James Abbott McNeill Whistler Biography, Art, and Analysis of Works. "To say to the painter that Nature is to be taken as she is, is to say to the player that he may sit on the piano.
" Synopsis One of the most significant figures in American art and a forerunner of the Post-Impressionist movement, James Abbott McNeill Whistler is celebrated for his innovative painting style and eccentric personality. He was bold and self-assured, and quickly developed a reputation for his verbal and legal retaliations against art critics, dealers, and artists who insulted his work. His paintings, etchings, and pastels epitomize the modern penchant for creating "art for art's sake," an axiom celebrated by Whistler and others in the Aesthetic movement.
They also represent one of the earliest shifts from traditional representational art to abstraction that is at the heart of much of modern art. Key Ideas Japanese art deeply fascinated many early modern artists living in Paris. Andy Warhol Biography, Art, and Analysis of Works. "How can you say one style is better than another?
You ought to be able to be an Abstract Expressionist next week, or a Pop artist, or a realist, without feeling you've given up something.. I think that would be so great, to be able to change styles. And I think that's what's is going to happen, that's going to be the whole new scene. " Synopsis Andy Warhol was the most successful and highly paid commercial illustrator in New York even before he began to make art destined for galleries.
Key Ideas. Vincent van Gogh Biography, Art, and Analysis of Works. "real painters do not paint things as they are... they paint them as they themselves feel them to be.
" Synopsis The iconic tortured artist, Vincent Van Gogh strove to convey his emotional and spiritual state in each of his artworks. Although he sold only one painting during his lifetime, Van Gogh is now one of the most popular artists of all time. His canvases with densely laden, visible brushstrokes rendered in a bright, opulent palette emphasize Van Gogh's personal expression brought to life in paint.
Joseph Mallord William Turner Biography, Art, and Analysis of Works. Synopsis Turner took classical genres and scenes - the stately landscape in well-designed compositions and historical events writ large - and infused them with a new dynamic in painting.
He reflected on the increasing importance of individual experience in the era of the Enlightenment, where the perceptions of human beings led to exalted personal moments and sublime interactions with nature. Through this dedication to rendering heightened states of consciousness and being, he helped define the cross-disciplinary artistic movement of Romanticism, setting the stage for later developments in painting subjective experiences that would lead to Impressionism. In some of his later works especially, Turner responded to the arrival of the modern era by making the contraptions of human invention powerfully, sometimes threateningly present.
Key Ideas. Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec Biography, Art, and Analysis of Works. "Bonnat tells me, 'Your painting isn't bad, it is chic, but even so it isn't bad, but your drawing is absolutely atrocious.' So I must gather my courage and start once again...
" Synopsis In addition to being the artist who designed the Moulin Rouge's legendary posters, Toulouse-Lautrec was an aristocrat, dwarf, and party animal who invented a cocktail called the Earthquake (half absinthe, half cognac). His favorite pursuits were dressing up (geisha girl and clown get-ups were among his more memorable party outfits) and frequenting Parisian brothels, where he was a V.I.P. Joseph Stella Biography, Art, and Analysis of Works. "I was thrilled to find America so rich with so many new motives to be translated into a new art.
Steel and electricity had created a new world. Frank Stella Biography, Art, and Analysis of Works. "I like real art.
It's difficult to define REAL but it is the best word for describing what I like to get out of art and what the best art has. It has the ability to convince you that it's present - that it's there. You could say it's authentic... but real is actually a better word, broad as it may be. " Synopsis In 1959, Frank Stella gained early, immediate recognition with his series of coolly impersonal black striped paintings that turned the gestural brushwork and existential angst of Abstract Expressionism on its head.
Key Ideas A decisive departure from Abstract Expressionism, Stella's Black Paintings series consists of precisely delineated parallel black stripes produced by smoothly applied house paint. Charles Sheeler Biography, Art, and Analysis of Works. "Every age manifests itself by some external evidence.
In a period such as ours when only a comparatively few individuals seem to be given to religion, some form other than the Gothic cathedral must be found. " Synopsis Famous for both his photographs and the paintings he often made from them, Sheeler was an influential American artist for most of the first half of the twentieth century. Sheeler used both photography and painting, which he referred to as his 'separate eyes,' to capture the function, abstraction, and the human element of the American industrial and urban age. Ben Shahn Biography, Art, and Analysis of Works.
"If I am to be a painter I must show the world how it looks through my eyes, not theirs.
" Synopsis Ben Shahn's desire to create narrative art that focuses on social and political justice have come to exemplify Social Realism and the art of social consciousness. From his questioning religious teachings as a youth in Lithuania and up through the end of his life, Shahn remained true to his vision. He never failed to create artwork to draw attention to those for whom life was a struggle, and did so with dignity rather than pathos or sentimentality. Key Ideas. Georges Seurat Biography, Art, and Analysis of Works. Synopsis Georges Seurat is chiefly remembered as the pioneer of the Neo-Impressionist technique commonly known as Divisionism, or Pointillism, an approach associated with a softly flickering surface of small dots or strokes of color.
