Art

Painting, sculpture, photography, and visual expression.

People in Art

174 profiles

Artist

Leonardo da Vinci

Painting the Mona Lisa and The Last Supper.

Painter

Frida Kahlo

Painting self-portraits about identity, pain and Mexican life.

Painter

Vincent van Gogh

Painting The Starry Night and Sunflowers.

Artist

Pablo Picasso

Co-developing Cubism and painting Guernica.

Painter

Georgia O'Keeffe

Painting enlarged flowers and the landscapes of New Mexico.

Artist

Salvador Dalí

Painting the melting clocks in The Persistence of Memory.

Painter

Édouard Manet

Painting Olympia and helping bring modern life into French painting.

Painter

Jackson Pollock

Making large abstract paintings by pouring and dripping paint.

Painter

Piet Mondrian

Creating abstract grids of black lines and primary colours.

Artist

Joan Miró

Creating a vivid visual language of floating shapes, stars and dreamlike figures.

Painter

Artemisia Gentileschi

Painting forceful Baroque heroines such as Judith.

Painter

Gustav Klimt

Painting The Kiss in a richly patterned field of gold.

Painter

Rembrandt

Painting The Night Watch and searching, lifelong self-portraits.

Artist

Edgar Degas

Depicting ballet dancers at work and rest.

Artist

Man Ray

Making experimental photographs and Surrealist images.

Painter

Bob Ross

Teaching relaxed landscape painting on television through The Joy of Painting.

Painter

Diego Rivera

Painting monumental murals that put workers and Mexican history on public walls.

Painter

Henri Matisse

Transforming modern art through bold colour, simplified forms and late paper cut-outs.

Artist

Katsushika Hokusai

Creating The Great Wave off Kanagawa and Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji.

Artist

Andy Warhol

Making soup cans, celebrities and mass-produced images central subjects of Pop art.

Painter

Amrita Sher-Gil

Helping shape modern Indian painting through portraits and scenes of everyday life.

Artist

Michelangelo

Creating David, the Pietà and the Sistine Chapel ceiling.

Artist

Jean-Michel Basquiat

Combining text, anatomy, history and street imagery in influential 1980s paintings.

Artist

Yayoi Kusama

Creating immersive Infinity Mirror Rooms and an unmistakable language of dots and repetition.

Artist

Wifredo Lam

Painting The Jungle and bringing Afro-Cuban imagery into modern art.

Painter

Tarsila do Amaral

Creating Abaporu and helping define Brazilian modernism.

Painter

Albert Namatjira

Bringing Central Australian landscapes to a wide audience through watercolour.

Painter

Raja Ravi Varma

Giving Indian mythological figures widely circulated painted and printed forms.

Painter

Ben Enwonwu

Shaping modern Nigerian art through paintings and sculpture.

Painter

Claude Monet

Helping establish Impressionism and painting the changing effects of light.

Artist

Utagawa Hiroshige

Creating woodblock landscapes that made travel, weather and everyday scenery memorable.

Artist

Jacob Lawrence

Painting the Great Migration as a sixty-panel visual narrative.

Artist

M. F. Husain

Helping define Indian modernist painting through bold narrative images.

Artist

Henry Ossawa Tanner

Painting intimate scenes and biblical works that gained international recognition.

Artist

Fernando Botero

Creating the rounded, exaggerated figures known as Boterismo.

Artist

Rufino Tamayo

Combining Mexican imagery with modern colour and form.

Artist

Oswaldo Guayasamín

Painting human suffering and inequality in a distinctive expressionist style.

Painter

Raphael

Painting The School of Athens and the Vatican frescoes that became defining images of the High Renaissance.

Painter

Titian

Transforming Venetian painting through rich colour, expressive brushwork and portraits of Europe's rulers.

Painter

Sandro Botticelli

Painting The Birth of Venus and Primavera, two of the most recognisable images of the Italian Renaissance.

Painter

Johannes Vermeer

Painting Girl with a Pearl Earring and quiet Dutch interiors shaped by extraordinary attention to light.

Painter

Paul Cézanne

Reworking landscapes and still lifes into structures of colour that helped prepare the way for Cubism.

Artist

Auguste Rodin

Sculpting The Thinker, The Kiss and other figures that made emotion and the human body central to modern sculpture.

