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Art

1,236 cards. Each one is a 40-second story with a five-minute read behind it. Page 14 of 21.

  1. Cézanne built Cubism's bridge with stubborn Aix brushstrokesPaul Cézanne, 19 January 1839 to 22 October 1906, turned Post-Impressionist color planes into a new pictorial grammar between Impressionism and Cubism. Dealers laughed for decades…
  2. Gauguin left the Paris Bourse for Tahiti's saturated colorEugène Henri Paul Gauguin, 7 June 1848 to 8 May 1903, quit a booming stockbroker career after the 1882 crash and remade Post-Impressionist and Symbolist painting with Breton, Mart…
  3. Klee taught Bauhaus color while drawing like a childPaul Klee, 18 December 1879 to 29 June 1940, filtered Expressionism, Cubism, and Surrealism into a dry-humored, musical draftsmanship. With Wassily Kandinsky he taught at the Bauh…
  4. Rubens painted Europe's courts and negotiated their treatiesSir Peter Paul Rubens, 28 June 1577 to 30 May 1640, ran Antwerp's most powerful Baroque workshop while serving as a knighted diplomat for Spain and England. Movement, color, and C…
  5. Phidias stamped Classical Greece onto gold, ivory, and bronzePhidias, active about 480 to 430 BC, designed the Olympian Zeus counted among the Seven Wonders and the Acropolis Athenas that defined Periclean Athens. No securely original statu…
  6. Johnson sold the International Style—then built a glass housePhilip Cortelyou Johnson, 8 July 1906 to 25 January 2005, curated MoMA's 1932 International Style show, later designed the New Canaan Glass House and postmodern AT&T tower at 550 …
  7. Renoir painted pleasure after years too poor to buy paintPierre-Auguste Renoir, 25 February 1841 to 3 December 1919, helped invent Impressionist sociability and was dubbed the last heir of a Rubens-to-Watteau line of feminine beauty. Fa…
  8. Mondrian boiled painting down to red, yellow, blue, and gridPieter Cornelis Mondriaan, known after 1911 as Piet Mondrian, lived from 7 March 1872 to 1 February 1944 and helped found De Stijl with Theo van Doesburg. Neo-Plasticism limited h…
  9. Bruegel made peasants and landscapes as grand as altarpiecesPieter Bruegel the Elder, born about 1525–1530 and dead 9 September 1569, turned genre scenes and wide landscapes into large-scale Flemish Renaissance statements. After Italy he d…
  10. Raphael packed three careers into thirty-seven yearsRaffaello Sanzio da Urbino, born 28 March or 6 April 1483 and dead on his birthday in 1520 aged thirty-seven, joined Leonardo and Michelangelo as a High Renaissance pyramid peak. …
  11. Loewy streamlined everything from locomotives to cigarette packsRaymond Loewy, 5 November 1893 to 14 July 1986, emigrated from Paris to New York and became Time's 31 October 1949 cover star as industrial design's public face. Shell, Exxon, TWA…
  12. Magritte made ordinary objects refuse to behaveRené Magritte, 21 November 1898 to 15 August 1967, placed familiar objects in unexpected settings to question how pictures relate to reality. The Belgian Surrealist spent years pa…
  13. Dalí melted clocks and turned eccentricity into a brandSalvador Domingo Felipe Jacinto Dalí i Domènech, 11 May 1904 to 23 January 1989, joined the Surrealists in 1929 and finished The Persistence of Memory in August 1931. Figueres-bor…
  14. Botticelli's Venus slept until the Pre-Raphaelites woke herAlessandro di Mariano Filipepi, called Sandro Botticelli, lived about 1445 to 17 May 1510 in one Florence neighborhood. Birth of Venus and Primavera now define Early Renaissance g…
  15. A tsar's railcar darkroom colorized an empire before film couldSergey Mikhaylovich Prokudin-Gorsky, 30 August 1863 to 27 September 1944, hauled three-plate color photography across Nicholas II's realms from about 1909 to 1915. Chemist-trained…
  16. Zen monk Sesshū forged Japanese ink painting in Ming ChinaSesshū Tōyō, about 1420 to 26 August 1506, trained as a Kyoto Zen monk under Tenshō Shūbun before a 1467–1470 Ming voyage remade his brush. Winter Landscape and seasonal scrolls m…
  17. Miyamoto turned a Kyoto cave walk into global game designShigeru Miyamoto, born 16 November 1952 in Sonobe, Kyoto, joined Nintendo in 1977 after showing toys to Hiroshi Yamauchi. Donkey Kong rescued unsold Radar Scope cabinets; a 1985 M…
  18. Escher drew infinity while calling himself no mathematicianMaurits Cornelis Escher, born 17 June 1898 in Leeuwarden and dead 27 March 1972, filled woodcuts and lithographs with impossible stairs and endless tilings. Art critics long shrug…
  19. Michelangelo finished David before thirty and still reshaped RomeMichelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni, 6 March 1475 to 18 February 1564, sculpted the Pietà and David before age thirty, then frescoed Genesis on the Sistine ceiling and The …
  20. Janissary engineer Sinan became the Ottoman MichelangeloMimar Sinan, born Joseph around 1488–1490 near Kayseri and dead 17 July 1588, rose from Janissary engineer to chief architect for Suleiman the Magnificent, Selim II, and Murad III…
