Edouard MANET

Edouard Manet (23 January 1832 – 30 April 1883) was a French painter. One of the first nineteenth century artists to approach modern-life subjects, he was a pivotal figure in the transition from Realism to Impressionism. His early masterworks "Le déjeuner sur l'herbe" and "Olympia" engendered great controversy, and served as rallying points for the young painters who would create Impressionism—today these are considered watershed paintings that mark the genesis of modern art.

Kazimir MALEVICH

Kazimir Severinovich Malevich (23 February 1878 – 15 May 1935) was a painter and art theoretician of Polish descendence, pioneer of geometric abstract art and one of the most important members of the Russian avant-garde and Suprematist movement.

Rene MAGRITTE

René François Ghislain Magritte (21 November 1898 – 15 August 1967) was a Belgian surrealist artist. He is famous for a number of witty and amusing images.

L S LOWRY

Laurence Stephen Lowry (1 November 1887–23 February 1976) was an English artist born on Barrett Street, Stretford, near Manchester, Lancashire. Many of his drawings and paintings depict Salford and surrounding areas, including Pendlebury where he lived and worked for over forty years at 117 Station Road, opposite St. Mark's RC Church.

Lowry is famous for painting scenes of life in the industrial districts of northern England during the early 20th century. He had a distinctive style of painting and is best known for urban landscapes peopled with many human figures (matchstick men). He tended to paint these in drab colours. He also painted mysterious unpopulated landscapes, brooding portraits, and the secret 'marionette' works (the latter only found after his death).

Sol LE WITT

Sol LeWitt (9 September 1928 - 8 April 2007) was an American artist linked to various movements including conceptual art and minimalism. His media were predominantly painting, drawing, and sculpture.



Sol LeWitt’s frequent use of open, modular structures originate from the cube, a form that influenced the artist’s thinking from the time that he first became an artist. Sol LeWitt: Structures includes early Wall Structures and three Serial Projects from the 1960s; four Incomplete Open Cubes from the 1970s; numerous painted white wood pieces from the 1980s: Hexagon, Form Derived from a Cube, Structure with Three Towers, among others as well as Maquettes for Concrete Block Structures from the late 1990s.

Leonardo DA VINCI

Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci (15 April 1452 – 2 May 1519) was a Tuscan polymath: scientist, mathematician, engineer, inventor, anatomist, painter, sculptor, architect, botanist, musician and writer.

Born at Vinci in the region of Florence, the illegitimate son of a notary, Piero da Vinci, and a peasant girl, Caterina, Leonardo was educated in the studio of the renowned Florentine painter, Verrocchio. Much of his earlier working life was spent in the service of Ludovico il Moro in Milan where several of his major works were created. He also worked in Rome, Bologna and Venice, spending his final years in France at the home given him by King François I.

Leonardo has often been described as the archetype of the "Renaissance man" or universal genius, a man whose seemingly infinite curiosity was equalled only by his powers of invention. He is widely considered to be one of the greatest painters of all time and perhaps the most diversely talented person ever to have lived.

Fernand LEGER

Joseph Fernand Henri Léger (4 February 1881 – 17 August 1955) was a French painter, sculptor, and filmmaker.

Léger wrote in 1945 that "the object in modern painting must become the main character and overthrow the subject. If, in turn, the human form becomes an object, it can considerably liberate possibilities for the modern artist." As the first painter to take as his idiom the imagery of the machine age, and to make the objects of consumer society the subjects of his paintings, Léger has been called a progenitor of Pop Art.

Paul KLEE

Paul Klee (18 December 1879 – 29 June 1940) was a Swiss painter of German nationality. His highly individual style was influenced by many different art trends, including Expressionism, Cubism, and Surrealism.



Klee was a natural draftsman who experimented with and eventually mastered color theory, and wrote extensively about it. His works reflect his dry humor and his sometimes child-like perspective, his personal moods and beliefs, and his musicality.

Wassily KANDINSKY

Wassily Kandinsky (16 December 1866 – 13 December 1944) was a Russian painter, printmaker and art theorist and arguably one of the most famous 20th-century artists, he is credited with painting the first modern abstract works.

Jasper JOHNS

Jasper Johns (born May 15, 1930 in Augusta, Georgia) is an American contemporary artist who primarily works in painting and printmaking.

He is best known for his painting Flag (1954-55), which he painted after having a dream of the American flag. His work is often described as a Neo-Dadaist, as opposed to pop art, even though his subject matter often includes images and objects from popular culture. However, many compilations on pop art include Jasper Johns as a pop artist because of his artistic use of classical iconography.

