Primarily, modern artists broke away from the traditions of the past to create artworks which kept challenging the existing notion of art. Realism is recognized as the first modern movement in art. It began in France in the 1850s and later spread to other nations.
- PABLO PICASSO 1881-1973
- VINCENT VAN GOGH 1853-1890
- Lawrence Alma-Tadema 1836-1912
- FRIDA KAHLO 1907-1954
- SALVADOR DALÍ
- CLAUDE MONET
- ANDY WARHOL 1928-1987
- WASSILY KANDINSKY
- HENRI MATISSE
The Realists portrayed, with uncompromising truth and accuracy, the people and situations of the present. This was in contrast to the religious or exotic subject matter and exaggerated drama prevalent in artworks at the time. Realism was followed by Impressionism, another French movement, which focused on capturing the momentary effect of a scene rather than accurately depicting it. The Post-Impressionists then extended Impressionism in various ways like intensifying its already vibrant colors or distorting form for expressive effects.
This was followed by various innovations in the 20th century including abstraction in which the artwork bears no trace of anything recognizable in the natural world. Prominent 20th century modern art movements include Cubism, Surrealism, Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art. Here are the 10 most famous modern art artists including Claude Monet, Vincent van Gogh, Pablo Picasso, Frida Kahlo and Andy Warhol.
The “Modern art” is a broad term which refers to art produced during the years 1870-1970. Some historians prefer to limit “modern art” to the 20th century, but, it is more customary to take Impressionism as the starting point, while the 1960s are usually seen as the transition between “modern art” and its successor “postmodernist art“.
“Modern art” witnessed many of the great international art movements, and also gave birth to entirely new forms of creative expression, including:
skyscraper architecture (1880s);
chromolithographic poster art (1880s/90s);
animation art (from the first cartoon film in 1906);
collage (from 1912);
performance art (from Dada onwards);
assemblages (from 1953);
land art (fl.1960s).
It also raised certain forms to new heights, like:
caricature art and photography. During the final phase of the “modern” period several types of avant-garde art appeared, including conceptual art (pioneered by Robert Rauschenberg 1950s) and video art (pioneered by Wolf Vostell and Andy Warhol late-50s/60s), however, because these forms are more closely associated with contemporary art, we deal with them in our article on contemporary art movements (1970 onwards).
1.PABLO PICASSO 1. pablo picasso
Demonstrating extraordinary artistic talent in his early years, Pablo Picasso went on to become the most influential artist of the 20th century. He broke the practices of the past and co-pioneered the art movement Cubism. Cubist artists depicted the subject from a multitude of viewpoints to give it greater context and this made the artwork partially abstract. The movement revolutionized European painting and sculpture. Picasso’s style changed over the course of his career as he experimented with different theories, techniques and ideas. He was a prolific artist and, apart from creating a large volume of work in other media, he made around 1900 paintings in his long career. No artist has been as famous as him during his lifetime. Several of his paintings are among the most expensive ever sold but his most famous works are generally held by museums. Pablo Picasso is undoubtedly the most famous modern artist and many regard him as the greatest painter of all time.
Édouard Manet created a nude which was unmistakably depicting a prostitute; Claude Monet painted Impression, Sunrise, which was called worse than “wallpaper in its embryonic state” but gave name to the influential Impressionist movement; Pablo Picasso produced Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, which became controversial for its radical style; and Andy Warhol put Campbell’s Soup Cans on canvases leading to a controversy which made Pop Art a dominant movement. Here are the 10 most famous paintings created by modern artists including The Starry Night, Marilyn Diptych, Guernica, The Persistence of Memory and The Scream.
Many people migrated from the rural farms to the city centers to find work, shifting the center of life from the family and village in the country to the expanding urban metropolises. With these developments, painters were drawn to these new visual landscapes, now bustling with all variety of modern spectacles and fashions. a number of European painters began to experiment with the simple act of observation. Artists from across the continent, including portraitists and genre painters such as Gustave Courbet and Henri Fantin-Latour, created works that aimed to portray people and situations objectively, imperfections and all, rather than creating an idealized rendition of the subject. This radical approach to art would come to comprise the broad school of art known as Realism.
