Basquiat, Jean-Michel (1960-1988)
American painter, whose work first appeared as graffiti on the streets and subways of New York City. He was the most successful of a number of so-called street artists, whose work crossed over into New York City's gallery scene in the early 1980s. His works mix imagery from African, Caribbean, European, and popular art.

The son of a Haitian father and a mother of Puerto Rican descent, Basquiat grew up in Brooklyn, New York. He had no formal art training beyond high school, but on his own he energetically explored a wide range of imagery and influences, ranging from comic books to Egyptian hieroglyphics, from the works of Spanish artist Pablo Picasso to children's art.

Initially feverishly productive, Basquiat grew increasingly undependable under the stresses of fame. Although he tried to overcome a heroin habit, he died of a drug overdose in his Manhattan loft when he was just 27.

Basquiat’s famous oil paintings include:

Beksinski, Zdzislaw (1929-)
He was born on 24th February 1929 in Sanok, Poland. Beksinski enrolled in the Faculty of Architecture of the Cracow University of Technology. After graduation in 1952, he lived first in Cracow and later in Rzeszów, and finally, in 1955, returned with his wife to Sanok.

Beksinski's numerous exhibitions in Poland and abroad, and also the substantial number of publications by him, including catalogues and albums, and the innumerable interviews with him and films about him have put him into the narrow group of the most talked about and best known Polish artists.

His early pictures were Expressionist in character: 'Figures crying out in the wilderness,' he recalls, 'people with heads of stone, women in childbirth, people in the act of copulation, defecation, dying, people being executed by firing squad or by hanging, prisons, windowless cities. Beksinski opened up to the sub-conscious, not afraid of what he would encounter in it, and it was from these experiences of drawing that the paintings of his 'fantasy period' developed. That was when a technique to which the artist has remained loyal to the present day was confirmed and stabilized: his painting in oils. The picture was to be a mirror image of an inner vision. Beksinski’s most spectacular of group of pictures from the 1967-1983 'fantasy period' is extraordinary witness to a vision full of drama, anxiety, and destruction not so much of the outside world but rather of a spiritual or psychological world.

Beksinski’s famous paintings include:

Botero, Fernando, (1932-)
Born in Medellin, Colombia, Botero attended a school for matadors from 1944 to 1946 but his true interest was in art. He first exhibited his paintings in 1948 in Medellin with other artists from the region. At that time he was influenced by the work of Mexican artists Diego Rivera, and David Alfaro Siqueiros. In 1952 Botero began studies at the Academy of San Fernando in Madrid, Spain, visiting the Prado Museum daily. He went to Paris in 1953, studying the old masters in the Louvre Museum. Later that year, he traveled to Florence, Italy, where he studied such Italian masters as Giotto and Piero della Francesca.

When Botero moved to New York City in 1960, he had developed his trademark style: the depiction of round, corpulent humans and animals. In these works he referenced Latin-American folk art in his use of flat, bright color and boldly outlined forms. He favored a smooth look in his paintings, eliminating the appearance of brushwork and texture, as in Presidential Family (1967). In works such as this, Botero also drew from the Old Masters he had emulated in his youth: his formal portraits of the bourgeoisie and political and religious dignitaries clearly reference the composition and meditative quality of formal portraits by Goya and Velázquez. The inflated proportions of his figures, such as those in Presidential Family, also suggest an element of political satire, perhaps hinting at the subjects' inflated sense of their own importance. Botero’s other oil paintings from the period include bordello scenes and nudes, which possess comic qualities that challenge and satirize sexual mores, and portraits of families, which possess a gentle, affectionate quality.

