field is postwar British and European urban building. The intrinsic force: the most complete built statement of the multi-level city at the scale of a quarter, with culture, learning, worship and dwelling in one structure, a real reorganisation of how a city centre could be lived, built from ideas others had made. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: in its own time narrow, for by the 1970s the deck and the tower were in retreat, the City’s upper walkway network was abandoned, and the estate was more the end of a line than a beginning. Its later reach is wide but of another kind: the return of Brutalism to favour, the listing of postwar housing, the case for dense central dwelling. It is reach of argument more than of buildings.
Many masters, from 1386; facade completed in the nineteenth century · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
Force and reach are scored together, in Italian building of the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The intrinsic force: the largest Gothic project of Italy, a works office that trained generations of Lombard masons and sculptors, and a debate that set down in writing the relation of geometry to building. But Italian building did not follow it. Florence had already turned elsewhere, and the Renaissance left Milan’s Gothic without a line; its later reach lies in the history of theory and in the completion of medieval fronts. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the Fabbrica’s workshop carried into Lombard building of the next century, the lantern gave Leonardo and Bramante a problem they drew on, and the building became the emblem of its city.
Court of Benin · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
The field is the court art of Benin and of the West African coast in the sixteenth century. Intrinsic force is high within the field: among the highest achievements of Benin ivory carving, a summit of the court’s portraiture, the royal pendant mask in its most refined state. It reorganises little of what sculpture could do; its devices are the court’s. Within its own tradition it stands as the exemplar of an established type rather than a redirection, and the court’s art continued on its own course. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: outside the field the reach is wide and late and partly the twin’s, the London mask the emblem of FESTAC 77 in Lagos and now among the best-known images of African art and of the argument for return; emblem more than redirection, credited in part.
Etruscan · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
The field is Etruscan art of the later sixth century and the funerary practice of central Italy. Intrinsic force: real and limited. The work is the fullest surviving statement of a type, the dead reclining on the lid of the vessel that holds them, and of the married pair within that type; it does not reorganise what sculpture could be, and its forms are Ionian. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: within Etruria the reclining figure on the lid became the standard funerary image for some four centuries, on the urns of Chiusi and Volterra and the sarcophagi of Tarquinia, and the Roman reclining effigy continues it, though the line runs through the type rather than through this object, and the Louvre pair stands beside it as an equal. Beyond its field it is an emblem: the image of the Etruscans, of the woman at the table, of conjugal love in death. That is presence more than redirection.
Thomas Bohier and Catherine Briçonnet; gallery by Philibert de l'Orme and Jean Bullant · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
Force and reach are scored together, in the field of the French Renaissance château of the sixteenth century, on the Loire and around Paris. The intrinsic force is real but bounded: the block’s rational plan and straight stair are part of the turn from medieval castle to planned house, and the bridge-gallery is a genuine reorganisation of what a château may do with water. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: narrower than its fame. The straight stair became the French norm, but this was one of several houses that carried the change; the bridge-gallery found no real successors; the gallery in France was carried forward by Fontainebleau and the Louvre; de l’Orme’s and Bullant’s consequential work is elsewhere. Its reach as an image is very large, but image is presence, not redirection.
Built for Ashikaga Yoshimitsu; rebuilt 1955 · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
Standing in its first form from about 1398 and in its second since 1955, so force and reach are scored together, in the field of Japanese building and garden from the Muromachi period on. The intrinsic force is a culmination: the pavilion in a paradise garden carried to its height and made the emblem of Kitayama culture, the synthesis of court, warrior and Zen in Yoshimitsu’s reign, after the Ruriden. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Yoshimitsu’s grandson Yoshimasa answered it with the Silver Pavilion at Jishō-ji, and the many-storeyed garden pavilion has a later line. But Japanese dwelling went on through the shoin room, the tea room and Katsura (8.7), not the gilded stack; the fame since 1950 lends little here.
Jorge Luis Borges · Literature
8.0 · Tier IV
The field is fiction in Spanish, and the short story wherever it was read, in the 1970s. The intrinsic force is modest: the book showed that the metaphysical tale could be told plainly, without the scaffold of invented scholarship, and it confirmed the late manner, but it does not reorganise what a story can do, as Ficciones did. Delayed influence through the title story is credited, and it is concentrated in one piece. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: “El libro de arena” is one of the most cited fictions in the discourse on digital and infinite text, its figure known well beyond readers of the book, and “El otro” is widely anthologised; but writers who follow Borges follow the Borges of 1941 to 1949, not this one, and the field was not redirected.
Eileen Gray and Jean Badovici · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
The intrinsic force is real. The house reorganises the modern dwelling from the inside out, deriving form from the inhabitant’s body, privacy and hours, and making furniture and architecture one continuous design; against the doctrine of the machine it states a modernism of comfort and the shell. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: delayed and partly indirect. Published and seen by its circle in 1929, it was little copied; Gray built little afterward and was largely forgotten for forty years. From the 1970s her furniture from the house became a widely produced canon of modern design, and the house became central to the rereading of modernism, of authorship and of women in architecture. Delayed reach is credited and discounted, and its reach on building is diffuse.
Louise Nevelson · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
The field is American sculpture of the late 1950s, between the welded sculpture of Smith and Roszak, assemblage, and the coming of environments and Minimalism. The intrinsic force is real: a new sculptural type, the assembled monochrome wall that the viewer faces and is enclosed by, giving assemblage a scale and a gravity the box, the combine and junk sculpture did not have. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the walls brought the maker into the museum’s “Sixteen Americans” of 1959 and into the major collections, and the monochrome wall became a widely used form in public and architectural sculpture. But the line of descent is diffuse and rarely named by its heirs, and the decisive reorganisations of the decade did not run through her.
Don DeLillo · Literature
8.0 · Tier IV
The field is the American novel of the 1990s. The intrinsic force is real and bounded: the book set the writer against the terrorist and the crowd as rival authors of the culture, and gave American fiction a figure, the hidden novelist overtaken by the image, that it has used since; it did not reorganise what the novel could do, and its method is DeLillo’s own, already formed. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction of 1992; a standing among the most cited novels in the argument about fiction and terrorism, above all after 2001, when its lines on novelists and terrorists were widely quoted; and an influence on the novel of the vanishing writer that is felt more than documented. No school turned on it, and its reach lies mostly within criticism and the conversation of writers.
Woody Allen · Film
8.0 · Tier IV
Field: the cinema of the 1970s. Intrinsic force: the film reorganised what an American romantic comedy could look like and how seriously it could take its own melancholy, and it fixed an image of New York as a romance in black and white. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: its look and its talk pass into Allen’s own later work, into the New York relationship film, whose black and white and whose city descend from it, and into television’s habit of making the city a character; the opening montage became a standing image of the city on screen. The limit: it did not redirect the medium as the decade’s strongest films did, Chinatown (8.6) among them. It consolidated a mode more than it opened a field, a step taken on the ground Annie Hall (8.2) had broken.
Wassily Kandinsky · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
Field: European abstract painting in the 1920s, force and reach scored together. The intrinsic force is the single-form painting, a whole picture built from one elementary shape and its colour relations, on a space that is neither flat ground nor perspective. It is a clear and finished statement, made inside an abstraction that Kandinsky among others had opened a decade before, and it is discounted for Delaunay’s priority with the disc and the Russians’ with the compass circle. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: in the Guggenheim’s founding collection and the programme of the Museum of Non-Objective Painting from 1939, it helped make Kandinsky the American type of non-objective art; the circle as a sufficient subject returns in the targets and discs of the 1950s and 1960s, by a general line rather than a traceable one; and its reach in reproduction is wide.
Luis Buñuel · Film
8.0 · Tier IV
Released in 1977, so force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force is one real reorganisation of possibility: the demonstration that a single character can be split between performers without explanation, and that the split can carry the meaning; around it, a late art film that made political terror an ambient condition of bourgeois life. The rest of the film perfects Buñuel’s own manner rather than moving the field. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the device is cited wherever casting against identity is discussed; later films that divide one character among several performers are set beside it, their debt not settled here; and the film closed a great career and is taught with it. What holds the axis here is the narrowness of that reach: the device has few true successors, a famous stroke more often admired than adopted, within art cinema.
Tiwa builders · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
The field is the Puebloan building of the Rio Grande and the American Southwest. The intrinsic force is moderate: within its tradition the village is an outstanding and late instance, not a reorganisation, and it did not redirect Puebloan building, which it inherited and shares with its neighbours. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: considerable but indirect. With other pueblos, Taos was a model for the Pueblo Revival that remade the look of New Mexico from the 1910s, in the work of John Gaw Meem and Mary Colter among others, and its silhouette entered the wider modern idea of building as stacked cubes of earth. Much of that reach borrowed a surface, often stucco over a frame, and the axis discounts it. Reach outruns force, and the two together stand at 7.8.
Tokugawa builders · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
Force and reach are scored together, in the field of Japanese building and painting of the early seventeenth century. The intrinsic force is a synthesis brought to completion, not a reorganisation of possibility: the fullest surviving statement of the formal reception palace, and a decisive early work of the Kanō manner that served the shogunate for two and a half centuries. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the official style Tan’yū set here had wide reach in painting; in building, the Edo palace that served as the model for the lords is lost, and later shoin palaces followed the same conventions without naming this one. Its fame in the twentieth century is presence, not pressure.
Canaletto · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
Intrinsic force: the canvas shows that the view could carry the weight of serious painting, with light, labour and the ordinary city given the attention a history picture receives. That is a genuine enlargement of the genre. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Canaletto’s views as a body redirected view painting across Europe, through Bellotto in Dresden and Warsaw, Guardi and Marieschi, and the English topographical school after his years in London; but that reach belongs mainly to the later, brighter, commercial manner, not to this canvas. The canvas’s own reach is quieter: long admiration in England, a place in critical writing as the best of Canaletto, and a name as an instance of the working city in painting. Credited for the genre’s force, discounted for the particular canvas’s narrower reach.
Kara Walker · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
The field is American public and installation art of the 2010s. Intrinsic force: a real enlargement of what a temporary commission could carry, a history of labour, race and sex given the scale of public statuary and set in the industrial site of its subject, with the audience made part of the material. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: wide and immediate in attendance and in argument, a reference point in the debate about monuments and whose bodies they show that grew through the decade; Walker’s later commission for the Turbine Hall of Tate Modern (2019) continues it. That it redirected the practice of other artists is not shown, and part of its reach was carried by the controversy over the visitors’ photographs rather than by the sculpture. Force and reach both solid; neither epochal.
Hans Holbein the Younger · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
Published, so intrinsic force and achieved reach are scored together, in the field of northern portraiture of the 1520s and of painting in England. Intrinsic force: the first great work of Holbein’s English career, it set the terms of the Tudor portrait, the sitter’s rank carried by the exact matter of his dress and insignia, the face held without flattery, the ground plain. It is the start of that reorganisation, not its summit; The Ambassadors, the Cromwell and the later court portraits carry it further, and the line to Hilliard, Eworth and the Elizabethan portrait runs through the whole English output. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the image became the image of More, copied repeatedly in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and the source of the saint’s iconography, a reach wide and largely presence.
Eero Saarinen · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
Seen and used since 1962, so force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force: the airport terminal made a work of architecture, its interior governed by one continuous plastic law; the expressive concrete shell carried through to the smallest fitting; the building as the image of a company. Shell roofs and sculptural form were already in play, which holds the force down. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: real and bounded. In the airport the line that followed ran through Saarinen’s Dulles (1958 to 1962) and through processing efficiency, not through this hall; the expressive concrete vault faded in the 1960s before brutalism and then postmodernism; its return came late, in the free-form and computed architecture of the 1990s onward that claimed it as a forebear, and in its own conversion, a much-cited model of reuse.
Denis Villeneuve · Film
8.0 · Tier IV
The field is the cinema of the 2020s. The intrinsic force is real: the film, with Part One, showed that a large-format blockbuster could be made in an austere manner, with brutalist design, slow scale and sound as structure, and could carry a political argument against its own hero to a mass audience. It perfected a manner rather than reorganising what film can do; spectacle of this scale and gravity has precedents from Lean to Kubrick, and the gravity is the novel’s. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: wide circulation, two Academy Awards for craft, and a share in the renewed confidence in large-screen exhibition, scored only as far as two years show it. The force carries the figure.
Nikos Kazantzakis · Literature
8.0 · Tier IV
The field is Greek literature of the twentieth century, within the European novel of the 1940s. The intrinsic force is real and bounded: the book showed that a Greek novel could carry a philosophy of the age in a demotic voice and a rural setting, and joined the literature of ideas to the literature of the Greek countryside; it did not reorganise what the novel could do in Europe. Its redirection of later fiction is real in Greece, where Kazantzakis became the novelist every successor was measured against, and slighter beyond it, and much of its reach belongs to the hero and to the film rather than to the novel, which is discounted. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it made modern Greek fiction visible to the world on this scale for the first time, was translated into many languages, and through Cacoyannis’s film of 1964 became one of the most recognised Greek works of its century.
Taddeo Gaddi or Neri di Fioravanti (attributed) · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
Scored on intrinsic force and achieved reach together, in the field of Italian and European bridge building and the urban building of Tuscany. The intrinsic force is real: a low segmental arch carried on two piers across a river that had just destroyed its bridge, and a corridor showing that a ruler could lay a private route through a city’s existing fabric. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: considerable but bounded. The flat-arched bridge became the way of later Italian bridge building, though Ammannati’s Santa Trinita (1567 to 1569) answered it with a subtler curve, and the Rialto (1591) carried shops on a single flat arch in a line that runs from here; the inhabited bridge as an urban picture reached as far as Bath. But the segmental arch had other sources, and the corridor had no comparable successors. The bridge is more often cited than followed.
David Cronenberg · Film
7.9 · Tier III
The field is the cinema of the 1980s. The intrinsic force is real: the film showed that body horror could carry tragedy and a love story at studio scale, and that practical effects could be a means of feeling rather than of shock alone; it is a strong case for the remake as reinvention. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: a commercial success, the Academy Award for makeup, a sequel in 1989, an opera by Howard Shore in 2008, and a lasting place as a canonical body horror film, cited in a line that runs to Titane (2021) and The Substance (2024). What holds the figure: in a decade others reshaped, its reach lies within a genre; it changed what horror could feel more than what film could do.
Balkrishna Doshi · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
The field is Indian architecture of the late twentieth century. The intrinsic force is a real reorganisation of the institutional campus as a type, from a set of monuments to a shaded, walkable, extendable matrix, and a demonstration that Indian modern architecture could build its own idiom from climate, local material and inherited spatial forms. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: within India the campus is a model for institutional and university building, part of the lineage, with Correa’s work and Doshi’s own, that turned regional modernism away from the monumentality of Chandigarh and of Kahn. Outside India its reach has been slower and largely retrospective, carried by the Pritzker Prize rather than by a following of buildings, and that delayed reach is discounted. Within its field the pressure is clear but shared with its peers.
Wes Anderson · Film
7.9 · Tier III
The field is the cinema of the 2000s, with animation the nearest part of it. Intrinsic force: the film showed that an auteur’s whole style could pass into stop-motion, that animation for families could carry an adult comedy of manners without condescension, and that visible craft, rather than seamless illusion, could be the chosen surface of a studio feature. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the director returned to the form with Isle of Dogs (2018) and carried its diorama staging into his later live-action films; its animation director Mark Gustafson went on to co-direct Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio (2022); and the film is commonly named in the revival of handmade animation for adults. What holds it: that revival had other lines, and the film did not change how animation is made at large.
Billie Holiday · Music
7.9 · Tier III
The field is vocal jazz and the orchestral popular album of the 1950s. The intrinsic force is real and narrow: the record made the damaged late voice an expressive instrument in its own right, and argued, against the decade’s polish, that what a voice has lived can be the content of a performance and not its flaw. That reorganises what good singing could mean; it does not reorganise form or method, for the album’s construction is the industry’s standard. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the record is widely cited as the model for late, worn voices recorded in lush settings, and its “I’m a Fool to Want You” became a reference performance. Holiday’s wider influence runs through her whole career and is not credited here.
Harper Lee · Literature
7.9 · Tier III
The field is the American novel after Faulkner, and the intrinsic force is small: the book reorganises nothing in technique and little in what the Southern novel could do. Its reach is very wide, and mostly outside literary practice. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: John Grisham’s A Time to Kill (1989), a Southern lawyer defending a black client, is written in its line; Kathryn Stockett’s The Help (2009) keeps its moral frame, a young white woman’s eye on black Southern life; Atticus became the exemplar of the American lawyer in legal education and in the profession’s image of itself; and through school reading the book shaped how generations of American readers first met race in fiction, setting a pattern, the decent white witness at the centre, that later writers have written against. Reach that large among readers and that small among makers sits in the high sevens.
Peter of Illyria, under Pope Celestine I · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
The field is Late Antique and early medieval church building in Rome and the Latin West. Intrinsic force: Santa Sabina is the most complete statement of the columnar, arcaded, light-filled basilica of the Roman fifth century, a classicizing renewal of the type at a low point in the city’s fortunes. That is a real force within the tradition, but a consolidation, not a reorganisation. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the type it perfects ran on in Rome through the Carolingian basilicas and the churches of the twelfth century, and reached the Renaissance through the Tuscan line rather than through this building. Its own reach is above all as exemplar, the building by which the Early Christian basilica has been taught and pictured since the nineteenth century, which is closer to presence than to redirection.
Maurice Ravel · Music
7.9 · Tier III
The field is orchestral music of the 1920s, the decade of Stravinsky, Bartók and the Viennese twelve-note works. The intrinsic force is real: the work showed that orchestration alone could carry a large form, and that repetition without development could hold a concert audience for a quarter of an hour, a reorganisation of possibility made at full scale in a mainstream concert work. It did not redirect the field as its contemporaries did. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the work is wide in presence and narrower in redirection. The minimalists of the 1960s are often named as its heirs, but their sources lay elsewhere and the credit is delayed and discounted; its clearest reach is in the cinema’s long crescendo and in the study of orchestration.
Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec · Visual art
7.9 · Tier III
The field is Paris painting of the early 1890s. The intrinsic force is real and partial: the canvas is the largest and fullest statement in oil of the painter’s dance-hall world, and its green face carries the face as mask under artificial light past anything Degas had done, toward Munch, the Fauves and the young Picasso; but its devices were largely the tradition’s, and it reorganises no possibility of painting as Cézanne or Seurat did in the same years. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the painter’s reach was great and ran mainly through his posters and lithographs; this canvas shares in it as the oil summary of the manner, seen in Picasso’s café and dance-hall pictures of 1900 and 1901, and became the Moulin Rouge for a century’s eye. Emblem and part share more than redirection.
Sesshū Tōyō · Visual art
7.9 · Tier III
The field is Japanese ink painting of the late fifteenth century. The intrinsic force is moderate: the scroll is the fullest statement in Japan of the abbreviated wet manner, given authority by its own written lineage, but it opens no possibility of painting that Yujian and Muqi had not opened, and its force is to naturalise that possibility in a Japanese hand. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: within the field it is large and delayed. Sesshū became the founding name of Japanese ink painting; Unkoku Tōgan claimed his studio and succession, Hasegawa Tōhaku styled himself in descent from him, and the Kanō school made him ancestor and model, so that this manner became a standard exercise for three centuries. Outside East Asia, little.
A. M. Cassandre · Visual art
7.9 · Tier III
The field is the French poster, and force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force: the sheet fixes, in its fullest form, a way of making the advertising image a monument, the product as a reduced, heroic object without narrative or persuasion in words, which the maker’s practice had put into the French poster across a decade. As one work its own reorganisation of possibility is modest beyond his earlier sheets. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the image became the emblem of the ocean liner and of the Art Deco travel poster, and the low bow-on hull has been repeated in travel and shipping posters and in pastiche ever since. Much of that reach belongs to the maker’s body rather than to this sheet, and much of its presence is reproduction, which is counted under survival. Strong in its field, narrow beyond it.
Nam June Paik · Visual art
7.8 · Tier III
Intrinsic force is real. The work gave video art an emblem that was not about the hardware, and showed that a live electronic image could sit with sculpture and with sacred objects on equal terms. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the image is among the most reproduced of video art, its maker is by wide report the medium’s founding figure, and the configuration has entered teaching and the museum as shorthand for the medium’s self-reflection. But reach must be named and particular, and the particulars that can be named with confidence are chiefly the maker’s own long series of variants. That later video installation descends from this work rather than from the common practice of the moment is not shown by the record. Fame is presence and is not counted here. This moved a medium within art; it did not reorganise what art could be.
Man Ray · Visual art
7.8 · Tier III
The field is avant-garde photography in Paris in the 1920s, and the image was published at once, so force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force is a single, condensed demonstration that a photograph could be a Surrealist object, a real body turned into a sign by a mark and a title, in the year Surrealism was named, the first manifesto following later in 1924. It does not reorganise the medium: Man Ray’s own rayographs, from 1922, and his later solarisations did more to change what photography could do, and the defaced image was Duchamp’s move. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the image stands in every account of Surrealist photography and of the nude in modern art, feminist critique took it as a standard case, and it has been quoted and pastiched in photography, advertising and fashion for a century; but that reach is citation more than redirection, and no line of practice starts from it.