2. VINCENT VAN GOGH
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March 30, 1853 – July 29, 1890
Vincent Van Gogh was a Post-Impressionist artist who had a difficult life marred by mental instability. He ultimately shot himself in the chest with a revolver and died two days later. Van Gogh rose to fame in the early 20th century, a decade after his death, Ultimately he was credited with being a key figure in the development of modern art. He is now widely regarded as one of the most influential figures in the history of Western art. Van Gogh created about 2,100 artworks in just over a decade which include landscapes, still lifes, portraits and self-portraits. He is considered one of the most skilled artists in all these genres. The art of Van Gogh is notable for its bold color; rough beauty; emotional honesty; and impulsive and expressive brushwork. He created some of the best known masterpieces of modern art including The Starry Night; the Sunflower series; and the Irises series.
3. FRIDA KAHLO
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July 6, 1907 – July 13, 1954
On 17th September 1925, Frida Kahlo and her friend Alex were riding in a bus when it crashed into a street trolley car. Due to the grave injuries she suffered in the accident, Frida had to undergo 35 operations in her life, bear with relapses of extreme pain and could not have children. While in hospital, Kahlo began painting and she ultimately abandoned her career in medicine to become an artist. Frida Kahlo is most famous for her self-portraits which often incorporate symbolic portrayals of physical and psychological wounds. She said, “I paint myself because I am so often alone and because I am the subject I know best.” Frida Kahlo is ranked among the greatest artists in the genre of self portraiture. Though her influence on modern art might not be as great as some of the artists in this list, Frida Kahlo is undoubtedly one of the most famous modern artists and perhaps the most renowned female painter. She also remains a feminist icon for the way she led her life.
4. SALVADOR DALÍ
May 11, 1904 – January 23, 1989
Surrealism was one of the most influential modern art movement of the 20th century. Its artists rejected rationalism and literary realism; and instead focused on channeling the unconscious mind to unveil the power of the imagination. Known for his eccentric manners, Salvador Dali created the most famous masterpieces of Surrealist art. His contribution to Surrealist painting include the paranoiac-critical method; in which the artist attempts to tap into his subconscious through systematic irrational thought and a self-induced paranoid state. Best known for his striking and bizarre images, Dali used extensive symbolism in his work. Recurring images in his paintings include elephants with brittle legs which evoke weightlessness; ants, thought to be his symbol for decay and death; and melting watches, perhaps symbolic of non-linear human perception of time. Salvador Dali was the most renowned Surrealist painter and he is regarded as one of the most influential figures in modern art.
5 CLAUDE MONET
Claude Monet was a founder of the art movement Impressionism; which laid emphasis on vivid colors, candid poses and, most importantly, on accurate depiction of light in its changing qualities.
Monet was the driving force behind this revolutionary art movement; and its most consistent and prolific practitioner. The name of the movement also comes from his painting Impression, Sunrise; the term was coined in a satirical review. Monet was dedicated to finding improved methods of painterly expression.
He broke tradition and thought in terms of colors, light and shapes. Some of his series explored how smoke, steam, mist, rain etc. affected color and visibility. Nympheas (Water Lilies), the most renowned series of Monet which contains around 250 paintings, has been described as “The Sistine Chapel of Impressionism”. Claude Monet is the most famous French artist and he is considered among the greatest painters ever.
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6 ANDY WARHOL
August 6, 1928 – February 22, 1987
6. Pop Art was the last prominent modern art movement. Its artists used recognizable imagery from popular culture like advertisements, celebrities and comic book characters.
Born Andrew Warhola, Andy Warhol was the best known and most influential artist of the Pop Art movement to the extent that he is known as the “Pope of Pop”. The non-painterly style and the commercial aspects of his paintings initially caused offense as it affronted the technique and philosophy of Abstract Expressionism, the then dominant style in the United States. His works created an uproar in the American art world and the resulting controversy made Warhol a household name.
