Artists beginning with B

Francis Bacon - Study after Velazquez's Portrait of Pope Innocent X (1953), Study for Portrait II (after the Life Mask of William Blake), (1955) Portrait of George Dyer in a Mirror (1968), Triptych May-June (1973), Francis Bacon's studio, preserved as left in 1992

Painting is something obscene and vicious, and utterly compelling, when Bacon wields the brush. His studio, preserved as a sealed room into which you peer anxiously as if you were looking into a poisonous snake's glassed box, is at once a monument to the solitude and mystery of creation and a scary claustrophobic nightmare in pink and purple and unshaded lightbulbs. His paintings are like that, too. Bacon found himself as a painter in the repressive aftermath of the second world war, with paintings that turn surrealism inside out and expose the mind's viscera. But it is the Old Masters, their rich cream surfaces and heavy frames on velvet wallpaper, with whom Bacon converses. His series of paintings of imprisoned, suffering, ridiculous popes meditate on Velázquez's great ruddy-faced Pope Innocent X and on the tyranny of the portrait; there is an idea in Bacon of art as violence, as cruelty, and his eviscerated nudes are never the objects of sentimental compassion. His art can oppress in the mass but when you come across one of his paintings in some dull and predictable collection of postwar art it's like meeting the most horrible, fascinating old bastard in the club. Jonathan Jones

Giacomo Balla - Street Light (1909)

The massive yellow explosion of artificial light in Balla's Futurist Manifesto of a painting eradicates, as if switching on a light, all the chiaroscuro shadows of the old canvases that were smothering young Italians a century ago like shrouds. (JJ)

Balthus - Nude Playing with a Cat (1949)

Balthus may have been frowned upon for his artistic penchant for semi-clad adolescents, yet this is surely an empathetic image of uninhibited delight. The voluptuous abandon of both girl and cat, the beam of dawn sunlight, all transfixed in exquisite compositional tension. Robert Clark

Aubrey Beardsley - Salome (1894)

Aubrey Beardsley's elegantly wasted figures and florid lettering, surrounded by exquisite detailing, were the most decadent images of the art nouveau movement. His highly sexualised and fevered illustrations for Oscar Wilde's play Salome scandalised Victorian society, and lost him his job at the Yellow Book literary periodical. Jessica Lack

Max Beckmann - Departure (1932)

Before fleeing Nazi Germany, where his paintings were especially denounced as Degenerate Art, Beckmann conjured this tragic tableau of carnival gone terribly wrong. The seemingly inescapable foreground composition is an angulated nightmare. An ultramarine horizon beams with a faint ray of faraway hope. (RC)

Gentile Bellini (attributed) - Portrait of a Young Turkish Boy (1479-1480)

East and west meet in this delicate portrait, done by a Venetian at the Turkish court in Istanbul, that combines an Islamic sense of decorative surface with a Renaissance European focus on capturing the reality of the figure. (JJ)

Giovanni Bellini - Agony in the Garden (c1465), Pietà (c1468-1471), Doge Leonardo Loredan (1501-1505), The Feast of the Gods (finished by Titian) (1514-1529)

The most brilliant member of the painting dynasty that put Venice on the Renaissance map painted, among many delicate and unexpected masterpieces, the single most moving sunrise in art. It was his secret weapon in a painting competition with his own brother-in-law, Andrea Mantegna — who had married into the painting clan consisting of father Jacopo and his sons Giovanni and Gentile.

In about 1460 Andrea painted a densely historical image of Christ praying in the garden before his arrest; it hangs today beside Giovanni's rivalrous version of the same subject.

Giovanni wins outright, because behind his simple uncluttered depiction of Christ and the sleeping disciples is a vista of morning light breaking over the hills of northern Italy that simply stops you, holds you and makes you sigh.

The pale white buildings of a Veneto hill town glow against a blue sky that is just starting to turn salmon pink. The hillsides below are still in nocturnal shadow. The image is rendered so beautifully that Giovanni must have been a man of disconcerting sensitivity. He pictures the dead Christ cradled by Mary not slumped over her knee but held up with his broad pale chest spread out like a handkerchief for the beholder to weep into.

