30.12.1961–?
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Artists
Biographies, facts and images with open sources and verified rights.
Found: 1775
14.08.1860–23.10.1946
Ernest Thompson Seton
Ernest Thompson Seton was born in South Shields, England, grew up in Toronto and began as an animal painter and naturalist in Manitoba. His collection “Wild Animals I Have Known” (1898) became one of the most widely read books about animals. In 1902 he founded the Woodcraft Indians, a play-based youth organization, and from 1910 to 1915 he was the first Chief Scout of the Boy Scouts of America.18.08.1859–15.04.1935
Anna Ancher
Anna Ancher (née Brøndum) grew up in her father’s hotel in Skagen, where artists stayed in summer, and remained the only member of the Skagen circle who was born there and lived there all her life. She painted interiors, fishermen’s wives, girls sewing and a funeral scene, all of them concerned above all with light. She and her husband Michael appeared together on the Danish thousand-kroner banknote.18.04.1896–10.12.1948
Na Hyesŏk
In 1921 Na Hyesŏk showed seventy of her canvases in Seoul, and this is regarded as the first solo exhibition of oil painting held by a Korean woman. She studied in Tokyo, painted landscapes, wrote stories and articles on women’s rights, and in 1927–1929 travelled through Europe and the United States. Of her three hundred oil paintings, about twenty survive.13.06.1908–06.03.1992
Maria Helena Vieira da Silva
Maria Helena Vieira da Silva (1908–1992) was born in Lisbon, studied in Paris with Fernand Léger and Antoine Bourdelle, and spent the war years in Brazil. Her paintings resemble labyrinths, cities seen from above and endless library shelves. In 1966 she became the first woman to receive the Grand Prix National des Arts of France.02.01.1783–22.07.1853
Christoffer Wilhelm Eckersberg
Eckersberg was born in southern Jutland to a carpenter and painter, studied under Jacques-Louis David in Paris and spent three years in Rome among the friends of Thorvaldsen. From 1818 he was a professor at the Copenhagen academy, where he took students outdoors to paint from nature. His pupils Købke, Rørbye and Bendz became the leading painters of the Danish Golden Age.0395–0350
Scopas
Scopas of Paros worked in the fourth century BC both as a sculptor and as an architect: Pausanias names him as the builder of the temple of Athena Alea at Tegea. On the eastern side of the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus he worked alongside Bryaxis, Leochares and Timotheus. Few originals survive, and most of his statues are known from Roman copies, such as the “Pothos” and the “Meleager”.13.08.1852–16.10.1925
Christian Krohg
Christian Krohg (1852–1925) graduated in law but became a painter, and a journalist as well: in 1886 he published the novel “Albertine”, which the police confiscated, and painted a picture to go with it, “Albertine in the Police Doctor’s Waiting Room”. He worked in Skagen and Paris, and in 1909 he became head of the Academy of Art in Oslo, which he directed until his death.10.11.1913–13.06.2005
Álvaro Cunhal
Álvaro Cunhal spent thirteen years in Salazar’s prisons, eight of them in solitary confinement, and there translated “King Lear” into Portuguese and drew. In January 1960 he escaped from Peniche fortress, in 1961 became head of the Portuguese Communist Party and led it until 1992. Under the pseudonym Manuel Tiago he wrote novels, and his prison drawings were published as separate albums.23.05.1933–28.01.2013
Ceija Stojka
Ceija Stojka was born into a family of Austrian Lovara Roma who traded horses, and spent her childhood and youth in Auschwitz-Birkenau, Ravensbrück and Bergen-Belsen. She published her first book of memoirs in 1988 and began to draw at fifty-six. Her ink drawings of the camps and bright oil paintings of caravans and nature have been shown in Europe, Japan and the United States.13.12.1871–02.03.1945
Emily Carr
Emily Carr (1871–1945) was born and died in Victoria, British Columbia. She studied in San Francisco, London and Paris, but recognition came only after an exhibition at the National Gallery of Canada in 1927. She painted totem poles and abandoned villages of the Indigenous peoples of the Pacific coast, then forest landscapes; her first book, “Klee Wyck” (1941), won the Governor General’s Award.09.11.1984–?