Wassily Kandinsky · Visual art
7.8 · Tier III
Field: abstract painting in Europe in the middle of the 1920s, the Bauhaus above all. The intrinsic force is a synthesis of geometric and lyrical abstraction at large scale, with colour, form and edge set to work as one argument; it is not a reorganisation of possibility, since abstraction itself, and Kandinsky’s share in founding it, came a dozen years before. The discount is heavy. The painter’s reach belongs to the canvases of 1910 to 1913 and, for these years, to his teaching and his book of 1926, which shaped the basic course at the Bauhaus and the design teaching after it. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: very wide as an image, among the most reproduced abstract paintings of its century and a standard example of colour theory in schools; but presence is not redirection, and no line of painting can be shown to run from this canvas rather than from the period, the teaching or the earlier work.
Antony Gormley · Visual art
7.8 · Tier III
The field is British public sculpture of the 1990s and after. The intrinsic force is moderate. The work does not reorganise what a sculpture can be; it carries a gallery artist’s practice of the body to monumental public scale, and shows that a large, abstracted figurative work can be loved by a public that was against it. It is a model more than a turning point: many later colossi followed its path, few of them well. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it became the reference point for landmark public art in Britain, commissions across the regions after 1998 were argued for and against in its name, and it is commonly credited with the confidence behind Gateshead’s riverside cultural projects. Beyond Britain its reach is narrower.
Rem Koolhaas (OMA) · Architecture
7.8 · Tier III
Scored on force and reach together, in the field of the concert hall and the European cultural building of its decades. The intrinsic force is considerable: it showed that a concert hall could be a structural monolith with the room as its core, that a shoebox could open to the city, and that a hall could be a free object made of its own interior plan rather than a wrapped box. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: real and narrower. It gave Porto a figure and Portugal a modern cultural emblem, and it is among the most cited halls of the 2000s; but the concert hall since 2005 has gone more toward the vineyard or surround room in a sculptural envelope, at Hamburg and Paris, than toward its model, and its glazed ends were not widely followed. It reinforced the shoebox’s return rather than causing it.
Duke Ellington · Music
7.8 · Tier III
Intrinsic force is modest. The record does not reorganise what jazz could be: its music is the band’s established language, and its one structural proposal, a long open interval inside a composed frame, was Ellington’s own earlier practice and was being worked out in small groups at the same time. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the record restored Ellington’s band to commercial and critical standing for the rest of his career, and with it the late suites; it made the live album a central format for jazz on Columbia and elsewhere; and the long tenor solo over a driving rhythm section, built to lift a room, became a familiar shape of the late 1950s and the 1960s, though through many channels.
Carl Orff · Music
7.8 · Tier III
The field is the concert music of the 1930s. The intrinsic force is bounded. The work did not reorganise what was possible, since Stravinsky had done that; it proved that a new choral and orchestral work could hold a mass audience by rhythm and repetition without development, and it made a German alternative to both late Romanticism and the Second Viennese School. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: very wide, and mostly outside composition. Within the concert field it founded Orff’s own line of stage works and fed the choral repertory. Outside it, the massed choir, the pounding ostinato and the Latin chant became a stock idiom of epic in film and advertising, from Excalibur (1981) to trailer music: presence and imitation more than reorganisation.
Francesco Bartolomeo Rastrelli · Architecture
7.8 · Tier III
The field is Russian architecture of the eighteenth century and the court residence of the north. The intrinsic force is high: the culmination of the Elizabethan Baroque, the palace that fixed the scale and the image of the imperial capital, a Russian synthesis of Western palace and native colour at its largest. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: within a year of the palace’s completion Catherine’s taste had turned to classicism, the Elizabethan Baroque ended with its architect’s fall from favour, and the style had no line of descent of any size. What the palace redirected was the city: Palace Square was formed against it, and Rossi’s arch and the Alexander Column answer it. That reach is real and local; the palace did not move European building as Versailles did.
Chuck Palahniuk · Literature
7.7 · Tier III
The field is American fiction of the 1990s. The intrinsic force is modest: the book did not reorganise what the novel could do, but joined available means, minimalist prose, a transgressive subject and the twist, into a form that proved portable. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it made Palahniuk the most imitated transgressive novelist of his generation, set a template, the short, refrain-driven first-person novel of riffing fact, that recurred through two decades of workshop and genre fiction, and put its first rule into common speech. But much of the reach belongs to David Fincher’s film of 1999, which is not credited to the novel, and the influence ran more through popular and cult fiction than through the literary field. Reach outruns force, and both stand below the reorganisation that White Noise made.
Tang, under Emperor Gaozong · Architecture
7.7 · Tier III
The field is the Buddhist tower of China and of the East Asian world it reached. The intrinsic force is a consolidation of possibility, not a reorganisation of it: the pagoda fixed, at imperial scale in the capital, the square storeyed brick tower in imitation of timber, the type of the storeyed masonry tower that imitates timber in that wider world. But the type was already in being, and its near neighbour, the Small Wild Goose Pagoda of 707 to 709, follows the other, dense-eave type. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the tower became the emblem of Chang’an and later of Xi’an, the touchstone named whenever the Tang pagoda is named, and the poems written on it carried it through Chinese literature. Wide in fame, moderate in redirection.
The White Stripes · Music
7.7 · Tier III
The field is the rock record of 2001, a year when guitar rock was widely thought spent. The intrinsic force is bounded: the record did not reorganise possibility so much as show that an old possibility, blues-rock played raw by two people, could still be heard as new and could carry feeling without irony. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: with The Strokes’ Is This It of the same year it is commonly credited with returning stripped guitar rock to the mainstream in Britain and America, and the two-piece rock band without bass became a common format in the decades after, though the Black Keys were forming in the same years and the line of descent is shared. Much of the band’s own reach came with its next record, Elephant, at 8.5 on this axis. Above Zooropa at 7.4; under Remain in Light at 8.5.
Eduard Riedel and Christian Jank, under Ludwig II · Architecture
7.7 · Tier III
The field is the castle revival of the nineteenth century, German above all, and the building of image that came after; force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force is modest. The castle sums and intensifies the Romantic castle rather than reorganising what a building can be, and its one real novelty, architecture as a theatrical scene for a single spectator, was in Ludwig’s other buildings, Linderhof and its Venus grotto, and in the stage design of its day. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: in architecture proper small, for historicism was ending and no school followed; in the building of image wide and late, the world’s picture of a castle and a source for the fairy-tale castles of the American theme park from the 1950s on. Delayed reach, carried by an image more than a building, is discounted twice.
Steven Spielberg · Film
7.7 · Tier III
Field: the cinema of the 1970s, so force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force is real: the film made the visitation a religious experience on the scale of the studio spectacle, and showed that effects could carry awe rather than combat. With Star Wars, released the same year, it turned Hollywood toward the large science fiction film of wonder and toward the director as the author of the blockbuster. What holds it at 7.8: that turn shares its credit with Star Wars and with the logic of Jaws, the New Hollywood it helped to end was replaced by nothing this film specifically founded, and its own line, contact as communion, is narrower than the field it helped to move. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the benign-contact film became a line, Spielberg’s own E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial first, with Contact and Arrival among the films commonly read as answering it; the five tones and the potato mountain entered common reference; and Trumbull’s craft of light set the look of the friendly visitor for a generation.
R.E.M. · Music
7.7 · Tier III
The field is the rock album of the early 1990s. The intrinsic force is modest: the record refines a folk-rock and chamber-pop palette inside a band’s evolving manner rather than reorganising what an album could do, and no practice can be shown to have turned on its form rather than on its sales and its one great song. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: a band out of college radio, with a mandolin single and no tour, reached number one in the United States and Britain six months before Nevermind, and showed the industry that the alternative audience could top the charts, a door through which much passed. The mandolin and strings of Losing My Religion fed the acoustic, string-dressed alternative records of the decade.
Zaha Hadid · Architecture
7.6 · Tier III
The field is public and cultural architecture of the early twenty-first century, and force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force is a culmination rather than a reorganisation: the building showed that the continuous surface could be built as a whole public building, ground to roof and exterior to interior, at a scale no earlier work of the line had reached, though Yokohama, Phaeno and MAXXI had already shown the principle. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it became the emblem of Hadid’s late work and of parametric architecture, reproduced in white flowing envelopes across China, the Gulf and Central Asia that rarely carry its idea, and it set a model of the oil state buying a world-famous cultural icon. It redirected little practice beyond its maker’s office and its imitators, and the critical tide turned from the gesture within a decade.
William Friedkin · Film
7.4 · Tier III
Field: the cinema of the 1970s. Intrinsic force: the film made horror a form of the prestige mainstream, treating the genre’s premise as fact and giving it realism, sound and makeup at a level the genre had not commanded; a reorganisation of where horror could stand, much less of what film could do. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: among the largest box-office successes of its time; the first horror film nominated for Best Picture; the possession film as a genre, from The Omen (1976) through the sequels and imitations of the decade to the cycles of the 2000s and 2010s and The Conjuring films; with Jaws it showed the studios what a genre premise could earn. Reach outruns force, and stays within one genre.
Tom Wright (Atkins) · Architecture
7.3 · Tier III
Field: building in the Arabian Gulf and the international luxury hotel at the end of the twentieth century. Intrinsic force is moderate: the building reorganised what a hotel and a tower could be for, an instrument of a place’s name, more than how either is planned or built. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: in its region it is large. In the Gulf it set the pattern that followed: the made island, in the Palm and the World; the record tower as a city’s sign, in the Burj Khalifa; the hotel or museum as national emblem in Abu Dhabi, Doha and beyond. Worldwide, the practice of the iconic commission owes something to it, though the Guggenheim Bilbao, two years earlier, carried that argument further in architecture proper. Architecture did not follow its form, and no line of sail towers of note descends from it. Strong as strategy, narrow as architecture.
Haddon Sundblom · Visual art
7.3 · Tier III
The field is American advertising illustration and Christmas imagery, and force and reach are scored together. Intrinsic force is modest: a reorganisation of how one figure looks, not a new possibility for painting or illustration. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the paintings fixed the face, build, costume and temperament that the commercial Santa has kept in the United States and, through the company’s international advertising, far beyond; Coca-Cola’s own Christmas advertising has reused this Santa for decades after 1964. Reproduction and sales are not counted as reach. Reach that large lifts the figure; force that modest holds it below 8.
Coldplay · Music
7.2 · Tier III
The field is the guitar rock album of the early 2000s. Intrinsic force is modest: the record reorganised no possibility. It refined the piano-led ballad and the slow build to an open chorus into a sound of great clarity, and showed a guitar band could put the piano at the centre and fill stadiums with sincerity while the New York revival sold irony and speed. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the piano and anthem rock of the mid-2000s, Keane, Snow Patrol and The Fray among it by common account, moved in the sound this record fixed, and the Clocks figure was widely imitated. What was taken up was a manner, itself inherited from U2 and Radiohead, not a method. It stands a tenth below All That You Can’t Leave Behind, whose stadium register this record carried forward and whose heirs, Keane and Snow Patrol among them, are its own: the same manner and the same reach, held a tenth lower for carrying what the earlier record made.
Anonymous (the Gawain poet) · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
The field is the poetry of England in the later fourteenth century, Chaucer, Gower and Langland, with the alliterative revival inside it, and behind it the Arthurian romance of Europe. The intrinsic force is high: the poem shows that romance can be moral comedy, that an ordeal can be made of manners, and that an English alliterative line can carry the finest courtly matter. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is reach. Surviving in one copy in a provincial dialect, the poem redirected nothing in English poetry for four centuries, and the road English verse took ran through Chaucer. Delayed influence is credited and discounted, and the force is not scored twice. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: since its first edition in 1839 it has become the type of the English romance in teaching and a central exhibit in the recovery of the alliterative tradition, and a source for modern writers and film: Iris Murdoch’s The Green Knight (1993) and David Lowery’s film (2021).
Terrence Malick · Film
8.7 · Tier IV
Released in 1998, so force and reach are scored together. The force: the film showed that the combat picture could be made as metaphysical reverie, with a chorus of inner voices and nature as witness, and that a cast of stars could be dissolved into a company. The reach is moderate and partly inward. Malick himself is the chief heir: The New World (2005) and The Tree of Life (2011) extend the method of floating voice and lit canopy this film established. Outside his work, David Gordon Green’s George Washington (2000) is an acknowledged debt, and the lyrical register of American independent cinema since owes it a lineage. But the war film went on as before; Saving Private Ryan, not this, set the genre’s grammar. Held at the figure for that reason.
Joseon builders · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
The field is Joseon and Korean state building from the fifteenth century to the nineteenth. The intrinsic force is considerable: the single extensible hall of chambers is a distinct answer to the problem of housing a dynasty’s dead, and Jongmyo is its fullest statement. Reach stands well below force. Much of the shrine’s manner of restraint was shared Confucian doctrine rather than an effect of this building alone, and it did not redirect building in China or Japan. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: within its own state the shrine was the model for royal ancestral shrines, and its restraint governed shrine and ritual building of the period; its modern reach, among architects who have admired its horizontality and repetition, is real but recent and diffuse, and is credited only a little.
Roman · Visual art
8.3 · Tier IV
The field is Roman wall painting of the late Republic. The intrinsic force is real: the fullest surviving demonstration of what the megalographia could do with a room, a life-size, continuous, psychologically charged sequence in which mortal and divine share one stage. It reorganised no possibility for its own time that can be shown: within a generation the style moved on to the flat fields and small pictures of the Third Style, and the frieze was a private room in one villa. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: since its excavation it has become the image by which Roman painting and the ancient mysteries are known, has shaped the modern understanding of Dionysiac religion and of women’s ritual, and has been answered in psychology and popular writing. That reach is delayed by eighteen centuries of burial, and is emblem and scholarship more than a field redirected; it is credited and discounted.
Greek (Classical) · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
The field is Greek sculpture of the fifth century BC. Intrinsic force is high: as made, the figures are a full realisation of the Classical reorganisation of the standing body, in bronze at heroic scale, and they would rank among the strongest works of that field if their place in it were known. But no ancient text names them securely, no copy is identified with them with certainty, and whatever they did to Greek sculpture cannot be told apart from what their period did. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: in their own tradition and decades, none that can be shown; since 1972, a change in what the modern field knows of original Greek bronze, alongside a very few other large originals; crowds in Florence and Rome in 1980 and 1981; and an emblem of Calabria. Reach into scholarship and attention is credited and discounted; it is not reach into the making of sculpture.
Martin Scorsese · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
The field is the cinema of the 2010s. Intrinsic force: high within its genre. The film is the gangster film’s self-revocation by its leading maker, with the cast that defined it, and it closes a line of American crime cinema by showing where it ends. But the force is spent inside one genre and one director’s line. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: in seven years the reach has been institutional and technical rather than artistic. The film became the case for the streaming service as patron of the expensive auteur film and the case in the dispute over theatrical windows, and its de-ageing became the reference point, praised and mocked, for that technique. What later films do has not demonstrably changed because of it; Scorsese’s own next film continues the late manner, a continuation rather than a redirection. Ten Academy Award nominations without a win are evidence of standing, not of reach. Delayed influence may come, and is not credited in advance.
Cormac McCarthy · Literature
8.2 · Tier IV
The field is the American novel and, within it, the literary Western. The intrinsic force is real and bounded: the book showed that a high, archaic and austere style could carry a love story, a coming of age and a cowboy romance without irony, and it joined the elegy for the ranch to the border novel. That is an extension within a form, not a reorganisation of it; the materials were the genre’s and the author’s own. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the National Book Award for Fiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award for 1992, a film in 2000, a trilogy, and a wide readership through which a public came to his earlier books. What holds it is that it did not redirect the novel or the Western. The redirection credited to its author runs through other books of his, and later literary Westerns owe this one a manner and a market more than a possibility.
Bichitr · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
The field is Mughal painting of the 1610s and 1620s. The intrinsic force: the picture is a classic statement of the Jahangiri allegorical portrait, fusing European emblem and Mughal portraiture into a political icon, and it helped fix a mode of imperial image in which the emperor is light, the world is below him and time is his subject. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: within the field, the haloed imperial portrait and the emblematic composition carried into Shah Jahan’s reign, where Bichitr himself worked, and into later Mughal and Rajput court portraiture. Outside its field the picture is a reference image for art historians and textbooks, which is presence, not reach. It reorganised no possibility beyond its court and shares the mode with Abu’l Hasan and the workshop.
James Gibbs · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
Force and reach are scored together, in the field of English building of the eighteenth century. The intrinsic force is considerable: the building made a free-standing domed library the centrepiece of a university, joined the University Church and the Schools into one civic set piece, and gave English Baroque a final statement as finished as any. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: limited. Gibbs’s wider influence ran through his London church and his Book of Architecture of 1728, copied from Britain to the American colonies; the library was not copied. The great round reading rooms that followed answer the Pantheon and the domed reading room as a type more than this building. It closed a line rather than opening one, though the picture of the domed library as the image of a university owes something to it.
Cormac McCarthy · Literature
8.1 · Tier IV
The field is the American novel of the early twenty-first century. The intrinsic force is moderate: a major literary novelist took the crime chase on its own terms and bent it into elegy, and the refusal of the genre’s ending is real pressure on the genre. It is not a reorganisation of what the novel can do, and within McCarthy’s own work it is a narrowing. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: wide in fame, and wide largely through the Coen brothers’ film of 2007, so that a good part of the reach is another work’s. The book is significant in its field, but the field is not unthinkable without it, and no influence on later fiction is credited here beyond what can be shown.
Hadhrami builders · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
Force and reach are scored together, in the field of earthen building and of the towns of the Hadramawt. The intrinsic force is considerable: Shibam is the fullest realisation of the Hadhrami tower-house city, and it shows what earth can do as a medium of urban height, a dense, vertical, defended settlement of sun-dried mud on a scale that still surprises engineers. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: within the Hadramawt it is the paradigm, the city against which the other towns are described, though it stands as the most complete instance of a shared regional tradition rather than its source; beyond the region its reach is recent, as an exemplar of density and of climate design in earth. Fame lends nothing.
Tulunid, under Ahmad ibn Tulun · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
The field is the building of Egypt and the Islamic west from the ninth to the eleventh century, with the long life of Cairo. The intrinsic force is moderate: it brought the full Abbasid vocabulary to Egypt in one stroke, and the brick pier, the pointed arcade and the carved stucco were its gift to Cairo, but it reorganised no possibility, since the type and its parts were Samarra’s. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the Fatimid mosque of al-Hakim, begun in 990, takes up its piered arcades; its stucco stands behind early Cairene ornament; Lajin made it a royal cause again. But Cairo turned to the portal, the dome and the madrasa, and the hypostyle with ziyadas had no Egyptian descendant of its scale.
Johannes Vermeer · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
The field is Dutch painting, in Delft and Holland, in the 1660s. The intrinsic force is real and small: the tronie turned from character study to optical encounter, a head made from light without line that no contemporary matched. The painter had a local reputation and few followers, and the picture was unknown to its own century. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: after the rediscovery Vermeer became a source for later painters of light and quiet rooms, but that reach belongs mainly to the interiors and to View of Delft, not to this head; its reach in modern visual culture, in the close photographic portrait, advertising, a novel and a film, is very wide, and most of it is the fame of an image, not a redirection of painting.
Andrei Tarkovsky · Film
8.0 · Tier IV
Released in 1986; the field is the cinema of the 1980s. Intrinsic force: a demonstration that a film could take an act of faith, and a miracle without irony, as its subject in a decade when serious cinema had largely given that up, and the long take carried to its extreme in the fire. Much of that force belongs to the earlier films, and it is discounted. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the slow cinema of the decades since, Sokurov, Béla Tarr, Nuri Bilge Ceylan and Carlos Reygadas among it, descends from Tarkovsky’s work, and Lars von Trier dedicated Antichrist (2009) to him; the burning house has been quoted and recalled. That reach runs mostly through the body of work, and what belongs to Mirror and Stalker is theirs.
Denis Johnson · Literature
8.0 · Tier IV
The field is American fiction of its decade, and within it the long war novel. The intrinsic force is real and bounded: the book showed that the visionary manner of Johnson’s short fiction could be sustained over an epic, and brought a religious seriousness to the novel of American intelligence. It did not reorganise what the war novel could do; Stone and Herr had done that. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the National Book Award for Fiction in 2007, wide and serious notice, the claim of some reviewers that it is the finest novel of the Vietnam war, and translation; but little sign that it has redirected what came after, and a standing still contested between readers who hold it Johnson’s masterpiece and readers who find it diffuse.
George Stubbs · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
The field is British painting of the 1760s, and the animal picture within it. The intrinsic force is real and specific: the canvas claims for the animal portrait the size and dignity of history painting and the grand portrait, against the academic hierarchy that set it near the bottom, and puts an anatomist’s knowledge in the place of formula; after Stubbs the horse could not be painted as the stiff rocking-horse of the earlier sporting tradition. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: most of Stubbs’s reach runs through The Anatomy of the Horse and the whole body of his work, felt in Ben Marshall, in Géricault’s horses and in the later sporting tradition, rather than through this canvas, little seen for most of its life; its late, wide fame is presence more than redirection.
Denys Lasdun · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
The intrinsic force is real and considerable within its tradition. The building recast the national theatre, a type Europe knew as a palace with a portico, as an open, terraced, public landscape with three kinds of stage under one roof, and it gave British brutalism its most public monument. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: narrower. The open-stage revival was Guthrie’s and was spreading before the Olivier opened; the open foyer was the Festival Hall’s; the building’s later influence on theatre design lies more in what was learned from the Olivier’s difficulties than in buildings that copied it, and abroad its reach is slight. Within British architecture it is a fixed point of reference, and its rehabilitation helped change how a nation regarded its postwar concrete.
