Matisse is considered, with Picasso, as the greatest artist of the 20th century. He was initially labelled as a Fauve (wild beast), by the 1920s, however, he was increasingly hailed as an upholder of the classical tradition in French painting. His mastery of the expressive language of colour and drawing, displayed in a body of work spanning over a half-century, won him recognition as a leading figure in modern art.

The first painting of Matisse acquired by a public collection was Still Life with Geraniums (1910), exhibited in the Pinakothek der Moderne. Today, a Matisse painting can fetch as much as US $17 million. In 2002, a Matisse sculpture, Reclining Nude I (Dawn), sold for US $9.2 million, a record for a sculpture by the artist.

Matisse died of a heart attack at the age of 84 in 1954. He is interred in the cemetery of the Monastère Notre Dame de Cimiez, near Nice. He was a great painter and paintings are a great asset for art.

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His early years were spent in Le Havre, where he first excelled as a caricaturist. Later he was converted to landscape painting by his early mentor Boudin, from whom he derived his firm predilection for painting out of doors. He studied in Paris at the Atelier Suisse in 1859. There he made a friendship with Pissarro. He also joined for two years’ military service in Algiers, he returned to Le Havre because he had contracted typhoid fever. On his return he met Jongkind, to whom he said he owed `the definitive education of my eye’. He then entered the studio of Gleyre in Paris , in 1862. There he met Renoir, Sisley, and Bazille, Together they shared new approaches to art, painting the effects of light en plein air with broken color and rapid brushstrokes, in what later came to be known as Impressionism. Monet’s Camille or The Woman in the Green Dress (La femme à la robe verte), painted in 1866, brought him recognition and was one of many works featuring his future wife, Camille Doncieux; she was the model for the figures in The Woman in the Garden of the following year, as well as for On the Bank of the Seine, Bennecourt, 1868, pictured here. Shortly thereafter, Cammille became pregnant and gave birth to their first child, Jean.

The Franco-Prussian War broke in 1870-71 and he traveled to England with Pissarro where he studied the work of Constable and Turner and painted the Thames and London parks. He also met the dealer Durand-Ruel, who was to become one of the great champions of the Impressionists.

Monet married Camille Doncieux in 1870. She had been the model of his paintings. He had two sons from her. After the birth of the second son weakened her already fading health. On 5 September 1879, Camille Monet died of tuberculosis at the age of thirty-two; Monet painted her on her death bed.

Before the death of his wife during the period from 1871 to 1878 Monet lived at Argenteuil, a village on the Seine near Paris, and here were painted some of the most joyous and famous works of the Impressionist movement, not only by Monet, but by his visitors Manet, Renoir and Sisley. In 1878 he moved to Vétheuil and in 1883 he settled at Giverny, also on the Seine, but about 40 miles from Paris. After having experienced extreme poverty, Monet began to prosper. By 1890 he was successful enough to buy the house at Giverny he had previously rented and in 1892 he married his mistress, with whom he had begun an affair in 1876, three years before the death of his first wife.

Beginning in the 1880s and 1890s through the end of his life in 1926, Monet worked on “series” paintings, in which a subject was depicted in varying light and weather conditions.–Haystacks or Grainstacks (1890-91) and Rouen Cathedral (1891-95) are the best known. He travelled widely, visiting London and Venice several times (and also Norway as a guest of Queen Christiana), but increasingly his attention was focused on the celebrated water-garden he created at Giverny, which served as the theme for the series of paintings on Water-lilies that began in 1899 and grew to dominate his work completely.

During World War I, in which his younger son Michel served and his friend and admirer Clemenceau led the French nation, Monet painted a series of Weeping Willow trees as homage to the French fallen soldiers. In 1923, he underwent two operations to remove his cataracts: the paintings done while the cataracts affected his vision have a general reddish tone, which is characteristic of the vision of cataract victims. It may also be that after surgery he was able to see certain ultraviolet wavelengths of light that are normally excluded by the lens of the eye, this may have had an effect on the colors he perceived. After his operations, he even repainted some of these paintings, with bluer water lilies than before the operation.

