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The Great Painters of Modern Art - from Mid 19th Century to end of 20th Century

Photo: Les Demoiselles d'Avignon by Pablo Picasso, 1907.

For Great painters from mid 13th to mid 19th centuries, please see: Old Masters

Selected Profiles of the most famous Great Painters of Modern Art (mid XIX to end XX C)

• Édouard Manet (1832 – 1883) was a French painter. One of the first 19th-century artists to approach modern-life subjects, he was a pivotal figure in the transition from Realism to Impressionism. His early masterworks, The Luncheon on the Grass (Le déjeuner sur l'herbe), 1863, and Olympia, 1863, engendered great controversy and served as rallying points for the young painters who would create Impressionism. Today, they are considered watershed paintings that mark the genesis of modern art.

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• Camille Pissaro (1830 – 1903) was a French Impressionist painter. His importance resides not only in his visual contributions to Impressionism and Post-Impressionism, but also in his patriarchal standing among his colleagues, particularly Paul Cézanne and Paul Gauguin: The Hay Cart, Montfoucault, 1879; Hay Harvest at Éragny, 1901.
• Edgar Degas (1834 – 1917) French painter, sculptor, and printmaker who was prominent in the Impressionist group and widely celebrated for his images of Parisian life" The Dance Class, 1874; Race Horses, 1885-88; Woman Bathing in a Shallow Tub, 1885.
• Paul Cézanne (1839 – 1906) French artist and Post-Impressionist painter. Cézanne can be said to form the bridge between late 19th century Impressionism and the early 20th century's new line of artistic enquiry, Cubism: The Bather, 1885; The Basket of Apples, 1893; The Sea at L'Estaqu, 1878.
• Claude Monet (1840 – 1926) Oscar Claude Monet, was a founder and central figure of the 19th century art movement known as Impressionism, expressing one's perceptions before nature, especially as applied to plain-air landscape painting. The term Impressionism is derived from the title of his painting Impression, Sunrise (Impression, soleil levant), 1872; San Giorgio Maggiore at Dusk, 1908; Red Water Lilies, 1919; Water Lily Pond Symphony In Rose, 1900.
• Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841 – 1919) was one of the central figures of the Impressionist movement. His work is characterized by a richness of feeling and a warmth of response to the world and to the people in it. By the mid-1880s, however, he had broken with the movement to apply a more disciplined, formal technique to portraits and figure paintings, particularly of women: The Theater Box 1874; Dance at Le Moulin de la Galette, 1876; Two Young Girls at the Piano, 1892.
• Paul Gauguin (1848 – 1903) Leading Post-Impressionist French painter. His bold experimentation with coloring led directly to the Synthetist style of modern art while his expression of the inherent meaning of the subjects in his paintings, paved the way to Primitivism and the return to the pastoral: Tahitian Women, 1891; Hail Mary, 1891; , The Day of the God, 1894.
• Vincent van Gogh (1853 – 1890) was a Dutch post-impressionist painter who is among the most famous and influential figures in the history of Western art. In just over a decade, he created about 2,100 artworks, including around 860 oil paintings, most of which date from the last two years of his life. Of his famous paintings: The Potato Eaters, 1885; ; Sunflowers, 1888; The Starry Night, 1889.
• Georges Seurat (1859 – 1891) was a French post-Impressionist artist. He is best known for devising the painting techniques known as chromoluminarism as well as pointillism: Woman with Umbrella, 1884; Young Woman Powdering Herself, 1890; May Day, Central Park, c.1900, c.1903.
• Gustav Klimt (1862 – 1912) Austrian Symbolist painter and one of the most prominent members of the Vienna Secession movement. His major works include paintings, murals, sketches, and other art objects. Klimt's primary subject was the female body, and his works are marked by a frank eroticism: Judith and the Head of Holofernes. 1901; Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I, 1907;The Kiss, 1908.
• Edvard Munch (1863 – 1944) was a Norwegian painter. His best known work, The Scream, has become one of the most iconic images of world art: The Scream, 1893; The Hands, 1893; Ashes, 1894.
• Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1864 – 1901) was a French painter, printmaker, draughtsman, and illustrator, whose immersion in the colourful and theatrical life of Paris in the late 1800s yielded a collection of exciting, elegant and provocative images of the modern and sometimes decadent life of those times: At the Moulin Rouge, The Dance, 1890; Moulin Rouge La Goulue, 1891; Jane Avril Dancing, 1893.
• Jacques Villon (Gaston Duchamp) (1875 – 1963) was a French Cubist and abstract painter and printmaker: The Game of Solitaire, 1904; Girl at the Piano (Fillette au piano), 1912; Birds in Flight, 1958.
• Paul Klee (1879 – 1940) Swiss-German painter. His highly individual style was influenced by movements in art that included expressionism, cubism, and surrealism: Senecio, 1922; Red Baloon, 1922; Insula Dulcamara, 1938.
• Pablo Picasso (1881 – 1973) was a Spanish painter, draughtsman, and sculptor who lived most of his adult life in France. He is best known for co-founding the Cubist movement and for the wide variety of styles embodied in his work. Among his most famous works are the proto-Cubist Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, 1907 and Guernica, 1937 - his portrayal of the German bombing of Guernica during the Spanish Civil War.
• Amedeo Clemente Modigliani (1884 – 1920) was an Italian artist who worked mainly in France. Primarily a figurative artist, he became known for paintings and sculptures in a modern style characterized by mask-like faces and elongation of form: Portrait of Maude Abrantes, 1907; Portrait of Beatrice Hastings, 1915; Le grand Nu (The great nude), 1917.
• Diego Rivera (1886 – 1957) was a prominent Mexican painter. His large frescoes helped establish the mural movement in Mexican and international art: Dance in Tehuantepec, 1928; The Flower Carrier, 1935; The Communicating Vessels, 1938.
• Marcel Duchamp (1887 – 1968) French artist whose work is most often associated with the Dadaist and Surrealist movements. Duchamp's output influenced the development of post-World War I Western art: Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2, 1912; The Passage from Virgin to Bride, 1912; L.H.O.O.Q., 1919.
• Marc Chagall (Марк Шагал) (1887 – 1985) Belarusian (that time Russian Empire) French artist, associated with several key art movements and was one of the most successful artists of the 20th century. He created unique works in virtually every artistic medium, including painting, book illustrations, stained glass, stage sets, ceramic, tapestries and fine art prints: I and the Village, 1911; Over the town, 1918; The blue fiddler, 1947.
• Chaim Soutine (1893 – 1943) was a Russian painter of Belarusian Jewish origin. Inspired by classic painting in the European tradition, exemplified by the works of Rembrandt, Chardin and Courbet, he developed an individual style more concerned with shape, colour, and texture over representation, which served as a bridge between more traditional approaches and the developing form of Abstract Expressionism: Baker Boy, 1919; Carcass of Beef, 1924; Houses of Cagnes, 1925.
• Mark Rothko (1903 – 1970) was an American painter of Latvian Jewish descent. Rothko did not personally subscribe to any art movement, but he is generally identified as an abstract expressionist: Slow Swirl at the Edge of the Sea, 1944; Green and Maroon, 1953; Untitled, 1970.
• Salvador Dali (1904 – 1989) Prominent Spanish painter, a skilled draftsman, best known for the striking and bizarre images in his surrealist work: Venus with Cupids, 1925; Allegory of an American Christmas, 1934; The Disintegration of the Persistence of Memory, 1953.
• Frida Kahlo (1907 – 1954) Mexican painter perhaps best known for her self-portraits, Kahlo's work is remembered for its "pain and passion", and its intense, vibrant colours: Autorretrato con traje de terciopelo, 1926; Self portrait on the border line between Mexico and the United States, 1932; Diego on my mind (Self-portrait as Tehuana), 1943.
• Jackson Pollock (1912 – 1956) was an influential American painter and a major figure in the abstract expressionist movement. He was well known for his unique style of drip painting: Man with Knife, 1940, Eyes in the Heat, 1946, Ocean Greyness, 1953.
• Andy Warhol (1928 – 1987) was an American artist, film director, and producer who was a leading figure in the visual art movement known as pop art. His works explore the relationship between artistic expression, advertising, and celebrity culture that flourished by the 1960s, and span a variety of media, including painting, silkscreening, photography, film, and sculpture: Marilyn II, 1967; Black Bean Soup, 1968; Saint Apollonia II, 1984.
• Jean Michel Basquiat (1960 – 1988) American artist. He exhibited internationally in galleries and museums his Neo-expressionist and Primitivist paintings. Basquiat died of a heroin overdose at the age of 27: Boxer Rebellion, 1982; Cabeza, 1982; Riding with Death, 1986.

