.A Burial at Ornans 1849 149 Musée d'Orsay ()

he painting, which drew both praise and fierce denunciations from critics and the public, is an enormous work, measuring 10 by 22 feet (3.1 by 6.6 metres), depicting a prosaic ritual on a scale which previously would have been reserved for a work of history painting. According to art historian Sarah Faunce, "In Paris the Burial was judged as a work that had thrust itself into the grand tradition of history painting, like an upstart in dirty boots crashing a genteel party, and in terms of that tradition it was of course found wanting."[4] Then too, the painting lacks the sentimental rhetoric that was expected in a genre work: Courbet's When Courbet painted this during the years 1849–50, the art mourners make no theatrical gestures of world still operates under traditional methods – the most famous grief, and their faces seem more caricatured of which is the style. So, it was understandable that than ennobled. The critics accused Courbet critics decried Courbet’s painting by pointing out his technique of a deliberate pursuit of ugliness. and realism of the image as well as its uncanny 10 feet by 22 feet Eventually the public grew more interested size. Defying the conventional components present in all work of in the new Realist approach, and the lavish, art during his time, by using real people present at the burial, as decadent fantasy of Romanticism lost subjects instead of art models, Courbet essentially gave birth to popularity. The artist well understood the Modern Art. importance of this painting; Courbet said: "The Burial at Ornans was in reality the burial of Romanticism."[5] It might also be said to be the burial of the hierarchy of genres which had dominated since the 17th century.

In 1873, when Courbet's political views had

Gustave Courbet

The painting portrays the burial of Courbet’s great uncle in the small French town of Ornans. Unlike most painting of that period, this French painting depicted the scene without any exaggerated visual 1819-1877 components. It stayed true to Courbet’s realist technique of only painting what he can see. It is obvious that the painting lacks the romanticism of grief and mourning that can easily be found in all customary Romantic paintings.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zRuLkyLx3No .A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte 1884 082 Art Institute of Chicago Pointillism

Seurat was inspired by a desire to abandon 's preoccupation with the fleeting moment, and instead to render what he regarded as the essential and unchanging in life. Nevertheless, he borrowed many of his approaches from Impressionism, from his love of modern subject matter and scenes of urban leisure, to his desire to avoid depicting only the 'local', or apparent, color of depicted objects, and instead to try to capture all the colors that interacted to produce their appearance. Seurat was fascinated by a range of scientific ideas about color, form and expression. He believed that lines tending in Georges Seurat is chiefly remembered as the pioneer of the certain directions, and colors of a particular Neo-Impressionist technique commonly known as Divisionism, warmth or coolness, could have particular or Pointillism, an approach associated with a softly flickering expressive effects. He also pursued the surface of small dots or strokes of color. His innovations discovery that contrasting or derived from new quasi-scientific theories about color and complementary colors can optically mix to expression, yet the graceful beauty of his work is explained by yield far more vivid tones that can be the influence of very different sources. Initially, he believed achieved by mixing paint alone. He called that great modern art would show contemporary life in ways the technique he developed similar to classical art, except that it would use technologically 'chromo-luminism', though it is better informed techniques. Later he grew more interested in Gothic art known as Divisionism (after the method of and popular posters, and the influence of these on his work make separating local color into separate dots), or it some of the first modern art to make use of such Pointillism (after the tiny strokes of paint unconventional sources for expression. His success quickly that were crucial to achieve the flickering propelled him to the forefront of the Parisian avant-garde. His effects of his surfaces). triumph was short-lived, as after barely a decade of mature work Although radical in his techniques, Seurat's he died at the age of only 31. But his innovations would be highly initial instincts were conservative and

Georges Seurat

53 Georges Seurat is one of the most important post-impressionist painters, and he is considered the creator of the "pointillism", a style French of painting in which small distinct points of primary colors create the 1859-1891 impression of a wide selection of secondary and intermediate colors.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jkVVrNfCfT8 .Adam and Eve 1533 067 Art Institute of Chicago Northern Renaissance

Cranach’s work took on a new direction, however, with the onset of the Protestant Reformation. Serving in the court of Luther’s protector and coming to know the young reformer personally, Cranach became a purveyor of Protestant thought and reform through his paintings and woodcuts. The woodcuts in particular decorated many of the treatises published by the Wittenberg reformers and functioned as visual conduits for their theology. The first such woodcut, in a 1519 pamphlet, featured a contrast between the chariot to heaven and the chariot to hell. On 1521, Cranach published 13 woodcuts by the title, Passional Chrisi The scene is set in a forest clearing where Eve stands before the und Antichristi, which this time contrasted Tree of Knowledge, caught in the act of handing an apple to a the life of Christ with the luxurious lifestyle bewildered Adam. Entwined in the tree’s branches above, the of pope and curia. The most famous serpent looks on as Adam succumbs to temptation. A rich woodcuts were printed in Luther’s German menagerie of birds and animals – a stag, a hind, a sheep, a translation of the scriptures. Beginning in roe-buck with its mate, a lion, a wild boar and a horse, and 1522 with the German New Testament, with partridges, a stork and a heron – completes this seductive vision the Old Testament following in 1524, of Paradise. On the tree-trunk are the date 1526 and the Cranach’s images took on a crucial bat-winged serpent which formed part of Cranach’s coat of arms. catechetical function though their The painting is particularly admired for its treatment of the representation of biblical passages in the human figure and for the profusion of finely painted details, Luther Bible. including animals and vegetation. Cranach delights in capturing details such as the roe-buck catching its reflection in the The most enduring images Cranach foreground pool of water. produced remain the portraits he painted of Luther, many of which still adorn books of the Wittenberg theologian’s writings. He

Lucas Cranach the Elder

painter and printmaker in woodcut and engraving. He was court painter to the Electors of Saxony for most of his career, and is known German for his portraits, both of German princes and those of the leaders of 1472-1553 the Protestant Reformation, whose cause he embraced with enthusiasm. He was a close friend of Martin Luther. Cranach also painted religious subjects, first in the Catholic tradition, and later trying to find new ways of conveying Lutheran religious concerns in art. He continued throughout his career to paint nude subjects drawn Martin Luther and Katherina van Bora - 1526 from mythology and religion. Cranach had a large workshop and many works exist in different versions; his son Lucas Cranach the Younger, and others, continued to create versions of his father's works for decades after his death. He https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g4XZGhnFOwM .Aladin (Flow P11) 2014 136 Private Collection Post-Modernism

Be it a rural landscape, a colorful gestural abstraction, or a black-and-white painting based on a family snapshot or image from the newspaper, a certain set of tensions consistently drives Richter's work: belief versus skepticism, gesture versus erasure, planning versus chance, personal engagement versus objective neutrality. In Richter's paintings one can identify many of the marks, methods, and forms that have driven the development of modern and contemporary art since the 1950s. But the often discordant way in which the artist brings them together on the canvas cools their rhetorical intensity. The restless Biography quality of these works, in which different Gerhard Richter's lifelong experimentation with diverse subjects modes of painting collide, reflects Richter's and methods — and his sophisticated questioning of their simultaneous hope and uncertainty that meanings — derives in part from his personal experience of painting can faithfully assess contemporary modern 's tumultuous history. Richter's childhood reality. coincided almost precisely with the rise and fall of the Third Reich; born in Dresden in 1932, just one year before Adolf Hitler came to power, Richter began his artistic career twenty years later within the academic system of East Germany. Richter trained as a muralist, painting realistic imagery that espoused socialist themes.

Gerhard Richter

82 One of the most important artists of recent decades, Richter is known either for his fierce and colorful abstractions or his serene German landscapes and scenes with candles. 1932-

Betty (1988)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8boixn7AMgk .Allegory of Chastity 1475 105 Musee Jacquemart-Andre (Paris) Northern Renaissance

Memling's portraits, in particular, were popular in . Memling's distinctive contribution to portraiture was his use of landscape backgrounds, characterized by "a balanced counterpoint between top and bottom, foreground and background: the head offset by the neutral expanse of sky, and the neutral area of the shoulders enlivened by the landscape detail beyond".Memling's portrait style influenced the work of numerous late-15th-century Italian painters

In the centre of the painting is a virgin surrounded by amethyst cliffs, with two lions below protecting her. To left of the cliffs is a town and beyond it, fading into the distance, a mountainous landscape. It has been suggested that the landscape was painted later than the central motif.

Hans Memling

81 Perhaps the most complete and "well-balanced" of all 15th century Flemish painters, although he was not as innovative as Van Eyck or German van der Weyden. 1434-1494 .American Gothic 1930 037 Art Institute of Chicago Regionalism

Rather, she asserts, Wood regularly infused his meticulously planned paintings with anxiety, alienation or, at least, ambiguity. As for his call for a distinctly American art, that was more a matter of subject than style. Wood himself emulated European artists in creating his works—but they were always about American people, scenes, values and identity. (In fairness, Wanda M. Corn trod some, but not all, of this ground in a smaller 1983 exhibition—but that was more than a generation ago and, marshaling less evidence, failed to make a lasting impression.) likely the most famous American painting and has been the basis The exhibition covers Wood’s entire career, for many parodies. “Gothic” (an architectural style used for beginning with his decorative Arts and churches) refers to the top window of the house in the Crafts objects, such as a silver coffee pot (c. background. During the Great Depression, this painting became a 1914) and a wrought-iron fireplace screen symbol of the hard-working and determined American people. (c. 1929-30). It displays his early Note that the pitchfork is mirrored on the man’s overalls. Impressionistic works, his commissioned American Gothic is the perfect example of being in the right murals, and a gallery of posters, book place at the right time. When it first came out it certainly did OK. illustrations and magazine covers Magazines and newspapers reprinted the painting while it (1932-40). All are proficient—some hanged comfortably in the Art Institute of Chicago but, with the beautifully so—and most of them can be onset of the Great Depression, it became something more to the read straightforwardly. people. It became a symbol of an unwavering spirit in the face of adversity, celebrating the struggling Midwestern Americans who Nor is there anything dark, for example, held their own during desperate times. So naturally, with time, it about his sprawling “Dinner for Threshers” became the most satirized piece of popular culture in the U.S. (1934), a cutaway look inside a farmhouse at men coming in from the fields to eat

Grant Wood

“American Gothic” (1930) is so renowned that when it arrived in last year for an exhibition, the Guardian called it “a huge American moment” because, save for its appearance in the same show in Paris 1891-1942 three months before, this arguably “most famous of all American paintings” had never before “left North American soil.”

The writer, like many others before and since, then described the duo as a man and his wife—not, as Wood said, a farmer and his daughter Daughters of Revolution 1932 (later acknowledged in a footnote to the article).

So it goes for Grant Wood (1891-1942), who is often misunderstood. With the aptly named “American Gothic and Other Fables,” curator https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vk2GvyNmYD0 .Ancient Italy Ovid Banished From 1838 074 Private Collection Romanticism

an English Romantic landscape painter, watercolorist and printmaker, whose style can be said to have laid the foundation for Impressionism. Although Turner was considered a controversial figure in his day, he is now regarded as the artist who elevated landscape painting to an eminence rivaling history painting.

This work treats the ancient poet Ovid’s purported exile from Rome, reconstructed here as a panoply of temples, triumphal arches, and statuary from different periods of the city’s history. Turner leaves Ovid’s identity within the image ambiguous: he could be the figure being arrested in the foreground, or he could be absent altogether, already banished or deceased (a tomb at lower left bears his full name). In any case, with the hazy scene and setting sun, Turner evokes the feeling of a final farewell to Rome and its golden age.

Joseph Mallord Turner

10 Turner is the best landscape painter of Western painting. Whereas he had been at his beginnings an academic painter, Turner was slowly English but unstoppably evolving towards a free, atmospheric style, 1775-1851 sometimes even outlining the abstraction, which was misunderstood and rejected by the same critics who had admired him for decades

Tintern Abbey

Mr. Turner (2014) .Annunciation Triptych (Mérode Altarpiece) 1427 022 The Cloisters (New York) Academic

Campin is usually now assumed to be identical with the Master of Flémalle. He was, with van Eyck, the founder of the realistic style of oil painting in the in the early 15th century. His influence was further extended by his pupil Rogier van der Weyden. Campin was active at Tournai from 1406. The group of works attributable to him include three life-sized panels, formerly at Flémalle and now at Frankfurt, the National Gallery's 'Virgin and Child before a Firescreen' and 'Virgin and Child in an Interior'.

In the early 15th century the Netherlands The naturalistic style of northern Europe in the 15th century belonged to the Duchy of Burgundy. The emphasizes on how god sees the world, so northern european realistic detail of Campin's work is artists at the time would create more depth preservative painting, accompanied by a weightiness in the detailed facial expression (much influenced by Gothic figures which is associated with Burgundian naturalism), and use of symbolism. Unlike the Italian sculpture. It is paralleled in Italy in the Renaissance, at the time, northern european artists saw a work of Florentine early Renaissance naturalistic style of flow in figures and simplicity to portray events. artists. This quality is also evident in his portraits.

Robert Campin

Robert Campin was an early pioneer of the naturalistic influences in northern Europe which has been applied in detail later in the Flemish renaissance period. 1375-1444

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZW0EVBoN6Lg .Arnolfi Wedding 1434 077 National Gallery (London) Gothic

Van Eyck painted both secular and religious subject matter, including altarpieces, single panel religious figures and commissioned portraits. His work includes single panels, diptychs, triptychs, and polyptych panels. He was well paid by Philip, who sought that the painter was secure financially and had artistic freedom and could paint "whenever he pleased". Van Eyck's work comes from the International Gothic style, but he soon eclipsed it, in part through a greater emphasis on naturalism and realism. Through his developments in the use of oil paint he achieved a new level of virtuosity. Van Eyck was highly influential and his It is considered one of the most original and complex paintings techniques and style were adopted and in Western art, because of its beauty, complex iconography, refined by the Early Netherlandish geometric orthogonal perspective, and expansion of the picture In the earliest significant source on van space with the use of a mirror. According to Ernst Gombrich ... A Eyck, a 1454 biography simple corner of the real world had suddenly been fixed on to a in Genoese humanist Bartolomeo panel as if by magic ... For the first time in history the artist Facio's De viris illustribus, Jan van Eyck is became the perfect eye-witness in the truest sense of the term" named "the leading painter" of his day. Signed and dated by van Eyck in 1434, it is, with the Ghent Facio places him among the best artists of Altarpiece by the same artist and his brother Hubert, the oldest the early 15th century, along with Rogier very famous panel painting to have been executed in oils rather van der Weyden, Gentile da Fabriano, than in tempera. and Pisanello. It is particularly interesting that Facio shows as much enthusiasm for Netherlandish painters as he does for Italian painters. This text sheds light on aspects of Jan van Eyck's production now lost, citing a bathing scene owned by a prominent Italian,

Jan van Eyck

He is often considered one of the founders of Early Netherlandish painting, and, one of the most significant representatives of Northern Flemish Renaissance art. The few surviving records of his early life indicate 1385-1441 that he was born c. 1380–1390, most likely in Maaseik. He took employment in the Hague as painter and Valet de chambre with John III the Pitiless, ruler of Holland and Hainaut in the Hague around 1422, when he was already a master painter with workshop assistants. After John's death in 1425 van Eyck was employed in Lille as court painter to Philip the Good, Duke of Burgundy, until 1429 before moving to Bruges, where he lived until his death. He was highly regarded by Philip, and undertook a number of diplomatic visits abroad, including to Lisbon in 1428 to explore the possibility of https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T4YoTIJe8Qo .Bacchus and Ariadne 1525 056 National Gallery (London) High Renaissance

Derived from stories by the Roman poets Ovid (43 BCE - 17 CE) and Catullus (c.84-54 BCE), this picture portrays the first encounter between Bacchus (god of wine), and Ariadne (daughter of King Minos), on the island of Naxos. Despite her vital role in helping him to defeat the minotaur, Ariadne has been deserted by her lover Theseus, whose ship can be seen (far left of the picture) sailing away into the distance. As she watches the ship depart - her sorrow is suddenly interrupted by the sudden arrival of Bacchus and his unruly troupe of drunken friends, one of whom (a Bacchus, god of wine, emerges with his followers from the satyr) is waving aloft the head of an animal landscape to the right. Falling in love with Ariadne on sight, he they have just killed (its head is lying on the leaps from his chariot, drawn by two cheetahs, towards her. ground). When the startled Ariadne turns to Ariadne had been abandoned on the Greek island of Naxos by face the revellers, she sees Bacchus leaping Theseus, whose ship is shown in the distance. The picture shows from his chariot and their eyes meet: it is her initial fear of Bacchus, but he raised her to heaven and turned love at first sight. Bacchus leaps down from her into a constellation, represented by the stars above her head. his chariot, drawn by two cheetahs, and Her brightly-lit rear leg, for instance, has no shadow on the declares his love. He promises to be a more ground while her raised arm is lit from the "wrong" direction. faithful partner than Theseus and offers her Raised arms in themselves, as in Titian's contemporaneous a constellation of stars (Corona Borealis, Assunta, are often the uplifted arms of "painters" painting the the Northern Crown) as a wedding gift. narrative. Here Ariadne stands to one side of her "canvas" where Other versions have Bacchus raising her to an artist might stand in a studio scene. To strengthen the heaven and transforming her into a association Titian signed the vase at her feet. constellation, represented by the eight stars above her.

Titian

24 After the premature death of Giorgione, Titian became the leading figure of Venetian painting of his time. His use of color and his taste Italian Venetian for mythological themes defined the main features of 16th century 1477–1576 Venetian Art. His influence on later artists -Rubens, Velázquez...- is extremely important

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-pqTUVgQgxM .Bal du moulin de la Galette 1876 019 Musée d'Orsay (Paris) Impressionism

Many critics prefer the socially charged paintings of Degas and Manet to Renoir's optimistic and prosperous modernism. The people who crowd Renoir's dance hall cavort on a Sunday, enjoying a "pay-as-you-drink-and-dance" entertainment. Most of them worked for a living - both men and women - and relished this moment of pleasure with a healthy abandon that sets them apart from the melancholy figures captured by Degas and others. Renoir's is indeed, a modernist vision of an urban Utopia of workers freed by their wages to dance and drink. Like several of Renoir's early Impressionist This painting is doubtless Renoir's most important work of the paintings Bal du Moulin de la Galette is a mid 1870's and was shown at the Impressionist exhibition in wonderful snapshot of real life, a moment 1877. Though some of his friends appear in the picture, Renoir's of movement, noise and light, now gone for main aim was to convey the vivacious and joyful atmosphere of ever. this popular dance garden on the Butte Montmartre. The study of the moving crowd, bathed in natural and artificial light, is handled using vibrant, brightly coloured brushstrokes. The somewhat blurred impression of the scene prompted negative reactions from contemporary critics. This portrayal of popular Parisian life, with its innovative style and imposing format, a sign of Renoir's artistic ambition, is one of the masterpieces of early Impressionism.

Pierre August Renoir

75 One of the key figures of Impressionism, he soon left the movement to pursue a more personal, academic painting. French 1841-1919

Renoir (2012)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tiVk4NfrIU4 .Black Square 1915 078 Tretyakov Gallery (Moscow) Suprematism

But it is a painting from a subsequent generation of artists, Russian Suprematist Kazimir Malevich’s Black Square (1915) – often credited with being among the first abstract works ever painted – that reveals just how easily the colour can curdle from soulful luminosity into something rather shadier. In 2015, fresh analysis of the celebrated work (which Malevich said signified where “the true movement of being begins”) traced the outlines of a barely visible bigoted quip scrawled by the artist beneath the varnish. The lurking words “battle of the negroes”, too gutless to show their face in full view, The basics of Suprematism boil down to “simple geometric are thought to be an allusion to a racist shapes” Black Square (also known as The Black Square or phrase – “negroes battling at night” – used Malevich's Black Square) is an iconic painting by Kazimir by a French humourist for an 1897 cartoon Malevich. The first version was done in 1915. Malevich made of a black square. With that disappointing four variants of which the last is thought to have been painted discovery, which succeeded in during the late 1920s or early 1930s. Black Square was first recontextualising the work from pioneering shown in The Last Futurist Exhibition 0.10 in 1915. The work is masterpiece to appalling misadventure, the frequently invoked by critics, historians, curators, and artists as inner light of a painting that had, for the "zero point of painting", referring to the painting's historical decades, been of meaningful significance and paraphrasing Malevich. meditation, suddenly went out.

Kazimir Malevich

41 Creator of Suprematism, Malevich will forever be one of the most controversial figures of the history of art among the general public, Russian divided between those who consider him an essential renewal and 1879-1935 those who consider that his works based on polygons of pure colors do not deserve to be considered Art

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cBBJYKhZvw0 .By Lamplight 1890 121 Galleri Rasmus Meyer (Bergen) Impressionism

One of her friends, Asta Nørregard, another Norwegian painter studying in Paris at the time, was the model for her Blått interiør (Blue Interior) (1883). It develops the theme of the play of light from the window on the person and contents of the interior of the room. Here the composition is complicated by the presence of a large mirror at the left. Her brushstrokes are now very painterly, and bright colours are starting to bring their harmonies and contrasts.

achieved recognition in her own time and was a pioneer among female artists both in the Nordic countries and in Europe generally. She is best known for her detailed interior scenes, communicated with rich colors and moody lighting. In , her style started to loosen up: another early success was her Solitude (c 1880), her first painting accepted for the Salon in 1880. This was one of her first interiors featuring limited light, whose play was to become a dominant theme in her paintings. Although she remained based in Paris, she returned to Norway each summer, where she seems to have painted mostly landscapes.

Harriet Backer

Harriet Backer’s paintings take the viewer beyond such instant optical gratification, into her discourse between the inside of our lives and Norwegian living spaces, the light that renders them in our mind’s eye, and the 1845-1932 outside. Syende kvinne ved lampelys (By Lamplight) (1890) reverses the lighting of her previous interiors. Now the view through the window is the blackness of night, and the interior is lit by a kerosene lamp on the table, inside. The play of light is changed into the play of shadow, with Blue Interior 1883 the woman’s shadow magnified on the wall behind her. .California Art Collector 1964 132 Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York) Pop

“I think in painting you can do things you can't do in photography. Edvard Munch said photography can't compete with painting because it can't deal with heaven or hell

Like other Pop artists, Hockney revived figurative painting in a style that referenced the visual language of advertising. What separates him from others in the Pop movement is his obsession with Cubism. In the spirit of the Cubists, Hockney combines several scenes to create a composite view, choosing tricky spaces, like split-level homes in California and the Grand Canyon, where depth perception is already a challenge. Hockney insists on personal subject matter - another thing that separates him from most other Pop artists. He depicts the domestic sphere - scenes from his own life and that of friends. This aligns him with Alice Neel, Alex Katz, and others who depicted their immediate surroundings in a manner that transcends a particular category or movement.

David Hockney

60 David Hockney is one of the living myths of the Pop Art. Born in Great Britain, he moved to California, where he immediately felt English identified with the light, the culture and the urban landscape of the 1930- 'Golden State'

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hUvoG_90XeE .Campbell Soup Cans 1962 079 Museum of Modern Art (New York) Pop

1 of 11 "Buying is more American than thinking, and I'm as American as they come." Andy Warhol "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."

Andy Warhol Signature Synopsis Campbell's Soup Cans, which is sometimes referred to as 32 Andy Warhol was the most successful and Campbell's Soup Cans, is a work of art produced in 1962 by highly paid commercial illustrator in New Andy Warhol. It consists of thirty-two canvases, each (51 cm) x York even before he began to make art (41 cm) in width and each consisting of a painting of a destined for galleries. Nevertheless, his Campbell's Soup can—one of each of the varieties the company screenprinted images of Marilyn Monroe, offered at the time soup cans, and sensational newspaper Warhol's early commercial illustration has recently been stories, quickly became synonymous with acclaimed as the arena in which he first learned to manipulate Pop art. He emerged from the poverty and popular tastes. His drawings were often comic, decorative, and obscurity of an Eastern European immigrant whimsical, and their tone is entirely different from the cold and family in Pittsburgh, to become a impersonal mood of his Pop art. charismatic magnet for bohemian New Much debate still surrounds the iconic screenprinted images York, and to ultimately find a place in the with which Warhol established his reputation as a Pop artist in circles of High Society. For many his ascent the early 1960s. Some view his Death and Disaster series, and echoes one of Pop art's ambitions, to bring his Marilyn pictures, as frank expressions of his sorrow at public popular styles and subjects into the events. Others view them as some of the first expressions of exclusive salons of high art. His crowning

Andy Warhol

28 Brilliant and controversial, Warhol is the leading figure of pop-art and one of the icons of contemporary art. His silkscreen series American depicting icons of the mass-media (as a reinterpretation of Monet's 1928-1987 series of Water lilies or the Rouen Cathedral) are one of the milestones of contemporary Art, with a huge influence in the Art of our days

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7VH5MRtk9HQ .Carcass of Beef 1925 014 Minneapolis Institute of Art Dadaism

Soutine looked to established masters like Rembrandt van Rijn and Jean Baptiste Simeon Chardin for inspiration, often referencing subject matter from their paintings in his own work. However, although many of his paintings contain clear references to historic works, Soutine reinterpreted each theme, imbuing it with a drama and tension derived from his own complex emotions not present in the older work. A preoccupation with food dominates Soutine's vivid still lifes, with the focus placed on the bodies of animals used for food. The artist's complex relationship to Here, Soutine cunningly portrayed the beef split open, as if food, with its prominent place in Jewish bearing its soul to the viewer. Soutine's repeated use of animal ritual as well as its scarcity in his youth and carcasses as the subject matter for still life paintings likely early career, lends the common vanitas stems from his complex relationship with food and his adoration theme a deeper, more personal meaning. of the work of Rembrandt. During his repeated visits to the Although labeled within art history as an Louvre, Soutine pondered the old master's Slaughtered Ox, Expressionist, Soutine's subjects and which bears a strong resemblance to Carcas of Beef(1655). paintings are far from the typical urban Unlike Rembrandt, Soutine isolated the subject and employed an angst commonly portrayed by German unusual method in the creation of this still life. After hanging Expressionists. Instead, his unique mode of the side of beef bought at a Parisian slaughterhouse in his conveying his inner psyche through the studio, he had his assistant fetch a bucket of fresh cow's blood manipulation of paint set a precedent that every few days and, while painting this work, Soutine would would reappear with the Abstract repeatedly pour blood over the carcass to ensure it maintained Expressionists. the bright color of freshly cut beef. Meanwhile, his assistant Soutine's early experience of religious fanned away flies and neighbors complained to the police about persecution had a large influence the smell, even causing health inspectors to almost cart the beef throughout his life, on both his personality

Chaim Soutine

Chaim Soutine is an Expressionist artist that lived and worked in Paris at the height of the modern era. Despite dominant trends Belarussian toward abstraction, Soutine maintained a firm connection to 1893-1943 recognizable subject matter. His innovation was in the way he chose to represent his subjects: with a thick impasto of paint covering the surface of the canvas, the palette, visible brushwork, and forms translated the artist's inner torment. As an expatriate Russian Jew living within Paris, with few friends beyond fellow artist Amedeo Houses with Pointed Roofs (1920) Modigliani, Soutine interpreted common themes with the eye of an outsider, further enhancing his unique perspective regarding his human subjects, landscapes, and still lifes and lending them a particular vanitas and poignancy. A prototypical wild artist, Soutine's https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XCb-2mHc0pw .Cataract 3 1967 040 British Council Collection Op

Steeped in the paintings of the Impressionist, Post-Impressionists, and the Futurists, Riley dissects the visual experience of the earlier modern masters without their reliance on figures, landscapes, or objects. Playing with figure/ground relations and the interactions of color, Riley presents the viewer with a multitude of dynamic, visual sensations. Riley's formal compositions invoke feelings of tension and repose, symmetry and asymmetry, dynamism and stasis and other psychic states, making her paintings less about optical illusions and more about stimulating the viewer's imagination. Riley became an icon, not just of Op art, but of contemporary While Riley meticulously plans her British painting in the 1960s, and she was the first woman to win compositions with preparatory drawings the painting prize at the Venice Biennale in 1968. Riley's and collage techniques, it is her assistants innovations in art inspired a generation of Op artists, including who paint the final canvases with great Richard Allen and Richard Anuszkiewicz. Due to the abstract precision. Riley creates a tension between geometric nature of much of her work, she has also been cited as the artist's subjective experience and the an influence for many designers, including the well-known almost mechanical feeling of the surface of graphic designer Lance Wyman, whose work on the Mexico the painting. 1968 Olympic Games shows a strong correlation with Riley's Riley's artistic practice is grounded in a aesthetic. utopian, social vision. She views her art as an inherently social act, as the viewer She also had an impact on a diverse number of artists associated completes the experience of the painting. with the YBA movement, including Damien Hirst and Rachel This belief in an interactive art led her to Whiteread. Even if artists aren't influenced by her abstract style, resist the commercialization, and in her they cite her intelligence and perseverance in an ever-changing mind, the vulgarization of Op art by the art world as a model. fashion world.

Bridget Riley

Bridget Riley's geometric paintings implore the viewer to reflect on how it physically feels to look. Her paintings of the 1960s became English synonymous with the Op Art movement, which exploited optical 1931- illusions to make the two-dimensional surface of the painting seem to move, vibrate, and sparkle. Grounded in her own optical experiences and not color theories, math, or science, Riley experiments with structural units, such as squares, ovals, stripes, and curves in various configurations and colors to explore the physical Movement in Squares 1961 and psychological responses of the eye. Her paintings inspired textile designs and psychedelic posters over the decades, but her objectives have always been to interrogate what and how we see and to provoke both uncertainty and clarity with her paintings. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vg4GE-7QoV8 .Ceiling of the Sistine Chapel 1508 137 The Vatican High Renaissance

A number of Michelangelo's works of painting, sculpture and architecture rank among the most famous in existence.[1] His output in these fields was prodigious; given the sheer volume of surviving correspondence, sketches and reminiscences, he is the best-documented artist of the 16th century. He sculpted two of his best-known works, the Pietà and David, before the age of thirty. Despite holding a low opinion of painting, he also created two of the most influential frescoes in the history of Western art: the scenes from Genesis on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in Rome, and The Last Judgment on its altar wall.

Michaelangelo Buonarotti

14 Some readers will be quite surprised to see the man who is, along with Picasso, the greatest artistic genius of all time, out of the "top Italian ten" of this list, but the fact is that even Michelangelo defined himself 1475-1564 as "sculptor", and even his painted masterpiece (the frescoes in the Sistine Chapel) are often defined as 'painted sculptures'. Nevertheless, that unforgettable masterpiece is enough to guarantee him a place of honor in the history of painting

The Agony and the Ecstasy (1965)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PEE3B8Fsuc0 .Chauvet cave paintings 138 Paleolithic cave art

Discovered on December 18, 1994, it is considered one of the most significant prehistoric art sites and the UN’s cultural agency UNESCO granted it World Heritage status on June 22, 2014.[3] The cave was first explored by a group of three speleologists: Eliette Brunel-Deschamps, Christian Hillaire, and Jean-Marie Chauvet for whom it was named. Chauvet has a detailed account of the discovery

Based on radiocarbon dating, the cave appears to have been used by humans during two distinct periods: the Aurignacian and the Gravettian.[5] Most of the artwork dates to the earlier, Aurignacian, era (30,000 to 32,000 years ago). The later Gravettian occupation, which occurred 25,000 to 27,000 years ago, left little but a child's footprints, the charred remains of ancient hearths[citation needed], and carbon smoke stains from torches that lit the caves. The footprints may be the oldest human footprints that can be dated accurately. After the child's visit to the cave, evidence suggests that due to a landslide which covered its historical entrance, the cave remained untouched until it was discovered in 1994

Paleolithic cave art

The Chauvet-Pont-d'Arc Cave in the Ardèche department of southern France is a cave that contains some of the best-preserved figurative French cave paintings in the world, as well as other evidence of Upper > 25,000 years Paleolithic life

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_xDcdVWnOiE .Christ's Entry into Brussels in 1889 1888 044 Getty Museum (Los Angeles) Expressionism

Ensor received a great deal of recognition during his lifetime due to his wedding of technical innovation to social criticism. His explorations, independence from tradition, and purposeful break with reality place him in a category of his own. Aspects of his work were influential in the later formation of a number of significant artistic movements including Symbolism, Fauvism, Expressionism, Dadaism, and Surrealism. For example, his willingness to critique the society in which he lived influenced a range of artists such as Derain, Munch and Picasso, while his use of bold, expressionistic color that adheres to Ensor took on religion, politics, and art in this scene of the surface of the canvas and refuses to Christ entering contemporary Brussels in a Mardi Gras parade. In recede in any traditional manner, affected response to the French pointillist style, Ensor used palette knives, the works of Matisse, Bonnard, and the spatulas, and both ends of his brush to put down patches of German Expressionists. colors with expressive freedom. Ensor's society is a mob, threatening to trample the viewer--a crude, ugly, chaotic, dehumanized sea of masks, frauds, clowns, and caricatures. Public, historical, and allegorical figures, along with the artist's family and friends, make up the crowd. The haloed Christ at the center of the turbulence is in part a self-portrait: mostly ignored, a precarious, isolated visionary amidst the herdlike masses of modern society. Ensor's Christ functions as a political spokesman for the poor and oppressed--a humble leader of the true religion, as opposed to atheist social reformer Emile Littré, shown in bishop's garb .

James Ensor

89 Violent painter whose strong, almost "unfinished" works make him a precursor of Expressionism Belgian Although educated in traditional painting, Ensor quickly stepped off 1860-1949 that path and began to develop a revolutionary style that reflected his own take on modern life. He was particularly fascinated with the popular carnival culture organized around the celebration of Mardi Gras each year throughout Belgium, most certainly influenced by the fact that his family's shop in Ostend was a main purveyor of carnival paraphernalia. The imagery he produced is consistently cynical and mocking; presenting an almost grotesque form of Realism meant to record the stresses underlying contemporary social morays of his time, and probably of all times. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YLImMgtXtm4 .Circus Horse 1964 124 Private Collection

Marc Chagall's influence is as vast as the number of styles he assimilated to create his work. Although never completely aligning himself with any single movement, he interwove many of the visual elements of Cubism, Fauvism, Symbolism and Surrealism into his lyrically emotional aesthetic of Jewish folklore, dream-like pastorals, and Russian life. In this sense, Chagall's legacy reveals an artistic style that is both entirely his own and a rich amalgam of prevailing Modern art disciplines. Chagall is also, much like Picasso, a prime example of a modern artist who mastered multiple media, including painting in both Chagall worked in many radical modernist styles at various points oil and gouache, watercolor, murals, throughout his career, including Cubism, Suprematism and ceramics, etching, drawing, theater and Surrealism, all of which possibly encouraged him to work in an costume design, and stained-glass work. entirely abstract style. Yet he rejected each of them in succession, remaining committed to figurative and narrative art, making him one of the modern period's most prominent exponents of the more traditional approach. Chagall's Jewish identity was important to him throughout his life, and much of his work can be described as an attempt to reconcile old Jewish traditions with styles of modernist art. However, he also occasionally drew on Christian themes, which appealed to his taste for narrative and allegory.

Marc Chagall

31 Artist of dreams and fantasies, Chagall was for all his life an immigrant fascinated by the lights and colors of the places he visited. Russian Few names from the School of Paris of the early twentieth century 1887-1985 have contributed so much -and with such variety of ideas- to change modern Art as this man "impressed by the light," as he defined himself

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WMhiNoZlkPg .Composition 8 1908 007 Solomon R Guggenheim Museum (New York) Abstract

When Kandinsky returned to his native Moscow after the outbreak of , his expressive abstract style underwent changes that reflected the utopian artistic experiments of the Russian avant-garde. The emphasis on geometric forms, promoted by artists such as Kazimir Malevich, Aleksandr Rodchenko, and Liubov Popova in an effort to establish a universal aesthetic language, inspired Kandinsky to expand his own pictorial vocabulary. Although he adopted some aspects of the geometrizing trends of Suprematism and Constructivism—such as overlapping flat planes and clearly In Composition 8, the colorful, interactive geometric forms delineated shapes—his belief in the create a pulsating surface that is alternately dynamic and calm, expressive content of abstract forms aggressive and quiet. The importance of circles in this painting alienated him from the majority of his prefigures the dominant role they would play in many Russian colleagues, who championed more subsequent works, culminating in his cosmic and harmonious rational, systematizing principles. image Several Circles. “The circle,” claimed Kandinsky, “is the synthesis of the greatest oppositions. It combines the concentric and the eccentric in a single form and in equilibrium. Of the three primary forms, it points most clearly to the fourth dimension.

Wassily Kandinsky

7. Although the title of "father of abstraction" has been assigned to several artists, from Picasso to Turner, few painters could claim it Russian with as much justice as Kandinsky. Many artists have succeeded in 1866-1944 painting emotion, but very few have changed the way we understand art. Wassily Kandinsky is one of them. founder of abstract art that uses symbols and designs rather than real people or things. Kandinsky spent his life trying to find the perfect combination of shapes and colors to show people just how he saw and experienced the world. Now, looking at Composition 8, you’re in your rights to think that he was obviously a dangerous loon with at least three schizophrenias, but modern researchers believe Kandinsky was in fact suffering from synesthesia, a condition which sort of https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZUfBl6iIGNo .Daniel in the Lion's Den 1615 097 National Gallery of Art (Washington, D.C.)

Rubens was preparing to paint a large canvas (approximately 7 x 10 feet) depicting the Biblical story of Daniel in the Lions' Den. In this Old Testament story the prophet Daniel, chief counselor and friend to the Persian king Darius, aroused the envy of the kings' other ministers. They conspired against Daniel, forcing Darius to throw the young man into a den of lions. The next morning Darius, concerned about his friend, had the stone that sealed the den's entrance removed. To his great joy he discovered that Daniel had been miraculously unharmed.

This painting is done in baroque style. Although Daniel’s portrait is unusual in that its location is Baroque is a style of European art dating off-center in the painting, the ominous dark coloring of the lions from the late 16th to early 18th century, and contrasted starkly by the pale color of Daniel’s skin and the blue Rubens is classified as a "high baroque" sky entering the cave as the entrance is unsealed, make for a painter. The style is flamboyant and highly dramatic statement. The strong color contrast forces the viewer decorative, full of drama and movement. to home in on Daniel, whose central activity is prayer. In this painting Rubens shows the moment The lions, which symbolize earthly rulers, are an important when early morning light first streams into feature of the work of art. In his painting, the cave. The lions squint and yawn in the features these animals from just about every angle. Indeed, he brilliant sunlight as Daniel gives thanks to worked from real models (Moroccan lions, owned by the his God for surviving the night. The ten sovereign in Brussels), and through this work, presents an enormous lions (two are almost hidden in unusual natural history lesson as well. The perspective of the the shadows) are placed close to the viewer, painting seems to stretch beyond the limits of the canvas, and yet giving a feeling of intimacy and danger. the viewer feels confined by the pacing lions and dark recesses of These are not tame lions. The bones of the cave. former victims and the ferociously snarling

Peter Paul Rubens

27 Rubens was one of the most prolific painters of all time, thanks in part to the collaboration of his study. Very famous in life, he traveled Flemish around Europe to meet orders from very wealthy and important 1577-1640 clients. His female nudes are still amazing in our days

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Mm7QYRUrFw .Dante Illuminating Florence with his Poem 1465 063 Duomo (Florence) High Renaissance

La commedia illumina Firenze (The Comedy Illuminating Florence) is the most famous frescoby Domenico di Michelino, located on the west wall of the Duomo in Florence, which used to bear another work of a similar subject. The painting was commissioned to Michelino by the workers of Santa Maria del Fiore, who wanted a portrait celebrating the poet Dante. In a mere five months the painting was finished and the clients were very satisfied. Until the last century, the Comedy Illuminating Florence was attributed to Mariotto di Nardo, grandson of the most famous Italian painter known as Orcagna, Dante holds his Divine Comedy between his beloved city of until the contract signed between the Florence and the realms of his imagined afterlife in this fresco workers of Santa Maria del Fiore and found in the nave of the Duomo of Florence. The city is closed Domenico di Michelino was finally off to Dante in this fresco, as it was in life when he was exiled in discovered. 1301; he was never again able to return home. The canvas is divided, like the Commedia, into three parts: Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso. Dante is placed in the center wearing a red robe and with the cap of the Florentines and a wreath of laurel on his head, and holding a volume of his poem La Divina Commedia (The Divine Comedy). With his right hand he points to a procession of sinners being led down through the nine circles of Hell. Behind him in the center are the seven levels of the Mount of Purgatory,

Domenico Di Michelino

Domenico di Francesco borrowed the name Michelino from his teacher, a bone and ivory carver. Italian a follower of the style of Fra Angelico. . 1417-1491 Michelino predominantly painted scenes from the Bible. However, his most famous work is the painting in the Florence Cathedral, La commedia illumina Firenze, also known as Dante and his World Michelino predominantly painted scenes from the Bible. His most famous work can be found on the west wall of Florence's "Duomo" (cathedral) Santa Maria del Fiore, including La commedia illumina Firenze ("The Comedy Illuminating Florence"), showing Dante Alighieri and the Divina Commedia (Divine Comedy). Along with Dante and the city of Florence, the work depicts Hell, .Dejeuner sur l'herbe 1863 096 Musée d'Orsay (Paris) Realism

Manet's modernity lies above all in his eagerness to update older genres of painting by injecting new content or by altering the conventional elements. He did so with an acute sensitivity to historical tradition and contemporary reality. This was also undoubtedly the root cause of many of the scandals he provoked. He is credited with popularizing the technique of alla prima painting. Rather than build up colors in layers, Manet would immediately lay down the hue that most closely matched the final effect he sought. The approach came to be used widely by the Impressionists, who found it perfectly suited In those days, Manet's style and treatment were considered as to the pressures of capturing effects of light shocking as the subject itself. He made no transition between the and atmosphere whilst painting outdoors. light and dark elements of the picture, abandoning the usual His loose handling of paint, and his subtle gradations in favour of brutal contrasts, thereby drawing schematic rendering of volumes, led to reproaches for his "mania for seeing in blocks". And the areas of "flatness" in his pictures. In the characters seem to fit uncomfortably in the sketchy background artist's day, this flatness may have suggested of woods from which Manet has deliberately excluded both depth popular posters or the artifice of painting - and perspective. as opposed to its realism. Today, critics see The 5 visual problems this quality as the first example of "flatness" There are at least five visual problems that scholars nearly in modern art. always mention but then dismiss as meaningless: Le déjeuner sur l'herbe - testimony to • the bather is out-of-scale. Manet's refusal to conform to convention • a nude woman at a picnic with clothed men is absurd as a scene and his initiation of a new freedom from of modern life. traditional subjects and modes of • the sunlight comes from two directions simultaneously: from representation - can perhaps be considered above the bather and from behind us, the spectator. as the departure point for Modern Art.

Édouard Manet

After his death, Manet's wife and friends worked to secure his memory and legacy, through extraordinary sales of his paintings, French acquisitions by the French government, and by publishing several 1832-1883 biographies. Considered by many art historians to be the father of modern art, Manet's influence on art and the art world is immeasurable. While greatness and scandal characterized his professional life, his desire for respectability ultimately dictated his private life. In spite of his relatively short career, spanning a little over two decades, his works are held in most major international museums and galleries.

He is best summarize by the 19th-century writer Edmond de Goncourt https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3xBGF8H3bQ4 .Deposition from the Cross 1525 065 Galleria Nazionale (Parma) Renaissance

Correggio was remembered by his contemporaries as a shadowy, melancholic and introverted character. An enigmatic and eclectic artist, he appears to have emerged from no major apprenticeship. In addition to the influence of Costa, there are echoes of Mantegna's style in his work, and a response to Leonardo da Vinci, as well. Correggio had little immediate influence in terms of apprenticed successors, but his works are now considered to have been revolutionary and influential on subsequent artists. A half-century after his death Correggio's work was well known to Vasari, who felt that he had not had enough "Roman" responsible for some of the most vigorous and sensuous works of exposure to make him a better painter. In the 16th century. In his use of dynamic composition, illusionistic the 18th and 19th centuries, his works were perspective and dramatic foreshortening, Correggio prefigured often noted in the diaries of foreign visitors the Rococo art of the 18th century. He is considered a master of to Italy, which led to a reevaluation of his chiaroscuro. art during the period of Romanticism. The flight of the Madonna in the vault of the cupola of the Cathedral of Parma inspired many scenographical decorations in lay and religious palaces during those centuries. Correggio's illusionistic experiments, in which imaginary spaces replace the natural reality, seem to prefigure many elements of Mannerist and Baroque stylistic approaches. He appears to have fostered artistic grandchildren, for example, Giovannino di Pomponio Allegri

Antonio Allegri da Correggio

Antonio Allegri da Correggio (August 1489 – March 5, 1534), usually known as Correggio (Italian: [kor'redd?o]), was the foremost painter Italian of the Parma school of the Italian Renaissance, who was responsible 1489-1534 for some of the most vigorous and sensuous works of the 16th century. In his use of dynamic composition, illusionistic perspective and dramatic foreshortening, Correggio prefigured the Rococo art of the 18th century. He is considered a master of chiaroscuro. .Duchess of Yorknee Elizabeth Bowes Lyon later Queen 1925 119

Born in Hungary, Philip de László (1869-1937) was one of the most celebrated and successful portrait painters of his generation. His many sitters included European royalty, aristocrats and society figures as well as members of his own family. This display focuses on some of de László’s finest paintings, notably his 1925 portrait of the Duchess of York (later Queen Elizabeth, The Queen Mother) and his compelling portrait of the 6th Duchess of Portland.

Philip Alexius de László

John Singer Sargent was reputed to have said: "Every time I paint a portrait, I lose a friend." The same could not be said of Philip de Hungarian László, his successor as the leading society portraitist in Britain from 1869-1936 1907 until his death 30 years later. De László, born in Hungary, was flattering and prolific, painting 5,000 portraits during his British career and capturing the likenesses of royalty and the landed gentry. He was the last of a long line of Elizabeth, future queen of England portraitists in the grand style, a tradition stretching back to Van Dyck.

Over the past 50 years, however, his work has been written off as glib and facile. When he died in 1937, the role of the British aristocracy https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BSWoUFar_Bk&t=109s .Field 1909 143 Hungarian National Gallery () Realism

Pál Szinyei Merse

With effervescent illustrations of the bright outdoors and the use of intense colors, this artist epitomizes the plein air movement. Hungarian After enduring a lengthy turbulent phase of daunting family issues 1845 - 1920 which nearly ended his career, the artist plunged into his work again thanks to the encouragement of his friends, and went on to create many acclaimed canvases after Emperor Franz Joseph purchased one of his paintings during an exhibition. Although he was rather critical of his own performance, his works were exhibited from Paris to St. Skylark (1882) Louis to Berlin to Rome during his lifetime. The painter’s masterpieces include the Picnic in May, a cheerful alfresco scene featuring a group of colorfully dressed men and women, while the widely criticized Lady in a Purple Dress stands as another symbolic https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=raVI8Y3vkjo .Finding of the Body of St Mark 1562 073 Pinacoteca di Brera (Milan) High Renaissance

Figure standing is an apparition of St Mark, gesturing to stop the raiding of the tombs, where a corpse is being lowered. On the right two figures, possessed by demons grabbing at a woman who is moving out of the canvas into our space. Technique and style: radical use of light and colour, dramatic contrasts of light and dark. Space rushing back which induces a sense of disorientation. St Mark is heroic and elongated. Expressive and Mannerist, a world of mystery with only the faintest delineation of form. All the balance and harmony of the High Renaissance, such as we see in , is The painting shows Venetians busy removing corpses from tombs opposed in a composition that is coming along the right wall and from a crypt in the background. In the apart, that is stretching at its seams. left foreground, the standing luminous saint himself with a faint It has recently been shown that this picture halo appears and beseeches them to stop, because his body has does not, as was long assumed, show the been found and lies pale at his feet, strewn on an oriental rug. In rediscovery of the body of Saint Mark on the center of the canvas, an elder (portrait of Rangone) kneels June 25, 1094, but various miracles of acknowledging the miracle. Elsewhere in the room, the figures healing are either astonished or oblivious to the apparition. worked by the Patron Saint of Venice: he is depicted raising a man from the dead, restoring a blind man's sight, and casting out devils. As in The Miracle of the Slave, which he painted for the same location, Tintoretto illustrates the power of Saint Mark by placing the invisible guidelines of his construction of the perspective in the Saint's outstretched hand. The donor Tommaso

Tintoretto

57 Tintoretto is the most flamboyant of all Venetian masters (not the best, such honour can only be reclaimed by Titian or Giorgione) and Italian Venetian his remarkable oeuvre not only closed the Venetian splendour till the 1518-1594 apparition of Canaletto and his contemporaries, but also makes him the last of the Cinquecento masters.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x3GFqNYaVRE .First Steps 1788 032 The State (St Petersburg) Genre

Soon Marguerite had her own patrons. Before the Revolution they were fellow painters like Hubert Robert, musicians like Grétry, architects. No royalty, no Marie-Antoinette, no aristocrats, but educated, wealthy bourgeois. Marguerite Gérard was no Court painter.

This may explain the small, intimate size of the portraits, barely larger than miniatures, such as the one used for the exhibition poster. Marguerite always included as her trademark a guéridon, a small pedestal table, clearly visible in this portrait of an architect and his family. Gérard started her career by etching and engraving copies of Fragonard's paintings; soon after, she began to create her own Marguerite Gerard 1778 portrait genre paintings. By her mid-20s, Gérard had developed her Before the Revolution Mademoiselle Gérard signature style, which featured painstakingly accurate details lived at the Louvre apartment occupied by rendered with subtly blended brush strokes, both traits borrowed her sister and brother-in-law. Together they from 17th-century Dutch genre specialists, notably Gabriel received in 1782 the visit of the Comte et Metsu. Gérard’s work is technically impressive but also practical: Comtesse du Nord, aliases of the Grand these relatively small-scale, portable canvases appealed to Duke Paul of Russia, future Tsar Paul I, and wealthy collectors who preferred to display in their homes his wife Grand Duchess Maria Feodorovna. meticulously painted still lifes and genre scenes rather than large history paintings. The numerous engraved versions of Gérard’s But times and tastes were already changing, paintings made them accessible to less affluent art lovers and and Fragonard’s fame was waning as helped increase her reputation. Marguerite’s star was rising. Her “semi-miniature” portraits only increased in popularity during the Revolution and Napoléon’s reign. The exhibition displays

Marguerite Gérard

Marguerite Gérard (1761-1837) is remembered, when she is remembered at all, as the sister-in-law, student and collaborator of the French great Jean-Honoré Fragonard. She was also an extremely successful 1761-1837 painter in her own right, to the point where her fame eclipsed that of her brother-in-law from the 1780s on. Then after her death Mademoiselle Gérard fell into oblivion – where she mostly remains to this day.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sah5tXiqUAE .Fish Magic 1925 072 Philadelphia Museum of Art Expressionism

Klee was fundamentally a transcendentalist who believed that the material world was only one among many realities open to human awareness. His use of design, pattern, color, and miniature sign systems all speak to his efforts to employ art as a window onto that philosophical principle. Klee was a musician for most of his life, often practicing the violin as a warm-up for painting. He naturally saw analogies between music and visual art, such as in the transient nature of musical performance and the time-based processes of painting, or in the expressive power of color as being akin to that of musical sonority. In his lectures at In Fish Magic, Paul Klee creates a magical realm where the the Bauhaus, Klee even compared the visual aquatic, the celestial, and the earthly intermingle. A delicate black rhythm in drawings to the structural, surface covers an underlayer of colors, which the artist revealed percussive rhythms of a musical by scratching and scrawling designs in the black paint. At the composition by the master of counterpoint, center of the painting, a square of muslin is glued onto the Johann Sebastian Bach. canvas. A long diagonal line reaching to the top of the clock Klee challenged traditional boundaries tower is poised as if to whisk off this subtle curtain. separating writing and visual art by exploring a new expressive, and largely abstract or poetic language of pictorial symbols and signs. Arrows, letters, musical notation, ancient hieroglyphs, or a few black lines standing in for a person or object frequently appear in his work, while rarely demanding a specific reading. Klee greatly admired the art of children, who seemed to create free of models or

Paul Klee

35 In a period of artistic revolutions and innovations, few artists were as crucial as Paul Klee. His studies of color, widely taught at the Swiss Bauhaus, are unique among all the artists of his time 1879-1940

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UJjAIZ0RK2I .Fog Off Mt. Desert 1850 134 National Gallery of Art (Washington, D.C.) Romanticism

Frederic Edwin Church was an American landscape painter born in Hartford, Connecticut. He was a central figure in the Hudson River School of American landscape painters, perhaps best known for painting large panoramic landscapes, often depicting mountains, waterfalls, and sunsets, but also sometimes depicting dramatic natural phenomena that he saw during his travels to the Arctic and Central and South America

Frederic Edwin Church

71 Church represents the culmination of the Hudson River School: he had Cole's love for the landscape, Asher Brown Durand's romantic American lyricism, and Albert Bierstadt's grandiloquence, but he was braver and 1826-1900 technically more gifted than anyone of them. Church is without any doubt one of the greatest landscape painters of all time, perhaps only surpassed by Turner and some impressionists and postimpressionists like Monet or Cézanne. .Galloping Outlaw 1857 140 Akademie der bildenden Künste () Romanticism

5 pictures Romantic landscapes of the Great Plains, natural nudes portraying his near and dear ones, and plentiful monumental murals all serve as a record of this German-Hungarian artist’s lifetime, and many of his works still decorate significant buildings of Budapest – including the Hungarian State Opera House, the Hungarian National Museum, St. Stephen’s Basilica, the Parliament House, and Keleti Railway Station, to name a few. Anyone can enjoy his Renaissance-style art while sampling aromatic coffees in Lotz Hall – housing a classic café inside Budapest’s elegant Alexandra Bookstore located on Andrássy Avenue – where the artist’s sophisticated perspective and dynamic composition characterize his gold-framed scenes from Greek mythology. All of Lotz’s upscale commissions and his elaborate style elevated the painter to become one of the most celebrated artists of his time.

Lotz Károly Antal Pál

Together with Rahl he worked on numerous commissions. Later he started on his own original works, first as a romantic landscape artist Hungarian in scenes of the Alföld (the Hungarian lowland plain), and then as a 1833 - 1904 creator of monumental murals and frescos in the style of the Venetian master Tiepolo.

After the Bath (1880) .Garden of Earthly Delights 1500 023 Museo Nacional del Prado (Madrid) Northern Renaissance

Bosch was the first artist to visually express beings and realms unbeknownst to human comprehension. His creation of the bizarre and the non-real was revolutionary amidst the staid status quo of tradition where artists painted literal truths without veering from the norm. He has said, "Poor is the mind that always uses the inventions of others and invents nothing itself." Bosch is noted for his profuse imagery of hell — as metaphor of our greatest fears and deepest desires; making him the preeminent image-maker of the absurdity and terror in our on-going human search for balance between the natural and spiritual It is quite a feat that a Dutchman who painted 500 years ago worlds. remains one of the most notable apocalyptic painters of the world Bosch is also considered to be the first and one of art’s first visionary geniuses. Hieronymus Bosch is modern artist by the Surrealists because of most celebrated for his detail-drenched and symbolic narrative his bold departure from depicting mere renditions of the dance between heaven and hell through reality and his endeavour in bringing the biblical-themed landscapes upon which play a revolving cast of interior life and its unconscious fantastical, and often macabre humans, animals, monsters, and machinations out of the mind’s dark make-believe creatures. His paintings demonstrate our age-old recesses and onto the canvas. tales of morality and the eventual fate of all sinners who succumb An unerringly, observant eye and extreme to the pleasures and perversity of the ego. These timeless stories, capacity for capturing detail mark all of masterfully portrayed upon canvas in Bosch’s impeccably steady Bosch’s work, compelling viewers to revisit hand, continue to challenge interpretation as well as position the a painting multiple times in order to absorb artist as one of the canon’s first original thinkers. its densely populated contents. The construction and presentation of his work, Bosch’s work is often seen as an eerie portend to the ongoing often through the use of triptych and existential struggles of man; he, himself is positioned as a sort of separated panelling, mirrors the epic

Hieronymus Bosch

68. An extremely religious man, all works by Bosch are basically moralizing, didactic. The artist sees in the society of his time the Dutch triumph of sin, the depravation, and all the things that have caused the 1453-1516 fall of the human being from its angelical character; and he wants to warn his contemporaries about the terrible consequences of his impure acts.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Y0udqmtgbk .Gathering Hay 1890 144 Hungarian National Gallery (Budapest) Impressionism

Though rarely seen in the West nowadays, an example of Csók's work can be glimpsed behind the opening credits of the 1971 film Countess Dracula. This is an 1896 painting showing serial killer Countess Elizabeth Bathory enjoying the torture of some young women: in an inner courtyard of one of her castles, naked girls are being drenched with water and allowed to freeze to death in the snow. The original painting was destroyed in World War II.

István Csók

Highly detailed portraits, lively landscapes, and intimate nudes distinguish Csók’s style with vibrant hues and zestful scenes. The Hungarian painter’s precious pieces were displayed worldwide from Rome to 1865 - 1961 San Francisco to Pittsburgh to London, bagging many trophies internationally, and in Hungary he was granted the government’s Kossuth Prize twice for his cultural contribution to the country. Csók cherished youth and beauty, along with laid-back settings of the Magyar countryside that are widely reflected in many of his paintings: The Awakening of Spring (1900) one of his notable works is Gathering Hay, displaying a group of young peasants preparing for lunch amid freshly mown grass, while the Godfather at Breakfast portrays a lighthearted man sitting at a set brunch table with pleasant sights in the background. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fuxGi1kmxcQ .Ghent Altarpiece - Adoration of the Mystic Lamb 1434 013 Getty Museum (Los Angeles) Northern Renaissance

Art historians generally agree that the overall structure was designed by Hubert in the early to mid 1420s, and that the panels were painted by his younger brother Jan between 1430 and 1432. One of the most renowned and important paintings in art history, generations of art historians have attempted to attribute specific passage to either brother, however no convincing separation has been established.[1] The altarpiece was commissioned by the merchant and Ghent mayor Jodocus Vijd and his wife Lysbette as part of a larger project for the Saint Bavo Cathedral chapel. The altarpiece's installation was officially Jan and Hubert van Eyck’s famous Adoration of the Mystic celebrated on 6 May 1432. It was much Lamb, better known as the Ghent Altarpiece of 1432, ranks later moved for security reasons to the among the most significant works of art in Europe. Housed at principal cathedral chapel, where it Saint Bavo Cathedral in Ghent, Belgium, the large and complex remains. While indebted to the altarpiece suffered a varied history over the centuries. International Gothic as well as Byzantine Dismantled, stolen, and damaged many times over, it was and Romanic traditions, the altarpiece reassembled, cleaned, and restored after World War II. represented a huge advancement in art, in which the idealisation of the medieval tradition gave way to an exacting observation of nature[2] and human representation. A now lost inscription on the frame stated that Hubert van Eyck maior quo nemo repertus (greater than anyone) started the altarpiece, but that Jan van Eyck—calling himself arte secundus (second best in the art)—completed it in

Jan van Eyck

11. Van Eyck is the colossal pillar on which rests the whole Flemish paintings from later centuries, the genius of accuracy, thoroughness Flemish and perspective, well above any other artist of his time, either Flemish 1385-1441 or Italian.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wxAwwAmBPrc .Girl with a Pearl Earring 1655 010 Mauritshuis (The Hague) Baroque

Tracy Chevalier wrote a historical novel fictionalizing the circumstances of the painting’s creation. The novel inspired a 2003 film with Scarlett Johansson as Johannes Vermeer’s assistant wearing the pearl earring. woman with a pearl necklace 1662

This painting is called “the of the North”. Three things stand out: the girl’s intimate gaze, her white earring in the middle of the picture, and the interesting combination of colors. Very little is known about Vermeer and his works and this painting is no exception. It isn’t dated and it is unclear whether this work was commissioned, and if so, by whom. In any case, it is probably not meant as a conventional portrait.

Jan Vermeer

43. Vermeer was the leading figure of the Delft School, and for sure one of the greatest landscape painters of all time. Works such Dutch as "View of the Delft" are considered almost "impressionist" due to 1632-1675 the liveliness of his brushwork. He was also a skilled portraitist

Girl with a Pearl Earring (2003)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x-Ezacf22Oc .Girl with Chrysanthemums 1894 107 National Museum (Kraków) Impressionism

By the last years of the old century, Boznanska’s painting was becoming more ethereal, with vagueness of form. Rather than disintegrating, they look as if they are gradually coalescing from their constituent brushstrokes. In Hôtel des Invalides in Paris (1899) the unmistakable structure of this building in Paris is in the process of materialising, as if in a dawn mist. Toward the end of the 1910s, Boznanska painted a series of quite radical still lifes featuring Japanese objects, such as Still Life with White Flowers and a Japanese Doll (1919). Her most famous 1894 portrait of an unknown child Girl with Chrysanthemums fascinated her contemporaries by its symbolist atmosphere and psychological insight

Girl with Chrysanthemums (1894) received acclaim for its expressive modernism, and for its exploration of emotion and mood in the context of character traits. It follows from the intimate portraits painted by Whistler.

Olga Boznanska

Which post-Impressionist painted in Paris from 1898, exhibited to acclaim across Europe from 1892, and in America from 1901, was Polish made a member of the Legion of Honour in 1912, and won the Grand 1865-1940 Prix at the Exposition in Paris in 1939? You may be surprised to know that the answer is the Polish woman artist Olga Boznanska (1865–1940), who was defining post-Impressionist art as early as the late 1880s. Place de Ternes 1903 .Gone, An Historical Romance of a Civil War as it Occurred 1994 047 Museum of Modern Art (New York) Conceptual Art

Kara Walker is essentially a history painter (with a strong subversive twist). She almost single-handedly revived the grand tradition of European history painting -creating scenes based on history, literature and the bible, making it new and relevant to the contemporary world. Walker's grand, lengthy, literary titles alert us to her appropriation of this tradition, and to the historical significance of the work. Walker's form - the silhouette - is essential to the meaning of her work. It is a potent metaphor for the stereotype, which, as she puts it, also "says a lot with very little information." The silhouette also allows This extensive wall installation, the artist's first foray into Walker to play tricks with the eye. There is the New York art world, features what would become her often not enough information to determine signature style. The work's epic title refers to numerous what limbs belong to which figures, or sources, including Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind which are in front and behind, ambiguities (1936) set during the Civil War, and a passage in Thomas Dixon, that force us to question what we know and Jr's The Clansman (a foundational Ku Klux Klan text) devoted to see. the manipulative power of the "tawny negress." The form of the Walker's images are really about racism in tableau, with its silhouetted figures in 19th-century costume the present, and the vast social and leaning toward one another beneath the moon, alludes to economic inequalities that persist in storybook romance. The tableau fails to deliver on this promise dividing America. More like riddles than when we notice the graphic depictions of sex and violence that one-liners, these are complex, appear on close inspection, including a diminutive figure multi-layered works that reveal their strangling a web-footed bird, a young woman floating away on meaning slowly and over time. the water (perhaps the mistress of the gentleman engaged in While Walker's work draws heavily on flirtation at the left) and, at the highest midpoint of the traditions of storytelling, she freely blends composition, where we can't miss it, underage interracial fellatio. fact and fiction, and uses her vivid

Kara Walker

Fresh out of graduate school, Kara Walker succeeded in shocking the nearly shock-proof art world of the 1990s with her wall-sized cut Armenian paper silhouettes. At first, the figures in period costume seem to 1969- hearken back to an earlier, simpler time. That is, until we notice the horrifying content: nightmarish vignettes illustrating the history of the American South. Drawing from sources ranging from slave testimonials to historical novels, Kara Walker's work features mammies, pickaninnies, sambos and other brutal stereotypes in a host of situations that are frequently violent and sexual in nature. Initial audiences condemned her work as obscenely offensive, and the art world was divided about what to do. Was this a step backward or forward for racial politics? Several decades later, Walker continues to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l0PCYBvV_9I .Grande Odalisque 1814 006 Musée du Louvre (Paris) Neoclassical

Within the long tradition of the female nude, Ingres's version demonstrates both his academic training and his penchant for experimentation. Indeed, the depiction of the idealized nude extends back to classical depictions of Aphrodite in ancient Greece. The reclining woman had been a popular motif since the Renaissance; Titian's Venus of Urbino was certainly an important example for Ingres. Here, Ingres continues this tradition by drawing the figure in a series of sinuous lines that emphasize the soft curves of her body, as well as by situating the woman in a lavish space, adorned with lustrous fabrics and intricately Ingres transposed the theme of the mythological nude, whose detailed jewels. Though he renders the long tradition went back to the Renaissance, to an imaginary body with the sculptural surface and clean Orient. This work, his most famous nude, was commissioned by lines associated with Neoclassicism, Caroline Murat, Napoleon's sister and the queen of Naples. Here, Ingres's painting also broke the expectations Ingres painted a nude with long, sinuous lines bearing little of pictorial illusionism by distorting the resemblance to anatomical reality, but rendered the details and body beyond the plausible. Ingres has taken texture of the fabrics with sharp precision. This work drew fierce David's directive to idealize the human form criticism when it was displayed at the Salon of 1819. to an extreme, so much that he was admonished by critics when he exhibited this painting at the Salon of 1819. The woman would need two or three extra vertebrae to achieve such a dramatic, twisted pose. So too do the figure's legs seem out of proportion, the left improbably elongated and disjointed at the hip. The result is paradoxical: she is at once

Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres

101 Ingres was the most prominent disciple of the most famous neoclassicist painter, Jacques Louis David, so he should not be French considered an innovator. He was, however, a master of classic portrait. 1780-1867

The Princesse de Broglie (1851)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lSV-J1JHDFY .Great Metaphysical Interior 1917 135 Museum of Modern Art (New York) Neoclassicism

Giorgio de Chirico was a pioneer in the revival of Classicism that flourished into a Europe-wide phenomenon in the 1920s. His own interest was likely encouraged by his childhood experiences of being raised in Greece by Italian parents. And, while living in Paris in the 1910s, his homesickness may have led to the mysterious, classically-inspired pictures of empty town squares for which he is best known. It was work in this style that encouraged him to form the short-lived Metaphysical Art movement, along with the painter Carlo Carrà. His work in this mode attracted considerable notice, particularly in France, In the years before World War I, he founded the scuola metafisica where the Surrealists championed him as a art movement, which profoundly influenced the surrealists. After precursor. But de Chirico was instinctively 1919, he became interested in traditional painting techniques, more conservative than the Paris and worked in a neoclassical or neo-Baroque style, while avant-garde, and in the 1920s his style frequently revisiting the metaphysical themes of his earlier work. began to embrace qualities of Renaissance De Chirico is most famous for the eerie mood and strange and Baroque art, a move that soon drew artificiality of the cityscapes he painted in the 1910s. Their great criticism from his old supporters. For many achievement lies in the fact that he treats the scenes not as years afterwards, the Surrealists' conventional cityscapes - as perspectives on places full of disapproval of his late work shaped the movement and everyday incident - but rather as the kinds of attitude of critics. The artist's reputation was haunted streets we might encounter in dreams. They are also not helped by his later habits of backdrops for pregnant symbols or even, at times, for collections creating new versions of his Metaphysical of objects that resemble still lifes. De Chirico's innovative paintings and of backdating his work, as if approach to these pictures - an approach rather like that of a those pictures had been created back in the theatrical set designer - has encouraged critics to describe them 1910s. In recent years, however, his work of as "dream writings." They are, in other words, disordered that period has attracted more interest, and

Giorgio de Chirico

99 Considered the father of metaphysical painting and a major influence on the Surrealist movement. Italian Although de Chirico's career spanned seventy years, his early 1888-1978 metaphysical works are his most significant. He was a major influence on the Surrealists. André Breton claimed that de Chirico was one the main torchbearers of a new modern mythology. For a time he was happy to be courted by the Surrealists, but he later referred to them as "the leaders of modernistic imbecility." Nevertheless, he was also inspirational for later French avant-garde groups such as the Lettrists and Situationists, particularly in relation to their interest in urbanism. These two groups consider de Chirico an architect as much as a painter, seeing in his enigmatic piazzas and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vf2BSi8LucA .Guernica 1937 092 Museo Reina Sofía (Madrid) Cubist

It was a confluence of influences - from Paul Cézanne and Henri Rousseau, to archaic and tribal art - that encouraged Picasso to lend his figures more structure and ultimately set him on the path towards Cubism, in which he deconstructed the conventions of perspective that had dominated painting since the Renaissance. These innovations would have far-reaching consequences for practically all of modern art, revolutionizing attitudes to the depiction of form in space. Picasso's immersion in Cubism also eventually led him to the invention of collage, in which he abandoned the idea of Picasso’s Guernica is HUGE, 11×25.6ft what sets it apart from the picture as a window on objects in the the other Picasso works is its message. you can’t help but feel a world, and began to conceive of it merely as little uncomfortable. The twisted faces, the solemn colors…it’s an arrangement of signs that used different, all a little…unnerving. And that’s the point, because the sometimes metaphorical means, to refer to painting was meant to represent the horrors of war and the those objects. This too would prove hugely suffering it inflicts upon individuals, particularly innocent influential for decades to come. civilians. Picasso’s purpose in painting it was to bring the Picasso had an eclectic attitude to style, and world’s attention to the bombing of the Basque town of Guernica although, at any one time, his work was by by Hitler's air force on behalf of the Nationalist forces of usually characterized by a single dominant General Franco during the Spanish Civil War. When Picasso approach, he often moved interchangeably started to paint his protest, he was at the height of his powers. between different styles - sometimes even in His cubist intelligence was now enriched by the mythology and the same artwork. poetry unleashed by the surrealist movement. He also looked His encounter with Surrealism, although back to such historical paintings as Raphael's Fire in the Borgo never transforming his work entirely, encouraged not only the soft forms and tender eroticism of portraits of his mistress

Pablo Picasso

1 Picasso is to Art History a giant earthquake with eternal aftermaths. With the possible exception of Michelangelo, no other Spanish artist had such ambitions at the time of placing his oeuvre in the 1881-1973 history of art. Picasso created the avant-garde, he destroyed the avant-garde. He looked back at the masters and surpassed them. He single-handedly redefined the tortuous relationship between work and spectator

Surviving Picasso (1996(

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jUpcyM-EK7Y .Harlequin's Carnival 1925 036 Albright–Knox Art Gallery (Buffalo) Surrealism

When Miro moved into the studio of Pau Gargallo on the rue Blomet in Paris, he came in contact with the poets and artists belonging to a group that had arisen from Dadaism. In 1924, this became the Surrealist group centered on the poet Andre Breton. Miro was never an orthodox Surrealist. However, the movement legitimized the use of dreams and the subconscious as artistic raw material. It thus offered him the possibility of liberating his own pictorial style by allowing him freely to combine the earthly and the magical elements seen in his "detailist" period. Harlequin's Carnival is good example of this change. The world of the imagination and subconscious, rather than being an end in itself, was for Miro a way of giving shape in his paintings to his lived experiences and his memories.

Joan Miro

29. Like most geniuses, Miro is an unclassificable artist. His interest in the world of the unconscious, those hidden in the depths of the Spanish mind, link him with Surrealism, but with a personal style, sometimes 1893-1983 closer to Fauvism and Expressionism.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HubcC0HFyIE .Harvest 1915 110 The Art Museum () Realism

Born near what is now Kharkiv, into a well-to-do family, she studied at an art school under the direction of , and went on to study with noted portraitist Osip Braz. She also traveled to Italy and Paris, studying at museums where possible.

Her work over time carried elements of Realism, Impressionism, Art Nouveau and Expressionism. Her subjects included landscape, still life and figures, but her primary interest was portraiture. In addition to portraits both formal and informal, she frequently painted and drew her children and created several self-portraits, the most famous of which (image above, top) helped establish her career.

She also found dancers of particular interest, featuring them in many compositions, as well as her own daughter in dancers garb from her classes (above, bottom).

Zinaida Yevgenyevna Serebriakova

holds a unique place in the history of Western art. A realist painter at a time when art was experimenting rapidly and the dominant Russian movements in the art world were Futurism, Expressionism, Cubism, 1884-1967 Fauvism and the Art Nouveau, her unique touch brought her recognition and the respect of her peers, even as the traditions she represented were becoming less fashionable and irrelevant to the contemporary world. With some of her most acclaimed work being portraits, she can be described as the Last Great Portrait Painter. .Isenheim Altarpiece 1513 048 chapel of the Hospital of Saint Anthony (Isenheim) Gothic

Different from High Renaissance idealism and humanism, however, are Grünewald's uses of figural distortion to portray violence and tragedy, thin fluttering drapery, highly contrasting areas of light and shadow (CHIAROSCURO), and unusually stark and iridescent color. It is these elements, already in evidence in this early work, that Grünewald was to develop into the masterful, individualistic style most fully realized in his Isenheim Altarpiece.

His Crucifixion, part of the many-panelled Isenheim Altarpiece, is now kept in Colmar. It was commissioned for the Antoinite Constructed and painted between 1512 and 1516, the enormous monastery at Isenheim and was intended to moveable altarpiece, essentially a box of statues covered by give support to patients in the monastic folding wings, was created to serve as the central object of hospital. Christ appears hideous, his skin devotion in an Isenheim hospital built by the Brothers of St. swollen and torn as a result of the Anthony. St. Anthony was a patron saint of those suffering from flagellation and torture that He endured. skin diseases The pig who usually accompanies St. Anthony in art This was understandably a powerful image is a reference to the use of pork fat to heal skin infections, At the in a hospital that specialized in caring for Isenheim hospital, the Antonine monks devoted themselves to the those suffering from skin complaints. care of sick and dying peasants, many of them suffering from the The more accessible Small Crucifixion effects of ergotism, a disease caused by consuming rye grain engages us very directly with the actual infected with fungus. Ergotism, popularly known as St. death of the Saviour. The crucified Lord Anthony’s fire, caused hallucinations, skin infection and attacked leans down into our space, crushing us, the central nervous system, . leaving us no escape, filling the painting with his agony. We are hemmed in by the immensities of darkness and mountain, alone with pain, forced to face the truth.

Matthias Grünewald

Mathis Gothart, called Nithart or Neithardt, was a major figure in a generation of great northern German Renaissance painters that also Flemish included Albrecht Dürer, Lucas Cranach, and Albrecht Altdorfer. 1434-1494 Grünewald remained relatively unknown until the 20th century; only about 13 of his paintings and some drawings survive. His present worldwide reputation, however, is based chiefly on his greatest masterpiece, the Isenheim Altarpiece (c.1513-15), which was long believed to have been painted by Dürer. He was possibly an exact contemporary of Dürer, but while Dürer was deeply influenced by the Renaissance, Grünewald ignored it in his choice of subject matter and style. Much of his work has not survived to this day, but even from the small amount that has come down to us, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p-IvNWAWQ08 .Ivan Tsarevich Riding the Grey Wolf 1889 117 State Tretyakov Museum (Moscow) Romanticism

“Ivan Tsarevich Riding a Grey Wolf,” 1889, depicts a scene from a popular Russian fairytale. The magical plot has been reflected in numerous literary works and musical pieces. The landscape background was derived from studies made in Abramtsevo. The landscape is very important. Forces of evil surround Ivan Tsarevich and Helen the Fair. The impassable wall of the wood rises in front of them. The artist's imagination has transformed an ordinary wood near Moscow into a fantastic, mysterious wilderness.

In 1876 Repin invited Vasnetsov to join the Wanderers colony in Paris. While living in France Viktor studied classical and contemporary painting. It was also during this time that he began to discover what would become his primary source of inspiration - Russian mythology and its legends, ballads, and fairytales. The 'folklore outlook' was still very much alive in the northern Russian village where he grew up and Vasnetsov found that his very soul was steeped in the poetry of Russian epic literature. Not only was he one of the first artists to turn to folklore for inspiration, but he also one of the first to study it in terms of method and technique. Thus he became the founder of a new style in Russian painting.

In Paris, Vasnetsov starting work on his first fairytale subjects, “Ivan-Tsarevich Riding a Grey Wolf” and “The Friend.”

Viktor Vasnetsov

specialized in mythological and historical subjects. He is considered the co-founder of Russian folklorist and romantic nationalistic Russian painting(see also neo-romanticism), and a key figure in the Russian 1848 revivalist movement. .Joan of Arc 1865 112 Private Collection Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood

Millais's Christ in the House of His Parents (1849–50) was highly controversial because of its realistic portrayal of a working class Holy Family labouring in a messy carpentry workshop. Later works were also controversial, though less so. Millais achieved popular success with A Huguenot (1851–52), which depicts a young couple about to be separated because of religious conflicts. He repeated this theme in many later works. All these early works were painted with great attention to detail, often concentrating on the beauty and complexity of the natural world. In paintings such as Ophelia (1851–52) Millais created dense The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was founded at his family home and elaborate pictorial surfaces based on the in London, at 83 Gower Street (now number 7). Millais became integration of naturalistic elements. the most famous exponent of the style, his painting Christ in the Millais's personal life has also played a House of His Parents (1850) generating considerable controversy, significant role in his reputation. His and painting perhaps the embodiment of the school, Ophelia, in wife Effie was formerly married to the 1851. However, by the mid-1850s Millais was moving away from critic John Ruskin, who had supported the Pre-Raphaelite style and developing a new and powerful Millais's early work. The annulment of the form of realism in his art. His later works were enormously marriage and her wedding to Millais have successful, making Millais one of the wealthiest artists of his day, sometimes been linked to his change of style, but she became a powerful promoter of his work and they worked in concert to secure commissions and expand their social and intellectual circles. After his marriage, Millais began to paint in a broader style, which was condemned by Ruskin as "a catastrophe." It has been

John Everett Millais

child prodigy, at the age of eleven Millais became the youngest student to enter the Royal Academy Schools. The Pre-Raphaelite English Brotherhood was founded at his family home in London, at 83 Gower 1829-1896 Street (now number 7). Millais became the most famous exponent of the style, his painting Christ in the House of His Parents (1850) generating considerable controversy, and painting perhaps the embodiment of the school, Ophelia, in 1851. However, by the mid-1850s Millais was moving away from the Pre-Raphaelite style Ophelia and developing a new and powerful form of realism in his art. His later works were enormously successful, making Millais one of the wealthiest artists of his day, but some former admirers including William Morris saw this as a sell-out (Millais notoriously https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-LgtilBrA4g .Judith and her Maid-servant 1625 020 Detroit Institute of the Arts Baroque

The work shows the scene of Judith beheading Holofernes, common in art since the early Renaissance, as part of the group of subjects called the Power of women, which show women triumphing over powerful men. The subject takes an episode from the apocryphal Book of Judith in the Old Testament, which recounts the assassination of the Assyrian general Holofernes by the Israelite heroine Judith. The painting shows the moment when Judith, helped by her maidservant, beheads the general after he has fallen asleep drunk.

The painting is relentlessly physical, from She specialized in painting pictures of strong and suffering the wide spurts of blood to the energy of the women from myths, allegories, and the Bible- victims, suicides, two women as they perform the act.[1] The warriors.[3] Some of her best known themes are Susanna and the effort of the women's struggle is most finely Elders (particularly the 1610 in Pommersfelden) and Judith represented by the delicate face of the Slaying Holofernes (most famous is her 1614-20 in Galleria maid, who is younger than in most degli Uffizi) and Judith and Her Maidservant (her version of paintings, which is grasped by the 1625 at the Detroit Institute of Arts) that scholars currently know oversized, muscular fist of Holofernes as he of. desperately struggles to survive. Although the painting depicts a classic scene from the Bible, Gentileschi drew herself as Judith and her mentor Agostino Tassi, who was tried in court for her rape, as Holofernes

Artemisia Gentileschi

85 One of the most gifted artists of the early baroque era, she was the first female painter to become a member of the Accademia di Arte Italian del Disegno in Florence. today considered one of the most 1593-1656 accomplished painters in the generation following that of Caravaggio. In an era when women painters were not easily accepted by the artistic community or patrons, she was the first woman to become a member of the Accademia di Arte del Disegno in Florence and had international clientele The Death of Holosfernes

Artemisia (1997)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BHFuLS9NW6s .Julie-die Vrouw 1985 150 Private Collection

With her brooding dark eyes, green hair, and paint–smeared body, this child confronts us from the menacing height of six feet and appears as a force of destruction. Yet the title reveals her to be a creative force—a painter. She is the artist's daughter, Helena, aged five or six, and her babylike body, able hands dipped in black and red paint, and startling visage are completely alien to traditional notions of the artist and the muse. "Historically . . . it was always the male artist who was the painter and his model the female," Dumas has said of this work. "Here we have a female child (the source my daughter) taking the main role. She painted herself. The model becomes the artist."

Marlene Dumas

Jule-die Vrou is a disembodied portrait painting framed in extreme close-up; only the model’s eyes and lips are fully rendered attributes South African of seduction and sexuality. The rest of the painting is obliterated by a 1953- corpulent fleshy pink, suggestive of femininity, sin, violence and womanhood. The contrast between representation, and abstraction suggests a psychological disparity, where morality, representation, and social convention are questioned. Die Baba (1985) ‘I don’t have any conception of how big an average head is, I’ve never been interested in anatomy. In that respect I relate like children do. What is experienced as most important is seen as the biggest, irrespective of actual or factual size. In the movies everything is larger https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6vwwJ4uSreo .La Mujer 1970 081 Collection of the artist Pop

Happy Reunion presents a group of women conversing in a living room. The macabre palette and the expressions of the women in the group suggest the notion of a façade upheld by society Spanish artist Isabel Oliver, who was part of the collective Equipo Cronica, explores the notion of idealised female beauty in her work ‘Beauty Products’ which shows one woman undergoing plastic surgery and another racing across a heap of cosmetics. The pursuit of youth and perfection is a topic with which most will empathise.

In the series, The Woman 1970-73, Oliver Happy Reunion focuses on a group of eleven women sitting in a comments on women’s role in Spanish living room, who laugh and converse with each other. Behind society during Franco’s dictatorship. In one them, a transparent wall reveals surreal scenes taking place in the painting from La Mujer series, a gaggle of outside world. The same scene appears in the window to the right women smile and laugh while strange and of the canvas. While the women are painted in muted tones, the surreal scenes play out beyond the room. exterior scenes are depicted in vivid and bright colors, featuring a giraffe on fire with flames burning out from its back and neck; a lake, green hills, yellow sand, and white abstract forms resembling horses. In the left corner of the foreground, a red-cloaked skeletal form appears with flowing blond hair and three hands, two skeletal and one made of flesh holding an old-fashioned hourglass that shows that time has run out.

Happy Reunion is a central image of Oliver's iconic series The Woman (1970-73), which examines different aspects of femininity in Franco's . Here, the happy women in the home

Isabel Oliver

By manipulating mass media images, in particular from magazines, Oliver critically appropriated history and art, juxtaposed reality and Spanish societal norms, individuality and family as well as addressed 1946- stereotypes of women propagated in popular culture. These popular images allowed her to comment on the superficial normalcy that women complied with in their daily lives. Working on an overarching theme, such as The Woman, in a series of images allowed Oliver to represent various aspects of a women's The Family societal, familial, and stereotypical portrayals. Seriality also mimicked the multiplicity of images generated by the mass media, and how images were repeated across different formats from magazines to television. .Lady Godiva 1898 116 Herbert Art Gallery and Museum (Coventry) Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood

Godiva, Countess of Mercia (/g?'da?v?/; died between 1066 and 1086), in Old English Godgifu, was an English noblewoman who, according to a legend dating at least to the 13th century, rode naked – covered only in her long hair – through the streets of Coventry to gain a remission of the oppressive taxation that her husband imposed on his tenants. The name "Peeping Tom" for a voyeur originates from later versions of this legend in which a man named Thomas watched her ride and was struck blind or dead.

one of the most prominent portrait painters of his generation. Both his marriages were to daughters of Thomas Henry Huxley.

John Collier

John Collier's Lady Godiva was bequeathed by social reformer Thomas Hancock Nunn. When he died in 1937, the English Pre-Raphaelite-style painting was offered to the Corporation of 1850-1934 Hampstead. He specified in his will that should his bequest be refused by Hampstead (presumably on grounds of propriety) the painting was then to be offered to Coventry.

the grand lady 1920 .Lady Lilith 1868 070 Delaware Art Museum (Wilmington) Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood

The subject is Lilith, who was, according to ancient Judaic myth, "the first wife of Adam" and is associated with the seduction of men and the murder of children. She is shown as a "powerful and evil temptress" and as "an iconic, Amazon-like female

In Paolo and Francesca da Rimini - The tragic story of the adulterous lovers, Paolo and Francesca, is recounted in Canto V of Dante's Inferno, and was a popular subject with artists and sculptors from the late 18th Century onwards. Throughout his life Rossetti was fascinated by stories of tragic lovers and illicit love. Here he illustrates the Lady Lilith is an oil painting by Dante Gabriel Rossetti first story of Francesca and her brother-in-law painted in 1866–68 using his mistress Fanny Cornforth as the Paolo, from Inferno by the medieval poet model, then altered in 1872–73 to show the face of Alexa Dante. They are condemned to Hell for Wilding. The subject is Lilith, who was, according to ancient adultery, although Dante has sympathy for Judaic myth, "the first wife of Adam" and is associated with the their true love and the cruelty of their death. seduction of men and the murder of children. She is shown as a "powerful and evil temptress" and as "an iconic, Amazon-like On the left, Francesca and Paolo embrace. In female with long, flowing hair the centre, Dante and Virgil look with concern to the right, where the lovers, murdered by Francesca's husband, drift through hell in each other's arms. Quotations from the text are inscribed around the edge of the composition.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti

93 Perhaps the key figure in the pre-Raphaelite movement, Rossetti left the poetry to focus on classic painting with a style that influenced English the symbolism. 1828-1882

Paolo and Francesca da Rimini 1855

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FQt96yBZFHQ .Lady Seated at Her Needlework 120 Private Collection Realism

Munkácsy's Christ paintings elevated historical genre painting to a new level of sophistication through his mastery of psychological insight and his very personal empathy for the plight of an oppressed man. In 1899, James Joyce wrote: “The picture reveals the mean human passions being characteristic of both genders with such realism [...] it is obvious, that the attitude of the artist is human, deeply shockingly human."

Neither 19th century visual art nor the historical developments of Hungarian art can be discussed without considering Munkácsy's contributions. His works are considered the apogee of national painting. He was a standard-setter, an oeuvre of reference value. He was one of the few with whom the antiquated colour techniques of 19th century Austro-Hungarian painting reached its most powerful and most lavish expression

Mihály Munkácsy

By 1888, he was Europe’s highest paid painter, thanks in part to the clever marketing tactics of his dealer. His most famous masterpieces, Hungarian known collectively as The Christ Trilogy, enthralled the public with 1844-1900 their massive scale and psychological insight. Under enormous pressure to produce, Munkácsy nonetheless kept evolving as an artist, creating stunning work that hangs in great museums today.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YqIq7zaHt1Q .Landscape of Aix - Mount Saint Victoire 1904 084 Philadelphia Museum of Art Post-Impressionist

This is one of the last landscapes of Mont Sainte-Victoire, favored by Cézanne at the end of his life. The view is rendered in what is essentially an abstract vocabulary. Rocks and trees are suggested by mere daubs of paint as opposed to being extensively depicted. The overall composition itself, however, is clearly representational and also follows in the ethos of Japanese prints. The looming mountain is reminiscent of a puzzle of various hues, assembled into a recognizable object. This and other such late works of Cézanne proved to be of a paramount importance to the emerging modernists, who sought to liberate The broken vision of Cezanne is a glittering array of glimpses themselves from the rigid tradition of and hesitations and reconsiderations. The intensity of his gaze pictorial depiction. and the severity of his mind as he attempts to see and somehow grasp the essence of the mountain before him is one of the most In Cézanne's mature work, the colors and moving and revelatory struggles in the history of art. Out of it, forms possessed equal pictorial weight. The very quickly, came cubism and abstraction. But even if Cezanne's primary means of constructing the new researches had led nowhere, they would put him among the perspective included the juxtaposition of greatest artists. Mont Sainte-Victoire is a series of oil paintings cool and warm colors as well as the bold overlapping of forms. The light was no longer an "outsider" in relation to depicted objects; rather light emanated from within. Instead of the illusion, he searched for the essence. Instead of the three-dimensional artifice, he longed for the two-dimensional truth.

Paul Cezanne

4. "Cezanne is the father of us all." attributed to both Picasso and Matisse. While he exhibited with the Impressionist painters, Cézanne French left behind the whole group and developed a style of painting never 1839-1906 seen so far, which opened the door for the arrival of Cubism and the rest of the vanguards of the 20th century

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KJuYXFHvRaY .Landscape with Charon Crossing the Styx 1519 025 Museo Nacional del Prado (Madrid) Northern Renaissance

In this painting, Landscape with Charon Crossing the Styx,, the ferryman Charon rows a departed soul down the River Styx. On the left side of the painting is paradise, a land of fountains, forests, and rivers emptying out into rich wetlands. On the right lies the infernal city of the damned. The tiny wavering spirit must choose–but see how his eyes dart towards Hell and away from the beckoning angel…

Joachim Patinir

62 Much less technically gifted than other Flemish painters like Memling or van der Weyden, his contribution to the history of art is Flemish vital for the incorporation of landscape as a major element in the 1480 –1524 painting. .Landscape with the Fall of Icarus 1558 057 Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium (Brussels) Northern Renaissance

This painting, featuring a subject from Greek mythology, depicts the hero described by Ovid in his Metamorphoses. However, in the composition itself, the presence of the mythical hero is in the detail, as only the legs of Icarus himself can be seen desperately flailing in the air. In the bottom right-hand corner of the painting, Icarus, surrounded by a fine spray of water, has just fallen into the water. Around him, the rest of the world remains unperturbed, as if unaffected by his demise.

The painting was neither signed nor dated. It appeared on the art market in 1912 and man’s indifference to the suffering of others. Icarus created became part of the collection at the Royal wings made of feather & wax but flew too close to the sun. In the Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium in the painting, Icarus is hard to find (he’s just below the big boat) and same year. the main character in the painting is going about his work without noticing The painting is probably a version of a lost original by Bruegel, probably from the 1560s or soon after. It is in oils whereas Bruegel's other paintings on canvas are in tempera. Though the world landscape, a type of work with the title subject represented by small figures in the distance, was an established type in Early Netherlandish painting,

Pieter Bruegel the Elder

It was long thought to be by the leading painter of Dutch and Flemish Renaissance painting, Pieter Bruegel the Elder. However, following Flemish technical examinations in 1996 of the painting hanging in the Brussels museum that attribution is regarded as very doubtful, and the painting, perhaps painted in the 1560s, is now usually seen as a good early copy by an unknown artist of Bruegel's lost original, perhaps from about 1558. According to the museum: "It is doubtful the execution is by Breugel the Elder, but the composition can be said with certainty to be his", although recent technical research has re-opened the question

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rSNdP9WLTQA .Leda and the Swan 1513 093 Uffizi Gallery (Florence) Mannerism

A painter's son, the young Jacopo was immersed in High Renaissance values as apprentice to Leonardo da Vinci and others in Florence. The agitated emotionalism of his altarpiece in the church of San Michele Visdomini in 1518, however, signaled a dramatic departure from his masters' balance and tranquility. Hallmarks of his mature Mannerist style were already present: psychic energy over physicality, beautiful linear rhythms, restless movement, ambiguous space, vivid colors. For Pontormo, the work of art was ornament. of his Florentine contemporaries, Pontormo Unlike most also studied northern European artists, Leda and the Swan is a story and subject in art from Greek particularly Albrecht Dürer. Under the mythology in which the god Zeus, in the form of a swan, seduces profound influence of his friend Leda. According to later Greek mythology, Leda bore Helen and Michelangelo, Pontormo, primarily a Polydeuces, children of Zeus, while at the same time bearing religious painter, developed more sculptural Castor and Clytemnestra, children of her husband Tyndareus, the form and disciplined his emotionalism, King of Sparta. retaining poignance. During his last ten years, he became increasingly reclusive and disturbed,

Pontormo

Jacopo Carucci, called Pontormo after the Tuscan town from which he came, was one of the leaders of the Mannerist movement, but as Italian Mannerism increasingly focused on masks and artificiality, there was 1494-1557 little room for his keen sensitivity and profound feeling for human states of mind. This quality is unmistakable in the elegant Portrait of a Halberdier, which shows Pontormo introducing an insightful new dimension of meaning to portraiture, expressing the sitter's public image while suggesting his inner life. Portrait of a Halberdier (Francesco Guardi) .Les Demoiselles d'Avignon 1907 088 Museum of Modern Art (New York) Cubist

Each figure is depicted in a disconcerting confrontational manner and none is conventionally feminine. The women appear as slightly menacing and rendered with angular and disjointed body shapes. Three figures on the left exhibit facial features in the Iberian style of Picasso's native Spain, while the two on the right are shown with African mask-like features. The racial primitivism evoked in these masks, according to Picasso, moved him to "liberate an utterly original artistic style of compelling, even savage force.

In this adaptation of Primitivism and abandonment of perspective in favor of a flat, two-dimensional picture plane, Picasso makes a radical departure from traditional European painting. This proto-Cubist work is widely considered to be seminal in the early development of both Cubism and Modern art. Les Demoiselles was revolutionary and controversial, and led to widespread anger and disagreement, even amongst the painter's closest associates and friends.

Pablo Picasso

This painting was shocking even to Picasso's closest artist friends both for its content and its execution. The subject matter of nude Spanish women was not in itself unusual, but the fact that Picasso painted 1881-1973 the women as prostitutes in aggressively sexual postures was novel. Picasso's studies of Iberian and tribal art is most evident in the faces of three of the women, which are rendered as mask-like, suggesting that their sexuality is not just aggressive, but also primitive. Picasso also went further with his spatial experiments by abandoning the Renaissance illusion of three-dimensionality, instead presenting a radically flattened picture plane that is broken up into geometric Surviving Picasso (1996( shards, something Picasso borrowed in part from Paul Cezanne's brushwork. For instance, the leg of the woman on the left is painted as https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pngGDycLQuE .Les grandes baigneuses 1900 039 Philadelphia Museum of Art Post-Impressionist

The Large Bathers is one of the finest examples of Cézanne's attempt at incorporating the modern, heroic nude in a natural setting. The series of very human nudes, no Greco-Roman nymphs or satyrs, are arranged into a variety of positions, like objects of still life, under the pointed arch formed by the intersection of trees and the heavens. The figures are devoid of any particular personality - the artist assembles them for purely structural purposes. Here Cézanne is reinterpreting an iconic Western motif of the female nude, but in an exceptionally radical way. The sheer size of the painting is monumental, confronting the This is the largest, the last, and in many ways, the most viewer directly with abbreviated shapes that ambitious work from Cézanne’s lifelong exploration of the resolve themselves into the naked limbs of time-honored theme of nudes in a landscape. It is also, perhaps, in his sitters. This is not yet abstraction, but in its unfinished state, the purest and most serene witness to the such instances Cézanne has already moved man whom Paul Gauguin described as spending “entire days on beyond the figurative tradition. mountaintops reading Virgil,” dreaming of wooded glades populated with beautiful figures who, if not exactly participants in a narrative as such, are full of animation and interaction. Perhaps it is its grand nobility—its authority as something beyond time, “like art in the museums,” as Cézanne said—that made it so attractive to many artists. the painting is considered one of the masterpieces of modern art, and is often considered Cézanne's finest work.

Paul Cézanne

4. "Cezanne is the father of us all." attributed to both Picasso and Matisse. While he exhibited with the Impressionist painters, Cézanne French left behind the whole group and developed a style of painting never 1839-1906 seen so far, which opened the door for the arrival of Cubism and the rest of the vanguards of the 20th century

picture in frame is from National Gallery in London

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h6D2rr38F00 .Lido 142 Hungarian National Gallery (Budapest) Romanticism

Géza Mészöly

Serene countryside settings and sweeping vistas characterize the artworks of this 19th-century landscape painter, who was passionate Hungarian about “the Hungarian Sea” (aka Lake Balaton), while many of his 1844-1887 meticulously crafted pictures illustrate peaceful panoramic views, showcasing peasants as they went about their daily life. The artist spent a fair amount of time in Hungarian nature from early spring to late autumn, drafting detailed sketches that he fleshed out in his workshop during the frosty winter months. Mészöly embodied the Girl at a Drawing Well plein air movement, and his images project his exposure to nature and his observations made under the open sky. One of his notable pieces depicts the Lido, an unexpected avant-garde work that vigorously revolves around the unity of three key elements: the earth, water, and .Mary, Countess Howe 1763 102 Kenwood House (London) Rococo

Thomas Gainsborough achieved name and fame as the best-known English artist of the 18th century for his outstanding innovations and techniques in both landscape and portraiture. Having been introduced to the Rococo style of art in the early part of his career, Gainsborough's works echoed luxury and leisure of aristocratic society through contemporary fashion. But his most influential works were ones of idealized pastoral life in the rural countryside, which would be taken further by the modern artists of Romanticism. With his exceptional abilities and passion for landscapes he exerted a powerful sway over At just under eight feet high, Gainsborough’s masterpiece is one the British School of painting and earned a of the most imposing of English eighteenth-century portraits. reputation as an artist of national significance. Wearing a formidably fashionable and impressively intricate outfit, Countess Howe puts her best – and immaculately shod – foot forward in a romantically stormy landscape which stands, symbolically, for her extensive landed interests. Sensuous but self-possessed, she fixes the viewer with an expression of coquettishly alluring hauteur.

Thomas Gainsborough

Exuding an affinity for Rococo stylistics, Gainsborough's portraiture was replete with lyricism and elegance that was a perfect way to English depict the opulence of his upper class clientele. 1727-1788 Gainsborough made conscious efforts at subverting the mainstream trends by displaying tendencies of deviation and social satire. For instance, in the work Mr. and Mrs. Andrews, the viewer's presence is not only acknowledged but the figures are also portrayed with uncanny expressions to powerfully convey the condescending attitude Mr and Mrs Andrews (1750) of the aristocratic society. Disregarding the conventions of patron selection, Gainsborough opened up the genre of portraiture even to the socially controversial personalities. This concept would be taken to the next level by the .Memory of the Heart 1937 146 Private Collection

colors and the colors of the Mexican flag. Symbolism, which is prevalent in Mexican art, is also seen in her paintings where she depicted animals that symbolized the tone of her pieces.

Many critics identified surrealism —an art form combining dreams and reality — in Kahlo's work, but she disagreed. After experiencing a tragic car accident, miscarriages and a tumultuous marriage, she felt that she was simply displaying her reality and personal life experiences. As an individualist who was disengaged from any official artistic movement, Kahlo's Small pins pierce Kahlo's skin to reveal that she still 'hurts' artwork has been associated with following illness and accident, whilst a signature tear primitivism, indigenism, Magic Realism, signifies her ongoing battle with the related psychological and Surrealism. Posthumously, Kahlo's overflow. Frida Kahlo typically uses the visual symbolism of artwork has grown profoundly influential physical pain in a long-standing attempt to better understand for feminist studies and postcolonial emotional suffering. Prior to Kahlo's efforts, the language of debates, while Kahlo has become an loss, death, and selfhood, had been relatively well investigated international cultural icon. The artist's by some male artists (including Albrecht Durer, Francisco Goya, celebrity status for mass audiences has at and Edvard Munch), but had not yet been significantly dissected times resulted in the compartmentalization by a woman. Indeed not only did Kahlo enter into an existing of the artist's work as representative of language, but she also expanded it and made it her own. By interwar Latin American artwork at large, literally exposing interior organs, and depicting her own body in distanced from the complexities of Kahlo's a bleeding and broken state, Kahlo opened up our insides to help deeply personal subject matter. Recent explain human behaviors on the outside. She gathered together exhibitions, such as Unbound: motifs that would repeat throughout her career, including Contemporary Art After Frida Kahlo (2014) ribbons, hair, and personal animals, and in turn created a new and at the Museum of Contemporary Art

Frida Kahlo

In this self-portrait, Kahlo expressed her misery and resentment over the affair that happened two years previously between Diego Rivera Mexican and Cristina. In this painting, her face has no expression but with all 1907-1954 tears. She cropped her hair and was wearing the European-style clothes, which style was her favorite when she was separated from Diego Rivera. And as always, she use the physical wounds to imply her psychic injuries. Portrait of Lucha Maria, A Girl from Tehuacan (1942) In the background was her schoolgirl outfit and her Tehuana costume and each set of clothes has one arm, with Frida Kahlo standing there Frida (2002) without arms and seems helpless. She stands there with one food on the ground and the other in the sea. The foot put over the sea wears an .Merrillium trovatum 1997 058 Dorothea Tanning Foundation (New York) Baroque

By the late 1990s, Tanning's focus had shifted again from painting, to sculpture, to poetry. By this time she was living in New York, having returned from France after Max Ernst had died. Tanning had some hand-stretched canvases that had been in storage since her life in Paris. She recalls how this particular purple flower came to her as, "a vision", and in turn led to the creation of a series of twelve similarly abstract flower paintings. The series were exhibited together two years later in a show called "Another Language of Flowers" in which Tanning incorporated her new found love of poetry by inviting 12 poets to write Art pervades Dorothea Tanning's life; not only have the many poems to accompany each of the paintings. images, objects, and texts that she created become worthwhile Her good friend, James Merrill, provided art, her very presence transformed photographs and moments in the verse to compliment this image. time to make them more artistic. The same whirling energy that followed Tanning as a person is also found in her energetic All of the flower paintings glow with soft brushstroke, a phenomenon linked to the day of her birth, "a day and illuminating depth. There are often of high wind," which was said to terrify her mother and, as a areas of dark void complimented by golden result, Tanning was born. The dominance of a frightening, highlights. At once suggestive of female unstoppable life force characterizes Tanning's entire oeuvre. genitalia and the far away cosmos, the work With ideas too big for rural Illinois, a place "where nothing of Georgia O'Keefe becomes an obvious happened but the wallpaper", the artist left for Chicago, and then, reference at this late point in Tanning's once in New York found that both in style and in company she career. The women's flower representations identified as a Surrealist (she married Max Ernst). With distinct are equally meditative as they both quietly progression through a long career, Tanning began by and powerfully uncover secrets that lie in meticulously depicting her own dreams. This penetrating the creases and in between the folds. psychological exploration continued while her work evolved to

Dorothea Tanning

Tanning's entire oeuvre - from painting to poetry - has had a profound influence on subsequent generations of artists. Her continued American exploration of the female form has led to her association with the 1910-2012 Feminist movement. Along with other female Surrealists, Tanning provided a necessary active role model for younger women also trying to break free of restrictive views of womanhood to become independent artists. Notably, her experiments in sculpture look forward to the career of Louise Bourgeois and later to that of Sarah Self-Portrait (1942) Lucas, revealing the same intense interest in base psychic forces. Her earlier paintings, in which children confront the viewer scantily clad with unsettling knowledge, establish a definite and interesting link to the photographs of Sally Mann. .Metropolis 1917 046 El Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza Expressionism

Grosz was drafted into the German army in 1914, after the outbreak of the First World War. His experiences in the trenches deepened his intense loathing for German society. Discharged from the army for medical reasons, he produced savagely satirical paintings and drawings that ‘expressed my despair, hate and disillusionment’. This work shows dogs roaming past the abandoned bodies of suicides in red nocturnal streets. The inclusion of an aged client visiting a prostitute reflects the pervasive moral corruption in Berlin during the war years. His role in the Berlin Dada movement The transformation of the city into a vast metropolis was one of affected political outlooks and artistic the subjects that most fascinated early twentieth-century painters, developments not only in Germany, but also and Grosz was no exception. One of the many artists anxious to in Russia, the Balkan nations, and parts of capture these rapid, constant changes, he painted this vision of France. Grosz's penetrating, darkly Berlin at the height of the First World War in an Expressionist humorous style of drawing and his use of style in which red is the dominant colour. In it he uses Cubist and satire as a weapon left a deep impression on Futurist devices, a very rigid perspective and overlapping figures the work of his contemporaries and the to convey the frenzied pace of city life. Yet whereas other artists of the next generation. His painters provide a highly optimistic interpretation, photomontage work set a standard for social Grosz—marked by his personal wartime experience—offers us critique in the new medium and inspired the an apocalyptic vision, stressing the alienation of man as he later collages of Romare Bearden. The plunges headlong towards self-destruction. critical content of his paintings influenced painter Francis Bacon, while his elaborately detailed and unflinchingly honest portraits influenced Lucien Freud's portrait work. Grosz's political orientation and social

George Grosz

George Grosz is one of the principal artists associated with the Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) movement, along with Otto Dix German and Max Beckmann, and was a member of the Berlin Dada group. 1893–1959 After observing the horrors of war as a soldier in World War I, Grosz focused his art on social critique. He became deeply involved in left wing pacifist activity, publishing drawings in many satirical and critical periodicals and participating in protests and social upheavals. His drawings and paintings from the Weimar era sharply criticize what Grosz viewed as the decay of German society. Shortly before Hitler seized power, Grosz moved to America to teach art and thus avoided Nazi persecution when his work was deemed "degenerate." His later style changed sharply due to his loss of faith in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=20zLAQTCAxk .Migrating Birds 1953 103 Carnegie Institute Abstract Expressionism

Lewis ceased painting Social Realist works in the early 1940s because he found the style was not effective to counter racism. He saw abstraction as a strategy to distance himself from racial artistic language, as well as the stereotypes of his time. Abstraction proved an important means to both artistic freedom and personal discovery. One marker of Lewis's work is his frequent use of the color black, which appears to predate that of his friend and fellow artist Ad Reinhardt. However, for an artist who was concerned with race and racism in America, painting during the turbulent 1950s and 1960s, it's hard not to see social Norman Lewis, a leading African-American painter, was an commentary in his choice of palette. important member of the Abstract Expressionism movement, Lewis garnered important gallery who also used representational strategies to focus on black urban representation and was involved with life and his community's struggles. Lewis's work is characterized several key events of the Abstract by the duality of abstraction and representation, using both Expressionist movement, this despite the geometric and natural forms, in the depiction of both the city and racism of the art world and American natural world, and expressing both righteous anger and joyous segregation of the 1940s and 1950s. celebration. His paintings are singled out for their linear, Norman Lewis, a leading African-American calligraphic lines, along with his bright, expressive palette and painter, was an important member of the atmospheric effects. Unlike other Abstract Expressionists, his Abstract Expressionism movement, who technique and content never wholly gave over to the subjective. also used representational strategies to Often overlooked in art history studies, there has been a focus on black urban life and his renaissance of interest in Lewis's oeuvre since the 1990s. community's struggles. Lewis's work is characterized by the duality of abstraction and representation, using both geometric and natural forms, in the depiction of both

Norman Lewis

Lewis's oeuvre demonstrates the ability to simultaneously paint abstractly without renouncing the representational and narrative. American Despite the strength of his life's work, Lewis - along with other 1909-1979 artists of color and - was excluded from the major studies on Abstract Expressionism such as Irving Sandler's The Triumph of American Painting (1976). Acknowledging the beauty and originality of his work, we can use Lewis as an example to question the racial strictures of art institutions and the artistic canon, selfportrait recognizing that these bodies furthered the racist prejudices of their time. Lewis was never forgotten within the African-American art community, and he influenced the second generation of black abstractionists. More attention is coming due to Lewis: in the fall of https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jk3wNadYA7k .Mona Lisa 1503 100 Musée du Louvre (Paris) Renaissance

Before its completion the Mona Lisa had already begun to influence contemporary Florentine painting. Raphael, who had been to Leonardo's workshop several times, promptly used elements of the portrait's composition and format in several of his works, such as Young Woman with Unicorn (c. 1506[97]), and Portrait of Maddalena Doni (c. 1506). Celebrated later paintings by Raphael, (1515–16) and Portrait of Baldassare Castiglione (c. 1514–15), continued to borrow from Leonardo's painting. Zollner states that "None of Leonardo's works would exert more influence upon the evolution of the likely the most famous, most controversial, and most expensive genre than the Mona Lisa. It became the painting in the world. It is a portrait of a rich lady named Lisa definitive example of the Renaissance Gherardini (a fact which was only known for sure in 2005). It is portrait and perhaps for this reason is seen famous because the lady’s expression is hard to define since she not just as the likeness of a real person, but doesn’t have any eyebrows or eyelashes. He began painting the also as the embodiment of an ideal Mona Lisa in 1503 or 1504 and finished it shortly before he died in 1519. The painting is named for Lisa del Giocondo, a member of a wealthy family of Florence. In 1911, the Mona Lisa was stolen by Louvre employee Vincenzo Peruggia, an Italian patriot who believed the Mona Lisa should be returned to Italy. After having kept the painting in his apartment for two years, Peruggia was finally caught when he attempted to sell it to the directors of the Uffizi Gallery in Florence. 6 million people see the painting each yea

Leonardo da Vinci

3 For better or for worse, Leonardo will be forever known as the author of the most famous painting of all time, the "Gioconda" or Italian "Mona Lisa". But he is more, much more. His humanist, almost 1452-1519 scientific gaze, entered the art of the quattrocento and revoluted it with his sfumetto that nobody was ever able to imitate

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vx_4pnQRm_M .Moulin Rouge 1895 106 Art Institute of Chicago Art Nouveau

Toulouse-Lautrec's career coincided with the expansion of the urban middle class -- people with money to spend on entertainment, but who weren't part of high society. He anticipated and shaped the needs of this audience and his style began to make an impact during his lifetime, inspiring the exaggerated outlines, languid, organic forms and script writing that appeared in the Art Nouveau movement.

He is one of the pillars holding up the rest of modern art. Without him, you'd have no Picasso, Warhol, Diane Arbus, or Chuck Close. Toulouse-Lautrec's celebration of When the Moulin Rouge cabaret opened, Toulouse-Lautrec was consumer culture and iconic popular commissioned to produce a series of posters. His mother had left advertisements paved the way for Pop art. Paris and, though he had a regular income from his family, In addition his portrayals fueled the making posters offered him a living of his own. Other artists obsession with superstars that persists today looked down on the work, but he ignored them. The cabaret (think Niki Minaj, Justin Bieber, Madonna, reserved a seat for him and displayed his paintings. Among the Miley Cyrus - the list goes on and on). well-known works that he painted for the Moulin Rouge and other Parisian nightclubs are depictions of the singer Yvette One further aspect of Toulouse-Lautrec's Guilbert; the dancer Louise Weber, better known as the achievement deserves special attention. outrageous La Goulue (The Glutton) who created the French Despite the celebrated freedom and Can-Can; and the much more subtle dancer Jane Avril. individualism of modern art, few artists of any period have been able to overcome social prejudice. While rubbing elbows with the riffraff was an acceptable, even encouraged rite-of- passage among avant-garde artists, Degas, Manet, and Van

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec

Toulouse-Lautrec was the first artist to elevate advertising to the status of a fine art. This is an extraordinary shift in the history of art, French obliterating the boundaries between high (painting, drawing, 1864-1897 sculpture) and low (posters, logos and other forms of visual culture) art. Acknowledging that some of his greatest masterpieces were posters for nightclubs does not in any way diminish their value. On the contrary, it set the gold standard for great commercial artists from Alphonse Mucha to Andy Warhol. In contrast to nearly all of the other artists in his circle, Toulouse-Lautrec had no trouble making a living. This is chiefly because Parisian business owners realized they could make money from his unique (modern) vision. In contrast to artists who worked for https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XLcbGHNFcpM .Napoleon Leading the Army over the Alps 2005 148 Brooklyn Museum (New York)

This painting is very typical of the style of Kehinde Wiley in that it is a monumental painting that incorporates brocade/decorative motif as an element of the background. Many of Kehinde Wiley’s paintings, like Napoleon Leading the Army, begin when he approaches a youthful black man in the streets (often from inner cities in the U.S.) and asks them to model for him. Kehinde then asks them to choose a painting from art history books for their portrait, and photographs them in the appropriate pose before beginning the actual painting, just as he probably did with the man who modeled for Napoleon Leading His Army Historically, the role of portraiture has been not only to create a likeness but also to communicate ideas about the subject's status, wealth, and power. During the eighteenth century, for example, major patrons from the church and the aristocracy commissioned portraits in part to signify their importance in society. This portrait imitates the posture of the figure of Napoleon Bonaparte in Jacques-Louis David's painting Bonaparte Crossing the Alps at Grand-Saint-Bernard. Wiley transforms the traditional equestrian portrait by substituting an anonymous young Black man dressed in contemporary clothing for the figure of Napoleon. The artist thereby confronts and critiques historical traditions that do not acknowledge Black cultural experience. Wiley presents a new brand of portraiture that redefines and affirms Black identity and simultaneously questions the history of Western painting.

Kehinde Wiley

It reinterprets traditional oil portraiture to raise questions of race and societal class. This immense piece hangs in the lobby of the American Brooklyn Museum in New York and helped established Wiley as a 1977- major player in the contemporary art scene. Beyond the details of how and where Dawson crossed the line in her generally execrable review, I think it’s interesting to ask ourselves why she, and perhaps her editors, felt the need to tear down Wiley for clicks. As with Selma, as with Kara Walker’s A Subtlety, as with Kanye and D’Angelo, Kendrick and Beyoncé, we’re living in a moment where the best work about “identity politics” isn’t being made for the glasses-wearing art kids, but for the masses. Just https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dHx4lFPqPiI .Napoleon on His Imperial Throne 1806 118 Musée de l'Armée (Paris) Neoclassicism

Although he considered himself to be a painter of history in the tradition of Nicolas Poussin and Jacques-Louis David, it is Ingres's portraits, both painted and drawn, that are recognized as his greatest legacy.

Ingres was profoundly influenced by past artistic traditions, and aspired to become the guardian of academic orthodoxy against the ascendant Romantic style, exemplified by Eugène Delacroix. His expressive distortions of form and space made him an important precursor of modern art, influencing Picasso, Matisse and other modernists. Ingres painted a new portrait of Napoleon for presentation at the 1806 Salon, this one showing Napoleon on the Imperial Throne for his coronation. This painting was entirely different from his earlier portrait of Napoleon as First Consul; it concentrated almost entirely on the symbols of power and the lavish imperial costume that Napoleon had chosen to wear, and the symbols of power he held. The scepter of Charles V, the sword of Charlemagne the rich fabrics, furs and capes, crown of gold leaves, golden chains and emblems were all presented in extremely precise detail; the Emperor's face and hands were almost lost in the majestic costume Perhaps now the most iconic portrait of Emperor Napoléon I, Ingres's painting was originally dismissed as overly gothic, archaic, and even "barbaric." Opulently adorned, the newly crowned emperor is represented among a hodgepodge of Roman, Byzantine, and Carolingian symbols. The intention, to legitimize

Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres

Ingres's portrait was soundly criticized at the Salon of 1806; it was even dismissed as "unintelligible" by his own teacher, Jacques-Louis French David. As the Neoclassical style began to ebb, with tastes preferring 1780-1867 a more natural and contemporary representation of power, Ingres's complex compendium of historical motifs seemed retrograde and outdated. Even though it was the target of scorn, with this complicated web of iconography and symbolism, Ingres ushered in a new twist on the Neoclassical and demonstrated his interests in art historical references and stylistic experiments. .Newton 1795 131 Tate Britain (London) Romanticism

Although Blake was considered mad by contemporaries for his idiosyncratic views, he is held in high regard by later critics for his expressiveness and creativity, and for the philosophical and mystical undercurrents within his work. His paintings and poetry have been characterised as part of the Romantic movement and as "Pre-Romantic".[8] Reverent of the Bible but hostile to the Church of England (indeed, to almost all forms of organised religion), Blake was influenced by the ideals and ambitions of the French and American Revolutions.Though later he rejected many of these political beliefs, the singularity of Blake's work makes him difficult to classify.

his opposition to the "single-vision" of scientific materialism: Newton fixes his eye on a compass (recalling Proverbs 8:27, an important passage for Milton) to write upon a scroll that seems to project from his own head

William Blake

40 Revolutionary and mystic, painter and poet, Blake is one of the most fascinating artists of any era. His watercolors, prints and English temperas are filled with a wild imagination (almost crazyness), unique 1757-1827 among the artists of his era. Largely unrecognised during his lifetime, Blake is now considered a seminal figure in the history of the poetry and visual arts of the Romantic Age.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SzPyeLQO8DE .No. 61 1953 123 Museum of Contemporary Art (Los Angeles) Abstract Expressionism

In 1936, Rothko began writing a book, never completed, about similarities in the art of children and the work of modern painters.[26] According to Rothko, the work of modernists, influenced by primitive art, could be compared to that of children in that "child art transforms itself into primitivism, which is only the child producing a mimicry of himself." In this manuscript, he observed that "the fact that one usually begins with drawing is already academic. We start with color." Rothko was using fields of color in his aquarelles and city scenes. His style was already evolving in the direction of his renowned later For Rothko, color is "merely an instrument". The multiforms and works. Despite this newfound exploration the signature paintings are, in essence, the same expression of of color, Rothko turned his attention to other basic human emotions as his surrealistic mythological paintings, formal and stylistic innovations, albeit in a purer form. What is common among these stylistic inaugurating a period of surrealist paintings innovations is a concern for "tragedy, ecstasy and doom". It was influenced by mythological fables and Rothko's comment on viewers breaking down in tears before his symbols. paintings that may have convinced the de Menils to construct the Rothko Chapel. Whatever Rothko's feeling about interpretations of his work, it is apparent that, by 1958, the spiritual expression he meant to portray on canvas was growing increasingly dark. His bright reds, yellows and oranges were subtly transformed into dark blues, greens, grays and blacks

Mark Rothko

19 The influence of Rothko in the history of painting is yet to be quantified, because the truth is that almost 40 years after his death the Russian influence of Rothko's large, dazzling and emotional masses of color 1903-1970 continues to increase in many painters of the 21st century

Black on Gray 1969

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1v1mBepDlOw .Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 1920 053 Philadelphia Museum of Art Dadaism

In 1918, the French avant-garde artist Marcel Duchamp picked up his brush after a four-year hiatus from painting and created a mysterious work that changed forever the way artists use and understand colour. After completing his painting, Duchamp put his brush back down again and, for the next 50 years (until his death in 1968), never painted another picture. The work in question is awkwardly proportioned – over 3m (9.4ft) long, yet barely two-thirds of a metre tall – and was commissioned to hang above a bookcase in the library of the US collector and patron of the arts Katherine Dreier. At first glance, the canvas (which This painting created a sensation when it was exhibited in New Duchamp eccentrically entitled T um’, a York in February 1913 at the historic Armory Show of terse abbreviation of the tetchy French contemporary art, where perplexed Americans saw it as phrase tu m’ennuies, or ‘you bore me’) representing all the tricks they felt European artists were playing appears to do everything it can to be at their expense. The picture's outrageousness surely lay in its something other than a painting. Its surface seemingly mechanical portrayal of a subject at once so sensual is dominated by shadowy allusions to a and time-honored. The Nude's destiny as a symbol also stemmed series of controversial sculptures that from its remarkable aggregation of avant-garde concerns: the Duchamp had recently been making – birth of cinema; the Cubists' fracturing of form; the Futurists' found objects such as a hat rack, a depiction of movement; the chromophotography of corkscrew, and a bicycle wheel – that he Etienne-Jules Marey, Eadweard Muybridge, and ; christened ‘readymades’ and the redefinitions of time and space by scientists and philosophers.

Marcel Duchamp

47 One of the major figures of Dadaism and a prototype of "total artist", Duchamp is one of the most important and controversial French figures of his era. His contribution to painting is just a small part of 1887- 1968 his huge contribution to the art world.

T’um (1918) - Yale University Art Museum .Nude Sitting on a Divan 1917 016 Private Collection Expressionism

Modigliani upended the tradition of the nude. Modern in their candid sensuality, his works in this genre are noticeably devoid of the modesty and mythological subtext present in many earlier depictions of nude figures. Because of these qualities - along with the artist's notorious womanizing - Modigliani's nudes were scandalously received at the time they were created. Modigliani's portraiture achieves a unique combination of specificity and generalization. His portraits convey his subjects' personalities, while his trademark stylization and use of recurring motifs - long necks and almond-shaped eyes - lends Simultaneously abstracted and erotically detailed, The nudes them uniformity. Modigliani's portraiture Modigliani painted between 1916 and 1919 exhibit a formal also serves as a vital art historic record, grace referencing nude figures of the Italian Renaissance while comprising a gallery of major figures of the at the same time objectifying their subjects' sexuality; they Ecole de Paris circle, to which he belonged "exemplify his position between tradition and modernism". The following his move to Paris in 1906. nudes of this period are "displayed boldly, with only the faintest The work of the Romanian sculptor suggestion of setting.... neither demure nor provocative, they are Constantin Brancusi was perhaps the single depicted with a degree of objectivity. Yet the uniformly thick, most important influence on Modigliani's rough application of paint - as if applied by a sculptor's hand - is creative development. Although Modigliani more concerned with mass and the visceral perception of the is best known as a painter, he focused on female body than with titillation and the re-creation of sculpture early on in his career, and, some translucent, tactile flesh". This series of nudes was writers have argued, may have regarded his commissioned by Modigliani's dealer and friend Leopold true calling as that of sculptor. The Zborowski, who lent the artist use of his apartment, supplied sculptures Modigliani created in 1909-14, models and painting materials, and paid him between fifteen and of which twenty-five carvings and one twenty francs each day for his work. woodcut survive, were highly influential on

Amedeo Modigliani

83. One of the most original portraitists of the history of painting, considered as a "cursed" painter because of his wild life and early Italian death. 1884-1920

(1919) Jeanne Hébuterne

Modigliani (2004)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n1MoBohEzqE&t=8s .Number 5, 1948 1948 111 Private Collection Abstract Expressionism

Pollock's immediate legacy was certainly felt most by other painters. His work brought together elements of Cubism, Surrealism, and Impressionism, and transcended them all. Beside that achievement even greats such as de Kooning, who remained closer to Cubism, and hung on to figurative imagery, seemed to fall short. And the best among subsequent generations of painters would all have to take on his achievement, just as Pollock himself had wrestled with Picasso.

And as early as 1958, when pioneering performance artist Allan Kaprow explicitly Time and time again, innovative art styles become the new addressed the question of his legacy in an mainstream. People have gone through lengths to express how article for Art News, some were beginning they feel over a canvas or any form of media. People are very to wonder if Pollock might even have interested with the history and techniques of different artists. We opened up possibilities outside of the realm have thousands of painters all over the world that graced the of painting. To borrow critic Harold diverse world of art with their contributions. One famous art Rosenberg's words, Pollock had re-imagined piece is No. 5, by Jackson Pollock that gave a whole new the canvas not as "a space in which to meaning to the Abstract Expressionism. reproduce, re-design, analyze, or 'express' an object.. [but as] an arena in which to A Great Contribution to the Abstract Expressionist Movement act." And it was a short step from this The Abstract Expressionism movement was started just right after realization to interpreting Pollock's balletic the World War 2. This American movement was able to achieve moves around the canvas as a species of worldwide influence. It was also the movement that placed New performance art. Since then, Pollock's York City as the center of the art world. The name of this reputation has only increased. The subject American movement came from a fusion of the German of many biographies, a movie biopic, and Expressionists’ self-denial and emotional intensity. The Abstract major retrospectives, he has become not

Jackson Pollock

13 The major figure of American Abstract Expressionism, Pollock created his best works, his famous drips, between 1947 and 1950. American After those fascinating years, comparable to Picasso’s blue period or 1912-1956 van Gogh’s final months in Auvers, he abandoned the drip, and his latest works are often bold, unexciting works. Pollock's tough and unsettled early life growing up in the American West shaped him into the bullish character he would become. Later, a series of influences came together to guide Pollock to his mature style: years spent painting realist murals in the 1930s showed him the power of painting on a large scale; Surrealism suggested ways to Pollock (2000) describe the unconscious; and Cubism guided his understanding of picture space. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1U19VOF4qfs .Olympia 1863 031 Musée d'Orsay (Paris) Realism

Distinguishing features: The subject matter is sensational - a nude who, in the eyes of 19th-century observers, was clearly a prostitute, in her trashy mules with a bootlace for a necklace. Yet Manet’s attention is anything but riveted. His eye drifts to the way the bed linen is tucked in, to the ruffled white pillows, the expanse of sheet. Her skin is a bright, glaring white; there are no half-tones, so the visual transitions from light to shadow are harsh. But it is Olympia’s look that is hardest to take. Her big, black pupils are uneven in size. This asymmetry is enhanced by the decoration in her hair and the turn of her It created an uproar, because of the way he painted her gaze and head. It is impossible to resolve the focus of other subtleties indicating that she was a mistress. The objections her eyes, or mood: melancholy or contempt? to Olympia had more to do with the realism of the subject matter than the fact that the model was nude. While Olympia's pose had When it was exhibited at the Paris Salon in classic precedents, the subject of the painting represented a 1865, critics and crowd were scandalised. prostitute. In the painting, the maid offers the courtesan a We are still challenged by Olympia: she is bouquet of flowers, presumably a gift from a client, not the sort so depthless that the eye cannot wander the of scene previously depicted in the art of the era. Since picture as if in a painterly dream world. We composition was not his forte, Manet took it ready-made from glance from detail to detail, trying to make the Venus of Urbino of Titian, hoping, no doubt, to shield himself sense of the whole, yet always come back to from the critical brickbats by invoking Titian's name. As if this a world fragmented, an eroticism of blunt were not enough, he replaced the innocuous lapdog sleeping at fact. the feet of Titian's Venus with a black cat, its back arched and tail raised. Inspirations and influences: The source is Titian’s Venus of Urbino (1538) whose gaze is unambiguously inviting. Olympia is a

Édouard Manet

18. the origin of Impressionism, a revolutionary in a time of great artistic revolutions. His (at the time) quite polemical "Olympia" or French "Déjeuner sur l'Herbe" opened the way for the great figures of 1832-1883 Impressionism

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bihBbqzL96Y .Portrait of a Woman with a Winged Bonnet 1435 094 Staatliche Museen (Berlin) Northern Renaissance

Every Flemish painter of the succeeding generation—Petrus Christus, Dieric Bouts, Hugo van der Goes, and Hans Memling (who may have studied in Rogier’s atelier)—depended on his formulations; and, during the 16th century, Rogierian ideas were transformed and revitalized by Quentin Massys and Bernard van Orley. Rogier’s art was also a vehicle for transporting the Flemish style throughout Europe, and during the second half of the 15th century his influence dominated painting in France, Germany, and Spain. today he is known, with Robert Campin and van Eyck, as the third (by birth date) of The sitter in this small work wears a wide, white hennin over a the three great Early Flemish artists brown dress, which features a black-lined, v-shaped neckline. As (Vlaamse Primitieven or "Flemish is usual of van der Weyden's female portraits, her hands are Primitives"), and widely as the most clasped tightly in prayer, while her expression is generally influential Northern painter of the 15th humble. Unusually for a van der Weyden', she does not bow her century. head or gaze into the middle distance.

Rogier van der Weyden

64 After Van Eyck, the leading exponent of Flemish painting in the fifteenth century; a master of perspective and composition. German 1399-1464

Descent from the Cross

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uDsv5gyHXuQ .Portrait of Isabel Rawsthorne 1966 125 Tate Britain (London) Abstract Expressionism

figurative painter known for his bold, grotesque, emotionally charged, raw imagery. He is best known for his depictions of popes, crucifixions and portraits of close friends. His abstracted figures are typically isolated in geometrical cage like spaces, set against flat, nondescript backgrounds. Bacon said that he saw images "in series", and his work typically focuses on a single subject for sustained periods, often in triptych or diptych

This is one of the many paintings Bacon made of his friend, the artist Isabel Rawsthorne. He preferred to base such works on photographs of the subject rather than work from life.Intimate knowledge of the sitter was also essential. ‘What I want to do is to distort the thing far beyond the appearance, but in the distortion to bring it back to a recording of the appearance’, he said.

Francis Bacon

36 Maximum exponent, along with Lucian Freud, of the so-called "School of London", Bacon's style was totally against all canons of Irish painting, not only in those terms related to beauty, but also against the 1909-1992 dominance of the Abstract Expressionism of his time .Ram's Head 1935 109 Brooklyn Museum (New York) Modernism

O'Keeffe incorporated the techniques of other artists and was especially influenced by Paul Strand's use of cropping in his photographs; she was one of the first artists to adapt the method to painting by rendering close-ups of uniquely American objects that were highly detailed yet abstract. O'Keeffe did not follow any specific artistic movement, but like Arthur Dove she experimented with abstracting motifs from nature. She worked in series, synthesizing abstraction and realism to produce works that emphasized the primary forms of nature. While some of these works are highly detailed, in others, she stripped O’Keeffe wanted to find the essence of natural objects through away what she considered the inessential to her painting. She was a master at using colour, light and shadow focus on shape and color. to simplify the complexity of nature on the canvas, giving the Through intense observation of nature, viewer a unique vision of the natural world. experimentation with scale, and nuanced Some people in O’Keeffe’s day found her close-ups of flowers use of line and color, O'Keeffe's art almost erotic, looking like the female reproductive organs. remained grounded in representation even O’Keeffe herself dismissed this. while pushing at its limits. From the 1940s through the 1960s in particular, O'Keeffe's art was outside the mainstream as she was one of the few artists to adhere to representation in a period when others were exploring non-representation or had abandoned painting altogether.

Georgia O'Keefe

97 A leading figure in the 20th century American Art, O'Keefe single-handedly redefined the Western American painting. Georgia American O’Keeffe is one of the most significant and intriguing artists of the 1887-1986 twentieth century, known internationally for her boldly innovative art. Her distinct flowers, dramatic cityscapes, glowing landscapes, and images of bones against the stark desert sky are iconic and original contributions to American Modernism. an American painter probably most famous for her beautiful and Black Iris III (1926) unmistakable close-ups of flowers and shells, as well as the landscapes and bleached desert bones of New Mexico.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_CSibQcg5BA .Rendezvous of Lovers 1902 145 Hungarian National Gallery (Budapest) Post-Impressionist

As a key representative of the avant-garde movement with his arbitrary post-Impressionist and subjective Expressionist style featuring vivid colors and distorted forms, Csontváry embarked on a journey from Budapest to international fame. A worldwide excursion deeply influenced his later works, and that was materialized in depictions of faraway nations and landscapes on large-scale canvases. His masterpieces include the Lonely Cedar, a windblown tree standing in solitude and dominating the landscape against the washed-up backdrop of sky and sea (the artwork is exhibited in the former He painted his major works between 1903 and 1909. He had Army Headquarters within the Buda Castle some exhibitions in Paris (1907) and Western Europe. Most of until December 31st), or the double-faced the critics in Western Europe recognized his abilities, art and Old Fisherman, demonstrating a peaceful congeniality, but in the during his life, he elderly man turning into a furious devil by was considered to be an eccentric crank for several reasons, e. g. a mirror effect. Although his works are for his vegetarianism, anti-alcoholism, anti-smoking, pacifism, widely known and appraised, during his and his cloudy, prophetic writings and pamphlets about his life lifetime Csontváry found little acclaim for (Curriculum), genius (The Authority, The Genius) and religious his imaginative style. philosophy (The Positivum). Some of his biographists considered this as a latent, but increasingly disruptive schizophrenia.[6] Although he was later acclaimed, during his lifetime Csontváry found little understanding for his visionary, expressionistic style. A loner by nature, his “failure” impaired his creative power.

Tivadar Csontváry Kosztka

part of the avant-garde movement of the early twentieth century.[1] Working mostly in Budapest, he was one of the first Hungarian Hungarian painters to become known in Europe. On 15 December 2006 the 1853-1919 Kieselbach Gallery in Budapest sold an auction the most expensive Csontváry painting so far. The Rendezvous (1902) ("Meeting of the lovers") was bought by an anonymous client for more than one million EUR. .Saturn Devouring His Children 1823 108 Museo Nacional del Prado (Madrid) Rococo

Goya occupies a unique position within the history of Western art, and is often cited as both an Old Master and the first truly modern artist. His art embodies Romanticism's emphasis on subjectivity, imagination, and emotion, characteristics reflected most notably in his prints and later private paintings. At the same time, Goya was an astute observer of the world around him, and his art responded directly to the tumultuous events of his day, from the liberations of the Enlightenment, to the suppressions of the Inquisition, to the horrors of war following the Napoleonic invasion. Both for its inventiveness and its According to the traditional interpretation, it depicts the Greek political engagement, Goya's art had an myth of the Titan Cronus (in the title Romanized to Saturn), who, enormous impact on later modern artists. fearing that he would be overthrown by one of his children,[1] His unflinching scenes from the Peninsular ate each one upon their birth. War presaged the works of Pablo Picasso in Goya's oeuvre represents a unique marriage of tradition and the 20th century, while his exploration of modernity. As an Old Master, he honored the works of his bizarre and dreamlike subjects in the predecessors like Velázquez and Rembrandt, working in a Caprichos laid the foundation for Surrealists traditional manner as seen in his many court portraits. At the like Salvador Dalí. Goya's influence extends same time, his bold departure from the artistic conventions of his to the 21st century, as contemporary artists day earns him a place as one of the first Modern Western have also drawn inspiration from the artist's painters. For instance, his use of social satire finds its legacy in grotesque imagery and searing social the works of James Ensor, who likewise pilloried the duped commentary. masses and corrupt leaders of his day, while the qualities of shock and horror - seen in his more dark or violent works - find a thread in contemporary art's concern for the abject and psychologically disturbed, from Damien Hirst to Paul McCarthy.

Francisco Goya

Goya's late paintings are among the darkest and most mysterious of his creations. His series of 14 paintings from his farmhouse on the Spanish outskirts of Madrid (the so-called "Black Paintings") contain images 1746-1828 of violence, despair, evil, and longing. They are the pessimistic expressions of an aging, deaf artist who was disillusioned with society and struggling with his own sanity. Their exploration of the dark forces at work in his own subconscious foreshadows the art of the Expressionists and Surrealists in the 20th century. Aquelarre (1820)

Goya's Ghosts (2006)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ScVgB5OhNfU .Self-Portrait 1556 011 Lancut Museum (Poland) Renaissance

Instead, she experimented with new styles of portraiture, setting subjects informally. Self-portraits and family members were her most frequent subjects, as seen in such paintings as Self-Portrait (1554, Kunsthistoriches Museum, Vienna), Portrait of Amilcare, Minerva and Asdrubale Anguissola (c. 1557–1558, Nivaagaards Malerisambling, Niva, Denmark), and her most famous picture, The Chess Game (1555, Muzeum Narodowe, Poznan), which depicted her sisters Lucia, Minerva and Europa. Painted when Sofonisba was 23 years old, The Chess Game is an intimate representation of an everyday family scene, Anguissola's education and training had different implications combining elaborate formal clothing with than that of men, since men and women worked in separate very informal facial expressions, which was spheres. Her training was not to help her into a profession unusual for Italian art at this time. wherein she would compete for commissions with male artists, but to make her a better wife, companion, and mother.[6] Although Anguissola enjoyed significantly more encouragement and support than the average woman of her day, her social class did not allow her to transcend the constraints of her sex. Without the possibility of studying anatomy or drawing from life (it was considered unacceptable for a lady to view nudes), she could not undertake the complex multi-figure compositions required for large-scale religious or history paintings.

Sofonisba Anguissol

Her most distinctive and attractive paintings are her portraits of herself and her family, painted before she moved to the Spanish court. Italian In particular her depictions of children were fresh and closely 1599-1660 observed. At the Spanish court she painted formal state portraits in the prevailing official style. In later life, she also painted religious themes, although many of her religious paintings have been lost. In 1625, she died at age ninety-three in Palermo. Anguissola's example, as much as her oeuvre, had a lasting influence on subsequent generations of Portrait at age artists, and her great success opened the way for larger numbers of women to pursue serious careers as artists.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5FQ_s6Goo68 .Self-Portrait at 26 1498 089 Museo Nacional del Prado (Madrid) Northern Renaissance

Albrecht Dürer

12 The real Leonardo da Vinci of Northern European Rennaisance was Albrecht Dürer, a restless and innovative genious, master of German drawing and color. He is one of the first artists to represent nature 1471-1528 without artifice, either in his painted landscapes or in his drawings of plants and animals

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OQEWArXaCeg .Self-Portrait with Two Circles 1665 095 Kenwood House (London) Baroque

You are not looking at Rembrandt. He is looking at you. The authority of genius and age gaze out of this autumnal masterpiece with a moral scrutiny that is terrifying. Rembrandt seems to see into the beholder's soul and perceive every failing. He is like God. He is the most serious artist of all, because he makes everyone who stands before him a supplicant in the court of truth.

Rembrandt van Rijn

3 The fascinating use of the light and shadows in Rembrandt's works seem to reflect his own life, moving from fame to oblivion. Dutch Rembrandt is the great master of Dutch painting, and, along with 1606-1669 Velázquez, the main figure of 17th century European Painting. He is, in addition, the great master of the self-portrait of all time, an artist who had never show mercy at the time of depicting himself

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ENYeIydLtWI .Self-portrait with two pupils 1785 008 Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York) Rococo

A lifelong champion of women's rights, Labille-Guiard worked toward reforming the Academy's policies toward women. Unlike Vigée-LeBrun, she supported the French Revolution and remained in Paris during this tumultuous era, winning new patrons and creating portraits of several deputies of the National Assembly. Although she also produced some history paintings, it was with her carefully crafted portraits that Labille-Guiard made her mark.

Using a restrained, sombre palette, she captured her sitters in relatively informal, candid poses. In the wake of the French Revolution, her clientele dried up, but Labille-Guiard adapted and found new sitters among the Revolutionary leaders including Maximilen de Robespierre. After several of her paintings were destroyed by official decree, she was forced to flee Paris but did eventually return.

Adélaïde Labille-Guiard

In forging a successful career as a portraitist, Adélaïde Labille-Guiard had to overcome an unwelcoming male-dominated art world. French Labille-Guiard was often described as a bitter rival of the best-known 1749-1803 woman painter of the time, Elisabeth Louise Vigée-Le Brun, but this rivalry was in fact the invention of male artists and critics threatened by their female competitors. After Labille-Guiard's Salon debut in 1783, a slanderous pamphlet accused her of ethical and sexual improprieties. Despite this adversity, Labille-Guiard was an active promoter of rights for women artists and a successful teacher.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jUqx-n9f8fc .Sleeping Venus 1501 091 Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister (Dresden) High Renaissance

also known as the Dresden Venus, is a painting traditionally attributed to the Italian Renaissance painter Giorgione, although it has long been usually thought that Titian completed it after Giorgione's death in 1510. The landscape and sky are generally accepted to be mainly by him. In the 21st century, much scholarly opinion has shifted further, to see the nude figure of Venus as also painted by Titian, leaving Giorgione's contribution uncertain

Giorgione

48 Like so many other painters who died at young age, Giorgione (1477-1510) makes us wonder what place would his exquisite Italian Venetian painting occupy in the history of Art if he had enjoyed a long 1477-1510 existence, just like his direct artistic heir - Titian. .Star Catcher 1956 017 Private Collection Art Nouveau

As is typical for Varo, a single female figure is in our focus, but the setting has moved inward and has become claustrophobic. Upon leaving behind a shadowy landscape the woman enters a room through an open door behind her. With staunch regal presence, she wears an elaborate hat, an intricate lace collar, and a butterfly sleeve dress composed of symmetrical folds resembling a vagina. In her right hand, the woman holds a long empty net, whilst in her left she carries a small cage that contains a glowing crescent moon recently captured. Insect looking in her symmetry, the figure looks forward to Dragonfly Woman (1960) and highlights the repeated theme of mimicry in the artist's oeuvre.Varo evokes the Egyptian Isis, the goddess of the moon and of magic. Unusually here, the strong lunar force of fertility is caged, perhaps making reference to the fact that Varo did not have children or that she viewed the potentiality of reproduction as an imprisoning factor. The tiled floor is a repeated motif for the artist as it was also for her great friend Leonora Carrington; the checkered black and white pattern reinforces important notions of opposites combined. The elongation of the central figure, her arms, and the disproportion of her small head strongly evoke the work of El Greco by whom Varo was much inspired. There seems to be an overall message of torture imposed by restriction expressed through this image. It is as though the woman feels at once defined and confined by her sex. The viewer's attention is drawn into a whirlwind by the seemingly erotic golden and grey plumage created by the process of decalcomania, but the labia-like opening in her dress greets the gaze with darkness rather than pleasure.

Varo and her work quickly became legendary in Mexico. Following her death, the art critics of Novedades called her "one of the most individual and extraordinary painters of Mexican art." Solo retrospectives of her work opened in 1964, 1971, and 1983 in Mexico. A major book, Obras de Remedios Varo, was published following the first retrospective and sold out all of its three subsequent printings to become a highly valued collector's item. In the decades that followed it became clear that Varo's 'Surrealist' work would have an enduring influence on subsequent generations of artists, and in particular on female practitioners. Post-WWII female artists resolutely shifted their role from that of passive muse to active maker.

At the forefront of this change and as pioneers of a new artistic language centered on interior reality, Varo and her contemporaries provided younger female artists necessary role

Remedios Varo

The visionary lone painter, Remedios Varo, typically portrays herself sitting at a desk engaged in magical work, embarking on a Spanish journey to unlock true meaning, or dissolving completely into the 1908-1963 environment that surrounds her. As a well-studied alchemist, seeker, and naturalist, however dreamlike her imagery may appear, it is in fact reality observed more clearly; Varo painted deep, intuitive, and multi-sensory pictures in hope to inspire learning and promote better individual balance in an interconnected universe. Interestingly, and Creation of the World, or Microcosm understandably, it was not until the last 13 years of the artist's life, having fled war-torn Europe, found home in Mexico (amongst a community of other displaced Surrealists) and finally become free of ongoing financial constraints that she was able to paint prolifically. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EVmmP9t-3Mk .Starry Night 1889 099 Museum of Modern Art (New York) Post-Impressionist

Starry Night is often considered to be Van Gogh's pinnacle achievement. Unlike most of his works, Starry Night was painted from memory, and not out in the landscape. The emphasis on interior, emotional life is clear in his swirling, tumultuous depiction of the sky - a radical departure from his previous, more naturalistic landscapes. Here, Van Gogh followed a strict principal of structure and composition in which the forms are distributed across the surface of the canvas in an exact order to create balance and tension amidst the swirling torsion of the cypress trees and the night sky. The result is a landscape rendered Although Van Gogh sold only one painting in his life, the through curves and lines, its seeming chaos aftermath of his work is enormous. Starry Night is one of his subverted by a rigorous formal most famous paintings and has become one of the most arrangement. Evocative of the spirituality well-known images in modern culture. The painting shows the Van Gogh found in nature, Starry Night is village of Saint-Rémy under a swirling sky, in a view from the famous for advancing the act of painting asylum The cypress tree to the left was added into the beyond the representation of the physical composition. world. At once balanced and expressive, the composition is structured by his ordered placement of the cypress, steeple, and central nebulae, while his countless short brushstrokes and thickly applied paint set its surface in roiling motion. Such a combination of visual contrasts was generated by an artist who found beauty and interest in the night, which, for him, was “much more alive and richly colored than the day

Vincent van Gogh

17 Few names in the history of painting are now as famous as Van Gogh, despite the complete neglect he suffered in life. His works, Dutch strong and personal, are one of the greatest influences in the 20th 1853-1890 century painting, especially in German Expressionism

Vincent & Theo (1990)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NNSL1Gez3bA .Starry Night over the Rhone 1888 098 Musée d'Orsay (Paris) Post-Impressionist

Van Gogh's dedication to articulating the inner spirituality of man and nature led to a fusion of style and content that resulted in dramatic, imaginative, rhythmic, and emotional canvases that convey far more than the mere appearance of the subject. Although the source of much upset during his life, Van Gogh's mental instability provided the frenzied source for the emotional renderings of his surroundings and imbued each image with a deeper psychological reflection and resonance. Van Gogh's unstable personal temperament became synonymous with the romantic image of the tortured artist. His probably one of the two or three most famous painters in history, self-destructive talent was echoed in the often remembered for cutting off part of his ear and suffering lives of many artists in the 20th century. from mental illness. Famous for its swirls in the sky, this Van Gogh used an impulsive, gestural painting was based on the view from his bedroom application of paint and symbolic colors to express subjective emotions. These methods and practice came to define many subsequent modern movements from Fauvism to Abstract Expressionism.

Vincent van Gogh

17 Few names in the history of painting are now as famous as Van Gogh, despite the complete neglect he suffered in life. His works, Dutch strong and personal, are one of the greatest influences in the 20th 1853-1890 century painting, especially in German Expressionism

Vincent & Theo (1990)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UoPZVkOuWaQ .Stop and Search 2007 147 Private Collection Grafitti

With tongue firmly planted in cheek, English graffiti artist and international prankster Banksy has managed to become one of the world's most recognized artists while remaining relatively anonymous. Staying true to the credos of street art, he's built a celebrated body of work, both permanent and impermanent, that utilizes satire, subversion, dark humor, and irony to create resonant social, political, and humanist messages for the masses on a populous and public level. His style is universally familiar, founded on a signature stencil aesthetic that has elevated him from mere man with a spray can to a highly Banksy's artistry lies in his ability to use humor and sardonic wit creative artist in his own right. He is to trick viewers into contemplating the underlying seriousness of responsible for catapulting guerilla work his messages about capitalism, advertising, politics, and into the mainstream as a viable form of art. humanity. It is this very sense of innocent whimsy coupled with daring, glaring truths about our times that lift him to a role as potent social mediator all under the guise of art. Because of the volatility and impermanence of Banksy's chosen canvas, i.e. the street and improvisational pop-up public places, he remains true to guerilla art's philosophy, being that the commodification of art is a blasphemous way to validate an artist within only a specific social sector or market. Anonymity has been Banksy's modus operandi, largely because it removes the status of artist as celebrity and instead forces a focus on the artwork. It also allows for the freedom of telling one's unapologetic truth without regard to consequence. In an ironic twist of fate, Banksy's subversive mien has only

Banksy

One of the most notorious street artists of the modern day is Banksy, who is probably the most well-known artist on this list. Part of the English mystique comes from the fact that s/he is anonymous. Despite rumors to the contrary, the public doesn’t know who this artist actually is (or if it is, rather, a group of artists). It’s not even conclusively known whether Banksy is male or female. Regardless, Banksy’s art speaks for itself. Banksy emerged from the underground graffiti scene of London in the 1990s. His/Her work has since gone global, selling for millions of dollars in galleries worldwide. Most of Banksy’s art is created on walls and billboards using stencils, and s/he often incorporates social criticism and elements of left-wing politics into the pieces. .Tea 1880 055 Museum of Fine Arts (Boston) Impressionism

Cassatt's work combined the light color palette and loose brushwork of Impressionism with compositions influenced by Japanese art as well as by European Old Masters, and she worked in a variety of media throughout her career. This versatility helped to establish her professional success at a time when very few women were regarded as serious artists. Cassatt's art typically depicted domestic settings, the world to which she herself (as a respectable woman) was restricted, rather than the more public spaces that her male contemporaries were free to inhabit. Her material was occasionally dismissed as depicted the "" of the 19th century quintessentially "feminine," yet most critics from the woman's perspective. As a successful, highly trained realized that she brought considerable woman artist who never married, Cassatt—like , technical skill and psychological insight to , and Cecilia her subject matter. Beaux—personified the "New Woman".[42] She "initiated the Through her business acumen and her profound beginnings in recreating the image of the 'new' friendships and professional relationships women", drawn from the influence of her intelligent and active with artists, dealers, and collectors on both mother, Katherine Cassatt, who believed in educating women to sides of the Atlantic, Cassatt became a key be knowledgeable and socially active. She is depicted in Reading figure in the turn-of-the-century art world 'Le Figaro' (1878) and helped to establish the taste for Impressionist art in her native United States.

Mary Cassatt

Cassatt was active into the 1910s, and by her late years she was able to witness the emergence of modernism in Europe and the American United States; however, her signature style remained consistent. The 1844-1926 waning critical taste for Impressionism after her death in the 1920s meant that her influence on other artists was limited. One exception was a group of women artists based in Montreal, Canada, in the 1920s that came to be known as the "Beaver Hall Group." This was the first Canadian art association in which professional women artists played a Gathering Fruit 1893 significant role, and its members (including Mabel May, Lilias Torrance Newton, and Prudence Heward) followed Cassatt's example of working closely together and studying abroad. Cassatt also influenced , a California-born artist who studied with the https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u4iX0PZPg0o .The Ambassadors 1533 030 National Gallery of Art (Washington, D.C.) Northern Renaissance

Jean de Dinteville and Georges de Selve ('The Ambassadors')

This picture memorialises two wealthy, educated and powerful young men. On the left is Jean de Dinteville, aged 29, French ambassador to England in 1533. To the right stands his friend, Georges de Selve, aged 25, bishop of Lavaur, who acted on several occasions as ambassador to the Emperor, the Venetian Republic and the . The picture is in a tradition showing learned men with books and instruments. The objects on the upper shelf include a celestial globe, a portable sundial and various other instruments used for understanding the heavens and measuring time. Among the objects on the lower shelf is a lute, a case of flutes, a hymn book, a book of arithmetic and a terrestrial globe.

Hans Holbein the Younger

50. After Dürer, Holbein is the greatest of the German painters of his time. The fascinating portrait of "The Ambassadors" is still German considered one of the most enigmatic paintings of art history 1497-1543

globe - detail

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ReF2O8rzpb4 .The Annunciation 1432 021 Museo Nacional del Prado (Madrid) Early Renaissance

The Annunciation is not Fra Angelico’s first painting on that theme nor his only one in the convent. His works are scattered across the world in well-known museums and galleries including the Prado. He is credited as the inventor of this type of composition, where Gabriel visits Mary in an outdoor setting. A typical Gothic Annunciation painting contained the archangel Gabriel visiting the Virgin Mary indoors and with Mary enthroned. The figures would appear flat, static, and unrealistic. This painting in particular is supposed to have "achieved heights of singular elegance."[3] The way it handles space and lighting is revolutionary This altarpiece was painted for the monastery of Santo Domenico because it is a transition out of the Gothic in Fiesole, near Florence. The central panel shows the Archangel period and into the Renaissance. Previous Gabriel’s Annunciation to Mary under a portico. On the left, versions had no spatial awareness. The Adam and Eve are being expelled from Paradise. The damnation figures seemed to float in the air, and lines and salvation of Humanity. The predella has scenes from the life did not end in a vanishing point. This caused of the Virgin; Mary’s Birth, Her Wedding with Saint Joseph, them to be lopsided and disproportional. Mary’s Visit to her cousin Saint Elisabeth, the Birth of the Christ Child, the Presentation of Jesus in the Temple and the Dormition of the Virgin with Christ receiving her soul. Fra Angelico, understood art to be an aspect of religious devotion. He was particularly meticulous in the details and qualities of Nature and of the objects and persons depicted. In his style, Fra Angelico merged the late Gothic Italian style with the new language of the Renaissance.

Fra Angelico

52 One of the great colorists from the early Renaissance. Initially trained as an illuminator, Italian 1395-1455

Detail from another version by Fra Angelico at the same site

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6lH7zWK_SAg .The Apparition 1876 038 Musée d'Orsay (Paris) Symbolism

shows the biblical character of Salome dancing in front of Herod Antipas with a vision of John the Baptist's head. The 106 cm high and 72,2 cm wide watercolor held by the Paris Musee d'Orsay elaborates an episode told in the Gospel of Matthew 14:6-11 and Mark 6:21-29.[1] On a feast on the occasion of Herod Antipas' birthday, the princess Salome dances in front of the king and his guest, pleasing him so much he promises her anything she wished for. Incited by her mother Herodias, who was reproved by the imprisoned John the Baptist for her illegitimate marriage to Herod, Salome demands John's head in a charger. The Apparition portrays Salome who, according to the Gospels, Regretful but compelled to keep his word in bewitched the ruler Herod Antipas, the husband of her mother front of his peers, Herod fulfills Salome's Herodiad, with her dancing. As a reward she was given the head demand. John the Baptist is beheaded, the of John the Baptist. head brought in a charger and given to Salome, who gives it to her mother. The Apparition stands apart from biblical and historic paintings of the period, incorporating elements of style which would become significant for the aesthetic and symbolist movement, while also anteceding surrealism.[8] Whereas the bible mentions Salome as acting out Herodias' will, Moreau draws her guided by her own lust. Among his series of Salome-paintings, the climactic The Apparition is the most openly erotic with a bare-breasted princess turned towards the viewer, her naked arm directed at the object she will soon receive. By accentuating her stillness, Moreau immobilizes her to be seen alternately as idol or sexual object or both

Gustave Moreau

98. One of the key figures of symbolism, introverted and mysterious in life, but very free and colorful in his works. French 1826-1898

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M6tgtKC6odU .The Artist's Wife (Seated Woman with Bent Knee) 1917 015 Národní galerie v Praze (Prague) Expressionism

With his signature graphic style, embrace of figural distortion, and bold defiance of conventional norms of beauty, Egon Schiele was one of the leading figures of Austrian Expressionism. His portraits and self-portraits, searing explorations of their sitters' psyches and sexuality, are among the most remarkable of the 20th century. The artist, who was astoundingly prolific during his brief career, is famous not only for his psychologically and erotically charged works, but for his intriguing biography: his licentious lifestyle marked by scandal, notoriety, and a tragically early death of influenza at age twenty-eight, three Egon Schiele’s art looks like it was from another time. “Seated days after the death of his pregnant wife, Woman with Bent Knee” (also known as “The Artist’s Wife”) and at a time when he was on the verge of was created in 1917, after years of mentorship from Gustav the commercial success that had eluded him Klimt. There are many talented artists who die too young, and for much of his career. Schiele was one. He died from the Spanish flu when he was only 28 years old (one year after he painted this featured work); just Key Ideas days after his pregnant wife succumbed to it. (Source) But we’re Schiele's portraits and self-portraits helped not here to focus on his death. Let’s look at this gorgeous work re-establish the vitality of both genres with that this passionate young artist created during his years on this their unprecedented level of emotional and earth. sexual directness and use of figural distortion in place of conventional notions of beauty. Frequently depicting himself or those close to him, Schiele's portraits often present their sitters in the nude, posed in revealing, unsettling angles—frequently viewed from above—and devoid of

Egon Schiele

92. Another "died too young" artist, his strong and ruthless portraits influenced the works of later artists, like Lucian freud or Francis Bacon. Austrian 1890-1918

Death and the Maiden (1915)

Egon Schiele (2016)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PLC_2tHjlBw .The Avenue at Middelharnis 1689 101 National Gallery (London) Baroque

Hobbema was born in Amsterdam in 1638, the son of a carpenter. At the age of 15, he and his younger brother and sister are recorded as having been sent to an orphanage. Two years later, in 1655, Hobbema was taken on as an apprentice to the famous landscape painter Jacob van Ruisdael. followed the compositions of Ruisdael, In his early works Hobbema closely before developing his own individual style, which is lighter than Ruisdael's in both tone and mood. He specialised in elaborate woodland scenes, often large-scale compositions animated with small figures and repeated in several variants. Watermills His style had become influential and respected by the Romantic were a favourite motif. period, and began to climb in value, especially in England. He year took up the post of municipal was loved by John Constable, John Crome and the Norwich In 1668, Hobbema married, and in the same wine-gauger which involved the weighing School of painters, all of whom he influenced.[25] and measuring of imported wines. With a wife, a job and a salary his painting output slowed down considerably - but he did produce his most famous work, 'The Avenue at Middelharnis', in 1689, twenty years after having given up art as a profession. harsh. His wife and his two children died in The last years of Hobbema's life were 1704, and five years later Hobbema died to be buried in a pauper's grave.

Meindert Hobbema

His skill at varying effects of light and colour throughout a work is exceptional. He often makes use of double vanishing points to add Dutch interest to the composition 1638-1709 His paths or roads normally wind diagonally across his composition through dense trees and vegetation, the trees spreading and varying in size. The water mills and other buildings are generally seen in the near distance, and generally only one or two appear in each picture. His compositions are carefully contrived and presumably imaginary, normally avoiding all symmetry .The Baptism of Christ 1475 052 Uffizi Gallery (Florence) Early Renaissance

The Baptism of Christ is a famous painting made by da Vinci’s master, Andrea del Verrochio at circa 1472 in his studio in Italy. The painting was completed by Verrochio in collaboration with his apprentice, da Vinci who painted and finished the details of some parts of the painting, particularly the angel. The painting was an altarpiece commissioned by the monks of the San Salvi Church near Florence.

The painting of The Baptism of Christ was mainly done by Verrochio using tempera on wood. The painting depicts St. John the studio of the Italian Renaissance painter Andrea del Verrocchio Baptist during the baptism of the Lord and generally ascribed to him and his pupil Leonardo da Vinci. Jesus Christ as according to the Gospels of Some art historians discern the hands of other members of Luke, Mark and Matthew. Two angels on the Verrocchio's workshop in the painting as well. The picture left side of the painting complete the four depicts the Baptism of Jesus by John the Baptist as recorded in figures in the artwork. The scene illustrated the Biblical Gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke. The angel to by the painting includes God’s extended the left is recorded as having been painted by the youthful arms painted with golden rays and dove Leonardo, a fact which has excited so much special comment with its wings widely spread, a halo with and mythology, that the importance and value of the picture as a cruciform is painted on top of Jesus’ head whole and within the œuvre of Verrocchio is often overlooked. and another halo on top of St. John the Modern critics also attribute much of the landscape in the Baptist. The two angels are holding Jesus’ background and the figure of Christ to Leonardo da Vinci as well clothes. The angel on the left side is the part done by Leonardo da Vinci. He used oil, which was at that time a new medium in painting.

Andrea del Verrocchio

Verrocchio was one of the leading artists of late 15th-century Florence. He is mainly celebrated as a sculptor, though a number of Italian important painters trained in his studio, including Leonardo da Vinci. 1435-1488 Some of Leonardo's artistic concerns, such as the twisting pose known as figura serpentinata, and the study of contrasting expressions, originate with Verrocchio.

Verrocchio trained as a goldsmith and went on to work as a sculptor and a painter. There is only one painting which is unanimously attributed to Verrocchio: the 'Baptism of Christ' in the Uffizi, Florence.

However, even in this famous work, Verrocchio seems to have used .The Basket of Apples 1893 050 Art Institute of Chicago Realism

Paul Cézanne was the preeminent French artist of the Post-Impressionist era, widely appreciated toward the end of his life for insisting that painting stay in touch with its material, virtually sculptural origins. Also known as the "Master of Aix" after his ancestral home in the South of France, Cézanne is credited with paving the way for the emergence of twentieth-century modernism, both visually and conceptually. In retrospect, his work constitutes the most powerful and essential link between the ephemeral aspects of Impressionism and the more materialist, artistic movements of Fauvism, Cubism, Expressionism, and even Cezanne is often said to be a bridge between 19th century complete abstraction. impressionism and the more abstract styles of the 20th century. Art is "a harmony running parallel to nature," not an imitation of nature. In his quest for underlying structure and composition, the artist is not bound to represent real objects in real space. The Basket of Apples contains one of his signature tilted tables, an impossible rectangle with no right angles. This painting, one of Cézanne’s rare signed works,. Since Cézanne had spent the majority of his career painting in isolation in his native Provence, this was the first opportunity in nearly twenty years for the public to see the work of the artist who is now hailed as the father of modern painting.

Paul Cezanne

Unsatisfied with the Impressionist dictum that painting is primarily a reflection of visual perception, Cézanne sought to make of his artistic French practice a new kind of analytical discipline. In his hands, the canvas 1839-1906 itself takes on the role of a screen where an artist's visual sensations are registered as he gazes intensely, and often repeatedly, at a given subject. Cézanne applied his pigments to the canvas in a series of discrete, methodical brushstrokes as though he were "constructing" a picture Table, Napkin, and Fruit (A Corner of the Table) (1895-1900) rather than "painting" it. Thus, his work remains true to an underlying architectural ideal: every portion of the canvas should contribute to its overall structural integrity. In Cézanne's mature pictures, even a simple apple might display a https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1a2-nTwYEnc .The Beheading of John the Baptist 1608 059 St John's Co-Cathedral (Valletta, Malta) Baroque

Caravaggio shows a murderous moment in a prison yard. The executioner has drawn a knife to sever the last tendons and skin of John the Baptist's neck. Someone watches this horrific moment from a barred window. All around is sepulchral gloom. Death and human cruelty are laid bare by this masterpiece, as its scale and shadow daunt and possess the mind. Saint John was the patron saint of the Knights of Malta and of the cathedral, for the new oratory of which Caravaggio painted this canvas. It is his largest work, and the only one he signed - prophetically, in the blood flowing onto the pavement from the saint's neck. The Grand Master was so pleased by it, according to Bellori, that he presented Caravaggio with a gold chain, two slaves, and various other rewards; the frame bears his coat of arms.

Caravaggio

The intensity of Caravaggio's paintings was matched only by his tempestuous lifestyle. Despite being a hot-headed, violent man often Italian in trouble with the law and implicated in more than one murder, he 1573-1610 created striking, innovative paintings and pioneered the use of dramatic lighting and the representation of religious figures in modern clothes and attitudes. Working from life and without the aid of preparatory sketches, Caravaggio paired close observation of his models with the use of strong beams of light to focus attention on certain elements of his images, contrasting these well-lit areas with dark shadows elsewhere on the canvas. This use of chiaroscuro Caravaggio (1986) became a core part of Caravaggio's highly individualized style and was widely imitated by his contemporaries. Even though he only lived https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UohHcRLbtqY .The Birth of Venus 1486 002 Uffizi Gallery (Florence) Renaissance

he Birth of Venus is undoubtedly one of the world’s most famous and appreciated works of art. Painted by Sandro Botticelli between 1482 and 1485, it has become a landmark of XV century Italian painting, so rich in meaning and allegorical references to antiquity.

The theme comes from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, a very important oeuvre of the Latin literature. Venus is portrayed naked on a shell on the seashore; on her left the winds blow gently caressing her hair with a shower of roses, on her right a handmaid (Ora) waits for the goddess to go according to some legends, Venus had no mother or father but closer to dress her shy body. The meadow is was born of the Sea after the death of Uranus sprinkled with violets, symbol of modesty but often used for love potions. As Poliziano was a great poet of written verses, so Botticelli was one of the greatest poets of the line and the drawing. It is worth We can find clear references to the to mention the exceptional technique and the fine materials used “Stanzas”, a famous poetic work by Agnolo to accomplish the work. The Birth of Venus is the first example Poliziano, a contemporary of Botticelli and in Tuscany of a painting on canvas. Moreover the special use of the greatest Neoplatonic poet of the Medici expensive alabaster powder, making the colors even brighter and court. Neoplatonism was a current of timeless, is another characteristic that makes this work unique. thought that tried to connect the Greek and Roman cultural heritage with Christianity. Behind the interpretation of the painting as a tribute to classic The Neoplatonic philosophical meaning is literature, we can certainly read an ode to the wealthy Florentine then clear: the work would mean the birth of family who commissioned the work: the beginning of the reign of love and the spiritual beauty as a driving love finally comes to Florence thanks to the Medici, their force of life. diplomatic skills and their vast culture.

Alessandro Botticelli

59. "If Botticelli were alive now he would be working for Vogue", said actor Peter Ustinov. As well as Raphael, Botticelli had been Italian equally loved or hated in different eras, but his use of color is one of 1445–1510 the most fascinating among all old masters.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-pzFEZwmDBc .The Calling of Saint Matthew 1599 060 San Luigi dei Francesi chapel (Rome) Baroque

Caravaggio's populist portrayals of religious figures were groundbreaking, showing biblical characters in a non-idealized fashion through the addition of signs of age and poverty and the use of contemporary clothing. This served to humanize the divine, making them more accessible to the average viewer. In doing this Caravaggio's work represented a type of spiritual populism. The bare, dirty feet of Caravaggio's figures united the artist's works with church teachings which emphasized the poverty of Christ and were also consistent with calls for a simplicity in religious art following the Council of Trent In a darkened room, five men count taxes. A light shines in. It (1545-1563). Despite this alignment with is Christ, who summons Levi the tax collector, to come and join current dogma, these portrayals drew some him. Thus, two worlds collide: the light of Christ and the dark of Caravaggio's harshest criticism. of the mundane. The picture is divided into two parts. The Whilst the technique of chiaroscuro was not standing figures on the right form a vertical rectangle; those introduced by Caravaggio, he was the first gathered around the table on the left a horizontal block. The painter to incorporate the technique as a costumes reinforce the contrast. Levi and his subordinates, who dominant stylistic element, making the are involved in affairs of this world, are dressed in a shadows darker and using clearly defined contemporary mode, while the barefoot Christ and Saint Peter, rays of light for emphasis and to highlight who summon Levi to another life and world, appear in timeless the narrative of the image. The style became cloaks. The two groups are also separated by a void, bridged increasingly prevalent in his later work and literally and symbolically by Christ's hand. This hand, like has subsequently become synonymous with Adam's in Michelangelo's Creation, unifies the two parts his more mature images. formally and psychologically. Underlying the shallow stage-like space of the picture is a grid pattern of verticals and horizontals, which knit it together structurally.

Caravaggio

Caravaggio has been alternately identified as an exemplar of late Mannerist style, or as a harbinger of the Baroque era. Though only Italian twenty-one works have been definitively attributed to the artist, 1573-1610 Caravaggio was a formidable artistic influence both in his time and today. By 1605, other Roman artists were beginning to imitate his signature style, and shortly thereafter artists outside of Italy such as Rembrandt and Diego Velázquez were incorporating Caravaggio's dramatic lighting effects into their own, landmark works. Caravaggio's style quickly gained devoted followers, the 'Caravaggisti', who imbued their compositions with the qualities of Caravaggio's work. Caravaggio (1986) Caravaggio's paintings also inspired important poets of his time such as Cavalier Giambattista Marino. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t200T-4PLDE .The Cradle 1872 113 Musée d'Orsay (Paris) Impressionism

Morisot was barred due to her gender from accessing the full range of subject matter otherwise available to her male Impressionist colleagues, particularly the seedier aspects of urban life - cabarets, cafés, bars, and brothels. Conversely, her paintings reveal her access to virtually all aspects of feminine life in the late-19th century, even private, intimate ones that were generally closed to her male counterparts. Morisot produced canvases that depicted a wide variety of subjects including landscapes, street and urban scenes, nudes, still life's, and portraits. Like her male n 1874 she exhibited The Cradle. It depicts one of her sisters, colleagues, she too developed favorite Edma, watching over her sleeping daughter, Blanche. It is the models - including her own daughter, Julie - first painting of motherhood to appear in Morisot's work, and participated in the artistic exchanges of although the theme would later become one of her favourite the period due to her connections within the subjects. Impressionist circle and beyond, remaining an innovator in painting up until her death. Edma's gaze, her bent left arm, a replication of the child's arm, Morisot had the good fortune to not only and the baby's closed eyes form a diagonal which links the marry into an artistic family, but also to be mother to her child. The net curtain of the cradle lying between wholeheartedly supported by her husband, the viewer and the baby, further enhances the sense of intimacy Eugène Manet (Edourd Manet's younger and maternal love expressed in the picture. brother), who sacrificed his own ambition in order to manage her artistic career. She Edma, Madame Pontillon, who like herself had begun a career as exhibited a keen appreciation of public taste a painter and had had the same masters as Berthe. But her and as a result her works sold well during marriage in 1869 to a naval officer stationed at Lorient, her lifetime and afterwards. Her talents and prevented her from continuing her interest in art. Berthe was very skill won her the public respect of her male

Berthe Morisot

features elegance and lightness. Her brushstrokes are as light as the touch of a petal; therefore, French critics often use the verb "effleurer" French (to touch lightly, brush against) to describe her technique. In her early 1841-1895 life, Morisot painted in open air as other Impressionists to look for truths in observation.[19] Around 1880 she began painting on unprimed canvases—a technique Manet and Eva Gonzalès also experimented with at the time[20]—and her brushwork became looser. In 1888–89, her brushstrokes transitioned from short, rapid strokes to long, sinuous ones that define form.[21] The outer edges of her paintings were often left unfinished, allowing the canvas to show through and increasing the sense of spontaneity https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=na05-xCZR8s .The Cyclops 1914 083 Kröller-Müller Museum (Otterlo) Symbolism

Redon worked almost exclusively in black and white during the first half of his career. In both charcoal drawings and lithographic prints, the artist relied on the expressive and suggestive possibilities of black in his monochromatic compositions called noirs. These are some of his most famous works, and typify Symbolism in their mysterious subjects and bizarre, dreamlike inventions. Redon's use of non-naturalistic color in his late pastels and oil paintings prefigure the later development of Expressionism and abstraction. In portraits, still lifes, and decorative ensembles, Redon explored the expressive and suggestive powers of color. Like most Cyclops in mythology, Polyphemus was villainized as Many of these works include passages that a wild creature that hunted its victims and then consumed them. are purely nonobjective, often seen in the The normally menacing beast is shown softly gazing with a large ethereal chromatic backgrounds that he eye that has been seen in previous Redon works. , the coupled with figurative subjects. naiad, is shown naked and vulnerably lying on a patch of One of the main themes in Redon's oeuvre is vegetation. It appears Polyphemus is keeping one gentle eye the decapitated or disembodied head. Often watching over the "sexualized maiden." He has hidden himself shown free-floating, and sometimes reduced from Galatea behind the rocky terrain, too shy to directly to a mere eyeball, the severed head confront her "helpless" form. The one-eyed giant’s love remains encapsulates the Symbolist desire to free unrequited, as Galathea prefers the river god Acis. The oneself from the shackles of the ordinary, unnaturally large eye is the most conspicuous part of the painting. mundane world, and achieve a higher state In Redon’s work, the eye is often an all controlling, independent of consciousness through the exploration of creature, a symbol of the human soul and of the mysterious, dreams and subjective vision. unknown inner world. When asked in an interview about his favorite artistic subjects, Redon replied, "My monsters. I believe that it is there that I

Odilon Redon

1 of 10 "My drawings inspire, and are not to be defined. They place us, as French does music, in the ambiguous realm of the undetermined." 1840-1916 Odilon Redon "I have often, as an exercise and as a sustenance, painted an object down to the smallest accidents of its visual appearance; but the day left me sad and with an unsatiated thirst. The next day I let the other source run, that of imagination, through the recollection of the forms Cactus Man 1881 and I was then reassured and appeased."

Odilon Redon Signature Synopsis .The Dance 1909 080 The State Hermitage Museum (St Petersburg) Fauvist

Matisse used pure colors and the white of exposed canvas to create a light-filled atmosphere in his Fauve paintings. Rather than using modeling or shading to lend volume and structure to his pictures, Matisse used contrasting areas of pure, unmodulated color. These ideas continued to be important to him throughout his career. His art was important in endorsing the value of decoration in modern art. However, although he is popularly regarded as a painter devoted to pleasure and contentment, his use of color and pattern is often deliberately disorientating and unsettling. Dance (La Danse) refers to either of two related paintings made Matisse was heavily influenced by art from by Henri Matisse between 1909 and 1910. The first, preliminary other cultures. Having seen several version is Matisse's study for the second version. The exhibitions of Asian art, and having traveled composition or arrangement of dancing figures is reminiscent of to North Africa, he incorporated some of Blake's watercolour "Oberon, Titania and Puck with fairies the decorative qualities of Islamic art, the dancing" from 1786 The painting shows five dancing figures, angularity of African sculpture, and the painted in a strong red, set against a very simplified green flatness of Japanese prints into his own style. landscape and deep blue sky. It reflects Matisse's incipient Matisse once declared that he wanted his art fascination with primitive art, and uses a classic Fauvist color to be one "of balance, of purity and serenity palette: the intense warm colors against the cool blue-green devoid of troubling or depressing subject background and the rhythmical succession of dancing nudes matter," and this aspiration was an important convey the feelings of emotional liberation and hedonism. The influence on some, such as Clement painting is often associated with the "Dance of the Young Girls" Greenberg, who looked to art to provide from Igor Stravinsky's famous musical work The Rite of Spring. shelter from the disorientation of the modern world. The human figure was central to Matisse's

Henri Matisse

20 Art critics tend to regard Matisse as the greatest exponent of twentieth century painting, only surpassed by Picasso. This is an French exaggeration, although the almost pure use of color in some of his 1869-1954 works strongly influenced many of the following avant-gardes .The Death of Marat 1793 068 Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium (Brussels) Neoclassical

David used his art to sway political opinion, curry favor with government regimes, and fuel uprisings. His direct political involvement brought history painting in contact with current affairs. This immediacy would inspire later artists to represent the contemporary world, although the Romantics (many of whom were David's students) would radically reimagine the engagement to criticize those in power, rendering more emotionally laden narratives in a more painterly style.

Indeed, David's impact on modernism is most evident in his influence on By 1793, the violence of the Revolution dramatically increased Romanticism; the latter movement was until the beheadings at the Place de la Concorde in Paris became directly connected to the rise of Modern a constant, leading a certain Dr. Joseph Guillotine to invent a Art. Romanticism grew directly out of machine that would improve the efficiency of the ax and block Neoclassicism; its rejection of the clear and therefore make executions more humane. David was in thick moral universe and pictorial precision of of it. Early in the Revolution he had joined the Jacobins, a Neoclassicism was equally a rejection of political club that would in time become the most rabid of the David's teachings. His students shifted away various rebel factions. Led by the ill-fated Georges Danton and from the severe narratives of David to more the infamous Maximilien Robespierre, the Jacobins (including sensuous and complicated Greco-Roman David) would eventually vote to execute Louis XVI and his histories and mythologies, providing the Queen Marie Antoinette who were caught attempting to escape first stirrings of Romantic painting. across the border to the Austrian Empire. In turn, artists such as Paul Cézanne and Pierre-Auguste Renoir, who were directly influenced by Romanticism, can be connected back to David and his studio. In

Jacques-Louis David

66 David is the summit of neoclassicism, a grandiloquent artist whose compositions seem to reflect his own hectic and revolutionary life. French David was the first French artist to unite classical subjects with a 1748-1824 linear precision and minimalist composition. Completely rejecting the decorative and painterly effects of the Rococo, his canvases created powerful, didactic works of moral clarity with few distractions or pictorial flourishes. David's paintings answered the demand for art that directly conveyed civic virtues to a wide audience. Although paintings such as The Oath of the Horatii and Death of Socrates would come to be associated with the Revolution of 1789, David's earliest successes were iconic images of valor and noble deeds, commissioned by royal and aristocratic patrons, who adopted https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EGmqjtJL8IE .The Desperate Man 1845 043 Private Collection Realism

With his eyes wide-open, Courbet stares at you and tears at his hair. Popular at the time, the Romantic approach to portraiture expressed emotional and psychological states of the individual. Courbet never considered himself a Romantic painter, he coped with the task extremely well. When viewers look at this self-portrait they experience his desperation and also get the idea of what kind of personality Courbet had. Bold, wily, radical, ambitious and determined. Determined to challenge established painting genres, protest against traditional clichés, and change the course of art history.

Gustave Courbet

31 Leading figure of realism, and a clear precedent for the impressionists, one of the greatest revolutionaries, both as an artist French and as a social-activist. Like Rembrandt and other predecessors, 1819-1877 Courbet did not seek to create beauty, but believed that beauty is achieved when and artist represents the purest reality without artifice .The Dream 1910 066 Museum of Modern Art (New York) Post-Impressionist

The Dream is an apt title for the present work, with its surreal depiction of a nude woman reclining on a sofa in a forest. The woman is surrounded by colorful, painstakingly depicted greenery - which reportedly included at least twenty-two shades of green - and inhabitants of the jungle, including several wide-eyed lions who gaze at the strange scene or at the viewer. This image of a humorously out-of-place academic-style nude - reminiscent of neoclassical odalisques portrayed by artists such as Ingres and perhaps modeled on a Polish woman Rousseau once loved - in an exotic setting Although Rousseau completed more than twenty-five jungle far from the artist's native France may be paintings in his career, he never traveled outside France. He seen as Rousseau's response to instead drew on images of the exotic as it was presented to the late-19th-century French colonialist urban dweller through popular literature, colonial expositions, expansion to lands he experienced only and the Paris Zoo. The lush jungle, wild animals, and mysterious through his visits to museums and visual horn player featured in this work were inspired by Rousseau's media like magazines and postcards. With visits to the city's natural history museum and Jardin des plantes its incredible attention to detail, vibrant (a combined zoo and botanical garden). Of his visits the artist palette, and absurdist combination of said, "When I am in these hothouses and see the strange plants imagery, The Dream reveals why from exotic lands, it seems to me that I am entering a dream." Rousseau's art was so admired by the The nude model in this painting reclines on a sofa, mixing the Surrealists, especially the movement's domestic and the exotic. His last completed work almost surreal founder, André Breton, who wrote, "It is portrait of Yadwigha (Jadwiga), Rousseau's Polish mistress from with Rousseau that we can speak for the his youth, first time of Magic Realism."

Henri Rousseau

Henri Rousseau became a full-time artist at the age of forty-nine, after retiring from his post at the Paris customs office - a job that prompted French his famous nickname, "Le Douanier Rousseau," "the toll collector." 1844-1910 Although an admirer of artists such as William-Adolphe Bouguereau and Jean-Leon Gerome, the self-taught Rousseau became the archetypal naïve artist. His amateurish technique and unusual compositions provoked the derision of contemporary critics, while earning the respect and admiration of modern artists like Pablo Picasso and Wassily Kandinsky for revealing "the new possibilities of simplicity." Rousseau's best-known works are lush jungle scenes, inspired not by any firsthand experiences of such locales (the artist reportedly never left France), but by frequent trips to the Paris gardens https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rUs-l4shyLg .The Embarkation for Cythera 1717 051 Musée du Louvre (Paris) Rococo

The Embarkation for Cythera (Louvre version): Many commentators note that it depicts a departure from the island of Cythera, the birthplace of Venus, thus symbolizing the temporary nature of human happiness.

In Antiquity, Cythera, one of the Greek islands, was thought to have a serious claim to be the birthplace of Aphrodite, goddess of love. The island thus became sacred to Aphrodite and love. Watteau's masterpiece is an allegory of courtship and falling in love. The first couple is sitting absorbed in flirtatious conversation. They are next to a second pair who are just standing up, while a third pair are heading for the ship. The young woman is looking back in nostalgia at the place where she has spent so many happy hours. In the distance, a number of figures are climbing aboard a superb ship with cherubs hovering overhead.

Jean-Antoine Watteau

54 Watteau is today considered one of the pioneers of rococo. Unfortunately, he died at the height of his powers, as it is evidenced in French the great portrait of "Gilles" painted in the year of his death 1684-1721

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ZlH2JswO3Q .The Fall of the Rebel Angels 1562 027 Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium (Brussels) Northern Renaissance

Painted in 1562, Bruegel's depiction of this subject is taken from a passage from the Book of Revelation (12, 2-9)[2] and reveals the artist's profound debt to Hieronymous Bosch, especially in the grotesque figures of the fallen angels, shown as half-human, half-animal monsters.

Pieter Bruegel the Elder

Whereas Bosch's fantasies are born of a deep deception and preoccupation for the human being, with a clearly moralizing Flemish message; works by Bruegel are full of irony, and even filled with a 1528-1569 love for the rural life, which seems to anticipate the Dutch landscape paintings from the next century.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cabGd4w71dY .The Fate of the Animals 1913 033 Kunstmuseum (Basel) Expressionism

This work is also characteristic of the sense of apocalypse and doom which began to taint Marc's work at this time and could be related to his feelings on the impending war. In a 1915 letter to his wife Maria, Marc explains that this change in his art occurred because he began to see the ugliness in animals which he had previously thought only existed in humans. He states that he was no longer able to see the beauty which animals had once represented for him. Marc was part of the school of thought that the war would purify and redeem the universe of all that was bad. Marc no longer saw animals as separate entities in their own perfect kingdom, as he had once represented them. At the point when Marc began to identify the ugliness in animals, he recognized them as part of the universe which man also inhabited and which was in need of redemption.

Franz Marc

74. After Kandinsky, the great figure of the Expressionist group "The Blue Rider" and one of the most important expressionist painters German ever. He died at the height of his artistic powers, when his use of 1880-1916 color was even anticipating the later abstraction.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8MCZVPim3SA .The Gleaners 1857 122 Musée d'Orsay (Paris) Realism

Painting The Angelus: The painting was commissioned by Thomas Gold Appleton, an American art collector based in Boston, Massachusetts. Appleton previously studied with Millet's friend, the Barbizon painter Constant Troyon. It was completed during the summer of 1857. Millet added a steeple and changed the initial title of the work, Prayer for the Potato Crop to The Angelus when the purchaser failed to take possession of it in 1859. Displayed to the public for the first time in 1865, the painting changed hands several times, increasing only modestly in value, since some considered the artist's political This is one of the most well known of Millet's paintings, The sympathies suspect. Upon Millet's death a Gleaners (1857). While Millet was walking the fields around decade later, a bidding war between the US Barbizon, one theme returned to his pencil and brush for seven and France ensued, ending some years later years—gleaning—the centuries-old right of poor women and with a price tag of 800,000 gold francs. children to remove the bits of grain left in the fields following the harvest. He found the theme an eternal one, linked to stories The disparity between the apparent value of from the Old Testament. In 1857, he submitted the painting The the painting and the poor estate of Millet's Gleaners to the Salon to an unenthusiastic, even hostile, public. surviving family was a major impetus in the invention of the droit de suite, intended to (Earlier versions include a vertical composition painted in 1854, compensate artists or their heirs when an etching of 1855–56 which directly presaged the horizontal works are resold format of the painting now in the Musée d'Orsay.[14])

A warm golden light suggests something sacred and eternal in this daily scene where the struggle to survive takes place. During his years of preparatory studies, Millet contemplated how best to

Jean-François Millet

86. One of the main figures of the Barbizon School, author of one of the most emotive paintings of the 19th century: The "Angelus". French 1814-1875

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5g3mt7AiAtw .The Gross Clinic 1875 062 Philadelphia Museum of Art Realism

He is widely acknowledged to be one of the most important artists in American art history.

For the length of his professional career, from the early 1870s until his health began to fail some 40 years later, Eakins worked exactingly from life, choosing as his subject the people of his hometown of Philadelphia. He painted several hundred portraits, usually of friends, family members, or prominent people in the arts, sciences, medicine, and clergy. Taken en masse, the portraits offer an overview of the intellectual life of Philadelphia in the late Many art historians consider The Gross Clinic to be one of the 19th and early 20th centuries; individually, best American paintings ever made. Dr. Samuel D. Gross, a they are incisive depictions of thinking seventy-year-old professor dressed in a black frock coat, lectures persons. a group of Jefferson Medical College students. Included among the group is a self-portrait of Eakins, who is seen at the right-hand side of the painting, next to the tunnel railing, with a white cuffed sleeve sketching or writing.[1] Seen over Dr. Gross's right shoulder is the clinic clerk, Dr. Franklin West, taking notes on the operation.

Thomas Eakins

Working primarily in the second half of the 19th century, Thomas Eakins painted portraits and sporting scenes with resolute Realism. American His style renounced idealized and romantic depictions and advocated 1844-1916 instead for precise investigation of the human form and the natural world. He embraced photography from its beginning as a tool to prepare his compositions and his bold and resolute paintings would greatly influence the next generation of American Realists known as the Ashcan School. Eakins was committed to scientific inquiry of natural laws to the point that he took anatomy lessons and observed dissections and surgeries. His uncompromising realism based on his astute observations brought a scientific rigor to his painting practice. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sif-JjxBLHs .The Kiss 1907 018 Österreichische Galerie Belvedere museum Art Nouveau

Klimt was one of the most important founders of the Vienna Secession in 1897, and served as its initial president, though he was chosen less for his completed oeuvre - relatively small at that point - than his youthful personality and willingness to challenge authority. His forcefulness and international fame as the most famous Art Nouveau painter contributed much to the Secession's early success - but also the movement's swift fall from prominence when he left it in 1905. Although Klimt's art is now widely popular, it was neglected for much of the 20th century. His works for public spaces The Kiss (In German: Der Kuss) was painted by the Austrian provoked a storm of opposition in his own Symbolist painter Gustav Klimt between 1907-08, the highpoint day, facing charges of obscenity due to their of his 'Golden Period', when he painted a number of works in a erotic content, eventually causing Klimt to similar gilded style. A perfect square, the canvas depicts a couple withdraw from government commissions embracing, their bodies entwined in elaborate robes decorated in altogether. His drawings are no less a style influenced by both linear constructs of the contemporary provocative and give full expression to his Art Nouveau style and the organic forms of the earlier Arts and considerable sexual appetite. Crafts movement. The work is composed of conventional oil Despite his fame and generosity in paint with applied layers of gold leaf, an aspect that gives it its mentoring younger artists, including Egon strikingly modern, yet evocative appearance. Schiele and Oskar Kokoschka, Klimt produced virtually no direct followers and his work has consistently been regarded as highly personal and singular, even up to the present day. However, his paintings share many formal and thematic characteristics with the Expressionists and Surrealists of

Gustav Klimt

37. Half way between modernism and symbolism appears the figure of Gustav Klimt, who was also devoted to the industrial arts. His Austrian nearly abstract landscapes also make him a forerunner of geometric 1862-1918 abstraction While some critics and historians contend that Klimt's work should not be included in the canon of modern art, his oeuvre - particularly his paintings postdating 1900 - remains striking for its visual combinations of the old and the modern, the real and the The Girlfriends - Destroyed by a fire set by retreating German forces in 1945 at abstract. Klimt produced his greatest work during a time of economic expansion, social change, and the introduction of radical ideas, and Klimt (2006) these traits are clearly evident in his paintings. Klimt created a highly personal style, and the meaning of many of his works cannot be https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BRUOACBkFRg .The Lamentation of Christ 1305 045 Scrovegni (Arena) Chapel (Padua) Early Renaissance

Without Giotto it is difficult to see how this could have happened. None of the other Old Masters of the 14th century - including Duccio di Buoninsegna (c.1255-1319), Ambrogio Lorenzetti (c.1290-1352), Pietro Lorenzetti (c.1280-1348) and Simone Martini (1284-1344) - had managed to free themselves from the constraints of Byzantine painting, and thus the first important generation of Florentine painters - Tommaso Masaccio (1401-1428), Piero della Francesca (1420-92) and Andrea Mantegna (1430-1506) - would have had little if anything to build on. The Renaissance in Florence would not therefore have happened during the 15th century, and so artists in Rome and Venice would not have developed as they did. The history of art would therefore have evolved quite differently.

Giotto (di Bondone)

2 It has been said that Giotto was the first real painter, like Adam was the first man. We agree with the first part. Giotto continued the Italian Byzantine style of Cimabue and other predecessors, but he earned the 1267-1337 right to be included in gold letters in the history of painting when he added a quality unknown to date: emotion

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RbBQN0Wt_wY .The Lamentation over the Dead Christ 1490 034 Pinacoteca di Brera (Milan) Renaissance

The theme of the Lamentation of Christ is common in medieval and Renaissance art, although this treatment, dating back to a subject known as the Anointing of Christ is unusual for the period. Most Lamentations show much more contact between the mourners and the body. Rich contrasts of light and shadow abound, infused by a profound sense of pathos. The realism and tragedy of the scene are enhanced by the violent perspective, which foreshortens and dramatizes the recumbent figure, stressing the anatomical details: in particular, Christ's thorax.

Andrea Mantegna

42. One of the greatest exponents of the Quattrocento, interested in the human figure, which he often represented under extreme Italian perspectives ("The Dead Christ") 1431-1506

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IiB8Cvhhvvw .The Last Judgment 1505 024 Akademie der bildenden Künste (Vienna) Northern Renaissance

This vast panoramic nightmare represents the earth in her final death throes, destroyed not by water as Dürer and Leonardo were to envision it, but by the fire foretold in a thirteenth-century hymn, the sombre Dies Irae: "Day of Wrath, that day when the world dissolves in glowing ashes". Bosch was probably also influenced by the account of the last days given in the Revelation of St John, a book which enjoyed renewed popularity in the late fifteenth century, when it was illustrated by Dürer in his famous Apocalypse woodcuts of 1497-98. The wide valley dominating the central panel may represent the Valley of The Last Judgment, a piece depicting the fall of humanity, is Jehoshaphat, which, on the basis of several composed, like many of Bosch’s triptychs, by a more grim Old Testament references (Joel 4:2,12), was grisaille painting in its exterior shutters and a more lively and traditionally thought to be the site of the colorful panel in its interior section. The left panel portays God, Last Judgment, with the walls of the earthly sitting in the clouds, with angels being cast down to earth as Jerusalem blazing in the background. In any insects, amidst a paradise in its infancy. Meanwhile Eve event, earth has become indistinguishable becomes manifest through the donation of Adam’s rib. In the from Hell, depicted on the right wing, out central panel, Jesus sits in heaven surrounded by angels observing of which the army of Satan swarms to attack the earthly events occuring below, already rife with destruction the damned; the eternity of torment has and sin. This devastation extends to the third panel on the right, begun. offering a representation of Hell. Unlike most of his other works, this piece depicts only heaven and hell, without giving The Hell scene in the Prado Tabletop had recognition to the idea of a middle place, or limbo, where souls paired off each punishment with one of the have the opportunity to reflect upon their actions prior to their Deadly Sins. In the Last Judgment it would fate’s determination. be difficult to identify the punishments with specific sins. The avaricious are boiled in

Hieronymus Bosch

68. An extremely religious man, all works by Bosch are basically moralizing, didactic. The artist sees in the society of his time the Dutch triumph of sin, the depravation, and all the things that have caused the 1453-1516 fall of the human being from its angelical character; and he wants to warn his contemporaries about the terrible consequences of his impure acts.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ea6qS3nuvng&index=2&list=PLbT4Zk9dLaH4CU-8o_4sRdB3 .The Liver is the Cock's Comb 1944 133 Albright-Knox Art Gallery (Buffalo) Abstract Expressionism

The painting represents the peak of Gorky's achievement and his individual style, after he had emerged from the influence of Cézanne and Picasso

Although usually labeled an Abstract Expressionist, perhaps Arshile Gorky should instead be considered a direct precursor of the Abstract Expressionists. His combination of Expressionist and Surrealist aesthetics exposed the New York-based artists to the innovative ways of assimilating the predominant European modernist styles of the time. As a major force behind the had a seminal influence on Abstract Expressionism. He spent emergence of the Abstract Expressionist most his life as a national of the United States. Along with Mark movement, Gorky helped to establish New Rothko, Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning, Gorky has York as an important arts center and, by been hailed as one of the most powerful American painters of the extension, the United States as the cultural 20th century. As such, his works were often speculated to have capital of the postwar world. been informed by the suffering and loss he experienced in the Armenian Genocide In particular, Gorky maintained a close personal and professional friendship with De Kooning. It is believed that Gorky introduced De Kooning to the insertion of personally relevant pictorial elements within his work. Moreover, Gorky's approach to assembling his compositions, apparently spontaneous, yet carefully planned, became a methodological template for many Abstract Expressionists,

Arshile Gorky

67 Armenian-born American painter, Gorky was a surrealist painter and also one of the leaders of abstract expressionism. He was called Armenian "the Ingres of the unconscious". 1905-1948

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j7LGZwxTGpE .The Maids of Honor (Las Meninas) 1656 009 Museo Nacional del Prado (Madrid) Baroque

The king and queen stand where you are standing, in front of a gathering of courtiers. Velazquez looks from the portrait he is painting of the royal couple. The infanta and her retinue of maids (meninas) and dwarf entertainers are gathered before the monarch Although he was paid to create work for royalty, Velazquez maintained an extreme commitment to also depict everyday people and scenes. He managed to quell the external influences of popular opinion, which deemed this work wasteful or meaningless, by creating pieces so compelling they could not escape interest. one of the most important of all-time. The central figure is the Velazquez's intensely direct style of painting young Margarita Teresa of Spain but the painting also shows the truth was photorealistic in nature and far artist himself, an image of the king and queen, several servants, ahead of its time. He infused various two dwarfs, and a dog. Las Meninas, or The Maids of Honor, techniques toward accurately depicting depicts a room in the Madrid palace of Spain’s King Philip IV. detail and its many nuances including free, The painting is famous for its complexities regarding reality and loose brushstrokes, the utilization of illusion. Uncertainty is played out in the relations between the gradients of light, color, and form, and an viewers and the figures, as well as between the figures eye for detail that was unsurpassed by his themselves. These complex uncertainties have welcomed much peers. This style would become an early discussion and analysis among critics and scholars. forebear to both Realism and Impressionism. Velazquez was a master of the use of chiaroscuro, or, the treatment of light and shadow in a painting to create high contrast. He utilized this technique to highlight points of particular importance to the viewer and to set an overall atmospheric

Diego Velazquez

6. Along with Rembrandt, one of the summits of Baroque painting. But unlike the Dutch artist, the Sevillan painter spent most of his life Spanish in the comfortable but rigid courtesan society. Nevertheless, 1599 - 1660 Velázquez was an innovator, a "painter of atmospheres" two centuries before Turner and the Impressionists, which it is shown in his colossal 'royal paintings' ("Meninas", "The Forge of Vulcan"), but also in his small and memorable sketches of the Villa Medici.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WKRKrpz09Fk .The Moneylender and His Wife 1514 035 Musée du Louvre (Paris) Northern Renaissance

Rather than a descriptive work documenting the subject's profession or contemporary religious practice, this painting is an allegorical and moral work, condemning avarice and exalting honesty, as is shown by emblems of the vanity of life and Christian symbols like the scales of the Last Judgment. Its nature is underlined by the curiously archaic dress of the subjects, which seems to hark back to an earlier period. The mirror is a fascinating detail, reminiscent of the virtuosity of van Eyck.

Quentin Massys

Although the roots of Matsys' training are unknown, his style reflects the artistic qualities of Dirk Bouts, who brought to Leuven the Flemish influence of Hans Memling and Rogier Van der Weyden. When 1466-1530 Matsys settled at Antwerp at the age of twenty-five, his own style contributed importantly to reviving Flemish art along the lines of Van Eyck and Van der Weyden.[3] Matsys departed from Leuven in 1491 when he became a master in the guild of painters at Antwerp. His most well known satirical works include The Ugly Duchess (1515), A Portrait of an Elderly Man (1513), and The Money Changer and His Wife (1514), all of which provide commentary on human feeling and society in general. He also painted religious altarpieces and triptych panels, the most famous of which was built for the Church of Saint https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_XcXLKWbpJ8&t=27s .The Night Watch 1642 054 Rijksmuseum (Amsterdam) Baroque

This painting is huge (11 ft x 14 ft) and shows a group of soldiers leaving for a battle. Unlike earlier paintings which showed people looking stiff, this picture captures their movement. Also, the way he painted the light emphasizes the three men in the front as well as a young girl. The girl has a dead chicken hanging from her belt — a symbol that they will defeat their enemy. The Night Watch is one of the most famous paintings by Dutch painter Rembrandt van Rijn. For much of its existence, the painting was coated with a dark varnish which gave the incorrect impression that it depicted a night scene, leading to the name Night Watch. This varnish was removed only in the 1940s.

Rembrandt van Rijn

Dutch 1606-1669

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P7iFTB2NyrY .The Ninth Wave 1850 003 The State Hermitage Museum (St Petersburg) Romanticism

huge painting of nearly 11 feet (3.3 meters) by 7 feet (2.2 meters), which portrays a group of people clinging to flotsam from a wrecked ship, in the midst of a tempestuous sea surrounded by the brilliant gold tones of the sunrise. The title refers to a traditional nautical belief that the ninth wave is the last, largest and most deadly wave in a series, at which point the cycle begins again. Painted when Aivazovsky was 33 years old, it is characteristic of his mature Romanticism in technique, theme and populist appeal.

The Christian message is less explicit, being confined to the cross-like form of the mast Aivazovsky reaches in this painting an absolute technical and the pleading attitude of the unfortunates perfection, representing a group of unlucky castaways trying to clinging to it, as they look to the rising sun survive under the merciless charges in form of oceanic waves. just before the big wave strikes. Displaying Nevertheless, the centre of the composition is the powerful, the classical academic discipline of almost mystical and diffuse representation of the sun, which composition and palette that Aivazovsky illuminates the scene with a strange, oneiric range of green and had been taught and then observed in the pink shades. This painting is often called "the most beautiful galleries and salons of the European painting in Russia" capitals, The Ninth Wave has all the melodrama of Aivazovsky at his most febrile and all the grandeur of his most strident efforts to impress. The epic quality, which according to Russophile writer and poet Rosa Newmarch, in her perceptive early comments about his work, had become "increasingly pronounced" by this point, did not yet consistently offer the more

Ivan Konstantinovich Aivazovsky

One of the most prominent Russian artists of his time, Aivazovsky was also popular outside Russia. He held numerous solo exhibitions Russian in Europe and the United States. During his almost 60-year career, he 1817-1900 created around 6,000 paintings, making him one of the most prolific artists of his time.[4][5] The vast majority of his works are seascapes, but he often depicted battle scenes, Armenian themes, and portraiture. Most of Aivazovsky's works are kept in Russian, Ukrainian and Armenian museums as well as private collections.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mkxKRv4krbU .The Parnassus (Stanza della Segnatura) 1511 127 The Vatican High Renaissance

By the end of 1508, Raphael had moved to Rome, where he lived for the rest of his life. He was invited by the new Pope Julius II, perhaps at the suggestion of his architect Donato Bramante, then engaged on St. Peter's Basilica, who came from just outside Urbino and was distantly related to Raphael.[32] Unlike Michelangelo, who had been kept lingering in Rome for several months after his first summons,[33] Raphael was immediately commissioned by Julius to fresco what was intended to become the Pope's private library at the Vatican Palace.[34] This was a much larger and more important commission than any he had received before; he had only painted one altarpiece in Florence itself. Several other artists and their teams of assistants were already at work on different rooms, many painting over recently completed paintings This first of the famous "Stanze" or "" to be painted, now known as the Stanza della Segnatura after its use in

Raphael

21 Equally loved and hated in different eras, no one can doubt that Raphael is one of the greatest geniuses of the Renaissance, with an Italian excellent technique in terms of drawing and color 1483-1520

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=juDVP1HDztk .The Peaceable Kingdom 1826 075 Worcester Art Museum Naive

Trained as a sign, coach, and ornamental painter, Hicks painted over a hundred versions of his now-famous Peaceable Kingdom between 1820 and his death. His artistic endeavors provided modest support for his activities as a Quaker preacher in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. The theme of this painting, drawn from chapter 11 of Isaiah, was undoubtedly attractive to Hicks and fellow Quakers not only for its appealing imagery but also for its message of peace: "The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid, and the calf and the young lion and fatling together; and a little child shall lead them."

Edward Hicks

Since their re-discovery in the 1930s, Hicks's deceptively simple, seemingly child-like depictions of the animal world have delighted American viewers of all ages. They also won him the admiration of modern 1780-1849 artists early in this century who saw in his almost surreal compositions executed in his flat, signboard-like style a provocative parallel to their own vision.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D2oH4tKoOag .The Persistence of Memory 1931 041 Museum of Modern Art (New York) Surrealism

Salvador Dalí is among the most versatile and prolific artists of the 20th century and the most famous Surrealist. Though chiefly remembered for his painterly output, in the course of his long career he successfully turned to sculpture, printmaking, fashion, advertising, writing, and, perhaps most famously, filmmaking in his collaborations with Luis Buñuel and Alfred Hitchcock. Dalí was renowned for his flamboyant personality and role of mischievous provocateur as much as for his undeniable technical virtuosity. In his early use of organic morphology, his work bears the stamp of fellow Spaniards Pablo Picasso distorting the ideas of hard and soft. and Joan Miró. His paintings also evince a This iconic and much-reproduced painting depicts the fluidity of fascination for Classical and Renaissance time as a series of melting watches, their forms described by Dalí art, clearly visible through his as inspired by a surrealist perception of Camembert cheese hyper-realistic style and religious melting in the sun. The distinction between hard and soft objects symbolism of his later work. highlights Dalí's desire to flip reality lending to his subjects characteristics opposite their usually inherent properties, an un-reality often found in our dreamscapes. They are surrounded by a swarm of ants hungry for the organic processes of putrefaction and decay of which Dalí held unshakable fascination. Because the melting flesh at the painting's center resembles Dalí, we might see this piece as a reflection on the artist's immortality amongst the rocky cliffs of his Catalonian home.

Salvador Dali

55 "I am Surrealism!" shouted Dalí when he was expelled from the surrealist movement by André Breton. Although the quote sounds Spanish presumptuous (which was not unusual in Dalí), the fact is that Dalí's 1904-1989 paintings are now the most famous images of all the surrealist movement.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OWRflkibv_I .The Rape of the Sabine Women 1638 129 Musée du Louvre (Paris) Baroque

the leading painter of the classical French Baroque style, although he spent most of his working life in Rome. Most of his works were on religious and mythological subjects painted for a small group of Italian and French collectors. He returned to Paris for a brief period to serve as First Painter to the King under Louis XIII and Cardinal Richelieu, but soon returned to Rome and resumed his more traditional themes. In his later years he gave growing prominence to the landscapes in his pictures. His work is characterized by clarity, logic, and order, and favors line over color. Until the 20th century he remained a major inspiration for such classically-oriented artists as Jacques-Louis David, Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres and Paul Cézanne.

Another of his early major themes was the Rape of the Sabine Women, recounting how the King of Rome, Romulus, wanting wives for his soldiers, invited the members of the neighboring

Nicholas Poussin

33 The greatest among the great French Baroque painters, Poussin had a vital influence on French painting for many centuries. His use of French color is unique among all the painters of his era

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7v1wb4BBjXg .The Resurrection 1460 104 Museo Civico (Sansepolcro) Renaissance

Art historians have often dated the fresco between 1450 and 1465 but new research has shifted the date to 1470. The original location and reason why it was moved are still unclear. And the mystery on whether the sleeping soldier represents Piero della Francesca remains unanswered.

After a three-year-long restoration, Renaissance master Piero della Francesca's Resurrection can once again be admired in its original glory at the civic museum of Sansepolcro, the little Tuscan town where the artist was born sometime around 1420. The details and colors that make up the masterpiece have been brought back to life - the eyes of Jesus Christ, the draping of his pink cloak, the soldiers at his feet and the hills and fortresses against a clear blue sky on the background. The fresco described by Giorgio Vasari, the father of modern art history, as the Renaissance pioneer's "most beautiful" artwork and hailed by British novelist Aldous Huxley in 1925 in the essay "The most beautiful painting in the world", is a symbol of Sansepolcro. Indeed gunnery officer Anthony Clarke in 1944 famously decided at the last minute not to bombard the town because he remembered about the masterpiece he would otherwise have risked destroying.

Piero della Francesca

Despite being one of the most important figures of the quattrocento, the Art of Piero della Francesca has been described as “cold”, Italian “hieratic” or even “impersonal”. the “metaphysical dimension” of the 1422-1492 paintings his precise and detailed Art finally occupied the place that it deserves in the Art history

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bZ4dauDXk9U .The Scream 1893 012 National Gallery (Oslo) Expressionism

Edvard Munch grew up in a household periodically beset by life-threatening illnesses and the premature deaths of his mother and sister, all of which was explained by Munch's father, a Christian fundamentalist, as acts of divine punishment. This powerful matrix of chance tragic events and their fatalistic interpretation left a lifelong impression on the young artist, and contributed decisively to his eventual preoccupation with themes of anxiety, emotional suffering, and human vulnerability. Munch intended for his intense colors, semi-abstraction and mysterious, often In this style of painting, reality is distorted in order to open-ended themes to function as symbols express emotion. Here the emotion is paniThe Scream is a series of universal significance. Thus his of paintings and prints an agonized figure against a blood red drawings, paintings, and prints take on the sky. The landscape in the background is Oslofjord, viewed from quality of psychological talismans: having the hill of Ekeberg, in Oslo. It was stolen in 1994 in a originated in Munch's personal experiences, high-profile art theft and recovered several months later. In 2004 they nonetheless bear the power to express, another version of The Scream was stolen from the Munch and perhaps alleviate, any viewer's own Museum, recovered in 2006 Essentially this famous picture is emotional or psychological condition. autobiographical, an expressionistic construction based on The frequent preoccupation in Munch's Munch's actual experience of a scream piercing through nature work with sexual subject matter issues from while on a walk, after his two companions, seen in the both the artist's bohemian valuation of sex background, had left him. Fitting the fact that the sound must as a tool for emotional and physical have been heard at a time when his mind was in an abnormal liberation from social conformity as well as state, Munch renders it in a style which if pushed to extremes can his contemporaries' fascination with sexual destroy human integrity. experience as a window onto the subliminal, sometimes darker facets of human

Edvard Munch

23.Modernist in his context, Munch could be also considered the first expressionist painter in history. Works like "The Scream" are vital to Norwegian understanding the twentieth century painting. 1863-1944

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OxP5e_ghWfM .The Skating Minister (The Reverend Robt Walker Skating on 1790 114 Scottish National Portrait Gallery (Edinburgh) Romanticism

Raeburn had all the essential qualities of a popular and successful portrait painter. He was able to produce a telling and forcible likeness; his work is distinguished by powerful characterisation, stark realism, dramatic and unusual lighting effects, and swift and broad handling of the most resolute sort. David Wilkie recorded that, while travelling in Spain and studying the works of Diego Velázquez, the brushwork reminded him constantly of the "square touch" of Raeburn.[4] Scottish physician and writer John Brown wrote that Raeburn "never fails in giving a likeness at once vivid, unmistakable and pleasing. He paints THE row over who painted the Skating Minister will be reignited the truth, and he paints it with love".[5] this week by claims that new X-ray evidence shows it was not Raeburn has been described as a "famously the work of Henry Raeburn. intuitive"[5] portrait painter. He was unusual amongst many of his The Skating Minister – which depicts the Reverend Dr Robert contemporaries, such as Reynolds, in the Walker skating on Duddingston Loch – is one of the most-prized extent of his philosophy of painting directly possessions of the National Galleries of Scotland and has been from life; he made no preliminary attributed to the 18th-century artist by its experts. However, a sketches.[2] This attitude partly explains the new book edited by an art historian will claim that X-rays taken often coarse modelling and clashing colour of the painting reveal that it lacks the white lead paint Raeburn combinations he employed, in contrast to typically used for his faces and that the work is “utterly alien” to the more refined style of Thomas the artist’s technique. Gainsborough and Reynolds. However these qualities and those mentioned above Dr Stephen Lloyd, who is convinced that the Skating Minister is anticipate many of the later developments the work of French emigre artist Henri-Pierre Danloux, says his in painting of the 19th century opinion is supported by Pierre Rosenburg, one of the foremost from romanticism to Impressionism.

Sir Henry Raeburn

Sir Henry Raeburn, (born March 4, 1756, Stockbridge, near Edinburgh—died July 8, 1823, Edinburgh), leading Scottish portrait Scottish painter during the late 18th and early 19th centuries. 1756-1823 In about 1771 Raeburn was apprenticed to the goldsmith James Gilliland and is said to have studied with the Edinburgh portrait painter David Martin briefly in 1775. But for the most part Raeburn was self-taught, progressing from miniature painting to full-scale portraiture. A portrait of George Chalmers (1776) is Raeburn’s earliest known portrait, and its faulty drawing and incorrect perspective suggest the artist’s lack of formal training. By his marriage to a wealthy widow in 1778, he achieved financial security, and during the next four years he considerably improved his artistic skill. In .The Sleeping Gypsy 1897 071 Museum of Modern Art (New York) Post-Impressionist

Although he had ambitions to become a famous academic painter, Rousseau instead became the virtual opposite: the quintessential "naïve" artist. Largely self-taught, Rousseau developed a style that evidenced his lack of academic training, with its absence of correct proportions, one-point perspective, and use of sharp, often unnatural colors. Such features resulted in a body of work imbued with a sense of mystery and eccentricity. The untutored and idiosyncratic character of Rousseau's art was derided by many early viewers of his work, with one Parisian journalist memorably writing that This painting's departure from Rousseau's usual subject matter "Monsieur Rousseau paints with his feet led many to declare it a forgery, some even attributing it to with his eyes closed." Yet this quality André Derain. The moonlit scene takes place in a desert, where a resonated with modern artists such as female gypsy sleeps with a mandolin and jug by her side, Picasso, who saw in Rousseau's work a untroubled and - amazingly - unharmed by a curious lion. The model for the sincerity and directness to strangeness of the scene is enhanced by the precariously sloping which they aspired in their own work, by plane and presentation of the animal and gypsy as if below the drawing inspiration from African tribal viewer's perspective. The gypsy is dressed in Eastern garb, while masks and other "primitive" and traditional the painting as a whole recalls the stories from Arabian Nights, art forms. which had been translated into several unabridged versions Influenced by a combination of "high" and starting in the mid-1880s. In an attempt to sell the piece to his "low" sources - academic sculpture, hometown, Rousseau sent the following description to the Mayor postcards, tabloid illustrations, and trips to of Laval: "A wandering negress, a mandolin player, sleeps in the Paris public zoo and gardens - Rousseau deep exhaustion, her jug beside her. A lion happens to pass that created modern, unconventional renderings way and sniffs at her but does not devour her." For its eerie, of traditional genres such as landscape, meditative beauty and image of humankind's harmony with the portraiture, and allegory. The fantastic,

Henri Rousseau

Rousseau described the subject of The Sleeping Gypsy thus: "A wandering Negress, a mandolin player, lies with her jar beside her (a French vase with drinking water), overcome by fatigue in a deep sleep. A lion 1844-1910 chances to pass by, picks up her scent yet does not devour her. There is a moonlight effect, very poetic.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3nad3u_3UmI .The Son of Man 1964 042 Private Collection Surrealism

Surely the most celebrated Belgian artist of the 20th century, Rene Magritte has achieved great popular acclaim for his idiosyncratic approach to Surrealism. To support himself he spent many years working as a commercial artist, producing advertising and book designs, and this most likely shaped his fine art, which often has the abbreviated impact of an advertisement. While some French Surrealists led ostentatious lives, Magritte preferred the quiet anonymity of a middle-class existence, a life symbolized by the bowler-hatted men that often populate his pictures. In later years, he was Magritte explained this painting as follows: “Everything we see castigated by his peers for some of his hides another thing, we always want to see what is hidden by strategies (such as his tendency to produce what we see. There is an interest in that which is hidden and multiple copies of his pictures), yet since which the visible does not show us.” Magritte painted The Son his death his reputation has only improved. of Man, or Le fils de l’homme, as a self-portrait. The painting Conceptual artists have admired his use of depicts a man in a suit with a bowler hat; his face is mostly text in images, and painters in the 1980s obscured by a green apple. The theme of the art work is a conflict admired the provocative kitsch of some of between that which is visible and that which is hidden. The parts his later work. of a person we want to see is often obscured by what is visible.

René Magritte

90 One of the leading figures of surrealism, his apparently simple works are the result of a complex reflection about reality and the Belgian world of dreams 1898-1967

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vopj2s2wkWw .The Teachings of Buddhism, No.3d 1920 005 Hilma af Klint Foundation Abstract Expressionism

Paradoxically delicate and powerful, the art of Hilma af Klint quietly and privately delivers a loud and essential message. Creating abstract canvases five years prior to the first by Wassily Kandinsky, and experimenting with writing and drawing guided by the unconscious decades before the Surrealists, the woman was a pioneer. Described as a mystic and a medium, af Klint conducted séances and communicated with spirits, even receiving a message from higher forces to create her most notable, devotional body of work, Paintings for the Temple. Yet, af Klint's sensitivity surrounding the ethereal was In stark contrast to other pioneers of 20th century abstraction, af married to an analytical and scientific way Klint worked away from the art world, without publishing of navigating the world. She was an eager manifestoes or participating in exhibitions. Despite her relative botanist, well read in natural sciences and isolation she arrived at similar conclusions therefore questioning in world religions. With unsurpassed the need for audience and outward influences in the development wisdom and in anticipation of human of an artistic style. It is a great achievement to become a 'big foolishness, not only did af Klint state that name' having followed an inward path. her work was not to be shown for 20 years Af Klint's combination of geometry, figuration, symbolism, following her death, but she also stipulated language, scientific research, and religion not only establishes her that no work could be sold separately, as a forerunner in abstract art, but also exposes her work as ensuring that her artworks could not significant in the broadest of artistic terms. Her route to become misunderstood commodities. abstraction drew not only from an interest in mathematics but also from her studies of organic growth, including shells and flowers, all culminating to portray life through a spiritual lens. The title for the artist's most important body of work, Paintings for the Temple is significant. It suggests that the canvases require

Hilma af Klint

Indeed, af Klint became interested in all world religions. Here she focuses on Buddhism, but does similar illustrations for Christianity, Swedish Judaism, and Islam. She begins the series with a circle divided into 1862-1944 one black semi-circle and one white. From there, the areas colored black and white change according to which spiritual outlook af Klint is exploring. One such drawing, The Mahatmas Present Standing Point represents a circle subdivided into four black and white quarters. A Mahatma is considered a 'great soul' and a 'spiritual The Swan, No. 1 (1914-15) teacher' within the Theosophy movement. The series is entirely painted in black and white until the final two works illustrating Buddhism and Christianity, to which the artist adds color. There is strong resemblance to Kazimir Malevich's Suprematist canvases. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yOEJHvVp_ns .The Tempest 1508 090 Gallerie dell'Accademia (Venice) High Renaissance

On the right a woman sits, suckling a baby. The woman has been described as a "Gypsy" since at least 1530 and in Italy the painting is known as ("The Gypsy woman and the soldier"). Her pose is unusual - normally the baby would be held on the mother's lap; but in this case the baby is positioned at the side of the mother, so as to expose her pubic area. A man, possibly a soldier, holding a long staff stands. He smiles and glances to the left, but does not appear to be looking at the woman.

Giorgione

48 Like so many other painters who died at young age, Giorgione makes us wonder what place would his exquisite painting occupy in Italian Venetian the history of Art if he had enjoyed a long existence, just like his 1477-1510 direct artistic heir - Titian.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LFA_qmGuY2A .The Thankful Poor 1894 029 Private Collection Realism

In The Thankful Poor, Tanner depicts a grandfather and a grandchild giving thanks before a meal. He focused on the people and the main objects in the room, painting them with great detail, while everything else blends in with the light and brushstrokes in the painting. The warm and expressive light that Tanner paints with helps to enhance the spiritual quality of the painting. The bright light shining on the young boy’s face illustrates the boy’s concentration, devotion, and thankfulness. Within a few years of painting The Thankful Poor, Tanner began painting even more religious scenes, often depicting biblical figures. Tanner is often regarded as a realist painter,[16] focusing on accurate depictions of subjects.[17] While works such as The Banjo Lesson were concerned with everyday life as an African American, Tanner later painted themes based on religious subjects, for which he is now best known.[9] It is likely that Tanner's father, a minister in the African Methodist Episcopal Church, was a formative influence for him

Henry Ossawa Tanner

first African-American painter to gain international acclaim.[1] Tanner moved to Paris, France, in 1891 to study, and continued to live American there after being accepted in French artistic circles.[2] His painting 1859-1937 entitled Daniel in the Lions' Den was accepted into the 1896 Salon,[3] the official art exhibition of the Académie des Beaux-Arts in Paris.

After his own self-study in art as a young man, Tanner enrolled in 1879 at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia. Fishermen at Sea (1913) The only black student, he became a favorite of the painter Thomas Eakins, who had recently begun teaching there.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FKTtUkp86BY .The Third of May, 1808 1814 004 Museo Nacional del Prado (Madrid) Rococo

Goya occupies a unique position within the history of Western art, and is often cited as both an Old Master and the first truly modern artist. His art embodies Romanticism's emphasis on subjectivity, imagination, and emotion, characteristics reflected most notably in his prints and later private paintings. At the same time, Goya was an astute observer of the world around him, and his art responded directly to the tumultuous events of his day, from the liberations of the Enlightenment, to the suppressions of the Inquisition, to the horrors of war following the Napoleonic invasion. Both for its inventiveness and its Napoleon’s attack on Spain in 1808. Prior to this, most paintings political engagement, Goya's art had an showed war as being a glorious thing. This painting shows it as enormous impact on later modern artists. being cruel and subhuman (see how the soldiers look His unflinching scenes from the Peninsular mechanical whereas the ones being shot look full of life firing War presaged the works of Pablo Picasso in squad killing Spanish who participated in the resistance against the 20th century, while his exploration of Bonaparte’s army. It’s not heroic, it’s not inspiring, and you can bizarre and dreamlike subjects in the clearly see dread and pants-wetting fear in the eyes of the guy Caprichos laid the foundation for Surrealists with the outstretched arms as he’s on his knees, waiting for the like Salvador Dalí. Goya's influence extends painful, hot lead death that is coming in the next 2-3 seconds. to the 21st century, as contemporary artists have also drawn inspiration from the artist's grotesque imagery and searing social commentary.

Francisco Goya

16 an enigma. In the History of Art few figures are as comple. Enterprising and indefinable, a painter with no rival in all his life, Spanish Goya was the painter of the Court and the painter of the people. He 1746-1828 was a religious painter and a mystical painter. He was the author of the beauty and eroticism of the 'Maja desnuda' and the creator of the explicit horror of 'The Third of May, 1808'. He was an oil painter, a fresco painter, a sketcher and an engraver.

Goya's Ghosts (2006)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dcf5xTOorpY .The Two Fridas 1939 139 Museo de Arte Moderno (Mexico City)

This painting was completed shortly after her divorce with Diego Rivera. This portrait shows Frida's two different personalities. One is the traditional Frida in Tehuana costume, with a broken heart, sitting next to an independent, modern dressed Frida. In Frida's dairy, she wrote about this painting and said it is originated from her memory of an imaginary childhood friend. Later she admitted it expressed her desperation and loneliness with the separation from Diego.

In this painting, the two Fridas are holding hands. They both have visible hearts and the heart of the traditional Frida is cut and Inspired by the country's popular culture, she employed a naïve torn open. The main artery, which comes folk art style to explore questions of identity, postcolonialism, from the torn heart down to the right hand of gender, class, and race in Mexican society.[1] Her paintings often the traditional Frida, is cut off by the had strong autobiographical elements and mixed realism with surgical pincers held in the lap of the fantasy. In addition to belonging to the post-revolutionary traditional Frida. The blood keeps dripping Mexicayotl movement, which sought to define a Mexican on her white dress and she is in danger of identity, Kahlo has been described as a surrealist or magical realist. bleeding to death. The stormy sky filled with agitated clouds may reflect Frida's inner turmoil.

Frida Kahlo

49 in recent years, Frida's increasing fame seems to have obscured her importance in Latin American art. On September 17th, 1925, Kahlo Mexican was almost killed in a terrible bus accident. She did not died, but the 1907-1954 violent crash had terrible sequels, breaking her spinal column, pelvis, and right leg.. After this accident, Kahlo's self-portraits can be considered as quiet but terrible moans

The Broken Column (1944)

Frida (2002)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bYXd_7voo-0&t=39s .The Yellow Christ 1889 087 Albright-Knox Art Gallery (Buffalo) Post-Impressionist

After mastering Impressionist methods for depicting the optical experience of nature, Gauguin studied religious communities in rural Brittany and various landscapes in the Caribbean, while also educating himself in the latest French ideas on the subject of painting and color theory (the latter much influenced by recent scientific study into the various, unstable processes of visual perception). This background contributed to Gauguin's gradual development of a new kind of "synthetic" painting, one that functions as a symbolic, rather than a merely documentary, or mirror-like, reflection of reality. Together with The Green Christ, it is considered to be one of the Seeking the kind of direct relationship to key works of Symbolism in painting. he Yellow Christ is a the natural world that he witnessed in symbolic piece that shows the crucifixion of Christ taking place various communities of French Polynesia in nineteenth-century northern France as Breton women are and other non-western cultures, Gauguin gathered in prayer. Gauguin relies heavily on bold lines to define treated his painting as a philosophical his figures and reserves shading only for the women. meditation on the ultimate meaning of The Yellow Christ is a strong example of both Cloisonnism (a human existence, as well as the possibility style characterized by dark contours and bright areas of color of religious fulfillment and answers on how separated by bold outlines) and Symbolism (in which subject to live closer to nature. matter is idealized or romanticized in some fashion). The Gauguin was one of the key participants painting's predominant imagery, the crucified Christ, is evident, during the last decades of the 19th century but Gauguin places the scene in the north of France during the in a European cultural movement that has peak season of Autumn foliage, indeed as women in 19th-century since come to be referred to as Primitivism. garb gather at the foot of the cross. It remains for the viewer to The term denotes the Western fascination decide whether the vision is conjured in the minds of the pious or for less industrially-developed cultures, and physically manifest in the contemporary landscape. the romantic notion that non-Western

Paul Gauguin

15 One of the most fascinating figures in the history of painting, his works moved from Impressionism (soon abandoned) to a colorful and French vigorous symbolism, as can be seen in his 'Polynesian paintings'. 1848-1903 Matisse and Fauvism could not be understood without the works of Paul Gauguin

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WI9bhnVkb_o .Tiger on the Watch 1888 001 The Museum of Fine Arts (Houston) Academic

Academic art, or academicism or academism, is a style of painting, sculpture, and architecture produced under the influence of European academies of art. Specifically, academic art is the art and artists influenced by the standards of the French Académie des Beaux-Arts, which practiced under the movements of Neoclassicism and Romanticism, and the art that followed these two movements in the attempt to synthesize both of their styles, and which is best reflected by the paintings

In 1859, Jean-Léon Gérôme left Paris for his first extensive trip to the "Orient," a term commonly used to describe North Africa and the Middle East during the 19th century. The journey sparked Gérôme´s interest in travel, and led him to focus on other exotic destinations such as Turkey, Egypt, Palestine, and Greece over the course of his career. Tiger on the Watch demonstrates Gérôme´s interest in exotic animals and landscapes. In the late 1880s scenes such as this were in extremely high demand among wealthy Parisians who yearned for an escape from the rigors of modern life. Why do you think the elite of Paris would want to own a painting such as this by Jean-Léon Gérôme?

Jean-Léon Gérôme

a French painter and sculptor in the style now known as academicism. The range of his oeuvre included historical painting, Greek French mythology, Orientalism, portraits, and other subjects, bringing the 1824-1904 academic painting tradition to an artistic climax. He is considered one of the most important painters from this academic period.

Leda and the Swan (1895)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o9vS1rnlMVQ .Tower of Babel 1563 026 Kunsthistorisches Museum (Vienna) Northern Renaissance

The Tower of Babel is the subject of three oil paintings by Pieter Bruegel the Elder. The first, a miniature painted on ivory, was painted while Bruegel was in Rome and is now lost. The Tower of Babel is on display at the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna. Another painting of the same subject The "Little" Tower of Babel, c. 1563, is in the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam. Bruegel's depiction of the architecture of the tower, with its numerous arches and other examples of Roman engineering, is deliberately reminiscent of the Roman Colosseum, which Christians of the time saw as both a symbol of hubris and persecution.

Pieter Bruegel the Elder

69 Whereas Bosch's fantasies are born of a deep deception and preoccupation for the human being, with a clearly moralizing Flemish message; works by Bruegel are full of irony, and even filled with a 1528-1569 love for the rural life, which seems to anticipate the Dutch landscape paintings from the next century.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dHtaPqoyABo .Untitled (Head) 1981 128 Grafitti

Jean-Michel Basquiat emerged from the "Punk" scene in New York as a gritty, street-smart graffiti artist who successfully crossed over from his "downtown" origins to the international art gallery circuit. In a few fast-paced years, Basquiat swiftly rose to become one of the most celebrated, and possibly most commercially exploited American "naif" painters of the widely celebrated Neo-Expressionism art movement.

Heads are seen as a major focal point of some of Basquiat's most seminal works. Two pieces, "Untitled (Head)" 1981 and "Untitled (Head)" 1982, held by the Broad Foundation and Maezawa Foundation respectively can be seen as primary examples. In reference to the potent image depicted in both pieces, Fred Hoffman writes that Basquiat was likely, "caught off guard, possibly even frightened, by the power and energy emanating from this unexpected image.” [38] Further investigation by Fred Hoffman of pieces like "Masonic Lodge" 1983 and Untitled (1983) in his book "The Art of Jean-Michel Basquiat" reveals a deeper interest in the artist's fascination with heads that proves an evolution in the artist's oeuvre from one of raw power to one of more refined cognizance.

Jean-Michel Basquiat

22 Basquiat is undoubtedly the most important and famous member of the "graffiti movement" that appeared in the New York scene in the American early'80s, an artistic movement whose enormous influence on later 1960-1988 painting is still to be measured

Self portrait

Basquiat (1996)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3YwUoPO70Ig .Victory Boogie Woogie 1942 126 Gemeentemuseum (The Hague) Abstract

in these final works, the forms have indeed usurped the role of the lines, opening another new door for Mondrian's development as an abstractionist. The Boogie-Woogie paintings were clearly more of a revolutionary change than an evolutionary one, representing the most profound development in Mondrian's work since his abandonment of representational art in 1913.

In 2008 the Dutch television program Andere Tijden found the only known movie footage with Mondrian.[28] The discovery of the film footage was announced at the unfinished Victory Boogie Woogie (1942–44), Mondrian replaced end of a two-year research program on the former solid lines with lines created from small adjoining Victory Boogie Woogie. The research found rectangles of color, created in part by using small pieces of paper that the painting was in very good condition tape in various colors. Larger unbounded rectangles of color and that Mondrian painted the composition punctuate the design, some with smaller concentric rectangles in one session. It also was found that the inside them. While Mondrian's works of the 1920s and 1930s composition was changed radically by tend to have an almost scientific austerity about them, these are Mondrian shortly before his death by using bright, lively paintings, reflecting the upbeat music that inspired small pieces of colored tape. them and the city in which they were made.

Piet Mondriaan

25 Along with Kandinsky and Malevich, Mondrian is the leading figure of early abstract painting. After emigrating to New York, Dutch Mondrian filled his abstract paintings with a fascinating emotional 1872 -1944 quality, as we can se in his series of "boogie-woogies" created in the mid-40s

Composition with Yellow, Blue and Red (1937)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dhv3_nGfETw .Virgin and Child 1340 061 Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza (Madrid) Early Renaissance

Like many in Florence's post-Giotto generation, Daddi later was probably influenced by Sienese art, with its gracefulness and tender human relationships. Ivory carvings from France also may have contributed to the lyric sweetness of his art. He rarely painted frescoes. His large workshop specialized in small, devotional panels, which retain a sense of intimacy even when intended for public places. Daddi is recorded as being artistically active between 1312 and 1347, and scholars estimate that he died soon after. One of the leading Florentine artists of the period, Daddi carried with him the Bernardo Daddi was an early Italian Renaissance painter and the influence of the early Renaissance from leading painter of Florence of his generation. He was one of the Giotto di Bondone (1267 – 1337). Said to artists who contributed to the revolutionary art of the have trained under Giotto; Daddi’s Renaissance, which broke away from the conventions of the documented works date as early as 1312 preceding generation of Gothic artists, by creating compositions and up until 1347, just before his death. which aimed to achieve a more realistic representation of reality. His work was also influenced by the He was particularly successful with his small-scale works and graceful Sienese style of artists like Pietro contributed to the development of the portable altarpiece, a Lorenzetti (1280 – 1348). One unique format that subsequently gained great popularity contributing influence on his work was that of Ivory carvings from France, which enhanced his style’s more lyrical attributes seen from the Sienese influence. Daddi helped to capture Giotto’s progression of art from the Iconic painting of Byzantine art into the Renaissance’s more natural forms. Though he was still an

Bernardo Daddi

That a painting should look like physical reality was the revolutionary idea of Giotto di Bondone, who may have been Bernardo Daddi's Italian teacher. As the leading Florentine painter of his generation, Daddi 1280-1348 helped to ensure that this idea, which heralded the Renaissance and came to be taken for granted until the modern age, was kept alive. For hundreds of years, Italian painting had been based on the abstractions of Byzantine art, which stressed patterning, flatness, and ethereal-looking people. Daddi's figures, like Giotto's, have bulk and physicality. As in everyday experience, their form is modeled by light that is earthly and real. Still, throughout his career, Daddi retained some elements of Byzantium's legacy of abstraction, choosing its almond-shaped eyes, ornamental patterning, and gold backgrounds. .Virgin and Child Surrounded by Angels 1450 064 Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium (Antwerp) Early Renaissance

figures realistic, mood is otherworldly, dreamlike state of sentimentalism. Madonna shown as the Queen of Heaven and reveals her as the veil between heaven and earth. She is both human and otherworldly. The colors have been attributed to represent the heraldic colors of the king,. The Virgin is believed to be an idealized portrait of Agnès Sorel, mistress of King Charles VII, who died 2 years earlier. Sorel was considered by many at the time to be "the most beautiful woman in the world" and therefore an obvious choice after which to model the Virgin.

Jean Fouquet

a master of both panel painting and manuscript illumination, and the apparent inventor of the portrait miniature. He was the first French French artist to travel to Italy and experience first-hand the early Italian 1420-1481 Renaissance. Fouquet's excellence as an illuminator, his precision in the rendering of the finest detail, and his power of clear characterization in work on this minute scale secured his eminent position in French art. His importance as a painter was demonstrated when his portraits and altarpieces were for the first time brought together from various parts of Europe for the exhibition of the "French Primitives" held at the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uWXgBqRV5-M .Vision after the Sermon; Jacob Wrestling with the Angel 1888 086 National Gallery of Scotland (Edinburgh) Post-Impressionist

Vision after the Sermon represents a significant departure from the subject matter of Impressionism, namely the city or rural landscape, which was still quite prevalent in Europe and the United States during the last two decades of the 19th century. Instead of choosing to paint pastoral landscape or urban entertainments, Gauguin depicted a rural Biblical scene of praying women envisioning Jacob wrestling with an angel. The decision to paint a religious subject was reminiscent of the Renaissance tradition, yet Gauguin rendered his subject in a decidedly modern style derived in part from Japanese prints, his own experiments It depicts a scene from the Bible in which Jacob wrestles an in ceramics, stained-glass window methods, angel. It depicts this indirectly, through a vision that the women and other popular and "high art" traditions, depicted see after a sermon in church. It was painted in finally emphasizing bold outlines and flat Pont-Aven, Brittany, France. areas of color.

Paul Gauguin

15 One of the most fascinating figures in the history of painting, his works moved from Impressionism (soon abandoned) to a colorful and French vigorous symbolism, as can be seen in his 'Polynesian paintings'. 1848-1903 Matisse and Fauvism could not be understood without the works of Paul Gauguin

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y5lhKvKvWPg .War Cripples 1920 076 Expressionism

perhaps more influential than any other German painter in shaping the popular image of the Weimar Republic of the 1920s. His works are key parts of the Neue Sachlichkeit ("New Objectivity") movement, which also attracted George Grosz and Max Beckmann in the mid 1920s. A veteran haunted by his experiences of WWI, his first great subjects were crippled soldiers, but during the height of his career he also painted nudes, prostitutes, and often savagely satirical portraits of celebrities from Germany's intellectual circles. His work became even darker and more allegorical in the early 1930s, and he "People were already beginning to forget, what horrible became a target of the Nazis. In response, suffering the war had brought them. I did not want to cause fear he gradually moved away from social and panic, but to let people know how dreadful war is and so to themes, turning to landscape and Christian stimulate people's powers of resistance." -- Otto Dix subjects, and, after serving in the army Expressionist art was conceived in opposition of Impressionism. during WWII, enjoyed some considerable The Expressionist craved emotional drama, pure color and acclaim in his later years. innovation. Otto Dix asserted "All art is exorcism. I paint dreams The figures are Avarice (an old, bent over and visions too; the dreams and visions of my time. Painting is hag clutching at money), Envy (who rides the effort to produce order; order in yourself. There is much chaos the back of Avarice), Sloth (the figure in in me, much chaos in our time." Expressionist painters looked the skeleton costume who holds the scythe, inward at their own emotions, and less on the outside world. and whose legs and arms form a rough Painters of the Expressionist generation grew up on the swastika), Lust (who dances in a lascivious battlefield, witnessing wartime atrocities and returning to war way behind Death, Anger (the horned ravaged countries. Demon behind Death), Pride (the enormous head behind the scythe, whose ears are plugged and who has an anus for a mouth),

Otto Dix

Otto Dix is one of modern painting's most savage satirists. After many artists had abandoned portraiture for abstraction in the 1910s, Dix German returned to the genre and injected sharp caricatures into his depictions 1891-1969 of some of the leading lights of German society. His other narrative subjects are remembered for their indictment of corrupt and immoral life in the modern city. Otto Dix was initially drawn to Expressionism and Dada, but like many of his generation in Germany in the 1920s, he was inspired by 7 deadly sins trends in Italy and France to embrace a cold, linear style of drawing and more realistic imagery. Later, his approach became more fantastic and symbolic, and he began to depict nudes as witches or personifications of melancholy. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=akDfjifD2DU .Water Lilies 085 Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York) Impressionism

However, Monet's experiments, including studies on the changes in an object caused by daylight at different times of the day; and the almost abstract quality of his "water lilies", are clearly a prologue to the art of the twentieth century.

a type of painting known for its light colors and simple subjects. Monet was known for painting lillies, like the ones in this painting. Water Lilies (or Nympheas) is a series of approximately 250 oil paintings by French Impressionist Claude Monet. The paintings depict Monet’s own flower garden at Giverny and were the main focus of his artistic production during the last thirty years of his life. The paintings are on display at museums all over the world. The one show above is displayed at the Met

Claude Monet

The importance of Monet is sometimes "underrated", as Art lovers tend to see only the overwhelming beauty that emanates from his French canvases, ignoring the complex technique and composition of the 1840-1926 work (a "defect" somehow caused by Monet himself, when he declared that "I do not understand why everyone discusses my art and pretends to understand, as if it were necessary to understand, when it is simply necessary to love"). second water lilies painting

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6fHorNn2zqQ .Watson and the Shark 1777 028 National Gallery of Art (Washington, D.C.) Colonial Era

depicting the rescue of the English boy Brook Watson from a shark attack in Havana, Cuba The painting is based on an attack that took place in Havana harbour in 1749. Brook Watson, then a 14-year-old cabin boy, lost his leg in the attack and was not rescued until the third attempt, which is the subject of the painting.[1] Watson went on to become a Lord Mayor of London.

John Singleton Copley

Anglo-American painter, active in both colonial America and England. He was probably born in Boston, Massachusetts, to Richard American and Mary Singleton Copley, both Anglo-Irish. He is famous for his 1738-1815 portrait paintings of wealthy and influential figures in colonial New England, depicting in particular middle-class subjects. His portraits were innovative in their tendency to depict artifacts relating to these individuals' lives.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RP-H-NG-8Lg .Whistler’s Mother “An Arrangement in Grey and Black: The 1871 049 Musée d'Orsay (Paris) Tonalism

Some may find it tough to stare squarely in the eye American painter James McNeill Whistler’s iconic sidelong portrait of his seated mother (painted in 1871) knowing, as we do, the artist’s penchant for racist remarks and his fondness for slapping abolitionists in the face. The artist of course shouldn’t be tarred by the appalling allegiances of his brother, who wore the grey uniform of the Confederacy in its doomed efforts to perpetuate slavery, but the fact adds context. Whistler’s mother herself, who once tried to stop the black wife of her uncle and their children from acquiring family land, makes an ironic One story says that his mother agreed to sit for the painting subject for a painting whose official title, on because the real model didn’t show up. Another says that reflection, feels more than a little racially Whistler wanted to paint the model standing up but that his charged: “Arrangement in Grey and Black”. mother could not do so for such an extended period so he painted her seated instead.

James McNeill Whistler

76 Along with Winslow Homer, the great figure of American painting of his time. Whistler was an excellent portraitist, which is shown in American the fabulous portrait of his mother, considered one of the great 1834-1903 masterpieces of American painting of all time.

Nocturne: Blue and Silver - Chelsea (1871)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=baUJTGZTOvU .Woman I 1952 130 Museum of Modern Art (New York) Abstract Expressionism

Woman I is noteworthy not only for this process, but also because it embodies two major themes in de Kooning's work. The first is the depiction of the female figure. The woman depicted in Woman I is wholly unlike anything seen in Western painting - she is highly aggressive, erotic and threatening. Her frightening teeth and fierce eyes are not those of a stereotypically submissive, Cold war-era housewife, and de Kooning created her in part as a response to the idealized women in art history, such as Ingres's Odalisque (1814).

De Kooning strongly opposed the restrictions imposed by naming movements and, while generally considered to be an Abstract Expressionist, he never fully abandoned the depiction of the human figure. His paintings of women feature a unique blend of gestural abstraction and figuration. Heavily influenced by the Cubism of Picasso, de Kooning became a master at ambiguously blending figure and ground in his pictures while dismembering, re-assembling and distorting his figures in the process. Although known for continually reworking his canvases, de Kooning often left them with a sense of dynamic incompletion, as if the forms were still in the process of moving and settling and coming into definition. In this sense his paintings exemplify 'action painting' - they are like records of a violent encounter, rather than finished works in the old Beaux Arts tradition of fine painting.

Willem de Kooning

34 After Pollock, the leading figure of abstract expressionism, though one of his greatest contributions was not to feel limited by the Dutch abstraction, often resorting to a heartbreaking figurative painting (his 1904-1997 series of "Women" are the best example) with a major influence on later artists such as Francis Bacon or Lucian Freud

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9t_RvIZ19KQ .Woman in Pink Dress and Black Collar 1915 115 Private Collection Post-Impressionist

József Rippl-Rónai

He first introduced modern artistic movements in the Hungarian art. After starting his training in , Rippl-Ronai came to Paris Hungarian where he worked for three years in the studio of his fellow 1861-1927 countryman, the painter Munkacsy. But a stay in Pont-Aven in 1889 and his discovery of Gauguin's work led him to break with his master 4 pictures Using rich colors and creating intensive visions, Rippl-Rónai typified the post-Impressionist and Art Nouveau styles in Hungary. .Woman with a Parasol - Madame Monet and Her Son 1875 069 National Gallery of Art (Washington, D.C.) Impressionism

One of Monet's most popular figure paintings, Lady with a Parasol showcases the women's accessory. The parasol itself makes many appearances in his work, primarily because when painting from real life outdoors, most women would use one to protect their skin and eyes. But the object also creates a contrast of light and shadows on the figure's face and clothing, indicating which direction the actual light is coming from. Quite uniquely, Monet paints into the light letting the model's features fade into the shadow. Most artists would avoid such a positioning of their subject as it is difficult to reproduce any detail - and even hard to Woman with a Parasol was painted outdoors, probably in a single simply look at your subject. But Monet is session of several hours' duration. The artist intended the work to interested in light itself, and captures it in convey the feeling of a casual family outing rather than a formal the scene in an unmatched way. portrait, and used pose and placement to suggest that his wife and son interrupted their stroll while he captured their likenesses. The brevity of the moment portrayed here is conveyed by a repertory of animated brushstrokes of vibrant color, hallmarks of the style Monet was instrumental in forming. Bright sunlight shines from behind Camille to whiten the top of her parasol and the flowing cloth at her back, while colored reflections from the wildflowers below touch her front with yellow.

Claude Monet

Monet's extraordinarily long life and large artistic output befit the enormity of his contemporary popularity. Impressionism, for which he French is a pillar, continues to be one of the most popular artistic movement 1840-1926 as evidenced by its massive popular consumption in the form of calendars, postcards, and posters. Of course, Monet's paintings command top prices at auctions and some are considered priceless, in fact, Monet's work is in every major museum worldwide.

Even though his works are now canonized, for a number of years after Monet's death, he was only known in select circles of art lovers. The major renaissance of his work occurred in New York by the Abstract Expressionists. Artists like Mark Rothko and Jackson https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ZJeuHM3D8M .Women of Eger 1867 141 Hungarian National Gallery (Budapest) Romanticism

In the sixteenth century, when the Turks had conquered the greater part of Hungary, Eger became the protecting bulkwark of the northern regions. After Buda, the capital, had fallen to the Turks, they tried to extend their dominion northwards to the Carpathians in order to carry through outflanking movements towards Vienna in the west and the southern territories of Poland in the east. Eger already had a fortress, built by Italian experts in fortification, to guard the valley which was the natural line of advance to the north.

It was on these walls that the memorable battle for the defense of Eger was fought. A garrison of not more than two thousand, under István Dobó, resisted the challenge of a Turkish force said to be a hundred and fifty thousand strong. The citizens of Eger fought with dauntless courage, and when the fort seemed to be in danger of capitulation,

Bertalan Székely

Born into a noble Transylvanian family, this painter of Hungarian history and portraits was influenced by Vienna’s Academy of Fine Hungarian Arts, and a later move to Munich made him an exemplifier of the 1835-1910 Romantic and Academic styles. The Escape of Emperor Charles VII landed him an international award, while at a later stage of his career various portraits and nude depictions of female figures were the focal points of his art. It was then that he created one of his most controversial works, Leda and the Swan, a sheer visualization of Portrait of Adalbert Stifter (1863) powerful passion, where Leda is in the role of both the seducer and the seduced, while the swan embodies the male figure as he is passively surrendering to Leda’s enticement. Another notable female portrayal by Székely is the Japanese Woman, a picture presenting an