MOST FAMOUS PAINTERS
A selection of famous painters in art history to inspire and to help you expand your art knowledge. Take a look at some famous painters who set trends and created a phenomenon in the world of art.
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APPEL, Karel. 1921 Amsterdam – 2006 Zurich. Contemporary Painting Karel (Christiaan) Appel was a Dutch painter, sculptor, designer, printmaker and writer. He was first encouraged to paint by an uncle, who gave him a set of paints for his 15th birthday, and he also took painting lessons. He began to paint with a more vigorous palette, with a clear interest in German Expressionism and above all in the work of Van Gogh. There was a turning-point in Appel’s style c. 1945 when he found inspiration in the art of the Ecole de Paris and in particular Matisse and Picasso. This influence remained visible in his work until 1948, for example in a series of plaster sculptures that he made at this time. He was one of the founders of the CoBrA group, the European group of the late 1940s to early 1950s allied with abstract expressionism. Appel reacted against the austerity of such earlier Dutch abstraction as that of de Stijl. |
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| AVERCAMP, Hendrick. 1585 Amsterdam – 1635 Kampen.Baroque Although born two generations after Pieter Breughel the Elder, Avercamp showed himself a receptive student of the famous Flemish painter. Avercamp was deaf and dumb which earned him the nickname "De Stomme van Campen". Besides landscapes depicting the sea and herds of cattle, Avercamp is known mainly for his atmospheric winter scenes in which he shows, with great skill in the art of perspective combined with a strong colour sense, the frolickings of peasants and burghers on the ice of the lakes and canals of his homeland. Although not without an undertone of the comical, his pictures seem to belong to the pure genre, as opposed to those of his exemplar Brueghel who operated on various levels. |
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| BACON, Francis. 1909 Dublin – 1992 Madrid. Contemporary Painting Bacon was just 16 years old when he went to London. Two years later, while working as decorator in Berlin and Paris, his first drawings and water-colours appeared, showing the influence of Picasso. He destroyed his early-paintings, painted under the influence of French Surrealism in 1944, after he had found his own form of expression. He depicted almost without exception disorted human bodies and faces against diffuse-oppresive backgrounds. His paintings, often consisting of several parts, are reflections of some inner reality, a foreboding and feeling of dissolution. Along with his compatriot Sutherland, Bacon is one of the most important representatives of visionary painting of the post-war era. |
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| BASELITZ, Georg. 1938 Deutschbaselitz (Saxony). Contemporary Painting/Postmodern Baselitz first strictly representational pictures are directed against Tachisme and abstract art. Since 1969 he has been painting upside-down portraits and landscapes. A scholarship took him in 1965 to the Villa Romana at Florence. Since then he has been visiting Italy most years, taking a studio in Imperia in 1987. In 1978 he was given a professorship at the Academy of Arts at Karlsruhe. From 1983 to 1988 and then again in 1992 he lectured at the Berlin Academy. In 1995 a large retrospective was arranged for him at the Guggenheim Museum, New York. |
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| BLAKE, William. 1757 London – 1827 London Romanticism Blake, the son of a stocking weaver, already had visionary expierences as a child, and this was to influence the "prophetic" character of his singular artistic combination of visual art and poetry. His works showed very early the influence of Michelangelo in particular, whose vast human figures later became central to his work. While studying at the Royal Academy (from 1778), he became embroiled in an argument with Reynolds about the relative importance of colour and drawing. Blake took the classical view and his entire work shows his disinclination to use colour for effect. In his illustrations of the Bible, Dante, or his own writings, the traditional relationship between picture and text was abandoned, achieving a symbolic unity of word and picture which would not be accepted until decades after his death. |
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| BOSCH, Hieronymus. 1450 ’s Hertogenbosch – 1516 ’s Hertogenbosch.Early Renaissance Bosch, a contemporary of Leonardo da Vinci, is one of the great European painters of his time. The disturbing world of his paintings, which often scourges the moral decadence and folly of the world, may have been induced by religious unrest before the Reformation. In the course of his development, Bosch increasingly refined his devices until he achieved a distinctive way of handling colour, combined with an equally distinctive clear outline. This marks him as a contemporary of Leonardo, whose works he may or may not have known. It is significant that Bosch, already highly regarded in his lifetime, should have found particular favour with his "morality" pictures in the very place where the 16th century Inquisition had its worst execces: in Spain. |  |
| BOTTICELLI . 1445 Florence – 1510 Florence. Early Renaissance After an apprenticeship as a goldsmith, which was to influence his entire work, he became the pupil of Filippo Lippi from whom he took over the madonna and angel figures, but giving them more expression. His early work takes up the plastic realism of the past generation. Later, the interest in space and physical form diminishes in favour of the richly moving line of slender figures and fine details of jewels and richly embroidered dress. But as his three frescos begun in 1481 on the lower wall of the Sistine Chapel show, Botticelli was well able to achieve monumental effects. He soon became a master of the large format. In his later work the line gains in sensitivity and in emotional expressiveness. With his death in 1510 the 15th-century period of Italian painting came to a close. |
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| BRUEGHEL, Pieter. C1525-1530 Breda – 1569 Brussels. Renaissance His nickname "Peasant Brueghel" harks back to his depiction of peasant life, proverb and genre scenes, unduly diminishing the importance of this great Netherlandish painter in the 16th century. In his representations of the life of peasants and the underpriveleged, Brueghel penetrated the outer shell, converting them to images applicable to human life in general, such as the folly of the World, or the fate awaiting the power-freedy (various versions of the " Tower of Babel"). In some respects Brueghel takes up the concerns of Bosch. His significant place as a landscape painter in the whole of European art in the 16th century is undisputed. |
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| CÉZANNE, Paul. 1839 Aix-en Provence – 1906 Aix-en Provence. Impressionism Born during the first generation of impressionists and spasmodically also belonging to the group. Cézanne nevertheless always went his own way. He was to become a great influence on subsequent generations of painters and can be regarded as the forerunner of modern painting. Despite his close contact with the impressionists, he did not adopt their methods, prefering to produce something "solid and lasting". He smarted under the rejection of his contemporaries, feeling that only a few understood him, and worked untiringly, always in doubt whether he would reach his goal of transmitting artistically his perceptions rather than merely rendering them. Cézanne painted in every genre, and was successful in landscapes and portraiture as well as the still life work he’s best known for. |