His innovations derived from new quasi-scientific theories about color and expression, yet the graceful beauty of his work is explained by the influence of very different sources. Initially, he believed that great modern art would show contemporary life in ways similar to classical art, except that it would use technologically informed techniques. Later he grew more interested in Gothic art and popular posters, and the influence of these on his work make it some of the first modern art to make use of such unconventional sources for expression. His success quickly propelled him to the forefront of the Parisian avant-garde. George Segal Biography, Art, and Analysis of Works. "For me to decide to make a cast of a human being broke all the rules of fine art. " Synopsis Using orthopedic bandages dipped in plaster, New York sculptor George Segal constructed some of the most haunting and memorable figurative art of the twentieth century. Life-sized models based on his body and those of friends, family, and neighbors are seated at lunch counters, poised on street corners, or waiting in train stations.
Like actors in a play that never starts, these figures inhabit three-dimensional environments that evoke everyday spaces. One can walk around them (which makes the effect all the more eerie) but they are lost in their own universe. Key Ideas Designed to treat broken bones, the bandage is not just a medium but a metaphor. John Singer Sargent Biography, Art, and Analysis of Works. Synopsis John Singer Sargent was the premiere portraitist of his generation, well-known for his depictions of high society figures in Paris, London, and New York.
He updated a centuries-old tradition by using vibrant Impressionistic brushstrokes and untraditional compositional solutions in order to capture his sitters' character and even reputation. Sargent's oeuvre was not limited to portraiture and also included impressionistic landscapes, executed en plein air alongside his friend Claude Monet. He also painted official murals commissioned by governmental officials both in the United States and the United Kingdom as well as a good number of nude sketches probably meant as personal works. James Rosenquist Biography, Art, and Analysis of Works. "Popular culture isn't a freeze-frame; it is images zapping by in rapid-fire succession, which is why collage is such an effective way of representing contemporary life. The blur between images creates a kind of motion in the mind. " Synopsis A seminal figure in the Pop Art movement, James Rosenquist is best known for his colossal collage paintings of enigmatically juxtaposed fragmentary images borrowed largely from advertisements and mass media.
Brought together and enlarged so as to cover entire gallery walls and overwhelm the viewer, these seemingly unrelated pictures of consumer products, weaponry, and celebrities hint at the artist's social, political, and cultural concerns. The billboard painter-turned-artist's early works are also considered emblematic of a burgeoning consumer culture in America during the 1960s. Diego Rivera Biography, Art, and Analysis of Works. "When art is true, it is one with nature. This is the secret of primitive art and also of the art of the masters—Michelangelo, Cézanne, Seurat, and Renoir. The secret of my best work is that it is Mexican.. " Synopsis Widely regarded as the most influential Mexican artist of the twentieth century, Diego Rivera was truly a larger-than-life figure who spent significant periods of his career in Europe and the U.S., in addition to his native Mexico.
Gerhard Richter Biography, Art, and Analysis of Works. "What I'm attempting in each picture is nothing other than this...to bring together in a living and viable way, the most different and the most contradictory elements in the greatest possible freedom. " Synopsis Gerhard Richter is a German painter who originally trained in a realist style and later developed an appreciation for the more progressive work of his American and European contemporaries. Richter increasingly employed his own painting as a means for exploring how images that appear to capture "truth" often prove, on extended viewing, far less objective, or unsure in meaning, than originally assumed. The other common themes in his work are the elements of chance, and the play between realism and abstraction.
Key Ideas Richter borrows much of his painted imagery from newspapers, or even his own family albums. In Richter's completely abstract canvases, personal emotion and all traces of the painter's autobiography seem missing. Pierre-Auguste Renoir Biography, Art, and Analysis of Works. Synopsis Pierre-Auguste Renoir was a French Impressionist painter whose eye for beauty made him one of the movement's most popular practitioners. He is best known for his paintings of bustling Parisian modernity and leisure in the last three decades of the nineteenth century. Robert Rauschenberg Biography, Art, and Analysis of Works. "Painting relates to both art and life. Neither can be made. " Synopsis. Jackson Pollock Biography, Art, and Analysis of Works. "It doesn't make much difference how the paint is put on as long as something has been said.
Technique is just a means of arriving at a statement. " Pablo Picasso Biography, Art, and Analysis of Works. Claes Oldenburg Biography, Art, and Analysis of Works. "I am for an art that is political-erotical-mystical, that does something more than sit on its ass in a museum. " Synopsis With his saggy hamburgers, colossal clothespins and giant three-way plugs, Claes Oldenburg has been the reigning king of Pop sculpture since the early 1960s, back when New York was still truly gritty. In 1961 he rented a storefront, called it The Store, and stocked it with stuffed, crudely-painted forms resembling diner food, cheap clothing, and other mass-manufactured items that stupefied an audience accustomed to the austere, non-representational forms in Abstract Expressionist sculpture.
