14.10.1886–01.10.1958
Research · Sources · Context
Artists
Biographies, facts and images with open sources and verified rights.
Found: 1775
31.10.1760–10.05.1849
Hokusai
Hokusai (1760–1849) worked in Edo for about seventy years and changed his artistic name at least thirty times. He began in the studio of Katsukawa Shunshō with pictures of kabuki actors, went on to illustrate books and publish the “Hokusai Manga”, and after seventy made the series “Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji”, with “The Great Wave off Kanagawa”. In the nineteenth century his prints had a strong influence on European artists.28.04.1955–present
William Kentridge
William Kentridge (born 1955) makes animated films in which each scene lives on one sheet of charcoal drawing: he draws, shoots a frame, erases, draws again. “9 Drawings for Projection” (1989–2003), about Johannesburg under apartheid and after, made his name worldwide. He stages operas at La Monnaie, the Metropolitan Opera and the Salzburg Festival, makes prints, tapestries and sculpture; in 2016 he covered the Tiber embankment in Rome with a frieze 550 metres long.
06.07.1907–13.07.1954
Frida Kahlo
Frida Kahlo (1907–1954) spent almost her whole life in the Blue House in Coyoacán, which is now her museum. She painted mostly herself: after the accident of 1925 a mirror was hung above her bed. Among her works are “The Two Fridas”, “The Broken Column” and “Henry Ford Hospital”. André Breton enrolled her among the Surrealists, but she rejected the label and said that she painted her own reality.
06.08.1928–22.02.1987
Andy Warhol
Andy Warhol (1928–1987), the son of Rusyn immigrants in Pittsburgh, spent ten years drawing shoes for fashion magazines, and in 1962 he showed thirty-two Campbell’s Soup cans and the “Marilyn Diptych”. His New York Factory printed silkscreens, made films, produced the Velvet Underground and published “Interview” magazine. His last large series was “The Last Supper” (1986).
28.07.1902–08.08.1959
Albert Namatjira
Albert Namatjira (1902–1959), a Western Arrernte artist from the Lutheran mission of Hermannsburg in Central Australia, painted the MacDonnell Ranges, gorges and white-trunked ghost gums in watercolour. His 1938 exhibition in Melbourne marked the beginning of the Hermannsburg school of watercolour. In 1957 he became the first Aboriginal person in the Northern Territory to receive full citizenship rights, and soon afterwards he found himself in court.
15.04.1452–02.05.1519
Leonardo da Vinci
Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) trained in Florence under Andrea del Verrocchio, served the Milanese duke Ludovico Sforza for almost twenty years and died in France as the guest of King Francis I. Fewer than twenty-five paintings by him survive, among them “The Last Supper” and the “Mona Lisa”, but some thirteen thousand pages of notes and drawings remain: anatomy, mechanics, the flight of birds, water.22.03.1929–14.08.2026
Yayoi Kusama
From childhood Yayoi Kusama (1929–2026) covered paper, canvases, furniture and people with polka dots and nets of dots. In New York in 1958–1973 she made the “Infinity Nets”, soft sculptures, the first mirror rooms and street happenings, then went back to Tokyo. Her best-known works are the yellow pumpkin with black dots on the island of Naoshima and the mirror rooms; in 2006 she became the first Japanese woman to receive the Praemium Imperiale.1944–present
El Anatsui
El Anatsui (born 1944), a sculptor from Ghana, taught for more than thirty-five years at the University of Nigeria in Nsukka. He became known for huge metal “cloths” made of thousands of aluminium bottle caps stitched together with copper wire. He holds the Venice Biennale’s Golden Lion for lifetime achievement (2015) and Japan’s Praemium Imperiale (2017).
08.12.1886–24.11.1957
Diego Rivera
Diego Rivera (1886–1957) came back from Paris a Cubist and became the leading master of Mexican muralism: the Ministry of Education, Chapingo, the National Palace in Mexico City. In the United States he painted the twenty-seven frescoes of “Detroit Industry”, and his mural with Lenin at Rockefeller Center was destroyed. A communist who gave Trotsky a home, and the husband of Frida Kahlo.
22.12.1960–12.08.1988
Jean-Michel Basquiat
Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960–1988), a Brooklyn native with Haitian and Puerto Rican roots, started out with street writing signed SAMO and postcards he sold in SoHo. In a short career he made about six hundred paintings and fifteen hundred drawings, showed at documenta in Kassel at twenty-one and painted in tandem with Andy Warhol. His canvases carry words, crowns, skulls, anatomical diagrams, jazz.
22.04.1917–28.11.1992
Sidney Nolan
Sidney Nolan (1917–1992) turned the steel helmet of the bushranger Ned Kelly into an emblem of Australian art: a black square with a slit for the eyes in the middle of the bush. He started out in the Melbourne circle of the Reeds, patrons of the arts, lived in England from the early 1950s, designed ballets and operas in London, and made more than 250 works about Auschwitz and a copper-and-enamel “Eureka” mural for the Reserve Bank of Australia.
