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Find Thirty - W European Historical Artwork 1: Michelangelo, Pieta, 1499, marble (St Peter's Basilica)

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Find Thirty - W European Historical Artwork 1: Michelangelo, Pieta, 1499, marble (St Peter's Basilica)

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Though I've been anti organised religion for most of my life, there is no denying the emotional impact of much High Renaissance art, and for me Michelangelo's Pieta is a deeply moving image of grief and love which transcends the religious narrative.

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Find Thirty - W European Historical Art  - Artwork 2: Vermeer, The Milkmaid, 1657, oil on canvas (Rijksmuseum)

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Find Thirty - W European Historical Art  - Artwork 2: Vermeer, The Milkmaid, 1657, oil on canvas (Rijksmuseum)

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Respectful of a scene of ordinary working life, the use of muted colours and still-life technique brilliance

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Find Thirty - W European Historical Artwork 3: Friedrich, The Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog ,1818, oil on canvas (Hamburger Kunsthalle)

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Find Thirty - W European Historical Artwork 3: Friedrich, The Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog ,1818, oil on canvas (Hamburger Kunsthalle)

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A Romanticist take on the love and awe of nature and of solitude. What's not to like!

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Friedrich's The Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog (1818)

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Find Thirty - W European Historical Artwork 4: Klimt, Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer, 1904-1907, oil and gold leaf on canvas (Neue Galerie, New York)

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Find Thirty - W European Historical Artwork 4: Klimt, Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer, 1904-1907, oil and gold leaf on canvas (Neue Galerie, New York)

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An amazing mix of technical brilliance, ravishing visual opulence, abstraction (the way the dress and chair merge into one dazzling mass of swirls and shapes) and a bit of Symbolistic weirdness. Love it. One of the key painters to bridge traditional and modern art.

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Find Thirty - W European Historical Artwork 5: Van Gogh, The Starry Night, 1889. oil on canvas (MOMA, New York)

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Find Thirty - W European Historical Artwork 5: Van Gogh, The Starry Night, 1889. oil on canvas (MOMA, New York)

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Beautiful, spectacular but unsettling - a bit like the artist's mind.

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Find Thirty - Non-Western European artwork 1: Augusta Savage, Gamin, 1929, paint on plaster (Smithsonian)

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Find Thirty - Non-Western European artwork 1: Augusta Savage, Gamin, 1929, paint on plaster (Smithsonian)

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Savage's backstory alone is fascinating. Born to a large poor family, she became established as a sculptor in 1930's Harlem, she overcame poverty, racism and sexism to become the leading Afro-American female sculptor of her generation and became the first African-American member of the National Association of Women Painters & Sculptors in 1934. One of her best-known works, Gamin, a bust portrait of her nephew, won her a Julius Rosenwald Fellowship to study in Paris.

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Find Thirty - Non-Western European Artwork 2: Caroline Weldon, Portrait of Sitting Bull, 1890, oil on canvas (North Dakota State Museum) 

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Find Thirty - Non-Western European Artwork 2: Caroline Weldon, Portrait of Sitting Bull, 1890, oil on canvas (North Dakota State Museum) 

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Sitting Bull, the leader of the Hunkpapa Lakota people, was the most celebrated tribal leader in the years of resistance to US Government policy and US Army violence and suppression. He is a hero of mine and actually visited my home town of Salford, Lancashire in 1887 as part of Buffalo Bill Cody's travelling Wild West show.

Weldon, an outspoken supporter of NA rights, for which as a single woman in her forties attracted a lot of nastiness, travelled to the Standing Rock reservation in the Dakotas to help Sitting Bull and other tribal chiefs in the campaign for indigenous justice. To honour her heroism the tribe gave her the name 'Woman Walking Ahead'.

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Find Thirty - Non-Western European artwork 3: Jean-Michel Basquiat, Untitled (Skull), 1982, mixed media on canvas (private collection)

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Find Thirty - Non-Western European artwork 3: Jean-Michel Basquiat, Untitled (Skull), 1982, mixed media on canvas (private collection)

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Basquiat rose to prominence in the 1970s and 1980s, first as a graffiti street artist against the background of early hip-hop culture and then as a leading light in the Neo-Expressionist movement. In his early twenties he was featured in some of contemporary arts key international exhibitions. A poet as well as a painter, he frequently mixed words into his pictures. He died aged 27 in 1988. The first major retrospective of his work was held at the Whitney Museum of American Art.

