Art and Artists Flashcards
The original Renaissance Man, he is identified with genius, not only for masterpieces such as the Mona Lisa (the title for which has entered the language as a superlative), The Last Supper and The Lady with an Ermine but also for his drawings of technologies (aircraft, tanks, automobile) that were five hundred years in the future.
Leonardo da Vinci
He was a triple threat: A painter (the Sistine Ceiling), a sculptor (the David and Pietà), and architect (St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome). Make that a quadruple threat since he also wrote poetry. Though he bounced between Florence, Bologna, and Venice, his greatest commissions were for the Medici Popes (including Julian II and Leo X, among others) in Rome. Aside from the aforementioned Sistine Ceiling, St. Peter’s Basilica, and Pietà, there was his tomb for Pope Julian II (which includes his iconic carving of Moses) and the design for the Laurentian Library at San Lorenzo’s Church. Twenty years after painting the Sistine Ceiling, he returned to the Chapel to create one of the greatest frescoes of the Renaissance: The Last Judgment.
Michelangelo
One of the greatest artists in history, this Dutch Master is responsible for masterworks such as The Night Watch and Doctor Nicolaes Tulp’s Demonstration of the Anatomy of the Arm. But he is particularly known for portraits in which he demonstrated an uncanny ability to evoke the innermost thoughts of his subjects (including himself through the play of facial expression and the fall of light across the sitter’s features.
Rembrandt
Remarkably, he was largely forgotten for two centuries before his rediscovery in the 19th century. Since then, he’s been recognized as one of art history’s most important figures, an artist capable of rendering works of uncanny beauty. Many have argued he used a camera obscura—an early form of projector—and certainly the soft blur he employs appears to foreshadow photorealism. But the most important aspect of his work is how it represents light as a tangible substance.
Vermeer
He (1684–1721) was arguably the greatest French painter of the 18th-century, a transitional figure between Baroque art and the Roccoco style that followed. He emphasized color and movement, structuring his compositions so that they almost resembled theater scenes, but it was the atmospheric quality of his work that would become highly influential for artists like J.M.W Turner and the Impressionists.
Jean-Antoine Watteau
He (1798–1863) was one of the towering figures of 19th-century art. A leading figure of Romanticism—which privileged emotions over rationalism—his expressive paint handling and use of color laid the foundation for successive avant-garde movements of the 1800s and beyond.
Eugene Delacroix
Perhaps the best know artist among the Impressionists, he captured the changeable effects of light on the landscape through prismatic shards of color delivered as rapidly painted strokes. Moreover, his multiple studies of haystacks and other subjects anticipated the use of serial imagery in Pop Art and Minimalism. But the same token, his magisterial, late-career lily pond paintings foreshadowed Abstract Expressionism and Color-Field Abstaction.
Claude Monet
Most people know him (1859–1891) as the inventor of pointillism (which he actually developed with the artist Paul Signac), a radical painting technique in which small daubs of color where applied to the canvas, leaving it to the viewer’s eye to resolve those dots and dashes into images. Just as importantly, he broke with the capture-the-moment approach of other Impressionists, going instead for ordered compositional style that recalled the stillness of classical art.
Georges Seurat
He is legendary for being mentally unstable (he did, after all, cut off part of his ear after an argument with fellow painter Paul Gauguin), but his paintings are among the most famous and beloved of all time. (His painting, The Starry Night, inspired a treacly Top 40 hit by Don McClean.) His technique of painting with flurries of thick brushstrokes made up of bright colors squeezed straight from the tube would inspire subsequent generations of artists.
Vincent van Gogh
I scream, you scream we all scream for his The Scream, the Mona Lisa of anxiety. In 2012, a pastel version of his iconic evocation of modern angst fetched a then-astronomical price of $120 million at auction (a benchmark which has since been bested several times). His career was more than just a single painting. He’s generally acknowledged as the precursor to Expressionism, influencing artists such 20th-century artists as Egon Schiele, Erich Heckel and Max Beckmann.
Edvard Munch
Vienna at the turn of the 20th century was a hothouse of psychologically and sexually charged tension and repression, and no figure channeled the milieu better than this artist (1890–1918), whose fevered sensibility found expression in drawings and paintings of subjects that were as explicit as they were jittery.
Egon Schiele
The fin de siècle Viennese Symbolist painter he is known for using gold leaf, something he picked up on while visiting the famous Byzantine frescoes in Ravenna Italy. He most famously put the idea to use in his masterpiece, Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I—also know as Austria’s Mona Lisa—a painting looted by the Nazis during World War II. The story of its eventual return to its rightful owner served as the basis of the film, Woman In Gold, starring Helen Mirren. Another of his paintings, The Kiss, is equally iconic.
Gustav Klimt
Born in Málaga, Spain, this artist is undoubtedly one of the most famous artists ever. His name is virtually synonymous with modern art, and it doesn’t hurt that he fits the commonly held image of the outlaw genius whose ambitions are matched by an appetite for living large. He changed the course of art history with revolutionary innovations that include collage and, of course, Cubism, which broke the stranglehold of representational subject matter on art, and set the tempo for other 20th-century artists. He utterly transformed multiple mediums, making so many works that it’s hard to grasp his achievement.
Pablo Picasso
No artist is as closely tied to the sensual pleasures of color as this artist. His work was all about sinuous curves rooted in the traditions of figurative art, and was always focused on the beguiling pleasures of pigment and hue. “I am not a revolutionary by principle,” he once said. “What I dream of is an art of balance, of purity and serenity, devoid of troubling or depressing subject matter…a soothing, calming influence on the mind, something like a good armchair.”
Henri Matisse
His name is widely recognized by art lovers and agnostics alike, and for good reason: He utterly transformed our expectations of what is real and what is not. When someone describes something as “surreal,” the chances are good that an image by this artist pops into his or her head. He was a Belgian Surrealist artist. He became well known for creating a number of witty and thought-provoking images. Often depicting ordinary objects in an unusual context, his work is known for challenging observers’ preconditioned perceptions of reality. His imagery has influenced pop art, minimalist art and conceptual art.
René Magritte
