16.09.1939–24.11.2024
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Artists
Biographies, facts and images with open sources and verified rights.
Found: 1775
30.08.1907–18.01.1996
Leonor Fini
Leonor Fini (1907–1996) grew up in Trieste, never went to art school, and from the early 1930s lived in Paris, exhibiting alongside the Surrealists without ever joining their group. Her canvases are peopled by sphinxes, witches and women who hold power. From the mid-1940s, for almost thirty years, most of her work went into theatre, ballet and film, and she illustrated about fifty books.
25.12.1911–31.05.2010
Louise Bourgeois
Louise Bourgeois (1911–2010) grew up in a family that restored antique tapestries, and as a girl she drew in the worn-away parts of their patterns. From 1938 she lived in New York. Recognition came late: the Museum of Modern Art gave her its first retrospective in 1982, when she was seventy. Her best-known works came after that: the “Cells” and the huge steel spider “Maman”.
11.01.1911–30.12.2003
Nora Heysen
Nora Heysen (1911–2003), daughter of the landscape painter Hans Heysen, became in 1938 the first woman to win Australia’s Archibald Prize for portraiture. In 1943 she became the first Australian woman appointed an official war artist: she painted women serving in the army, navy and air force, and from 1944 she served in New Guinea. Of her early work, the still lifes are now especially valued, “Eggs” (1927) among them.
12.06.1890–31.10.1918
Egon Schiele
Egon Schiele (1890–1918) lived twenty-eight years and left about three hundred paintings and several thousand drawings: nudes with a broken, angular contour, a great many self-portraits, landscapes. He was Klimt’s pupil and protégé from the age of seventeen, spent more than three weeks under arrest in 1912, and in 1918 fifty of his works filled the main hall of the 49th exhibition of the Vienna Secession.
19.07.1895–26.09.1953
Xu Beihong
Xu Beihong (1895–1953) learned painting from his father in Yixing, then studied in Paris, travelled around Europe, and returned to China convinced that Chinese ink painting needed European drawing from life and perspective. He is best known for his ink paintings of galloping horses and birds. He was one of the first in China to paint monumental oils on epic Chinese subjects, and from 1950 he was the first president of the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing.10.10.1968–present
Chris Ofili
Chris Ofili (born 1968), a British painter from Manchester whose parents came from Nigeria, builds his pictures up in layers of paint, resin, glitter and lumps of elephant dung. He won the Turner Prize in 1998 and represented Britain at the Venice Biennale in 2003. Since 2005 he has lived and worked in Trinidad, where he began painting dark blue pictures drawn from the local carnival.
08.05.1850–13.11.1899
Almeida Júnior
Almeida Júnior (1850–1899) started out as a bell-ringer in the church of his native Itu, studied at the Imperial Academy of Fine Arts in Rio de Janeiro and then, with money from Emperor Pedro II, under Cabanel in Paris. He made his name with scenes from the life of the caipiras, the country people of São Paulo, and was one of the first in Brazil to paint in the Realist tradition of Courbet and Millet.27.10.1908–19.06.1984
Lee Krasner
Lee Krasner (1908–1984), a New York painter from a family of Jewish immigrants, trained under Hans Hofmann and by the 1940s was a recognised figure among the abstract artists of the New York School. For a long time she was seen above all as Jackson Pollock’s wife. She constantly changed her manner, destroyed whole series and cut up old canvases and drawings for collages; her catalogue raisonné lists only 599 works.22.04.1892–10.12.1984
Grace Cossington Smith
Grace Cossington Smith (1892–1984) was among the first to bring Post-Impressionism to Australia: her “The Sock Knitter” (1915) is regarded as the first Post-Impressionist painting exhibited in the country. She lived almost all her life in the house called Cossington in the Sydney suburb of Turramurra and painted the Harbour Bridge under construction, city crowds and the yellow-lit rooms of her own home.28.10.1909–28.04.1992
Francis Bacon
Francis Bacon (1909–1992), born in Dublin, came to painting seriously late: his fame came with the triptych “Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion” (1944), painted at thirty-five. He painted crucifixions, screaming popes after Velázquez, portraits of friends and self-portraits, often as triptychs, never from life, only from photographs. He spent most of his life in London; his studio has now been reconstructed in Dublin.
25.10.1857–07.12.1899
Juan Luna
Juan Luna (1857–1899) made his name in 1884, when his “Spoliarium”, a canvas more than seven and a half metres long, won a gold medal at the National Exhibition of Fine Arts in Madrid. He trained in Manila, Madrid and Rome, kept a studio in Paris, turned to realist subjects by the 1890s, and at the end of his life served on diplomatic delegations of the Philippine revolutionary government.
