Joan Miró Joan Miró (1893–1983, born Barcelona, Spain) was a painter, sculptor, and printmaker whose singular visual language, combining biomorphic forms, bold primary colours, and a poetic spontaneity rooted in the unconscious, placed him among the most original and influential artists of the twentieth century. Initially associated with Surrealism, Miró maintained a lifelong independence from any…

Henri Matisse Henri Matisse (1869–1954, born Le Cateau-Cambrésis, France) was a painter, draughtsman, printmaker, and sculptor whose revolutionary use of colour and his development of a simplified, expressive line made him, alongside Picasso, the most significant artist of the first half of the twentieth century. Turning to painting in his early twenties following a period of…

Sally Mann Sally Mann (born 1951, Lexington, Virginia) is one of the most significant and critically engaged photographers working in America today, whose practice spans over five decades of rigorous investigation into landscape, memory, mortality, and the American South. Educated at Hollins College and a longtime resident of Lexington, Virginia, she developed her practice in deliberate…

Jackson Pollock Jackson Pollock (1912–1956, born Cody, Wyoming) was a painter whose development of the drip technique in the late 1940s placed him at the forefront of Abstract Expressionism and changed the history of American art. Raised in Arizona and California before moving to New York in 1930, he studied under Thomas Hart Benton and came…

Pablo Picasso Pablo Picasso (1881–1973, born Málaga, Spain) was the most influential visual artist of the twentieth century, whose extraordinary range, longevity, and formal invention shaped the course of modern art across painting, sculpture, printmaking, and ceramics. His early development produced two of the most emotionally distinctive bodies of work in modern painting: the Blue Period…

Roy Lichtenstein Roy Lichtenstein (1923–1997, born New York City) was a painter and sculptor whose transformation of comic strip imagery and commercial graphic techniques into monumental fine art made him one of the defining figures of American Pop Art. Educated at the Art Students League of New York and Ohio State University, Lichtenstein served in the…

Jasper Johns Jasper Johns (born 1930, Augusta, Georgia) is one of the most significant American artists of the twentieth century, whose work fundamentally transformed the relationship between representation, abstraction, and the act of looking. Moving to New York in the early 1950s following military service, he began in 1954 to make paintings of the American flag,…

Damien Hirst Damien Hirst (born 1965, Bristol, England) is one of the most prominent and widely discussed artists to emerge from the British art scene of the 1990s, and a central figure of the Young British Artists. His work addresses themes of mortality, beauty, and the relationship between science, medicine, and human experience with a…

Lucio Fontana Lucio Fontana (1899–1968, born Rosario, Santa Fe, Argentina) was an Argentine-Italian sculptor, painter, and theorist whose radical rethinking of the painted surface fundamentally changed the terms of postwar art. The founder of Spatialism, a movement concerned with the integration of colour, sound, space, and time into a unified aesthetic experience, Fontana developed his most…

Helen Frankenthaler Helen Frankenthaler (1928–2011, born New York City) was a painter of major importance to the development of postwar American abstraction, and is widely credited as one of the inventors of Color Field painting. Educated at the Dalton School under Rufino Tamayo and subsequently at Bennington College, she came of age artistically in the milieu…