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Francisco Goya
Born
Francisco Goya began with sunny tapestry designs of picnics and fairs for the Spanish royal workshop, then became a sharp court portraitist. After illness left him deaf in the 1790s, his etchings Los Caprichos and The Disasters of War turned to satire and horror. Finally, in the Black Paintings he painted straight onto the walls of his house around 1820, he reached a dark, rough style that looks a century ahead of its time.
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Hokusai
Hokusai changed his artist's name more than thirty times, each change roughly marking a new phase: actor prints in his twenties, refined surimono greeting prints, the Hokusai Manga sketchbooks that taught a nation to draw, the landscape prints of Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji in his seventies, and finally intense brush paintings in his eighties. He said he hoped to understand nature properly by the age of 110.
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J. M. W. Turner
Born
J. M. W. Turner started as a precise topographical watercolourist, then painted grand historical landscapes in the manner of Claude Lorrain to win a place at the Royal Academy. From the 1830s, in works such as Rain, Steam and Speed, his paintings dissolved into light, colour and weather, puzzling critics. The Turner Bequest at Tate Britain, including thousands of sketches, lets visitors follow each stage.
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Wassily Kandinsky
Born
Wassily Kandinsky painted Russian fairy-tale scenes and Bavarian landscapes in bright colour, then around 1910 to 1913 dissolved them into the Improvisations and Compositions often counted among the first abstract paintings. At the Bauhaus in the 1920s his work became hard-edged and geometric, with circles and lines, and in Paris in the 1930s it filled with soft, biological shapes.
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Henri Matisse
Born
Henri Matisse moved from dark academic still lifes to the wild colour of Fauvism in 1905, then to the flat, decorative interiors of the 1910s and the softer Nice odalisques of the 1920s. In his last decade, after surgery left him largely confined to bed or a wheelchair, he made the paper cut-outs, gouache-painted sheets cut and arranged with assistants, including The Snail and the designs for the chapel at Vence.
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Piet Mondrian
Born
Piet Mondrian painted dark Dutch landscapes and windmills in the manner of the Hague School, passed through vivid Symbolist trees and a Cubist phase in Paris, then by 1921 arrived at the black grids and primary colours that made him famous. Moving to New York in 1940, he loosened them again into the coloured, syncopated lines of Broadway Boogie Woogie, inspired by jazz and the city's street plan.
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Kazimir Malevich
Born
Kazimir Malevich worked through Impressionism, peasant scenes in a Cubo-Futurist style and then, in 1915, the Black Square and Suprematism, pure geometric forms on white. Under Stalin, when abstraction became dangerous, he returned to figurative painting, with faceless peasants and Renaissance-style portraits, which he backdated to the 1910s. Curators are still untangling which works belong to which period.
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Francis Picabia
Born
Francis Picabia made a successful start as an Impressionist landscape painter, then switched to Cubist abstraction, Dada machine drawings, layered transparent figures in the 1920s and, in the 1940s, kitsch nudes copied from soft-porn magazines, before ending with dot paintings. He changed style so often that it became his position: a refusal to settle. His late work strongly influenced painters of the 1980s.
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Pablo Picasso
Born
Pablo Picasso is the standard example: the melancholy Blue Period and gentler Rose Period, the shock of Les Demoiselles d'Avignon in 1907, Cubism developed side by side with Georges Braque, a neoclassical return to heavy, statuesque figures in the 1920s, Surrealist-tinged distortions leading to Guernica in 1937, and late, fast, loose paintings and ceramics made at the Madoura pottery in Vallauris.
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Giorgio de Chirico
Born
Giorgio de Chirico's metaphysical paintings of the 1910s, empty arcaded squares, long shadows and mannequins, inspired the Surrealists. He then turned to an old-master style in tempera and to baroque self-portraits in costume, which the Surrealists denounced. Late in life he painted new versions of his early metaphysical pictures, sometimes backdated, which makes his career a puzzle about originality and copying.
