Listicle: 10 artworks that uncannily predicted the future

These 10 artists eerily predicted death, disaster, and modern life — proof that sometimes a brush is mightier than a crystal ball

Listicle: 10 artworks that uncannily predicted the future

• 
  Victor Brauner’s Self-Portrait with Enucleated Eye

  The Romanian surrealist blended human, animal and object when he painted his figures. He often represented subjects whose eyes or a single eye were detached from their orbits. He probably wouldn’t have painted this oil on canvas in 1931 had he known what was to come. In 1938, Brauner got into a bar brawl and was hit by a glass. He lost only his left eye.
• 
  Michael Richards’s Tar Baby vs St. Sebastian

  Did the sculptor foresee his death in an airplane attack? His 1999 work used a bronze cast of his own body dressed as an Afro-American Tuskegee aviator. It featured dozens of aircrafts pierced through its form. On September 11, 2001, Richards was in his studio on the 92nd floor of the World Trade Centre (North Tower), when the first hijacked plane flew into the floor above, killing him and thousands of others.
• 
  Van Gogh’s At Eternity’s Gate

  Critics call it his saddest work – and for a man whose paintings echo his lifelong struggle with depression, that’s saying a lot. The self-portrait was created in May 1890, barely two months before he died by suicide. It is impossible not to be moved to tears seeing the image of a frail old man, face buried in his hands – absolutely alone, slouched in a chair, probably weeping in despair. As if he knew the end was near.
• 
  Andy Warhol’s Self-Portrait with a Skull

  Those outside the art world remember the American visual artist as the one who claimed, “In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes”. Reels are shorter than that now. Fame is ever more fleeing. But his self-portrait (he made one in 1978 and another in 1986) are both cheeky references to the power of the façade, the creation of the public persona and the obsession with the self. All of that echoes in our Insta feeds today.
• 
  Manabu Ikeda’s Foretoken

  Okay, so Ikeda is Japanese. His pen-and-ink drawings blend civilisation and nature. He would, at some point, paint a giant wave. But the gigantic 2008 work, a giant wave made up of intricate illustrations of skyscrapers, streets, urban landscapes and industrial activity, eerily foreshadows the 2011 tsunami, which devastated Japan. Life imitated art. We wish it didn’t.
• 
  Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks

  Hopper was painting about 100 years before the pandemic. His world already seemed solitary, lonely, empty. There were lone figures in cubicles. Women gazing longingly out the window. Pensively spending an evening at home. Our life in lockdown echoed his mood. But Nighthawks, his best-known work, might best capture our halting steps out, as we isolated at restaurants, eager for company, but not quite so close.
• 
  Ferdinand Georg Waldmüller’s The Expected One

  Did the Austrian have a time machine? He painted the work in 1860. It depicts a young woman walking down a field path in a bonnet, voluminous skirt and boots. But wait. Is she texting on a smartphone? Why are her eyes looking down at what appears to be a device in her hands? Relax. It’s a hymn book. But she’s just as engrossed. She hasn’t even noticed the young man watching her.
• 
  Jean-Marc Côté’s Electric Scrubbing

  No, there were no motorised home-cleaning devices in 1899, when this postcard-style picture was painted. The image was meant to be a joke, an outlandish vision of what life might look like a century on, for the France En L’an 2000 series. But here we are, in Côté’s future, with a vacuum cleaner in the cupboard and a Rooma on our wishlist. Our homes, however, don’t seem quite so grand.
• 
  Cildo Meireles’s Tower of Incomprehension

  Yes, the Brazilian conceptual artist was riffing on the Biblical Tower of Babel in his 2001 installation, with a towering stack of used analogue radios all tuned to different radio stations at the same time. But his work unknowingly riffs on the future too. He warns of information overload, the crush of mass-media chatter, the rise of miscommunication and echo chambers. We weren’t listening then, and it seems almost too late now.
• 
  Nam June Paik’s Electronic Superhighway

  The Korean video artist predicted the upcoming digiscape all the way back in 1995. Paik’s installation Electronic Superhighway used hundreds of video monitors, TV sets, DVD players and neon lights to form a map of the US, each state displaying different video clips. It underlined his vision of global electronic interconnectivity. That you’re reading this on a screen via the internet means his vision came true!