Monet died of lung cancer on 5 December 1926 at the age of 86 and is buried in the Giverny church cemetery. He was a founder of French impressionist painting, and the most consistent and prolific practitioner of the movement’s philosophy of expressing one’s perceptions before nature, especially as applied to plein-air landscape painting. The term Impressionism is derived from the title of his painting Impression, Sunrise.

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Kahlo was born in a small town house known as La Casa Azul (The Blue House). Her parents were Lutheran Germans. Her father, Guillermo Kahlo sailed to Mexico in 1891 at the age of nineteen. Frida’s mother, Matilde Calderón y Gonzalez, was a devout Catholic of primarily indigenous, as well as Spanish descent. Kahlo contracted polio at age six, which left her right leg thinner than the left, which Kahlo disguised by wearing long, colorful skirts. It has been conjectured that she also suffered from spina bifida, a congenital disease that could have affected both spinal and leg development. Kahlo joined a clique at the school and fell in love with the leader, Alejandro Gomez Arias. During this period, Kahlo also witnessed violent armed struggles in the streets of Mexico City as the Mexican Revolution continued. On September 17, 1925, Kahlo met a serious accident causing several injuries.

After the accident, Kahlo turned her attention away from the study of medicine to begin a full-time painting career. It was due to her temporary immobilization and isolation. It were her depriviations which appeared in the stark portrayals of pain. Of her 143 paintings, 55 are self-portraits which often incorporate symbolic portrayals of physical and psychological wounds.

As a young artist, Kahlo approached the Mexican painter, Diego Rivera, whose work she admired, asking him for advice about pursuing art as a career. This advice later resulted in likeness, love and ultimately, marriage. But their marriage was often tumultuous due to numerous extramarital affairs of the both artists. Farida was bisexual. She had affairs both with men and women, including Josephine Baker. Their marriage broke but they remarried in in 1940, yet their metrimonial life remained the same. Frida Kahlo died on July 13, 1954 due to pulmonary embolism.
A few days before her death she wrote in her diary: “I hope the exit is joyful – and I hope never to return – Frida”

Kahlo’s Casa Azul (Blue House) in Coyoacán, Mexico City, where she lived and worked, was donated by Diego Rivera upon his death in 1957 and is now a museum housing artifacts of her life. Her work  conveys a melancholy and contemplative nature and is largly admired throughout the whole world. Though late after her death yet her art forced the art lovers to admire her works truely, deeply and cosiderably.

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At age 14, he entered apprenticeship with the painter José Luzán, after completing his early education at the school named Escuelas Pias. He later moved to Madrid where he studied with Anton Raphael Mengs, a painter who was popular with Spanish royalty but could not continue his study there due certain clash with his master.

In 1771, he journeyed to Rome where he won second prize in a painting competition organized by the City of Parma. He the same year, returned to Zaragoza and painted a part of the cupola of the Basilica of the Pillar, frescoes of the oratory of the cloisters of Aula Dei, and the frescoes of the Sobradiel Palace. He studied with Francisco Bayeu y Subías and his painting began to show signs of the delicate tonalities for which he became famous.

His work gradually made him famous with the maturity of his art. In 1783, the Count of Floridablanca, a favorite of King Carlos III, commissioned him to paint his portrait. He also became friends with Crown Prince Don Luis, and lived in his house. His circle of patrons grew to include the Duke and Duchess of Osuna, whom he painted, the King and other notable people of the kingdom. After the death of Charles III in 1788 and revolution in France in 1789, during the reign of Charles IV, Goya reached his peak of popularity with royalty.Goya left Spain in May 1824 for Bordeaux, where he settled. He returned to Spain in 1826, but, despite a warm welcome, he returned in ill health to Bordeaux, where he died in 1828 at the age of 82.

Goya was a court painter to the Spanish Crown and a chronicler of history. The subversive and subjective element in his art, as well as his bold handling of paint, provided a model for the work of later generations of artists, notably Manet and Picasso. His famous works like “The Maja”, “Darker realms”, “Black Paintings and The Disasters”, made him immortal in the realm of Art.

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René François Ghislain Magritte was born in Lessines, in the province of Hainaut on 21 November 1898.  He was a Belgian artist. He is specilly known for his  surrealism.