Chimú builders · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
The field is building on the Andean coast and in the Andean states of the later centuries before conquest. The intrinsic force is substantial: the city reorganised what a capital could be, a field of royal precincts in earth, each a palace, treasury, court and tomb, at a scale no earthen city in the Americas reached. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: real within its region and narrow outside it. The Chimú carried the compound and the audiencia to their provincial centres; the Inca took Chimú craftsmen to Cuzco, and it has been argued, though not settled, that the Inca practice of a new palace and a kept body for each ruler echoes the Chimú. Beyond the Andes, and after the Spanish conquest, the reach is slight: the city has redirected little building since, and modern architecture has answered it only as motif. The reach holds the axis down.
David Lynch · Film
7.9 · Tier III
The field is the cinema of the 1990s. The intrinsic force is real: the film showed that an American narrative feature could give its protagonist another body and carry on as the same mind, and that a noir could be a loop rather than a line, in a decade of puzzle films that mostly kept their solutions. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: delayed, and narrower than the force. Its plainest heir is Lynch’s own Mulholland Drive (2001), which stands at 8.8 and carries the two-part dream and the doubled woman further, so that part of the credit returns to the director rather than to this film. Beyond it the reach is diffuse: the mind-game films of the next decade, none of which can be named with confidence as its heir, and an opera. Delay, and reach lodged in a later and better film, hold the figure.
Gerhard Richter · Visual art
7.9 · Tier III
Published, so intrinsic force and achieved reach are scored together, in the field of European painting of the 2010s and the art of Holocaust remembrance in Germany. Intrinsic force: within one painter’s work, the resolution of the split between photograph and abstraction that had defined it; and a painted position in the argument over representing the camps that holds both sides at once. That weighs within his work. It is not a reorganisation of what painting can do, since the covered image and the abstraction as memorial were available. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: in twelve years the cycle has been a centre of exhibitions and writing, its reach running into German memory culture more than into painting, and no body of later painting is known to have turned on it. Delayed influence cannot yet be credited.
Agnes Martin · Visual art
7.9 · Tier III
The field is American abstract painting of the early and middle 1960s. The intrinsic force is the hand-made grid as a whole painting, neither gesture nor system: a real reorganisation, which sat between Abstract Expressionism and Minimalism and was claimed by both. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Martin’s grids were taken up as a precedent by the grid and serial art of the later 1960s and by much abstraction since, her standing has grown steadily, and later painters of the quiet, hand-made grid and the restrained field name her as a source. The discount is heavy. Most of that reach belongs to the series and to the bands of the 1970s and after, not to this canvas, and the gold works were a side branch from which no later line of work is known to start.
Denis Villeneuve · Film
7.9 · Tier III
The field is the cinema of the 2020s, and five years is short. The intrinsic force is real: the film showed that a franchise epic could be made at the pace and in the tone of an art film and draw a wide audience back to cinemas in the pandemic’s wake; it renewed large-format spectacle; and it filmed a book that had defeated earlier attempts. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: its success secured a second part; it took six Academy Awards from ten nominations, Best Picture among them; it returned to IMAX screens in revival. Held below the gate because it reorganised the blockbuster’s manner more than what film can do, and its lasting reach is not yet shown.
John Bradfield and Ralph Freeman (Dorman Long) · Architecture
7.8 · Tier III
In use since 1932, so force and reach are scored together, in the field of the long-span steel bridge. The intrinsic force is substantial in execution and slight in reorganisation: the bridge proved that a steel arch of over 500 m could be built by cantilever over a working harbour and set the measure of width for long-span bridges for decades, but it opened no new possibility as a structural type does, and the long steel arch was soon overtaken for great spans by the suspension bridge, at the Golden Gate in 1937. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: large in its city and country, which it reorganised, turning the north shore into suburbs and fixing the rail and road plan round it; small in the bridge tradition, where Bayonne is its contemporary, not its follower.
Herzog and de Meuron · Architecture
7.8 · Tier III
Field: the concert hall and the European civic building of the early twenty-first century. Intrinsic force is real. The building joined the vineyard room to a vertical mixed-use town on an industrial block and made the seam a public square in the air; and in the White Skin it showed an acoustic surface designed and milled panel by panel at the scale of a whole hall, a step beyond the timber reflectors of earlier rooms. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: wide as an emblem, short as a demonstrated redirection. It became Hamburg’s figure at once, and concert and cultural buildings since have cited it; but under ten years cannot show a line of buildings descending from it, and its loudest effect in Germany has been as a cautionary tale of cost. Delayed influence is credited and discounted. It is a summit of the turn begun at Sydney and Bilbao more than the turn itself.
Egon Schiele · Visual art
7.8 · Tier III
The field is Viennese and Central European painting of the 1910s. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the force is modest to real, since the painter’s self-portraiture as a whole reorganised what a self-portrait could show, the self as an exposed and performing body, but this panel is a central and polished instance of that body of work, not its breaking point, and the reorganisation is carried chiefly by the works on paper of 1910 and 1911. The reach was delayed and then wide. The painter died in 1918 and Austrian painting did not follow his line closely; from the 1960s his contour, isolated figure and raw flesh entered figurative painting, illustration and the image of the artist, and this panel is one of the handful of images by which that manner is known. Reach of the painter is not reach of the panel.
Damien Hirst · Visual art
7.7 · Tier III
The field is British and European art around 1990. Intrinsic force is moderate to good: the work joins the monochrome to a living system and to the vanitas in one gesture, and shows a painting that is a habitat, a reorganisation of what a painting can host if not of what art can be. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: large inside Hirst’s own work, where the butterfly runs from these rooms into the monochromes with single butterflies, the kaleidoscope compositions of whole wings and much of the market for them; real in the young British art of the 1990s, for which the live organism became part of the vocabulary; outside that, thin, since art with living things had other and earlier sources. Fame and price are not reach.
Robert Altman · Film
7.7 · Tier III
Field: the cinema of the 1990s. The intrinsic force is real and bounded: the film showed that a reflexive satire of the industry, built on a genre spine and a cast of stars playing themselves, could be a popular film, and it made the long opening take a declared signature that later films answered. It perfected a mode more than it reorganised what film could do. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Best Director and Best Actor at Cannes in 1992; three Academy Award nominations, for direction, adapted screenplay and editing; a commercial success modest in figures and large for its kind; the start of Altman’s late renewal, from Short Cuts (8.2) to Gosford Park (2001); and a lasting place as the reference point for Hollywood satire in film and television. The redirection is real within its subject and narrow beyond it.
Ai Weiwei · Visual art
7.7 · Tier III
The field is Chinese contemporary art and international installation of the 2000s and 2010s. Intrinsic force: a real but partial reorganisation, the readymade inverted into the hand-made multiple, labour itself made the material of a monumental installation, and a Chinese artist’s critique of mass and state carried by the means of Chinese craft rather than by Western forms; much of it is the culmination of Ai’s work of that decade, not a first move. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it made Ai the most visible Chinese artist in the world and an emblem of art against state power, in a season when the state detained him, and the grey field and the seed in a hand are widely known. Redirection of practice is less shown: wide in presence, moderate in practice.
Minoan · Visual art
7.7 · Tier III
The field is Aegean painting of the Late Bronze Age. The intrinsic force is high for that field: the panel is the fullest surviving statement of Minoan pictorial movement, the flying gallop, the inverted body and the empty field that lets action carry the picture, a way of showing an instant of motion that Egypt and the Near East did not have. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: within its own world the subject and manner pass to Minoan-style painting in Egypt at Tell el-Dab’a; then the world that made it ended, and its reach was cut for over three thousand years. Since its recovery it has become the emblem of the Minoan civilization Evans reconstructed. That later reach is credited and discounted: wide, but largely as emblem.
Jasper Johns · Visual art
7.7 · Tier III
Field: American painting of the early and middle 1960s, between the close of Abstract Expressionism, Pop and the first Minimal and Conceptual work. The intrinsic force is real and partial. The painting makes a canvas into a lexicon of how things are represented, language, object, body, print and colour system held on one plane, and it puts the question that Conceptual art would put without paint. But the reorganisation was the painter’s already, made in the flags, targets and colour-word paintings of 1954 to 1959; this work gathers and extends it. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the reach that can be documented lies chiefly within the painter’s own work and the conversation with Duchamp; the cast body within painting is shared with other artists of the decade, and that this painting redirected them is not shown. Its reach is narrower than its maker’s.
Soundgarden · Music
7.7 · Tier III
The field is heavy and alternative rock of the early 1990s. The intrinsic force is real: the record showed that metal’s weight, uneven metres and psychedelic modality could be carried inside the alternative album, without metal’s display and without punk’s thinness. The reach is real but shared and hard to particularise: Nevermind, at 8.8 here, and Ten, at 8.4, moved more of the field that year, and much of the reach credited to the band runs through Superunknown. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Cash’s Rusty Cage carried the song into American country and folk, and the record’s place in the education of alternative metal guitarists is real but diffuse.
Anish Kapoor · Visual art
7.7 · Tier III
The field is public sculpture and civic art of the 2000s, and the large abstract sculpture of Kapoor’s own generation. The intrinsic force is a real reorganisation of the civic monument, from an object looked at to an apparatus in which the public sees itself and the city, at a seamless scale not achieved before; but it gathers Kapoor’s own prior reorganisation, made in the mirror works of the 1990s and in Sky Mirror of 2001, rather than making it. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: very wide in the public sphere, where it became the image of Chicago and of Millennium Park and a model for cities commissioning a single photographable landmark in a plaza; narrower within art practice, where no line of artists is known to start from it, and where much of its reach is as the emblem of public art as spectacle. Strong reach, partial force.
Alejandro González Iñárritu · Film
7.7 · Tier III
The field is the cinema of the 2010s. Intrinsic force: the film showed that a mainstream feature could be made as one apparent movement and that a percussion score could carry a narrative picture, and it joined the auteur’s backstage comedy to the decade’s quarrel with the superhero franchise at the moment that quarrel was loudest. That is a strong synthesis rather than a reorganisation of what film could do. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: wide circulation, and a share in the vogue for the long and the single take that followed, in which Victoria (2015) and 1917 (2019) stand, though how much of that vogue is this film’s and how much Lubezki’s earlier work is open; the drum score was imitated more than the form. Awards are presence, and are credited nothing here.
Yayoi Kusama · Visual art
7.6 · Tier III
The field is international installation art of the 2010s and the museums that show it. Intrinsic force is modest for the unit: the reorganisation, a painting made into a space of repetition that the body enters, belongs to the series and to 1965, and this room perfects a version of it rather than reorganising anything. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the queues at David Zwirner in 2013 and at The Broad from 2015 made the room the emblem of the immersive room and of the photograph taken in it; of the timed, booked visit to a single work; of the museum’s turn toward rooms built to be entered and shared; and of a commercial field of immersive light rooms that followed. Much of that reach belongs to the series and its maker, and much of it went into museum practice and entertainment rather than into what artists made next. Credited, and discounted for both.
Federico Fellini · Film
7.6 · Tier III
Released in 1953, so force and reach are scored together, in the cinema of the 1950s, a decade that holds Tokyo Story and Seven Samurai. The force is real: the film made the template of the ensemble film of aimless young men in a small place, plotless, episodic, comic and sad, ending in one departure, and it moved Italian cinema from neorealism toward a cinema of memory. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the word vitelloni entered Italian speech for such men; Martin Scorsese has named the film as a source for Mean Streets (1973); and the shape recurs in George Lucas’s American Graffiti (1973), Barry Levinson’s Diner (1982) and Fellini’s own Amarcord (1973). The reach is wide but of one kind: the film redirected a genre, and did not reorganise what cinema could do.
Jeff Koons · Visual art
7.5 · Tier III
Published, so intrinsic force and achieved reach are scored together, in the field of American and international sculpture of the 1990s and 2000s and the art market that became part of its matter. Intrinsic force: a culmination more than a reorganisation. Pop had made the commodity a subject and Rabbit had made the inflatable a mirrored monument; the dog fixed that move at public scale and made the flawless, fabricated, studio-produced spectacle object the type of a period. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the emblem of art and money at the turn of the century and again in 2013, the standard against which the polished, fabricated sculpture of the following decades is read, and imitated and parodied without end. It redirected little not also credited to Rabbit and to Koons as a whole, and much of its reach is as the thing argued against.
Sandro Botticelli · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
The field is Florentine and Italian painting about 1500. Intrinsic force is modest as reorganisation: this is a powerful late statement of an archaic devotional order, and it opened no possibility the field took up; the field went to Leonardo, Michelangelo and Raphael, the opposite way. In its own century it reached no one the record shows; it was in private hands and out of sight. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: a late reach, after the canvas came to England about 1800 and entered the National Gallery, through the nineteenth century’s recovery of Botticelli by Ruskin, Pater, the Pre-Raphaelite circle and Burne-Jones, to which it was one source among several. Delayed influence is credited and discounted; fame as a Christmas image is presence, not reach.
William Gaddis · Literature
8.3 · Tier IV
The field is the American novel of the 1980s, and this is the lowest of the twelve. The intrinsic force is real and bounded: the book showed that the large novel of systems could be compressed into a short domestic form without losing its social reach, and it turned the satire of money from JR onto the alliance of fundamentalism, media and covert foreign policy before that alliance was a common subject. What holds it here is reach: it moved little that its author’s larger books had not already moved, and Gaddis’s bearing on later American writers runs mainly through JR and The Recognitions. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: respectful and some enthusiastic reviews, no prize of note, and a standing as a way into Gaddis rather than as a model for the field.
Unknown (English or French) · Visual art
8.3 · Tier IV
The field is court painting in England and northern Europe in the 1390s, the International Gothic. The intrinsic force is high within the style: it is one of the finest panel paintings of its decade north of the Alps, and it shows that the court style could carry a personal political myth in devotional form. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: small and late. It was a private object, in private hands for over five centuries, and it redirected no painters; English panel painting after it did not continue in its line, and the English court style it may represent is otherwise almost wholly lost. Since 1929 its reach is that of an emblem, the image by which medieval English painting and Richard’s kingship are known. That is presence, not redirection, and it lifts the axis only a little.
Anselm Kiefer · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
Shown and published, so force and reach are scored together, in the field of German and international sculpture and installation about 1990. Intrinsic force: the library as ruin, the book as sealed vessel, a mystical cosmogony built from industrial matter; with the lead library before it, it made the archive a sculptural subject of memory and gave the art of its century one of its sterner images of what survives a destruction. The discount: much of that force belongs to the lead library, and Kiefer’s reach to his paintings of the 1980s. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Kiefer’s own later returns to the Lurianic theme, and the book and the library as figures of memorial art in the decade after, though derivation from this object is not demonstrated. It is seen steadily, but in one regional museum, and little that followed can be traced to it alone.
Martin Amis · Literature
8.2 · Tier IV
The field is the British novel of its years and, beyond it, the fiction of the Holocaust. The intrinsic force is real and bounded: the book showed that a perpetrator’s consciousness could be entered by form rather than by confession, that a formal device could carry moral knowledge about atrocity, and that a comic novelist could write the subject without either solemnity or obscenity. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: a place on the Booker shortlist of 1991; a continuing place in the debate over the representation of the Holocaust, where it is still cited; and a standing as one of the most read of Amis’s novels. What holds the axis at the foot of the twelve, with one other, is that reach: no practice or school can be shown to have turned on the book. Later fiction narrated by perpetrators did not take its form, and the backward narrative did not become an instrument others used to the same end.
Master Enrique and Juan Pérez · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force: León constitutes the glass-walled Rayonnant cathedral at an extreme, in a full cathedral and not a chapel, and it is the summit of the French manner in Spain. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it is narrow. Castilian and later Spanish Gothic did not follow it; the line ran instead toward the Catalan single-vessel churches, the hall churches and the vast late Gothic cathedrals, Seville Cathedral and the Giralda (8.4) among them, which kept their walls and their dark. León stands as an endpoint, an exemplar admired rather than a seed. Its later influence lies chiefly in the practice and theory of restoration in nineteenth-century Spain, credited and discounted, since the restoration and not the work moved that field. That holds it at 7.6.
Tang builders · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Field: Chinese timber building of the Tang and after, within the tradition of the East Asian hall. The intrinsic force is that of the most complete surviving statement of the Tang bracketed hall; but it did not reorganise possibility in its century, for it carried a manner shaped elsewhere, on capital and palace halls now lost. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the Liao halls of north China, at Dulesi in 984 and at Fengguosi, inherited the same system, but from the type, not demonstrably from this provincial hall. Its real reach came in 1937, when its discovery proved that Tang timber building survived in China and became a foundation of the modern history of Chinese architecture and its conservation. That reach is delayed, and it moved scholarship more than building.
Iris Murdoch · Literature
8.1 · Tier IV
One of the two lowest of the twelve. The field is the English novel of the later twentieth century. The intrinsic force is moderate: the book perfects a way of joining moral philosophy to comic and gothic fiction that Murdoch had built over a career, and does not reorganise what the English novel could do. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the Booker Prize of 1978 made it Murdoch’s best known novel, and it became a fixture of the late twentieth century English canon in teaching and in the anthologies of its period. What holds the axis there is that particular later works that changed course because of it are hard to name with confidence, and Murdoch’s larger influence on the philosophical novel in English belongs to her body of work, which is not what is scored here. A strong book in its field, not a turn in it.
Peder Vilhelm Jensen-Klint; completed by Kaare Klint · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
The field is Nordic church building and the brick tradition of northern Europe between the wars. The intrinsic force is genuine: the church proved that Gothic could be rebuilt as an abstract, repetitive architecture of one material at monumental scale, without historicist detail, and that the vernacular could carry a national monument. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the church stands at the head of a Danish brick tradition that continued strongly through the century; the stepped front of Hallgrímskirkja in Reykjavík is commonly said to descend from it, a debt credited as commonly stated, not as documented; and the reach of Kaare Klint’s furniture belongs to the chair and its maker and is credited lightly. Beyond the Nordic countries it did not redirect the field, and it is admired as a culmination more than followed as a model.
Don DeLillo · Literature
8.1 · Tier IV
The field is the American novel of the 1980s. The force is real and bounded: the book made a register, the elliptical, aphoristic, gravely comic prose of DeLillo’s later work, joined it to subjects that would define the decades after, terror, data, global business and the American abroad as target, and showed that the political novel could be written as a novel of language. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is that it did not reorganise the form: its means were in reach, and the reorganising force arrived fully only with the next book, White Noise, whose reach is not credited here; no school or practice can be shown to have turned on this book in particular, and force stands above reach. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: its standing in the criticism as the hinge of DeLillo’s career, its place in the teaching of his work, and the wide return to its themes after 2001.
Denis Johnson · Literature
8.1 · Tier IV
The field is American fiction of the 2010s, and the novella within it. The intrinsic force is real and bounded: the book showed that the historical West could be written as a single labourer’s life in a hundred pages, with the uncanny admitted into the plainest chronicle, and it made a strong case for the novella as a form that can carry a century. That widened a practice more than it reorganised one. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: high esteem, a place among the finalists for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction of 2012, a lasting place among writers and in the workshops as a model of compression, and Clint Bentley’s film of 2025, which brought it a wide new readership. What holds it at the foot of the twelve is that no school or practice can be shown to have turned on it, and the elegiac Western of the single life was not its invention.
Byzantine, under Justinian · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
Force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force: the monastery is the most complete surviving example of Justinian’s practice of fortifying holy places, and the type of the fortified desert monastery; it shows imperial building put to the service of a pilgrimage shrine at the edge of the empire. That is a real but not a large reorganisation of possibility, for the church form and the fortress form are both received. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the fortified monastery recurs across the Orthodox world, on Athos, in Serbia and Bulgaria and in the Coptic desert, but no line of descent can be traced through Sinai rather than through general need. Its reach is that of an exemplar and a destination. As a place it moved pilgrimage greatly; as architecture it redirected little.
Gustave Caillebotte · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
The field is French painting of the late 1870s and the painting of modern life. Intrinsic force is real: the canvas shows that the Impressionist subject could be carried at monumental size and with academic exactness, and its cropping and split field anticipate devices of later photography and painting; it is among the strongest single statements of Haussmann’s Paris in paint. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: in its decade it redirected little, since the painter was eclipsed, left the Paris street within a few years, and the canvas spent most of a century in private hands. Its later reach is largely of another kind, as the image by which the painter is known and an emblem of the century’s Paris, which is presence, not pressure. No documented line of descent is claimed.
Mark Rothko · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
Field: American abstract painting at the end of the 1960s, with Minimalism ascendant and colour-field painting in its later phase. The intrinsic force is modest as a reorganisation of the field. The series turns the colour field into a bounded object and the luminous field into a dark one, a real move inside painting against the Minimal claim that painting was finished; but the dark monochrome and the hard horizontal were already in the field’s hands, in Reinhardt’s black paintings and Stella’s of 1959. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the series has reached its public as part of the general image of the painter’s late dark work, which the Rothko Chapel carries more strongly. The reach is diffuse, and shared.