Artist

Constantin Brâncuși

Reducing birds, heads and embracing figures to essential forms that helped transform modern sculpture.

Artist

Barbara Hepworth

Creating pierced abstract sculptures that make the space inside a form as important as its surface.

Artist

Louise Bourgeois

Creating giant spider sculptures and installations that turn memory, family and anxiety into physical forms.

Artist

Edmonia Lewis

Building an international sculpting career in nineteenth-century Rome as a woman of African American and Indigenous ancestry.

Artist

Augusta Savage

Sculpting The Harp and building opportunities for Black artists during the Harlem Renaissance.

Painter

Loïs Mailou Jones

Connecting African, Caribbean and American visual traditions in a long career as a painter and teacher.

Artist

Faith Ringgold

Creating story quilts that combine painting, fabric and written narratives about Black American lives.

Artist

Ai Weiwei

Using installations, found objects and documentary work to confront power, censorship and human rights.

Artist

Nam June Paik

Helping establish video art by turning television sets, electronic images and live broadcasts into artistic material.

Artist

Isamu Noguchi

Bringing sculpture into everyday life through public spaces, furniture and Akari paper lights.

Artist

Anish Kapoor

Creating Cloud Gate, Chicago's mirror-like sculpture known as The Bean, and vast installations that play with perception.

Artist

Käthe Kollwitz

Making powerful prints and sculptures about poverty, mourning and the human cost of war.

Painter

Hilma af Klint

Creating large abstract paintings from 1906, before many of modernism's best-known abstract pioneers.

Painter

Berthe Morisot

Helping establish Impressionism through lively paintings of women, children and everyday life.

Painter

Mary Cassatt

Bringing an American voice to Impressionism through paintings and prints of women and children.

Artist

Camille Claudel

Creating expressive sculptures such as The Waltz and The Mature Age while forging a career beyond Rodin's studio.

Artist

Sonia Delaunay

Taking abstract colour beyond painting into clothes, textiles, books and everyday design.

Painter

Caravaggio

Making biblical scenes feel immediate through dramatic light and ordinary human faces.

Painter

Hieronymus Bosch

Painting The Garden of Earthly Delights and extraordinary visions of temptation and judgment.

Painter

Jan van Eyck

Bringing extraordinary detail and luminous colour to early Netherlandish oil painting.

Painter

Francisco Goya

Painting The Third of May 1808 and exposing violence, superstition and power through art.

Painter

Peter Paul Rubens

Creating dynamic Baroque paintings filled with movement, colour and human energy.

Painter

John Constable

Painting The Hay Wain and making the Suffolk landscape an enduring subject of art.

Painter

John Singer Sargent

Painting Madame X and some of the most recognizable portraits of his era.

Painter

Winslow Homer

Painting American life and the sea with striking realism and force.

Painter

Edward Hopper

Painting Nighthawks and scenes of American life charged with stillness and isolation.

Painter

Wassily Kandinsky

Pioneering abstract painting through colour, form and ideas drawn from music.

Painter

Kazimir Malevich

Creating Black Square and founding Suprematism, an art of pure geometric forms.

Artist

Lyubov Popova

Moving abstract art into theatre sets, textiles and everyday design.

Artist

László Moholy-Nagy

Bringing photography, light and industrial materials into modern art and design education.

Painter

Pierre-Auguste Renoir

Painting the light, movement and sociability of modern life as a leading Impressionist.

Painter

Georges Seurat

Creating A Sunday on La Grande Jatte and developing pointillist painting.

Painter

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec

Making posters and paintings that defined the image of Parisian nightlife.

Painter

Egon Schiele

Creating intense Expressionist portraits and figure drawings with angular lines and exposed emotion.

Artist

Leonor Fini

Painting powerful women, sphinxes and dreamlike worlds outside the conventions of Surrealism.

Artist

Willem de Kooning

Painting Woman I and helping shape Abstract Expressionism in New York.

Artist

Lee Krasner

Creating constantly evolving abstract paintings, from Little Images to monumental canvases.

Artist

Jasper Johns

Turning flags, targets and numbers into paintings that questioned what art represents.

Artist

David Hockney

Painting vivid California swimming pools and exploring new ways of seeing through photography and digital drawing.

Artist

Nicolas Poussin

Giving classical stories a precise visual order in paintings such as The Shepherds of Arcadia.