Botero’s famous oil paintings include:

Cezanne, Paul (1839-1906)
Was probably the greatest painter of the last century. He was born in Aix-en-Provence, the son of a wealthy banker and tradesman, and was educated at the College Bourbon, where he became friendly with Zola. In 1861, after aban­doning the study of law, Cezanne went to Paris, where he met Pissarro and from 1862 he devoted himself to oil painting, living in Paris until 1870. The Franco-Prussian War drove him to L'Estaque, in the South of France. While he was closely associated with Pissarro Cezanne began to paint landscapes in an Impressionist technique, and he exhibited at the first ~Impressionist Exhi­bition in 1874. One of his pictures was among those which incurred the greatest public displeasure. This was the most extraordinary of all his erotic fantasies, the Modern Olympia so called as a rather dubious compliment to Manet: it represents a fat squatting female being disrobed by a black woman, while a man watches with interest. In the midst of the chaste Impressionist landscapes the effect must have been unnerving, particularly as these pictures are painted with great violence, and the color is often piled on with a palette-knife. During the 1870s Cezanne digested the theories of color and light which the Impressionists were then developing: in the third Impressionist Exhibition (1877) he showed sixteen pictures, and one critic praised them highly. Gradually he calmed down the exuberant Romanticism of his temperament and abandoned a Delacroix-like technique, to which he was not really suited. His great achievements lay in the direction of an ever more subtle analysis of color and tone, totally different.

Cezanne himself was no theorist, and constant insults £rom critics and public made him very chary of exhibiting his work. When his father died in 1886 he found himself rich and able to live in seclusion in his native Provence, mainly at the Jas de Bouffan, near Aix, a house his father owned, and which once contained some very early decorations by Cezanne. In 1890 he was invited to exhibit in Brussels by Les Vingt; in 1895 he had his first big show; and from about 1900 his genius was fairly widely recognized. In the last years of his life Cezanne returned to some of his favourite early themes - in particular the big compositions of Bathers, with nude figures in a landscape setting. His great contribution was to show that color and tone values must be considered as one thing and not two; in doing this he made Impressionism into something solid.

Cezanne’s famous oil paintings include:

Chagall, Marc (1887-1985)
Was born in Vitebsk and trained (1908) in St Petersburg. Chagall was in Paris 1910-14 and was influenced by Cubism; in 1917, after the Russian Revolution, he became Commissar of Fine Arts in Vitebsk and founded an academy. After disagreements with Malevich, he resigned and worked for theatres in Moscow, returning to Paris in 1923. By then Chagall’s highly imaginative style was fully formed, and he was painting recognizable objects in unusual juxtapositions, floating rather insecurely in space. His color was very rich, and most of his subjects were poetic evocations of Russian-Jewish village life, increasingly religious in sentiment. Chagall’s fantasies influenced the Surrealists. In 1941 he was invited to America by the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and he remained in the US until 1948.

Chagall’s famous oil paintings include:

Dali, Salvador (1904-89)
Was originally a Spanish Cubist, but went to Paris in 1928 and in 1929 was welcomed into the Surrealist group by Andre Breton, who, in 1938, expelled him for rejecting the Marxist connections of the movement while retaining the Freudian overtones. Dali’s is the nightmare world of man-size ants and limp pocket watches, meticulous in realistic detail, haunting in the inescapability of the horrific, and even in his later religious works - the Glasgow Crucifixion (1951) or the Last Supper in Washington - unable to avoid crude and willful sensationalism. Dali was in the US between 1940 and 1955, after which he returned to Spain as an avowed Francoist. Dali spent his last years in seclusion in his castle at Figueras, in Catalonia, which he left as a memorial to his art.

Dali’s famous oil paintings include:

Degas, Edgar (1834- 1917)
Was born in Paris of a wealthy family. Degas studied at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts under a pupil of Ingres, whom he knew and greatly admired. Degas’s early works - family portraits and some history pictures ­suggest that he was to develop into an academic painter in the Ingres tradition. By the late 1860s, however, Degas had begun to develop a deceptively casual composition, probably influenced by Manet and possibly also by Whistler, and certainly by snapshot photography. Degas knew Manet well, as he did Bazille, Berthe Morisot and Tissot, and was a frequent member of the circle which gathered round Manet, where he also met Fantin-Latour, Renoir, Cezanne, Monet, Sisley and Pissarro. During the Franco-Prussian War he remained in Paris and in 1872-3 he visited relations in New Orleans. There Degas painted only a few pictures, but these - and those executed after his return to Paris - show him using unusual viewpoints and purely contemporary subject matter, e.g. the Cotton Exchange in New Orleans. He ceased exhibiting at the Salon in 1870, and in 1874 Degas took part in the first Impressionist Exhibition, as he did in six of the subsequent seven. His works could only be seen in public at these group exhibitions, always received with hostility and ridicule.