  21. Poussin fled the French court to keep painting in RomeNicolas Poussin, June 1594 to 19 November 1665, led classical French Baroque painting yet spent most of his career in Rome for Italian and French collectors. A brief turn as First…
  22. Rockwell sold America itself on magazine covers for decadesNorman Percevel Rockwell, 3 February 1894 to 8 November 1978, painted more than four thousand works and 322 Saturday Evening Post covers across forty-seven years. Critics called h…
  23. Tezuka rewired manga and still finished medical schoolOsamu Tezuka, 3 November 1928 to 9 February 1989, earned nicknames from Father to God of Manga after New Treasure Island ignited a postwar boom in 1947. Astro Boy, Princess Knight…
  24. Niemeyer curved Brasília into a capital of concreteOscar Niemeyer, 15 December 1907 to 5 December 2012, designed Brasília's civic core and helped shape the United Nations headquarters in New York. Over seventy-eight years and roug…
  25. Picasso co-founded Cubism and never stayed in one stylePablo Ruiz Picasso, born in Málaga on 25 October 1881 and dead in France on 8 April 1973, helped invent Cubism, constructed sculpture, and collage. Les Demoiselles d'Avignon in 19…
  26. Whistler signed paintings with a stinging butterflyJames Abbott McNeill Whistler (10 July 1834 – 17 July 1903) left America for Europe and preached art for art's sake. He titled canvases arrangements, harmonies, and nocturnes, sig…
  27. A self-taught writer killed the expressway through SoHoJane Isabel Jacobs (4 May 1916 – 25 April 2006) had no planning degree, yet The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961) called urban renewal a pseudoscience. From Greenwich…
  28. Ingres guarded Raphael while inventing modern contourJean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres (29 August 1780 – 14 January 1867) cast himself as Poussin and David's heir against Romantic colour. History painting was his ambition, yet portraits…
  29. Miró tried to assassinate bourgeois painting itselfJoan Miró i Ferrà (20 April 1893 – 25 December 1983) turned Catalan childhood symbols into Surrealist signs. From Barcelona's Gothic quarter to Paris automatism, he mocked convent…
  30. Constable made Dedham Vale feel like a private religionJohn Constable (11 June 1776 – 31 March 1837) painted Suffolk's Stour valley with such intensity the district is still called Constable Country. The Hay Wain (1821) and other six-…
  31. Madame X scandal shoved Sargent from Paris to LondonJohn Singer Sargent (12 January 1856 – 15 April 1925), Florence-born to American parents, became his generation's premier society portraitist. Roughly 900 oils and more than 2,000…
  32. Malevich's Black Square declared painting without objectsKazimir Severinovich Malevich (23 February 1879 – 15 May 1935) founded Suprematism in 1915 as pure geometry on monochrome fields. Black Square at Petrograd's Last Futurist Exhibit…
  33. Le Corbusier rebuilt cities as machines for livingCharles-Édouard Jeanneret (6 October 1887 – 27 August 1965), styling himself Le Corbusier from 1920, pioneered modern architecture across five decades and seven countries later ga…
  34. Alberti wrote the Renaissance rulebook for buildings and picturesBy the time he was twenty, Leon Battista Alberti had written a comedy that readers accepted as a genuine ancient text. The Genoa-born priest (1404–1472) went on to explain perspec…
  35. Leonardo left fewer than twenty-five major paintings—and remade artA notary's illegitimate son from a Tuscan hill town left fewer than 25 major paintings, several unfinished, yet one of them, the Mona Lisa, is counted the most famous picture on E…
  36. Kahn's heavy concrete made modern rooms feel ancientAt three, a boy on the Estonian island of Saaremaa scooped glowing coals into his apron and scarred his face for life. As Louis Kahn (1901–1974), he later raised massive buildings…
  37. Mies turned "less is more" into steel-and-glass destinyMaria Ludwig Michael Mies, who grew up in his father's stone-carving shop in Aachen, built himself a grander surname: the Dutch "van der" plus his mother's maiden name, since Germ…
  38. Man Ray renamed himself and invented the rayographMan Ray once argued that Dada could never take root in New York, because the whole city already was Dada. So in 1921 the tailor's son born Emmanuel Radnitzky in Philadelphia moved…
  39. Chagall kept flying over Vitebsk for ninety-seven yearsJewish boys were barred from the ordinary high school, so young Moishe Shagal's mother handed the headmaster 50 roubles to let him in. Renamed Marc Chagall, the boy from near Vite…
  40. Duchamp's signed urinal asked who gets to call it artWhat turns a urinal into art? In 1917 Marcel Duchamp painted "R. Mutt 1917" on one and titled it Fountain. The Rouen-schooled Frenchman (1887–1968), who spent his last 25 years in…