Jean INGRES

Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres (29 August 1780 – 14 January 1867) was a French Neoclassical painter. Although he thought of himself as a painter of history in the tradition of Nicolas Poussin and Jacques-Louis David, by the end of his life it was his portraits, both painted and drawn, that were recognized as his greatest legacy.

Edward HOPPER

Edward Hopper (22 July 1882 – 15 May 1967) was an American painter and printmaker. While most popularly known for his oil paintings, he was equally proficient as a watercolorist and printmaker in etching.

Hans HOLBEIN

Hans Holbein the Younger (c. 1497– before 29 November 1543) was a German artist and printmaker who worked in a Northern Renaissance style. He is best known for his numerous portraits and his woodcut series of the Dance of Death, and is widely considered one of the finest portraitists of the Early Modern Period.

Hans HOFMANN

Hans Hofmann (March 21, 1880 – February 17, 1966) was a German abstract expressionist painter. He was born in Weißenburg, Bavaria on March 21, 1880 the son of Theodor and Franziska Hofmann. In 1932 he immigrated to the United States, where he resided until the end of his life.

Hofmann's work is distinguished by "a rigorous concern with pictorial structure, spatial illusion, and color relationships." Hofmann believed that abstract art was a way to get at what was really important. He famously stated that "the ability to simplify means to eliminate the unnecessary so that the necessary may speak."

David HOCKNEY

David Hockney, CH, RA, (born 9 July 1937) is an English artist, based in Yorkshire, United Kingdom, although he also maintains a base in London. An important contributor to the Pop art movement of the 1960s, he is considered one of the most influential British artists of the twentieth century.

Richard HAMILTON

Richard Hamilton (born February 24, 1922) is an English painter and collage artist. His 1956 collage titled Just What Is It that Makes Today's Homes So Different, So Appealing?, produced for the This Is Tomorrow exhibition of the Independent Group in London, is considered by critics and historians to be one of the first works of Pop Art. The Tate Gallery now has a comprehensive collection of Hamilton's work from across his career.

Mathias GRUNEWALD

Matthias Grünewald (c. 1470 – 31 August 1528), was an important German Renaissance painter of religious works, who ignored Renaissance classicism to continue the expressive and intense style of late medieval Central European art into the 16th century.



Only ten paintings (several consisting of many panels) and thirty-five drawings survive, all religious, although many others were lost at sea in the Baltic on their way to Sweden as war booty.

His reputation was obscured until the late nineteenth century, and many of his paintings attributed to Albrecht Dürer, who is now seen as his stylistic antithesis. His largest and most famous work is the Isenheim Altarpiece in Colmar, Alsace (now in France).

Juan GRIS

Juan Gris (23 March 1887 – 11 May 1927), was a Spanish painter and sculptor who lived and worked in France most of his life. His works are closely connected to the emergence of an innovative artistic genre — Cubism.

Gris articulated most of his aesthetic theories during 1924 and 1925. He delivered his definitive lecture, Des possibilités de la peinture, at the Sorbonne in 1924. Major Gris exhibitions took place at the Galerie Simon in Paris and the Galerie Flechtheim in Berlin in 1923, and at the Galerie Flechtheim in Düsseldorf in 1925.

Francisco GOYA

Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes (30 March 1746 – 16 April 1828) was a Aragonese Spanish painter and printmaker.

Goya was a court painter to the Spanish Crown and a chronicler of history. He has been regarded both as the last of the Old Masters and as the first of the moderns. The subversive and subjective element in his art, as well as his bold handling of paint, provided a model for the work of later generations of artists, notably Manet and Picasso.

Many of Goya's works are on display in the Museo del Prado in Madrid.

GIOTTO

Giotto di Bondone (c. 1267–January 8, 1337), better known simply as Giotto, was an Italian painter and architect from Florence. He is generally considered the first in a line of great artists who contributed to the Italian Renaissance.



Giotto's contemporary Giovanni Villani wrote that Giotto was "the most sovereign master of painting in his time, who drew all his figures and their postures according to nature. And he was given a salary by the commune [of Florence] in virtue of his talent and excellence."

The later 16th century biographer Giorgio Vasari says of him "…He made a decisive break with the …Byzantine style, and brought to life the great art of painting as we know it today, introducing the technique of drawing accurately from life, which had been neglected for more than two hundred years."

Giotto's masterwork is the decoration of the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua, commonly called the Arena Chapel, completed around 1305

GIORGIONE

Giorgione (c. 1477 — 1510) is the familiar name of Giorgio Barbarelli da Castelfranco, an Italian painter, one of the seminal artists of the High Renaissance in Venice. Giorgione is known for the elusive poetic quality of his work, and for the fact that only very few (around six) paintings are known for certain to be his work.

