Items20The creator’s order
  1. 1Francisco GoyaFrancisco GoyaBorn 30 Mar 1746Francisco 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…0i
  2. 2HokusaiHokusaiHokusai 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…0i
  3. 3J. M. W. TurnerJ. M. W. TurnerBorn 23 Apr 1775J. 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…0i
  4. 4Wassily KandinskyWassily KandinskyBorn 16 Dec 1866Wassily 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…0i
  5. 5Henri MatisseHenri MatisseBorn 31 Dec 1869Henri 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,…0i
  6. 6Piet MondrianPiet MondrianBorn 7 Mar 1872Piet 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…0i
  7. 7Kazimir MalevichKazimir MalevichBorn 23 Feb 1879Kazimir 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…0i
  8. 8Francis PicabiaFrancis PicabiaBorn 22 Jan 1879Francis 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…0i
  9. 9Pablo PicassoPablo PicassoBorn 25 Oct 1881Pablo 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…0i
  10. 10Giorgio de ChiricoGiorgio de ChiricoBorn 10 Jul 1888Giorgio 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…0i