Koo Hye-sun
Koo Hye-sun (born 1984) became known as an actress, but alongside acting she published books, released albums and made films. In 2009 she brought out the illustrated novel “Tango”, held her first solo exhibition and released the album “Breath”, and in 2011 she founded her own film company. Since 2008 she has also directed her own films.24.12.1922–23.01.2019
Jonas Mekas
Jonas Mekas bought his first film camera, a 16mm Bolex, two weeks after arriving in New York in 1949. He went on to found the journal Film Culture, write a film column for The Village Voice and open Anthology Film Archives. He is the author of the diary films Walden and Reminiscences of a Journey to Lithuania, and of a book of Lithuanian poems, Idylls of Semeniškiai.27.03.1879–25.03.1973
Edward Steichen
Edward Steichen was born in a Luxembourg village, grew up in Milwaukee and began in a lithography shop. With Alfred Stieglitz he founded the New York gallery known as “291”, in 1911 photographed Paul Poiret’s gowns for a magazine, and from 1947 to 1962 ran photography at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. There, in 1955, he assembled the exhibition “The Family of Man”.19.08.1954–?
Daina Taimiņa
Daina Taimiņa, a mathematician from Riga, crocheted her first model of a hyperbolic plane in 1997 to show students at Cornell University non-Euclidean geometry. She went on to make more than a hundred such models, showed them in galleries as handmade objects, and wrote “Crocheting Adventures with Hyperbolic Planes”, which won the Euler Book Prize in 2012.05.12.1944–?
Jeroen Krabbé
Jeroen Krabbé, the son and grandson of painters, studied in Amsterdam first at an art academy and then at a drama school, and became famous in film: in Paul Verhoeven’s “Soldier of Orange” and “The Fourth Man”. He painted landscapes alongside, a retrospective was held at a museum in Zwolle in 2008, and since 2015 he has made series for Dutch television about Van Gogh, Picasso, Gauguin and others.24.02.1788–14.10.1857
Johan Christian Dahl
The son of a Bergen fisherman, Dahl trained with a local decorative painter, came to Dresden in 1818 and lived there for almost forty years, sharing a house with Caspar David Friedrich for part of that time. He painted Norwegian mountains, waterfalls and fjords, as well as moonlit views of Dresden. His pupils included Thomas Fearnley and Peder Balke. In 1934 his remains were brought back to Bergen.06.04.1941–?
Gheorghe Zamfir
Gheorghe Zamfir, a Romanian nai player, came to a music school at fourteen to learn the accordion and ended up in a pan flute class. He extended the instrument from 20 pipes to 30, led the Ciocârlia ensemble, recorded “The Lonely Shepherd” with James Last and played in film scores, from “The Tall Blond Man with One Black Shoe” to “Once Upon a Time in America”. He also writes poetry and paints.19.10.1927–?
Pierre Alechinsky
Pierre Alechinsky was born in Brussels in 1927 and at twenty-two joined the COBRA group, where with the poet Christian Dotremont he organised exhibitions and put out the journal. He has lived and worked in France since 1951. In 1955 he made a film in Kyoto about Japanese calligraphy, and in 1965, in the painting “Central Park”, he first surrounded the central image with rows of small drawings.29.09.1946–?
Jeff Wall
Jeff Wall (born 1946) made his name showing staged photographs as large transparencies in illuminated boxes, a format he conceived on seeing back-lit advertisements at a bus stop. He builds his scenes on models by Manet, Hokusai and Velázquez and shoots them like one-frame films. He lives and works in Vancouver, where he taught at the university.15.01.1900–12.03.1991
William Heinesen
William Heinesen (1900–1991) grew up in a trading house in Tórshavn, spoke Faroese at home and wrote in Danish, since Faroese was not yet taught in schools. His first book of poems appeared when he was twenty-one, and the novel “The Lost Musicians” brought him international fame. He also drew, made paper collages and painted the walls of a school hall. In 1981 he declined a possible Nobel Prize.13.07.1935–14.07.2021
Kurt Westergaard
Kurt Westergaard (1935–2021) worked as a teacher and the head of a school for children with disabilities until his late forties, and from 1983 drew for the newspaper Jyllands-Posten. His drawing of the Prophet Muhammad with a bomb in his turban, published in September 2005, provoked protests in Muslim countries. From 2008 he lived under police protection.08.05.1920–07.11.1991
Tom of Finland
Touko Laaksonen (1920–1991) studied advertising in Helsinki, served in the war as a lieutenant and for years drew in the evenings without showing the drawings to anyone. In spring 1957 the American magazine Physique Pictorial put his drawing of a lumberjack on its cover under a pseudonym invented by the editor. In all he made about 3,500 illustrations; museums and a foundation bearing his name hold them to this day.05.02.1967–?