06.1594–19.11.1665
Research · Sources · Context
Artists
Biographies, facts and images with open sources and verified rights.
Found: 1775
11.04.1887–24.04.1972
Jamini Roy
Jamini Roy (1887–1972) was trained in academic oil painting in Calcutta and in the early 1920s gave up commissioned portraits for flat, sharply outlined figures in the manner of the Bengali bazaar prints of Kalighat. He painted in tempera with earth and vegetable pigments, lamp black and chalk. His main cycle is the “Ramayana” of 1946 on seventeen canvases; he asked to be called a patua, a village painter.
1981–present
Hend Kheera
Hend Kheera (born 1981) puts stencilled graffiti with short slogans on the walls of Cairo; most of her known pieces appeared in 2011 around Tahrir Square. She became the first woman graffiti artist to be featured in “Rolling Stone” and took part in the street campaign against sexual harassment. By profession she is a structural engineer, and she keeps making graffiti.
1933–present
Anna Bella Geiger
Anna Bella Geiger (born 1933) began in the 1950s as an abstract painter in Fayga Ostrower’s studio in Rio de Janeiro, and since the 1970s has worked with maps, photo-etching, video and metal objects, asking where the borders of “Brazilian culture” run. Her 1978 photographic postcard “Our Daily Bread” is held by museums in the United States. She teaches at the Escola de Artes Visuais do Parque Lage.
26.11.1969–present
Kara Walker
Kara Walker (born 1969) cuts life-size silhouettes out of black paper and assembles them into panoramas of the slaveholding American South; the first such wall, “Gone”, appeared in 1994, when she was twenty-four. In 2014 she built a sphinx of sugar about twenty-three metres long in the closing Domino refinery in Brooklyn. She teaches at Columbia and Rutgers.
08.12.1922–20.07.2011
Lucian Freud
Lucian Freud (1922–2011), grandson of Sigmund Freud, grew up in Berlin and lived in London from 1933. He painted only from life, standing, for months on a single picture: friends, relatives, fellow painters and, from the 1950s, more and more often the naked model in thick impasto. The portrait of Elizabeth II he finished in 2001 was called a travesty by the newspapers.
02.10.1868–26.02.1958
Yokoyama Taikan
Yokoyama Taikan (1868–1958), Sakai Hidemaro in his youth, studied in the first intake of the Tokyo School of Fine Arts under Okakura Kakuzō and, together with Hishida Shunsō, gave up the contour line for blurred patches of colour; their opponents nicknamed it “mōrōtai”, the hazy style. Later he turned to monochrome ink. His forty-metre scroll “Metempsychosis” of 1923 is a designated Important Cultural Property of Japan.
07.01.1917–17.11.1977
Gamal El-Sagini
Gamal El-Sagini (1917–1977) grew up by the Khan el-Khalili bazaar in Cairo, where his father worked as a metal chaser, and from the early 1950s worked in hammered copper relief himself, joining the ancient Egyptian turn of the figure to Arab ornament. He studied sculpture in Cairo, Paris and Rome, where he took a diploma in medal art. His bronze monument to the poet Ahmed Shawqi stands in the gardens of the Villa Borghese in Rome.
06.09.1897–26.10.1976
Emiliano Di Cavalcanti
Emiliano Di Cavalcanti (1897–1976) conceived and designed the Week of Modern Art of 1922 in São Paulo, and after two years in Montparnasse began painting mulatto women, carnival and the back streets of Rio in dense colour. “Five Girls from Guaratinguetá” of 1926 is his best-known picture. He was jailed twice for his communist views, and in 1951 helped set up the first São Paulo Biennial.01.04.1933–29.11.1996
Dan Flavin
Dan Flavin (1933–1996) worked from 1963 only with factory-made fluorescent tubes: red, blue, green, pink, yellow, ultraviolet and four shades of white, in lengths of two, four, six and eight feet. His first mature work was the yellow “Diagonal of May 25, 1963”, and between 1964 and 1990 he made fifty “Monuments to V. Tatlin”. His last work, for a church in Milan, he finished two days before his death.
21.05.1844–02.09.1910
Henri Rousseau
Henri Rousseau (1844–1910), a Paris toll collector nicknamed Le Douanier, took up painting at about forty and learned only by copying in the Louvre. From 1886 he showed at the Salon des Indépendants, where the critics laughed at him until Jarry, Apollinaire and Picasso took his side. The jungles of “The Sleeping Gypsy”, “The Hungry Lion” and “The Dream” were painted by a man who never once left France.
28.11.1788–16.06.1878
Kikuchi Yōsai
Kikuchi Yōsai (1788–1878), the son of a foot soldier in the shogun’s guard in Edo, gave up his post for painting and spent most of his life on a single book: the “Zenken Kojitsu”, ten volumes of portraits of 571 figures from Japanese history, dressed according to old custom and surviving objects. The book came off the press in 1868 and became a reference work for the history painters, printmakers and even photographers of the Meiji era.1934–present
Ablade Glover
Ablade Glover (born 1934), a Ghanaian painter and teacher, works with a palette knife, thickly and hot in colour: the markets of Accra, lorry parks, the outskirts, the women of Ghana. For two decades he taught at the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology in Kumasi, where he became Dean of the College of Art, and in Accra he runs the Artists Alliance Gallery. His works are held in the Imperial Palace in Tokyo and at the UNESCO headquarters in Paris.