Degas’s first pictures of dancers were painted about 1873, and from then on ballet girls, laundresses, models dressing and bathing, and cabaret singers became his principal subjects. He recorded the manners and movements of a society which he observed almost as if it were another world, treating the figures as the material of his investigations into light, color and form, as much as the paint he used.

Degas’s famous oil paintings include:

Diebenkorn, Richard (1922-1993)
American painter, best known for his intensely colored abstract paintings based on California landscapes. Diebenkorn was born in Portland, Oregon, and raised in San Francisco, California. He studied art at Stanford University from 1940 to 1943 and then entered the California School of Fine Arts in Oakland, California, in 1946. Two of the school's instructors, Clyfford Still and Mark Rothko, had a significant influence on local artists, introducing them to the East Coast movement of abstract expressionism. Diebenkorn's early abstractions, with their emphasis on color and composition, show this influence. Diebenkorn himself had joined the faculty by 1947, but in 1949 he left to study at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, where he received an M.F.A degree in 1951.

During the following two years, Diebenkorn spent brief periods at the University of Illinois at Urbana and in New York City, where he made sufficient connections in the art community to be included in the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum's 1954 exhibition, Younger American Painters. Diebenkorn returned to the San Francisco Bay area in 1953 and began his Berkeley paintings, a large series of semiabstract oil paintings based on local topography.

Diebenkorn began painting representational works about 1955. He became part of a West Coast movement known as the Bay Area Figurative School, which incorporated the expressive brushwork, innovative compositions, and vivid colors characteristic of abstract expressionism into art that no longer excluded recognizable subject matter.

After accepting a position at the University of California, Los Angeles, and moving to Santa Monica, Diebenkorn returned to abstraction in 1967. He began his most renowned series, Ocean Park, monumental, abstract meditations on the ocean, sky, and land near his home, which occupied him for the rest of his life. , Diebenkorn divided large rectangular canvases into geometric planes of soft, light-drenched colors. Multiple layers of lines and planes show through the complex surfaces, creating an informal yet intense quality that defies the simple geometry of the works.

Diebenkorn’s famous paintings include:

Gauguin, Paul (1848-1903)
Was born in Paris. Gauguin became a stockbroker in 1871, and a Sunday-painter who collected the works of the Impressionists and joined in their exhibitions (1881-6). Gauguin gave up his job in 1883, and after many vicissitudes separated from his family and went to live in Brittany at Pont-Aven and Le Pouldu, where he worked from 1886 to 1890, except for visits to Paris, a trip to Panama and Martinique in 1887 and a disastrous stay of two months with van Gogh in Arles in 1888. In 1891 he went to Tahiti, returned to Paris in 1893 for lack of money, but went back to the South Sea Islands in 1895. Gauguin’s health was failing and he had been seriously hurt in a brawl with sailors in Brittany in 1894. His remaining years were spent in poverty, illness and continual strife with the colonial authorities through his championing of native causes. Gauguin died at Atuana in the Marquesas.

Gauguin’s famous oil paintings include:

Gogh, Vincent van (1853 -90)
Was the son of a Dutch pastor. Vincent van Gogh was first employed in The Hague, London and Paris by the picture dealers for whom his brother Theo worked. He then taught in two English schools, worked in a bookshop in Holland, began studying for the Church, and became a missionary in the coalmining district of the Borinage in Belgium, where he shared the poverty and hardships of the miners. Vincent van Gogh did not begin to become an artist until he was living in great poverty after his dismissal from the mission in 1880, and from then until 1886 he lived variously at Brussels, The Hague and Antwerp, teaching himself to draw and paint, with occasional lessons in Brussels and at the Academy in Antwerp, which appear to have contributed little to his development. In 1886 Vincent van Gogh joined Theo in Paris and immediately came into contact with the works of the Impressionists, which Theo endeavored to sell in the gallery devoted to modern art that he directed. Vincent van Gogh met Toulouse-Lautrec, Pissarro, Degas, Seurat and Gauguin, and in 1888 went to Arles where he was later joined by Gauguin. In December 1888 he became insane, which resulted in the famous incident with his ear, and from then until his death he suffered intermittent attacks of mental trouble. During the intervals between them he continued to paint, both in the asylums and after his removal to Auvers, where, in July 1890, Vincent van Gogh shot himself.