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Mark Rothko
Mark Rothko painted flattened, anxious city scenes of subway platforms in the 1930s, then mythological, Surrealist-influenced canvases in the early 1940s and loose blurred "multiforms", before arriving around 1949 at the stacked, glowing colour rectangles he is known for. In his final years, as with the Seagram murals and the Rothko Chapel, the colours darkened to maroon, brown and black.
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Willem de Kooning
Willem de Kooning painted careful, melancholy men and still lifes in the 1930s, then the black-and-white abstractions of the late 1940s, and the ferocious Woman series of the early 1950s, which shocked fellow abstract painters by returning to the figure. In the 1960s his work loosened into pastoral abstract landscapes, and in his final years, during dementia and with studio assistance, into spare ribbons of colour.
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Lee Krasner
Born
Lee Krasner was famously self-critical, destroying and cutting up earlier work to make new pieces. She moved from Cubist-influenced still lifes under Hans Hofmann to the dense, small Little Image paintings of the late 1940s, then to collages built from torn canvases in the 1950s, and the huge, sweeping Umber and Primary Series paintings after Jackson Pollock's death. Each decade looks like a different artist.
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Jackson Pollock
Born
Jackson Pollock trained under the Regionalist Thomas Hart Benton, painting swirling rural scenes, then absorbed Mexican muralists and Picasso in totemic, symbol-laden canvases of the early 1940s. From 1947 he laid canvases on the floor and poured and dripped paint, as in Autumn Rhythm. In 1951 and 1952 he switched to black poured paintings that brought figures back, before his death in 1956.
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Philip Guston
Born
Philip Guston painted public murals in a Renaissance-influenced figurative style in the 1930s, then became a respected abstract expressionist in the 1950s with shimmering clusters of pink and grey strokes. In 1970 he shocked the art world by returning to crude, cartoonish figures, hooded Klansmen, cigarettes and shoes, in his Marlborough Gallery show. That late work is now widely seen as his most influential.
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Bridget Riley
Born
Bridget Riley's black-and-white Op Art of the early 1960s, such as Movement in Squares, made her famous for paintings that seem to move. From 1967 she introduced colour, in long stripes and curves, and in the 1980s after a trip to Egypt shifted to a palette of bright lozenge shapes. Since the late 1990s she has returned to curves and wall paintings, executed with studio assistants from her designs.
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Gerhard Richter
Born
Gerhard Richter has worked in several styles in parallel and in sequence: blurred grey paintings copied from photographs in the 1960s, colour-chart grids, monochrome grey panels, the squeegee-dragged abstract paintings of the 1980s onwards, and the October 18, 1977 cycle about the Baader-Meinhof group. In his late eighties he announced he had stopped painting and turned to drawing.
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Paula Rego
Born
Paula Rego began with near-abstract collages full of cut-up figures in the 1960s, moved to brightly coloured, cartoon-like animal fables in the early 1980s, and then to large, solid figurative paintings, such as The Dance and the Dog Woman pastels of the 1990s, often posed by her studio model Lila Nunes. Her Abortion series of 1998 was made in response to a Portuguese referendum.
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Frank Stella
Born
Frank Stella made his name at 23 with the Black Paintings of 1959, flat black stripes separated by thin bare lines. He then shaped the canvases themselves, painted the brilliant protractor curves of the late 1960s, and from the 1970s built increasingly three-dimensional, painted metal reliefs that spill off the wall, made with a fabrication team. By the end of his life his work had become sculpture.
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David Hockney
Born
David Hockney moved from the graffiti-like, Pop-tinged paintings of his Royal College of Art years to the flat, sunlit Los Angeles swimming pools of the 1960s and the large naturalistic double portraits of the 1970s. He then made photo-collage "joiners" in the 1980s, vast Yorkshire landscapes painted outdoors in the 2000s and, in his seventies and eighties, iPad drawings of Normandy seasons. He died in London in June 2026, aged 88.
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