Artists beginning with W

Jeff Wall - A Sudden Gust of Wind (1993)

Nature's uncanny tendency to upset the most well-prepared plans of human business are transcribed by Wall from the early 19th century of Hokusai's Japan to the late 20th-century outskirts of Vancouver. A petrified lightbox montage of over 100 photographs. (Robert Clark)

Alfred Wallis - String of Boats (1928)

Alfred Wallis said he created paintings to keep him company. The St Ives semi-abstract sophisticates, slumming it down from London, claimed to have discovered him and, perhaps patronisingly, championed his art as that of a naive eccentric. Yet Wallis outpainted every single one of them with his irresistible Cornish mists, perky lighthouses and frail little ships that say it all about the free dreams of seafaring. (RC)

Andy Warhol - Marilyn Diptych (1962), Orange Car Crash Fourteen Times (1963), Electric Chair (1964), Empire (1964), Zenith (with Jean-Michel Basquiat) (1985)

There is a brutal realist punch inside Warhol's glittering glamour. His masterpiece, Marilyn Diptych, manages to make both sides of his regard equally blatant. On the left, Marilyn Monroe's face is luridly perfect, eternal, unchanging – a byzantine icon of fame. On the right, she fades and rots: the black-and-white photographic image is left uncoloured and it degrades before our eyes. As the reference to the Christian tradition of the two-part diptych makes plain, this is a religious painting. Eternal Marilyn is a soul in paradise — or a face and personality preserved for ever in her films while the decay of the black and white image reveals the fate of the body after death. Is there eternal life, or just enduring celebrity?

Warhol is a great painter. One of the many cliches of his fame is the myth that he was more interested in films, TV and famous people than in the production line of pictorial art he launched in the early 1960s when he adopted the silkscreen method to transfer inked images of photographs directly onto canvas. In reality, Warhol's paintings deploy their black silkscreen shadows with great nuance and poetry within planes of painterly colour.

His Electric Chairs are terse elegies to the victims of American justice: portraits of a dark national icon, Old Sparky, all alone in a room waiting for you. Warhol is at once surreal, abstract – and funny. His film Empire, dwelling unblinking on the Empire State Building for nearly nine hours, is typical of his work's brilliant revelation of depth in shallowness. A hostile critic, and there have been a few, might be tempted to reach for an apocalyptic comparison between Warhol's flat gaze on a Manhattan landmark and Cézanne's passionate staring at Mont Sainte-Victoire, but a more astute one might pause to reflect that Warhol so precisely invites this comparison.
The social ethos that led him to create the derelict alternative community of his Factory studio in the 1960s was, like everything about him, far more human and radical than he allowed it to seem. After his death it was revealed that he regularly worked in New York soup kitchens. In some of his last works he seems to be trying to recreate the radical playfulness of the 60s in the much more atomised 80s, by abandoning fixed ideas of authorship to share canvases with graffit artist Jean-Michel Basquiat. (Jonathan Jones)

John William Waterhouse - The Lady of Shalott (1888)

A mean-spirited obituary in The Times in 1917 of this quintessential pre-Raphaelite stated: "He painted always like a scholar and a gentleman, though not like a great artist." Piffle. This painting based on Tennyson's poem of a cursed woman sent to die in a boat downstream to Camelot is loved the world over. For all romantic dreamers. (Mark Brown)

Charles Waterton - The Nondescript (1824)

Not satisfied with making breakthroughs in taxidermy, wrestling with an alligator or hanging upside down from a tree while reading the Bible, the eccentric aristocrat Charles Waterton grafted together hybrid specimens like this human face moulded from the backside of a red howler monkey. Maybe the infinite variety of God's creation wasn't quite infinite enough for him? All done a century before surrealism. (RC)

Antoine Watteau - Embarkation for Cythera (c1717), Gilles (c1718)

Nothing melts the heart as instantly and permanently as an encounter with Watteau's genius. Your whole understanding of what art can be is enriched and liberated by this painter of fripperies — fragile rococo scenes of love in the open air and portraits of commedia dell'arte characters — that are, magically, as profound as any religious altarpiece. The depths of feeling and tenderest elusive realities of life are intimated in their flickers and gauzes of decorative richness.

Watteau himself is a Gilles, staring back at us with enigmatic sadness from within his elegant costume. His misty romantic reverie of a crowd of ladies and their beaux heading for — or are they leaving? — the island of love is a utopian monument to the noble dream of hedonism.