Pierre Bonnard · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
The field is French painting of the later 1930s. The intrinsic force is real but not a reorganisation of the possible: the picture is a summit of a mode, colour painting as the record of remembered sensation, carried further than anyone else carried it, but its means are Impressionist, Nabi and Matissean, extended rather than overturned. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: within its decade it redirected little, since the field ran through abstraction and surrealism and then into the postwar. Its reach came later, and through the body of late work more than through this canvas: the British painter and critic Patrick Heron championed late Bonnard as a model for colour painting. No later work can be named that answers this canvas in particular. The reach is real, delayed and diffuse, and it is credited and discounted.
Mimar Hayruddin · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
The field is Ottoman and Balkan bridge building and the stone arch bridge of the early modern Mediterranean. The intrinsic force: one of the boldest single stone arches of its century in the region, a permanent crossing at a site that had defeated one, and the high single-arch bridge fixed in its most complete Balkan example. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: real but bounded. The type has precedents and kin, smaller bridges of the same kind in Mostar and across Herzegovina, and the bridge stands at the head of that family rather than redirecting it; it did not change how bridges were built. Its later reach, as a reference for rebuilding heritage after war, belongs to the rebuilding and is credited at a discount.
The Walkmen · Music
8.0 · Tier IV
The field is the American guitar band of the 2000s, after the New York revival of 2001 to 2004. The intrinsic force: the record showed that a band of that revival could leave its urgency for a slow, spacious music drawn from older pop and folk forms and keep its identity, a path the band’s own Lisbon and Heaven followed. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the record was admired by critics and held by a devoted following, In the New Year has stayed among the band’s most played songs, and the singer’s later work grows from this voice. What holds the figure: the reclaiming of older American song was already under way among other bands, and no later school can be named as having turned on this record.
Anonymous · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
The field is the Gravettian of central Europe. The intrinsic force: a fine and distinctive instance of a type it did not originate; it reorganised nothing that the evidence can show, and its reach within its own field cannot be traced, since no line runs from this figure to any later one. That component is low, and is scored as unknown rather than credited. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: in the field it entered on its finding in 1908, the reach is wide and in part particular, as the emblem of Palaeolithic art, the figure by which the type and its modern name are known, the plate that opens the history of art in many surveys, and a central object for readings of a prehistoric goddess. Its reach on the making of later art is diffuse, and no later sculptor’s answer to it is credited. Much of the rest is fame.
Norman Rockwell · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
The field is American painting and illustration of the early 1960s, and force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force is real within illustration: the canvas puts the whole authority of mass-magazine realism behind the civil rights movement at its height, and makes the country’s best-loved illustrator a witness against his own public. It reorganises no possibility of painting; its means are those Rockwell had used for forty years. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: as an image its reach is very wide and lasting, in schoolbooks, in the life of its subject and on a wall of the White House; in the field it redirected Rockwell’s own later pictures for Look and heads the civil rights image in popular art, but no line of painters is shown to start from it. Emblem more than redirection.
Michael Curtiz · Film
8.0 · Tier IV
Released in 1942, so force and reach are scored together, in the cinema of the 1940s. The intrinsic force is modest: the film reorganised nothing in what film could do. It brought the studio picture’s existing means to a rare finish and fused romance and war propaganda into one plot. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the reluctant idealist became Bogart’s persona, taken up at once in To Have and Have Not (1944) and Passage to Marseille (1944); the romance resolved by sacrifice to the cause became a template for the war picture; homage and pastiche followed, Play It Again, Sam (1972) above all, and lines passed into common speech. The reach is wide but shallow in what it redirected: it lies in culture’s memory more than in the field’s practice, and filmmakers quote it more than they work differently because of it. Fame and box office lend nothing here.
Talk Talk · Music
8.0 · Tier IV
The field is the album of the 1980s. The intrinsic force is real and moderate: a band from the synthesiser pop mainstream showed that a record could be made of space, organic instruments and long forms inside that mainstream, at a moment when the decade’s production ran the other way. It reorganised Talk Talk more than it reorganised the field, and the move from synthesiser to organic sound was being made by others in the same years. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Life’s What You Make It has stayed in broadcast, but the record’s influence on later music, on what came to be called post-rock and on British art rock of the 1990s, runs mainly through the two records after it, and is not credited here.
Alan Moore and J. H. Williams III · Literature
8.0 · Tier IV
The field is English-language comics from 1999 to 2005. The force is real and bounded. The work showed that a mainstream monthly could carry a whole metaphysics and make the page itself an instrument of argument, and Williams’s design, the page as one designed object and the panel border as meaning, set a mark later artists measured themselves against. It extended a line of formal ambition that ran through Moore’s earlier work and others’, and did not reorganise what comics are for. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the design is widely cited and carried on by Williams into later work, and the work is a reference for comics about magic; but no school can be shown to have turned on it, the field was not redirected by it as it had been by Moore’s work of the 1980s, and its reach outside comics is slight.
Mike Leigh · Film
7.9 · Tier III
The field is the cinema of the 1990s. The intrinsic force is real and narrow: the film showed that a director of observant social comedy could make a work of real darkness by the same method, and it fixed a type, the articulate, wrecked, talking male anti-hero of the British street, in one performance. It did not reorganise what film could do. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Best Director and Best Actor at Cannes in 1993; the making of Thewlis’s career and the standing of Katrin Cartlidge; a lasting place among Leigh’s films, though the film that most extended his reach abroad came three years later. A place in the line of British realism is general rather than traceable to this film, and no line of films can be named that descends from it as a debt.
Cy Twombly · Visual art
7.9 · Tier III
The field is American and European painting of the later 1970s. Intrinsic force is real and partial: the cycle restores the classical subject and the narrative cycle to large abstract painting at a moment that had largely left both, and makes writing a material of epic painting, which reorganises what such painting could do. But it is the late summit of a reorganisation Twombly had made in the 1950s and 1960s, and the discount for that is large. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the return of myth, history and the classical in painting around 1980 is often traced in part to Twombly, but what can be shown belongs to his work as a whole, and that this cycle redirected others is not shown. Its reach is narrower than its maker’s.
Mary Cassatt · Visual art
7.9 · Tier III
The field is painting in Paris and American painting of the 1890s, and force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force is real: the canvas is the fullest statement in oil of Cassatt’s synthesis of Impressionist subject, the drawing of Degas and the space of the Japanese print, and it recasts the mother and child as a modern, secular, working subject. But it reorganises no possibility of painting, and Degas, Gauguin and the Nabis were learning the Japanese lesson at the same moment. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: within its field it redirected little, and its own reach is as an image, among the best known pictures in Chicago and a standard image of its subject. Her wider reach on American taste and collecting is the career’s, not the canvas’s. Emblem and model more than redirection.
Isambard Kingdom Brunel; completed by Hawkshaw and Barlow · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
The field is the bridge building of Britain and Europe in the nineteenth century. The intrinsic force is real: the design of 1831 reorganised what British engineers thought a single suspension span could do over a deep site, and it made Brunel; the completed bridge shows chain suspension at a late and refined stage, with the stiffened deck the type needed. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: modest as engineering. By 1864 the field had moved to wire cable, with Roebling’s railway bridge at Niagara of 1855 and his Cincinnati bridge opening in 1866, and chain spans of this kind were a closing chapter, not an opening one; the bridge’s revisions followed others’ lessons rather than teaching new ones. Its reach is wide in another sense, as the emblem of Bristol and of the Victorian engineer as hero; but emblem is presence, not redirection.
Doris Salcedo · Visual art
7.9 · Tier III
The field is international installation of the 2000s and the large museum commission. Intrinsic force: a real turn in that field, from the volume to the floor, from spectacle to absence, from the building as container to the building as the thing indicted; not a reorganisation of what a work can be, since the negative cut and institutional critique were already there. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: wide in discourse and in public memory, one of the two or three Turbine Hall commissions most often recalled, and the work that fixed Salcedo’s international standing. Reach into the practice of others cannot be named in particulars; no line of artists is shown to have taken its turn as a starting point. Held at 7.6.
Alexandros of Antioch (attributed) · Visual art
7.9 · Tier III
The field is Hellenistic sculpture of the second century BC, and force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force there is slight: a fine late variation on a classical type, buried on an island for close to two thousand years, could move nothing in its field. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: after 1820 it became the emblem of the Louvre and the most reproduced image of ancient sculpture; Cézanne drew it, Dalí fitted it with drawers in 1936, Magritte painted a cast of it, Yves Klein made it blue, and Arman and Jim Dine returned to it. That reach is the icon’s and the fragment’s more than the sculptor’s, and the Belvedere Torso had shown artists the fragment centuries before. Delayed reach is credited and discounted.
David Foster Wallace · Literature
7.9 · Tier III
The field is the American novel of the 2010s. The intrinsic force is real and bounded: the book showed that the most consequential matter of modern life, the administrative and fiscal state, could be the whole subject of a serious novel, and that tedium could be a literary medium, not only a topic. That is a reorganisation of possibility, but stated as much as realised, because the book is unfinished. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it was widely reviewed and read on publication, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2012, and it is taught in courses on Wallace and on contemporary fiction; its arguments about attention and boredom entered criticism and the essay. It has not redirected the novel. The workplace and attention novels of the following decade owe more to Wallace in general, to Infinite Jest and the essays, above all the Kenyon commencement address, than to this book, and its reach is hard to separate from its author’s posthumous fame.
Akira Kurosawa · Film
7.8 · Tier III
Released in 1963, and scored in the cinema of the 1960s, the decade of Antonioni, the new waves and 8½, released the same year. The force: a genre crime film made to carry a social argument in its structure and to spend its first part on conscience; the vertical city as a figure of class; a procedure carried to a thoroughness few films had attempted. It perfected and turned a genre; it did not reorganise what film could do. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: wide among filmmakers and in the crime film, where the kidnapping procedural and the ransom drop took it as a template, and a remake sixty-two years on, Spike Lee’s Highest 2 Lowest (2025). The reach is real and lies inside one genre. The director’s period films, Seven Samurai and Rashomon on this desk, entered the grammar of world cinema; this one entered the crime film.
Ingmar Bergman · Film
7.8 · Tier III
The field is the cinema of the 1970s, and the film was released in December 1972, so force and reach are scored together. Its force is the demonstration that colour in an art film could be the structure of meaning rather than its dress, and that bodily suffering and death could be held on screen at length without the consolations of plot. Much of that force belongs to Persona and the chamber films before it, and is discounted: the film extended a reorganisation already made more than it made one, and that holds the axis here. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: a foreign-language film nominated for Best Picture, which was rare; Nykvist’s Academy Award for cinematography; Woody Allen’s Interiors (1978) as the plainest heir; and red rooms and a long dying carried into an art cinema of death and the body, a breadth hard to pin to this one film.
Gerhard Richter · Visual art
7.8 · Tier III
The field is stained glass and art for churches in Germany and Europe, and German painting, in the 2000s. Intrinsic force: the window reorganised what a commission for a historic cathedral could accept, chance and a pure field of colour in place of an iconographic programme, and it did so in one of the most visited buildings in Germany, before a very wide public. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: wide in attention, and real in the run of artists’ windows in historic churches that followed, though how much of that run this window caused cannot be shown and is discounted. In painting it redirected little, since its means were Richter’s of the 1970s, and nineteen years is short for reach to prove itself.
Fariborz Sahba · Architecture
7.8 · Tier III
Standing since 1986; the field is sacred building in South Asia, the Bahá’í houses of worship, and late-century shell and symbolic architecture. The intrinsic force is moderate. It showed that a minority faith could build in India a modern sacred building the public at large adopted as its own, and that a literal natural figure could be resolved into buildable shell geometry. It did not reorganise how sacred space is planned, the plan being the type’s, nor open a new structural principle. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: wide in image, narrow in practice; an emblem of Delhi and of the Faith, on stamps and in guidebooks; a standard of ambition later houses of worship answered, Santiago among them; Sahba made the Faith’s architect for the Terraces on Mount Carmel; and no school of building redirected after it.
George Saunders · Literature
7.8 · Tier III
The field is the American short story. The intrinsic force is real: the book made a voice the story had not had, the working man’s confession spoken in the dialect of management and set a step into the future, and showed that the absurdist fable could carry tenderness without losing its edge. That enlarges the story’s possibilities rather than reorganising them, and its materials were Vonnegut’s and Barthelme’s. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the manner first appeared here and passed into writing programmes and into a fiction of corporate absurdity, but most of that reach runs through Saunders’s later books, Tenth of December (2013) and Lincoln in the Bardo (2017), and through his teaching. Delayed reach is credited at a discount, and reach that belongs to the author is not credited to the book.
David Hockney · Visual art
7.8 · Tier III
Field: painting in Britain and the United States in the late 1960s, between Pop, hard-edge abstraction, Minimal art and the return of figuration. The intrinsic force is real and limited: the canvas makes the flat means of advanced abstraction serve a lucid figurative picture, and makes the gesture a represented thing. That is an intelligent reorganisation, but much of it was already in Pop’s handling of the vernacular image and in the painter’s own earlier pool pictures; this canvas perfects it. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: very wide as public image, where it became the emblem of Los Angeles and of the swimming pool, gave its title to Jack Hazan’s film, and stands among the best-known British paintings of its century; much narrower in practice, where no line of painters is known to have started from it.
Interpol · Music
7.8 · Tier III
The field is the guitar record of the early 2000s. The intrinsic force lies in a sharpening rather than a reorganisation: the record showed that a dark, bass-led sound drawn from post-punk could be made into the short pop single without losing its darkness. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Antics was a central record of the New York guitar revival of the early 2000s, and the band’s sound of these years passed into British and American bands of the middle of the decade; what is particular to this record is the turn to the dark single, which carried that sound onto the radio and into larger rooms. What holds it is that the lineage descends at least as much from the first record and from the shared British sources.
John Barth · Literature
7.8 · Tier III
The field is American fiction of the 1960s, and the intrinsic force is real. The book showed that the American novel could be a comic scripture, could build the monomyth knowingly as its plot, and could make its own authority the subject of its frame. With V., Catch-22 and Vonnegut it helped define what was soon called fabulation and then postmodern fiction. Held below the bar by its reach after the first years: the force of Barth’s example passed to later writers chiefly through Lost in the Funhouse and the essay “The Literature of Exhaustion” (1967), no line of campus allegories or computer gospels follows from this book, and the cinema that later made Campbell’s pattern its plot did not learn it here. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Scholes’s The Fabulators, the year after publication, set the book among the founding texts of a critical category; reach that belongs to the author is not credited to the work.
Paul Klee · Visual art
7.7 · Tier III
The field is German modernist painting and drawing of about 1920. The sheet’s own force is modest: it reorganises nothing that Klee’s work of 1914 to 1922 as a whole had not already reorganised, the fusion of sign, child’s drawing and poetic title, and within that work it is one strong instance among many; his late angels of 1939 and 1940 are a larger body on the same figure. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Walter Benjamin named his planned journal of 1921 and 1922 after it; Gershom Scholem wrote a poem to it; Benjamin’s ninth thesis made it the figure of the critique of progress; Heiner Müller’s poem “Der glücklose Engel” answers it; Laurie Anderson’s song “The Dream Before” (1989) sets the thesis. That reach runs through a text into thought, poetry and song; no line of artists is shown taking the sheet as a starting point.
Bong Joon-ho · Film
7.7 · Tier III
The field is the cinema of the 2010s, so force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force: a director from a national cinema made a large English-language genre film on his own terms, and a dystopian action film carried a structural argument about class in place of a hero’s victory, with a line of carriages made a figure for a social order. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: a television series from 2020, drawn from the film and the novel; a share in the international turn toward Korean cinema that Parasite completed, where the line becomes a staircase; a place among class allegories built on one linear or vertical structure; and a dispute over the cut, now a common example of a director holding his film. What holds it: the film perfected and carried abroad a manner more than it reorganised what film could do, and much of its reach runs through the later film.
Tame Impala · Music
7.7 · Tier III
The field is guitar and synthesiser pop of the early 2010s, then in a psychedelic revival. Intrinsic force is moderate: the record shows that a single maker can produce a full-band psychedelic record at the scale of the studio albums it loves, and that synthesisers can carry what guitars carried in 1967. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the sound, saturated drums, phased synthesisers and a voice set back, has been widely taken up in the psychedelic pop that followed, but the reach is diffuse, more a sound spread than particular records shown to turn on it, and much of it is shared with the band’s next record. It sits level with The Swerve and below Halcyon Digest at 7.9.
Fleet Foxes · Music
7.7 · Tier III
The field is the rock and indie album of the late 2000s. The intrinsic force is real and bounded: the record showed that massed harmony, forms older than rock and a pastoral without irony could carry an indie album and stand at the centre of its year, and in that it reorganised a part of the field’s sense of what was possible. It did not reorganise its materials, which were all inherited. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the record was widely named the album of its year by the critical press, and the harmony-led indie folk of the following years, The Head and the Heart and others of the Pacific Northwest, leaned on it; the commercial folk after it took the surface, not the method. Bon Iver’s For Emma, Forever Ago, released months earlier, shared the moment and divides the credit.
Luis Buñuel · Film
7.7 · Tier III
The field is the cinema of the 1970s. The force is a feature built as a relay without protagonist, theme or resolution, joined only by contiguity: a real enlargement of what a narrative film could leave out. Part of that force belongs to La Ronde and to The Milky Way, and the television sketch with its own hand-offs, Monty Python’s Flying Circus (from 1969), was contemporary; that is discounted. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the episodic and network films of later decades, where the debt is diffuse and shared; the toilet dinner, passed into the common stock of cinematic satire; and Richard Linklater’s Slacker (1990), close in form, its debt not settled here. The reach is real and narrow.
The Smashing Pumpkins · Music
7.7 · Tier III
The field is the rock album of the 1990s, after the alternative scene had defined itself against scale. The intrinsic force is moderate: the record does not reorganise what rock could do, but gathers what the band and the classic double album could already do and makes it larger. Its real formal moves, the loop-based soft rock of 1979 and the orchestral alternative anthem of Tonight, Tonight, are local. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it proved that an alternative band could carry a two-hour double album to a mass audience in the 1990s, and it shaped the grandiose, emotive arena rock of the decade that followed, though the particular later records it redirected cannot be named with confidence. Its reach is that of a period-defining record, not a field-moving one.
Johann Bernhard Fischer von Erlach, Nikolaus Pacassi and Johann Ferdinand Hetzendorf von Hohenberg · Architecture
7.7 · Tier III
Force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force of the built work is modest. Fischer’s reorganisation of possibility lies in the unbuilt first project and in his book, which are not the work; the palace as built is a capable instance of the Versailles type, and the Gloriette a fine late eye-catcher of a kind already known in landscape gardens. The reach is real, and of a particular kind: within the Habsburg lands Schönbrunn fixed the image of the imperial residence. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: its ochre render, “Schönbrunn yellow”, spread to palaces, barracks, post offices and railway stations across the monarchy as the colour of the state. That is reach as the emblem of a polity, not a redirection of architecture.
Buena Vista Social Club · Music
7.7 · Tier III
The field is the popular and world music of the late 1990s, and the Cuban popular music of the decade. Intrinsic force is small: the record reorganised no possibility in son or bolero, and showed only that this music, played this way by these people, could still be heard whole. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the record remade the international market for Cuban music, opened late careers for Ferrer, González and Portuondo, who recorded and toured widely after it, drew a wave of traditional Cuban records and ensembles, and in Havana turned a share of musicians and venues back toward the old son for a visiting audience. That is reach of a market and an image more than of a practice: no later music can be shown to have changed its making because of it.
Stephen King · Literature
7.6 · Tier III
The field is American fiction of the 1970s, with popular fiction within it. The intrinsic force is real and bounded: the book showed that the horror novel could carry addiction, domestic violence and the psychology of a family with seriousness, and it set the pattern for the modern haunted-place novel as a family under siege by its own history. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: very wide in popular culture and in the genre, and particular. “The shining” became a word for a psychic gift; the haunted hotel and the possessed father became a template; Kubrick’s film of 1980 is itself among the most influential horror films; a television serial followed in 1997, and King’s own Doctor Sleep in 2013. In literary fiction the reach is slight. Scored on both: wide in the genre, narrow in the field as a whole.
Damien Hirst · Visual art
7.5 · Tier III
The intrinsic force: a whole commercial interior made into a sculpture of belief and mortality, with a living process inside a Minimal order. It is a real reorganisation, but a local one, since the readymade, the shop installation and the vitrine already stood. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: within Hirst’s work the room is decisive, leading to the pill cabinets and the long pharmaceutical strand of his output, and giving him the name for a public venture; in the field it is one of the defining installations of the London scene of the early 1990s, and medicine and its packaging became common ground for later artists. But the field-moving works of Hirst’s are the animals in formaldehyde and the spot paintings, not this room, and no later work can be shown to descend from this room rather than from Hirst at large. Force above reach, both moderate.
Tracey Emin · Visual art
7.5 · Tier III
The field is British art of the 1990s and the confessional and installation art of its decade, and force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force: the readymade carried into autobiography, so that the artist’s unredeemed private life is the found object. It is a real extension of possibility, but it gathers what confessional art, the readymade and Rauschenberg had opened rather than reorganising them. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the emblem of the Turner Prize as public argument and of the Young British Artists in the popular mind, cited in nearly every account of British art and of the confessional since, with a visible line to later art that shows the unmade, intimate self, and to a wider culture of self-exposure. What can be shown of redirected practice, as distinct from discourse, is less: wide in the press and the public image, narrower in what artists demonstrably took from it.