His portrait of Venice's elected ruler, in its stillness and quietness, is the male Mona Lisa. (JJ)

Benin - read more here

Berlin painter - Neck amphora decorated with an ageing reveller (c490BC)

The so-called "Berlin painter" of Athens was superb at marrying the composition of his designs to the form of the pot he was working on. His reveller, carrying a lyre, seems to lope nonchalantly along, graceful and balanced. Charlotte Higgins

Gianlorenzo Bernini - The Rape of Proserpine (1621-1622), Apollo and Daphne (1622-1625), David (1623-1624), Bust of Scipione Borghese (1632), Bust of Costanza Bonarelli (c1636-1637), Triton Fountain 1642-1643), Ecstasy of St Theresa (1647-1652), Fountain of the Four Rivers (1648-1651), Bust of Louis XIV (1665), Blessed Ludovica Albertoni (1671-1674)

If one person could be said to have defined and perfected the baroque style, it was Gianlorenzo Bernini. Born in Naples, Bernini came to Rome around 1605 and caught the eye of an influential patron, Cardinal Scipione Borghese, for whom he created a series of mythological figures that represents the most significant advance in sculpture since the Renaissance. Bernini's chief innovation was to set marble in motion: whereas Donatello and Michelangelo had depicted the giant-killing David in monumental repose, Bernini catches him in the act of unleashing his sling, grimacing like a tennis player about to execute a ferocious backhand. Bernini captures the terror and poetry of the moment when the nymph Daphne becomes a laurel tree by showing leaves sprouting from her outstretched fingers; while his unparalleled ability to transform cold stone into warm blood can be seen as the god Pluto roughly sinks his fingers into the softness of Proserpine's thigh, leaving pressure indentations that made Bernini the first sculptor to depict cellulite.

Bernini's baroque makeover of the Eternal City included the curved colonnade around the piazza at St Peter's, the dynamic parade of angels along the Sant'Angelo bridge, and many of Rome's monumental fountains, of which the Triton Fountain in Piazza Barberini and the Fountain of the Four Rivers in Piazza Navona are the most iconic. Such structures were not intended merely to be ornamental — fountains formed a vital part of the city's water supply, while the personification of the great rivers from four continents (Nile, Danube, Ganges and Rio de la Plata) represented the Church's dominion over the known world.

Bernini elevated the portrait bust to a new level of animation, creating sculptures that are not merely likenesses but psychological profiles — he
identified the most revealing moment to be the point just before a person speaks, and thus depicted his patron Cardinal Borghese with threads of saliva between his lips. His dynamic image of Louis XIV, hair flowing and lace flying as if caught in a strong wind, makes a flamboyant contrast to the dishevelled, apparently post-coital intimacy with which Bernini depicted his lover, Costanza Bonarelli.

Yet for sheer unbridled sensuality, nothing matches Bernini's images of female saints in the throes of religious passion. The Chapel of the Blessed Ludovica Albertoni shows the charismatic saint clutching her breast, parting her lips and writhing in a manner that can only be described as orgasmic; while the Ecstasy of St Theresa in the Cornaro Chapel of Santa Maria della Vittoria is a piece of baroque theatre in which the swooning saint performs for onlookers in the donor family's box as if at some mystical, Counter-Reformation peep show. Alfred Hickling

Joseph Beuys - Painroom (1941-1983), Burnt Door, Beak and Ears of a Hare (1953), Auschwitz Demonstration (1956-1964), Lightning with Stag in its Glare (1958-1985), Double Gouache (1959-1960), Chair with Fat (1963), Infiltration Homogeneous for Grand Piano (1966), Felt Suit (1970), The Hearth II (1978), The End of the Twentieth Century (1983-1985)

"I am not a human being. I am a hare. I am a really horny hare!" Joseph Beuys was the most influential artist of the latter half of the 20th century.
His work touches on concerns ranging from Holocaust guilt to ecological alarm. He was endlessly searching and reinventing, impossible to pin down by pre-Beuys definitions. His "counter-images" are often impenetrably hermetic, certainly enigmatic, yet always compelling. After all, anyone who could stand still performing on one leg for hours with a lump of lard shoved into the crook of his knee and keep a straight face has got to be either a screwball or a seer. One list of the contents of Beuys's studio includes a frankfurter painted with brown floor paint; a tin box filled with tallow, with a thermometer in it; toenail clippings; copper rods wrapped in felt. From such materials Beuys constructed sculptural installations and choreographed performances as attempts to exorcise the demons of "the schizophrenia of our age". He got stuck into an obsessive thing about felt, lead and fat. He was a contrary one: sweeping out a forest with a birch broom and bandaging a knife after cutting his finger. Then he could pick up a pencil and summon a drawing of a stag that is all a-quiver with wild life. And he delivered the most rousing lectures: "The animals have sacrificed themselves to make humanity possible... Man must once more be in contact with those below, animals, plants, and nature, and those above, angels and spirits." (RC)