Warhol was a prolific artist and he explored a wide variety of media including painting, silkscreening, photography, film and sculpture. His paintings are among the most expensive ever sold. Though many still doubt the merit of his work, Andy Warhol is without doubt the most famous American artist and a leading figure of 20th century modern art.
7 WASSILY KANDINSKY
born on December, 16th , 1866 Died 1896
Wassily Kandinsky was born on December, 16th (4), 1866 in Moscow, in a well-to-do family of a businessman in a good cultural environment. In 1871 the family moved to Odessa where his father ran his tea factory. There, alongside with attending a classical gymnasium (grammar school), the boy learned to play the piano and the cello and took to drawing with a coach. “I remember that drawing and a little bit later painting lifted me out of the reality”, he wrote later. In Kandinsky’s works of his childhood period we can find rather specific color combinations, which he explained by the fact that “each color lives by its mysterious life”.
However, Wassily’s parents saw him in the future as a lawyer. In the year of 1886 he went to Moscow and entered Law Faculty of Moscow University. Graduating with honors, six years later Wassily married his cousin, Anna Chimyakina. In 1893 he became Docent (Associate Professor) of Law Faculty and continued teaching. In 1896 the famous in Derpt University in Tartu, where at that time the process of russification was taking place, a thirty-year-old Kandinsky was appointed Professor to the Department of Law, but at this particular time he decided to give up a successful career to devote himself completely to painting. Later on Kandinsky recollected two events, which had affected this decision: his visiting an exhibition of the French impressionists in Moscow in 1895 and an emotional shock he experienced from K. Monet’s, “Haystacks”, and an impression of Rihard Wagner’s “Lohengrin” at the Bolshoi Theatre.
In 1896 he left for Munich, at that time considered to be one of the centers of the European art, and entered Anton Azbe’s (Yugoslavian artist) prestigious private painting school , where he received the first skills in image composition, in work with line and form. However, rather soon the school ceased to satisfy his needs. Later the artist would write, “Quite often I yielded to a temptation to play truant and to go with a painter’s case to Shvabing, to Englishen-Garten, or to the parks on the Isar”.
In 1900 after a failure of the previous year, Kandinsky entered the Munich Academy of Arts, and studied under Franz Stuck, “German graphic artist Number One”. The master is happy with his student, but considered his palette too bright. Meeting the Master’s requirements, for the whole year Kandinsky drew exclusively in black-and-white spectrum , “studying the form as that”.
During that period Kandinsky got acquainted with a young artist, Gabriela Munter, and in 1903 he divorced his wife, Anna Chimyakina. The following five years he with Gabriela travelled across Europe, being engaged in painting and participating in exhibitions. Having returned to Bavaria, they settled down in a small town of Murnau at the bottom of the Alps. It was the beginning of the stage of intensive and fruitful search. The works of those years were basically landscapes, based on color discords. The play of color spots and lines was gradually superseding images of reality (Akhtyrka. Autumn. A sketch, 1901; Sluice, 1901; Old Town, 1902; Blue Rider, 1903; The Gulf Coast in Holland, 1904; Murnau. The Bailey, 1908). At that very time he turned to Russian fairy epic olden time, creating captivating images (Russian Rider, 1902; Russian Beauty on the Landscape Background, 1904), making mysterious legends about slavic wooden cities visible (Russian Village on the River with the Shallops, around 1902; To the City, around 1903).
Music, being abstract in nature, was an inherent part of his art and he named some of his spontaneous works as “improvisations” and elaborate ones as “compositions”. Apart from being a painter, Kandinsky was also a prominent art theorist whose books had an enormous and profound influence on future artists. For his tremendous contribution in moving the art world away from representational traditions and towards abstraction, Wassily Kandinsky is considered by many as the “Father of Abstract Art”.