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| CARAVAGGIO (Michelangelo Merisi, Amerighi da Caravaggio). 1573 Caravaggio (near Milan) – 1610 Porto Ercole. Baroque Michelangelo Merisi was born in Caravaggio as the son of a ducal architect. The main stages of his stort, a restless and finally hounded man, are reflected in his work, albeit in an unexpected way. Just before 1600 the light, clear coloration of his early work is replaced almost without transition, by his famous chiaroscuro, combining dynamism with dramatic expression. Then, from his Maltese period onwards, the intensity of this combination is steadily reduced. Perhaps because of his need to paint more rapidly, he began to paint more thinly, and the dark background becomes increasingly part of the overall composition, while the strong contrasting chiaroscuro effect is lessened to such a degree that it can be no longer be understood merely as light and shade but as an indication of an increasing spiritualisation. |
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| CARRA, Carlo. 1881 Piedmont – 1966 Milan. Futuristic After attending classes at the Milan Brera School and working as an independent painter, Carra joined the Futurists in 1909 and signed their manifesto. When in Paris in 1911, he met Modigliani, Picasso and Apollinaire. His work from this period shows the influence of Cubism, but in a manner that is more dynamic and not restricted to studio subjects. As early as 1915 he terminated his Futurist membership. During his military service he became acquinted with de Chirico and his ideas on ‘metaphysical’ art when at Ferrara in 1917. The vehemence of his Futuristic period was now replaced by stillness, toned coloration and structural objectivity. His former relationship with tradition was renewed: he again occupied himself with Masaccio, Uccello and Giotto. The result was a new Italian realism of melancholy solemnity – Carra’s third contribution to his chosen art. |
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| CHABAS, Paul Émile. 1869 Nantes – 1937 Paris. Futuristic Chabas was a French painter and illustrator and member of the Académie des Beaux-Arts. He first exhibited at the Salon in 1890, remaining loyal to that Salon thereafter. He was awarded a gold medal at the Exposition Universelle of 1900 and in 1912 he received the Médaille d’honneur. At first he exhibited portraits and produced numerous studies of water and sky from either Brittany or by Lac D’Annecy, Haute-Savoie. In 1899, however he exhibited Joyful Pastime depicting a group of scantily dressed females playing in the water at the edge of a lake, for which he received the Prix de Salon. Thereafter he produced variations on this theme. In both subject-matter and execution these paintings belong to the 19th-century academic tradition, and their interest resides only in this anachronistic quality. His preferred subject was a nude young girl in a natural setting. His most famous painting, September Morn (1912), created a sensation when it exhibited in the United States, when Anthonty Comstock, head of the New York Scociety for the Suppression of Vice, protested against the painting as supposedly immoral. There was much publicity, and reproductions of the painting sold briskly for years afterwards. September Morn has often been cited as an example of kitsch. In the 1890s Chabas illustrated books by such authors as Paul Bourget and Alfred de Musset. He became a member of the Académie des Beaux-Arts in 1921 and received the Légion d’honneur in 1928. From 1925 to 1935 he was president of the Sociéte des Artistes Francais. |
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| COURBET . 1819 Ornans – 1877 La-Tour-de-Peilz. Realism After attending the grammar school, Courbet began to study law in Paris in 1840. In painting he was largely self-taught, learning his art by copying the old masters (Velázques, Hals, Rembrandt and the Venetians) in the Louvre, and in Holland where he stayed in 1846. The themes of his early works, taken from Goethe’s Faust and the books of Victor Hugo and George Sand, still bear the strong mark of Romanticism which he was soon to reject. In 1849/50 his first realistic prictures are produced at his home town of Ornans, which were considered revolutionary. Revolutionary they certainly were in their choice of subject, depicting the life of simple people. Courbet, who influenced and advised the budding Impressionists, has become a major representative world-wide of a naturalistic realism which shows up inconsistencies in reality by means of artistic devices. |
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DALI, Salvador. 1904 Figueres – 1989 Figueres. Classical- Modernism Salvador Felipe Jacinto Dali I Domenech was born in the small agricultural town of Figueres, in the foothills of the Pyrenees. Early recognition of Dali’s talent came with his first one-man show in Barcelona in 1925. He became internationally known when three of his paintings, including The Basket of Bread, were shown in the third annual Carnegie international Exhibition in Pittsburgh in 1928. Dali soon became a leader of the Surrealist Movement. His painting, The Persistance of Memory, with the soft or melting watches is still one of the best-known surrealist works. But as the war approached, the apolitical Dali clashed with the Surrealists and was ‘expelled’ from the Surrealist group during a ‘trial’ in 1934. Dali escaped from Europe during World War II, spending 1940-1948 in the United States. These were very important years for the artist. The last years of his life were spent in seclusion. Dali died in on January 23, 1989 in Figueres from heart failure with respiratory complications. As an artist, Salvador Dali was not limited to a particular style or media. The body of his work, from early impressionist paintings through his transitional surrealist works, and into his classical period, reveals a constantly growing and evolving artist. |
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| DEGAS, Edgar. 1834 Paris – 1917 Paris. Impressionism Degas came from a cosmopolitan, well-to-do family. His work was suffused by a very personal kind of phychological observation and a profound interest in modern life. His themes always deal with people and city life; raw nature did not inspire him. He was particularly fond of dancers-street and city scenes, and the femal nude. From 1862 onwards he liked to present a subject repeatedly, looking at if from various angels and aspects. From 1880 he began to work in pastel, developing his technique and finding new applications. Degas produced a great number of lithographs, drawings, engravings and monotypes. From 1909 failing eyesight caused him to turn to sculpture, leaving many wax models of dancers, horses and female nudes to be cast in bronze after his death. |
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| DÜRER, Albrecht. 1471 Nuremberg – 1528 Nuremberg. Renaissance Dürer was the son of a Hungarian goldsmith who settled in Germany. Dürer’s work is often regarded as the quintessence of the spirit of German art. A master of the graphic arts as well as painting. Dürer, through his extraordinarily dynamic development, laid the foundation of the German High Renaissance. He was the most important mediator between Italian and German art, and it could be said there was an interactive effect. |
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| EYCK, Jan van. before 1395 Maaseik – 1441 Brugges. Early Renaissance Jan van Eyck can claim as much importance for northern painting as must be conceded to Masaccio in Italian art. His mastery in rendering the human figure, his modern understanding of portraiture, his minutely observed landscapes and brilliant perpectival construction of interiors combine to give a suggestion of reality which can only be called "Renaissance" to distinguish it from medieval art. In addition, van Eyck was the principal representative of a new epoch in colour technique. Though not the inventor of oil-paintings, as Vasari assumed, van Eyck was the first master of this medium and developed a process, called glazing, in which successive transparent layers of paint are applied to the canvas, thus achieving a high colour depth. Until 1422 he served at the court of Duke Johann of Bavaria in The Hague, painting and restoring pictures. He was also highly regarded at the court of Philip the Good of Burgundy who entrusted him with various diplomatic missions. From about 1940 he lived and worked in Bruges as paniter to the court and city. |
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| FRIEDRICH, Caspar David.
