25.09.1599–02.08.1667
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Artists
Biographies, facts and images with open sources and verified rights.
Found: 1775
19.02.1876–16.03.1957
Constantin Brâncuși
Constantin Brâncuși left Bucharest for Paris on foot in 1903 and settled in Montparnasse, in the Impasse Ronsin. There he carved The Kiss, Sleeping Muse and Bird in Space from stone and wood, photographed his work, and for decades kept changing how it stood in his studio. His main project in Romania was the ensemble at Târgu Jiu (1937–1938).19.07.1819–15.07.1890
Gottfried Keller
Gottfried Keller trained as a landscape painter, spent two penniless years in Munich and came back to Zurich with nothing, then became one of the leading prose writers of German-speaking Switzerland. He wrote “Green Henry”, a novel about a young artist’s failed career, the story cycle “Seldwyla Folks” and the novel “Martin Salander”. For fifteen years he served as First Official Secretary of the Canton of Zurich.26.07.1893–06.07.1959
George Grosz
In 1916 George Grosz anglicised his name out of a love of America, which he knew from the novels of Cooper and Karl May. In the 1920s he drew Berlin profiteers, war cripples and prostitutes in a way that brought him to court more than once, and from 1933 he lived and taught in New York. He died in West Berlin a few weeks after returning.19.05.1898–11.06.1974
Julius Evola
Julius Evola (Giulio Cesare Andrea Evola) painted abstract canvases and wrote avant-garde poems in the early 1920s, exhibiting in Rome, Berlin and Paris, and in 1922 gave up painting for philosophy and esotericism. He later wrote books on traditionalism, alchemy, the Grail and race, worked with the Fascist press and after the war became one of the main figures of the Italian far right.01.12.1844–20.11.1925
Alexandra of Denmark
A princess from a modest Copenhagen family, whose father was unexpectedly named heir to the Danish throne in 1852, married the heir to the British crown at eighteen and was Princess of Wales for thirty-eight years, longer than anyone has held the title. She was queen consort in 1901–1910. She took up photography, drew, collected Fabergé and in 1904 helped an exhibition in aid of a children's hospital.10.12.1945–09.10.2006
Marek Grechuta
Marek Grechuta studied architecture in Kraków but became famous for his songs: in 1966 he founded the cabaret Anawa with the composer Jan Kanty Pawluśkiewicz, and in 1971 he won the Grand Prix at the Opole festival for “Korowód”. He set poems by Mickiewicz, Leśmian and Witkacy to music and recorded the album “Śpiewające obrazy”, inspired by paintings. He also exhibited his own paintings.26.11.1931–?
Adolfo Pérez Esquivel
Adolfo Pérez Esquivel studied sculpture and painting in Buenos Aires and La Plata, taught for a quarter of a century and made sculptures drawing on pre-Columbian America. From the 1970s he coordinated Christian nonviolent communities across Latin America; in 1977 he was arrested and held for 14 months without trial. Nobel Peace Prize, 1980. He made the Latin American Via Crucis (1992) and the Monument to Refugees in Geneva.27.02.1884–27.12.1950
Max Beckmann
Max Beckmann (1884–1950) painted the human figure all his life and accepted neither abstraction nor the label of Expressionist. In 1927 he painted “Self-Portrait in Tuxedo”, and in 1932 he began the first of ten triptychs, “Departure”. In 1937 he left Germany for Amsterdam, and he spent the last three years of his life living and teaching in the United States.09.04.1906–15.03.1997
Victor Vasarely
Victor Vasarely (born Győző Vásárhelyi) gave up medical studies in Budapest for painting, trained with Sándor Bortnyik and in 1930 moved to Paris, where he spent ten years working for advertising agencies. Out of the black-and-white “Zebras” and his geometric series grew Op art; in 1955 he issued the “Yellow Manifesto”. Museums bearing his name stand in Aix-en-Provence, Pécs and Budapest.30.08.1883–07.03.1931
Theo van Doesburg
Theo van Doesburg (born Christian Emil Marie Küpper) had no formal training as an artist, but in 1917 he founded the magazine De Stijl and for almost fifteen years travelled Europe preaching a new kind of painting. He painted pictures and wrote poems, designed stained glass and interiors, broke with Mondrian in 1924 over the diagonal, and died in Davos in 1931.17.02.1929–?
Alejandro Jodorowsky
Alejandro Jodorowsky (born 1929) began with puppet theatre and mime in Santiago, co-founded the Panic Movement in 1962 with Fernando Arrabal and Roland Topor, and in Mexico made El Topo and The Holy Mountain. His film of Dune was never made, but it supplied material for the comic The Incal, written with Mœbius. From the late 1990s he developed a method he calls “psychomagic”.13.07.1944–?