8 HENRI MATISSE
December 31, 1869, Le Cateau, Picardy, France—died November 3, 1954, Nice
Fuller Biography
Henri-Émile-Benoît Matisse,
He is the artist often regarded as the most important French painter of the 20th century. He was the leader of the Fauvist movement about 1900, and he pursued the expressiveness of colour throughout his career. His subjects were largely domestic or figurative, and a distinct mediterranean verve presides in the treatment.
Matisse worked in a variety of media including sculpture and paper cut-outs but is most famous for the masterpieces he created as a painter. He is considered the greatest colorist of the 20th century and was the leading figure of the art movement Fauvism, which was characterized by vivid expressionistic and non-naturalistic use of color.
Although at this period he had, in his own words, “hair like Absalom’s,” he was far from being a typical Left Bank bohemian art student. “I plunged head down into work,” he said later, “on the principle I had heard, all my young life, expressed by the words ‘Hurry up!’ Like my parents, I hurried up in my work, pushed by I don’t know what, by a force which today I perceive as being foreign to my life as a normal man.”
This 19th-century gospel of work, derived from a middle class, northern French upbringing, was to mark his entire career, and soon it was accompanied by a thoroughly bourgeois appearance—gold-rimmed spectacles; short, carefully trimmed beard; plump, feline body; conservative clothes—which was odd for a leading member of the Parisian avant-garde.Matisse had a lifelong rivalry and friendship with Pablo Picasso. Their works were a source of inspiration to each other and they excelled on each others brilliance.
Matisse invented a new medium famous as the paper cut-out, in which he cut forms from colored paper and arranged them as collages. He worked solely in this new medium during his later years and these works are considered his final artistic triumph.
9 JACKSON POLLOCK
January 28, 1912 – August 11, 1956
Abstract Expressionism was a post World War II art movement which was the first specifically American movement to gain international prominence and one of the most influential movements in abstract art. It incorporated a variety of styles and emphasized on conveying strong emotional or expressive content through abstraction. Drip painting is a technique in Abstract Expressionism in which paint is dripped or poured onto the canvas, rather than being carefully applied. Jackson is the leading force behind the abstract expressionist movement in the art world. During his lifetime, Pollock enjoyed considerable fame and notoriety. Jackson Pollock’s greatness lies in developing one of the most radical abstract styles in the history of modern art, detaching line from color, redefining the categories of drawing and painting, and finding new means to describe pictorial space.
Jackson Pollock was born in Cody, Wyoming in 1912. His father, LeRoy Pollock was a farmer and later a land surveyor for the government. Jackson Pollock grew up in Arizona and Chico, California. During his early life, Pollock experienced Native American culture while on surveying trips with his father. Although he never admitted an intentional imitation or following of Native American art, Jackson Pollock did concede that any similarities were probably a result of his “early memories and enthusiasm.”
In 1929, Jackson Pollock studied at the Students’ League in New York under regionalist painter, Thomas Hart Benton. During the early 1930s, he worked in the Regionalist style, and was also influenced by Mexican muralist painter such as Diego Rivera, as well as by certain aspects of Surrealism – a 20th-century literary and artistic movement that attempts to express the workings of the subconscious by fantastic imagery and incongruous juxtaposition of the subject matter.
Jackson Pollock is the most famous practitioner of drip painting to the extent that he was dubbed “Jack the Dripper” by TIME magazine. Pollock’s technique of pouring and dripping paint popularized the term action painting, a method in which the physical act of painting itself is an essential aspect of the finished work. Jackson Pollock was the preeminent figure of the Abstract Expressionism movement. He is the most famous American abstract artist and one of the outstanding figures of 20th century modern art.
Read Biography of Jackson Pollock
10. frida Kahlo.