1774 Greifswald – 1840 Dresden. Romanticism and Realism |
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| GAUGUIN, Paul. 1848 Paris – 1903 French Polynesia. Postimpressionism Gauguin (Eugene-Henri-)Paul, was one of the leading French painters of the Postimpressionist period, whose development of a conceptual method of representation was a decisive step for 20th-century art. After spending a short period with Vincent van Gogh in Arles (1888), Gauguin increasingly abandoned imitative art for expressiveness through colour. |
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| GIOTTO Di Bondone. 1266(?) Colle di Vespignano (near Florence) – 1337 Florence.Gothic According to the legend-Giotto was one of the first artists to become a legend-he was discovered by Cimabue as a boy, making drawings of his father’s sheep. Documentary sources tell us that he was the most famous painter of his generation in Italy. He received innumerable offers of work from leading lords and princes, including from the Pope and his cardinals in Rome and Bologna. Giotto was an excellent organiser. He had a large workshop with a great number of well-trained assistants so that he was in a position to undertake even the largest of commissions. In this he is comparable to Rubens. And it is safe to assume that he was also a good businessman which at the time, meant that as a leading painter he was able to charge exorbitant fees. Most of his work has been lost. Of his late work only some badly preserved frescos in the side chapels of Santa Croce in Florence survive in outline. |
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| GOGH, Vincent van. 1853 Groot-Zundert – 1890 Auvers-sur-Oise (near Paris). Impressionism The Dutch painter, son of a clergyman, only had a short creative period of about ten years. All his life he remained very close to his younger brother Theo, who provided for him, as Vincent only sold one single picture during his painting career. All his life he suffered from loneliness, his only consolation being painting. In despair of his condition, he shot himself. Initially he painted sombre scenes from the life of the poor which show his personal engagement with his subject, using darktoned colours and a rough sharp-edged technique ("Potato Eaters", various versions). Between 1888 and his death van Gogh produced, in just thirty months of feverish creativity, those 463 paintings which established his worldwide fame and made him one of the founders of modern 20th century painting, in particular in the fields of Expressionism and Fauvism. |
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| GOYA, Francisco José de. 1746 Feundetodas (near Zaragozza) – 1828 Bordeaux. Rococo/Neoclassicism Goya started painting in the Spanish version of the Rococo manner, intermingled with French and Italian elements, but from 1792 his style changed drastically. During that year he became deaf as a result of severe illness. In 1780 he became a member of the Real Academia de San Fernando, later to become its deputy principal and then principal. Having carried out court commissions since 1781, he was appointed as a court painter in 1786, painter to the royal chamber in 1789, and principal court painter in 1799. In a series of uncommissioned paintings he created under the mask of ordinary genre scenes, a world of terror and nightmare. Under the pressure of the Restoration Goya left Spain and emigrated to Bordeaux. The deeply questionable in human nature, which is also expressed in Goya’s portraits, did not find full recognotion until the 20th century. |
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| GRECO, EL (Domenikos Theotokópoulos) C1541 Phodele (Crete) – 1614 Toledo. Renaissance As a mosy unusual phenomenon in the 16th century European painting, El Greco combined the strict Byzantine style of his homeland with influences received during his studies in Venice and Spain. El Greco obtained his training as icon-maker in a monastery. Historical records tell us of many disputes with commissioners about inappropriate interpertation of religious themes, unusual coloration, elongation of figures, but also old-fashioned representation. In the course of his development El Greco became gradually detached from the reality of representation. He distorted the human figure, abandoned logical space construction and also used colour no longer objectively. It is possible that his Bryzantine legacy may have been responsible for his grewing asceticism. He is now considered as one of the most important representatives of European Mannerism. |  |
| HALS, Frans. C1581-1585 Antwerp – 1666 Haarlem. Baroque Frans Hals was the son of a cloth-maker from Mecheln. He moved to Haarlem at a young age. Apart from one or two short visits to Antwerp and Amsterdam, Hals never left Haarlem. He was highly esteemed in Haarlem, as is shown by the fact that he received altogether eight commissions for the large civic guard pictures. But Hals was often in debt as his portraits were not ‘elegant’ enough for contemporary taste, so that he never became a fashionable painter. Also, he had to provide for ten children from his two marriages. In 1652 he had to auction his furniture and his paintings to pay the baker, and shortly before his death he received poor relief in the form of money and peat. It is often maintained that his poverty was the result of his extravagant life-style, but there is no evidence for this. Frans Hals is the most important Dutch portrait painter. His surviving work comprises about 300 paintings, and the majority of these are portraits and group portraits. Hals certainly was the foremost painter of the Dutch group portrayal. His special devices used for livening up the picture are most evident in his genre portraits (The Gypsy Girl, The Merry Drinker, Malle Babbe). With a spontaneous seemingly improvised brushstroke, he produces light reflections on the faces, objects, cloth and lace, thus creating an effect of immediacy as well as vitality. |
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| HOPPER, Edward. 1882 Nyack (New York) – 1967 New York. Realism Between 1900 en 1906 he travelled widely in Europe, spending a great deal of time in Paris, where he painted street scenes in the Impressionist manner. From 1924 onwards, his subject matter moved away from the world of French painting and he concentrated entirely on American life. Modern civilasation became his subject, and he was particularly fascinated by the urbanization, the expansion of industry and the excesses of American architecture. Many of his pictures are realistic depictions of street scenes, views over roofs and abandoned houses. He intensifies the sinister atmosphere by showing them at different times of the day and in different weathers. Hopper, who kept away from the avant-garde stream in Europe and America, created as no other a realistic picture of American urban life and landscape. In 1968 his widow gave all the works he left to the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. |