The resulting uncertainty about the identity and meaning of his art has made Giorgione one of the most mysterious figures in European painting.

Madge GILL

Madge Gill (1882 – 1961), born Maude Ethel Eades, was an English artist. Born an illegitimate child in East Ham, Essex, (now Greater London), she spent much of her early years in seclusion and was placed in an orphanage at the age of 9. At the age of 25, she married her cousin, Thomas Edwin Gill, a stockbroker. Together they had three sons with their second, Reginald, dying of the Spanish flu. The following year she gave birth to a stillborn baby girl and almost died herself, contracting a serious illness that left her bedridden for several months and blind in her left eye.

After recovering from her illness, she took a sudden and passionate interest in drawing, creating thousands of mediumistic works over the following 40 years, most done with ink in black and white. The works came in all sizes, from postcard-sized to huge sheets of fabric, some over 30 feet (9.1 m) long. She claimed to be guided by a spirit she called "Myrninerest" (my inner rest) and often signed her works in this name. The figure of a young woman in intricate dress appeared thousands of times in her work, and is often thought to be a representation of herself or her lost daughter.

Gill rarely exhibited her work and never sold any pieces out of fear of angering "Myrninerest." After her first son, Bob, died in 1958 she started drinking heavily and stopped drawing. Following her death in 1961, thousands of drawings were discovered in her home; the collection is currently owned by the London Borough of Newham which has no plans to display them.

Théodore GERICAULT

Théodore Géricault (26 September 1791 – 26 January 1824) was an important French painter and lithographer, known for "The Raft of the Medusa" and other paintings. He was one of the pioneers of the Romantic movement.

Paul GAUGIN

Paul Gauguin (7 June 1848 – 8 May 1903) was a leading Post-Impressionist painter. Gaugin's bold experimentation with coloring led directly to the Synthetist style of modern art while his expression of the inherent meaning of the subjects in his paintings, paved the way to Primitivism and the return to the pastoral. He was also an influential exponent of wood engraving and woodcuts as art forms.

Thomas GAINSBOROUGH

Thomas Gainsborough (christened 14 May 1727 – 2 August 1788) was one of the most famous portrait and landscape painters of 18th century Britain.



His most famous works, such as 'Portrait of Mrs. Graham'; 'Mary and Margaret: The Painter's Daughters'; 'William Hallett and His Wife Elizabeth, nee Stephen, known as The Morning Walk'; and 'Cottage Girl with Dog and Pitcher', display the unique individuality of his subjects.

Caspar David FRIEDRICH

Caspar David Friedrich (5 September 1774 – 7 May 1840) was a 19th century German Romantic painter, considered by many critics to be one of the finest representatives of the movement. Alongside other romantic painters, such as J. M. W. Turner or John Constable, Friedrich made landscape painting a major genre in Western art.

Lucian FREUD

Lucian Michael Freud, OM, CH (born 8 December 1922) is a British painter. Freud was born in Berlin, Germany in 1922, son of Jewish parents Ernst Ludwig Freud, an architect, and Lucie née Brasch. He is the grandson of Sigmund Freud and brother of writer and politician Clement Raphael Freud and of Stephan Gabriel Freud.

Freud and his family moved to the U.K. in 1933 to escape the rise of Nazism, and gained British citizenship in 1939. During this period he attended Dartington Hall school in Totnes, Devon, and later Bryanston School.

Helen FRANKENTHALER

Helen Frankenthaler (born December 12, 1928) is an American post-painterly abstraction artist. Born in New York City, she was influenced by Jackson Pollock's paintings and by Clement Greenberg. She later married fellow artist Robert Motherwell.

Her career was launched in 1952 with the exhibition of 'Mountains and Sea'. This painting is large - measuring seven feet by ten feet - and has the effect of a watercolor, though it is painted in oils. In it, she used the technique of painting directly on to an unprepared canvas so that the material absorbs the colors. She heavily diluted the oil paint with turpentine or kerosene so that the color would soak into the canvas. This technique, known as "soak stain" was adopted by other artists (notably Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland) and launched the second generation of the Color Field school of painting. This method would leave the canvas with a halo effect around each area to which the paint was applied.

Piero della FRANCESCA

Piero della Francesca (c. 1412 – 12 October 1492) was an Italian artist of the Early Renaissance. To contemporaries, he was known as a mathematician and geometer as well as an artist, though now he is chiefly appreciated for his art. His painting was characterized by its serene humanism and its use of geometric forms, particularly in relation to perspective and foreshortening.

