10 Most Popular Artists of All Time

With a career spanning seventy years, two World Wars, and incorporating the traditions of neoclassicism, surrealism, and cubism (of which he was a founder), Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) remains one of the most famous and versatile artists of the twentieth century. His massive body of work encompasses prints, paintings, drawings, and sculptures. His most famous works include Les Demoiselles d’avignon, his first cubist painting, an Guernica–a mural depicting the 1937 bombing of a Basque fishing village.

Source:

Pablo Picasso Biography and Artworks-The Art History Archive

As an artist, Vincent Van Gogh (1853-1890) accomplished more in ten years than most painters do in a lifetime. From early experiments in Dutch realism and French impressionism, Van Gogh developed his own unique style of expressive brushstrokes and vivid–almost explosive–colors, producing some 840 paintings and one thousand drawings between 1880 and 1890. Although productive, Van Gogh’s career was plagued by financial worry and declining mental health, culminating in his suicide at age thirty-seven.

Source:
Van Gogh Museum: Official Site

From humble beginnings as the illegitimate son of a notary, Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) grew to become one of the most universally gifted human beings in history. In addition to his seventeen surviving paintings (each a supreme example of Renaissance art), da Vinci also applied his genius as a draftsman, sculptor, musician, philosopher, inventor, scientist, and military engineer–even designing rudimentary tanks and flying machines five hundred years before the Industrial Revolution.

Source:

Gelb, Michael J. How to think Like Leonardo da Vinci: Seven Steps to Genius Everyday.

New York, Random House. 1998.

Together with Manet and Renoir, Claude Monet (1840-1926) emerged in the late nineteenth century as one of the founding fathers of Impressionism–at the time, a completely new style of painting that emphasized visible brush strokes, the primacy of light and color over line, and composing in the open air. His first success as a painter came in 1874 when his Impression: Sunrise (from which the term impressionism derives) shocked Paris’s artistic and academic society.

Source:
Guggenheim Museum

The pioneering figure of Pop Art, Andy Warhol (1928-1987) entered New York ’s art scene after a successful career as a commercial artist. Working in multiple media–painting, silk screening, printmaking, and film–Warhol mass-produced a body of work whose subject matter and technique emphasized repetition, consumerism, and American pop culture. Over his 30-year career, Warhol’s studio (”the factory”) pumped out images of soup cans, Coca-Cola bottles, and celebrities–often to the shock and dismay of critics.

Source:

The Warhol Foundation

Once heard to say “I am surrealism,” Salvador Dali (1904-1989) began his career as a student of the renaissance masters. By 1926, he had turned classical technique toward photorealistic depictions of intricate, often nightmarish dreamscapes–vast plains occupied by distorted figures, insects, and double images (his most famous work, The Persistance of Memory, features melting clocks). In addition to paintings, Dali produced sculpture, illustrations, writings, and films–even collaborating on projects with Alfred Hitchcock and Walt Disney.

Source:

Gala Salvador Dali Foundation

Although skilled as a draftsman, sculptor, and printmaker, Henri Matisse (1869-1954) is remembered principally as a painter and the founder of fauvism. Although he studied the works of the old masters, he was inspired by contemporaries Van Gogh and Gaugin to create brightly-colored works that his critics mocked as bestial (fauvism comes from fauve, the French word for “wild beast”). Matisse’s most famous work, The Dance, showcases his strikingly use of color and shape.

Source:
Metropolitan Museum of Art

(Wassily Kandinsky) Originally trained as a lawyer, Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944) began to study painting at thirty. His early works incorporated pointillist and fauvist techniques, but by 1911, his artistic style shifted to abstract representations of internal feelings and music (rather than external visual objects). Abstract expressionism–as his style would later be called–shocked the art world of Kandinsky’s time, even contributing to his expulsion, first from his native Russia (under Soviet rule) and, later, Nazi Germany.
Source:

The Guggenheim

Originally trained in imitative realism at the Art Institute of Chicago and the Art Student’s League of New York, Georgia O’Keefe (1887-1986) developed a unique artistic language that pursued emotional expression through stylized representation. In 1916, her work attracted the attention of photographer Alfred Stieglitz, who offered O’Keefe support throughout her career and their subsequent marriage. In 1929, they moved to
New Mexico, where O’Keefe completed her trademark series of cattle bones and southwestern landscapes.

Source:

O’Keefe Museum

A monumental figure of Holland’s Golden Age, Rembrandt Van Rijn (1606-1669) began his career as a court portraitist, quickly gaining a reputation for his ability to capture human mood and gesture. Although his portraits are among the most celebrated in Western culture, much of his work consists of biblical and mythological scenes composed with a striking approach to color, light, contour, and arrangement. His masterpiece, The Nightwatch, showcases Rembrandt’s his unique artistic language.

Sources:

Encyclopedia Britannica

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