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| JOHNS, Jasper. 1930 Augusta (Georgia) – Contemporay painting Johns studied at the University of South Carolina in 1947/48. Military service took him to Japan in 1949. On his return in 1952 he worked as a bookseller and in New York with Rauschenberg as a window-dresser at Tiffany’s. In 1966 he designed scenery and costumes for the Merce Cunningham Dance Company and worked with the composer John Cage. With Rauschenberg, Johns belongs to those artists who introduced decisive new elements into the art which followed Abstract Expressionism. His one-man exhibition in 1958 is seen as the beginning of Pop Art, yet his art also goes in other directions. Initially John’s works concentrated on a relative small repetoire of subjects, such as the American flag, letters, numbers and shooting targets produced in the early 1950s. He also produced assemblages of actual objects and everyday artefacts in cast metal. |
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| KADINSKY, Wassily Wassilyevich 1866 Moscow – 1944 Neuilly-sur-Seine Contemporary painting; Expressionism, Abstract Art. One of the most important twentieth-century artists, he is credited with painting the first modern abstract works. Although Kadinsky showed talent as both a musician an artist in his youth, art was a hobby to him until age 30 when he first viewed Monet’s “Haystack”. Born in Moscow, Kadinsky spent his childhood in Odessa. He enrolled at the University of Mocow and chose to study law and economics. Quite successful in his profession- he was offered a professorship at the University of Dorpat- he started painting studies (lifedrawing, sketching and anatomy) at the age of 30. Kadinsky’s creation of purely abstract style did not come about abruptly, but rather as the fruit of a long period of developement and maturation of his own intense theoretical introspection based on his personal experience of painting. Not only was Kadinsky a very innovative artist in his day, he was founder of a number of art education facilities and an apt administrator. Even more importantly, he was a visionary who understood the spiritual aspect of life and created works of art to communicate about the spiritual aspect of reality, driven by ‘inner necessity’. |
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| KLEE, Paul. 1879 Münchenbuchsee (near Bern) – 1940 Muralto (near Locarno).Expressionism/Cubism,Surrealism Klee’s father, a music teacher, was German, his mother Swiss. He himself played the violin and stayed close to music all his life. In 1916 Klee was called up for military service. On his discharge in 1919 he began painting in oil. In his pictures he developed the representational out of abstract forms. In 1931 Klee became professor at the Academy in Düsseldorf. From this period date his divisionist pictures in which colour is applied in small dots similar to the method of pointillism. To evade the pressures of rising facism, he returned to Bern in 1933, where he began to produce large-scale pictures. His work is often ambiguous or somewhat ironic, but it never loses touch with the real world. |
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| KLIMT, Gustav. 1862 Baumgarten (near Vienna) – 1918 Vienna. Symbolism/Art Nouveau During his study in Vienna, Klimt, together with 19 other artist joined the Jugenstil (Art Noveau) movement in 1897. He became a co-founder of the Vienna Secession and was its president until his resignation in 1905. To this day his work still has both its admirers and its detractors. He is criticised for his massed repetitive decorative elements, and his gold backgrounds and jewelled coloration are considered to be outside the bounds of ‘great art’. Stylisation carried to the point of ornamental dissolution is typical of his style, as is the craftsmanlike execution. Like many of his contemporaries he favoured Symbolist representations. His portraits are both delicate and magnificent, his less numerous landscapes mosaic-like, with their dotted brushwork. Klimt’s work, which is now highly esteemed, greatly influenced the development of the Vienna Jugenstil and also the arts and craft movements, as represented by the Wiener Werkstätte founded in 1903. |
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| KOONING, Willem de. 1904 Rotterdam – 1997 Long Island (US) Abstract Expressionism From 1916 de Kooning worked for four years for an art dealer in Rotterdam, attending evening courses at the Academy. In 1926 he entered the USA illegally. In 1930 he met Gorky, with whom he then started a studio and who was to be an important influence. De Kooning is, with Pollock, one of the most important painters of abstract Expressionism. His first one-man exhibition was not held until 1948, and he became one of the leading avant-garde personalities and influencial artists of the 1950s. During the 1930s and 1940s de Kooning specialised in the depiction of three main themes: men, women and abstractions; towards the end of this period his manner of painting grew in intensity. After 1950 he returned to his subject ‘Woman’, while continuing with his abstract compositions. During this period his work was marked by a heightened colour intensity and density which in turn was replaced by lighter tones and larger, more reduced forms. He painted abstract landscapes after 1995. |
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| LEONARDO, da Vinci. 1452 Vinci – 1519 Cloux. Renaissance Leonardo was the embodiment of the Renaissance ideal of the universal man, the first artist to attain complete mastery of all branches of art. He was a painter, sculptor, architect and enigineer besides being a scholar in the natural sciences, medicine and philosophy. He received his artistic training under Verrochio in Florence, with whose workshop he retained contact even after having become an independent master. He left Florence for Milan in 1482, working at the court of Duke Lodovico Sforza in the capacities of painter, sculptor and engineer until 1499. When the French invasion of the city caused the Duke to leave, Leonardo returned to his homeground, but later he worked again in Milan and Rome. With his ‘Last Supper’ in Milan Leonardo created the first work of the High Renaissance. His representation of the theme has become the epitome of all Last Supper compositions. Leonardo was never quite understood in Florence, but this was more than made up by his influence on the 16th century Venetian art. His theories on art too were influential. He also supported his new ideas about painting with a sound theoretical basis. A number of projects remained uncompleted, such as the wall painting of the Battle of Anghiari in the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence, the numerous designs for the two equestrian movements of Lodovico Sforza and Marshal Trivulzio in Milan, and some architectural designs. |
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| LOCHNER, Stefan. C1400 Meersburg (?) – 1451 Cologne. Late Gothic The dating of Lochner’s work points to the fifth decade of the 15th century. Lochner must have been familiar with contemporary Dutch art (Campin and van Eyck), but direct thematic adoptions are rare. Undoubted is the fact that he orientated himself towards the old masters when in Cologne. The person always comes first in his art; any connections with schools of contemporary painting stand back. Lochner always used his artistic devices to correspond closely with subject matter, purpose and requirements. With his freshness of colour and charm of style he had no equal in central Germany until Schongauer. Lochner was elected to the city council of Cologne in 1447 and 1450 which proves that he was highly respected. He also had a flourishing workshp, where his book illuminations were produced, and where the work was carried on after his death during the Plague in 1451. |
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| MANET, Edouard. 1832 Paris – 1883 Paris. Realism, Impressionism Manet came from a well-to-do background. He came to painting by an indirect route. First he studied law, before taking up an artist’s career. Although a contemporary and a friend of the Impressionists, whose work he admired, he didn’t follow the aims of pure Impressionism in his own paintings. As with Degas, his themes were were contemporary Paris life, but Manet also portrayed political events. Serene interior designs and the depiction of familiar surroundings and friends occur frequently. With great skill he captured the peaceful atmosphere in country scenes or by the sea, or cheerful moments in Paris cafés or at the races, making no emotional statements, but using colour tones for expression. His delicate handling of tones is most apparent in his still lifes. Zola, Mallarmé, and Baudelaire admired him and paid tribute to his art. In 1881 he was made a member of the Legion of Honour. |
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| MASACCIO. 1401 San Giovanni Valdarno – 1428 Rome. Renaissance Masaccio was the first great painter of the Italian Renaissance, whose application of scientific perspective and depiction of natural lighting represent an important step in the development of modern painting. Only five unquestionable attributable works by Masaccio survive, although various other paintings have been attributed in whole or in part to him. All of his works are religious in nauture – altarpieces or church frescoes. Although Masaccio dies at a very young age, the body of his work exerted a strong influence on the course of later Florentine art, particularly on the work of Michelangelo. |
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| MATISSE, Henri. 1869 Cambrésis – 1954 Nice. Fauvism, Modernism Matisse studied law and worked in a solicitor’s office in his home town. While recovering from an appendicectomy in 1890 he began to paint, moving to Paris in order to study art. Rejecting an academic training, he became a pupil of Moreau. In the Louvre he copied the works of Poussin and Chardin, painting their chiaroscuro manner. While staying in Brittany in 1896 he returned to Impressionist painting. In about 1900 he recognised the independent value of colour and began to analyse the works of Cézanne, van Gogh and Gauguin in order to find new synthesis. While with Signac at Saint Tropez in 1904 he adopted this painter’s pointillist manner. This he gradually abandoned, using longer brushstrokes which finally became areas of of colour divided by darker outlines. Towards 1910 he adopted intensy brilliant coloration and simplified forms, lines and colour contrasts to a high degree, creating images of pure joy, unhampered by decorative and ornamental effects. His late work lacked the serenity and ease which marked his former concern with perfection and harmony. |
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| MIRÓ, Joan. 1893 Montroig (near Barcelona) – 1983 Palma de Mallorca. Surrealism While attending a business school, Miró was already going to art classes in Barcelona. He worked briefly in a chemist’s shop before taking up his studies at the art academy, where he was introduced to Impressionist and Fauvist painting. When visiting Paris in 1919 he made the acquanintance of Picasso and his circle. He began to explore Cubism, was briefly introduced in the Dada movements, and moved to Paris in 1920. Here his art achieved its first height with the poetic realism of his paradisiacal landscapes. Gradually his pictures lost depth, giving way to purely flat painting when Miró joined the Surrealists in 1924 and signed their Manifesto. In 1928 he went to Holland to paint his ‘imaginary portraits’, after old masters, at the same time producing his first collages. New forms appeared, and Miró’s work turned into a fantastic play of realistic attributes and imagery. In 1937 he designed the wall decorations for the Spanish pavillion at the Paris World Exhibition, and posters reclaiming the Spanish Republic. His late works again combined lithe figurations of human and animal elements with an artful, naive cosmology. |
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| MONDRIAAN, Piet. 1872 Amersfoort – 1944 New York. Contemporary/De Stijl Mondriaan came from an artistic family. He studied art in Amsterdam. In 1904/05, while on a painting tour in Brabant and Overijssel, he was already painting in a manner detached from what one sees. He continued painting landscapes in the Impressionist style of The Hague and Amsterdam schools until 1906. In 1909 he incurred severe criticism with fauvist-like landscapes at the exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. His years in Paris from 1911 to 1914 were greatly influenced by Cubism. His journey into abstraction started in 1917 with his first paintings of rhythmical horizontals and verticals, followed by those with geometrical grid patterns. From this period date his pictures of coloured rectangles with black outlines, the colours being soon reduced to the primaries plus black, grey and white. This trend continued over the next few years, developing an increasing purity of style. In 1938 he went to London, then emigrated to New York in 1940. There his style changed once more, replacing the black grid with coloured lines dividing small, colour rectangles. |
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| MONET, Claude. 1840 Paris – 1925 Giverny (near Paris).Impressionism Monet’s family moved from Paris to Le Havre in 1843, where the young Monet met the painter Boudin. Boudin recognised the boy’s talent and began to work with him, converting him to painting in the open. He was called up for military service in Algeria in 1861, but for health reasons was allowed to return to Paris the following year. He was not on good terms with his family, who refused to support him financially. He found more congenial company amongst intellectuals and artists. Monet has his first public success at the Salon in 1865, receiving a good review form the critic Paul Mantz in the Gazette des Beaux-Arts. The siege of Paris caused him to go to London with his family in 1870/71. He then spent some time in Holland. By the 1870s he had fully developed his style and has banned black from his palette altogether, replacing it with blue. From 1883 he finally settled at Giverny, where he created his famous garden with water-lily ponds, finding at last some measure of peace and also inspiration. |
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| MURILLO, Bartolomé Esteban. 1617 Seville – 1682 Seville. Baroque Murillo was the youngest of fourteen children of a doctor in Seville, where he probably remained all his life. Being orphaned at the age of ten, he was apprenticed early to a painter by the name of Castillo. He gained sudden fame with the cycle of paintings he did for the cloisters of the Franciscan monastery in Seville. While his earliest works show him working in a tenebrist style derived from Zurbarán an then in the style of Ribera with a preference for cool colours, he soon developed his characteristic style of soft forms and warm colours, which owed something to the works of van Dyck, Rubens and Raphael which he had studied in local collections. Today considered somewhat sentimental his genre scenes nevertheless represent a new way of perception. When Hegel said about Murillo’s beggar children that they sat on the ground "contented and blissful almost like Olympian gods", he cleared them of pathos, and so brought out the sensitisation for simple objects and feelings which would first find full expression in the 18th century. Murillo’s many devotional pictures, particularly of the Madonna, reflect a piety which was senstive and close to the people. Apart from this new approach he commanded a brilliant painterly technique, which made him the head of the Seville school. He also founded the Academy of Seville and became its president. |
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| PICASSO, Pablo. 1881 Málaga – 1973 Mougins (near Cannes). Cubism Pablo Picasso is probably the most important figure in the 20th Century art. Time Magazine art critic Robert Hughes once said "”To say that Pablo Picasso dominated Western art in the 20th century is, by now, the merest commonplace. Before his 50th birthday, the little Spaniard from Malaga had become the very prototype of the modern astist as public figure. No painter before him had had a mass audience in his own lifetime ". He was born October 25, 1881 in Malaga, Spain and by the time he died in France in April 1973, had created a staggering 22,000 works of art in a variety of mediums, including sculpture, ceramics, mosaics, stage design and graphic arts. In 1937 he produced his "Guernica" for the Spanish pavillion at the Paris World Exhibition, using abstraction, deformation and anatomical dissection to express the feeling aroused by the bombardment of the town by the German air force. During the Second World War Picasso lived in Paris, painting deformed, tortured heads of women and severe still lifes, and he wrote the Surrealist piece "How to catch desires by their tails". After the liberation of Paris in 1944 he joined the French Communist Party, and in 1946 he moved to the Côte d’Azur. He turned to designing pottery in 1950 and began exploring the works of old masters, producing variations on paintings by Velázquez, Delacroix and Manet. As critic Huges notes, "There was scarely a 20th century movement that de didn’t inspire, contribute to or -in the case of Cubism-, which, in one of art history’s great collaborations, he co-invented with George Braque-beget.". Pablo Picasso died on April 8, 1973 in Mougine, France, while he and his wife Jacqueline entertained friends for dinner. His final words were " Drink to me, drink to my health, you know I can’t drink any more ". In addition to his manifold artistic accomplishments, Picasso had a film career, including a cameo appearance in Jean Cocteau’s "Testament of Orpheus". Picasso always played himself in his film appearances. In 1955 he helped made the film "Le Mystere Picasso (The Mystery of Picasso)". |  |
| PISSARRO, Camille. 1830 Antilles – 1903 Paris. Impressionism As the son of well-to-do parents Pissarro was sent to a school in Passy near Paris form 1842 to 1847. Depsite his early promising talent he worked first in his father’s business on the island of St. Thomas from 1847 to 1852. Like Monet, he escaped the war in France by going to London. Pissarro was one of the most active members of the Impressionist group. He was the only painter who participated in all eight Impressionist Exhibitions between 1874 and 1886. His sight began to fail in 1888. In 1894 he was in danger of being arrested as an anarchist and had to flee to Belgium. In 1896 and 1898 he was in Rouen, painting views of the town and harbour and always remaing loyal to the Impressionist school. In 1897 and 1903 he produced many impressions of Paris boulevards, and also painted in Dieppe and Le Havre. In 1900 he again showed his work at the Paris World Exhibition, finally gaining universal recognition. |
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| POLLOCK, Jackson. 1912 Cody (Wyoming) – 1956 Easthampton (New York). Abstract Expressionism Pollock grew up in California and Arizona. In 1939 Pollock received psychiatric treatment for his alcoholism and this led him to study the works of C.G. Jung, and he became particularly interested in his theory of archetypes. His early work was abstract with elements of primitive, mostly Indian art in stylised form. In 1945 Pollock married the painter Lee Krasner. A year later he began to develop a completely new style. With this he made a name for himself, becoming a key figure in American painting. He was turning away from the conventional use of brush and easel. This he finally achieved with his "drip painting". The canvas is placed on the floor, and paint is dribbled and splashed over it spontaneously from perforated cans. An inner tension of relaxation, a psychic automatism determines the speed, the rhythm, the action. With this, Pollock achieved the high point of his expressive energy. In 1934 he had his first one-man exhibition in New York. In 1956 he died in a car accident. |
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| PONTORMO 1494 Pontormo (near Empoli)- 1556 Florence Renaissance Pontormo can be regarded as one of the most interesting figures in the 16th century Italian art and also as an exponent of Florentine Mannerist painting. Like Rosso Fiorentiono, his early work still reflected the High Renaissance, apart from increased movement (fresco of the ‘Visitation’). In subsequent years Pontormo abadoned this style, with its balanced composition, logical constructions, idealised figure representation and clear coloration. Pontormo’s fresco style in the cloister of Certosa di Galluzzo near Florence, 1530, draws on an intensive syudy of Durer’s graphic art, Then, in the following period, Pontormo increasingly set out to portray movement in all its forms and directions. By distortion of the ideal physical proportions -elongated figures with small heads-exaggerated perspective and use of relatively harsh, vivid colours, he transposed traditional pictorial themes into a new sphere in some respects related to medieval art. His late works, particularly in the rendering of figures, strongly reflect Michelangelo’s influence, whom he met around 1530 in Rome. A favourite of the Medici, he carried out much important fresco work, which has, however, not survived. Pontormo’s portraits belong to the greatest achievements in this field in Florentine painting. |
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| RAPHAEL 1483 Urbino – 1520 Rome. Renaissance Raphael’s fame as the greatest painter of the Western world will continue despite certain dectracting voice which made themselves heard at the beginning of the 20th century. Raphael had an extraordinary power of assimilation without falling into the trap of eclecticism. In exploring the works of the past and present he only adopted such element which served to perfect his own original artistic personality. The large numbers of commissions for fresco cycles and other works resulted in the organisation of a large workshop. His significance as an architect can now only be traced in outline. In just two decades of creativity Raphael’s work made unique, influential history outgrowing the 15th century, leading the High Renaissance to its peak and finally paving the way for Mannerism, often leaping ahead to the Baroque. |
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| REMBRANDT, van Rijn. 1606 Leiden – 1669 Amsterdam. Baroque Rembrandt, the son of a miller and a baker’s daughter, was originally intended to become a scholar. Rembrandt was the most universal artist of his time and influenced painting for half a century, irrespective of schools and regional style. Unlike most Dutch painters of the time, who worked in fairly narrow fields, Rembrandt depicted almost every type of subject. Rembrandt’s fame rests on his continual development of pictorial devices and unvarying excellence of execution, as well on his brilliant handling of light and shade and his ability to suggest states of mind through facial expression. In 1639 he bought a large house, never quite paid for, which he filled with works of art and curios. Soon his passion for collecting exceeded his finances. In 1656 he went bankrupt, and his house and all possessions were put up for compulsory auction. Rembrandt spent his final years in poverty and isolation in rooms on the outskirts of Amsterdam, his powers of creation undiminshed. Apart form his greatness as a painter he was a powerful draughtsman and etcher. About 300 of his etchings survive. |
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| RENOIR, Pierre-Auguste. 1841 Limoges – 1919 Cagnes-sur-Mer (near Nice).Impressionism The son of an impecunious tailor, he moved with his family to Paris in 1844. When living in Bougival in 1869, he developed with Monet the Impressionist manner of painting. Subsequently he went to paint with Monet in Argenteuil and took part in the first three Impressionist in Exhibitions, 1874-1877, and showed his work at the Salon 1878-1881. Like Monet, Renoir delighted in painting family scenes and depicting life in the city and the country. Pure landscapes were unusual for Renoir; his main interest was in people, and women held a special fascination for him. He also produced still lifes and portraits. Although he adopted the broken brushwork of the Impressionists, his works had a character of their own, distinguishing themselves from those of Monet, Sisley and Pissarro through their gaiety and brilliance of colour. |
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| ROTHKO, Mark 1903 Dvinsk (Lithuania) – 1970 New York Contemporary painting Rothko’s family emigrated to Oregon when he was seven years old. Together with Adolph Gottlieb he founded the Expressionist group The Ten in 1935. In about 1938 he began to take an interest in Surrealism and engaged in the study of Greek mythology and metaphysics, Jung’s theory of archetypes and primitive art. He produced his first pictures depicting forms floating in space from 1947. Three years later he had evolved his distinctive manner, In 1949 he founded with William Baziotes, Motherwell and Newman the Subject of the Artist School, which only functioned for a year. He taught until 1955 at its successor Studio 35. In 1950 he travelled in Europe, and from 1951-1954 he taught as assistant professor at Brooklyn College. In 1958 he received the lucrative commission of painting a mural in the Seagram Building. After 1960 his palette became noticeably darker and gloomier. In 1964 he decorated a chapel in Houston designed by Philip Johnson for Jean and Domique De Menil. He was one of the most significant representatives of flat area colour painting. |
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| RUBENS, Peter Paul. 1577 Siegen (West phalia) – 1640 Antwerp. Baroque His father was a Calvinist and so he had to live in exile from Antwerp, so Ruben’s grew up in Cologne. In 1610 he built himself a large house and studio. During his Antwerp period, until 1622, he received a flood of commissions from the church, state and nobility, employing in his large workshop many pupils who later became famous to help with the work. His largest commission was for a series of 21 paintings of the life of the Queen Dowager Marie de Medici for the Palais Luxembourg in Paris, for which he received a fee of 20.000 ducats. The most important painter of the International Baroque thus became the first artistic aristocrat, whose fame and wealth constantly increased. Rubens, the great Baroque master, succesfully brought together in his style northern and Flemish elements of this period withe those of Italy. His influence on the painters of his century was enormous, as it was on sculpture and architecture. His sometimes gigantic ‘pictorial inventions’, which do not always appeal to today’s taste, were pioneering in composition, design and the art of colour, taking as subject all major themes of painting: Biblical scenes and lives of the saints, mythology and subjects of Antiquity, and also peasant scenes, landscapes and portraiture. My talent is such, he wrote, " that no undertaking, however large and varied in theme, has ever gone beyond my self-confidence " |
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| TITIAN, (Tiziano Vecelli) between 1473 and 1490 Pieve di Cadore (Venetia) – 1576 Venice Renaissance Titian was the most outstanding painter of the 16th century. At a time when Mannerist tendencies became prevalent, he took over the heritage of the High Renaissance and carried it further. Although the standards of ‘classical art’ of about 1500 were his guideline, he endowed them with a new dynamism for greater effect. He played a unique rol in the history of colour and found ways of achieving unprecedented freedom in pictorial composition, making him not only the most important precursor of European Baroque (Rubens), but also a lasting influence on painters until the late 19th century. Manet for example, studied and copied his work in the Louvre. Already in 1530 Titian had become of European eminence. In 1533 the Emperor Charles V called him to his court and made him a Count Palatine. But Titian never left Venice for very long. In his late work colour achieved an almost ‘Impressionistic’ effect. |
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| TOULOUSE-LAUTREC, Henri de. 1864 Albi – 1901 Chateau Malromé (Gironde). Postimpressionism Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec was born on November 24, 1864, in Albi, France. He was an aristocrat, the son of and heir of Comte Alphonse-Charles de Toulouse and last in line of a family that dated back a thousand years. Henri’s father was rich, handsome, and eccentric. His mother was overly devoted to her only living child. Henri was weak and often sick. By the time he as 10 he had begun to draw and paint. At the age of 12 young Toulouse-Lautrec broke his left leg and at 14 his right leg. The bones failed to heal properly and his legs stopped growing. He reached young adulthood with a body trunk of normal size but with abnormally short legs. He was only 1.5 meters tall. Deprived of the kind of life that a normal body would have permitted, Toulouse-Lautrec lived wholly for his art. He stayed in the Monmatre section of Paris, the center of the cabaret entertainment and bohemian life that he loved to paint. Circuses, dance halls and nightclubs, racetracks – all these spectacles were set down on canvas or made into litographs. Toulouse-Lautrec was very much part of all this activity. He would sit at a crowded nightclub table, laughing and drinking, and at the same time he would make swift sketches. The next morning in his studio he would expand the sketches into bright-colored paintings. In order to become a part of the Monmartre life -as well as to protect himself against the crowd’s ridicule of his appearance- Toulouse-Lautrec began to drink heavily. In the 1890s the drinking started to affect his health. He was confined to a sanatorium and to his mother’s care at home, but he could not stay away from alcohol. Toulouse-Lautrec died on September 9, 1901, at the family chateau of Malrome. Since then his paintings and posters -particularly the Moulin Rouge group- have been in great demand and bring high prices at auctions and art sales. |
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| TURNER, Joseph Mallord William. 1775 London – 1851 London. Romaticism Turner was only fourteen years old when he was admitted to the Royal Academy. He started his career by painting water-colours and producing mezzotints which were stongly influenced by John Robert Cozen’s work. He started painting in oil from 1796 in the Classicist manner of Wilson and Poussin, and these paintings found general approval. Turner, who was one of the most prolific painters on his time, made extensive travels in many parts of England and also on the Continent. Like the works of Constable, his seemingly effortless water-colours and oil-sketches were drawn from nature, as for example his series of landscapes painted from a boat on the Thames in 1807. By abandoning form or showing it only in shadowy outline, Turner endowed colour with a power of its own. This development was to be escpecially influential on the art of the 20th century. |
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| VELÁZQUEZ, Diego. 1599 Seville – 1660 Madrid.Baroque Velázquez’ father was the descendant of a noble Potuguese family, which was to become a significant factor in his career at the Spanish Royal Court. In 1622/23 he travelled with his father-in-law to Madrid, to be introduced at the court. There he was appointed ‘pintor del Rey’, but, as was the custom of the day, without a fixed income. Velázquez’ estimation at court rose reapidly. After a painting competition in 1627 he was appointed court door- keeper and later, in 1652 court-marshall. Important was his meeting with Rubens, who visited the Spanish court on a diplomatic mission in 1628. Perhaps this inspired him to visit Italy, where he met Ribera in Napels. In Rome he was honoured by being made a member of the Accademica di San Luca after having exhibited one of his pictures publicly. As one of the foremost artists of the 17th century, he owed something to the School of Seville, but achieved a style which was entirely his own. Although open to the innovations of Titian, Caravaggio and Rubens, he transformed any inspirations he received in his own inmitable manner. |
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| VERMEER, Jan. 1632 Delft – 1675 Delft. Baroque Although Vermeer was one of the greatest of Dutch genre painters, with Frans Hals and Rembrandt, and his work is unique in the history of art, very little is known about his life. In 1653 he married Catharina Bolens, whom he often portrayed in his pictures. He worked slowly and therefore his output was small, and insufficient to keep a large family, although he achieved fairly high prices. He tried to supplement his income by acting as an art dealer, but this also failed. Only one of his 36 survivings paintings is dated. The pictures with which Vermeer’s name is now mostly associated were paintings shortly before and after 1660, including ‘Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window’, ‘The Milkmaid’, ‘Woman Holding a Balance’ and ‘The Artist’s Studio’. In these intimate scenes, light itself seens to have become the subject of the picture; a moment of stillness captured on canvas. Vermeer stands apart from his contemporary genre painters through his superb draughtmanship and skill in perpective, his colour harmonies,in which cool blue and a brilliant yellow predominate. On his death his pictures were auctioned off and he was forgotten, and it was not until towards the end of the 19th century that his true significance was recognised. |
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| WARHOL, Andy. 1928 Pittsburgh – 1987 New York. Contemporary/Popart From 1945 to 1949 Warhol studied at the Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh. He then went to New York where he became one of the key figures in Pop Art. While working as an illustrator and graphic artist he developed his technique of the "blotted line", the first step to the reproduction process which was to become the basis of his pictorial work. From 1960 he produced pictures after comic strips, then motifs of the world of American consumerism, such as Coca-Cola bottles, dollar notes and Campbell soup cans. He also used subjects found in newspapers and magazines, such as snapshots of road accidents. In his New York Factory, which was set up in 1962, he produced his portraits of famous personalities, photographic works, films and music, often in team-work. He also published the magazine Interview and organised TV shows and multi-media concerts with the pop group Velvet Underground. For his later works he chose more conventional subjects, such as old master paintings (e.g. Leonardo’s Last Supper). |
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| WATTEAU, Jean-Antoine. 1684 Valenciennes – 1721 Nogent-sur-Marne.Rococo One of the most brilliant and original artists of the eighteenth century. Antoine Watteau had an impact on the development of Rococo art in France and throughout Europe lasting well beyond his lifetime. Living only thirty-six years, and plagued by frequent illness, Watteau nonetheless rose from an obscure provincial background to achieve fame in the French capital during the Regency of the duc d’Orleans. His paintings feature figures in aristocratic and theatrical dress in lush imaginary landscapes. Their amorous and wistful encounters create a mood, but do not employ narrative in the traditional sense. During Watteau’s lifetime, a new term, fête galante, was coined to describe them. Watteau was also a gifted draftsman whose sparkling chalk sheets capture subtle nuances of deportment and expression. In 1708 Watteau began working with Claude Audran, who had the care of the treasures at the Luxembourg Palace. This collection included a group of scenes from the life of Marie de’ Medici painted at the early 1600s by the Flemish master Peter Paul Rubens. Watteau returned to Paris and lived for a time in the residence of Pierre Crozat, but after a while he left to live in seclusion. This began the period of his major paintings, including the fêtes galantes. Watteau’s health continued to fail, and he moved to Nogent-sur-Marne just east of Paris, where he died on July 18, 1721. The paintings of Watteau and his fellow Rococo painters Francois Boucher and Jean-Honore Fragonard fell from favor in the late 1700s. His work was not fully appreciated again until the mid-1800s. |
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