Van Gogh's Dutch period is characterized by his use ofdark color, heavy forms, and subject matter chiefly drawn from peasants and their work. He ignored Theo's advice to lighten his palette as the Impressionists were doing, but during his short stay in Antwerp he became more interested in Japanese prints and the work ofRubens. Afterhis arrival in Paris a complete change took place in his palette and subject matter; he adopted the Impressionist technique, leaning briefly towards the pointillism ofSeurat, and turned to flowers, views ofParis, and portraits and self-portraits which enabled him to experiment with these new ideas. Afterhe went to Aries, Vincent van Gogh painted many landscapes and portraits in heightened color and with a vivid, passionate expression of light and feeling. His paintings done at St Remy and Auvers are vivid in color and with writhing, flame-like forms in the drawing, completely expressive ofhis tormented sensibility. His greatest influence was on ~Munch and the German Expressionists.

Vincent van Gogh’s famous oil paintings include:

Haring, Keith (1958-1990)
American painter, whose simple, symbol-like drawings of dogs, babies, and dancing figures brought him international acclaim in the 1980s. Keith Haring grew up in Kutztown, Pennsylvania. He attended the Ivy School of Professional Art in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and had his first exhibition at the Pittsburgh Center for the Arts in 1978.

Haring's work is informed by diverse sources, including the popular appeal of American artist Andy Warhol and others in the pop art movement; the rhythm and movements in African, Cuban, and hip-hop dancing; and Afro-Cuban body painting. In 1988 Haring was diagnosed with AIDS, and during the remaining two years of his life he devoted much of his energy to educating the public about AIDS and drug abuse.

Keith Haring’s famous paintings include:

Hockney, David (b.1937)
Is a British painter, etcher, film-maker and stage­ designer, who began in the Pop Art fold but developed into a straightforward representational artist, exploiting, in particular, strong, light colors, usually in flat paint. His subjects include moving and reflecting surfaces - water, glass, tiles - and, above all, portraits

David Hockney’s famous paintings include:

Hopper, Edward (1882- 1967)
Was a realist painter of urban America. Edward Hopper exhibited at the Armory Show (1913) and sold an oil painting, but was unable to sell another for ten years so he supported himself as a commercial artist and illustrator, which had some effect on his oil paintings. His scenes of desolate streets and cheap eating-houses express the loneliness of big cities, especially New York, where he lived most of his life. Edward Hopper visited Europe three times but was quite untouched by contemporary European art.

Edward Hopper’s famous oil paintings include:

Kahlo, Frida (1907-1954)
Mexican painter, who produced mostly small, highly personal self-portraits using elements of fantasy and a style inspired by native popular art. Kahlo was born in Coyoacán, Mexico, near Mexico City. While a student at Mexico City's National Preparatory School in 1925, Frida Kahlo sustained severe injuries in a bus accident. During her recuperation, Kahlo taught herself to paint. After three years she took some of her first paintings to the famous Mexican muralist Diego Rivera, who encouraged her to continue her work. Kahlo and Rivera married in 1929.

Influenced by Rivera's work, Kahlo adopted his use of broad, simplified color areas and a deliberately naive style in her oil paintings. Like Rivera, she wanted her paintings to affirm her Mexican identity, and she frequently used subject matter from Mexican archaeology and folk art.

Kahlo primarily depicted her personal experience. She frequently focused on the painful aspects of her life, using graphic imagery to convey her meaning. The turbulence of her marriage is shown in the weeping and physically injured self-portraits she painted when she felt rejected by Rivera. Frida Kahlo portrayed her physical disintegration, the result of the bus accident, in such works as The Broken Column, in which she wears a metal brace and her body is open to reveal a broken column in place of her spine.

Frida Kahlo’s famous paintings include:

Kandinsky, Wassily (1866- 1944)
Was born in Moscow but trained in Munich, after abandoning a legal career. Wassily Kandinsky painted his first purely abstract work in 1910 and was therefore one of the founders of pure abstract painting. In 1911 Wassily Kandinsky was one of the founders of the Blaue Reiter group. He returned to Russia 1914-21 and then went back to Germany and taught at the Bauhaus from 1922, again coming into contact with Klee. In 1933 Wassily Kandinsky went to France.

