Roy Lichtenstein

Martin Kippenberger (25 February 1953 – 7 March 1997) was a German artist known for his extremely prolific output in a wide range of styles and media, superfiction as well as his provocative, jocular and hard-drinking public persona.

Kippenberger was "widely regarded as one of the most talented German artists of his generation, according to Roberta Smith of the New York Times. He was at the center of a generation of German enfants terribles including Albert Oehlen, Markus Oehlen,… more

Franz Moritz Wilhelm Marc (8 February 1880 – 4 March 1916) was a German painter and printmaker, one of the key figures of German Expressionism. He was a founding member of Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider), a journal whose name later became synonymous with the circle of artists collaborating in it.

His mature works mostly depict animals, and are known for bright colouration. He was drafted to serve in the German Army at the beginning of World War I, and died two years later at the Battle of Verdun.

In the 1930s, the Nazis named him a degenerate artist as part of their… more

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (6 May 1880 – 15 June 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. His work was branded as "degenerate" by the Nazis in 1933, and in 1937 more than 600 of his works were sold or destroyed.

Alex Katz (born July 24, 1927) is an American figurative artist known for his paintings, sculptures, and prints.  - Wikipedia

Vincent Willem van Gogh  30 March 1853 – 29 July 1890) was a Dutch Post-Impressionist painter who posthumously became one of the most famous and influential figures in Western art history. In a decade, he created about 2,100 artworks, including around 860 oil paintings, most of which date from the last two years of his life. They include landscapes, still lifes, portraits, and self-portraits, and are characterised by bold colours and dramatic, impulsive and expressive brushwork that contributed to the… more

Born in Concord, New Hampshire in 1957, George Condo lives and works in New York City. He studied Art History and Music Theory at the University of Massachusetts in Lowell, where he became particularly inspired by a course on Baroque and Rococo painting. He moved to Boston and played in a punk band, ‘The Girls’; relocated to New York, where he worked as a printer for Andy Warhol; and spent a year studying Old Master glazing techniques in Los Angeles. During his first trip to Europe in 1983, Condo connected with the anarchic Mülheimer Freiheit group in Cologne which included painters Jiri… more

Anselm Kiefer (born 8 March 1945) is a German painter and sculptor. He studied with Peter Dreher and Horst Antes at the end of the 1960s. His works incorporate materials such as straw, ash, clay, lead, and shellac. The poems of Paul Celan have played a role in developing Kiefer's themes of German history and the horrors of the Holocaust, as have the spiritual concepts of Kabbalah.

In his entire body of work, Kiefer argues with the past and addresses taboo and controversial issues from recent… more

Edgar Degas ( 19 July 1834 – 27 September 1917) was a French Impressionist artist famous for his pastel drawings and oil paintings.

Degas also produced bronze sculptures, prints and drawings. Degas is especially identified with the subject of dance; more than half of his works depict dancers. Although Degas is regarded as one of the founders of Impressionism, he rejected the term, preferring to be called a realist, and did not paint outdoors as many Impressionists did.

Degas was a superb draftsman, and particularly masterly in depicting movement, as can be seen in his… more

Chu Teh-Chun or Zhu Dequn (24 October 1920 – 26 March 2014) was a Chinese-French abstract painter acclaimed for his pioneering style integrating traditional Chinese painting techniques with Western abstract art. Chu Teh-Chun enrolled in the National School of Fine Arts (now China Academy of Art), where he studied under Fang Ganmin and Wu Dayu. He was the first ethnic Chinese member of the Académie des Beaux-Arts of France, and together with Wu Guanzhong and Zao Wou-Ki… more

Henri Émile Benoît Matisse ( 31 December 1869 – 3 November 1954) was a French visual artist, known for both his use of colour and his fluid and original draughtsmanship. He was a draughtsman, printmaker, and sculptor, but is known primarily as a painter.[1] Matisse is commonly regarded, along with Pablo Picasso, as one of the artists who best helped to define the revolutionary developments in the visual arts throughout the opening decades of the twentieth century, responsible for significant developments in painting and sculpture.

The intense colourism of the works he painted… more

Laurence Stephen Lowry was an English artist. His drawings and paintings mainly depict Pendlebury, Lancashire, where he lived and worked for more than 40 years, Salford and its vicinity.

