The Impossible Collection, by private art advisers Franck Giraud and Philippe Ségalot, is nothing if not well named. The ambitious notion behind the project—to distill the complex 20th century into an ideal collection of just 100 works of art—delivers a selection that tends toward the obvious, the arbitrary and the expensive. Even such deep-pocketed tycoons as Steve Wynn, Aby Rosen and François Pinault (a client of the authors, who both worked at Christie’s before founding their consultancy, in 2002) have stopped short of assembling systematic collections representing the achievements of an entire century. This greatest-hits chronicle, which is dominated by auction favorites, is bound to rally more skeptics than a Whitney Biennial.

What differentiates The Impossible Collection from such past best-of-art anthologies as Thomas Hoving’s pompously titled Greatest Works of Art of Western Civilization is that the authors do not even try to defend their choices in the text. The book moves chronologically through the 20th century, beginning with Picasso’s thickly painted 1901 self-portrait, which depicts the artist at 20 imitating the aristocrats portrayed by Velázquez and Goya. Each page that follows is devoted to a “masterpiece” identified by its year, title and maker. An introduction by Joachim Pissarro, the great-grandson of the painter and the third musketeer in Ségalot and Giraud’s art consultancy, surveys the selection approvingly. He does not even apologize for the authors’ glaring omissions of such masters as Edgar Degas, Amedeo Modigliani, Balthus, Giorgio Morandi and Edward Hopper.

As Pissarro points out, Giraud and Ségalot’s choices are weighted toward postwar art, especially that produced after the decline of Abstract Expressionism. Pissarro goes overboard when he calls this an “Athenian” age, but from the perspective of the market, in which the book collaborators make their living, these works are where the money is. Sixties Pop art from Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein and their progeny is leading the

In addressing modern art, the book largely omits photography. The most important new medium of the century appears only after Warhol gets his hands on it, giving the impression that this artist and, later, Gilbert & George, Cindy Sherman and Andreas Gursky were the century’s major forces behind the camera. What happened to the pioneers—Henri Cartier-Bresson, Walker Evans and Man Ray—who showed them the way?

Similarly, cataclysms such as Fascism and the Holocaust fail to make their mark, even though war and conflict shaped the oeuvre of many of the century’s masters. Picasso has four works in the book, but Guernica doesn’t appear. And while you will find taxidermy by Maurizio Cattelan and sexualized fiberglass dolls by Takashi Murakami, both of which are capitulations to art fashion, you won’t see the mournful landscapes of Anselm Kiefer. You get the feeling that the authors approached their book as they would prospective clients, avoiding anything grim that might scare away customers. No evocations of the Great Depression, nuclear weapons or HIV/AIDS allowed.

Yet if Giraud and Ségalot were just surfing the palatable top of the market, we might have seen Le rêve, Picasso’s 1932 depiction of a sleeping Marie-Thérèse Walther, which would have sold for $139 million two years ago if Steve Wynn hadn’t put his elbow through it. The shimmering 1907 portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer by Gustav Klimt that Ronald Lauder bought for the Neue Galerie at an unprecedented price of $135 million is also absent.

In the end, the authors defy their short-term market intuition and close out the century, uncharacteristically, with an object of contemplation (and an approving pull-quote from Roberta Smith of The New York Times, who seems to have been a muse). Untitled is a meditative 2000 relief by Rudolf Stingel, whose works were notable failures at Christie’s London in February. The graceful indentations in Stingel’s white Styrofoam panels look like footprints in fine sand, hinting here that the works and reputations of most artists are nothing more than faint impressions—signs of their moment that will fade in the rearview mirror as time passes. They leave you wondering how much of The Impossible Collection will be invisible 20 years from now. I predict that bets will be made around the coffee table, where this book is destined to be found.