06.03.1475–18.02.1564
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Artists
Biographies, facts and images with open sources and verified rights.
Found: 1775
20.07.1932–29.01.2006
Nam June Paik
Nam June Paik, as he is known in the West (Baek Nam-jun in Korean), studied music in Tokyo and Munich, joined Fluxus and in 1963, in Wuppertal, first exhibited television sets as a material for art. In New York he worked with the cellist Charlotte Moorman, made “TV Buddha” (1974) and built a video synthesizer with the engineer Shuya Abe. He is regarded as the founder of video art.09.12.1913–20.03.1993
Gerard Sekoto
Gerard Sekoto grew up on a Lutheran mission in the Transvaal and worked for some years as a teacher; in 1938 he moved to Johannesburg to paint the streets of Sophiatown, and later District Six in Cape Town and Eastwood in Pretoria. In 1947 he emigrated to Paris, where he earned a living playing the piano and wrote songs. He is described as one of the pioneers of art about the urban life of black South Africans.
08.12.1902–11.09.1982
Wifredo Lam
Wifredo Lam, the son of a Chinese immigrant and the grandson of a former slave woman from the Congo, grew up in Sagua la Grande in Cuba, studied in Havana and Madrid, fought for the Republic and in 1938 in Paris became close to Picasso. Back in Cuba he painted “The Jungle” (1943), in which figures with mask-like faces grow into the sugar cane. From the 1950s he lived in France and Italy and also worked in ceramics and sculpture.
22.07.1882–15.05.1967
Edward Hopper
For almost twenty years Edward Hopper earned his living from commercial illustration, and he won recognition only after forty, first for his watercolors and etchings. His diners, hotel rooms, gas stations and empty morning streets, as in “Nighthawks” (1942) and “Early Sunday Morning” (1930), became an image of American loneliness. He himself insisted that what interested him above all was sunlight on the wall of a house.
11.08.1931–24.02.2013
Ralph Hotere
Ralph Hotere, a Māori of the Te Aupōuri and Te Rarawa iwi, was born at Mitimiti on the shore of the Hokianga Harbour and lived most of his life in Port Chalmers near Dunedin. His best-known works are the “Black Paintings”, begun in 1968: almost unbroken black, thin coloured stripes, crosses, lines of poetry. In his paintings he responded to the threat of nuclear weapons, to apartheid and to the sinking of the Rainbow Warrior.
14.11.1840–05.12.1926
Claude Monet
Claude Monet grew up in Le Havre, where Eugène Boudin first took him out to paint in the open air. His “Impression, Sunrise”, shown at the 1874 exhibition, gave Impressionism its name. From 1883 Monet lived at Giverny, painting series of a single motif in changing light (haystacks, poplars, Rouen Cathedral, the Thames), and he gave the last decades of his life to the water lilies in his own pond.01.01.1864–16.09.1957
Qi Baishi
Qi Baishi started out as a village carpenter in Hunan, carving wooden figures and blocks for popular prints, and learned to paint from an old printed manual. From 1917 he lived in Beijing, where he taught, carved seals and painted shrimp, mice, birds and plants in ink. In 1953 he became the first chairman of the China Artists Association, and in 1956 he received the International Peace Prize.
11.11.1935–present
Esther Mahlangu
Esther Mahlangu carried Ndebele wall painting, which her mother and grandmother taught her at the age of ten, from the walls of houses onto canvas, metal and fabric. International fame came with the Magiciens de la Terre exhibition in Paris in 1989, and in 1991 she became the first woman and the first non-Western artist to paint a car for the BMW Art Car series. She works in Mpumalanga province, South Africa.
01.09.1886–17.01.1973
Tarsila do Amaral
Tarsila do Amaral grew up on a coffee fazenda in São Paulo state and studied in Barcelona and in Paris with André Lhote, Fernand Léger and Albert Gleizes. Her Abaporu (1928), a gift to her husband, the poet Oswald de Andrade, set off the Anthropophagic Manifesto and a whole current of Brazilian modernism. She painted about 230 pictures; in 1931 she exhibited in Moscow.
15.11.1887–06.03.1986
Georgia O'Keeffe
Georgia O'Keeffe painted flowers as if looking at them through a magnifying glass, New York skyscrapers from a thirtieth-floor window, and sun-bleached skulls in the New Mexico desert. Her abstract charcoal drawings were first exhibited in 1916 by Alfred Stieglitz, who later became her husband. From 1949 she lived in New Mexico; a museum bearing her name is open in Santa Fe.