Zaha Hadid · Architecture
7.5 · Tier III
The field is the European museum and public building of the 2000s and 2010s, and Italian architecture in particular. The intrinsic force is real: the building constructed at institutional scale the museum as a continuous field, and showed that the drawn fluidity of Hadid’s office could be cast in concrete as structure rather than clad over a frame, which separates it from Bilbao. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: moderate, and partly absorbed into the general spread of fluid, digitally drawn public buildings, which owes as much to the office as a whole and to Bilbao as to this building. It brought the first major work of contemporary architecture by a foreign architect of world standing to Rome in decades, and a new institution has lived in it since. A strong instance of a turn, more than the turn itself.
Vlado Milunić and Frank Gehry · Architecture
7.3 · Tier III
Field: architecture in Central Europe and in the historic cities of Europe in the late twentieth century, with Gehry’s line as context. Intrinsic force is moderate. The building showed that a free, moving form could enter a protected historic row and answer it, and it stood a year before Bilbao in the same turn toward the free form. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: real in its region, narrower beyond. In Prague and the Czech lands it opened the historic centre to contemporary building and became a national image; beyond them, its manner and its fame were absorbed into Bilbao, which redirected the field where this building only prepared it. It is a forerunner, credited and discounted.
Moshe Safdie · Architecture
7.3 · Tier III
Standing since 2010, it is scored on force and reach together, in the field of the tall building and the resort in East and Southeast Asia. The intrinsic force is modest as a reorganisation of possibility: it showed that towers can share a crown and that the crown can be the main public room, and it made a casino resort a national emblem; neither was quite new. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: wide and specific. The linked crown and the sky bridge spread through Asia in the 2010s, Safdie’s own Raffles City Chongqing (2019), a horizontal conservatory laid across four towers, the clearest descendant; Singapore’s later towers took up sky gardens and roof decks as a civic expectation; and as an emblem it has largely displaced older images of the city. A reach of image and type more than of method: a peak of the spectacle building, not the turn that produced it.
James Montgomery Flagg · Visual art
7.2 · Tier III
Field: the American poster and popular image, and wartime propaganda, of the 1910s. Intrinsic force is modest: the poster reorganises no possibility of the poster, the direct-address pointing figure belongs to Leete, and the colour lithographic recruiting poster was a mature form. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the figure became the standing image of Uncle Sam for the twentieth century; the pointing summons “I want you” is a formula of American speech and advertising traceable to this sheet; and its parodies form a small genre of their own. That is reach without force, in a field where much of the force was borrowed, and the reach carries the figure well above what the force alone would hold.
Hildegard of Bingen · Music
8.3 · Tier IV
Intrinsic force and achieved reach are scored together, and they part far. The field is twelfth-century sung drama and chant. The force is high, about 8.6: the work showed that a sung drama could stage an inner life in allegory, without scripture’s plot, and that the opposition of song and speech could carry its moral law. That is a reorganisation of possibility. The reach is low, about 6.4: no medieval performance is recorded, no copy with music beyond the one book is known, and no line runs from it to the later morality plays, which found the form again by other roads. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the redirection came eight centuries late, in performance and reputation rather than composition, when the work became central to the revival of Hildegard’s music and to the recovery of women composers.
Built for Frederick II · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
Field: castle building and court architecture of thirteenth century southern Italy and the Empire. The intrinsic force is high for that field: a fortified type turned into a figure of pure order, and a classical portal that is an early and conscious recovery of antique form in southern Italy, of a piece with Frederick’s gate at Capua. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the reach is narrow. The octagonal castle did not become a type in Italy or the Empire, the Angevins built otherwise, and the classical revival of Frederick’s court did not lead directly to the Renaissance, which came from Tuscany by other roads. The later fame, the coin and the World Heritage listing, is presence, not redirection, and is not credited.
Alex Proyas · Film
8.0 · Tier IV
The field is the cinema of the 1990s. The film joined noir to Gnostic science fiction and made the manufactured world the subject of a studio genre picture, in the year of The Truman Show and a year before The Matrix, eXistenZ and The Thirteenth Floor. It did not originate that strand, which Philip K. Dick had long supplied, and it did not change how films are made. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: commercial failure on release, then a cult following that has lasted; critical defence, Ebert naming it the best film of 1998 and recording a commentary for it; and a lasting place in the discussion of the films of the simulated world. A film that anticipated more than it redirected.
Byzantine, under Archbishop Ursicinus · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
Force and reach are scored together, in the field of the sixth-century basilica of Ravenna and the Adriatic. The intrinsic force is modest in the architecture, which perfects a received type with Eastern parts, and greater in the apse, which set a saint in the place of Christ and abstracted the Transfiguration into a sign. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the Ravennate basilica with its round campanile and its brick exterior of pilasters and arches became a regional pattern, and the church entered the canon of Early Christian building, cited, drawn and imitated in the Byzantine and Romanesque revivals of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. But the redirection of its own field came from San Vitale and from Constantinople, not from here, and the apse’s iconography had few close followers. It is a summit of a tradition, not a turn in it.
Johannes Vermeer · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
The field is Dutch painting of the late 1650s, Delft and its townscape and courtyard genre. Force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force is real: the ordinary house front made a whole picture, frontal and cropped, reorganises what a townscape could be, and with de Hooch’s courtyards it opened the domestic exterior as a subject. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: narrow in its own time, since Vermeer’s work was little known outside Delft and the painters who carried the Dutch townscape forward, Jan van der Heyden and the Berckheydes, went back to the named and the panoramic; then, after the 1860s, the reach of Vermeer’s whole revival, which has made it the type of the quiet Dutch street. No particular later work it redirected can be named, and delayed reach is discounted.
David Mackenzie · Film
8.0 · Tier IV
The field is the cinema of the 2010s. The intrinsic force is real: the film showed that the western could carry a present-day economic argument, with stars, wit and a strong sense of place, and set the dispossession of the Comanche under a story of foreclosure without a sermon. It perfected a register more than it reorganised what film can do, and it never left the genre’s grammar. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: in ten years the film has become the central work of its writer’s run of contemporary westerns, from Sicario to Wind River (2017), which led into his television westerns, and it is commonly cited among the films of the American heartland after 2008. Reach through the later television, which owes as much to the series form, is discounted.
Paula Rego · Visual art
7.9 · Tier III
The field is European figurative painting of the later 1980s, in London and in Portugal. The intrinsic force is substantial: the canvas makes the large figurative composition, a form then often treated as nostalgic, carry a woman’s account of marriage, generation and exclusion with full weight and without irony, a real reorganisation of what the genre could be asked to hold. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Rego’s later standing as a model for figurative painters, and for women painting women’s lives and bodies, is large, but that this picture in particular redirected anyone is less shown. The reach that can be named lies in her own development, the stories of the 1990s, the Dog Women and the abortion pictures, and in a revaluation of her work that came mostly after 2000. The work moved its maker more than its field.
Godspeed You! Black Emperor · Music
7.9 · Tier III
The field is instrumental rock: the Montreal scene around Constellation and the post-rock the band had helped to found. The intrinsic force is a demonstration that the band’s form could return after a decade heavier and undiluted, its politics carried by titles over wordless sound. Neither was a new possibility for the field, and the pressure falls most on the band’s own body of work. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the Polaris Prize of 2013 put the record before the national field, it re-established the band, and its plan of long pieces paired with drones became the template of the band’s second period. Beyond the band no redirection can be traced, and that holds the figure where it is.
Built for Tokugawa Iemitsu · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
The field is Japanese temple building of the Edo period. Intrinsic force is modest: the hall consolidates the cliff-built Kannon hall rather than reorganising it, and makes it at the largest and most public scale, a strong statement of an inherited type, not a new possibility. The hall is a summit of the Tokugawa restoration campaigns rather than a turn in them. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: real but narrow in architecture and wide in culture. Its stage became the emblem of the type and of Kyoto, and halls elsewhere were named and built after Kiyomizu; but it did not redirect Japanese building, and its reach runs through pilgrimage, image and proverb more than through builders.
Roman · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
Standing some nineteen centuries, it is scored on intrinsic force and reach together, in the field of the Roman aqueduct in Hispania and the building of Iberia that inherited it. The intrinsic force is modest as reorganisation: the arcade is among the finest and best preserved of its type, but what an aqueduct is had been settled in Italy. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it was the standing Roman model in Spain through the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, and the rebuilding of 1484 to its own design shows it held as a pattern; no documented line of later aqueducts built in its image is credited here. As image it reached very widely, the emblem of its city and of Roman Spain; but image is presence, not redirection. A major work, not a field-moving one.
Beach House · Music
7.9 · Tier III
The field is the indie and dream pop album of the early 2010s. Intrinsic force: Bloom takes a language its makers and their forebears had established and gives it scale and finish, the swell made the whole of the form, which sharpened what the idiom could do at full size without reorganising it; its devices, reverb, organ pads, slide guitar, the drum machine, were common property by 2012. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: across the 2010s Beach House became a reference sound for a generation of dream pop and bedroom pop, and that influence runs from the earlier records, Teen Dream and Bloom above all. Held back because no particular practice, record or school can be shown to have turned on Bloom rather than on the band’s sound as a whole.
Floating Points, Pharoah Sanders and the London Symphony Orchestra · Music
7.9 · Tier III
The field is where jazz, electronic and orchestral music meet. The intrinsic force is moderate: the record shows that an electronic producer, a jazz elder and an orchestra can meet in one patient form without spectacle, and it gave Sanders a late summation, released eighteen months before his death. That reorganises a corner, not a field. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the record was widely heard in 2021 by jazz, electronic and classical listeners at once, and it is part of the period’s revival of spiritual jazz and of the joining of ambient and orchestral music. No later records by named makers that it redirected can yet be named, and none is credited. Sales and lists are presence, not reach.
Nine Inch Nails · Music
7.9 · Tier III
The field is the rock album of the late 1990s. The intrinsic force is real and bounded: the record shows that industrial rock’s apparatus of treated guitar, programmed rhythm and noise can carry long, quiet, near-orchestral passages, and that a record in this idiom can be built as a soundtrack to a mind rather than a set of songs; an enlargement of the idiom, not a reorganisation of rock. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the clearest line runs through its maker, from this instrumental grammar to Ghosts I to IV (2008) and the film scores of Reznor and Atticus Ross from The Social Network (2010) on, a reach delayed and discounted. Beyond the maker the effect is diffuse, with no named school descending from it.
Sumerian · Visual art
7.8 · Tier III
The field is Early Dynastic Mesopotamian art of the middle of the third millennium. The intrinsic force is strong: the fullest surviving early statement of the state told in registered narrative, war and peace together, the ruler fixed by scale, a real organisation of possibility that runs on through the Stele of the Vultures, the stele of Naram-Sin and, some two thousand years later, the Assyrian palace reliefs. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: little can be credited to this object. It went into a tomb soon after it was made and was not seen for some forty-five centuries; what came after shares its conventions, but it did not cause them. Its modern fame is presence, not reach.
Jenny Saville · Visual art
7.8 · Tier III
The field is painting in Britain at the start of the 1990s. The intrinsic force is considerable for that field: with its companions the canvas declared that the large figurative oil, and the nude, could be the art of a young painter at the moment of the readymade and the vitrine, and that the nude could be taken over by a woman from inside. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it is real in the career and in the market and narrower in named redirection. It made the painter’s name, entered Sensation, and is cited as an emblem of the return of flesh painting in the 1990s; but no particular later works can be named that it redirected, and the broader turn of women painting the female body has many sources. Fame and price are presence, not reach.
Radiohead · Music
7.8 · Tier III
The field is the album of the 2000s, rock and its neighbours. The record showed that a band could fold electronic textures and rock playing into one quick, live-made album, and could make protest out of nursery rhyme, telling a frightened year in the forms a parent uses at bedtime. That widened what a rock record could carry, but it reorganised little: it consolidated what the band had opened. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: There There became one of the band’s standard songs, and the record’s frame was among the earliest large-scale rock responses to the war on terror. No school or later record is traced to it.
Pierre-Auguste Renoir · Visual art
7.8 · Tier III
On view for about 145 years, so force and reach are scored together, in French painting about 1880. The intrinsic force is a summation, not a reorganisation: Impressionist light carried into the large composition of many figures, with a new firmness of form, proving that the movement could hold a group of Salon scale without losing its touch. That achievement lies within possibilities Manet and the Moulin de la Galette had opened. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: very wide as image and narrow as consequence. It became one of the most reproduced paintings of its century and the emblem of a museum, and it has been quoted in film, where the painter in Amélie (2001) copies it year after year. Painting after 1881 went where Cézanne, Seurat and Gauguin took it, and this picture redirected little of that. Presence is not pressure.
The National · Music
7.8 · Tier III
The field is American indie rock in its literate, chamber-orchestrated line, and the contest is with that line’s habit of staying small. The record showed that the anxieties of settled adult life, money, marriage and children, could be carried at full orchestral and rock density without leaving the register of confession. That is an enlargement of scale, not a reorganisation of possibility: the materials were in Cohen, Cave, Springsteen’s quieter records and the band’s own Boxer. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the adult indie rock of the following decade owes the band much, and Aaron Dessner’s later production carried something of this sound into the pop mainstream, a delayed reach credited at a discount.
Mike Leigh · Film
7.7 · Tier III
The field is the cinema of the 1990s. The intrinsic force is real: the film carried a devised, improvised realism to its fullest emotional reach and showed that the method could hold a large audience with a plot of revelation, without giving up duration and awkwardness. It perfected a manner already its maker’s rather than reorganising what film could do. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the Palme d’Or and five Academy Award nominations brought the method to an international audience and helped make Leigh a director financed on his own terms, which Vera Drake, Another Year and Mr. Turner used. Descent in other films is diffuse and not credited; the reach ran to its maker and to performance, not to the field’s grammar.
Sidney Lumet · Film
7.7 · Tier III
Field: American cinema of the 1970s, a decade crowded with films that moved it. The intrinsic force is real: the film made the hostage siege a form, a crime told as a live media event watched by a crowd and by the camera within it, and made a botched robbery a vehicle for social disclosure; it put a queer love at the centre of a mainstream crime film as motive, not menace. It perfected the New York realist manner more than it reorganised what film could do. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the siege and negotiation films that followed, Spike Lee’s Inside Man (2006) openly in its line; the chant in common speech, quotation and parody; a lasting place in the study of screen acting. The turn to the failed, sympathetic criminal it shares with the decade, and its reach is wider in presence than in redirection.
Paul Thomas Anderson · Film
7.7 · Tier III
The field is the cinema of the 1990s, and force and reach are scored together. The force is a reorganisation of register more than of structure: the ensemble mosaic played as melodrama at full emotional volume, with music as the binding agent and a rupture of realism at its centre, rather than as Altman’s ironic survey. Structure had already moved further in the same decade, in Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the film of linked lives became a fashion in the next decade, but its main lines, Amores perros, 21 Grams and Babel, descend from Altman and Iñárritu as much as from this film. Its clearest reach is a register of earnest, maximal American filmmaking and the consolidation of its maker’s standing, which belongs to the later films as much as to this one. Real, shared and diffuse.
Horace Jones and John Wolfe Barry · Architecture
7.6 · Tier III
The field is the bridge-building of Britain and Europe in the late nineteenth century, and the crossings of the London river. The intrinsic force is real and bounded: a bascule span of large scale, joined to suspension spans and worked by hydraulic power, built in the river without closing it, and the demonstration that a lifting span could serve a capital’s main port. But it reorganised no possibility for later builders: its parts were known, and the composite was a site’s answer. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: very wide as image, narrow as engineering and as architecture. The large bascules that followed in America and Europe descend mainly from other systems, the trunnion and rolling types of the Chicago school, and the steel bridge dressed in stone was a dead end, criticised as a sham and not repeated as a model. As the emblem of a city it has hardly an equal; but emblem is presence, not pressure.
Norse · Visual art
7.6 · Tier III
The field is Romanesque ivory carving and the European chess set of the twelfth century, and force and reach are scored together. Intrinsic force: these are the most complete surviving statement of the figurative chess set of the High Middle Ages, a whole population of ranks in one manner, but they reorganised neither carving nor the game, since the turn to figures was general and abstract and figurative sets went on side by side. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: within the field it is small, since the pieces were lost to sight and unknown until 1831 and redirected nothing in medieval carving. Later reach is very wide, as the image of a chess set for the modern world, in replicas and in film; it is popular and delayed, and discounted.
Dolly Parton · Music
7.6 · Tier III
The field is the country album of the early 1970s, beside Loretta Lynn, Merle Haggard, Kris Kristofferson and Tammy Wynette. The intrinsic force is modest to moderate. The record does not reorganise what a country album could be; it is a superb singer-songwriter’s record in the existing form, and its distinction is the title song’s plain autobiography and a woman’s authority as a writer. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the title song became a model of the autobiographical country song and of the woman songwriter who tells her own origins, a line that runs through later country and Americana writing, and it established Parton as a writer of standing apart from the duo with Wagoner. The album as an album was not a model others followed.
The Smiths · Music
7.6 · Tier III
The field is the British guitar album of the mid 1980s. The intrinsic force is modest: the record extends a manner, the band’s own, into new genres and a political frame, and its devices were already in the debut; it does not reorganise what a guitar record could do. The band’s large reach on guitar music, from the Stone Roses to Radiohead, Suede and the independent bands of the 2000s, runs chiefly through the singles and the other albums, not through this one. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it took a record on an independent label to number one in Britain, and its title track is the clearest case in British popular music of a record that changed listeners’ conduct, its conversion of listeners to vegetarianism widely reported, its stance made part of the band’s public meaning. Real reach, but narrow and particular.
Alex Proyas · Film
7.6 · Tier III
The field is the cinema of the 1990s. Intrinsic force: the film showed that a comic adaptation could be a work of mourning in a subcultural key, dark in feeling as well as in decor, and it joined image to an alternative-rock soundtrack so that the record became the voice of the film. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it fixed a figure, the white-faced avenger in black, that passed into the goth and rock culture of the decade and into professional wrestling; it was followed by three sequels, a television series and a remake (2024); and the rain-soaked, near-monochrome city of later genre film, Proyas’s own Dark City (1998) among it, is often placed in its line. What holds the figure: it perfected a mood more than it reorganised what film could do, and its reach is wider in a subculture than in the art.
John Nash · Architecture
7.6 · Tier III
The field is British architecture of its century. The intrinsic force is real: the fullest realisation in Europe of the exotic pleasure palace and of the Indian manner in a royal building, and an early, bold use of cast iron both hidden, in the structure under the domes, and displayed, in the palm columns of the kitchen and the bamboo stairs. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: modest and diffuse. The building stands at the close of Regency chinoiserie, not at the start of a movement; Victorian taste turned against it, and the century’s serious building went Gothic. Its descendants are the oriental domes of piers, pavilions and winter gardens and the exotic theatres and cinemas of a century later; the Indo-Saracenic of the Raj draws more on the Daniells and on Sezincote. It gave Brighton its emblem: reach local and lasting.
Yorgos Lanthimos · Film
7.6 · Tier III
The field is the cinema of the 2010s. The intrinsic force is a demonstration: the deadpan, rule-bound absurdism of a small national cinema could carry an English-language film with international stars, and a dystopian premise could be played as comedy of manners rather than spectacle. That widens what film can do; it does not reorganise it. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the Jury Prize at Cannes and a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay; wide release in the art houses; and the opening of its director’s English-language career, The Killing of a Sacred Deer, The Favourite and Poor Things, which carried the register into the mainstream of awards cinema. The flat delivery and the arbitrary-rule premise became a recognisable mode after it, but how much of that is this film’s and how much the later films’ is hard to separate, and that part is discounted.
Shepard Fairey · Visual art
7.3 · Tier III
Published, so intrinsic force and reach are judged together, in the field of American political graphics and street art of the 2000s. Intrinsic force is modest: the idiom was established, and the image restates the propaganda portrait in a street artist’s hand with great economy; it reorganises a use more than a possibility. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it became the image of the 2008 campaign and one of the defining American images of its decade; its manner became a template, applied to any face, taken up by later campaigns and movements of every side and by its maker for later causes, and parodied without end; and it carried street art into the National Portrait Gallery and the mainstream of political design. It redirected a genre of illustration, not the art of its decade.
Georges de La Tour · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
The field is painting in Lorraine and France in the 1630s and 1640s, and intrinsic force and achieved reach are scored together. The intrinsic force is real: the canvas is a mature instance of the most original transformation of the Caravaggesque nocturne in France, the night picture turned from drama to contemplation and from description to geometry, and nothing else in its decade does what it does with a single flame. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: in its own field the reach was small. French painting after 1650 went the way of the Academy, of Poussin and of Le Brun, and La Tour’s name was lost for about two and a half centuries, his pictures given to others. His rediscovery shaped twentieth-century taste and the reading of the Caravaggesque; that reach is delayed, and discounted.
Francisco de Zurbarán · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
The field is Spanish painting of the 1630s, in Seville and Madrid. The intrinsic force is modest and real: the canvas shows that the bodegón’s means could carry the highest religious meaning without narrative, a reorganisation of the relation between still life and devotional image, though in a culture where Sánchez Cotán had already given still life a contemplative gravity. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: within the field it is small. The image was repeated by Zurbarán and his shop, and Spanish painting after 1640 moved toward Murillo’s warmth and the movement of the late Baroque, not toward this austerity. In the twentieth century it became an emblem of the still life as devotion, but fame is not reach, and no later works it redirected can be named.
