Yoshitomo Nara

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

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

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

Édouard Manet ( 23 January 1832 – 30 April 1883) was a French modernist painter. He was one of the first 19th-century artists to paint modern life, as well as a pivotal figure in the transition from Realism to Impressionism.

Born into an upper-class household with strong political connections, Manet rejected the naval career originally envisioned for him; he became engrossed in the world of painting. His early masterworks, The Luncheon on the Grass (Le déjeuner sur l'herbe) and Olympia, both 1863, caused great controversy and served as rallying points for the young painters who… 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

Edward Hopper was born in Nyack, New York, a town located on the west side of the Hudson River, to a middle-class family that encouraged his artistic abilities. After graduating from high school, he studied briefly at the Correspondence School of Illustrating in New York City (1899–1900), and then he enrolled in classes at the New York School of Art (1900–1906). In his shift from illustration to the fine arts, he studied with William Merritt Chase, a leading American Impressionist painter, and with Robert Henri, who exhorted his students to paint the everyday conditions of their own world… 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

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.

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

Pierre Bonnard (French; 3 October 1867 – 23 January 1947) was a French painter, illustrator and printmaker, known especially for the stylized decorative qualities of his paintings and his bold use of color. A founding member of the Post-Impressionist group of avant-garde painters Les Nabis, his early work was strongly influenced by the work of Paul Gauguin, as well as the prints of Hokusai and other Japanese artists. Bonnard was a leading figure in the transition from Impressionism to… more

Renoir was one of the leading painters of the Impressionist group. He evolved a technique of broken brushstrokes and used bold combinations of pure complementary colours, to capture the light and movement of his landscapes and figure subjects. Following a visit to Italy in 1881 his style changed, becoming more linear and classical.

Renoir was born in Limoges in south-west France, where he began work as a painter on porcelain. He moved to Paris, joining the studio of the fashionable painter Charles Gleyre in around 1861-2. Courbet influenced the young Renoir. In Paris he encountered… 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

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

Lucian Freud was born in Berlin on 8th December 1922. During Hitler’s ascension to power in 1933, Freud moved to England with his family, assuming British citizenship in 1939. With a budding interest in art encouraged by renowned grandfather Sigmund Freud, Lucian Freud was enrolled in Dartington Hall. However, he proved rebellious, prompting a change of schools from Dane court to Bryanston, where he was later expelled. In 1937, he was accepted into the Central School of Arts and Crafts due to his great three-legged sandstone carving. During his early years, he produced numerous artworks… more

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

Born in the Prussian city of Königsberg (now Kaliningrad, Russia) in 1867, Käthe Kollwitz established herself in an art world dominated by men by developing an aesthetic vision centered on women and the working class. Her representations of women, including her frequent self-portraits, effectively communicated her subjects’ predicaments during a period when women were still negotiating ways to represent themselves in the arts. While her naturalistic style appeared out of touch in an era that witnessed the birth of abstraction, her depictions of universal human experiences, given depth and… more

Juan Gris, original name José Victoriano González, (born March 23, 1887, Madrid, Spain—died May 11, 1927, Boulogne-sur-Seine, France), Spanish painter whose lucidly composed still lifes are major works of the style called Synthetic Cubism.

Gris studied engineering at the Madrid School of Arts and Manufactures from 1902 to 1904, but he soon began making drawings for newspapers in the sensuously curvilinear Art Nouveau style. He moved to Paris in 1906 and settled at the Bateau-Lavoir, an artists’ dwelling where his compatriot Pablo Picasso lived. Gris was thus in touch with the… 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

Albert Namatjira was an Australian Arrente artist largely credited with pioneering contemporary indigenous Australian art and popularizing it worldwide. Namatjira was born on July 28, 1902 in Alice Springs, Australia and adopted Christianity at an early age, dividing his cultural upbringing between a Western and Aboriginal one. He was taught to paint by Rex Batterbee while he guided the artist around Central Australia and had his first solo show two years later in Melbourne, becoming an overnight sensation. His paintings often depict color-contrasted landscapes: purple rolling mountains in… 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

Sir Sidney Robert Nolan (22 April 1917 – 28 November 1992) was one of Australia's leading artists of the 20th century. Working in a wide variety of mediums, his oeuvre is among the most diverse and prolific in all of modern art. He is best known for his series of paintings on legends from Australian history, most famously Ned Kelly, the bushranger and outlaw. Nolan's stylised depiction of Kelly's armour has become an icon of Australian art.

