01.08.1856–23.10.1932
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Artists
Biographies, facts and images with open sources and verified rights.
Found: 1775
26.01.1918–08.08.2013
Fernando Castro Pacheco
Fernando Castro Pacheco (1918–2013) painted for the Government Palace in Mérida more than twenty huge canvases on Yucatán, from the creation of people out of maize in the “Popol Vuh” to the hands of the henequen cutter, and nineteen more for the Government Palace in Querétaro. Before that he lived thirty years in Mexico City: cutting linocuts and woodcuts, teaching at San Carlos and running the school La Esmeralda.
16.07.1796–22.02.1875
Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot
Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot (1796–1875) worked in the cloth trade until he was twenty-six, and only then did his father allow him to become an artist. In summer he painted studies in the open air in Italy, in the Forest of Fontainebleau and all over France; in winter, in the studio, he turned them into pictures for the Salon. His late silvery “souvenirs”, such as “Souvenir of Mortefontaine” (1864), gave rise to thousands of forgeries.
1589–1700
Abu'l-Hasan
Abu'l-Hasan, son of the Herat painter Aqa Riza, grew up at the court of Prince Salim, the future Mughal emperor Jahangir, and at twelve copied an engraving by Dürer. In 1618, for a frontispiece to the emperor’s memoirs, he received the title Nadir al-Zaman, “Wonder of the Age”. He painted portraits and political allegories of Jahangir; after 1628 his trail is lost.
12.11.1936–28.10.2020
Mohamed Melehi
Mohamed Melehi (1936–2020), a native of Asilah in Morocco, studied painting in Tetouan, Seville, Madrid, Rome, Paris and New York, and from 1964 to 1969 taught at the School of Fine Arts in Casablanca. There, with Farid Belkahia and Mohamed Chabâa, he created the “Casablanca school” of Moroccan modernism. His signature is the geometric wave in bright colours; he also designed the magazine Souffles.
17.05.1845–20.04.1912
Pedro Lira
Pedro Lira (1845–1912), a lawyer by training, studied painting in Santiago and Paris; after his return in 1884 he organised the first exhibition devoted solely to Chilean artists and founded the “Unión Artística” with José Miguel Blanco. His “Foundation of Santiago” won a medal at the 1889 World’s Fair and appeared on banknotes. He wrote Chile’s first biographical dictionary of painters.03.03.1907–29.01.1989
Federico Cantú Garza
Federico Cantú Garza (1907–1989) studied with Alfredo Ramos Martínez and briefly with Diego Rivera, spent ten years in Montparnasse and the United States, and after his return painted murals and religious subjects in a classical manner far from the muralists. His sculpture “Maternity” became the emblem of the Mexican Social Security Institute. He is buried at the foot of his own mural.
26.09.1791–26.01.1824
Théodore Géricault
Théodore Géricault (1791–1824) lived thirty-two years and managed to show only a few large paintings at the Salon, among them “The Raft of the Medusa” (1818–1819), a huge canvas about a disaster that had happened three years before. A pupil of Carle Vernet and Pierre Guérin, all his life he painted horses and soldiers of Napoleon’s army, and at the end a series of portraits of the mentally ill; he was also one of the first masters of lithography.
18.09.1867–14.02.1938
Gaganendranath Tagore
Gaganendranath Tagore (1867–1938), elder brother of Abanindranath and nephew of Rabindranath Tagore, began in the spirit of the Bengal School and Japanese brush painting, then became a caricaturist and published several albums of satirical lithographs. Together with his brother he is counted among the first Indian modernists; in 1920–1925 he painted in a Cubist manner. He also wrote a children’s book.
26.12.1955–present
Lemi Ghariokwu
Lemi Ghariokwu (born 1955), a self-taught Nigerian artist from Lagos, met Fela Kuti at eighteen and drew 26 covers for his albums. In all he has more than two thousand covers to his name for Nigerian and foreign musicians, from Bob Marley to Miriam Makeba. His painting “Anoda Sistem” (2002) is in the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
30.07.1866–15.10.1944
Eliseu Visconti
Eliseu Visconti (1866–1944), a native of Campania, came to Brazil as a boy, studied in Rio de Janeiro and in Paris under Eugène Grasset, and later decorated the Theatro Municipal in Rio: the curtain, the ceiling and the foyer. He is regarded as the most striking Impressionist in Brazil and a pioneer of Brazilian design: stamps, posters, ceramics, textiles, stained glass.05.01.1934–30.03.2011
Jorge Camacho
Jorge Camacho (1934–2011), a self-taught painter from Havana, gave up law school for painting, moved to Paris in 1959 and two years later joined André Breton’s circle. His Surrealist pictures are full of skulls, claw-like forms, alchemical signs and birds: he took ornithology seriously. He illustrated Surrealist poets and lived in France from 1959 until his death.
