14.11.1961–17.02.2007
Research · Sources · Context
Artists
Biographies, facts and images with open sources and verified rights.
Found: 1775
12.07.1886–01.02.1971
Raoul Hausmann
Raoul Hausmann (1886–1971) shouted his manifesto on “the new material in painting” into a darkening exhibition hall, co-edited the Berlin magazine “Der Dada” and, with Hannah Höch, developed photomontage. His best-known work, “The Mechanical Head”, is built from a hairdresser’s dummy and measuring instruments. After 1922 he gave up painting for photography and sound poetry.07.01.1958–?
Rosa Liksom
Rosa Liksom (real name Anni Ylävaara) grew up in Finnish Lapland in a family of farmers and reindeer herders and studied in Helsinki, Copenhagen and Moscow. She wrote her first stories in Christiania, and in 1985 the collection “One Night Stands” appeared. She writes prose and makes comics, paintings, films and plays; she won the Finlandia Prize for “Compartment No. 6”.27.11.1878–29.09.1931
William Orpen
William Orpen (1878–1931) studied in Dublin from the age of thirteen, painted society portraits for patrons in London and Dublin, and taught a generation of Irish artists. In the First World War he became the most active of Britain's official war artists on the Western Front and gave the state 138 works. After the war he painted the delegates to the Paris Peace Conference and returned to commissioned portraits.07.08.1975–?
Gaahl
Gaahl (born Kristian Eivind Espedal) grew up in the Espedal valley in western Norway and as a teenager, in the early 1990s, founded the band Trelldom. He sang in Gorgoroth, took part in Wardruna, God Seed and Gaahls Wyrd, played the archer Grim in the film “Escape” (Flukt) and shows his paintings at the Galleri Fjalar in Bergen. The Gaahls Wyrd album won the Norwegian Spellemannprisen award.08.04.1944–?
Odd Nerdrum
Odd Nerdrum was born in 1944 in Helsingborg, Sweden, where his parents, members of the Norwegian resistance, had been sent from the occupied country. He left the Norwegian National Academy of Fine Arts in Oslo to learn from Rembrandt and Caravaggio, and became one of the most prominent and controversial Norwegian figurative painters. He calls his own work kitsch and wrote a manifesto about it.21.06.1903–17.04.1980
Alf Sjöberg
Alf Sjöberg began as an actor at the Royal Dramatic Theatre in Stockholm and from 1930 until his death staged productions there. He made eighteen films, among them “Torment”, from a script by Ingmar Bergman, and “Miss Julie”, twice shared the top prize at the Cannes Film Festival, and directed “Hamlet” for Swedish television in 1955.05.04.1900–30.09.1985
Herbert Bayer
In 1925 Herbert Bayer, aged twenty-five, took charge of the printing workshop at the Bauhaus in Dessau and introduced setting in lowercase letters only. He went on to work as an art director in Berlin, designed the Bauhaus exhibition in New York, and from 1946 lived in Aspen, where he built, designed earthworks and made the fountain “Double Ascension” for the towers in Los Angeles.1459–1525
Michael Sittow
Michael Sittow, from Reval (now Tallinn), studied under Hans Memling in Bruges and then served at the court of Isabella of Castile, painting small portraits and images of the Virgin. His works are almost never signed or dated, so only a small part of his output can be attributed to him with confidence. His name returned to art history only in the twentieth century.01.11.1878–15.08.1925
Konrad Mägi
Konrad Mägi (1878–1925) came to painting late: he made his first studies on the Åland Islands in 1906, at twenty-seven, having earlier carved furniture rosettes and studied at the Stieglitz school in St Petersburg. He worked in Norway, France, Saaremaa, southern Estonia and Italy, painted landscapes and portraits, and headed Pallas, the first Estonian higher art school. More than half of his works have still not been found.1498–03.01.1578
Giulio Clovio
Giulio Clovio (Juraj Julije Klović) left Croatia for Italy at eighteen and became a master of the illuminated manuscript in the households of Cardinals Grimani and Farnese. For Alessandro Farnese he spent nine years on the Farnese Hours, completed in 1546. His contemporaries called him the “Michelangelo of the miniature”; he is buried in the Roman church of San Pietro in Vincoli.30.04.1938–24.02.2023
Juraj Jakubisko
Juraj Jakubisko came from the Rusyn village of Kojšov in eastern Slovakia and became one of the directors of the Czechoslovak New Wave, often working as his own cinematographer. His films of the late 1960s were shelved for two decades, and “The Millennial Bee” (1983) was later named the best Czechoslovak film of the 1980s. He trained as a photographer, drew a great deal and showed his paintings in exhibitions.26.02.1886–1954
Mihri Müşfik Hanım
In 1913 Mihri Müşfik Hanım became a drawing teacher at a girls’ school in Istanbul, and a year later she took charge of the first school of fine arts for women in the Ottoman Empire. She painted portraits: of Atatürk, by her own account, and of a pope. She spent her life between Istanbul, Paris, Italy and New York, where she died in 1954.13.05.1935–?