Considered one of Mexico’s greatest artists, Frida Kahlo was born on July 6, 1907 in Coyocoan, Mexico City, Mexico. She grew up in the family’s home where was later referred to as the Blue House or Casa Azul. Her father is a German descendant and photographer. He immigrated to Mexico where he met and married her mother Matilde. Her mother is half Amerindian and half Spanish. Frida Kahlo has two older sisters and one younger sister. Frida Kahlo has poor health in her childhood. She contracted polio at the age of 6 and had to be bedridden for nine months. This disease caused her right leg and foot to grow much thinner than her left one. She limped after she recovered from polio. She has been wearing long skirts to cover that for the rest of her life. Her father encouraged her to do lots of sports to help her recover. She played soccer, went swimming, and even did wrestle, which is very unusual at that time for a girl. She has kept a very close relationship with her father for her whole life.
Frida Kahlo attended the renowned National Preparatory School in Mexico City in the year of 1922. There are only thirty-five female students enrolled in that school and she soon became famous for her outspokenness and bravery. At this school she first met the famous Mexican muralist Diego Rivera for the first time. Rivera at that time was working on a mural called The Creation on the school campus. Frida often watched it and she told a friend she will marry him someday. In the same year, Kahlo joined a gang of students who shared similar political and intellectual views. She fell in love with the leader Alejandro Gomez Arias.
On a September afternoon when she traveled with Gomez Arias on a bus the tragic accident happened. The bus collided with a streetcar and Frida Kahlo was seriously injured. A steel handrail impaled her through the hip. Her spine and pelvis are fractured and this accident left her in a great deal of pain, both physically and physiologically. (READ MORE>>)
was a Mexican artist who is famous for her self-portraits which often incorporate symbolic portrayals of physical and psychological wounds. She had a tumultuous relationship with another famous Mexican painter Diego Rivera during which they married, divorced and re-married. The Two Fridas was created around the time of Kahlo’s divorce to Diego Rivera and it is believed it portrays her loss.
It is a double self-portrait. Frida on the left is wearing a white European style dress with her heart torn and bleeding while Frida on the right is wearing a traditional Mexican dress with her heart still whole. Kahlo remarried Rivera a year later and although their second marriage was as troubled as the first, it lasted till her death. This painting is the largest work of Kahlo and also her most famous.
11. GEORGIA O’KEEFFE
November 15, 1887 – March 6, 1986
Born on November 15, 1887, the second of seven children, Georgia Totto O’Keeffe grew up on a farm near Sun Prairie, Wisconsin. By the time she graduated from high school in 1905, O’Keeffe had determined to make her way as an artist. She studied at the Art Institute of Chicago and the Art Students League in New York, where she learned the techniques of traditional painting. The direction of her artistic practice shifted dramatically four years later when she studied the revolutionary ideas of Arthur Wesley Dow. Dow offered O’Keeffe an alternative to established ways of thinking about art. She experimented with abstraction for two years while she taught art in West Texas. Through a series of abstract charcoal drawings, she developed a personal language to better express her feelings and ideas.
By the mid-1920s, O’Keeffe was recognized as one of America’s most important and successful artists, known for her paintings of New York skyscrapers—an essentially American symbol of modernity—as well as her equally radical depictions of flowers.
In the summer of 1929, O’Keeffe made the first of many trips to northern New Mexico. The stark landscape and Native American and Hispanic cultures of the region inspired a new direction in O’Keeffe’s art. For the next two decades she spent most summers living and working in New Mexico. She made the state her permanent home in 1949, three years after Stieglitz’s death.
American Modernism was an artistic and cultural movement which peaked between the two World Wars. It was marked by a deliberate departure from tradition and use of innovative forms of expression.
Georgia O’Keeffe became the leading figure in American Modernism by challenging the boundaries of artistic style with her paintings, which combined abstraction and representation.
She is most famous for her dramatically large, sensual close-up of flowers which essentially made them into abstract works. Georgia O’Keeffe was highly significant in influencing the gender balance in the artistic scene. Known as the “Mother of American Modernism“, she is not only the most famous female American artist but also one of the most influential figures of 20th century art. In 1977, she was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honor in the United States.
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