Zhang Xiaogang is a Chinese painter and preeminent member of the contemporary Chinese avant-garde. His Surrealist-inspired, stylized portraits executed in smoothly rendered oil paint maintain a formal and stiffly posed aesthetic, focusing on the aftereffects of the Cultural Revolution and the meaning of family, history, and memory in China today. Born in 1958 in Kunming, China, Zhang went on study painting at Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts in Chongqing. Forced to work construction and other odd jobs instead of teaching painting as he had intended, Zhang fell into a deep… 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.

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

Wassily Wassilyevich Kandinsky ( 16 December [O.S. 4 December] 1866 – 13 December 1944) was a Russian painter and art theorist. Kandinsky is generally credited as one of the pioneers of abstraction in western art, possibly after Hilma af Klint. Born in Moscow, he spent his childhood in Odessa, where he graduated at Grekov Odessa Art school. He enrolled at the University of Moscow, studying law and economics. Successful in his profession—he was offered a professorship (chair of Roman Law) at the University of Dorpat (today Tartu, Estonia)—Kandinsky began… 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

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

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

Pierre Soulages was born on December 24, 1919, in Rodez, in the south of France. As a child, he was fascinated by the Celtic carvings in the local museum and the architecture of the abbey of Sainte-Foy in nearby Conques, and these early impressions would continue to surface throughout his career. In 1938, inspired by the works of Paul Cézanne and Pablo Picasso, he enrolled in the École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts, Paris, but he was disappointed by the traditional instruction and soon moved back to Rodez.

In 1946, having served in the military during World War II, Soulages… 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

Camille Pissarro ( 10 July 1830 – 13 November 1903) was a Danish-French Impressionist and Neo-Impressionist painter born on the island of St Thomas (now in the US Virgin Islands, but then in the Danish West Indies). His importance resides in his contributions to both Impressionism and Post-Impressionism. Pissarro studied from great forerunners, including Gustave Courbet and Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot. He later studied and worked alongside Georges Seurat and Paul Signac when he took on the Neo-Impressionist style at the age of 54.

In 1873 he helped… more

Paul Jackson Pollock (January 28, 1912 – August 11, 1956) was an American painter and a major figure in the abstract expressionist movement. He was widely noticed for his "drip technique" of pouring or splashing liquid household paint onto a horizontal surface, enabling him to view and paint his canvases from all angles. It was also called all-over painting and action painting, since he covered the entire canvas and used the force of his whole body to paint, often in a frenetic dancing style. This extreme form of abstraction divided the critics: some praised the immediacy of the creation,… more

Lazar Markovich Lissitzky ( 23 November [O.S. 11 November] 1890 – 30 December 1941), known as El Lissitzky (Russian: Эль Лиси́цкий, Yiddish: על ליסיצקי), was a Russian artist, designer, photographer, typographer, polemicist and architect. He was an important figure of the Russian avant-garde, helping develop suprematism with his mentor, Kazimir Malevich, and designing numerous exhibition displays and propaganda works for the Soviet Union. His work greatly influenced the Bauhaus and constructivist movements, and he… 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

Max Ernst (2 April 1891 – 1 April 1976) was a German (naturalised American in 1948 and French in 1958) painter, sculptor, graphic artist, and poet. A prolific artist, Ernst was a primary pioneer of the Dada movement and surrealism. He had no formal artistic training, but his experimental attitude toward the making of art resulted in his invention of frottage—a technique that uses pencil rubbings of objects as a source of images—and grattage, an analogous technique in which paint is scraped across canvas to reveal the imprints of… 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

Known for his use of both photorealism and abstraction in painting, often simultaneously, Gerhard Richter is one of the most important artists working today. Born on 9 February 1932 in Dresden, he began his career as an advertisement and stage painter before attending art school first in Dresden, then in Dusseldorf. The significance of Richter’s career and body of work is evident in his many solo exhibitions at museums worldwide, including at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; National Portrait Gallery, London; and National Art Museum of China, Beijing. Further, his work… more