BEFORE WHO DIES? GUARDIAN'S 1,000 WORKS TO SEE....

I have two words for the compilers of the Guardian's week-long list of '1,000 artworks to see before you die':
Franz Kline.

There are ten Pollocks on the list. You think Jack was ten times the artist Kline was? Even Yves Klein gets one. Pissarro gets only one. This is why I hate lists like that; you get forced into making artificial value judgements, while the overall perspective of the poll drives you crazy anyway (almost like no Faulkner in Waterstone's millennial top 100 novelists).

I'm not insisting on my favourites. I'd have included one Diebenkorn too, but I'm not surprised he's out. But Kline? His early death doesn't seem to have given him a romantic image, like Pollock, but to his AbEx colleagues, he was the real deal, and in some ways the prototype: Pollock's macho crossed with Rothko's intensity.