Paul CEZANNE

Paul Cézanne (19 January 1839 – 22 October 1906) was a French artist and Post-Impressionist painter whose work laid the foundations of the transition from the 19th century conception of artistic endeavour to a new and radically different world of art in the 20th century.

Cézanne can be said to form the bridge between late 19th century Impressionism and the early 20th century's new line of artistic enquiry, Cubism. The line attributed to both Henri Matisse and Picasso that Cézanne "is the father of us all" cannot be easily dismissed.



Cézanne's work demonstrates a mastery of design, colour, composition and draftsmanship. His often repetitive, sensitive and exploratory brushstrokes are highly characteristic and clearly recognisable. He used planes of colour and small brushstrokes that build up to form complex fields, at once both a direct expression of the sensations of the observing eye and an abstraction from observed nature. The paintings convey Cézanne's intense study of his subjects, a searching gaze and a dogged struggle to deal with the complexity of human visual perception.

Mary CASSATT

Mary Cassatt (1844 - 1926) was the daughter of an affluent Pittsburgh businessman, of French ancestry. In 1861, she studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and was required to draw copies of prints and plaster casts before she was allowed to paint. Between 1865 and 1869 she travelled and studied throughout Europe. In 1868, Cassatt had her first painting accepted by the Paris Salon.

Carlo CARRA

Carlo Carrà (February 11, 1881—April 13, 1966) was an Italian painter, a leading figure of the Futurist movement that flourished in Italy during the beginning of the 20th century. In addition to his many paintings, he wrote a number of books concerning art. He is best known for his 1911 futurist work, The Funeral of the Anarchist Galli.

Michelangelo CARAVAGGIO

Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (28 September 1571 – 18 July 1610) was an Italian artist active in Rome, Naples, Malta and Sicily between 1593 and 1610. He is commonly placed in the Baroque school, of which he was the first great representative.



Famous and extremely influential while he lived, Caravaggio was almost entirely forgotten in the centuries after his death, and it was only in the 20th century that his importance to the development of Western art was rediscovered. Yet despite this his influence on the new Baroque style which eventually emerged from the ruins of Mannerism, was profound. Andre Berne-Joffroy, Paul Valéry’s secretary, said of him: "What begins in the work of Caravaggio is, quite simply, modern painting."

Francis CADELL

Francis Campbell Boileau Cadell (1883–1937) was a Scottish painter associated with the Scottish Colourists. He painted landscapes, interiors, still life and figures in both oil and watercolour, but he is particularly noted for his portraits, depicting his subject with vibrant waves of colour.

Geoff BUNN

Geoff Bunn (14 April 1963) is a British artist. Initially known for conceptual work, in recent years, influenced whilst working in France with the painter Fred Yates, Bunn has turned towards more traditional means of representation, producing large disturbing canvases of empty human spaces.

Pieter BRUEGEL

Pieter Bruegel the Elder (c. 1525 – 9 September 1569) was a Netherlandish Renaissance painter and printmaker known for his landscapes and peasant scenes (Genre Painting). He is nicknamed 'Peasant Bruegel' to distinguish him from other members of the Brueghel dynasty, but is also the one generally meant when the context does not make clear which "Bruegel" is being referred to. From 1559 he dropped the 'h' from his name and started signing his paintings as Bruegel.

Pieter Brueghel the Younger (1564/1565 - 1636) was a Flemish painter, known for numerous copies after his father Pieter Brueghel the Elder's paintings and nicknamed "Hell Brueghel" for his fantastic treatments of fire and grotesque imagery.

Although his precise date of birth is unknown, he was 36 years old on 22 May 1601 and died on 10 October 1636 at the age of 72. Therefore, he was born in late 1564 or early 1565.

Georges BRAQUE

Georges Braque (13 May 1882 – 31 August 1963) was a major 20th century French painter and sculptor who, along with Pablo Picasso, developed the art movement known as cubism.

Sandro BOTTICELLI

Alessandro di Mariano di Vanni Filipepi, better known as Sandro Botticelli (1 March 1444/45 – 17 May 1510) was an Italian painter of the Florentine school during the Early Renaissance.

His posthumous reputation suffered until the late 19th century; since then his work has been seen to represent the linear grace of Early Renaissance painting, and 'The Birth of Venus' and 'Primavera' rank now among the most familiar masterpieces of Florentine art.

Hieronymus BOSCH

Hieronymus Bosch, (Latinised Jheronimus Bosch; real name Jeroen van Aken) (c. 1450 – 9 August 1516) was an Early Netherlandish painter of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Many of his works depict sin and human moral failings.



Bosch used images of demons, half-human animals and machines to evoke fear and confusion to portray the evil of man. The works contain complex, highly original, imaginative, and dense use of symbolic figures and iconography, some of which was obscure even in his own time.

Joseph BEUYS

Joseph Beuys (12 May 1921 – 23 January 1986) was an influential German artist who came to prominence in the 1960s.



He is most famous for his public performances and his energetic championing of the healing potential of art. As well as performances, Beuys produced sculptures, prints and posters, and thousands of drawings. A charismatic and controversial figure, the nature and value of Beuys’s contribution to Western art has elicited a hotly contested and often polarised debate.