Wassily Kandinsky’s  famous oil paintings include:

Klee, Paul (I879- 1940)
Was a Swiss painter whose art of free fantasy, perhaps the most poetic of modern times, is best defined in his own words as 'taking a line for a walk'. Paul Klee was trained in Munich and went to Italy (1901-2), after which he returned to Switzerland and began etching. Paul Klee’s early graphic work was influenced by William Blake and Beardsley as well as Goya, and, later, Ensor. He worked in Germany from 1906 until 1933, teaching for many years at the celebrated Bauhaus in Weimar and Dessau, and later at Dtisseldorf Academy.  From 1911 he was associ­ated with the Blaue Reiter artists, and was especially close to Kandinsky, Feininger and Jawlensky (they were known, from 1924, as the 'Blue Four'): all four were German by adoption, not by birth. In 1914 he went to Tunisia with August Macke, an experience which revealed a new world of color to him.

Paul Klee’s famous oil paintings include:

Klimt, Gustav (1862- 1918)
Was the principal Austrian Jugendstil (Art Nouveau) painter, and one of the founders of the ViennaSezession (1898), although he resigned in 1903. He was essentially a decorator and, from 1883 to 1892, he shared a studio for decorative painting with his brother and another artist: they worked in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, in 1891. From 1898, after a barren period of about six years, he was influenced by Japanese art and by contemporary English painters like Burne-Jones and Alma-Tadema. A more realist style characterized his ceilings for Vienna University (1900-1903), which were very unpopular. Gustav Klimt was perhaps most successful as a designer for the applied arts (e.g. mosaic), but he was also a great influence on Egon Schiele and Oskar Kokoschka.

Gustav Klimt’s famous oil paintings include:

Kooning, Willem de (1904-1997)
Dutch-born American painter, whose work is characterized by energetic brushstrokes and twisted forms. Willem De Kooning was a leading member of the abstract expressionism movement, which sought to capture the spontaneous and often vigorous act of painting through the artist’s personal gestures.

De Kooning was born in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. From 1916 onward he received classical instruction in drawing and painting at the Rotterdam Academie and at the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts in Brussels, Belgium. Willem De Kooning emmigrated to the United States in 1926, and settled in New York City in 1927.

In the early 1950s de Kooning used slashing strokes of color to create a series of paintings of women. In many of these works, an imposing framework of angular shapes conceals a violently distorted figure with exaggerated female features. His oil paintings of women shocked many feminists, who interpreted his colliding brushstrokes as a gesture of violence toward the female body. But de Kooning related his oil paintings of women to prehistoric fertility figures.
 
De Kooning's art always hovers between figuration and abstraction. Easter Monday combines abstract brushstrokes with recognizable lettering and photographs of human figures

In the early 1960s de Kooning’s compositions opened up, with long, wide swaths of color that evoked landscape forms. By the 1970s his canvases had become more densely congested with brushstrokes. De Kooning produced simpler and more lyrical works in the 1980s, which featured loops and twisting lines of orange, blue, or red on bare white surfaces.

Willem De Kooning’s famous oil paintings include:

Lempicka, Tamara de (1898-1980)
Born in Warsaw. Poland to wealthy parents. With her husband she emigrated to Paris in 1918. Tamara de Lempicka exhibited at the Art Deco exhibition in 1925. With new husband, Baron Raoul Kuffner, Lempicka moved to the US in 1939 where she continued oil painting but in a more abstract style than her earlier stylized nudes.

Tamara de Lempicka’s famous oil paintings include:

Lichtenstein, Roy (1923-2005)
Was a leading American Pop artist. He began by painting cowboy and Indian subjects; he was influenced by Abstract Impression­ism in 1957, and by 1961 achieved a breakthrough with his enlarged dot images. His usually large pictures are based on the magnification of details from advertisements of everyday objects - a foot on a pedal-bin, a hand holding a sponge, a cooker with food in the open oven, and strip-cartoons. His technique imitates the coarse screen process of cheap newspaper printing, and his stylized forms translate his commonplace sources into simple but powerful patterns, expressed in strong primary colors, or in black and white.