16.04.1924–17.04.1989
Inji Aflatoun
Inji Aflatoun (1924–1989) began in Cairo among the Surrealists of the Art and Freedom Group, then painted people at work in Luxor, Nubia and the oases, and kept painting in prison, where she spent 1959–1963 as a political prisoner. In the 1940s and 1950s she was one of the prominent figures of Egypt’s left-wing women’s movement; in the 1970s she arrived at luminous pictures with areas of bare canvas.
29.04.1843–07.10.1905
Pedro Américo
Pedro Américo (1843–1905) painted the pictures through which Brazilians still imagine their history: “Battle of Avaí”, “Independence or Death!”, “Tiradentes Quartered”. He studied in Rio de Janeiro and Paris, earned a doctorate in natural sciences in Brussels, taught at the Imperial Academy, sat in the Constituent Congress, wrote novels and spent his last years in Florence.
29.01.1905–04.07.1970
Barnett Newman
Barnett Newman (1905–1970) found his language in 1948 with “Onement I”: an even field of colour cut by a thin vertical stripe. He destroyed his early work, critics met his first solo show with hostility, and recognition came only in the 1960s. He is one of the leading colour field painters, and Donald Judd and Frank Stella built on his example.1962–present
John Pule
John Pule was born in 1962 on the island of Niue and grew up in New Zealand. He writes novels and poetry, and as an artist works on canvas and on traditional Polynesian bark cloth, drawing on Niuean cosmology, Christianity, migration and colonialism. He has taken part three times in the Asia Pacific Triennial in Brisbane; the Queensland Art Gallery calls him one of the most significant artists of the Pacific.
28.07.1887–02.10.1968
Marcel Duchamp
Marcel Duchamp (1887–1968) painted “Nude Descending a Staircase” in 1912 and then all but gave up painting: he signed ready-made objects such as a bottle rack or a urinal, spent eight years putting together “The Large Glass” and became a chess master. He lived in New York for the last twenty-odd years of his life and worked in secret for twenty years on the installation “Étant donnés”, which became known only after his death.
07.08.1871–05.12.1951
Abanindranath Tagore
At the start of the twentieth century Abanindranath Tagore (1871–1951) urged Indian artists to build on Mughal and Rajput miniatures and the murals of Ajanta in place of European academic training. In 1907, with his brother Gaganendranath and Ernest Havell, he founded the Indian Society of Oriental Art and became the head of the Bengal school; in Bengal he is also remembered as a writer of children’s books.
22.09.1932–10.04.2012
Afewerk Tekle
Afewerk Tekle (1932–2012) studied in London, at the Central School of Arts and Crafts and the Slade, and on returning to Ethiopia worked above all as a monumental artist: the stained glass of Africa Hall in Addis Ababa, the murals and mosaics of St George’s Cathedral, the monument to Ras Makonnen in Harar. In 1981 his self-portrait became the first work by an African artist to enter the Uffizi collection.
16.06.1863–29.07.1898
Arturo Michelena
Arturo Michelena (1863–1898) won a medal at the Paris Salon of 1887 for “The Sick Child” and a gold medal at the Exposition Universelle of 1889 for “Charlotte Corday”, then returned to Caracas and became the official painter of President Joaquín Crespo. His best-known picture, “Miranda in La Carraca” (1896), is in the National Art Gallery in Caracas.03.06.1928–12.02.1994
Donald Judd
Donald Judd (1928–1994) began as a painter and art critic, and in the early 1960s turned to three-dimensional “specific objects”: stacks, boxes and progressions in metal, plywood and Plexiglas, fabricated from his drawings. He is regarded as the chief theorist of Minimalism, although he himself did not accept it as a movement. In Marfa, Texas, he created the Chinati Foundation, a permanent display of his own work and that of his contemporaries.04.11.1948–24.02.2014
Alexis Hunter
Alexis Hunter (1948–2014) came from New Zealand to London in 1972, and in the seventies made photographic series whose main character is a pair of women's hands: they remove nail varnish, get grimy with engine oil, set fire to a silver shoe. The “Approach to Fear” and “Sexual Warfare” series are now at Tate and at Te Papa. From the 1980s she returned to painting, and in the 2000s she joined the Stuckists.
10.06.1819–31.12.1877
Gustave Courbet
Gustave Courbet (1819–1877), the son of a well-to-do landowner from Ornans in the Franche-Comté, painted the funeral of his own great-uncle on a canvas the size of a history painting, and in 1855 built his own “Pavilion of Realism” next to the Exposition Universelle. For his part in the Paris Commune and the toppling of the Vendôme Column he was imprisoned and ordered to pay for its reconstruction; he spent his last four years in Switzerland.10.05.1899–02.04.1983