Lowry is famous for painting scenes of life in the industrial districts of North West England in the mid-20th century. He developed a distinctive style of painting and is best known for his urban landscapes peopled with human figures, often referred to as "matchstick men". He painted mysterious unpopulated landscapes, brooding portraits… more

A realist painter of modern urban life, John Brack emerged during the 1950s in Melbourne as an artist of singular originality and independence. His highly cerebral, smooth and hard-edged painting style was unique in the context of both the expressive figuration of Melbourne contemporaries such as Arthur Boyd and Albert Tucker, and the rapid growth of abstraction in his time.

After leaving school at 16, Brack worked as an insurance clerk in Melbourne when he was prompted to study art after seeing reproductions of work by Vincent van Gogh. He enrolled in evening drawing classes with… more

Valentin Alexandrovich Serov (Russian: Валенти́н Алекса́ндрович Серо́в; 19 January 1865 – 5 December 1911) was a Russian painter, and one of the premier portrait artists of his era.

Serov was born in Saint Petersburg, son of the Russian composer and music critic Alexander Serov, and his wife and former student Valentina Serova also a composer in her own right. Raised in a highly artistic milieu he was encouraged to pursue his talents by his parents and in his childhood he studied in Paris and Moscow under Ilya Repin and in the St. Petersburg Academy of Arts (1880–1885) under Pavel… more

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

Cézanne is said to have formed the bridge between late 19th-century Impressionism and the early 20th century's new line of artistic enquiry, Cubism. Cézanne's often repetitive, exploratory brushstrokes are highly characteristic and clearly recognizable. He used planes of colour and small brushstrokes that build up… more

Georges Braque ( 13 May 1882 – 31 August 1963) was a major 20th-century French painter, collagist, draughtsman, printmaker and sculptor. His most notable contributions were in his alliance with Fauvism from 1905, and the role he played in the development of Cubism. Braque's work between 1908 and 1912 is closely associated with that of his colleague Pablo Picasso. Their respective Cubist works were indistinguishable for many years, yet the quiet nature of Braque was partially eclipsed by the fame and notoriety of … more

Roy Fox Lichtenstein ( October 27, 1923 – September 29, 1997) was an American pop artist. During the 1960s, along with Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns, and James Rosenquist among others, he became a leading figure in the new art movement. His work defined the premise of pop art through parody. Inspired by the comic strip, Lichtenstein produced precise compositions that documented while they parodied, often in a tongue-in-cheek manner. His… more

Emil Nolde (born Hans Emil Hansen; 7 August 1867 – 13 April 1956) was a German-Danish painter and printmaker. He was one of the first Expressionists, a member of Die Brücke, and was one of the first oil painting and watercolor painters of the early 20th century to explore color. He is known for his 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… more

One of Britain's preeminent post-war painters, Frank Auerbach was born in Berlin, Germany in 1931. Arriving in England as a Jewish refugee in 1939, he attended St Martin's School of Art, London, and studied with David Bomberg in night classes at Borough Polytechnic. He then studied at the Royal College of Art and has remained in London ever since. His first exhibition was held at London's Beaux Arts Gallery in 1956; since then his works have become some of the most internationally collected of living artists.

Auerbach's organic, yet unified forms are deeply rooted in… more

Andy Warhol born Andrew Warhola Jr.; August 6, 1928 – February 22, 1987) was an American artist, film director, and producer who was a leading figure in the visual art movement known as pop art. His works explore the relationship between artistic expression, advertising, and celebrity culture that flourished by the 1960s, and span a variety of media, including painting, silkscreening, photography, film, and sculpture. Some of his best-known works include the silkscreen paintings Campbell's Soup Cans… more

Marc Chagall was born on July 7, 1887, in Vitebsk, Russia. From 1907 to 1910 he studied in Saint Petersburg, at the Imperial Society for the Protection of the Arts, and later with Léon Bakst. In 1910 he moved to Paris, where he associated with Guillaume Apollinaire and Robert Delaunay and encountered Fauvism and Cubism. He participated in the Salon des Indépendants and the Salon d’Automne in 1912. His first solo show was held in 1914 at Der Sturm gallery in Berlin.

Chagall visited Russia in 1914 and was prevented from returning to Paris by the outbreak of war. He settled in Vitebsk… more

Yoshitomo Nara (奈良 美智, Nara Yoshitomo, born 5 December 1959 in Hirosaki, Aomori Prefecture, Japan) is a Japanese artist. He lives and works in Nasushiobara, Tochigi Prefecture, though his artwork has been exhibited worldwide. Nara has had nearly 40 solo exhibitions since 1984. His art work has been housed at the MoMA and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (LACMA). His most well-known and repeated subject is a young girl with piercing eyes.