24.01.1823–03.11.1870
Prilidiano Pueyrredón
Prilidiano Pueyrredón (1823–1870), son of the Supreme Director of the United Provinces of the Río de la Plata, trained in Paris as an engineer and in Buenos Aires became the country’s first notable painter: portraits of the elite, the city’s first nudes, gauchos and washerwomen on the banks of the Río de la Plata. He also rebuilt the Pyramid of May and the Casa Rosada and designed a bridge over the Riachuelo whose opening he did not live to see.
07.09.1917–09.06.2000
Jacob Lawrence
Jacob Lawrence (1917–2000) grew up in Harlem and at twenty-three became the first African-American artist taken on by a New York gallery: his “Migration Series”, sixty tempera panels on the movement of Black Americans from the South to the North, was split between the Museum of Modern Art and the Phillips Collection. He painted in series, the way stories are told, and taught for sixteen years at the University of Washington in Seattle.
1527–11.07.1593
Giuseppe Arcimboldo
Giuseppe Arcimboldo (c. 1527 – 1593), a Milanese, began with stained glass for the cathedral alongside his father, and from 1562 served the Habsburgs in Vienna and Prague for a quarter of a century: he painted portraits, staged tournaments and festivities, and bought curiosities for the Kunstkammer. His “composite heads” of flowers, fruit, fish and books, the cycles “The Four Seasons” and “The Four Elements”, forgotten for three centuries, were brought back in the twentieth by the Surrealists.
1750–1837
Sengai
Sengai Gibon (1750–1837), a Zen monk of the Rinzai school, headed Shōfuku-ji in Hakata, the oldest Zen temple in Japan, for twenty-three years and took up painting in earnest only after forty-five. His ink pictures with joking inscriptions explained Zen to townspeople, who kept coming to him for “a single stroke” until his death; the sheet with a circle, a triangle and a square became, in the twentieth century, the best-known image of Zen in the West.1974–present
Otobong Nkanga
Otobong Nkanga (born 1974), a Nigerian-born artist living in Antwerp, works with the earth in the literal sense: she brings soil in eight colours from Pointe-Noire, weaves hangings about the scars left by mines, shares a kola nut with a viewer across a table. Her work has been shown at documenta 14, Tate Modern and the Museum of Modern Art in New York; in 2015 she received the Yanghyun Prize, in 2025 the Nasher Prize for sculpture.
29.06.1861–24.07.1938
Pedro Figari
Pedro Figari (1861–1938), a lawyer, deputy and journalist from Montevideo, won the abolition of the death penalty in Uruguay, reformed the School of Arts and Crafts and only at nearly sixty, having moved to Buenos Aires, began to paint in earnest. His cardboards painted from memory, candombe, pericón, gauchos, colonial patios, funerals, made him within a few years in Buenos Aires and Paris the leading painter of the Río de la Plata of his generation.
25.06.1923–04.11.1994
Sam Francis
Sam Francis (1923–1994), a Californian, began painting in a military hospital and came into his own in the Paris of the 1950s: first monochrome abstractions, then large canvases in which patches and drips of colour crowd towards the edges and leave a white emptiness in the middle of the picture. He worked in Paris, Tokyo, Bern, New York and Santa Monica, painted murals for the Kunsthalle in Basel and the Chase Manhattan Bank, and kept a lithography workshop of his own.
1400–18.02.1455
Fra Angelico
Guido di Pietro of Vicchio became a painter before he became a friar: the first payments for his work date from 1418, and he entered the Dominican convent at Fiesole later, taking the name Fra Giovanni. The frescoes in the cells of San Marco in Florence, the San Marco Altarpiece and the chapel of Nicholas V in the Vatican made him the order’s principal painter; Vasari fixed the name “Angelico”, and in 1982 John Paul II beatified him.22.08.1920–26.05.2014
Hooshang Seyhoun
The Avicenna Mausoleum in Hamadan with its twelve columns under a dome, built in 1952 to his design, the Omar Khayyam Mausoleum in Nishapur, Tehran’s central railway station: with the buildings of the 1950s Hooshang Seyhoun joined functionalism to Iranian ornament. For six years he was dean of the Faculty of Fine Arts at the University of Tehran, for fifteen years he was in charge of restoring Iran’s historic buildings, and after 1979 he lived in Vancouver.1938–present
Farouk Hosny
Farouk Hosny, an abstract painter from Alexandria, headed Egypt’s Ministry of Culture for twenty-four years, from 1987 to 2011: under him the Nubian Museum in Aswan, the Alexandria National Museum and the Palace of Arts in Cairo opened, and construction of the Grand Egyptian Museum began. Before that he was cultural attaché in Paris and director of the Egyptian Academy of Arts in Rome; in 2009 he ran for Director-General of UNESCO.
11.12.1857–31.05.1941