15.07.1606–04.10.1669
Rembrandt
Rembrandt van Rijn, the son of a Leiden miller, never travelled abroad, though he learned a great deal from the Italians; his chiaroscuro became proverbial. In the 1630s he was the most sought-after portraitist in Amsterdam, and in 1656 he declared himself insolvent. He left about three hundred paintings, almost as many etchings and some forty painted self-portraits; Danaë and The Holy Family have been in the Hermitage since 1772.
30.01.1913–05.12.1941
Amrita Sher-Gil
Amrita Sher-Gil was born in Budapest to a Sikh aristocrat from the Punjab and a Hungarian singer, studied in Paris, and at twenty became the youngest, and the only Asian, Associate of the Paris Salon. After returning to India in 1934 she painted village life, joining what she had learned from Gauguin and Cézanne with Mughal miniatures and the Ajanta murals.30.12.1956–present
Chéri Samba
Chéri Samba started out in Kinshasa as a sign painter and drew comics for a magazine, then carried speech bubbles with text in French and Lingala into his paintings. The Magiciens de la Terre exhibition in Paris (1989) made him known beyond Africa. His works are in the Centre Pompidou, the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Jean Pigozzi collection; in 2007 he took part in the Venice Biennale.
26.08.1899–24.06.1991
Rufino Tamayo
Rufino Tamayo, a Zapotec from Oaxaca, painted murals as Rivera and Siqueiros did, but argued with them about the revolution and kept his distance from political art. He spent almost twenty years in New York and Paris, painted murals for UNESCO and the Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City, invented relief “Mixografia” prints with the printer Luis Remba, and founded two museums.
12.12.1928–27.12.2011
Helen Frankenthaler
In 1952 Helen Frankenthaler painted Mountains and Sea by pouring heavily thinned oil paint onto unprimed canvas; Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland took up this soak-stain method, and the second generation of colour field painting is dated from it. For sixty years she worked in painting and printmaking, from lithographs in 1961 to woodcuts using dozens of blocks.
06.04.1483–06.04.1520
Raphael
Raphael, the son of a court painter to the dukes of Urbino, in twelve years in Rome painted the Vatican Stanze, made cartoons for the Sistine Chapel tapestries and directed the building of St Peter's Basilica. His Sistine Madonna has been in Dresden since 1754. He died at thirty-seven and, at his own wish, was buried in the Pantheon.05.12.1959–present
Yoshitomo Nara
Yoshitomo Nara paints and sculpts big-headed children with a heavy, sullen upward glare, sometimes holding a tiny knife or saw. He studied in Aichi Prefecture and at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf and designed record covers for rock bands. In 2021 the Los Angeles County Museum of Art showed a hundred of his works from 36 years; Nara’s pieces are in the Museum of Modern Art in New York and in museums in Chicago and San Francisco.14.07.1917–05.02.1994
Ben Enwonwu
Ben Enwonwu began with his father’s carving tools in Onitsha and studied painting and sculpture at the Slade School in London. In 1956 Elizabeth II sat for him; his bronze “Anyanwu” stands on the facade of the National Museum in Lagos, and a full-size version is at United Nations headquarters. He was the first professor of fine arts at the University of Ife.
23.10.1920–25.04.1988
Lygia Clark
Lygia Clark began with black, grey and white geometric painting, and in 1960 she invented the “Bichos”, hinged metal “critters” that viewers fold into shape themselves. She was one of the founders of Brazilian Neo-Concretism and taught at the Sorbonne in the 1970s. In her last decade she worked with her “relational objects” as a tool of art therapy.
12.02.1925–30.10.1992
Joan Mitchell
Joan Mitchell grew up in Chicago, belonged to the New York School in the 1950s and from 1959 lived in France, from 1967 in Vétheuil, next to Monet’s former house. She painted large, often multi-panel abstractions from remembered landscapes: “I carry my landscapes around with me.” Under her will a foundation was set up that supports working artists.
29.09.1571–18.07.1610
Caravaggio
The Milanese Michelangelo Merisi became “Caravaggio” in Rome, where he painted straight from his models, without preparatory drawings, picking figures out of the dark with harsh light. His paintings for the Contarelli Chapel in 1600 made him the best-known painter in the city. After killing Ranuccio Tomassoni in 1606 he fled and spent his last four years between Naples, Malta and Sicily.
26.03.1957–present
Shirin Neshat
Shirin Neshat left Iran to study at Berkeley in 1975 and did not see her homeland again until 1990. That shock gave rise to the photographic series “Women of Allah”, portraits covered in Persian calligraphy. In 1999 her video installations won the International Prize at the Venice Biennale, and in 2009 her film “Women Without Men” earned her the Silver Lion for best director.05.09.1930–present