1415–12.10.1492
Piero della Francesca
From 1442 Piero della Francesca sat on the town council of his native Borgo Sansepolcro, while he painted in Arezzo, Ferrara, Rimini, Rome and Urbino. His works include the frescoes of “The History of the True Cross” in Arezzo, “The Flagellation of Christ” and the double portrait of the Duke and Duchess of Urbino. He also wrote three mathematical treatises, among them a book on perspective for painters.
1500–1500
An Kyŏn
An Kyŏn served in the Dohwaseo, the court painting bureau of the early Joseon dynasty, and rose to the fourth official rank. In 1447, for Grand Prince Anpyeong, he painted the scroll “Dream Journey to the Peach Blossom Land”, the oldest surviving Korean landscape. The scroll is now in Japan, at Tenri University; it is the only work securely from his brush.
05.06.1938–30.06.2019
David Koloane
David Koloane had his first drawing lessons as a schoolboy in Soweto, and in 1977 he was one of the founders of the first gallery for black artists in South Africa. In oil pastel and acrylic he painted the life of the black population under apartheid and after it; he curated exhibitions, studied museology in London and in 1991 opened the Bag Factory studios in Johannesburg.
10.05.1889–18.09.1954
Armando Reverón
Armando Reverón studied in Caracas, Barcelona and Madrid, and from the 1920s lived at Macuto on the Venezuelan coast, in the “Castillete” he built himself. There he painted landscapes almost white with light, then sepia views of the port of La Guaira, and made life-size dolls and objects for his house. In 2007 the Museum of Modern Art in New York gave him a retrospective.
17.05.1877–09.03.1896
Juana Borrero
Juana Borrero wrote her first poem at seven, studied painting at the San Alejandro academy in Havana and with Armando Menocal, and lived only eighteen years. She left the collection “Rimas” (1895), an extensive correspondence and a few paintings of everyday scenes; two of them, “Los pilluelos” and “Las niñas”, are in the National Museum of Fine Arts of Cuba.
05.04.1732–22.08.1806
Jean-Honoré Fragonard
Jean-Honoré Fragonard, a pupil of Boucher and a pensionnaire of the French Academy in Rome, was admitted to the Royal Academy for a history painting, “Coresus and Callirhoe” (1765), but made his name with galant scenes for private patrons: “The Swing”, “The Bolt” and the “Progress of Love” cycle for Madame du Barry. The Revolution deprived him of patrons, and he died in Paris in 1806 almost forgotten.
29.08.1919–25.06.2010
Wu Guanzhong
Wu Guanzhong studied in Hangzhou under Pan Tianshou and in Paris at the École des Beaux-Arts, and after returning to China heard himself accused of “formalism” for decades. All his life he looked for ways to nationalise oil painting and modernise Chinese painting, and he worked out his own painting in ink and colour on paper. In 1992 he became the first living Chinese artist to have an exhibition at the British Museum.1943–present
Jimoh Buraimoh
Jimoh Buraimoh came out of the workshops that Ulli and Georgina Beier ran in Osogbo in the 1960s and became one of the best-known artists of that school. He devised his own bead painting: strings of glass beads glued to a wooden panel, with motifs from Yoruba beaded crowns. He also makes mosaics and murals, and has taught in Nigeria and the United States.
14.10.1853–31.05.1927
Benedito Calixto
Benedito Calixto began with signboards and wall decorations in Santos, studied at the Académie Julian in Paris, and all his life painted the coast of São Paulo: the port of Santos, seascapes, old views of the towns. He worked for the Museu Paulista, carried out some seventeen church commissions, photographed his subjects for his history paintings and wrote books on the history of the colonial captaincies.
02.09.1911–12.03.1988
Romare Bearden
Romare Bearden drew cartoons for African American newspapers, studied with George Grosz, went through an abstract period, and in the 1960s found his own language in collage made from magazine cuttings and enlarged photocopies. His series on the life of Black Americans in the South and the North, his cycle on the “Odyssey” and his mosaics for transit stations made him one of the leading collagists in the United States.
13.05.1882–31.08.1963
Georges Braque
The son and grandson of house painters and decorators, raised in Le Havre, Georges Braque created Cubism together with Picasso in 1908–1914: the canvases they painted side by side at Céret in the summer of 1911 are still hard to tell apart. In 1912 he invented papier collé. The late Braque means the eight “Studio” canvases, the birds on a ceiling in the Louvre and the stained glass of the Norman church beside which he is buried.
1584–1645