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Famous Artists

A concise, chapter-aligned list of pivotal artists. Use the era links to jump and pair with the chapters for context.

Renaissance

  • Leonardo da Vinci — “Mona Lisa,” “The Last Supper.”
  • Michelangelo Buonarroti — Sistine Chapel ceiling, “David,” “Pietà.”
  • Raphael — “School of Athens,” Madonnas.
  • Titian — Venetian colorito, portraits and mythologies.

Baroque

  • Caravaggio — Dramatic chiaroscuro, realist saints.
  • Artemisia Gentileschi — Tenebrist heroines (“Judith Slaying Holofernes”).
  • Peter Paul Rubens — Dynamic compositions, rich color.
  • Rembrandt van Rijn — Portraits, self-portraits, printmaking.
  • Diego Velázquez — “Las Meninas,” court portraiture.

19th Century

  • Édouard Manet — Bridge from Realism to modernism.
  • Gustave Courbet — Monumental Realism (“A Burial at Ornans”).
  • Claude Monet — Impressionist serial light studies.
  • Berthe Morisot — Impressionist domestic interiors, light.
  • Vincent van Gogh — Expressive impasto, color symbolism.
  • Paul Cézanne — Structural color; precursor to Cubism.
  • Georges Seurat — Pointillism (“La Grande Jatte”).
  • Paul Gauguin — Synthetic color, Tahiti works.

Early 20th Century (Modern)

  • Pablo Picasso — Cubism, collage; Blue/Rose periods.
  • Georges Braque — Co-founder of Cubism.
  • Henri Matisse — Fauvist color, decorative line.
  • Wassily Kandinsky — Toward abstraction; color/music analogies.
  • Franz Marc — Expressionist color symbolism (animals).
  • Umberto Boccioni — Futurist dynamism; sculpture.
  • Piet Mondrian — De Stijl grids, primary colors.
  • Paul Klee — Playful symbols, color theory.
  • Marcel Duchamp — Readymades, conceptual pivot.
  • Salvador Dalí — Surrealist dreamscapes, paranoiac-critical method.
  • René Magritte — Surrealist paradox of word/image.

Postwar & Contemporary

  • Jackson Pollock — Action painting, drip technique.
  • Mark Rothko — Color Field luminescent rectangles.
  • Willem de Kooning — Gesture and figure/ground tension.
  • Helen Frankenthaler — Soak-stain abstraction.
  • Andy Warhol — Pop Art, mass media icons.
  • Roy Lichtenstein — Comic-based Pop Ben-Day dots.
  • Louise Bourgeois — Sculpture/installations on memory and body.
  • Yayoi Kusama — Infinity nets, immersive environments.
  • Jean-Michel Basquiat — Neo-Expressionist text/image hybrids.

Tip

Pair each artist with 1–2 key works and note the movement traits they exemplify. Use the chapter navigation to see how these figures relate across periods.