Roy Lichtenstein’s famous paintings include:

Magritte, Rene (1898-1967)
Was a Belgian Surrealist painter who was trained in Brussels and traveled in France, Britain, Germany and Holland. Rene Magritte lived near Paris and came into contact with the French Surrealist movement, although he painted some Impressionist-style pictures during World War 2. Rene Magritte later lived in Brussels and painted murals for Belgian public buildings. His pale and dryly painted works have a dream-like clarity, with, frequently, an unexpected wittiness. They often have nude women, sometimes accompanied by men in bowler hats, and similar incongruities.

Rene Magritte’s famous oil paintings include:

Malevich, Kasimir (1878- 1935)
Was a Russian artist who, not content with Cubism, invented Suprematism and painted the picture which should have ended all abstract pictures - a white square on a white ground. It didn't. From c.1904 in Moscow Malevich was aware of modem French painting and about 1912 he went to Paris for a month, and came back a Cubist. He claimed to have invented Suprematism as a purer form of Cubism in 1913, but it was more probably in 1915.  After the Revolution he had a violent disagreement with Chagall over aesthetics:  Malevich was in Warsaw and Berlin in 1927, and once Socialist Realism had taken hold of the arts in Russia he returned to painting more conventional figurative works, but without much success.

Malevich’s famous oil paintings include:

Manet, Edouard (1832-83)
His well-to-do bourgeois father reluctantly allowed him to study under Couture 1850- 56. Manet then reacted very strongly against the academic history painting of his teacher and began his career as an artistic rebel with the Absinthe Drinker a scene from the seamier side of life. His brilliant technique, founded on the opposition of light and shadow with as little half-tone as possible, on painting directly from the model with intense immediacy, and on a restricted palette in which black was extremely important, helped him to create a new style; yet one founded on Velazquez, Goya and Hals, all of whom could be studied in Paris. Manet’s early works include many Spanish subjects inspired by troupes of dancers visiting Paris and he did not actually visit Spain until 1865. These Spanish pieces include numerous bull-fighting scenes, Lala de Valence and the Guitaris, his only successful Salon exhibit before Le bon Bock. Manet had previously traveled in Italy, Holland, Flanders and Germany.

Manet’s work was frequently rejected by the Salon jury (he played an important part in the 1863 Salon des Refuses) and, if hung, was ill-received by critics, his friend Zola being almost alone in defending him. The Dejeuner sur l'herbe and Olympia were particularly ill-received but both were objected to more on moral grounds than aesthetic ones - the Dejeuner represents two fully-clothed men and two naked women having a picnic in a park (but the composition is based on a Giorgione), and the Olympia, ostensibly an odalisque in the Ingres manner was generally thought to be a portrait of a prostitute attended by her black maid. After 1870, due partly to the influence of Berthe Morisot, he adopted the Impressionist technique and palette, aban­doning the use of black and his genius for analysis and synthesis for a lighter, sweeter, color and a freer handling. Manet also tended more to sentimental subjects, such as Washing Day and his last masterpiece, the Bar at the Folies-Bergere . He always longed for official recognition and refused to take part in the Impressionist exhibitions organized by Degas. Although Manet was friendly with Monet, Renoir, Sisley and Pissarro he bitterly resented being coupled with them in newspaper criticisms as the leader of 'Manet's gang'. At the end of his life he was given the Legion of Honour and the vilification of his works abated, chiefly because Impressionist handling and color were beginning to affect academic painting. The tragedy of his life was that Manet was the perfect academic painter, unrecognized and rejected by the body whose dying traditions he alone could have revivified.

 Manet’s famous oil paintings include:

Marc, Franz (1880- 1916)
Was a German Expressionist painter, associated with Macke and Kandinsky in the Blaue Reiter. Franz Marc’s chief subjects were animals, and his variants on the theme of the Blue Horse are perhaps his best-known works. He met Delaunay in Paris in 1912 and his last works (1914) are more abstract. Franz Marc was killed in the battle of Verdun.

Franz Marc’s famous oil paintings include: