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Gene Davis

Gene Davis (August 22, 1920 - April 6, 1985) was an american painter known especially for paintings of vertical stripes of colour as a member of the group of abstract painters in Washington DC during the 1960s known as the Washington Color School.

Davis was born in Washington DC in 1920 and spent nearly all his life there. Before he began to paint in 1949, he worked as a sportswriter and journalist. His first art studio was in his apartment on Scott Circle, and later he worked out of a studio on Pennsylvania Avenue.

The Washington painters were among the most prominent of the mid-century color field painters.


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Lucy Bacon

Lucy Angeline Bacon (July 30, 1857 – October 17, 1932), was a Californian artist who studied in Paris under the famous Impressionist, Camille Pissarro (who was friends with Paul Cézanne), and was the only known California artist to have studied under any of the Great French Impressionists.

Mary Cassatt introduced her to Pissarro.

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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.

Cassatt embraced more radical art in the mid-1870s, when she discovered the works of the Impressionists. She was the only American to exhibit with the Impressionists.



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The Global Mess - an art project for charity

The Global Mess is an art project by the British artist Geoff Bunn.

I'm giving it a plug as all the money from it will be going to charity. And if someone could only be persuaded to buy it for loads of money - that would be a good thing!



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20th century art on the web: Lucian Freud

20th century art on the web: Lucian Freud

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Francesco Clemente

Francesco Clemente (born in Naples, 23 March 1952) is an Italian painter. His work shows both surrealist and expressionist references. In 1986, he created the Hanuman Books series with Raymond Foye which is a collection of 48 miniature handmade books featuring American and European poets and philosophers, edited by George Scrivani and printed in Madras.

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Richard Serra

Richard Serra was born in San Francisco in 1939 and has exhibited extensively in major museums and exhibitions throughout the world, creating site-specific sculptures for both public and private venues in North America and Europe.

His most recent projects include an exhibition at the Museo Archeologico and Piazza Plebiscito in Naples (2004), and an eight-part permanent installation The Matter of Time at the Guggenheim Bilbao, which was inaugurated in 2005.

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Joseph Kosuth

Joseph Kosuth (born January 31, 1945 Toledo, Ohio) is an American conceptual artist.His art generally strives to explore the nature of art, focusing on ideas at the fringe of art rather than on producing art per se.

One of Kosuth's most famous works is "One and Three Chairs", a visual expression of Plato's concept of The Forms. The piece features a physical chair, a photograph of that chair, and the text of a dictionary definition of the word "chair". The photograph is a representation of the actual chair situated on the floor, in the foreground of the work of art. The definition, posted on the same wall as the photograph, delineates in words the concept of what a chair is, in its various incarnations.

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Victor Burgin

Victor Burgin (born 1941) is a British conceptual artist. Burgin first came to attention as a conceptualist in the late 1960s. He has worked with photography and film, calling painting "the anachronistic daubing of woven fabrics with coloured mud". His work is influenced by theorists and philosophers such as Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, Michel Foucault and Roland Barthes.

In 1986, Burgin was nominated for the Turner Prize for his exhibitions at the Institute of Contemporary Arts and Kettle's Yard Gallery in Cambridge and for a collection of his theoretical writings (The End of Art Theory) and a monograph of his visual work (Between).

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Michael Asher

Michael Asher (born 1943 in Los Angeles, California) is a conceptual artist, described by The New York Times as "among the patron saints of the Conceptual Art phylum known as institutional critique, an often esoteric dissection of the assumptions that govern how we perceive art." Rather than designing new art objects, Asher typically alters the existing environment, by repositioning or removing artworks, walls, facades, etc.

Asher's work initially consisted of dividing up gallery spaces using partition walls and curtains, and designing environments that reflected or absorbed sound. His untitled 1991 work featuring a granite drinking fountain juxtaposed with a flag pole was his first permanent public outdoor work in the United States. It is part of the Stuart Collection of public art on the campus of the University of California, San Diego.

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Mel Bochner

Mel Bochner (born 1940) is an American conceptual artist. Mr. Bochner received his BFA in 1962 and honorary Doctor of Fine Arts in 2005 from the School of Art at Carnegie Mellon University. He lives in New York City.

Starting in the 1960s, he evolved several of the exhibition strategies now taken for granted, including using the walls of the gallery as the subject of the work and using photo documentation of ephemeral and performance works. As Richard Kalina wrote in Art in America in 1996, Bochner was one of the earliest proponents, along with Joseph Kosuth and Bruce Nauman, of photo-documentation work in which the artist “created not so much a sculpture as a two-dimensional work about sculpture.”

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Geoff Bunn

Geoff Bunn (born 1963) is a British artist who can be considered as a latter day conceptualist. Primarily "just a painter", during the 1990's Bunn developed the idea of the random location of a set of artworks in the environment with the gradual release of clues to allow people to discover the nature and whereabouts of the pieces.

A further major element, often misunderstood, of Bunn's work is his mockery of the contemporary art world. For instance, he argues that "art is no longer about the object, the idea or about good art or bad art, but (solely) about the publicity surrounding the artist". And to this end he pokes fun at the art world with a raft of dissembling publicity.

In this respect Bunn follows a quizzically humorous tradition in art which reaches from William Hogarth through Marcel Duchamp to the Stuckists of today.

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Victor Vasarely

Victor Vasarely (Vásárhelyi Győző) (9 April 1906[1], Pécs - 15 March 1997, Paris) was a Hungarian French artist often acclaimed as the father of Op-art. Working as a graphic artist in the 1930s he created what is considered the first Op-art piece — Zebra, consisting of curving black and white stripes, indicating the direction his work would take. Over the next two decades, Vasarely developed his style of geometric abstract art. His work won his international renown and he received 4 prestigious prizes. He died in Paris in 1997.


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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.

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Audrey Flack

Audrey Flack (b. 1931 in New York) is an American photorealist painter, printmaker, and sculptor.

Flack studied fine arts in New York from 1948 to 1953. Her early work was abstract; one such painting paid tribute to Franz Kline. But gradually, Flack became a New Realist and finally a photorealist, in reaction to the abstract art movement. She later claimed she found the photorealist movement too restricting, and now gains much of her inspiration from baroque art.

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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.


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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.


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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.

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Andy Warhol

Andrew Warhola (August 6, 1928 – February 22, 1987), more commonly known as Andy Warhol, was an American artist and a figure in the movement known as pop art. After a successful career as a commercial illustrator, Warhol became famous worldwide for his work as a painter, avant-garde filmmaker, record producer, author, and public figure known for his membership in wildly diverse social circles that included bohemian street people, distinguished intellectuals, Hollywood celebrities and wealthy aristocrats.

Warhol has been the subject of numerous retrospective exhibitions, books, and feature and documentary films since his death in 1987.

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Frank Helmut 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.

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Kenneth Noland

Kenneth Noland (born April 10, 1924) is an American abstract painter. He is identified today as one of the best-known contemporary American Color field painters, although in the 1950s he was thought of as an abstract expressionist and in the early 1960s he was thought of as a minimalist painter.

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Robert Mangold

Robert Mangold (born October 12, 1937 in North Tonawanda, New York) is an American minimalist artist. In 1965, the Jewish Museum in New York held the first major exhibition of what was called Minimal art and included Robert Mangold. In 1971, he had his first solo museum exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum. He has been featured in the Whitney Biennial four times, in 1979, 1983, 1985, and 2004.

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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.

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Christo and Jeanne-Claude

Christo (born as Christo Vladimirov Javacheff, Bulgarian: Христо Явашев) and Jeanne-Claude (born as Jeanne-Claude Denat de Guillebon) are a married couple who create environmental installation art. Their works include the wrapping of the Reichstag in Berlin and the Pont Neuf bridge in Paris, the 24-mile-long curtain called Running Fence in Marin and Sonoma counties in California, and most recently The Gates in New York City's Central Park.

Although their work is visually impressive and often controversial as a result of its scale, the artists have repeatedly denied that their projects contain any deeper meaning than their immediate aesthetic. The purpose of their art, they contend, is simply to make the world a "more beautiful place" or to create new ways of seeing familiar landscapes.

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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.

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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.

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Anselm Kiefer

Anselm Kiefer (born March 8, 1945, Donaueschingen) is a German painter and sculptor. He studied with Joseph Beuys during the 1970s. His works incorporate materials like straw, ash, clay, lead, and shellac.

His works are characterised by a dull/musty, nearly depressive, destructive style and are often done in large scale formats. It is also characteristic of his work to find signatures and/or names of humans, legendary figures or places particularly pregnant with history in nearly all of his paintings. He is often gets him linked with a style called "New Symbolism."

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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.

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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.


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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.


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Morris Louis

Morris Louis (Morris Louis Bernstein) (November 28, 1912 - September 7, 1962) was an American Abstract Expressionist - one of the many such painters to emerge in the 1950s. Louis destroyed many of his paintings between 1955 and 1957. In 1986 there was an important retrospective exhibition of his later works at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.

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Mark Rothko

Mark Rothko, born Marcus Rothkowitz (Latvian: Marks Rotko; September 25, 1903–February 25, 1970), was a Latvian-born American painter and printmaker. He is classified as an abstract expressionist, although he himself rejected this label, and even resisted the classification as an "abstract painter".

"I am not an abstract painter. I am not interested in the relationship between form and color. The only thing I care about is the expression of man's basic emotions: tragedy, ecstasy, destiny."

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Mario Merz

Mario Merz (January 1, 1925 – 9 November 2003) was an Italian artist who was a part of the Art Povera movement.

Born in Milan, Merz started drawing during World War II, when he was imprisoned for his activities with an antifascist group. He soon rejected Abstract Expressionism’s subjectivity in favor of opening art to exterior space and in the 1960s, Merz’s work with energy, light and matter placed him in the movement that Germano Celant named Arte Povera, which, together with Futurism, remains one of the most influential movements of Italian art in the 20th century.

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August Natterer

August Natterer (1868 - 1933), also known as Neter, was a schizophrenic German outsider artist.

As a young man, Natterer studied engineering, got married, travelled widely, and had a successful career as an electrician but he was suddenly stricken with delusions and anxiety attacks. On April Fool's Day, 1907 he had a pivotal hallucination of the Last Judgment during which "10,000 images flashed by in half an hour." This ordeal led to a suicide attempt and committal to the first of what would be several mental asylums occupied during the remaining twenty-six years of his life.

The vision also inspired an intense production of drawings, all documenting images and ideas seen in the vision. Because of the intense and psychotic imagery, Netterer's work is more often studied scientifically than artistically. He died in 1933 in an asylum near Rottweil.

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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.


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Robert Motherwell

Robert Motherwell (January 24, 1915 – July 16, 1991) was an American abstract expressionist painter and printmaker. He was one of the youngest of the New York School (a phrase he coined), which also included Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning.

Motherwell completed one year of a philosophy Ph.D. at Harvard before shifting fields to art and art history. This rigorous background in rhetoric would serve him and the abstract expressionists well, as he was able to tour the country giving speeches that articulated to the public what it was that he and his friends were doing in New York. Without his tireless devotion to communication (in addition to his prolific painting), well-known abstract expressionists like Rothko, who was extremely shy and rarely left his studio, might not have made it into the public eye.

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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."

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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.

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Bernard Buffet

Bernard Buffet (July 10, 1928 – October 4, 1999) was a French expressionist painter and Member of the Anti-Abstract Art Group "L 'homme Témoin".

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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."

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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.


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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.

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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.

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James Whistler

James Abbott McNeill Whistler (14 July 1834 – 17 July 1903) was an American-born, British-based painter and etcher. Averse to sentimentality in painting, he was a leading proponent of the credo "art for art's sake". He took to signing his paintings with a stylized butterfly, possessing a long stinger for a tail. The symbol was apt, for Whistler's art was characterized by a subtle delicacy, in contrast to his combative public persona. Finding a parallel between painting and music, Whistler titled many of his works 'harmonies' and 'arrangements'.


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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.
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Pablo Picasso

Pablo Ruiz Picasso (25 October 1881 – 8 April 1973), often referred to simply as Picasso, was a Spanish painter and sculptor. One of the most recognized figures in 20th century art, he is best known as the co-founder, along with Georges Braque, of Cubism.

Picasso's work is often categorized into periods. While the names of many of his later periods are debated, the most commonly accepted periods in his work are the Blue Period (1901–1904), the Rose Period (1905–1907), the African-influenced Period (1908–1909), Analytic Cubism (1909–1912), and Synthetic Cubism (1912–1919).

Picasso's final works were a mixture of styles, his means of expression in constant flux until the end of his life. Devoting his full energies to his work, Picasso became more daring, his works more colourful and expressive, and from 1968 through 1971 he produced a torrent of paintings and hundreds of copperplate etchings.

At the time these works were dismissed by most as pornographic fantasies of an impotent old man or the slapdash works of an artist who was past his prime. One long time admirer, Douglas Cooper, called them "the incoherent scribblings of a frenetic old man".

Only later, after Picasso's death, when the rest of the art world had moved on from Abstract Expressionism, did the critical community come to see that Picasso had already discovered Neo-Expressionism and was, as so often before, ahead of his time.


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Chaïm Soutine

Chaïm Soutine (1893 – August 9, 1943) was an expressionist painter from Belarus. For a time, he and his friends lived at La Ruche, a residence for struggling artists in Montparnasse, where he became friends with Amedeo Modigliani.

Soutine produced the majority of his works from 1920 to 1929. He seldom showed his works, but he did take part in the exhibition of Independent Art held in 1937 in Paris. Soon thereafter France was invaded by German troops. As a Jew, Soutine had to escape from the French capital and hide in order to avoid arrest by the Gestapo. He moved from one place to another and was sometimes forced to seek shelter in forests, sleeping outdoors. Suffering from a stomach ulcer and bleeding badly, he left a safe hiding place for Paris in order to undergo emergency surgery, which failed to save his life. On August 9, 1943, Chaim Soutine died of a perforated ulcer.


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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.

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Carlo Carrà

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.

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Umberto Boccioni

Umberto Boccioni (October 19, 1882 – August 17, 1916) was a painter and a sculptor. He was born in Reggio Calabria, Italy. Like other Futurists, his work centered on the portrayal of movement, speed and technology.

Boccioni was the main theorist of the Futurist movement and in 1914, he published Pittura e scultura futuriste explaining the aesthetics of the group: “While the impressionists make a table to give one particular moment and subordinate the life of the table to its resemblance to this moment, we synthesize every moment (time, place, form, color-tone) and thus build the table.”

Mobilized in the first world war, Boccioni was assigned at an artillery regiment at Sorte, near Verona. On 16 August 1916, Boccioni was thrown from his horse during a cavalry training exercise and was trampled. He died the following day, age thirty-four.

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Stanton MacDonald-Wright

Stanton MacDonald-Wright (July 8, 1890 – August 22, 1973), was a U.S. abstract painter and co-founder of the Synchromist movement in 1913.

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An A to Z of Artists

Ernst Kirchner

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (May 6, 1880 – June 15, 1938) was a German expressionist painter and printmaker and one of the founders of the artists group Die Brücke or "The Bridge", a key group leading to the foundation of Expressionism in 20th century art. He volunteered for army service in the First World War, but soon suffered a breakdown and was discharged. In 1933, his work was branded as "degenerate" by the Nazis and in 1937 over 600 of his works were sold or destroyed. In 1938 he committed suicide.

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An A to Z of Artists

Emil Nolde

Emil Nolde (7 August 1867 – 13 April 1956) was a German painter and printmaker. He was one of the first Expressionists, a member of Die Brücke, and is considered to be one of the great watercolour painters of the 20th century.

Nolde is known for his vigorous brushwork and expressive choice of colors. Golden yellows and deep reds appear frequently in his work, giving a luminous quality to otherwise somber tones. His watercolors include vivid, brooding storm-scapes and brilliant florals - his intense preoccupation with the subject of flowers reflect his continuing interest in the art of Vincent Van Gogh.


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An A to Z of Artists

Maurice Vlaminck

Maurice de Vlaminck (April 4, 1876 – October 11, 1958) was a French painter. Along with André Derain and Henri Matisse he is considered one of the principal figures in the Fauve movement, a group of modern artists who from 1904 to 1908 were united in their use of intense color.

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An A to Z of Artists

Gustav Klimt

Gustav Klimt (July 14, 1862 – February 6, 1918) was an Austrian Symbolist painter and one of the most prominent members of the Vienna Art Nouveau (Vienna Secession) movement. His major works include paintings, murals, sketches, and other art objects, many of which are on display in the Vienna Secession gallery. Klimt's primary subject was the female body and his works are marked by a frank eroticism.

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An A to Z of Artists

Pierre Bonnard

Pierre Bonnard (3 October 1867 – 23 January 1947) was a French painter and printmaker, a founding member of Nabism; an art movement committed to creating work of symbolic and spiritual nature. Other Nabis include Édouard Vuillard and Maurice Denis.

Bonnard is known for his intense use of color. His often complex compositions — typically of sunlit interiors of rooms and gardens populated with friends and family members — are both narrative and autobiographical. Bonnard did not paint from life but rather drew his subject—sometimes photographing it as well—and made notes on the colors. He then painted the canvas in his studio from his notes.

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An A to Z of Artists

Henri Rousseau

Henri Julien Félix Rousseau (May 21, 1844 – September 2, 1910) was a French Post-Impressionist painter in the Naive or Primitive manner. He is also known as Le Douanier (the customs officer) after his place of employment. Ridiculed during his life, he came to be recognized as a self-taught genius whose works are of high artistic quality.

His best known paintings depict jungle scenes, even though he never left France or saw a jungle. His inspiration came from illustrated books and the botanical gardens in Paris, as well as tableaux of "taxidermified" wild animals. To the critic Arsène Alexandre, he described his frequent visits to the Jardin des Plantes: "When I go into the glass houses and I see the strange plants of exotic lands, it seems to me that I enter into a dream."

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Georges Braque

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

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Wassily Kandinsky

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

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Walter Gropius

Walter Adolph Georg Gropius (18 May 1883 – 5 July 1969) was a German architect and founder of Bauhaus. Along with Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier, he is widely regarded as one of the pioneering masters of "modern" architecture.

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