Ernő Rubik
Ernő Rubik studied sculpture and architecture and from 1971 taught in Budapest. There in 1974 he made a wooden prototype of the “Magic Cube” from 27 blocks, hoping to give his students something to work on. The cube went out into the world under his name, and Rubik later opened a studio, headed an engineering academy and devised other puzzles.29.05.1868–23.08.1944
Abdülmecid II
Abdülmecid II, the fourth son of Sultan Abdulaziz, spent half his life in closed palaces and became chairman of the Ottoman Artists’ Society. His paintings were shown in Paris and Vienna, and in November 1922 the Grand National Assembly of Turkey elected him caliph. Eighteen months later he was expelled from the country and went on painting and playing music in exile.01.03.1886–22.02.1980
Oskar Kokoschka
Oskar Kokoschka (1886–1980) made his debut in Vienna in 1908 with lithographs for his own poem, and the exhibition ended in scandal and his expulsion from school. He painted portraits of Adolf Loos’s Viennese acquaintances, “The Bride of the Wind” and views of European cities, and wrote plays. The Nazis branded him a “degenerate” artist; he lived in Prague, England and Switzerland.29.09.1899–24.10.1985
László Bíró
László Bíró (1899–1985) began as a journalist in Hungary and devised a ballpoint pen using thick printing ink, showing the first model at the Budapest International Fair in 1931. He took out patents in Hungary, France and Argentina, where he went to escape the persecution of Jews. In Argentina his surname gave the pen its name: “birome”. He had more than twenty inventions to his name.16.10.1906–28.01.1972
Dino Buzzati
Dino Buzzati spent almost half a century at the Milan newspaper Corriere della Sera, rising from trainee to special correspondent and deputy editor of its Sunday supplement. Alongside this he wrote fiction (The Tartar Steppe, 1940), plays and opera librettos, and painted. He called his pictures “painted stories”, and in 1969 he published Poem Strip, a retelling of the myth of Orpheus.07.08.1867–13.04.1956
Emil Nolde
Emil Nolde (born Hans Emil Hansen) grew up on a farm near the Schleswig border, trained as a woodcarver and decided to become an artist only around the age of thirty. In 1906–1907 he belonged to Die Brücke, and he painted flowers, stormy seas, Berlin nightlife and “The Life of Christ”. In 1937 more than a thousand of his works were confiscated, and in 1941 he was forbidden to work professionally.28.09.1952–17.10.2012
Sylvia Kristel
In January 1973 Sylvia Kristel won the television contest “Miss TV Europe”, and a year later she played the title role in the French film “Emmanuelle”, one of the most successful French films ever made. She appeared in more than fifty pictures, wrote autobiographical prose and in later years painted. In 2006 she received an award at the Tribeca Film Festival for her animated film “Topor and Me”.24.04.1908–23.01.1963
Józef Gosławski
Józef Gosławski (1908–1963) grew up in the village of Wąwolnica near Lublin, in a blacksmith’s family, and became known as a designer of medals and coins. His fisherman on the 1958 five-złoty coin went into circulation; the Chopin monument at Żelazowa Wola was erected after his death. During the German occupation he made medals about the sufferings of the Polish people.28.05.1853–22.01.1919
Carl Larsson
Carl Larsson grew up in a poor family in Stockholm, entered the Academy of Arts at sixteen and at first earned his living with caricatures and book illustrations. Success came with the watercolours from Grez-sur-Loing and the album “A Home” (1899) about his family’s life at Sundborn. He regarded the mural-scale canvas “Midvinterblot” as his most important work, and the museum accepted it only some eighty years later.15.12.1928–19.02.2000
Friedensreich Hundertwasser
The Viennese Friedrich Stowasser took the name Hundertwasser in 1949, translating the first syllable of his surname into German. He began as a painter whose main motif was the spiral, and came to architecture: a house in Vienna with uneven floors and trees on the roof made him famous well beyond Austria. He spent his last decades in New Zealand, where he is buried.16.10.1827–16.01.1901
Arnold Böcklin
Arnold Böcklin (1827–1901) was born in Basel into a silk manufacturer’s family, studied in Düsseldorf and became a mature artist in Italy, where he lived for about twenty years in all. He painted nymphs, centaurs, sea monsters and five versions of “Isle of the Dead” (1880–1886). He also dreamed of flight and built a flying machine, because of which he fled Rome to escape arrest.06.02.1908–20.11.1999