The Cure · Music
8.1 · Tier IV
The field is the rock album of the 2020s, and within it the late record by a veteran artist facing death. The intrinsic force is real: the record shows that a band’s mode of youthful grandeur can be turned, unaltered in its means, onto the actual mortality of its makers, at full scale rather than in the stripped, quiet form late records usually take. That is a claim about what the late record can be, made at the loudest and slowest pitch available. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: a number one album in Britain, top five in the United States, the album played whole in London on its release, a remix album in 2025, and a revival of attention to the band. What holds it is that the reorganisation is of its makers’ own practice, and no sound or school can yet be shown to have turned on it.
Alan Moore · Literature
8.1 · Tier IV
The field is the English novel of the 2010s. The intrinsic force is real but bounded: the book showed that the encyclopedic modernist method could be turned on a provincial working-class place and made to carry a metaphysics, and it brought a comics writer’s mythmaking into the long novel. It does not reorganise what the novel can do, since its methods were Joyce’s, Blake’s and Sinclair’s. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: in ten years no practice, school or later novel can be shown to have turned on it. It was widely reviewed, with a divided reception, and it is read chiefly as a Moore book by Moore’s readers. Reach that belongs to the author’s comics is not credited to the novel. The axis stands a tenth above the lowest of the twelve.
Pablo Picasso · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
On view since 1926, so force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force: the picture is the fullest statement of a manner, colour as a single emotional key and anatomy bent by feeling, and the Blue Period proved that a young painter could make a whole body of work out of one temperature. But it was a private road, which its painter left within two years, and the pressure his name put on painting dates from 1907, not from here. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: a diffuse later influence on expressive monochrome and on figurative melancholy, and, as public image, a very wide reach, an early Picasso on view in an American museum for a century and endlessly reproduced, which is presence rather than pressure on the tradition.
John Singer Sargent · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
The field is Paris Salon portraiture and Anglo-American painting of the 1880s. The intrinsic force is modest and real: the canvas is the purest statement of the bravura society portrait turned toward the graphic and the cool, the silhouette made the portrait; it reorganises no possibility of painting, and its devices were Velázquez’s, Manet’s and Whistler’s. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: within the field it is small, since the scandal turned the painter to London and to a society portraiture this canvas’s severity did not lead, and the swagger portraits that followed, his own and Boldini’s, are warmer and looser; as an image its reach is wide and late, the emblem of Belle Époque glamour, cited in fashion and costume. That is emblem more than redirection.
Terrence Malick · Film
8.0 · Tier IV
Released in 2019, so force and reach are scored together, in the cinema of the 2010s. The force is moderate. The film showed that its maker’s late manner, which had come to seem a style without a subject, could carry a historical narrative of moral weight, and it set a nearly unknown farmer before a wide audience as the decade’s most serious film about conscience under a totalitarian state. It did not reorganise what cinema could do; its means were its maker’s own, and partly those of The Tree of Life. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: small so far. A limited release in December 2019 lost the cinemas within three months, and nothing the film has redirected can yet be shown; its standing among critics is high, and partly restored its maker’s. What holds the axis lowest is a mature manner applied rather than a field reorganised, and the age speaks here as much as the work.
Hakka builders (Jiang clan) · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
The field is the Fujian and Hakka earth building of its centuries. The intrinsic force is bounded: the building is a summit of its type, the round tulou carried to its fullest elaboration of rings, not a reorganisation of what earth building could do, since the ring, the gallery, the blind wall and the central hall were established before it. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: later Yongding builders kept building round tulou, some with inner rings, as Zhencheng Lou of 1912 has an inner ring and hall, but whether they followed this building or the type cannot be shown. Its wider reach is as the face of the tulou, on a stamp, as the “king of tulou”, in the World Heritage case. That is presence, and it lends nothing.
U2 · Music
7.8 · Tier III
The field is the rock album of the 1990s, and the contest is with rock’s sincerity and the band’s own former earnestness: anthem answered with irony, the stadium with the studio. The force is real and bounded. The record showed that a band at the commercial summit could carry ambient, dance and sampled texture into the mainstream album and keep its audience, but Achtung Baby had largely made that reorganisation, and the means came from Eno, Kraftwerk and the dance-rock crossover. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: rock’s electronic turn later in the decade moved in its direction, but no practice can be shown to have turned on it, and that holds the figure low.
Frank Darabont · Film
7.8 · Tier III
The field is the cinema of the 1990s. The film showed that the classical drama of patience, friendship and moral reward could still be made at a high finish in the decade of Tarantino and the independent revival, and it moved the prison film from escape to endurance. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: very wide in audience, it became the leading case of a film that failed in theatres and was made a popular classic by television and home video, and it set the pattern of the prestige King adaptation that Darabont followed with The Green Mile (1999). What holds it: its imitators took its sentiment rather than its form, and it did not reorganise what films could do.
Lucian Freud · Visual art
7.8 · Tier III
The field is British and European painting of the 1990s, and force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force: the culmination of the painter’s late nude, the most complete statement that the painted figure could still bear the full weight of attention in the decade that had turned from it. It reorganises no possibility of painting; its means had been established over thirty years. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: very wide as an image and an emblem, the picture by which the painter’s late work is known and, after the sale of 2008, the token of figurative painting’s standing in the market. As redirection, less: the large painted bodies of the next British generation, Jenny Saville’s above all, had begun before 1995 and owe the painter’s work as a whole more than this canvas, and much of the reach is price, which is presence, not pressure.
Jean-Honoré Fragonard · Visual art
7.8 · Tier III
The field is French painting of the 1760s, and force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force is modest and real: the canvas is the fullest statement of the late Rococo’s gallant mode, compressing the fête galante into an erotic narrative with the viewer as accomplice, but it reorganises no possibility of painting, and its devices were the tradition’s. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: within the field it redirected little, since Diderot’s call for a moral painting, then Greuze and David, carried the decades that followed and the Rococo ended; as an image its reach is very wide and late, the one picture by which the Rococo is known, answered in Yinka Shonibare’s The Swing (after Fragonard) of 2001. That is emblem more than redirection.
Alejandro González Iñárritu · Film
7.8 · Tier III
The field is the cinema of the 2010s. The intrinsic force is real: the film carried the immersive method of natural light and long takes, then held to art cinema, into the scale and the stars of the studio epic, and made bodily endurance itself a mainstream spectacle. It is a synthesis, of Malick’s light, the floating continuous camera of Children of Men and Gravity and the sustained takes of Birdman, and its force lies in the joining. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: in eleven years it has been very widely seen, and it stands as a reference for the survival film and for hardship on location as a mark of seriousness; a redirection of what came after that does not belong equally to its sources is not shown. Prizes and gross are presence, not reach.
Muqi · Visual art
7.8 · Tier III
The field is Chan ink painting of the Southern Song and its reception in Japan, where the work’s life has been led. The intrinsic force is modest and real: the sheet reorganises nothing that painting could do, but brings one possibility of the abbreviated ink sheet to its plainest and most complete statement. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: in China close to none for this sheet, since Muqi was little valued there; in Japan the reach belongs mostly to Muqi as a name and a manner, not to this sheet. Its own reach is late and that of an emblem: in twentieth-century writing on Zen and on Japanese aesthetics, East and West, it became the type of the art of reduction. Reach as image; redirection is hard to name.
Bonanno Pisano (attributed) and Giovanni di Simone; Tommaso Pisano · Architecture
7.7 · Tier III
The intrinsic force is moderate: a fine development of the Pisan Romanesque, not a reorganisation of what a campanile could be. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: in its own field, Tuscan and Italian building of the twelfth to fourteenth centuries, it is small. The Pisan manner spread to Lucca, Pistoia and Pisa’s dominions, Sardinia among them, and it spread through fronts and churches. Reach outside the field is large and of another kind: the tower is the founding case of a discipline’s attention to foundations and settlement, and its stabilisation redirected how engineers treat a moving monument. That reach is delayed and outside building, and is credited at a discount. Fame counts for nothing here.
Alfred Hitchcock · Film
7.7 · Tier III
Released in 1946; the field is the cinema of the 1940s, and force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force: the thriller shown to be a vehicle for an erotic and moral study, and camera movement and the close-up of an object made to carry suspense and meaning at once, in a classical form so complete it became a standard for the director’s later work. It perfected a manner rather than reorganising what film could do; Citizen Kane, five years earlier at the same studio, is the decade’s reorganisation. How much of the reach is the film’s own, and how much borrowed back from its maker’s later fame, is weighed against it. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the spy romance of a woman sent to the enemy’s bed, carried into North by Northwest (1959); the crane to the key, one of the most quoted shots in cinema; Brian De Palma’s homages; its place in the auteur argument. That reach lies largely within the director’s line and the genre.
P. G. Wodehouse · Literature
7.7 · Tier III
The field is the novel in English in the 1930s, and comic fiction within it. The intrinsic force is real and bounded: the book is perhaps the fullest realisation of a comic manner that is Wodehouse’s own, and it consolidated the Jeeves and Wooster form at the length of a novel; but it did not reorganise the possibilities of fiction in English, whose turns in that decade were made by Joyce, Woolf and Faulkner, and in comedy by Waugh. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the Wooster voice became the model for a long line of English comic first-person prose; the pairing of Jeeves and Wooster was adapted for television, in the Granada series of 1990 to 1993, and for the stage; and Jeeves’s name passed into the language for the indispensable servant. That reach is broad, but it belongs to the series and the manner more than to this book, and it is reach in comedy, not in the novel’s capacity.
David Fincher · Film
7.7 · Tier III
Released in 2014, so force and reach are scored together, against the cinema of the 2010s. Intrinsic force: a studio thriller made into a satire of marriage and of trial by television, with a female villain given the film’s argument and its most quoted speech. It perfected a manner, the glossy adult thriller of Fincher’s maturity, more than it reorganised what film could do. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: wide in audience; the “Cool Girl” monologue in common speech; the film a reference point in the domestic noir that followed in film and television, The Girl on the Train (2016), Big Little Lies (2017) and Flynn’s own Sharp Objects (2018). What holds the axis among the lowest: much of that wave answers the novel as much as the film, and that share is discounted; the reach that remains lies within its genre, and a manner perfected is not a field redirected.
Takashi Yamazaki · Film
7.7 · Tier III
The field is the cinema of the 2020s, so force and reach are scored together. Intrinsic force is real within the genre: the film showed that a blockbuster’s scale of destruction could be made by a small team on a small budget and set inside a sincere drama, and it gave back to the monster film the moral weight that the franchise spectacle of its decade had spent. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the Academy Award for visual effects, won against far costlier films, and a wide discussion of what effects cost and who makes them, all within three years. What holds the figure: the film did not reorganise what film can do, its means are the established means of the disaster film, and whether it redirects anything beyond its franchise cannot yet be shown.
Maya (Puuc) · Architecture
7.7 · Tier III
The field is Maya building of the Late and Terminal Classic in the northern lowlands. The intrinsic force is moderate: the tallest work of the principal Puuc city, joining Chenes and Puuc manners on one body, with an oval plan that truly reorganises the pyramid’s mass. But the reorganisation of Puuc architecture that matters most at Uxmal belongs to the Nunnery and the Governor’s Palace, whose long mosaic façades are the summit of the style; the pyramid is the city’s landmark more than its manifesto. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: no school of oval pyramids is known to have followed; Uxmal declined within about a century of the last campaign, and the northern field turned to Chichén Itzá, whose Castillo is the type that lasted. The modern reach runs through Uxmal as a whole, in the Maya Revival of the 1920s, and the pyramid has become the emblem of the site.
Don DeLillo · Literature
7.7 · Tier III
The field is the American novel of the 2000s. The intrinsic force is real: the book was among the first novels to treat networked finance as a change in the nature of time and of the self rather than as a scene of greed, and it gave the novel of money a new register, abstract, prophetic and cold. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: a film by David Cronenberg in 2012, and a standing that rose after 2008, as the market it described came to pass. What it did not do is redirect practice: the novels of the crash took other forms, mostly realist, and no school followed its stylization. It stands below Ellis’s American Psycho, whose figure entered the wider culture. What holds the axis at the foot of the twelve, with one other, is a reach that came late and lies in how a period is read more than in what was written after it.
Lal Chand Ustad · Architecture
7.6 · Tier III
The field is the Rajput palace and the building of north India in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The intrinsic force is modest. The building is a culmination and a concentration of a vocabulary, the screen made total, not a reorganisation of what building could do; its plan, structure and use are those of its tradition. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: wide as emblem, narrow as model. It became the sign of Jaipur and of Rajasthan, the pink city’s own image of itself, copied in pictures, souvenirs and the fronts of hotels. As architecture its reach is slight and partly second-hand: the jali as a climatic skin in modern building in India and beyond owes more to the tradition than to this one front, though the Hawa Mahal is its most famous instance. Force low, reach as image high, reach as architecture slight.
Michel Pinseau · Architecture
7.6 · Tier III
Field: mosque architecture in the Maghreb and the wider Islamic world in the late twentieth century, with the state mosques of those decades as the immediate field. Intrinsic force is moderate: the building showed that the full repertory of Moroccan craft could be carried to the largest scale on a modern structure, and joined it to engineering, the sliding roof and the sea platform, in a congregational mosque. It did not reorganise the possibilities of the mosque’s form. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: real and bounded. In Morocco it fixed the neo-traditional manner of royal and public building and sustained the trades it employed; abroad, it entered the competition of state mosques, and the Djamaa El Djazaïr in Algiers was built in open answer to its minaret, a rivalry in scale more than a redirection of the art. It is a summit of a manner.
Damien Hirst · Visual art
7.5 · Tier III
Published, so intrinsic force and achieved reach are scored together, in the field of British and international art of the 2000s and the art market that became its subject. Intrinsic force: not a reorganisation of what a work can be, but a culmination. Price and production as content had been opened by Warhol and carried into fabricated luxury by Koons; Hirst pressed the case to its limit, with the cost as material. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the emblem of the market boom that ended in 2008, cited in nearly every account of art and money since, a reach in discourse, the press and the public image, wide and lasting so far. It redirected little practice: no line of artists is known to have taken its turn as a starting point, and much of its reach is as the thing argued against.
Andreas Gursky · Visual art
7.5 · Tier III
Published, so intrinsic force and achieved reach are scored together, in the field of German and international art photography of the 1990s. Intrinsic force: the purest statement of a turn already under way, the documentary photograph become a constructed tableau, digital alteration placed at the service of a realist claim. It is not the reorganisation itself, which belongs to Gursky’s work of the decade as a whole, to Wall’s staged pictures and to the Düsseldorf school; within Gursky’s own work, his pictures of crowds and goods carry it as much. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the sale of 2011 made it the emblem of the photograph as a museum object priced like a painting, cited in nearly every account of photography and the market since. That reach is presence more than redirection; no line of artists taking this picture as a starting point is shown.
André Waterkeyn; André and Jean Polak · Architecture
7.5 · Tier III
The field is the world’s fair emblem and the European public structure of the postwar decades, in view since 1958. The intrinsic force is real but bounded: a new source for the form of an emblem structure, a scientific model rather than a type, and the fair’s theme stated in one figure; but no reorganisation of how buildings are planned, built or used, and the structure is conventional steel under an unconventional figure. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: wide as image and narrow as architecture. It fixed the idea that an exposition should leave a single memorable figure, which later fairs pursued, and it set the molecule and the sphere in the visual language of the atomic age. Architecture did not follow it: no line of buildings descends from enlarged models.
Renzo Piano · Architecture
7.5 · Tier III
The field is the tall building in London and Europe in this century, with the international supertall as its context. Intrinsic force is moderate: a mixed-use tower whose taper sorts its uses, clad in glass that dissolves its mass, set on transport; a refinement of the type, not a reorganisation of how tall buildings are planned, built or used. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it is real in its city. The Shard broke the height of London’s skyline and its geography, its consent and success helped open Southwark and the south bank to towers, and within a decade it became the emblem of the city’s growth and a national landmark. Beyond London the reach is narrow: the faceted glass spire has been imitated, but no line of tall buildings descends from it as one does from the Seagram Building.
Keith Haring · Visual art
7.3 · Tier III
The field is New York street and mural painting of the 1980s. Intrinsic force is modest: the wall did not reorganise the possibilities of painting; it put an established idiom to a civic use with unusual directness and at personal cost. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: within Haring’s own work it opens the line of public walls with a message that runs through his later murals; it stands by wide account as the best known single wall in New York’s history of street painting; and it is a reference point for later activist street art and public health imagery, though no particular later work by another hand can be named as drawn from it. The city’s adoption, the playground’s name and the restorations, is a real change in how an illicit wall can be received, and it counts.
Egyptian (New Kingdom) · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
The field is the Theban funerary papyri of the late Eighteenth and Nineteenth Dynasties. The intrinsic force is high in quality and low in reorganisation: the roll is among the finest of its kind, but its vignettes follow established models, and it reorganised no possibility. It was made to be placed in a tomb and never seen. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: in antiquity none that can be shown, since it was buried and later rolls derive from workshop models, not from this one; since its arrival in London, its judgment has become a standard image by which the modern world knows the Egyptian judgment of the dead, in museum display, in textbooks and in the popular imagery of Anubis, Ammit and the scale. That reach is reception, named, and discounted as outside the field.
Jane Campion · Film
8.0 · Tier IV
The field is the cinema of the 2020s. Intrinsic force: a western remade as a chamber poisoning, a showing that the genre’s last secret can be told by withholding and by an act of care, and a performance of male cruelty as concealment, done with the restraint the revisionist western had prepared. It is a strong statement in a known argument more than a reorganisation of what film can do. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the film was received as a major work at once and is a common reference in talk of the western and of masculinity on screen, but whether it has redirected anything is not yet demonstrable after five years, and prizes and a large streaming audience are presence and fame, not effect. That is what holds the axis lowest: considerable force, wide notice, little proven effect.
Ancestral Puebloan builders · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
The field is Ancestral Puebloan building of the Four Corners in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The intrinsic force is moderate: the village is the fullest and largest realisation of the cliff-dwelling type, but it carries an existing village type into a shelter many others also entered, late in a tradition that ended in the region within a generation. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: within the field it is small, since the Pueblo building that followed, in the Rio Grande valley and at Hopi and Zuni, took up plaza-centred villages, not cliff dwellings. Outside it, the village’s finding helped bring about the Antiquities Act and the park in 1906, and it became the public image of the cliff dwellers. That is presence and preservation more than pressure, and it holds the axis lowest.
Jeff Nichols · Film
7.9 · Tier III
The field is the cinema of the 2010s. The intrinsic force is real: the film showed that a regional working-class drama could carry the apocalyptic register at full strength, and that mental illness could be given on screen from inside, with no twist that settles it. It refined the field rather than reorganised it. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: a turn in Michael Shannon’s career and a step in Jessica Chastain’s, and Nichols’s own later films, Mud and Midnight Special, built on it. Its place among the precursors of the decade’s independent horror of grief and illness is arguable and not shown, and its circulation was small. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is that the redirection it can show is local and partly delayed.
Andrew Wyeth · Visual art
7.9 · Tier III
Shown since 1948, so force and reach are scored together, in the field of American painting of the late 1940s. The intrinsic force is modest: the panel does not reorganise what a painting could do; it takes an inherited realism to an extreme of concentration and a striking composition. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: in painting almost none, since the field went to Abstract Expressionism and no later realist can be shown to have started from this picture; outside painting, wide, as one of the most widely known American images of its century, and taken up in film, where Malick’s Days of Heaven (8.5) carries it among its inheritances, echoed in the house. That reach is mostly presence. The panel stood outside its field and was loved there; it did not move it.
David Lynch · Film
7.8 · Tier III
Field: the cinema of the 1980s. Intrinsic force: the demonstration that an avant-garde sense of sound and image could carry a studio prestige picture intact, a period film made in the textures of industrial nightmare. It is a force of fusion, not of reorganisation. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the protest over its makeup is the usual account of why the Academy introduced a makeup award; the film made Lynch’s career, with Dune and Blue Velvet following from it; the cry at the station passed into common speech and parody; and later films of disfigurement and the exhibited body, Mask (1985) among them, work in its frame. But its successors took its subject, not its means. It redirected little of what filmmakers did, and its grafting was carried further by Lynch than by anyone it touched.
Vilhelm Hammershøi · Visual art
7.8 · Tier III
The field is Danish and northern European painting of the 1900s. The intrinsic force is modest and distinct: a reorganisation of the interior genre from a scene of domestic life into a study of light, interval and absence, with the figure reduced to a tone. But the reorganisation is carried by the body of interiors more than by this canvas, and it opened no school. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: within the field the painter had admirers and no real following, and his manner was set aside by the painting that came after; the later reach is wide in taste rather than in practice, and the comparisons often made with Hopper state resemblance, not descent. Delayed influence is credited and discounted, and here it is mostly delayed presence.
Arcade Fire · Music
7.8 · Tier III
The field is the rock album of the 2000s, and the contest is with indie rock’s scale and its reticence: whether a band from that world could make a record as large, as earnest and as public as the arena tradition, without irony. The intrinsic force is real and bounded. The record showed that the orchestral, communal indie sound could carry a public subject and fill a large room, but Funeral had already shown the sound, and the anthemic means came from Springsteen and older rock. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the record helped carry the band and its massed-vocal, many-instrument manner toward the arena and the charts, and Peter Gabriel recorded My Body Is a Cage in 2010. What holds it lowest of the twelve: the wave of bands with group shouts and strings that followed is traced chiefly to Funeral, and no practice can be shown to have turned on this record.