Gian Lorenzo BERNINI

Gian Lorenzo Bernini (7 December 1598 – 28 November 1680) was a pre-eminent Baroque sculptor and architect of 17th century Rome.

Giovanni BELLINI

Giovanni Bellini (c. 1430 – 1516) was an Italian Renaissance painter, probably the best known of the Bellini family of Venetian painters. His father was Jacopo Bellini, his brother was Gentile Bellini, and his brother-in-law was Andrea Mantegna.



Bellini is considered to have revolutionized Venetian painting, moving it towards a more sensuous and colouristic style. Through the use of clear, slow-drying oil paints, he created deep, rich tints and detailed shadings. His sumptuous coloring and fluent, atmospheric landscapes had a great effect on the Venetian painting school, especially on his pupils Giorgione and Titian.

Max BECKMANN

Max Beckmann (February 12, 1884 – December 28, 1950) was a German painter, draftsman, printmaker, sculptor, and writer. Although he is usually classified as an Expressionist artist, he rejected both the term and the movement. In the 1920s he was associated with the New Objectivity (Neue Sachlichkeit), an outgrowth of Expressionism that opposed its introverted emotionalism.

Jean-Michel BASQUIAT

Jean-Michel Basquiat (December 22, 1960 – August 12, 1988) was an American artist. He gained popularity first as a graffiti artist in New York City, and then as a successful 1980s-era Neo-expressionist artist.

BALTHUS

Balthazar Klossowski de Rola (29 February 1908 in Paris – 18 February 2001), known as Balthus was an esteemed Polish/French modern artist.

Balthus' style is primarily classical and academic. Though his technique and compositions were inspired by pre-renaissance painters, there are also eerie intimations reminiscent of contemporary surrealists like de Chirico. Painting the figure at a time when figurative art was largely ignored, he is widely recognised as an important 20th century artist.

Many of his paintings show young girls in an erotic context. Balthus insisted that his work was not pornographic, but that it just recognized the discomforting facts of children's sexuality.

Francis BACON

Francis Bacon (28 October 1909 – 28 April 1992) was an Irish figurative painter.

He was a collateral descendant of the Elizabethan philosopher Francis Bacon. His artwork is known for its bold, austere, and often grotesque or nightmarish imagery.

Frank AUERBACH

Frank Helmut Auerbach (born April 29, 1931) is a German-born British painter. His work typically portrays either one of a small group of mainly female models, or scenes around London, especially Camden Town.

Auerbach studied art at St Martin's School of Art in London and later at the Royal College of Art, but was more strongly influenced by lessons with David Bomberg at Borough Polytechnic, and especially so by Bomberg's exploratory attitude. Recurring subjects in his Camden landscapes are Mornington Crescent and the adjacent Art Deco former Carreras cigarette factory and nearby Camden Palace dance club (originally a music hall); the most pastoral setting is nearby Primrose Hill.

Jean ARP

Jean Arp (16 September 1886 – 7 June 1966) was a German-French sculptor, painter, poet and abstract artist.

Arp was a founding member of the Dada movement in Zürich in 1916. In 1920, as Hans Arp, along with Max Ernst, and the social activist Alfred Grünwald, he set up the Cologne Dada group. However, in 1925 his work also appeared in the first exhibition of the Surrealist group at the Galerie Pierre in Paris. In 1931, he broke with the Surrealism movement.

Fra ANGELICO

Fra Angelico (c. 1395 – 18 February 1455), born Guido di Pietro, was an Early Italian Renaissance painter, referred to in Vasari's Lives of the Artists as having "a rare and perfect talent".

Known in Italy as il Beato Angelico, he was known to his contemporaries as Fra Giovanni da Fiesole (Brother John from Fiesole). In Giorgio Vasari’s Lives of the Artists, written prior to 1555, he is already known as Fra Giovanni Angelico (Brother Giovanni the Angelic One).

Pierre ALECHINSKY

Pierre Alechinsky (October 19, 1927) is a Belgian artist.

In 1945 he discovered the work of Henri Michaux and Jean Dubuffet and developed a friendship with the art critic Jacques Putman. In 1949 he joined Christian Dotremont, Karel Appel and Asger Jorn to form the art group Cobra. He participated both with the Cobra exhibitions and went to Paris to study engraving with Stanley William Hayter in 1951.

His paintings are related to Tachisme, Abstract expressionism, and Lyrical Abstraction.

Nadir AFONSO

Nadir Afonso, OSE (1920, Portugal) is a geometric abstractionist painter.

Trained in architecture, which he practiced early in his career with Le Corbusier and Oscar Niemeyer, Afonso later studied painting in Paris and became one of the pioneers in Kinetic art, working alongside Fernand Léger, Auguste Herbin, and André Bloc.

As a theorist of his own geometry-based aesthetics, published in several books, Nadir Afonso defends that art is purely objective and ruled by laws that treat art not as an act of imagination but of observation, perception, and form manipulation.