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Untitled (Skull) by Jean-Michel Basquiat

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Find Thirty - Non Western European artwork 4: Yellow Pumpkin by Yayoi Kusama

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Find Thirty - Non Western European artwork 4: Yellow Pumpkin by Yayoi Kusama

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Born in 1929, Kusama is acknowledged as one of Japan's most important and influential contemporary artists. She works primarily through sculpture and installation but her work also spans painting, film and video, performance art, fashion, poetry and fiction.

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Find Thirty - Non Western European artwork 5: The Bull Handler by Nandalai Bose, 1937, tempera

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Find Thirty - Non Western European artwork 5: The Bull Handler by Nandalai Bose, 1937, tempera

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Bose is one of India's most celebrated contemporary artists. He is credited with being a leader in the evolution of modern India art and Contextual Modernism. drawing on folklore and mythology and eschewing Western modernism in favour of a more distinctive Indian cultural style.

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Find Thirty - Contemporary artwork, living artist, artwork 1: 'Sergeant Pepper' album cover, by Peter Blake (1967)

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Find Thirty - Contemporary artwork, living artist, artwork 1: 'Sergeant Pepper' album cover, by Peter Blake (1967)

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The most important contemporary music album by the greatest guitar group ever, fittingly designed by the godfather of Brit Pop Art and its sole living leading light.

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Find Thirty - Contemporary artwork, living artist, artwork 2 - 'The Architect's Home in the Ravine' by Peter Doig, 1991, oil on canvas (private collection) 

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Find Thirty - Contemporary artwork, living artist, artwork 2 - 'The Architect's Home in the Ravine' by Peter Doig, 1991, oil on canvas (private collection) 

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Scottish born Doig focusses on narrating stories through his work, which has been described as magical and mesmerising. One of his paintings, 'White Canoe', sold at Sotherby's in 2007 for $11.3m, at the time a record for a living European artist.

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Find Thirty - Contemporary artwork, living artist, artwork 3:  Billy Childish, Hand on Face, 2005, oil on canvas (whereabouts unknown)

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Find Thirty - Contemporary artwork, living artist, artwork 3:  Billy Childish, Hand on Face, 2005, oil on canvas (whereabouts unknown)

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Childish (born in Chatham, Kent - where he still lives and works - in 1959 as Stephen John Hamper) has been described by Peter Doig as 'one of the most outstanding and often misunderstood figures on the British art scene. A painter, writer, singer and guitarist. Childish is strong advocate of amateurism and free emotional expression.

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Find Thirty - Cultural Context (Social) artwork 2: Our Town, by LS Lowry, 1947, oil on canvas (The Lowry Museum, Salford)

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Find Thirty - Cultural Context (Social) artwork 2: Our Town, by LS Lowry, 1947, oil on canvas (The Lowry Museum, Salford)

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Frequently considered an unfashionable artist, not least because of the aweful 'Matchstalk Men' pop song, I have a fond regard for Lowry and his warts and all celebration of my home town of Salford during it's period of heavy and dirty industrialisation. His depictions of ordinary working class people living and existing against a background of dark Satanic mills and pollution spewing chimney I find moving (partly I guess from civic pride in the city Engels dubbed 'the classic slum').

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Find Thirty - Contemporary artwork, living artist, artwork 4: 'Selfie', by Francoise Petrovitch, 2022

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Find Thirty - Contemporary artwork, living artist, artwork 4: 'Selfie', by Francoise Petrovitch, 2022

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Like Jenny Saville, Petrovitch paints contemporary portraits that say to me - "I want to paint like that!".

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Contemporary artwork, living artist, artwork 5 - 'Loveloss II', by Meredith Marsone, 2015oil and silver leaf on board (Waikato Trust Collection, NZ)

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Contemporary artwork, living artist, artwork 5 - 'Loveloss II', by Meredith Marsone, 2015oil and silver leaf on board (Waikato Trust Collection, NZ)

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New Zealand artist Marsone says "I create figurative paintings infused with the human condition". Her paintings mix highly figurative and abstract elements that challenge and reshape the traditions of realism - dubbed "disrupted realism" by art critic and writer John Seed (author of "Disrupted Realism; Paintings for a Distracted World" (Schiffer Publishing, 2019) ).

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Find Thirty - Cultural Context (Social) artwork 1: Self portrait, by David Bowie (date unknown, private family collection)

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Find Thirty - Cultural Context (Social) artwork 1: Self portrait, by David Bowie (date unknown, private family collection)

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As well as writing and making music over five decades, acting and generally shape-shifting, Bowie was also a talented painter.

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Find Thirty - Cultural Context (Social) artwork 3: The Lute Player, by Caravaggio, 1595, oil on canvas (State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg

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Find Thirty - Cultural Context (Social) artwork 3: The Lute Player, by Caravaggio, 1595, oil on canvas (State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg

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Described as the most perfect of an early group of paintings featuring musicians and musical instruments, painted where he was living, the Palazzo Madama, a vibrant centre of musical and artistic life. Caravaggio had only arrived in Rome from Lombady three years earlier, young and unknown.