René Magritte’s father was a tailor and textile merchant. His mother committed suicide by drowning herself in the River Sambre when he was 13 year old. When her body was recovered from the river, her face was covered with a cloth. It is said that the dominent significance of Magritte’s paintings with heads covered by cloth, is the incident related with his mothers’death.

Magritte’s earliest paintings, which date from about 1915, were Impressionistic in style. From 1916 to 1918 he studied at the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts in Brussels, but found the instruction uninspiring. The paintings he produced during the years 1918–1924 were influenced by Futurism and by the offshoot of Cubism practiced by Metzinger. Most of his works of this period are female nudes.

In 1922 Magritte married Georgette Berger, whom he had met as a child in 1913. From December 1920 until September 1921, Magritte served in the Belgian infantry in the Flemish town of Beverlo near Leopoldsburg. He worked as a draughtsman in a wallpaper factory, and was a poster and advertisement designer until 1926, when a contract with Galerie la Centaure in Brussels made it possible for him to paint full-time. In 1926, Magritte produced his first surreal painting, The Lost Jockey (Le jockey perdu), and held his first exhibition in Brussels in 1927. Critics heaped abuse on the exhibition. Depressed by the failure, he moved to Paris where he became friends with André Breton, and became involved in the surrealist group. Galerie la Centaure closed at the end of 1929, ending Magritte’s contract income.

He was in Brussels during the German occupation of Belgium in World War II. This led to a break with Breton. Those days he was victomized by alienation and abandonmen. During that era his paintings are the exponents of passimism and lonliness. But soon by renouncing the early impression, he joined several other Belgian artists in signing the manifesto Surrealism in Full Sunlight. During 1947–48—Magritte’s “Vache Period”—he painted in a provocative and crude Fauve style. During this time, Magritte supported himself through the production of fake Picassos, Braques and Chiricos—a fraudulent repertoire he was later to expand into the printing of forged banknotes during the lean postwar period. This venture was undertaken alongside his brother Paul Magritte.

Magritte died of pancreatic cancer on 15 August 1967. Popular interest in Magritte’s work rose considerably in the 1960s, and his imagery has influenced pop, minimalist and conceptual art. He became well known for a number of witty and thought-provoking images. His intended goal for his work was to challenge observers’ preconditioned perceptions of reality and force viewers to become hypersensitive to their surroundings. He was a true representative of Surrealism.

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Salvador Domingo Felipe Jacinto Dalí i Domènech, 1st Marquis of Púbol (May 11, 1904 – January 23, 1989) was a Spanish Catalan surrealist painter born in Figueres.

Dalí (Spanish pronunciation: [daˈli]) was a skilled draftsman, best known for the striking and bizarre images in his surrealist work (Surrealism). His painterly skills are often attributed to the influence of Renaissance masters. His best-known work, The Persistence of Memory, was completed in 1931. Dalí’s expansive artistic repertoire includes film, sculpture, and photography, in collaboration with a range of artists in a variety of media.

Dalí attributed his “love of everything that is gilded and excessive, my passion for luxury and my love of oriental clothes” to a self-styled “Arab lineage,” claiming that his ancestors were descended from the Moors.

Dalí was highly imaginative, and also had an affinity for partaking in unusual and grandiose behavior, in order to draw attention to himself. This sometimes irked those who loved his art as much as it annoyed his critics, since his eccentric manner sometimes drew more public attention than his artwork.

Source: Wikipedia

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Picasso was the first child of Don José Ruiz y Blasco and María Picasso y López. He belonged to a middle-class family. Picasso’s father was also a painter who specialized in naturalistic depictions of birds and other game. Picasso showed a passion and a skill for drawing from an early age. At the age of seven, Picasso started his formal artistic training from his father in figure drawing and oil painting. In 1897, Picasso, age 16, was sent to Madrid’s Royal Academy of San Fernando but he disliked formal instruction and quit attending classes soon after enrollment.

Picasso began to frequent the Barcelona cafes where intellectuals gathered. He soon went to Paris, the capital of art, and soaked up the works of Manet, Gustave Courbet, and Toulouse-Lautrec, whose sketchy style impressed him greatly. Then it was back to Spain, a return to France, and again back to Spain – all in the years 1899 to 1904.