Peter Blake - Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band album cover (1967)

Peter Blake wanted to make the visual equivalent of pop music. Elvis, wrestlers, strippers and matchboxes all found their way into his colourful canvases. His artwork for the Beatles' Sgt Pepper album combined a cast of historical and contemporary celebrities; the result has been pored over almost as much as the album itself. (JL)

William Blake - The Ancient of Days, from Europe: A Prophecy (1794), Jerusalem (1804-1820), The Ghost of a Flea (c1819-1920)

Blake's illuminated books are arguably Britain's greatest contribution to world art. Free from the empiricism that has made British painters excel at portraiture and landscape but so rarely at anything more freely imaginative, Blake created his own inner Sistine Chapel. This Southwark Michelangelo with no patron and little gift for drawing the nude mapped his own heroic universe with its own mythology — and amazingly Blake's bearded Ancient of Days merges with Michelangelo's God in your memory and mine. Blake proved long ago that ideas can be more crucial than skill. He will go on burning bright. (JJ)

Umberto Boccioni - The City Rises (1910), Unique Forms of Continuity in Space (1913), Dynamism of a Speeding Horse and Houses (1914-1915)

When the poet FT Marinetti published the manifesto of futurism in 1909, announcing a new art movement that would blow away the cobwebs of old Europe, there wasn't actually any futurist art to illustrate it. That soon changed. Some of Italy's most talented painters joined the movement — including Boccioni. The great explosion of rearing horses in his epic canvas The City Rises is just the beginning of a radical artistic experiment in which Boccioni attempts to capture the essence of speed and power. His sculpture of a striding man tries quixotically to depict... what, exactly? The flames and flanges the strider gives off seem to represent energy leaving its trail in the ether. (JJ)

Arnold Bocklin - Isle of the Dead (1880)

One of the most haunting landscapes ever, showing a rocky island, a dark sea and boat carrying what is probably a coffin. Perhaps because the artist couldn't exorcise the image from his mind, he painted several versions. The image's unforgettable presence lies less in its enigmatic symbolism than in the irresistible seductiveness of that sea and that sky. (RC)

Christian Boltanski - The Missing House (1990)

The Missing House powerfully explores remembrance and loss. An installation on the site of a bombed east Berlin apartment block in the Jewish quarter, it features plaques displaying former residents' names and jobs. This quiet, shocking memorial employs architectural absence to remember those lost through persecution or war. Elisabeth Mahoney

Pierre Bonnard - The Bath (1925), The Almond Tree in Blossom (1945-1947)

This is painting as an exercise in enchantment. Bonnard gazes so longingly that his perceived image, often painted away from the subject, glows to become something akin to Proustian memory. Scents, tastes and touches are evoked as much as sight. His forever pubescent wife soaking up a bathroom shimmer of Côte d'Azur sunlight. A blossom tree treasured like a totemic self-portrait. The seductiveness belies the artistic struggle, the years of intuitions and hesitancies, involved in its achievement. (RC)

Hieronymous Bosch - The Garden of Earthly Delights (1503-1504)

Pink fleshy structures prick against the sky as if grown from tongues, lips, labia in some mad geneticist's architectural experiment. Spotlights blaze through a smoke-filled night sky as if we are watching the firebombing of a wartime city... how did an obscure Flemish artist at the beginning of the 16th century concoct a fantasy that monstrously foreshadows and outdoes science fiction, surrealism, psychedelia? This religious work painted for an altar was purchased by Philip II, the melancholy Catholic pietist king who launched the Spanish Armada, so he must have seen something spiritual in it. And yet it reeks of heresy and madness. (JJ)

Sandro Botticelli - Primavera (c1481-1482), Pallas and the Centaur (c1482), The Birth of Venus (c1484), Illustrations to Dante (c1480-1490), The Calumny of Apelles (c1495), Mystic Nativity (1500)

Botticelli is so clear and crisp. Totally uninterested in chiaroscuro or ambiguity or even the poetry of landscape, he has a harshness of line that makes him the perfect artist for the hardnosed merchants who funded the Florentine Renaissance — and yet, paradox of paradoxes, he is one of art's supreme mystics.