Jean Honore FRAGONARD

Jean-Honoré Fragonard (5 April 1732 – 22 August 1806) was a French painter and printmaker whose late Rococo manner was distinguished by remarkable facility, exuberance, and hedonism.



One of the most prolific artists active in the last decades of the ancien régime, Fragonard produced more than 550 paintings (not counting drawing and etchings), of which only five are dated. Among his most popular works are genre paintings conveying the atmosphere of intimacy and veiled eroticism.

Lucio FONTANA

Lucio Fontana (19 February 1899 – 7 September 1968) was a painter and sculptor born in Rosario, Argentina, the son of an Italian father and an Argentine mother. He was mostly known as the founder of Spatialism and his ties to Arte Povera.

Fontana's works can be found in the permanent collections of more than one hundred museums around the world.

John Duncan FERGUSSON

John Duncan Fergusson (1874–1961) was a Scottish artist, regarded as one of the major artists of the Scottish Colourists school of painting.

While studying at the Louvre in Paris, Fergusson was impressed by the impressionist paintings at the Salle Caillebotte and these were an important influence on his developing style. Later he would also be influenced by Fauvism and the fauvist principles would become a strong feature of his art. Andre Dunoyer de Segonzac wrote in his foreword to Fergusson's memorial exhibition of 1961: "His art is a deep and pure expression of his immense love of life. Endowed with a rare plastic feeling, almost sculptural in its quality. He joined with it an exceptional sense of colour, outspoken, ringing colours, rich and splendid in their very substance."

Richard ESTES

Richard Estes (born May 14, 1932 in Kewanee, Illinois) is an American painter who is best known for his photorealistic paintings. The paintings generally consist of reflective, clean, and inanimate city and geometric landscapes. He is regarded as one of the founders of the international photo-realist movement of the late 1960s.

El GRECO

El Greco - "The Greek" (1541 – 7 April 1614) was a painter, sculptor, and architect of the Spanish Renaissance. He usually signed his paintings in Greek letters with his full name, Doménicos Theotokópoulos, underscoring his Greek origin.

El Greco was born in Crete, but in 1577 he moved to Toledo, Spain, where he lived and worked until his death. In Toledo, El Greco received several major commissions and produced his best known paintings.

El Greco's dramatic and expressionistic style was met with puzzlement by his contemporaries but found appreciation in the 20th century. El Greco is regarded as a precursor of both Expressionism and Cubism, while his personality and works were a source of inspiration for poets and writers such as Rainer Maria Rilke and Nikos Kazantzakis. El Greco has been characterized by modern scholars as an artist so individual that he belongs to no conventional school. He is best known for tortuously elongated figures and often fantastic or phantasmagorical pigmentation, marrying Byzantine traditions with those of Western painting

Albrecht DURER

Albrecht Dürer (21 May 1471 – 6 April 1528) was a German painter and mathematician. He was born and died in Nuremberg, Germany and is best known as one of the greatest creators of old master prints, along with Rembrandt and Goya. His prints were often executed in series, including the Apocalypse (1498) and his two series on the passion of Christ, the Great Passion (1498–1510) and the Little Passion (1510–1511).



Dürer's best known individual engravings include Knight, Death, and the Devil (1513), Saint Jerome in his Study (1514) and Melencolia I (1514), which has been the subject of extensive analysis and speculation. His most iconic images are his woodcuts of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1497–1498) from the Apocalypse series, the "Rhinoceros", and numerous self-portraits in oils.

Marcel DUCHAMP

Marcel Duchamp (28 July 1887 – 2 October 1968) was a French artist (he became an American citizen in 1955) whose work and ideas had considerable influence on the development of post-World War II Western art, and whose advice to modern art collectors helped shape the tastes of the Western art world.



Thousands of books and articles attempt to interpret Duchamp's artwork and philosophy, but in interviews and his writing, Duchamp only added to the mystery. The interpretations interested him as creations of their own, and as reflections of the interpreter.

A playful man, Duchamp prodded thought about artistic processes and art marketing, not so much with words, but with actions such as dubbing a urinal "art" and naming it Fountain. He produced relatively few artworks as he quickly moved through the avant-garde rhythms of his time.

Andre DERAIN

André Derain (10 June 1880 – 8 September 1954) was a French painter and co-founder of Fauvism with Henri Matisse.

Eugene DELACROIX

Ferdinand Victor Eugène Delacroix (26 April 1798 – 13 August 1863) was the most important of the French Romantic painters. Delacroix's use of expressive brushstrokes and his study of the optical effects of colour profoundly shaped the work of the Impressionists, while his passion for the exotic inspired the artists of the Symbolist movement.