In 1907 Picasso was prominent for being the champion of Cubism. After World War I, Picasso made a number of important associations and relationships with figures associated with Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes.In 1927 Picasso met 17-year-old Marie-Thérèse Walter and began a secret affair with her. Picasso’s marriage to Khokhlova soon ended in separation. The photographer and painter Dora Maar, a constant companion and lover of Picasso remained closest in the late 1930s and early 1940s and it was Maar who documented the painting of Guernica. In 1944, Picasso met a young art student, Françoise Gilot. The two eventually became lovers, and had two children together, Claude and Paloma. Unique among Picasso’s women, Gilot left Picasso in 1953. Picasso was not long in finding another lover, Jacqueline Roque. The two remained together for the rest of Picasso’s life, marrying in 1961. Picasso was married twice and had four children by three women.

Pablo Picasso died on 8 April 1973 in Mougins, France, while he and his wife Jacqueline entertained friends for dinner. His final words were “Drink to me, drink to my health, you know I can’t drink any more.”

Picasso demonstrated uncanny artistic talent in his early years, painting in a realistic manner through his childhood and adolescence; during the first decade of the twentieth century his style changed as he experimented with different theories, techniques, and ideas. Picasso’s creativity manifested itself in numerous mediums, including painting, sculpture, drawing, and architecture. His revolutionary artistic accomplishments brought him universal renown and immense fortunes throughout his life, making him the best-known figure in twentieth century art. A figure which would remain immortal due to his artistic accomplishments and creative capabilities.

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In 1886 he went to Paris to join his brother Théo, the manager of Goupil’s gallery. In Paris, van Gogh studied with Cormon, inevitably met Pissarro, Monet, and Gauguin, and began to lighten his very dark palette and to paint in the short brushstrokes of the Impressionists. His nervous temperament made him a difficult companion and night-long discussions combined with painting all day undermined his health. He decided to go south to Arles where he hoped his friends would join him and help found a school of art. Gauguin did join him but with disastrous results. In a fit of epilepsy, van Gogh pursued his friend with an open razor, was stopped by Gauguin, but ended up cutting a portion of his ear lobe off. Van Gogh then began to alternate between fits of madness and lucidity and was sent to the asylum in Saint-Remy for treatment.

In May of 1890, he seemed much better and went to live in Auvers-sur-Oise under the watchful eye of Dr. Gachet. Two months later he was dead, having shot himself “for the good of all.” During his brief career he had sold one painting. Van Gogh’s finest works were produced in less than three years in a technique that grew more and more impassioned in brushstroke, in symbolic and intense color, in surface tension, and in the movement and vibration of form and line. Van Gogh’s inimitable fusion of form and content is powerful; dramatic, lyrically rhythmic, imaginative, and emotional, for the artist was completely absorbed in the effort to explain either his struggle against madness or his comprehension of the spiritual essence of man and nature.

Source: vangoghgallery.com

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Michelangelo’s output in every field during his long life was prodigious; when the sheer volume of correspondence, sketches, and reminiscences that survive is also taken into account, he is the best-documented artist of the 16th century. Two of his best-known works, the Pietà and David, were sculpted before he turned thirty. Despite his low opinion of painting, Michelangelo also created two of the most influential works in fresco in the history of Western art: the scenes from Genesis on the ceiling and The Last Judgment on the altar wall of the Sistine Chapel in Rome. As an architect, Michelangelo pioneered the Mannerist style at the Laurentian Library. At 74 he succeeded Antonio da Sangallo the Younger as the architect of Saint Peter’s Basilica. Michelangelo transformed the plan, the western end being finished to Michelangelo’s design, the dome being completed after his death with some modification.

In a demonstration of Michelangelo’s unique standing, he was the first Western artist whose biography was published while he was alive. Two biographies were published of him during his lifetime; one of them, by Giorgio Vasari, proposed that he was the pinnacle of all artistic achievement since the beginning of the Renaissance, a viewpoint that continued to have currency in art history for centuries. In his lifetime he was also often called Il Divino (”the divine one”). One of the qualities most admired by his contemporaries was his terribilità, a sense of awe-inspiring grandeur, and it was the attempts of subsequent artists to imitate Michelangelo’s impassioned and highly personal style that resulted in Mannerism, the next major movement in Western art after the High Renaissance.