His tough lucidity tricks the commonsense eye into accepting the occult. Slender arms and legs, polished leaves, a centaur's beard — all are visualised by Botticelli like pieces of imaginary sculpture held under the smooth surfaces of his pictures. And yet, nothing is real at all. The sea is too green to be wet, the women too beautiful to live, their dancing feet don't even touch the earth. Botticelli is so popular, so lovely — and yet if any artist could drive you mad with his conundrums, it would be him.

Students of his great woodland arcadian dance, the Primavera, have if not gone mad then almost come to blows in their endless rival interpretations — is it a spiritual allegory, a magic talisman, a rite of spring? You can love this painting all your life and never know what it means. Botticelli's myths speak the secret language of a culture steeped in magic and philosophy. When he finally speaks directly to us, in an inscription in Greek above his Mystic Nativity, it is to prophesy a new heaven and a new earth. (JJ)

Louise Bourgeois - Red Room (Parents) (1994), Red Room (Child) (1994)

Born in 1911, Louise Bourgeois is an artist of baffling versatility — she has worked in every medium from marble to bronze to drawing and embroidery — but with a profoundly individual, powerful voice. Her Red Rooms are coiling chambers enclosed in old panelled doors and contain objects such as a marital bed, a violin case, a toy train, and an oversize glass teardrop that seems about to drop on the bed. Like much of her work, Red Rooms trigger myriad associations about the family, about childhood, memory, sex — and not in a comforting way. (CH)

Dirck Bouts - Hell (1470)

The damned bear witness with dark deathly eyes to their own sufferings as they are engorged by hell's serpents in this wing from a late medieval altarpiece. The emaciated nudity and macabre pallor lend the work a resemblance to some 19th century absinthe-drinker's decadent enfer. (JJ)

Mr Bower of Chesterfield - The Squirting Tree (original version 1695)

Once known as The Weeping Willow, but renamed by the future Queen Victoria, aged 13. Visiting Capability Brown's gardens at Chatsworth House, stumbling upon this crying copper sculpture makes one feel sad and glad to be around. (RC)

Boyle Family - Rock and Scree Series (1977)

Mark and Joan Boyle started out producing light shows for gigs played by Soft Machine and Jimi Hendrix. But it was their mixed-media replications of patches of earth, randomly selected by throwing darts at an atlas, that really put the family on the map. (AH)

Constantin Brancusi - Brancusi's studio, reconstructed as it was left in 1957

Brancusi's beautiful abstract sculptures, polished, seductive, perfect, create a distant magic world of soaring bird gods and columns that climb heavenwardl ike some sky-ladder in a folk tale. (JJ)

Georges Braque - Le Guéridon (1912), L'Atelier III (1949)

You can make out parts of a violin or cello, musical notes, the legs and round top of a table in Braque's cubist painting Le Guéridon, but these simple, almost cartoonlike sketchy elements melt away as soon as they are noticed, in a picture that is like a hesitant musical piece in the way it starts to find a theme and then becomes tentative again. Cubism is the most revolutionary art movement of the 20th century, a systematic repudiation of the idea that seeing is simple. Braque's still life is a series of feints in which he acknowledges the discontinuous and partial nature of perception. He pioneered cubism in close collaboration with Picasso but the partnership ended when he was wounded in the first world war. Only later in life did he once again produce masterpieces such as L'Atelier III. (JJ)

Brassaï (Gyula Halász) - Lovers in a Small Cafe near the Place d'Italie (1932)

The Hungarian-born photographer who stalked the rain-soaked streets of Paris after dark, Brassaï was an artist who fell in love with the louche, bohemian world of Montmartre in the 1930s, documenting the activities of nocturnal pleasure-seekers. Like these lovers, who circled the bright lights of the city's cafes like moths. (JL)

Rodolphe Bresdin - The Good Samaritan (1861)

The Good Samaritan dismounts from his trusty camel and carries out his act of charity dead centre of the painting; but it's the imps hiding in obsessively delineated undergrowth who steal the show. It's said Bresdin was so in love with nature that he planted a mini landscape complete with waterfall in his Paris apartment, much to his neighbour's consternation. (RC)