Jan Saudek
Jan Saudek worked in a Prague print shop from 1952 to 1983 and photographed all that time in his spare hours: first in a cellar, hiding from the secret police, then in a studio with a peeling wall. His hand-coloured staged photographs were shown in Chicago, Paris and Melbourne, while at home they went unrecognised for a long time. He received the French Order of Arts and Letters.05.05.1866–19.11.1942
Ants Laikmaa
In 1891 Ants Laikmaa walked from Riga to Düsseldorf to study at the academy, and later opened the first drawing school in Estonia, in Reval (Tallinn). He painted pastel portraits of the Estonian intelligentsia and landscapes brought back from Finland, Capri and Tunisia. He spent his last ten years on the Kadarpiku farm, which is now a museum.29.08.1871–28.03.1957
Jack B. Yeats
Jack B. Yeats (1871–1957) began as a magazine illustrator and comic-strip artist, and in his mature years painted in thick oil, sometimes without a brush: circuses, horse races, the west coast of Ireland. He was born in London, grew up in Sligo and died in Dublin. In 1924 his “The Liffey Swim” won a silver medal in the art competition of the Paris Olympics.02.04.1993–?
Atvara
Atvara (real name Liene Stūrmane) was born in Liepāja and studied conducting and jazz singing, but came to a solo career only in 2024, after talent shows, work as an English teacher and a job in marketing. Her first single, “Pie manis tveries”, ended up in a television series, in 2025 she gave more than twenty concerts across Latvia, and in February 2026 she won the Supernova selection and went to Eurovision in Vienna.14.08.1814–25.08.1876
Adolph Tidemand
Adolph Tidemand spent most of his adult life in Düsseldorf, but he painted mainly Norway: peasant weddings, a funeral on the fjord, services in village churches. To do this he travelled through the country’s valleys and drew folk costumes from life. More than a hundred of his works are in the National Museum in Oslo, and he painted “The Bridal Procession in Hardanger” together with Hans Gude.15.09.1942–10.05.2020
Mare Vint
Mare Vint trained as a glass artist but became known as a graphic artist: from the 1970s she worked mainly in lithography and drew “ideal landscapes” of gardens, parks and cityscapes. Her work was shown at the biennials in Rijeka and Ljubljana and at the Tallinn Print Triennials, and is held in museums in Tallinn, Moscow, Cologne and Washington.31.03.1923–14.02.2006
Shoshana Damari
Shoshana Damari was born in Yemen and came to Palestine with her family as a toddler. At fourteen her songs were broadcast on the radio, and “Kalaniyot” (“Anemones”) by Moshe Wilensky became her signature song. She sang in the Li-La-Lo theatre, for soldiers in 1948, and on stages in America and Europe. In 1988 she received the Israel Prize for Hebrew song.15.01.1895–15.05.1925
Geo Milev
Geo Milev (born Georgi Milev Kasabov) edited the Sofia magazine Scales, which brought Symbolists and Expressionists together, and translated Verhaeren, Dehmel and Verlaine himself. In 1924 his magazine Flame published the poem “September”, about the suppressed uprising of 1923. The day after he was sentenced for it, he was summoned to the police and never returned.08.11.1863–15.11.1937
Eero Järnefelt
Eero Järnefelt studied in Helsinki, St Petersburg and Paris and became one of Finland’s leading portrait painters. His best-known picture, “Under the Yoke” (1893), shows peasant labour without prettifying it. From 1892 to 1936 he travelled to paint the lakes and rocks of Koli in North Karelia, and late in life he painted altarpieces for churches.22.08.1985–?
Teemu Keisteri
Since 2008 Teemu Keisteri (born 1985) has made paintings and prints of a fictional character, Ukkeli, “Old Man”, through whom he talks with humour about the Finnish way of life. As Windows95man he DJs in the spirit of the mid-1990s, and he runs his own gallery, Kalleria, in Helsinki. In 2024 he represented Finland at the Eurovision Song Contest with “No Rules!”.02.06.1915–19.05.1985