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Profiles of other famous Great Painters (mid XIX to the end of XX C)

only public Geni profiles, please

• Moritz Daniel Oppenheim (1800 – 1882)
• Ivan Konstantinovich Aivazovsky (Иван Константинович Айвазовский) (1817 – 1900) Russian Romantic painter who is considered one of the greatest masters of marine art.
• Jozef Israëls (1824 – 1911) was a Dutch painter. He was a leading member of the group of landscape painters referred to as the Hague School and, during his lifetime, "the most respected Dutch artist of the second half of the nineteenth century".
• Sir Frederic Leighton (1830 - 1896) English painter and sculptor. His works depicted historical, biblical and classical subject matter.
• James Abbott McNeill Whistler (1834 – 1903) American artist active during the American Gilded Age and based primarily in the United Kingdom. He was a leading proponent of the credo "art for art's sake".
• Winslow Homer (1836 - 1910) American landscape painter and printmaker, best known for his marine subjects.
• Homer Ransford Watson (Jan. 14, 1855 - May 30, 1936) Canada's premier landscape painter.
• Grandma Moses (1860 - 1961) Renowned American folk artist.
• Mikalojus Konstantinas Čiurlionis (1875 – 1911) was a Lithuanian painter, composer and writer. He contributed to symbolism and art nouveau and was representative of the fin de siècle epoch.
• Edward Hopper (1882 – 1967) Prominent American realist painter and printmaker.
• Georgia O'Keeffe (1887 - 1986)
• Enríquez Gómez (1900 - 1957) Cuban painter, illustrator and writer of the Vanguardia movement (the Cuban Avant-garde).
• Alice Neel (1900 - 1984)
• Francis Bacon (1909 - 1992) Born in Ireland, a figurative painter known for his bold and graphic imagery.
• Robert Motherwell (1915 - 1991)
• Yehuda Pen (1854 - 1937) A Jewish artist and art teacher active in the Russian Empire and Soviet Union. He is best known for founding an influential art school in Vitebsk and teaching notable avant-garde artists like Marc Chagall, El Lissitzky, and Ossip Zadkine.

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