British (c3000BC-c1600BC) - Stonehenge

It might be a monstrous face looming in the mist, its grey skin flecked with green lichens. Gnarled recesses pockmark its twisted body. It is the Heel Stone just outside the outer earthwork of Britain's most unforgettable ancient monument. From a distance, the standing stones with their broken ring of lintels look like jagged teeth gnashing at the empty sky. Up close, their massive dark forms, blue and grey and scarred by organic parasites, are like ancestral spirits silently menacing the living world. Look carefully and you can make out dagger shapes carved into some of the upright stones. Watch the sky move over the circle, and it seems framed, controlled, by the imaginations of the ancient builders. A temple, a cemetery? Whatever it once was, today it endures as an sculptural marvel. (JJ)

Agnolo Bronzino - Andrea Doria as Neptune (c1540-1550), Venus and Cupid (c1545)

As precious as a ruby on a white throat, Bronzino is the last genius of the Florentine Renaissance, the painter of corruption who saw the last days of the city's republic and who served the Medici "tyrants". His paintings breathe decadence. Venus and Cupid play their sensuous, in fact incestuous, games in a painting whose enigmatic allegory fails to disguise its irresponsibility. His portraits find character in strangeness. (JJ)

Pieter Bruegel the Elder - Landscape with the Fall of Icarus (1555), The Tower of Babel (1563), The Procession to Calvary (1564), Hunters in the Snow (1565), The Gloomy Day (1565), The Return of the Herd (1565), The Massacre of the Innocents (c1567)

An immense spiralling tower, its base as wide as a city, slowly crawls into the sky. From our bird's eye viewpoint we can see tiny people working on its unfinished hulk, on ramparts that circle the tapering cylinder. Anyone who has visited Rome will surely be reminded of the vast Flavian amphitheatre — the Colosseum — whose arched tiers seem to be imitated here, or rather turned inside out, the sloping substructure of internal seating thrown outward as Gothic buttresses.

When Bruegel visited Rome from his native Flanders, another architectural marvel was going up that may have influenced his vision of hubris. The new St Peter's was already many decades into its construction, but did not yet have a dome. The building site begun in the early 1500s must have looked as chaotic and impossible as Bruegel's Tower of Babel.

His painting of a monster building typifies the rich paradoxes that make him such a great artist. At once a sophisticated allusion to ancient Rome and a truly medieval image of sin and folly, it is simultaneously veristic and fabulous. Bruegel's fascination with details of work and engineering — his depiction of wooden cranes on the Tower or, in his Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, the ploughman in the foreground — makes it seem as though he follows homely Flemish tradition, yet his themes are historical and mythological. Is he a sophisticated pasticheur of popular culture or a naive mixer of high and low?

In fact Bruegel is one of those human miracles unique to the Renaissance — the obvious comparison is Shakespeare — who straddle high and low art and whose epic vision is truly universal. (JJ)

Buddhist art - read more here

Burmese (12th century) - Frescoes of the Abeyadana, Frescoes of the Wet-kyi-in, Ky-byauk-kyi

There are few examples of the brilliantly coloured Khmer-Thai-style temple frescoes left in Burma, many having been destroyed when the Mongols seized power in 1287. Of those that survive, the most beautiful can be found at Abeyadana and the Wet-kyi-in, Ky-byauk-kyi, depicting the life of Buddha. (JL)

Burmese (15th century) - Demons from the Army of Mara Defeated by the Buddha

Around the 11th century, Burmese craftsmen began decorating temples with glazed ceramic plaques depicting the life of Buddha. This tile, in brilliant green and red, depicts two ass-headed demons from the army of Mara — the god of death. (JL)

Byzantine/Gothic - Mosaics, Monreale cathedral, (late 12th-13th centuries), Mosaics, St Mark's Basilica, Venice (12th-16th centuries)

Endlessly changing nuances of light and dark play on the golden mosaics inside St Mark's Basilica. The curves and recesses of the vault richly complicate the shimmering and sacred atmosphere. At Monreale, the glitter of gold leaf contrasts with the greens, blues and reds of narrative scenes as if you are wandering through an illuminated book. (JJ)

Byzantium - read more here

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