Source: Wikipedia

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Leonardo grew up in an environment rich with scholarly texts and art, provided by his father, who himself taught Leonardo how to paint. Famous renaissance sculptor Andrea del Verrocchio was among his early teachers.

Leonardo spent his next sexteen years in Milan. He for the period went on to be in the service of the Duke Ludovico Sforza.  He not only paint for the Duke, but also designed machinery, weapons, and a fair bit of architecture. He later worked in Rome, Bologna and Venice and spent his last years in France, at the home awarded him by Francis I.

Leonardo is renowned primarily as a painter. Two of his works, “the Mona Lisa” and “The Last Supper”, are the most famous, most reproduced and most parodied portrait and religious painting of all time, respectively, their fame approached only by Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam. Leonardo’s drawing of the Vitruvian Man is also regarded as a cultural icon, being reproduced on everything from the Euro to text books to t-shirts. Perhaps fifteen of his paintings survive, the small number due to his constant, and frequently disastrous, experimentation with new techniques, and his chronic procrastination. Nevertheless, these few works, together with his notebooks, which contain drawings, scientific diagrams, and his thoughts on the nature of painting, comprise a contribution to later generations of artists only rivalled by that of his contemporary, Michelangelo.

Leonardo is revered for his technological ingenuity. He conceptualised a helicopter, a tank, concentrated solar power, a calculator, the double hull and outlined a rudimentary theory of plate tectonics. Relatively few of his designs were constructed or were even feasible during his lifetime, but some of his smaller inventions, such as an automated bobbin winder and a machine for testing the tensile strength of wire, entered the world of manufacturing unheralded. As a scientist, he greatly advanced the state of knowledge in the fields of anatomy, civil engineering, optics, and hydrodynamics.

On May 2, 1519, at the age of 67, Leonardo da Vinci died. He was burried with King Francis at his side. The famous lines of Leonardo da Vinci are quotable when he said,”As a well-spent day brings happy sleep, so a life well spent brings happy death.”
Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci (April 15, 1452 – May 2, 1519) was born in Vinci, Italy. He was an illegitimate son of a young notary named Piero da Vinci, and a peasant woman, Caterina, at Vinci in the region of Florence. He was an Italian polymath, scientist, mathematician, engineer, inventor, anatomist, painter, sculptor, architect, botanist, musician and writer.

Leonardo grew up in an environment rich with scholarly texts and art, provided by his father, who himself taught Leonardo how to paint. Famous renaissance sculptor Andrea del Verrocchio was among his early teachers.

Leonardo spent his next sexteen years in Milan. He for the period went on to be in the service of the Duke Ludovico Sforza.  He not only paint for the Duke, but also designed machinery, weapons, and a fair bit of architecture. He later worked in Rome, Bologna and Venice and spent his last years in France, at the home awarded him by Francis I.

Leonardo is renowned primarily as a painter. Two of his works, “the Mona Lisa” and “The Last Supper”, are the most famous, most reproduced and most parodied portrait and religious painting of all time, respectively, their fame approached only by Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam. Leonardo’s drawing of the Vitruvian Man is also regarded as a cultural icon, being reproduced on everything from the Euro to text books to t-shirts. Perhaps fifteen of his paintings survive, the small number due to his constant, and frequently disastrous, experimentation with new techniques, and his chronic procrastination. Nevertheless, these few works, together with his notebooks, which contain drawings, scientific diagrams, and his thoughts on the nature of painting, comprise a contribution to later generations of artists only rivalled by that of his contemporary, Michelangelo.

Leonardo is revered for his technological ingenuity. He conceptualised a helicopter, a tank, concentrated solar power, a calculator, the double hull and outlined a rudimentary theory of plate tectonics. Relatively few of his designs were constructed or were even feasible during his lifetime, but some of his smaller inventions, such as an automated bobbin winder and a machine for testing the tensile strength of wire, entered the world of manufacturing unheralded. As a scientist, he greatly advanced the state of knowledge in the fields of anatomy, civil engineering, optics, and hydrodynamics.

On May 2, 1519, at the age of 67, Leonardo da Vinci died. He was burried with King Francis at his side. The famous lines of Leonardo da Vinci are quotable when he said,”As a well-spent day brings happy sleep, so a life well spent brings happy death.”