The Enlightenment produced no more beautiful declaration of its belief in the heroism of the senses — and no more exquisite contradiction of its cult of reason than this delirious journey into the unknown. (JJ)

Fishli Weiss - Suddenly This Overview (1981), Fotografías (2004-5)

The collaborative duo Fishli Weiss come on as if amused by the lunacy of it all. Tragicomic mischief-makers they may be, yet their work is always tactically considered and immaculately composed. Suddenly This Overview takes a look at momentous goings-on in the form of some 250 hand-moulded clay tableaux. Featured protagonists include the first fish that decided to go ashore and Mr and Mrs Einstein sleeping after conceiving Albert. In contrast Fotografías are 109 monochrome samples of pretty trashy illustrations, subtly doctored to reveal a melancholic wonderland. (RC)

Richard Wentworth - Making Do and Getting By and Occasional Geometries (1973-2007)

A photographic series documenting the small-scale ingenuities and serendipitous curiosities Wentworth comes across on his travels. A coat-hanger propping open a window, a car door reused as a farmyard gate: found Duchampian marvels proliferate. (RC)

Western European (c800) - Book of Kells

Experts debate whether the dazzling gospels were made in Ireland, Scotland or northern England; in the village of Kells, County Meath, they insist local monks made the masterpiece of western calligraphy, writhing with human and animal figures in a style closely related to the intricate metalwork of the period. (Martin Kettle)

Rogier van der Weyden - The Descent from the Cross (c1435)

The beautifully proportioned nude body of Christ and the lifelike faces massed in dignified grief make this gothic painting a monument of controlled, eloquently tragic art. (JJ)

James Abbott McNeill Whistler - Arrangement in Grey and Black: Portrait of the Painter's Mother (1871), Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket (1875)

Whistler's Nocturnes — many of them products of night-time adventures in rowing boats on the Thames — are ghostly, bottle-green affairs, almost suspiciously decorative and utterly seductive. In 1877 Ruskin denounced Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket, accusing Whistler of "flinging a pot of paint in the public's face". Whistler sued for libel and won — but, since he was awarded only a farthing in damages, the affair bankrupted him. Like his Nocturnes, the portrait of his mother deliberately marries the idea of painting and music with its ideas of harmony in composition; it is a groundbreaking visual manifesto for the aesthetic movement. (Charlotte Higgings)

John White - Indians Dancing (1580s)

The customs of the New World are portrayed with an eye mercifully free from caricature and genuinely interested in other peoples' ways in the watercolours of an adventurous artist sent by Sir Walter Raleigh to observe life in Chesapeake Bay. (JJ)

Rachel Whiteread - Ghost (1990)

Whiteread, the first woman to win the Turner Prize, is famous for her reverse plaster casts and this was one of her first: a 9ft wide, 11ft high room from a Victorian east London house with its coal grate and peeling wallpaper. It's very British, and quite sad in a way. (MB)

Richard Wilson - 20:50 (1987)

A room is filled to waist height with sump oil, save for a narrow walkway leading from the entrance. The viewer is surrounded by oil on all sides, in whose glassy, inky surface the architecture of the space is reflected. A magical, disorienting experience. (CH)

Wols - Manhattan (1947), Butterfly's Wing (1947)

The titles were added by cataloguers. Wols left his paintings untitled, to preserve their essential ambiguity. Part of the Parisian existentialist set, Wols took a rather more Taoist angle on philosophical uncertainty. His images are improvised evocations of some kind of psychological back-of-beyond. While Pollock in New York threw paint around on a heroic scale, Wols worked away obsessively in a spirit of introverted exploration. His semi-abstractions transcend mere doodles and daubs through a super-sensitivity to paint's suggestive potential. His dream beings are glimpsed just as they emerge as if pulsing from the undifferentiated magma of the unconscious. (RC)

Francesca Woodman - House #3 (1976)

The fact that Francesca Woodman committed suicide aged only 23 cannot help but add poignancy to the dreadfully ephemeral disposition of her self-portrait photographs. In this typically bleak image she appears just about to be absorbed by the captivating dereliction. Charismatically tragic. (RC)

Joseph Wright of Derby - An Experiment on a Bird in the Air-Pump (1768)

Two young sisters are upset by a scientific experiment conducted at night in a room of an English country house. Wright shares their compassion: his vision of the power of science is at once exhilarating and horrific. The white cockatoo about to be killed resembles the dove of the Holy Spirit. (JJ)

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