Ten artists who took sculpture off its pedestal, from Rodin's trembling bronze surfaces to the welded steel, floating mobiles, and raw confessions that followed. For most of its history, sculpture knew its job: commemorate the hero, flatter the saint, hold the pose.

Ten painters, sculptors, and printmakers of the 1400s and 1500s who taught Europe to see in perspective, paint in oil, and put the human being at the center of art. Something extraordinary happened in European art between roughly 1400 and 1600.

Ten painters who carried their easels out of the studio and into the light, and changed what a picture could be. In April 1874, a group of painters rejected or ignored by the official Paris Salon rented the former studio of the photographer Nadar on the boulevard des Capucines and hung their own show.

From the cubist earthquake of 1907 to the graffiti-charged canvases of the 1980s, these are the ten painters who taught the twentieth century how to see itself. No century asked more of painting than the twentieth.

Ten musicians who took jazz from the dance floor to the concert hall and then blew it wide open, from the swing bands of the 1930s to the bebop revolution of the 1940s and 1950s. For roughly two decades, jazz was not one thing but two revolutions in a row.

Ten living choreographers, from Frankfurt to the favelas of Rio, whose stages, schools, and movement languages are rewriting what dance can say. Something remarkable happened to contemporary dance after 1990: it stopped being a niche and became a lingua franca.

From ragtime New York to the dance halls of Havana, Buenos Aires and London, ten dancers, teachers and one composer who turned partner dancing into a twentieth-century art. At the start of the twentieth century, partner dancing was either a stiff society ritual or a craze that respectable people disapproved of.