Artist

Francis Bacon (artist)

Painting distorted human figures that became some of modern art’s most unsettling images.

Artist

Henry Moore

Creating monumental sculptures of reclining figures and mothers with children.

Artist

Alexander Calder

Inventing mobiles that made movement part of abstract sculpture.

Artist

Marcel Duchamp

Challenging the definition of art with readymades such as Fountain.

Artist

Rachel Whiteread

Casting empty spaces into solid sculptures and becoming the first woman to win the Turner Prize.

Artist

Lygia Clark

Turning sculpture into an experience that viewers could physically change.

Artist

Richard Serra

The sculptor whose enormous steel forms change how viewers move through space.

Artist

Barbara Chase-Riboud

The sculptor and novelist known for her Malcolm X steles and the novel Sally Hemings.

Artist

Ibrahim Mahama

The artist whose vast installations of used sacks reveal the labour and trade carried by ordinary materials.

Artist

Kara Walker

The artist whose cut-paper silhouettes confront slavery, racial violence and historical myth.

Artist

Kehinde Wiley

The portrait painter who places Black subjects inside the visual language of traditional power.

Artist

Zanele Muholi

Creating a visual record of Black queer lives in South Africa.

Artist

Njideka Akunyili Crosby

Layering painting and family photographs to explore life between Nigeria and America.

Artist

Doris Salcedo

Creating sculptures and installations that confront violence, loss and remembrance.

Artist

Hélio Oiticica

Turning colour into environments and wearable artworks that invite participation.

Artist

Roberto Matta

Painting expansive surrealist worlds that connect inner life and political tension.

Artist

Abanindranath Tagore

Helping shape the Bengal school of painting and modern Indian art.

Painter

Jamini Roy

Creating a modern Indian painting style from Bengali folk art and Kalighat traditions.

Painter

Tyeb Mehta

Creating stark modern paintings of falling figures, diagonals and mythological conflict.

Artist

Bhupen Khakhar

Painting ordinary Indian lives and openly exploring gay identity.

Artist

Nilima Sheikh

Creating narrative paintings and scrolls about memory, displacement and women’s lives.

Artist

Nalini Malani

Pioneering Indian video art and immersive works about memory and violence.

Painter

Zainul Abedin

His stark drawings of the 1943 Bengal famine and pioneering modern art education in Bangladesh.

Painter

S. M. Sultan

Painting Bengali peasants as monumental, muscular figures of labour and strength.

Artist

Abdur Rahman Chughtai

Developing a distinctive painting style inspired by Mughal and Persian art.

Artist

Shirin Neshat

Photographs and films exploring women, power and exile, including Women of Allah.

Artist

Xu Beihong

Reinvigorating Chinese painting through powerful ink horses and Western-trained observation.

Artist

Zhang Daqian

Developing luminous splashed-ink landscapes after mastering traditional Chinese painting.

Painter

Zao Wou-Ki

Creating expansive abstract paintings that connect Chinese ink traditions with European modernism.

Painter

Hasegawa Tōhaku

Painting Pine Trees, a celebrated pair of Japanese ink screens.

Artist

Ogata Kōrin

Painting gold-ground screens of irises and plum trees that became landmarks of Rinpa art.

Artist

Kawanabe Kyōsai

Painting lively scenes of folklore, animals and satire across Japan’s Edo and Meiji eras.

Artist

Taro Okamoto

Creating the Tower of the Sun and the mural Myth of Tomorrow.

Artist

Chun Kyung-ja

Painting vivid women, flowers and snakes in a distinctive colour-rich style.

Artist

Park Seo-bo

Creating the repeated marks and textured surfaces of Écriture.

Artist

Raden Saleh

Bringing European Romantic painting into dialogue with Java.

Artist

Georgette Chen

Helping shape Singapore’s Nanyang art through portraits and tropical still lifes.

Cartoonist

Lat

Capturing Malaysian childhood and everyday life in The Kampung Boy.

Painter

Fernando Amorsolo

Painting luminous Philippine rural scenes and becoming the country’s first National Artist.

Painter

Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri

Creating monumental Western Desert paintings, including Warlugulong.

Artist

Daphne Odjig

Helping establish Indigenous artists’ independent place in Canada’s art world.

Artist

Kenojuak Ashevak

Creating The Enchanted Owl and helping establish modern Inuit graphic art.