  41. Rothko refunded a rich commission rather than decorate diners' wallsStacked rectangles of colour that seem lit from within made Mark Rothko famous, yet he gave back a lucrative fee rather than let his canvases decorate the Four Seasons restaurant …
  42. Masaccio reinvented painting—then died at twenty-sixHis nickname meant something like messy Tom, yet Masaccio, born Tommaso di Ser Giovanni di Simone in 1401, was dead at twenty-six after changing Florentine painting. His heavy, sh…
  43. Ernst rubbed floors into forests and fled as an undesirableBy his own account, Max Ernst died on the first of August 1914 and came back to life on 11 November 1918, the span of his war service. The self-taught German (1891–1976) then help…
  44. Turner sold stormy light while critics sniffed at his classJoseph Mallord William Turner, born in Covent Garden on 23 April 1775, entered the Royal Academy Schools at fourteen and became a Royal Academician at twenty-seven. Roughly 550 oi…
  45. David painted republics, then emperors, then exileJacques-Louis David (30 August 1748 – 29 December 1825) made Neoclassical history painting the moral weather of late Ancien Régime France. Friend to Robespierre, arts strongman of…
  46. Suzhou gardens taught the architect of glass pyramidsIeoh Ming Pei, 26 April 1917 to 16 May 2019, carried scholar-gentry garden memory from Guangzhou and Suzhou into American modernism. Mesa Lab, the Kennedy Library, Louvre glass, a…
  47. Volga barge haulers made Russian realism impossible to ignoreIlya Repin, 5 August 1844 to 29 September 1930, became nineteenth-century Russia's most famous painter with Barge Haulers on the Volga and processional crowds. An 1885 Ivan the Te…
  48. Lower East Side kid who dynamited the Marvel universeJacob Kurtzberg, 28 August 1917 to 6 February 1994, became Jack Kirby, comics' prolific King. From Essex Street tenements to Captain America with Joe Simon and cosmic Fourth World…
  49. Wyoming-born painter who danced paint onto the floorPaul Jackson Pollock, 28 January 1912 to 11 August 1956, made Abstract Expressionism famous by pouring household enamel onto canvases laid flat. LIFE asked in 1949 if he was Ameri…
  50. Wisconsin farm girl who made flowers fill whole canvasesGeorgia Totto O'Keeffe lived from 15 November 1887 to 6 March 1986 and spent seven decades painting on her own terms. Later dubbed Mother of American modernism, she magnified bloo…
  51. East German escapee who paints photos and pure blurBorn in Dresden on 9 February 1932, Gerhard Richter fled East Germany with his wife weeks before the Berlin Wall rose in 1961. In the West he reinvented painting as both razor pho…
  52. Baroque Rome's sculptor who treated marble like theatreGian Lorenzo Bernini, born in Naples on 7 December 1598 and dead in Rome on 28 November 1680, fused sculpture, architecture, and stagecraft for popes. One scholar likens his grip …
  53. Medieval Florence's painter who made chapel walls breatheGiotto di Bondone, active around 1267 to 8 January 1337, stands between Gothic and Proto-Renaissance painting. His Padua Scrovegni Chapel frescoes, finished about 1305, still coun…
  54. Vienna's gold-leaf rebel who left the official art worldGustav Klimt began as a dependable painter of theatre ceilings and imperial staircases, decorated by the Emperor himself. Then his ceiling panels for the University of Vienna were…
  55. He painted stone breakers at history-painting scaleJean Desire Gustave Courbet, 10 June 1819 to 31 December 1877, led French Realism by insisting he would paint only what he could see. Late-1840s canvases of unidealized peasants a…
  56. Augsburg precision that taught England to see itselfHans Holbein the Younger, born about 1497 and dead between 7 October and 29 November 1543, carried Northern Renaissance exactness from Basel print shops to Henry VIII's court. Thr…
  57. The decisive moment made street photography a craftHenri Cartier-Bresson, 22 August 1908 to 3 August 2004, mastered candid 35mm seeing and helped invent modern street photography. A Magnum Photos co-founder in 1947, he mostly quit…
  58. Aristocrat of Montmartre who drew nightlife without flatteryComte Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, 24 November 1864 to 9 September 1901, turned Paris cabarets into modern graphic legend. Adolescent femur fractures left him short-statured; brothe…
  59. Law clerk turned Fauve who made color the whole argumentHenri Matisse, 31 December 1869 to 3 November 1954, stands with Picasso as a shaper of early twentieth-century art. Between 1900 and 1905 blazing canvases earned the wild beasts s…
  60. The customs clerk whose jungles never left ParisHenri Rousseau, 21 May 1844 to 2 September 1910, painted exotic forests while working toll gates, earning the nickname Le Douanier. Critics mocked the Naïve canvases; Picasso thre…

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