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Find Thirty - Cultural Context (Social) artwork 4: FAC 1, by Peter Saville, 1978, poster. 

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Find Thirty - Cultural Context (Social) artwork 4: FAC 1, by Peter Saville, 1978, poster. 

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Thirty years on from the Lowry painting herein, Peter Saville, lead graphic designer to Factory Records and designer of a number of iconic album covers for Joy Division, New Order and other Northern bands (who went on to be Creative Director from Greater Manchester), captured the ironic spirit of post-industrial Manchester as Lowry had of industrial Salford.

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Find Thirty - Cultural Context (Social) artwork 5: The Art of Painting, by  Johannes Vermeer, 1666-7, oil on canvas (Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna

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Find Thirty - Cultural Context (Social) artwork 5: The Art of Painting, by  Johannes Vermeer, 1666-7, oil on canvas (Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna

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On the surface, a painting of an artist and model. But there's so much more to this artwork. The interior is not a studio but one of Vermeer's richly patterned interiors. The 'model' is in fact a representation of Clio, the Muse of History, complete with laurel wreath, a trumpet and a book, denoting history. The artist is wearing fine clothes, clearly unsuitable for painting, so all in all it is not a literal representation. Dominating is a map of the United Netherlands, with a split down the middle symbolising the subsequent break up into two independent staters. Lots of symbolism.

I was intrigued by this painting - not his most popularly known but considered by critics his finest work, to the point that he never sold it - because it is the earliest painting I could find that captures - albeit in highly symbolised form - the actual art of painting as opposed to a self portrait of the artist.

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Find Thirty -Cultural Context (political, legal) artwork 1: Swinging London '67, by Richard Hamilton, 1968, screen print (National Gallery, London)

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Find Thirty -Cultural Context (political, legal) artwork 1: Swinging London '67, by Richard Hamilton, 1968, screen print (National Gallery, London)

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Hamilton's pop-art take on the notorious Jagger/Richards Sussex drugs bust - a trial (in Chichester) that challenged establishment attitude to drug laws at the time.

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Find Thirty - Cultural Context (political, legal) artwork 2: Darkness on the Edge of Democracy, by Andrew Hay, 1984, oil on canvas (The Stirling Smith Gallery) 

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Find Thirty - Cultural Context (political, legal) artwork 2: Darkness on the Edge of Democracy, by Andrew Hay, 1984, oil on canvas (The Stirling Smith Gallery) 

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One artist's take on the Battle of Orgreave during the UK Miner's Strike, 1984-1985. The foreground horse's almost sad eye draws us into the violent chaos of the painting.

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One of the most famous examples of Russian revolutionary art and propaganda, Lissitzky depicts the Bolsheviks as a wedge splitting the monarchists and other reactionary forces  - the Whites - asunder during the Russian civil war. Art historians have likened the work to the Italian Futurists and their 1914 manifesto 'Futurist Synthesis of War'. It has been used in everything from commercials to album covers and left-wing politics in the UK in the 1980s (by a group of Labour supporting musicians whom I did publicity for). 

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Find Thirty - Cultural Context (political, legal), artwork 3: Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge, by El Lissitzky, 1919, lithograph (Municipal Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, The Netherlands)

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Find Thirty - Cultural Context (political, legal), artwork 3: Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge, by El Lissitzky, 1919, lithograph (Municipal Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, The Netherlands)

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Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge

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Find Thirty - Cultural Context (political, legal), artwork 4: Massacre in Korea, by Pablo Picasso, 1951, oil on board (Museo Picasso Malaga, Spain). 

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Find Thirty - Cultural Context (political, legal), artwork 4: Massacre in Korea, by Pablo Picasso, 1951, oil on board (Museo Picasso Malaga, Spain). 

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Picasso's third anti-war painting after 'Guernica' and 'The Charnel House', painted as a protest at US involvement in Korea. It portrays a group of naked women and children facing execution by an American army firing squad.

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Find Thirty - Cultural Context (political, legal), artwork 5: Photo-Op, by kennardphillips (Peter Kennard & Cat Phillips), 2005, photo-montage (IWM North)

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Find Thirty - Cultural Context (political, legal), artwork 5: Photo-Op, by kennardphillips (Peter Kennard & Cat Phillips), 2005, photo-montage (IWM North)

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The defining artwork image of the anti-Iraq War movement, from veteran anti-war artist Peter Kennard and his collaborator Cat Phillips.