Jean-Pierre Cassigneul is best known for his striking compositions of fashionable women in floral hats. Using vibrant color and smoky contour, his paintings evoke both the avant-garde graphic sensibilities of Les Nabis, particularly Pierre Bonnard and Edouard Vuillard, as well as the radical color palette and sensuous portraiture of Kees van Dongen.

Cassigneul was born in 1935 in Paris. He had his first solo exhibition at the age of 17 at Galerie Lucy Krohg. Cassigneul studied at l’École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Paris and was later instructed by the French painter… more

Jean-Michel Basquiat ( December 22, 1960 – August 12, 1988) was an American artist who rose to success during the 1980s as part of the Neo-expressionism movement.

Basquiat first achieved fame as part of the graffiti duo SAMO, alongside Al Diaz, writing enigmatic epigrams in the cultural hotbed of Manhattan's Lower East Side during the late 1970s, where rap, punk, and street art coalesced into early hip-hop music culture. By the early 1980s, his paintings were being exhibited in galleries and museums internationally. At 21, Basquiat became the youngest artist to ever take part in… more

Arnulf Rainer (born 8 December 1929) is an Austrian painter noted for his abstract informal art.

Rainer was born in Baden, Austria. During his early years, Rainer was influenced by Surrealism. In 1950, he founded the Hundsgruppe (dog group) together with Ernst Fuchs, Arik Brauer, and Josef Mikl. After 1954, Rainer's style evolved towards Destruction of Forms, with blackenings, overpaintings, and maskings of illustrations and photographs dominating his later work. He was… more

David Hockney was born in Bradford on 9th July 1937. At 11, he purposefully failed his test while on a scholarship to Bradford Grammer School to get away from academics.

At age 16, he began studying art, attending the Bradford School of Art for three years. Later, he enrolled in the National Service, opting to be a conscientious objector rather than serve in the army. After this, he went to the Royal College of Art, focusing on the modernistic representation of art.

In 1960, he had his first gallery, later visiting America in 1964, where his exhibitions were sold out.… more

Sigmar Polke (13 February 1941 – 10 June 2010) was a German painter and photographer.

Polke experimented with a wide range of styles, subject matters and materials. In the 1970s, he concentrated on photography, returning to paint in the 1980s, when he produced abstract works created by chance through chemical reactions between paint and other products. In the last 20 years of his life, he produced paintings focused on historical events and perceptions of them.

Grant Wood is known for his stylized and subtly humorous scenes of rural people, Iowa cornfields, and mythic subjects from American history—such as the Art Institute’s iconic painting American Gothic (1930). Along with other Midwestern Regionalist painters like John Steuart Curry and Thomas Hart Benton, Wood advocated for a realistic style and recognizable subjects that showed local places and common people, a radically different approach from European modernism and its push toward abstraction.

Living most of his life in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, Wood studied metalsmithing with Arts and… more

An aristocratic, alcoholic dwarf known for his louche lifestyle, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec created art that was inseparable from his legendary life. His career lasted just over a decade and coincided with two major developments in late nineteenth-century Paris: the birth of modern printmaking and the explosion of nightlife culture. Lautrec’s posters promoted Montmartre entertainers as celebrities, and elevated the popular medium of the advertising lithograph to the realm of high art. His paintings of dance hall performers and prostitutes are personal and humanistic, revealing the sadness… more

Yue Minjun is a contemporary Chinese artist known for his inventive take on self-portraiture. Grouped into the Cynical Realism movement in China, alongside artists Fang Lijun and Liu Wei, he refutes this labelling of his work. His brightly colored depictions of maniacally laughing figures are influenced both by Pop Art and Surrealism. His works act as a tacit form of social and political critique which deals with both Chinese history and the Western canon of art. “I’m actually trying to make sense of the world,” he said of his work. “There’s nothing cynical or absurd in what I do.” Born in… more

Pablo Ruiz Picasso (25 October 1881 – 8 April 1973) was a Spanish painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist and theatre designer who spent most of his adult life in France. Regarded as one of the most influential artists of the 20th century, he is known for co-founding the Cubist movement, the invention of constructed sculpture, the co-invention of collage, and for the wide variety of styles that he helped develop and explore. Among his most famous works are the proto-Cubist Les Demoiselles d'Avignon… more