Artist

Bill Reid

Creating The Raven and the First Men and Spirit of Haida Gwaii.

Artist

Wangechi Mutu

Creating hybrid figures that challenge representations of women and nature.

Artist

Emily Kame Kngwarreye

Transforming knowledge of Alhalker Country into expansive abstract paintings.

Artist

Elizabeth Catlett

Portraying Black women’s lives through sculpture and printmaking.

Artist

El Anatsui

Transforming discarded bottle tops into monumental flexible sculptures.

Artist

Remedios Varo

Painting dreamlike worlds where science and magic meet.

Artist

Agnes Martin

Creating restrained abstract paintings of grids and bands.

Artist

Ruth Asawa

The sculptor who turned looped wire into intricate hanging forms that seem to draw in space.

Artist

Gill Gatfield

Creating sculpture after a career in equality law.

Artist

Richard Butler Bowdon

Exploring African identities and migration through portraiture and collage.

Artist

Lindokuhle Sobekwa

Documenting family memory and township life through photography.

Artist

Nikos Economopoulos

Photographing everyday life across Greece, Turkey and the Balkans.

Artist

Lady Skollie

Exploring sexuality, consent and power through bold visual art.

Artist

Victoria Kosasie

Combining contemporary art with the KemBALIkeSENI initiative.

Artist

Julia Morison

Creating symbolic paintings, installations and sculptural forms.

Artist

Newsha Tavakolian

Photographing everyday life and women’s experiences in Iran.

Artist

René Burri

Making enduring photographs of Che Guevara and modern cities.

Painter

Horiki Katsutomi

Creating abstract paintings inspired by Renaissance art and the Odyssey.

Painter

Felipe Santiago Gutiérrez

Painting portraits and helping build art education in Colombia.

Painter

José de Ibarra

Painting religious scenes and portraits in eighteenth-century New Spain.

Artist

Micha Bar-Am

Documenting Israeli life and conflict through photojournalism.

Artist

Jonas Bendiksen

Photographing overlooked communities and challenging trust in images with The Book of Veles.

Painter

Lawrence Alma-Tadema

Painting richly detailed scenes of classical antiquity.

Painter

Francisco Zenteno Bujáidar

Painting murals and co-founding Tepito Arte Acá.

Artist

Paul du Toit

Making brightly coloured paintings and mixed-media sculpture.

Artist

Bieke Depoorter

Making collaborative photographic portraits and books.

Artist

Martine Franck

Photographing everyday lives and co-founding the Henri Cartier-Bresson Foundation.

Artist

Raymond Depardon

Co-founding Gamma and documenting life through photography and film.

Artist

Myra Landau

Developing abstract works in her Rhythms series.

Artist

Keith Joubert

Southern African wildlife art

Artist

Henri Cartier-Bresson

The decisive moment in candid photography

Artist

Atomi Kakei

Painting, calligraphy and founding the Atomi School

Artist

Vlady

Mexican murals exploring revolution and history.

Artist

Jorge Marín

Bronze figures exploring balance, flight and the human body.

Artist

Noguchi Shohin

Japanese landscape and bird-and-flower painting.

Artist

Barbara Pike

Detailed illustrations of southern African plants.

Artist

Eduardo Cataño

Mexican calendar and advertising illustration.

Artist

Toshio Saeki

Surreal illustrations combining erotic imagery and Japanese visual traditions.

Painter

Tanomura Chikuden

Literati painting and scholarship in Edo-period Japan.

Artist

David Seymour

Photojournalism as Chim and co-founding Magnum Photos.

Artist

Gillian Condy

Detailed botanical illustrations of southern African plants.

Artist

Sebastião Salgado

Long-form photographic projects about labour, migration and the natural world.

Artist

Peter Eastman

Making reflective paintings and atmospheric forest scenes.

Artist

Luke Hasegawa

Painting Catholic murals for the Church of the Holy Japanese Martyrs in Civitavecchia.

Artist

Graham Bennett

Creating public sculptures including Reasons for Voyaging.

Artist

Cinga Samson

Figurative oil paintings with dark palettes and ceremonial poses.

Artist

Ayanda Mabulu

Political paintings challenging power and inequality.

Artist

Guy Le Querrec

Photographs connecting jazz, travel and documentary storytelling.

Painter

Tosa Mitsunobu

Establishing the Tosa school of Japanese painting.