Museum curators are never in a position to acquire every painting they want. But Michel Nuridsany, the art critic of Le Figaro newspaper for the last 20 years, has created an imaginary museum between the hard covers of a book — “100 Masterpieces of Painting: From Lascaux to Basquiat, from Florence to Shanghai” (Flammarion, $34.95, 208 pages).

In picking the 100 paintings, Mr. Nuridsany’s aim is not to find the 100 “best” paintings. In his words: “In short, this book presents painting as art that reflects the globalization governing our lives today.”

That sense of range is suggested in the book’s subtitle, which refers to paintings created between 16,000 before the common era and 1987 C.E. But it is Mr. Nuridsany’s careful, intellectual choice of paintings in between those dates that creates a compelling narrative for his ideal global museum. Reproduced on large color plates, these paintings are accompanied by short essays in enthusiastic, stylish prose. Neither professorial nor pretentious, Mr. Nuridsany knows how to communicate his appreciation. As a result, this is not only a book for lovers of art, but of language as well.

As for the selections, there are eight masterworks of Chinese painting intended to show the evolution in the genre without giving it short shrift. Among the earliest is Fan Kaun’s “Travelers Among Mountains and Streams” (c. 1000, C.E.), depicting a lush vertical landscape with a tiny group of travelers and donkeys at the base. Painted during the Northern Song dynasty, it stands in marked contrast to a work from the Yuan Dynasty in the early 14th century, Zhao Mengfu’s “Elegant Rocks and Scattered Trees.” The contrast is brought to bear through Mr. Nuridsany’s commentary: “The painters of the Yuan dynasty liked to translate personal experiences. Their landscape painting reflects their inner life more than it depicts mountains and water.”

Among the most interesting of the early works is a colorful, linear painting from the 14th century in Central Asia. Known simply as “Page with the name of Allah written in Kufic decorative script,” the painting is mysterious in its origins, but not in its impact. “Here the red, the green, the yellow, and the black resonate, collide, jostle, clash, interlock, and combine with a virtuosity that rejoices in the simultaneously austere and dizzying geometrical games encouraged by this type of Arabic script.”

As this collection moves through time and toward Europe, the emphasis on religious art grows, but is modulated by the emergence of new traditions. Raphael’s “Sistine Madonna” (1513–15) is just pages away from Albrecht Dürer’s “The Large Turf” (1503), a green patch of vegetation that “conveys all the rapturous intensity felt by the artist,” Mr. Nuridsany writes. That still life is preceded by “Mona Lisa” (1503). It may seem like too obvious of a choice, but Mr. Nuridsany suggests taking this masterpiece seriously again: It is “an urgent candidate for rediscovery,” he writes in the preface.

He also uses his “Mona Lisa” entry as criticism of the Louvre. “In her temperature-controlled security cabinet, behind the non-reflective glass that keeps you at a respectable distance (not to mention the curved wooden barrier and a console bristling with electronics), she is completely invisible. Head for the bookshop: you can see her more clearly on a postcard.”

No art survey book can ignore the dorm-room favorites of Western art. And so Georges Seurat’s “Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte” (1884-86), Edvard Munch’s “The Scream” (1893), and Vincent van Gogh’s “Starry Night” (1889) are all accounted for.

In several cases, it pays to read the essays chronologically. The Cézanne entry, “The Large Bathers” (1895), immediately precedes the Picasso selection, “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon” (1907), accompanied by an essay in which Mr. Nuridsany writes: “It all sprung from Cézanne. Cézanne, whom he admired so much that one day when he was informed the painter had a grandson, Picasso cut the conversation short to exclaim: ‘But I’m Cézanne’s grandson!'”

Modernism swings in with Kandinsky’s “Composition VII” (1913) and Duchamp’s “The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass)” (1915–23). The focus shifts to America in the 1950s with Jackson Pollock, Robert Rauschenberg, and Jasper Johns.

“100 Masterpieces” concludes with Jean-Michel Basquiat’s “Pegasus” (1987), and the essay argues for Basquiat’s talents. Yet the last line of the commentary asks the reader to reconsider: “But was he even an artist? At the beginning at least, weren’t graffitists called ‘writers?'”

It’s a bit of a jolt, but by the time the reader comes across that question — in the last line of the last essay — it feels appropriate to Mr. Nuridsany’s tone and intent. This is a highly subjective endeavor. No two critics would pick the same 100 paintings to represent the worldwide history of painting — and not every reader will be satisfied with the omissions or inclusions here. But the mood here is set early, as the author advises in the preface: “Try not to forget that the most crucial thing in all this is to enjoy.”