30.03.1853–29.07.1890
Vincent van Gogh
Vincent van Gogh (1853–1890) took up painting at twenty-seven, after failed attempts to become an art dealer and a preacher, and in ten years produced about 2,100 works, most of them in the last two years. His main work was done in France: in Arles, in the asylum at Saint-Rémy and in Auvers. What we know of his views comes mostly from the hundreds of letters he wrote to his brother Theo.
1797–12.10.1858
Hiroshige
Utagawa Hiroshige (1797–1858), a master of the Japanese colour woodblock print, ukiyo-e, made the road and the weather the real subjects of his prints: travellers in rain and snow, the stations of the Tōkaidō, mist over Edo. His best-known series are “The Fifty-three Stations of the Tōkaidō” and the vertical “One Hundred Famous Views of Edo”. Monet and Van Gogh collected his prints, and in Russia Bilibin and Dobuzhinsky looked to him.22.06.1972–present
Wangechi Mutu
Wangechi Mutu (b. 1972), an artist from Nairobi who has worked in New York since the 1990s, assembles her heroines from magazine cuttings, medical illustrations and mechanical parts: half women, half animals or machines. She makes collages, sculpture, video and performances; in 2019 her bronze “Seated” figures filled the long-empty niches on the façade of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
19.04.1932–15.09.2023
Fernando Botero
Fernando Botero (1932–2023), a Colombian from Medellín, found his manner when he drew a mandolin with a tiny sound hole: small details make the form enormous. His voluminous people and animals, in paint and in bronze, have stood on Park Avenue and the Champs-Élysées, and he gave hundreds of his works and his own collection to museums in Bogotá and Medellín. He also painted political series: on violence in Colombia and on Abu Ghraib prison.
28.01.1912–11.08.1956
Jackson Pollock
Jackson Pollock (1912–1956) spread his canvas on the floor of a barn in Springs, Long Island, and poured liquid household enamel onto it from sticks and hardened brushes, working round it from every side. From the “drip” paintings of 1947–1950 critics derived the idea of “action painting”. He began as a pupil of Thomas Hart Benton and first tried liquid paint with the Mexican artist Siqueiros.1914–03.09.1996
Emily Kame Kngwarreye
Emily Kame Kngwarreye (c. 1910–1996), an artist of the Anmatyerre people from Utopia in Central Australia, took up canvas at almost eighty, after eleven years of batik. In eight years she painted more than three thousand pictures of her land, Alhalkere: yams, seeds, emus, the designs of ceremonial body painting. In 1997 her work represented Australia at the Venice Biennale.
25.10.1881–08.04.1973
Pablo Picasso
Pablo Picasso (1881–1973), a native of Málaga who lived in France for almost all his adult life, created Cubism together with Georges Braque, glued a piece of oilcloth into a painting (one of the first collages) and began assembling sculpture from sheet metal and wire. He painted “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon” and “Guernica”, designed ballets for Diaghilev and made ceramics at Vallauris. His estate held more than 45,000 works.
29.04.1848–02.10.1906
Raja Ravi Varma
Raja Ravi Varma (1848–1906), a painter from the aristocratic Kilimanoor family in the princely state of Travancore, combined European academic oil painting with Indian subjects: Shakuntala, Nala and Damayanti, the gods and heroines of the Mahabharata and the Ramayana. His lithographic press near Bombay printed these gods in thousands of oleographs, and many people in India still picture the epics through his paintings.1894–23.08.1966
Irma Stern
Irma Stern (1894–1966), a South African artist from a German-Jewish family, studied in Germany under the Expressionist Max Pechstein and brought his manner to Cape Town, where at first she was greeted with headlines such as “Ugliness as a Cult”. She painted portraits, still lifes and the people of Zanzibar, the Congo and Senegal; in her lifetime she held almost a hundred solo exhibitions and represented South Africa four times at the Venice Biennale.16.12.1908–08.10.1963
Remedios Varo
Remedios Varo studied at the San Fernando Academy in Madrid, joined the Paris circle of the Surrealists in the late 1930s and in 1941 fled the war to Mexico City, where she lived for the rest of her life. Her best-known paintings date from the 1950s: alchemists, travellers, weavers and cats on panels scratched down to the gesso ground. Her first solo exhibition was held in Mexico City in 1955.
09.07.1937–11.06.2026
David Hockney
David Hockney grew up in Bradford, studied at the Royal College of Art in London and in 1964 moved to Los Angeles, where he painted his swimming pools, including “A Bigger Splash” (1967). Later he assembled “joiners” from Polaroid photographs, designed operas at Glyndebourne and the Metropolitan Opera, drew on a tablet and painted the landscapes of his native Yorkshire outdoors. He died in London in 2026.
29.04.1875–28.05.1963