These so-called "soft-sculptures" are now hailed as the first sculptural expressions in Pop art. Georgia O'Keeffe Biography, Art, and Analysis of Works. "When you take a flower in your hand and really look at it, it's your world for the moment. I want to give that world to someone else. " Piet Mondrian Biography, Art, and Analysis of Works. "I wish to approach truth as closely as is possible, and therefore I abstract everything until I arrive at the fundamental quality of objects. " Synopsis Piet Mondrian, one of the founders of the Dutch modern movement De Stijl, is recognized for the purity of his abstractions and methodical practice by which he arrived at them. He radically simplified the elements of his paintings to reflect what he saw as the spiritual order underlying the visible world, creating a clear, universal aesthetic language within his canvases.
Claude Monet Biography, Art, and Analysis of Works. "For me, a landscape does not exist in its own right, since its appearance changes at every moment; but the surrounding atmosphere brings it to life - the light and the air which vary continually. For me, it is only the surrounding atmosphere which gives subjects their true value. " Amedeo Modigliani Biography, Art, and Analysis of Works. "Every great work of art should be considered like any work of nature. First of all from the point of view of its aesthetic reality and then not just from its development and the mastery of its creation but from the standpoint of what has moved and agitated its creator. " Synopsis A central participant in the Ecole de Paris, Modigliani modernized two of the enduring themes of art history: the portrait and the nude. Franz Marc Biography, Art, and Analysis of Works.
"I try to intensify my sensitivity for the organic rhythm of all things; I seek pantheist empathy with the vibration and flow of the blood of nature-in the trees, in the animals, in the air . . . I see no happier medium for the 'Animalization' of art, as I would like to call it, than the animal picture. " Synopsis. Edouard Manet Biography, Art, and Analysis of Works. Rene Magritte Biography, Art, and Analysis of Works. Morris Louis Biography, Art, and Analysis of Works. Roy Lichtenstein Biography, Art, and Analysis of Works. Fernand Léger Biography, Art, and Analysis of Works. Dorothea Lange Biography, Art, and Analysis of Works. Barbara Kruger Biography, Art, and Analysis of Works. Jeff Koons Biography, Art, and Analysis of Works. Gustav Klimt Biography, Art, and Analysis of Works.
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner Biography, Art, and Analysis of Works. Anselm Kiefer Biography, Art, and Analysis of Works. Wassily Kandinsky Biography, Art, and Analysis of Works. Frida Kahlo Biography, Art, and Analysis of Works. Robert Indiana Biography, Art, and Analysis of Works. Edward Hopper Biography, Art, and Analysis of Works. Hans Hofmann Biography, Art, and Analysis of Works. David Hockney Biography, Art, and Analysis of Works. Damien Hirst Biography, Art, and Analysis of Works. Paul Gauguin Biography, Art, and Analysis of Works. Ralph Goings Biography, Art, and Analysis of Works. Juan Gris Biography, Art, and Analysis of Works. Helen Frankenthaler Biography, Art, and Analysis of Works. Richard Estes Most Important Art. Max Ernst Biography, Art, and Analysis of Works. Marcel Duchamp Biography, Art, and Analysis of Works. Arthur Dove Biography, Art, and Analysis of Works. Jim Dine Biography, Art, and Analysis of Works. Richard Diebenkorn Biography, Art, and Analysis of Works.
André Derain Biography, Art, and Analysis of Works. Charles Demuth Biography, Art, and Analysis of Works. Robert Delaunay Biography, Art, and Analysis of Works. Edgar Degas Biography, Art, and Analysis of Works. Willem de Kooning Biography, Art, and Analysis of Works. Giorgio De Chirico Biography, Art, and Analysis of Works. Stuart Davis Biography, Art, and Analysis of Works. Salvador Dalí Biography, Art, and Analysis of Works. Joseph Cornell Biography, Art, and Analysis of Works. Chuck Close Biography, Art, and Analysis of Works. Judy Chicago Biography, Art, and Analysis of Works. Marc Chagall Biography, Art, and Analysis of Works. Paul Cézanne Biography, Art, and Analysis of Works. Mary Cassatt Biography, Art, and Analysis of Works. Alexander Calder Biography, Art, and Analysis of Works. André Breton Biography, Art, and Analysis of Works. Georges Braque Biography, Art, and Analysis of Works. Umberto Boccioni Biography, Art, and Analysis of Works.
Thomas Hart Benton Biography, Art, and Analysis of Works. Max Beckmann Biography, Art, and Analysis of Works. Aubrey Beardsley Biography, Art, and Analysis of Works. Romare Bearden Biography, Art, and Analysis of Works. Ai Weiwei Biography, Art, and Analysis of Works.