Ptolemaic and Roman builders · Architecture
7.8 · Tier III
The field is the late Egyptian and Nubian temple of the Ptolemaic and Roman centuries. The intrinsic force is modest. Philae does not reorganise the type; Edfu is its fuller statement, and Philae’s distinction is setting and adaptation to ground. Its Roman additions, above all the Kiosk of Trajan, are fine and late, at the end of the line rather than its turning. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: within its region the temple stood at the frontier as the great neighbour of the temples of Lower Nubia that answered the Egyptian type, though it is not shown to have been their model; beyond its age it entered the European picture of Egypt through the travellers and painters of the nineteenth century, and its rescue set a standard for international heritage campaigns. That reach belongs to its survival more than its making.
Samuel Barber · Music
7.8 · Tier III
The field is American and European concert music of the 1930s. The work did not reorganise what music could do. It renewed a manner, the long-breathed tonal string adagio, as the field moved away from it; the intrinsic force is modest. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the reach is large and of a particular kind. The work became the model of elegiac string music in American public life and in film scoring, so that the slow string threnody over a battlefield or a deathbed is now a language. It redirected use and a film idiom more than composition; no school or practice of concert music turned on it, and its reach is presence more than pressure.
Federico Fellini · Film
7.7 · Tier III
Released in 1957, so force and reach are scored together. The force: with La strada, the film carried Italian cinema from neorealism toward a cinema of the inner life told through a body and a face, and its ending made the look at the lens a final statement rather than a breach. Much of that force belongs to La strada, and it is discounted. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the Academy Award and Masina’s prize at Cannes; Sweet Charity on Broadway in 1966, staged by Bob Fosse, and his film of it in 1969, which borrowed the story without changing what the musical did; the ending studied as a model of the open close. It perfected a manner more than it redirected the field, and the redirection that followed came from Fellini’s next films and from Antonioni.
Sahelian builders · Architecture
7.7 · Tier III
The field is the earthen religious architecture of the Sahel and the Sahara from the sixteenth century to the nineteenth, and the building traditions of Aïr and Hausaland. Intrinsic force is moderate: the building realises the tapering timbered tower at its greatest height and makes it the minaret of a congregational mosque, a real and bold application, but it does not reorganise how mosques were planned, built or used. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: narrow as a model and wide as an emblem. No line of buildings is shown to descend from Agadez, and its form is read as the tradition’s rather than as its own; as an image it is the emblem of Agadez and of Niger and a figure in the modern revival of earthen building in the Sahel, which is presence more than pressure.
Yorgos Lanthimos · Film
7.7 · Tier III
The field is the cinema of the 2010s. The intrinsic force: the film proved that the European deadpan of the so-called Greek Weird Wave could be carried into an English-language genre film with stars and a mainstream distributor, and it joined that manner to the A24 cycle of domestic horror in which grief and guilt are the monster, which Hereditary continued in 2018. That is a refinement and transfer of a manner more than a reorganisation of what film can do. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the screenplay prize it shared at Cannes; a widened path for its director, whose larger films followed, The Favourite (2018) and Poor Things (2023); a lasting mark on the register of Keoghan’s career; and a share, arguable rather than demonstrable, in the decade’s taste for horror played flat. The reach runs mostly within its director’s line and its distributor’s cycle.
Michael Mann · Film
7.7 · Tier III
The field is the cinema of the 1990s, so force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force is a reorganisation of how the historical action epic could move: period combat filmed at speed and in depth, the physical labour of the frontier made visible, and a climax built from running, landscape and music without dialogue. That is real, and not small. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the historical battle epics of the following years share its ambition and its manner of period combat, Braveheart (1995) the nearest, and that likeness is credited at a discount, as the likeliest line of its reach, since descent cannot be shown; its music has been endlessly reused; and its director’s influence on the decade rests more on his films of the city, Heat (1995) among them. Fame is presence, not pressure, and is not counted here.
The Walkmen · Music
7.7 · Tier III
The field is American independent rock of around 2010. The intrinsic force is real and bounded: the record showed that a band from the garage-rock revival of the early 2000s could age into a spacious, vintage, adult music without nostalgia turning to pastiche, and it showed it whole, across a record without a lapse. That reorganises what such a band could become more than what the field could do. Its devices, reverb-heavy clean guitar, brass, a crooning and straining lead voice, were in common use. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the record was well received on release, and the band is cited as a touchstone by some later guitar bands. What holds the axis lowest but one is that no practice, sound or school can be shown to have turned on this record in particular.
Beach House · Music
7.7 · Tier III
The field is dream pop and indie pop of the early 2020s. Intrinsic force: the record extends the band’s sound to double length, adds strings and a self-made production, and moves partway toward synth-pop, which widens a manner without reorganising anything. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the record was well received and widely streamed by the band’s large following, and the band’s influence on younger dream-pop acts of the decade is real. Held back because that influence runs from the earlier records, Teen Dream (2010) and Bloom (2012) above all, and reach that belongs to a band’s earlier work is not credited to a later one; nothing is yet redirected by this record itself.
Danny Boyle · Film
7.7 · Tier III
The field is the cinema of the 2020s. The intrinsic force is real: the film shows that a genre franchise can be turned toward elegy and national allegory at studio scale and that a phone camera can carry a wide-release picture in an extreme frame, and its freeze at the moment of violence, seen from an arc of angles, is a device of its own. That enlarges what a genre picture may hold rather than reorganising what film can do, and the turn toward the mournful and the literary in genre cinema is shared with other films of the decade. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: a year shows a successful release, wide discussion, a divided reception of the ending and a sequel made on its terms. Reach not yet shown is not credited, and the figure rests on the force.
Alfred Hitchcock · Film
7.6 · Tier III
Released in 1943, so force and reach are scored together, in the cinema of the 1940s. The intrinsic force is real: the film put the dark of the thriller inside the sunlit American family and town, and made the murderer a member of it, the most charming at the table and never caught. That reorganised where evil lives in Hollywood cinema more than how films are made. What holds the figure low is reach, delayed and specific, narrower than its director’s later films, in a decade moved more by others. A later line of small-town films is often said to descend from it; that descent is contested and is not credited here. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Park Chan-wook’s Stoker (2013), which takes the uncle, his name and his niece; and two remakes, Step Down to Terror (1958) and a television film of 1991.
René Magritte · Visual art
7.6 · Tier III
Published, so force and reach are scored together, in the field of European painting of the 1960s. The intrinsic force is modest. The canvas does not reorganise what painting can do; it applies a late, settled method to the portrait, and its devices were the painter’s own long before. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: very wide, but of a particular kind. The image entered advertising, film, television and graphic design, and is among the most quoted paintings of its century in popular culture. As redirected practice among painters its reach is small; what later art took from Magritte, the deadpan rendering of the impossible and the image that argues with its title, it took from the body of work and from earlier canvases.
Robert Motherwell · Visual art
7.6 · Tier III
The field is American abstract painting around 1970: after Abstract Expressionism, beside Minimal art and colour field painting, and beside the painter’s own Open series, begun in 1967. Its intrinsic force is modest. The canvas restates at great scale and with full assurance a format set two decades earlier, and reorganises nothing in a field that had moved to the grid, the stripe, the stain and the object. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the series has real reach, the claim that abstract painting can bear a historical and political subject, which bears on the later reading of the New York School and stands behind later abstract memorials of a public death; but that reach belongs to the series and its earlier canvases, not to No. 110, and is credited here little.
Frans Hals · Visual art
7.6 · Tier III
The field is portraiture in Haarlem and the Northern Netherlands in the 1620s, and force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force is real: the canvas is a full statement of Hals’s lively mode in its finished, early form, and that mode did reorganise what a Dutch portrait could do with a living face. But this is one realisation of the mode among several of the same years, not the canvas in which it was invented. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Hals’s influence on the nineteenth century, on Manet, the realists and later Sargent and Henri, ran chiefly through the free brushwork of his later portraits and group pieces; this canvas’s own reach is as an emblem, the type of the cavalier in popular imagery. That is presence more than redirection.
Robert Zemeckis · Film
7.5 · Tier III
The field is the cinema of the 1980s. Intrinsic force is moderate: the film perfected the high-concept studio comedy, made time paradox a popular plot rather than a science-fiction premise, and set a model of setup and payoff that the teaching of screenwriting still uses; it did not reorganise what film could do. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the trilogy and what grew from it; the line of time-travel comedy from Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure (1989) to Hot Tub Time Machine (2010); a standing reference for causal paradox in later blockbusters; a place in the screenwriting manuals. The reach is broad in popular cinema and common culture, and shallow in what it changed about film form.
R.E.M. · Music
7.5 · Tier III
The field is the American rock album of the 1980s, and above all the independent and college rock of the middle of the decade. Intrinsic force is modest. The record consolidated what Murmur had proposed, that an American guitar band could be reticent, Southern and melodic, sound like a band in a room and hold a growing public without the gloss of radio rock; it did not reorganise that possibility again. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the band as a body of work bent American independent rock and the alternative rock that followed, but what can be traced to this record rather than to the debut or the career is thinner, the proof that the first album was no accident, the touring life Little America records, and Rockville’s turn to country.
The Cure · Music
7.4 · Tier III
The field is the rock and pop album of the mid 1980s. The intrinsic force is modest but real: the record showed that a band from post-punk’s darkest wing could write bright, eclectic, radio-length pop without giving up its unease, and it did so with craft. It does not reorganise what an album could do; its devices were in the common language of 1985 or the band’s own of the two years before. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the record took the band to a wider, international audience and set the template of melodic, melancholy guitar pop that many later alternative bands followed. The named case is In Between Days, whose strummed, drum-driven shape is widely heard in later indie pop; much of the rest belongs to the band at large.
Steve McCurry · Visual art
7.4 · Tier III
Published, so intrinsic force and achieved reach are scored together, in the field of documentary and magazine photography of the 1980s. Intrinsic force is modest: the picture does not reorganise what a photograph can do; it is a perfected instance of an existing kind, the colour humanitarian close portrait. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it became the emblem of National Geographic itself, reprinted on its covers and in its anthologies as the magazine’s own signature image; it set the template, followed in later photojournalism and in the fundraising imagery of aid organisations, for the single tightly cropped face of a child in need meeting the lens; and it is the standing example in critiques of the Western humanitarian gaze. Fame itself is presence and is not credited here. Reach broad, force slight.
Kehinde Wiley · Visual art
7.3 · Tier III
The field is American portraiture of the 2010s and the institution of the official portrait. The intrinsic force is modest: the canvas does not reorganise what a portrait can be; it carries a turn already made, the painter’s own and the wider return of figurative Black portraiture in that decade, into the most official room in the country. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: wide in presence and real in one institution, the canvas and its companion drew crowds to the National Portrait Gallery and made the commissioning of contemporary, non-traditional painters for official portraits newly thinkable in American institutions, a change in who paints power and how the office is shown. It redirected little painting as painting; no line of artists is known to start from this canvas rather than from the painter’s practice as a whole.
Banksy · Visual art
7.0 · Tier III
The field is British and European street art and urban painting of the 2000s, and its passage into galleries and the auction room; force and reach are scored together. Intrinsic force is low: the image reorganised nothing, and its means were already in use. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: by the late 2000s the girl and her heart had become the emblem of street art for a public that knows no other piece of it, imitated without end in sentimental stencils and reproduced in every kind of merchandise, and it was the image chosen for the act of 2018, at the centre of the most cited event in the recent art market. It redirected taste and the market more than practice; no serious line of artists starts from it. Wide reach, low force.
Quentin Tarantino · Film
7.0 · Tier III
Released in 1992, so force and reach are scored together, against the cinema of the 1990s. Intrinsic force: the film showed that a low-budget American crime picture could run on talk, broken chronology and pop quotation, and that the genre’s violence could be staged as comedy and horror at once; that reorganised a manner more than what film could do. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: after sex, lies, and videotape (1989), it fixed the Sundance and Miramax model of the independent film as a commercial proposition; its idiom was imitated across the decade, in crime films of talk and colour names, from Things to Do in Denver When You’re Dead (1995) to Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels (1998); the slow-motion walk and the torture to a pop song passed into common grammar. Much of that reach was carried by Pulp Fiction (1994), and what the imitators took was largely surface.
Egyptian (New Kingdom) · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
The field is Egyptian royal funerary art of the late Eighteenth Dynasty. The intrinsic force is modest: the mask reorganises no possibility of its art; it is the fullest surviving statement of a programme, not a change to one. Its reach within that field is nil. It was buried within weeks of its making and unseen for some thirty-two centuries, so it redirected nothing in Egyptian art. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: delayed reach, credited and discounted, very wide as an image and narrow as redirection; with the tomb, the Egyptian manner of 1920s design, in jewellery, architecture and the decorative arts of Art Deco; and the emblem by which ancient Egypt is known. Most of that reach is the tomb’s, and most of it is emblem and presence rather than an art redirected.
Andrew Haigh · Film
7.8 · Tier III
The field is the cinema of the 2020s. The intrinsic force is real: the film shows that a queer chamber drama can carry a ghost story’s structure without losing its realism of feeling, and that the 1980s, the decade of the fear of AIDS, can be reckoned with through the family rather than through public history. That is a strong personal synthesis, and its pressure on the form it joins is felt. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: wide critical acclaim on release, British awards nominations, and a place in the conversation about queer cinema and about the careers of Andrew Scott and Paul Mescal. What holds the figure: the film’s means were available and known, it reorganises little of what film can do, and no redirection of later films can yet be seen after three years.
Nick Cave and Warren Ellis · Music
7.8 · Tier III
The field is the singer-songwriter and art-rock album of the early 2020s. The intrinsic force is modest: the record shows the late Cave manner, loop, pad and choir, able to carry rhythm, menace and topical speech as well as elegy, which enlarges a manner without reorganising a field. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: within five years the record was widely praised, was set into film, and made the partnership of the two a front line of Cave’s work rather than a sideline of film scores. No redirection of other musicians’ practice is traced to it, and the reach the late manner has belongs first to Skeleton Tree and Ghosteen. Delayed reach cannot yet be credited, which holds the axis at the foot of the twelve, with one other.
Radiohead · Music
7.8 · Tier III
The field is the album of the 2010s. The record perfects a manner, the art-rock song held in an orchestral and electronic setting, and makes the orchestra a working part of a rock band’s sound with unusual skill: strings and choir are written into the band, not laid on it. That is real force, but it does not reorganise what an album could do, and its devices were the band’s own or Greenwood’s from his film work. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the record was widely praised on release and holds a settled place in the band’s catalogue, but no redirection of later records is traced to it. Delayed influence is credited as possible and discounted.
Terry Gilliam · Film
7.8 · Tier III
The field is the cinema of the 1990s. Intrinsic force: the film showed that a studio picture could carry a medieval legend as its structure without costume, that a director of fantasy could set the fantastic inside a contemporary city as a symptom, and it gave a pattern for the star comedian in a part that holds clowning and grief at once. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Williams’s later dramatic and comic work and a line of urban fables of damaged men in the 1990s are often placed near it, and it fixed LaGravenese as a writer and showed its director able to work inside the American system. What holds this, the lowest axis, is that the film did not reorganise what American film could do; its descendants share a tone more than a form.
Arcade Fire · Music
7.8 · Tier III
The field is the indie and alternative rock album of the early 2010s, and the band’s own place at its head. Intrinsic force: the record showed that the largest band of that field could carry rara percussion and a dance producer’s sound into a double album and keep its audience, and it carried its idiom further than any record of the band before it. That widens the band’s idiom more than it reorganises the field, since the dance turn of indie rock was a decade old by 2013, led by the producer’s own work. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the record was widely heard and its release much talked of, but no practice, sound or school can be named that turned on it, and Haitian rhythm cannot be shown to have entered the field through it.
Chinese builders (Northern Wei foundation, Ming and Qing rebuilding) · Architecture
7.7 · Tier III
The field is Chinese religious building, above all the mountain and cliff temples of the north, over the centuries since the founding. Intrinsic force is real but bounded: the temple shows that timber halls can be hung on a cliff and kept for centuries, and it joins the three teachings in one building, but it reorganises neither the hall, the bracket set, the plan of the monastery nor the practice of the cave temple, and its means were known. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: narrow in the tradition and wide in fame. No line of building is shown to descend from it, and it did not redirect how Chinese temples were made. Its reach is as an image of China, which is presence, not pressure.
Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun · Visual art
7.7 · Tier III
The field is French portraiture of the 1780s. The intrinsic force is modest and real: the picture is one of the clearest statements of the period’s sentimental motherhood in portrait form, and of a woman painter claiming the Madonna’s place for herself; but it reorganises no possibility of painting, and its devices, the Raphael scheme, the plain ground, the antique dress, were all to hand. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: within the field it redirected little, since the Revolution scattered its world, its painter left France in October 1789, and the decades that followed belonged to David and his school. As an image its reach is wide and late, among the most reproduced pictures of maternal tenderness and central to the modern recovery of women painters of the old regime; no later work it redirected can be named.
Imre Steindl · Architecture
7.7 · Tier III
The field is the public building, and the parliament first of all. The intrinsic force is moderate: the building is a late and very large summation of the Gothic Revival parliament, not a reorganisation of what a parliament or a public building could be, and its distinct move, the dome over a symmetrical Gothic plan, is a combination rather than a new possibility. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: within architecture it is small. Hungarian building turned almost at once to Ödön Lechner’s national style and then to the Secession, away from Steindl’s idiom, and no school of parliaments followed his model; later legislatures looked elsewhere. Its reach as an image is very wide, the emblem of the city and of the state, its dome the measure of the skyline. That is presence, and it lends little here.
Martin McDonagh · Film
7.7 · Tier III
Released in 2022, so force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force is the demonstration that a mainstream comedy can be built on almost nothing but the end of liking, with a death and a burning at its close, and that the Irish island fable can be carried into the cinema of the 2020s with full popular reach. It does not reorganise what film can do: its means are classical and its register is its maker’s own. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: in four years, wide circulation, two prizes at Venice and nine Academy Award nominations, and no demonstrated redirection of other films, which is not forecast. That holds the axis at the foot of the twelve, with The Swerve.
Paul Abadie · Architecture
7.7 · Tier III
The field is French and European church building from 1870 to 1930, not the postcard; force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force is modest: the church is a late and large instance of a revival already under way at Marseille and Lyon, by an architect whose method was the restorer’s, in conventional masonry, and it opens no type. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: as an image immense, in its field real but limited. The national expiatory basilica of the period took it as an example, and Sacred Heart churches in France and its colonies borrowed its domes and its whiteness. But the main line of French religious building after 1900, concrete at Le Raincy and then Ronchamp, turned away from it, and it is more often named as what was refused.
Stuart Rosenberg · Film
7.6 · Tier III
The field is the cinema of the 1960s, so force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force is moderate: the film made the prison picture a passion play and gave the antihero of the late 1960s his martyr’s death inside a classical studio form, without reorganising how films are made or what they may hold. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it is real and lies largely in the culture rather than the craft. The Captain’s line about a “failure to communicate” passed into common speech, and the smiling, unbreakable prisoner and the boss in mirrored glasses passed into the genre. Later prison films descend from it only in part; in a decade others moved, it was a strong film of the field rather than one that moved it.
Berthe Morisot · Visual art
7.6 · Tier III
The field is French painting of the early 1870s, and force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force is real: a domestic, maternal interior painted as serious modern art, in the first independent exhibition, by a woman, without sentiment. That enlarged what the group’s modern life could include, though as a single canvas it reorganised little; Morisot’s whole body, not this picture, did that work. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: no documented line runs from this canvas to the later painting of its subject, and none is credited; outside its field the reach is late and emblematic, since the 1970s the image most often used to stand for Morisot and for women in Impressionism. Emblem is presence more than redirection.
Indus Valley (Mohenjo-daro) · Visual art
7.6 · Tier III
The field is the art of the Indus civilization and of the Bronze Age in its region, in the third millennium BC. The intrinsic force is real and early: among the oldest known lost-wax figural bronzes of South Asia, and a statement of the free-standing, asymmetrical, self-possessed figure at a date when the sculpture of Mesopotamia and Egypt held its figures frontal. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: within its own field nothing it redirected can be shown, since the Indus tradition ended, and the line often drawn from it to the later Indian bronzes, the Chola bronzes above all, crosses a gap of millennia and is asserted rather than shown. Since 1926 its reach has been as an emblem, not a redirection of practice.
Alfred Eisenstaedt · Visual art
7.5 · Tier III
Published, so intrinsic force and achieved reach are scored together, in the field of American photojournalism and the picture magazine of the 1940s. Intrinsic force is low: the image reorganises no possibility of photography; it is a fine instance of what Life and the 35 mm candid had already made possible, and the decade’s real turns in the field lie elsewhere, in the war photographs of Capa and W. Eugene Smith and in the decisive moment as a doctrine. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it became the picture by which the end of the war is remembered in the United States; it is answered in Seward Johnson’s Unconditional Surrender sculptures and re-enacted by couples in Times Square on anniversaries. That is reach as an icon. It did not redirect how photographs were made.
Danny Boyle · Film
7.5 · Tier III
The field is the cinema of the 2000s. The intrinsic force is modest: the film did not reorganise what film can do. It joined the Bollywood melodrama to a Western festival style with a kinetic digital camera, and showed that a story set wholly in India, partly in Hindi, with no stars, could become a worldwide popular success. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: eight Academy Awards, Best Picture among them; a large box office; international careers for Dev Patel and Freida Pinto; two Oscars for A. R. Rahman and his “Jai Ho” a song heard around the world; a sharp debate in India over how the West pictures it. What holds the figure: few films took its form, its style was Boyle’s before it, and its reach is fame more than redirection.