Willem DE KOONING

Willem de Kooning (April 24, 1904 – March 19, 1997) was an abstract expressionist artist, born in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. In the post-World War II era, de Kooning painted in a style that came to be referred to variously as Abstract expressionism, Action painting, and the New York School.

Jacques-Louis DAVID

Jacques-Louis David (30 August 1748 – 29 December 1825) was a highly influential French painter in the Neoclassical style, considered to be the prominent painter of the era. In the 1780s his cerebral brand of history painting marked a change in taste away from Rococo frivolity toward a classical austerity and severity, chiming with the moral climate of the final years of the ancien régime.

David later became an active supporter of the French Revolution and friend of Maximilien Robespierre, and was effectively a dictator of the arts under the French Republic. Imprisoned after Robespierre's fall from power, he aligned himself with yet another political regime upon his release, that of Napoleon I. It was at this time that he developed his 'Empire style', notable for its use of warm Venetian colours. David had a huge number of pupils, making him the strongest influence in French art of the 19th century, especially academic Salon painting.

Salvador DALI

Salvador Domingo Felipe Jacinto Dalí i Domènech (11 May 1904 – 23 January 1989), was a Spanish surrealist painter born in Figueres, Catalonia, Spain. Dalí was a skilled draftsman, best known for the striking and bizarre images in his surrealist work. His painterly skills are often attributed to the influence of Renaissance masters. His best known work, 'The Persistence of Memory', was completed in 1931.



Salvador Dalí's artistic repertoire also included film, sculpture, and photography. He collaborated with Walt Disney on the Academy Award-nominated short cartoon Destino, which was released posthumously in 2003. He also collaborated with Alfred Hitchcock on Hitchcock's film Spellbound.

Widely considered to be greatly imaginative, Dalí had an affinity for doing unusual things to draw attention to himself. This sometimes irked those who loved his art as much as it annoyed his critics, since his eccentric manner sometimes drew more public attention than his artwork. The purposefully-sought notoriety led to broad public recognition and many purchases of his works by people from all walks of life.

Gustave COURBET

Jean Désiré Gustave Courbet (10 June 1819 – 31 December 1877) was a French painter who led the Realist movement in 19th-century French painting.

Best known as an innovator in Realism (and credited with coining the term), Courbet was a painter of figurative compositions, landscapes and seascapes. He also worked with social issues, and addressed peasantry and the grave working conditions of the poor. Courbet believed the Realist artist's mission was the pursuit of truth, which would help erase social contradictions and imbalances.

Jean COROT

Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot (16 July 1796 – 22 February 1875) was a French landscape painter and printmaker in etching. Corot was the leading painter of the Barbizon school of France in the mid-nineteenth century. He is a pivotal figure in landscape painting: his work simultaneously referencing the Neo-Classical tradition and anticipateing the plein-air innovations of Impressionism.

Of Corot Claude Monet exclaimed "There is only one master here — Corot. We are nothing compared to him, nothing." His contributions to figure painting are hardly less important; Edgar Degas preferred his figures to his landscapes, and the classical figures of Pablo Picasso pay overt homage to Corot's influence.

John CONSTABLE

John Constable (11 June 1776 – 31 March 1837) was an English Romantic painter. Born in Suffolk, he is known principally for his landscape paintings of Dedham Vale, the area surrounding his home, which he invested with an intensity of affection.



His most famous paintings include "Dedham Vale" of 1802 and "The Hay Wain" of 1821. Although his paintings are now among the most popular and valuable in British art, he was never financially successful and did not become a member of the establishment until he was elected to the Royal Academy at the age of 52. He sold more paintings in France than in his native England.

Dan CHRISTENSEN

Dan Christensen (October 6 1942, January 20 2007) was an American abstract painter, he is best known for paintings that relate to Lyrical Abstraction, Color field painting and Abstract expressionism. His early work from 1965-1966 was related to Minimalism.

Marc CHAGALL

Marc Chagall (7 July 1887 – 28 March 1985) was a Belarussian/French painter of Russian-Jewish origin who was born in Belarus, then part of the Russian Empire. Among the celebrated painters of the 20th century, he is associated with the modern movements after impressionism.

Chagall's works fit into several modern art categories. He took part in the movements of the Paris art world which preceded World War I and was thus involved with avant-garde currents. However, his work always found itself on the margins of these movements and emerging trends, including Cubism and Fauvism. He was closely associated with the Paris School and its exponents, including Amedeo Modigliani.

Link to The Blog Catalog Directory

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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."