William Eggleston William Eggleston (born 1939, Memphis, Tennessee) is a photographer widely credited with establishing colour photography as a serious and legitimate artistic medium. Raised in Sumner, Mississippi, Eggleston came to photography through self-directed study, developing a practice rooted in the observation of the American South and its overlooked, often mundane surfaces, rendered in colour of…

Willem de Kooning Willem de Kooning (1904–1997, born Rotterdam, the Netherlands) was one of the leading figures of Abstract Expressionism and among the most consequential painters of the twentieth century. Stowing away on a ship bound for the United States in 1926, he settled in New York, where he formed close friendships with Arshile Gorky and…

GEORGE CONDO George Condo (born 1957, Concord, New Hampshire) is an American painter whose work occupies a singular position in contemporary art, fusing the compositional intelligence of old master painting with a darkly comic, psychologically charged figuration entirely his own. Working across painting, drawing, sculpture, and printmaking, Condo developed what he has described as “artificial realism,”…

Mark Rothko Mark Rothko (1903–1970, born Daugavpils, Latvia, then part of the Russian Empire) was a painter whose mature work established one of the most sustained and emotionally resonant bodies of abstract painting of the twentieth century. Emigrating with his family to the United States in 1913, he eventually settled in New York, where he became…

Jean-Michel Basquiat Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960–1988, born Brooklyn, New York) was a painter whose meteoric rise from the streets of downtown Manhattan to the centre of the international art world remains one of the defining stories of late 20th century art. Beginning his public presence as part of the graffiti duo SAMO, he transitioned to canvas by…

William Klein William Klein (1926–2022, born New York City) was a photographer, filmmaker, and graphic designer of exceptional range whose work across street photography, fashion, and film produced one of the most formally radical and culturally engaged bodies of visual art of the twentieth century. Trained as a painter under Fernand Léger in Paris, Klein…

Tom Wesselmann Tom Wesselmann (1931–2004, born Cincinnati, Ohio) was a painter and sculptor whose bold, sensuous work in the Pop Art tradition combined the visual language of advertising and consumer culture with a sustained engagement with the nude, producing a body of work that stands as one of the most distinctive achievements in postwar American art.…

Robert Mapplethorpe Robert Mapplethorpe (1946–1989, born Queens, New York) was a photographer whose precisely composed, psychologically charged images of the human body, flowers, and cultural figures produced one of the most distinctive and contested bodies of work in the history of photography. Educated at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, Mapplethorpe came to photography through an early…

Robert Frank  Robert Frank (1924–2019, born Zurich, Switzerland) was a photographer and filmmaker whose landmark book The Americans, published in France in 1958 and in the United States in 1959, transformed the possibilities of documentary photography and produced one of the most influential bodies of photographic work of the twentieth century. Emigrating to the United States…

Richard Serra Richard Serra (1938–2024, born San Francisco, California) was a sculptor whose monumental steel works established him as one of the most significant and formally ambitious sculptors of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Educated at the University of California and at Yale University, Serra came of age artistically in New York in the late 1960s,…