Guðjón Samúelsson · Architecture
7.5 · Tier III
The field is twentieth-century Nordic church building, and Icelandic above all, and force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force: a monumental statement of national romantic expressionism in concrete, the summation of Guðjón’s search for an Icelandic architecture drawn from its geology. It culminates a line rather than reorganising what a church could be; its model stood in Copenhagen, and by its completion the Nordic church had gone elsewhere, to Aalto, Lewerentz and the Siréns. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: within Iceland it is the national image of the church and of Reykjavík, on the stamps, the posters and the skyline; as a model that redirected building, in Iceland or beyond, its reach is small. Reach as emblem outruns reach as architecture.
Christo and Jeanne-Claude · Visual art
7.4 · Tier III
The field is public and large-scale installation art in the early 2000s, in New York and beyond. Intrinsic force: not a reorganisation of possibility. The temporary, self-financed environmental project, its process counted as the work, was the partnership’s own from the late 1960s, and the reorganisation belongs to those works; this one carried the method to its largest public and into the centre of a city. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: very wide in attention, a mass public event that put contemporary art before people who seldom meet it, cited in accounts of temporary public art in cities since; the partnership’s own The Floating Piers (2016) is its plainest heir. That it redirected the practice of others is not shown. Wide reach, small reorganisation.
Jun Xia (Gensler) · Architecture
7.4 · Tier III
The field is the supertall tower in China and in Asia in the twenty-first century, with the international supertall as context. The intrinsic force is moderate to considerable: the tower showed that a full, free-standing second skin with atria could be carried round a supertall, and that a form shaped by the wind could be a building’s figure; it set a technical standard for Chinese supertall construction and was built by Chinese contractors to it. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: real and limited. It is a reference for the supertall built in China in the decade after and for wind shaping as form, a line opened by the Burj Khalifa; the double skin with atria has not become the type. Eleven years is short for reach to show.
Martin Scorsese · Film
7.8 · Tier III
The field is the cinema of the 1990s. Intrinsic force: the gangster film made the vehicle for an anatomy of an economy, with the narration as a mechanism of blindness. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is how much of that force was already spent: the film extends a form more than it reorganises what film can do, and the reorganisation belongs to Goodfellas, five years earlier, which is discounted here. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Scorsese’s own later anatomies of money, The Wolf of Wall Street (2013) and The Irishman (2019), take up its doubled narration and its scale, though reach within one director’s line counts for less than reach across a field; later voice-over crime chronicles owe it something alongside Goodfellas; its images and lines are widely quoted. But its successors mostly took from the two films together, and few changed what they did because of this one.
My Bloody Valentine · Music
7.7 · Tier III
The contest is with the band’s own legacy and with the revival of its sound by others, well under way by 2013. The force is real and bounded: the last third shows that the glide-guitar language can carry speed and pulse without losing its haze, and Is This and Yes that it can survive without the guitar. That widens the idiom without reorganising the field, since the elements were the band’s own and drum and bass was long established. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the release was an event, but no practice, sound or school can be shown to have turned on it, and it confirmed a revival rather than altering it.
Robertson Davies · Literature
7.6 · Tier III
The field is fiction in English of the 1970s, with its Canadian part within it. The intrinsic force is real and bounded: the book showed that the Canadian novel could carry the marvellous, the religious and the mythic without abandoning its realist ground, and it gave Canadian fiction an urbane, learned and international voice. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is the width of the field: the reach is real in one national literature and slight in the wider one, and the turns of the decade in the novel in English were made elsewhere. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: within Canada it became one of the defining novels of its literature, read in schools and universities for decades, and it established Davies internationally as a novelist; beyond Canada it was widely read but did not redirect what came after.
Pearl Jam · Music
7.5 · Tier III
The field is the rock album of the mid 1990s, above all the alternative rock that had entered the mainstream in 1991 to 1993. The intrinsic force is modest but real: the record showed that a band at the summit of that mainstream could make an abrasive, broken, partly anti-commercial album and keep its audience, and it set the band’s long turn from stardom toward a working career outside the promotional machine; a reorganisation of a career more than of the album form. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the record went to the top of the chart and sold in very large numbers, and Spin the Black Circle won a Grammy, but no practice can be shown to turn on it. The bands who followed the band’s sound followed Ten, and the swerves here were not widely taken up. Presence is not reach.
Jeff Nichols · Film
7.7 · Tier III
The field is the cinema of the 2010s. The intrinsic force is one of example: the film showed that a classically shaped, sincere, regional narrative of boyhood could still be made at a middling budget within American independent cinema, carrying a star, and it gave McConaughey’s change of direction one of its first serious roles. It refined what such a film could hold rather than reorganised what films can do. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: a place in competition at Cannes, steady critical regard, a modest commercial success for an independent film, a place in the line of Southern and rural American films of its decade, and the career of Tye Sheridan, which followed it. No line of films can be shown to descend from it, and that holds the axis lowest of the twelve.
Terry Pratchett · Literature
7.6 · Tier III
The field is the English novel of the late twentieth century, comic and fantastic. The intrinsic force is real: a comic fantasy that argues theology with conviction, showing that the series could carry moral argument, and within Pratchett’s own work it opened a later run of books in which the comedy carries a sustained argument. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is particular reach. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the Discworld as a whole changed British comic fantasy and its market, and this is the book most often named as the series’ best single entry and the way into it; but no particular later novel can be named that it redirected, and the series’ influence is a corpus effect that is not credited to one book. A strong success that did not reorganise the possibilities of its form.
Alex Garland · Film
7.5 · Tier III
The field is the cinema of the 2020s. The intrinsic force is moderate: the film showed that a large independent production could stage an American civil war as foreign war is seen, from the press pack, without a political programme, and it made a new arrangement of known means more than a reorganisation of what film can do. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: in two and a half years, wide attention, a commercial reach new in scale for its company, images taken up in commentary, soldiers on Washington’s monuments and the press vest on a highway, and a share in a renewed run of films and series about American breakdown. That reach is mostly forecast, and fame is presence, not redirection; that is what holds the axis at the foot of the twelve, with one other.
M83 · Music
7.5 · Tier III
The field is the electronic and indie music of the early 2000s. The intrinsic force is real and bounded: the record showed that the shoegaze wall could be made from synthesisers and a drum machine and pitched at cinematic scale, and in that it widened the idiom; it did not reorganise it, since the elements were known and others were joining them at the same time. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the plainest line runs through M83 itself, whose later work as Gonzalez’s project carried this sound to a far larger public, but that reach belongs to the later records and only part of it passes back here; beyond the band the record is often named among the sources of the electronic strand of the later shoegaze revival, but no particular record can be shown to have turned on it, and unnamed reach is credited little.
Jim Jarmusch · Film
7.5 · Tier III
Released in 1999, so force and reach are scored together, against the cinema of the 1990s. Intrinsic force is moderate: the film reorganised a few possibilities at once, a hip-hop composer scoring an art film as a full collaborator, the samurai code carried into a Black American hero, the gangster genre played as a melancholy comedy of obsolescence. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: RZA’s later film scoring and a hip-hop samurai strain in animation and music stand in its line, and the film helped make the crossing of hip-hop and Japanese martial myth a recognised idiom; but how much they owe it is unsettled, and part of that line belongs to the Wu-Tang Clan’s own earlier samurai mythology. Within its decade it did not redirect the field as Pulp Fiction (8.3) or Chungking Express (7.8) did. A solid but local pressure.
Thomas Gainsborough · Visual art
7.4 · Tier III
Published, so force and reach are scored together, in British portraiture of the late 1760s and 1770s, the field of Reynolds and the new Royal Academy. The intrinsic force is limited. The picture shows, splendidly, that a cool colour could carry a full length and that a loose, feathery touch could do Van Dyck’s work; it does not reorganise what a portrait could be, and Gainsborough’s own later portraits and landscapes carry his innovations further. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: wide, and mostly outside painting. The sale of 1921 and the showing in London before the canvas left made it a public event; it became one of the most reproduced images in the English-speaking world and the treasure of a museum. Reach into the practice of painting is slight.
The National · Music
7.4 · Tier III
The field is guitar-led indie and alternative rock of the early 2010s. Intrinsic force is modest: the record refines a manner the band had already established and shows that the manner can carry warmth and ease without losing its gravity, but it reorganises no possibility. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: real in presence and thin in redirection. The record was nominated for a Grammy and confirmed the band as the leading act of its kind. The literate, low-voiced, slow-building band song of adult melancholy was widely heard after it, but that influence belongs to the band’s whole body of work and to Boxer and High Violet before it, and Aaron Dessner’s later production is a career’s reach, not this album’s. No named later record can be shown to turn on it.
Paul Thomas Anderson · Film
7.3 · Tier III
The field is the cinema of the 2000s. The intrinsic force is real and limited: the film showed that the persona of a broad comic star could carry an art film without irony, and that a romance could be built from anxiety, abstraction and noise; it compressed the scale of American auteur cinema after the ensemble films of the 1990s. It perfected a personal manner more than it reorganised what film could do. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: a shared directing prize at Cannes; a lasting influence on how its star’s dramatic register is read, with later films, the Safdie brothers’ Uncut Gems (2019) among them, commonly placed in its line; and a share in the decade’s off-kilter American romance that is arguable rather than demonstrable. The redirection is local.
Talk Talk · Music
7.3 · Tier III
The field is the album of the 1980s. The intrinsic force is modest but real: the record takes the synthesiser pop of its moment and gives it a melancholy interior and room to breathe, a refinement of the form rather than a reorganisation of what the album could do. Its devices, synthesisers, programmed and played drums and studio polish, were the common language of 1984; its distinction is a voice and a temper. Reach as an album, as a model others followed, is small, and the influence that runs from this band runs through Spirit of Eden and Laughing Stock, which is not credited here. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the singles have lived on in broadcast and are reported to have been large hits in continental Europe, and the title song reached a new audience through a cover by No Doubt, reported as a hit in 2003.
Yousef Abdelky · Architecture
7.3 · Tier III
Field: the congregational and state mosque of the Gulf and the wider Muslim world in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Intrinsic force is small. The building does not reorganise the possibilities of the mosque; it consolidates the grand eclectic state mosque at a new size and finish, a type already present in the Gulf before it opened. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: real as image and as type, narrow as architecture. It set a standard of white marble, many domes, floral inlay and night lighting that later state mosques have pursued, it was copied outright in a replica at Surakarta in Indonesia, and its name is carried by other mosques. But it taught no new way to plan or build a mosque, and what followed it imitates its image. Reach is wide for its age and of the kind presence gives.
Wes Anderson · Film
6.9 · Tier II
The field is the American cinema of the 1990s. Intrinsic force is modest and real: the film proposed a comedy of earnest failure, a crime film without cruelty and a tone of deadpan tenderness at a moment when American independent cinema was turning toward violence and irony, and it is the first statement of a manner. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: on release it was almost none, for the film failed commercially; its later reach is large, but it is carried mostly by its maker’s subsequent films and by the careers it began, Anderson’s and the Wilsons’, and through them a strand of deadpan American comedy and independent film in the 2000s. That reach is credited and discounted: the film opened a door that others, and its maker, went through.
Robert Eggers · Film
7.6 · Tier III
The field is the cinema of the 2020s. The intrinsic force is real and limited: the film showed that a director of small art-horror films could carry historical literalism to studio scale, and that a large action film could be made from inside a premodern worldview without translation. It does not reorganise what film can do, and its means are Eggers’s own, developed in his earlier films. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: a theatrical failure against its cost; a strong critical reception and a following grown on home release; a place in a wider turn toward Norse and medieval subjects on screen. Reach beyond that is forecast, and holds the axis below 7.0.
Jeff Nichols · Film
7.5 · Tier III
The field is the cinema of the 2010s. The intrinsic force is moderate and real: the film shows that the wonder film of the late 1970s can be made at a low register, with an adult’s grief at its centre and its exposition removed, and it is one of the cleaner instances of that idea in its decade. It refines what the genre can do; it does not reorganise it. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: a respected work by a respected director, in a decade whose broad return to the wonder of that earlier cinema it joined rather than led, with no line of later films shown to take its manner from it. What holds the axis is that reach, still slight after ten years.
Robert Eggers · Film
7.5 · Tier III
The field is the cinema of the 2020s. The intrinsic force is modest: the film shows that a period horror film made with exacting craft and a severe palette can reach a wide audience, re-reads a canonical image and restores folklore to the vampire. It does not reorganise what film can do, and its methods extend those of its maker’s earlier work and of a decade of art-house horror rather than opening a new path. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it can only be forecast. The film had a wide release and its image of Orlok was much discussed, but nothing yet shows later films taking their direction from it. The figure records a strong instance of a current, not a redirection of it.
Luca Guadagnino · Film
7.3 · Tier III
The field is the cinema of the 2020s. The intrinsic force is real and limited: the film shows that the sports drama can carry an erotic triangle in its frame structure and its score, and that a studio film for adults can be cut to dance music without irony. It is a confident refinement of its director’s manner and of the adult studio picture, not a reorganisation of what film can do. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: after so short a span it is mostly forecast, and shows as the Reznor and Ross score’s life of its own, with a remix album, and a tennis-club look that entered fashion for a season. Fashion and box office are presence, not reach, and there is no sign yet that the film has redirected how films are made.
Chris Sanders · Film
7.3 · Tier III
The field is the cinema of the 2020s. The intrinsic force is moderate: the film shows that the painted manner in American studio computer animation can carry a full-length, earnest nature drama, not only comedy and spectacle, and its long passages carried by image and score with little dialogue are a real stretch for the studio form. It does not reorganise what is possible: the manner was opened by others in the six years before, the narrative form is inherited, and Flow, of the same season, made the larger departure. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: in two years it shows as prominence among the animated features of its year and a wide audience, which is presence, not redirection.
David Fincher · Film
7.5 · Tier III
Released in 2023, so force and reach are scored together, against the cinema of the 2020s, and reach can only be what three years show. Intrinsic force is modest: the film refines the professional-killer film and its director’s procedural manner with authority, and its devices, an inner voice set against action, point-of-view sound, a chaptered procedure, were all available and are used with intelligence rather than discovered. Set beside The Zone of Interest (8.4), of the same year, it reorganises nothing in how its subject can be shown. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the film was widely seen on its platform, discussed as a late self-portrait of its director and admired by critics, but no redirection of the field can be shown, and it has not become a model others follow. Promise is discounted, and both components point the same way.
Alex Garland and Ray Mendoza · Film
7.3 · Tier III
The field is the cinema of the 2020s. The intrinsic force is moderate. The film showed that a wide release from a prominent studio could carry a combat picture with no score, no arc and testimony in place of a script, and that an ensemble of rising actors could be used as an anonymous unit. It extends a manner more than it reorganises what the form can do. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the film was widely reviewed and argued over, earned modest returns in cinemas, and prompted a debate on the ethics of reconstructing combat from one side’s memory. Whether it redirects the war film cannot yet be known, and nothing shown in eighteen months says that it has.
Deafheaven · Music
7.3 · Tier III
The field is the guitar album of the early 2020s, metal and shoegaze both. Intrinsic force is modest. The record shows that a band formed in extreme metal can make a full shoegaze record with the voice clean and the dynamic architecture of post-rock intact, and that the scream can be used once, as structure, rather than as a constant. That widens the band’s idiom without reorganising the field, since every element was established and Alcest’s precedent was seven years old. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: no school or sound can be shown to have turned on it, and it sat inside a wider revival of shoegaze among younger listeners that it did not lead.
Mogwai · Music
7.3 · Tier III
The field is instrumental rock of the 2000s, in which the long crescendo had become a common form: Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Explosions in the Sky, Sigur Rós and the band’s own earlier records. The intrinsic force is modest. The record showed that the crescendo could be compressed into the length of a rock song and keep its weight, and set a piano at the centre of a heavy record. That widens the idiom without reorganising it. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Auto Rock has been widely used in film and television, carrying the band’s crescendo into the language of screen scoring. That is a real reach, but it is the use of a sound already made, and no records or makers can be shown to have turned on this one.
David Childs (Skidmore, Owings and Merrill) · Architecture
7.2 · Tier III
The field is the American tall building of the 2000s and 2010s. The intrinsic force is modest: a refined summation of the tapered glass supertall, with a concrete core and a life-safety section that answered the failures of 2001, lessons the tower exemplifies rather than founds. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: considerable in the life of the city, small in the art. The tower anchored the rebuilding of Lower Manhattan’s office market and gave the skyline its figure back. It did not redirect tall-building design, which in New York turned in the same decade to the thin residential towers of Midtown, and abroad followed other lines. A summit of height, not of consequence.
Maurizio Cattelan · Visual art
6.7 · Tier II
Published, so force and reach are scored together, in the field of the international art world and art market of the late 2010s. The intrinsic force is slight: not a reorganisation of what a work can be, since the readymade, the certificate and the replenished perishable were all established, but a pointed restatement, the gesture pared to its least. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the most discussed work of its year, a meme, a byword for the absurdity of contemporary art, and in 2024 a market event, with a reach in discourse that continues. It redirected little practice: no line of artists is known to start from it, and much of its reach is as the thing derided or imitated in jest. Wide reach on narrow force.
Arcade Fire · Music
7.5 · Tier III
The field is the rock album of the early 2020s, and the record’s contest is with the band’s own past and with the records of isolation made in the same years. Intrinsic force is small: the suite form, the cumulative anthem and the theme of attention dissolved by screens were each available, and the last was common in its moment. The distinction is concentration and craft, a band doing its own thing more tightly. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: no later records are shown to have turned on this one, the band’s influence runs through its first records, and the record’s public life was cut short within months by the allegations against its singer reported in August 2022. That holds it lowest here.
Luca Guadagnino · Film
7.1 · Tier III
The field is the cinema of the 2020s, and reach can only be what two years show. The intrinsic force is real but not reorganising: a major star’s persona turned to abjection; an explicit queer love story at an international scale with a hallucinatory last act; a model of the literary adaptation that reads a writer’s life into a book he wrote before the event. Each has its precedent. The hallucinatory Burroughs is Cronenberg’s, the turn of a star’s persona is a known gesture, and the studio artifice belongs to a broader current. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: a competition premiere at Venice, a small box office, and a critical reception divided over the last act, with no redirection of the field yet to be shown. That is what holds the axis lowest of the twelve.
Thomas Heatherwick · Architecture
6.8 · Tier II
The field is the public landmark and civic centrepiece of the 2010s and 2020s, and the intrinsic force is modest. It made the stair alone the substance of a monument, and showed that a developer’s centrepiece could be a structure entered and climbed rather than an object to look at; but it reorganised nothing in how buildings are planned, built or used, and its structure, though well made, is conventional steel. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: wide as image, narrow and largely negative as architecture. It joined, and for a time led, the fashion for the destination object commissioned to make a district photographable. What followed it as a lesson was chiefly a caution, about parapet heights, about public space on private terms, about building for the photograph. No line of buildings descends from it.
Jack Vettriano · Visual art
6.5 · Tier II
Published, so intrinsic force and achieved reach are scored together, in the field of British and Scottish painting of the 1990s and the market for popular art. Intrinsic force is slight: the canvas reorganises no possibility of painting, its means and idiom were all in hand by mid-century, and it is a strong instance of a manner, not a new one. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: very wide as an image and narrow in practice. As a print it reached a very wide public, and it became a standing case in the British argument over popular taste and critical judgment. But it redirected little: no line of painters is known to start from it, and its influence is felt in decorative prints rather than in the art it entered.
Francis Ford Coppola · Film
6.7 · Tier II
Field: the cinema of the 1980s. The force is real and local. The film showed that the teenage picture, the most commercial form of its decade, could be made as an avant-garde elegy in black and white with a percussion score. It did not reorganise what film could do; it carried known means into a genre that had not had them. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it failed at release, the youth film of the decade followed John Hughes rather than this, and no successor can be named that redirected itself because of it; resemblance is not counted as influence. Copeland’s score stands as an early film score by a rock drummer. The later cult and critical recovery is delayed reach, credited and discounted.
David Mackenzie · Film
7.2 · Tier III
The field is the cinema of the 2010s. The intrinsic force is slight: a finished, sober manner of historical war film, in a line with Ackroyd’s earlier work and a decade of grimed, handheld medieval pictures, turned on a Scottish subject; nothing in it reorganises what the medium or the genre can do, and the opening take is a virtuoso passage of a kind the decade had many of. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the opening-night slot at Toronto, wide availability on Netflix in its first year, a place among the streaming studio’s first large prestige features, a public argument about cutting a film after its premiere, and some interest in Scottish locations. What holds it lowest of the twelve: no later historical film shows its mark, and its reach is largely the reach of a distributor’s strategy.
Francis Ford Coppola · Film
6.4 · Tier II
The field is the cinema of the 1990s, and the intrinsic force is slight: the film reorganised no possibility of the medium, and its strength is a finished manner, its predecessors’, turned on old age and religion. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: seven Academy Award nominations, Best Picture among them, and no wins; a complaint, “pull me back in”, that passed into common speech and into parody; an afterlife carried largely by The Sopranos, whose gangsters quote and imitate it. What it redirected is hard to name. The late return of an ageing master to his saga became a recognised kind, and this film is cited in it as a caution more than a model; the gangster film of its decade went elsewhere, after Goodfellas (8.7). Narrow reach on slight force holds the axis lowest.