10 Contemporary Artists Share Their Favorite Works of Art

Every artist derives inspiration from their surroundings, and often, they are directly inspired by the work of artists who came before them. In My View: Personal Reflections on Art by Today's Leading Artists, edited by Simon Grant, provides firsthand accounts by contemporary artists, who share the artists and artworks that have inspired them the most. Each description is no longer than a page, but they all encompass greater discussions about art and art history. Click through 10 Contemporary Artists Share Their Favorite Works of Art to see excellent selections from the book. Buy it here.

RELATED: How to Make It: 15 Rules for Success From Creative Industry Insiders

Credit: In My View: Personal Reflections on Art by Today's Leading Artists, edited by Simon Grant, published by Thames & Hudson, 2012.

Follow @Complex_Art

"Gernes had little interest in selling his art, and many works ended up being stored in a large, damp barn for years...[He] strongly believed that artists could play an important role in society, and felt that the most essential thing was for them to discover their own ideas. However, his intention was for artists to create art that had a public purpose, rather than creating work for their own subjective ends."

Above: Poul Gernes, Decoration of the Herlev Hospital, University of the Copenhagen, Herlev, Denmark, 1968-76

(p. 193)

"White and Pink Head is a tautly organized image, which makes every inch of paint part of one dynamic entity, coherent as a whole thing, but continually surprising as to placing and proportion. Although laid on in blatant, uninflected areas, it evokes a delicate apprehension of real matter in real space. Although it seems to be brutally geometrical, it resolves itself into a tender image of a specific, loved young woman - it depicts Matisse's remarkable daughter Marguerite, who looks back at us with a gaze as direct and human as the gaze of Rembrandt in his self-portraits. To miraculously hold together contradictions and incompatibilities is a good definition of art."

Above: Henri Matisse, White and Pink Head, 1914-14, Oil on canvas

(p. 28)

"All of this is to say that Johannes Vermeer is the only artist whose paintings I cannot readily deconstruct; their physicality and process seem to resist all analytical scrutiny. Other than the fact that they were all made with the use of a lens and a camera-obscura-like mechanical contrivance of some kind, the paintings remain impenetrable. I have no idea how Vermeer made them. The paint appears to have been blown onto the canvas or panel by a divine breath of air - the perfect breeze. The paint does not seem to function as a film of pigment - neither opaque nor translucent - but instead as light itself."

Above: Johannes Vermeer, The Milkmaid, c. 1657-58, Oil on canvas

(p. 54)

"I once read somewhere that da Vinci is like a deep ocean, Michelangelo like a towering mountain, and Raphael like a boundless plain. On my last trip to Milan I was again on a journey to find the three 'greats' of the Renaissance, and again I felt that strength - like waves crashing in unison, but unable to move the great rock - from da Vinci's Last Supper. The painting is an immovable force within art history."

Above: Leonardo da Vinci, The Last Supper, 1492-7/8, Tempera and oil on plaster

(p. 198)

"[A Painting That Is Its Own Documentation] is painted on canvas by professional signwriters and lists the date of the work's conception followed by its subsequent exhibition history, which must be updated every time the painting is shown. I like the way that, by incorporating its own history and perpetuity, A Painting That Is Its Own Documentation defies the fate of most works, which eventually become weighed down with their history. Marcel Duchamp said a work of art only has a life of forty years after which it becomes history, but in this work, now in its forty-third year, John Baldessari has it both ways: A Painting That Is Its Own Documentation has not only become history but, paradoxically, history keeps it alive. By being continuously exhibited the work lives on, constantly renewing itself."

Above: John Baldessari, A Painting That Is Its Own Documentation, 1966-68, Acrylic on canvas

(p. 128)

"As the author Heiner Müller said, 'Only he who agrees can change things.' Andy Warhol showed me that reality cannot be changed unless you agree with it. To agree requires being audacious. Audacious in thinking that art, because it's art, is resistance. Art resists facts. Art resists political, aesthetical and cultural habits. Through its resistance art is movement, positive-ness, intensity, belief. Andy Warhol cooperated with reality in order to change it. There is a kind of loss of reality in his work, and it is precisely this loss that creates a new real."

Above: Andy Warhol, 129 Die in Jet, 1962, Acrylic on canvas

(p. 102)

"Sometimes, I think Hugo had the 'bug' of the ink. I know what that is like - it can become an extension of you. It is in your blood. What he did was establish some kind of relationship, an affection or love, between the work and himself. It was an act of generous collaboration between one's hand, one's mind, the paper, the ink and the gesture. The result is that his drawings look just right."

Above: Victor Hugo, Octopus with the Initials V.H., c. 1866, Pen, brush, sepia ink and wash on cream paper

(p. 134)

"I first came across Man Ray's Dust Breeding (1920) - a photograph of Marcel Duchamp's Large Glass (1915-23) covered with dust in his studio - many years ago, when on my foundation course. I found the image in an anthology and didn't really know what I was looking at. It looked like an aerial photograph, or a view through a microscope. Dust Breeding seemed a truly ambiguous image, appearing to be abstract yet at the same time acting as an accurate record of an object. It was only later, when I read more about Duchamp and his work, that I appreciated how he deified neglect, and that allowing dust to settle could be a valid process in the making of art."

Above: Man Ray, Dust Breeding, 1920, printed c. 1967, Gelatin silver print

(p. 126)

"Rembrandt's paintings and etchings endlessly played with this idea of combining personal and general experience. He seemed like a man who was trying to find 'himself' in every portrait he created. His own scarred and chiselled features can even be seen in the portraits he painted on commission. The despondent, dejected look of his late self-portraits seems to say: 'Well, what can you do - that's life.'"

Above: Rembrandt Van Rijn, Portrait of Nicolaes Ruts, 1631, Oil on mahogany panel

(p. 57)

"When you look at Polke's work, you see that he constantly evolved and continually re-invented himself, taking chances as well as taking liberties. With other artists you have an idea what they're going to do, but with Polke, I was never able to anticipate that. He exemplifies a definition of art I believe in. When somebody asks me, 'What is art?', I always say, 'Art is what you can get away with.'"

Above: Sigmar Polke, The Higher Powers Command: Paint the Upper Right Hand Corner Black!, 1969, Lacquer on canvas

(p. 30)