Pablo Ruiz Picasso was a Spanish painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist and theatre designer who spent most of his adult life in France. Regarded as one of the most influential artists of the 20th century, he is known for co-founding the Cubist movement, the invention of constructed sculpture, the co-invention of collage, and for the wide variety of styles that he helped develop and explore. Among his most famous works are the proto-Cubist Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907), and Guernica (1937), a dramatic portrayal of the bombing of Guernica by German and Italian air forces during the Spanish Civil War.
Willem de Kooning was a Dutch-American abstract expressionist artist. He was born in Rotterdam and moved to the United States in 1926, becoming an American citizen in 1962. In 1943, he married painter Elaine Fried.
Richard Diebenkorn was an American painter and printmaker. His early work is associated with abstract expressionism and the Bay Area Figurative Movement of the 1950s and 1960s. In the late 1960s he began his extensive series of geometric, lyrical abstract paintings. Known as the Ocean Park paintings, these paintings were instrumental to his achievement of worldwide acclaim.
Color field painting is a style of abstract painting that emerged in New York City during the 1940s and 1950s. It was inspired by European modernism and closely related to abstract expressionism, while many of its notable early proponents were among the pioneering abstract expressionists. Color field is characterized primarily by large fields of flat, solid color spread across or stained into the canvas creating areas of unbroken surface and a flat picture plane. The movement places less emphasis on gesture, brushstrokes and action in favour of an overall consistency of form and process. In color field painting "color is freed from objective context and becomes the subject in itself."
Robert Motherwell was an American abstract expressionist painter, printmaker, and editor. He was one of the youngest of the New York School, which also included Philip Guston, Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, and Mark Rothko.
Rudolph Carl Gorman was a Native American artist of the Navajo Nation. Referred to as "the Picasso of American Indian artists" by The New York Times, his paintings are primarily of Native American women and characterized by fluid forms and vibrant colors, though he also worked in sculpture, ceramics, and stone lithography. He was also an avid lover of cuisine, authoring four cookbooks, called Nudes and Food.
Antoni Tàpies i Puig, 1st Marquess of Tàpies was a Spanish painter, sculptor and art theorist, who became one of the most famous European artists of his generation.
Sidney Janis was a wealthy clothing manufacturer and art collector who opened an art gallery in New York in 1948. His gallery quickly gained prominence, for he not only exhibited the work of most of the emerging leaders of Abstract Expressionism, but also that of such important European artists as Pierre Bonnard, Paul Klee, Joan Miró, and Piet Mondrian. As the critic Clement Greenberg explained in a 1958 tribute to the dealer, Janis' exhibition practices had helped to establish the legitimacy of the Americans, for his policy "not only implied, it declared, that Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, Phillip Guston, Mark Rothko, and Robert Motherwell were to be judged by the same standards as Matisse and Picasso, without condescension, without making allowances." Greenberg observed that in the late 1940s "the real issue was whether ambitious artists could live in this country by what they did ambitiously. Sidney Janis helped as much as anyone to see that it was decided affirmatively."
Ralston Crawford (1906–1978) was an American abstract painter, lithographer, and photographer.
Sir Richard Sheridan Franklin Bowling, known as Frank Bowling, is a Guyana-born British artist. His paintings relate to Abstract expressionism, Color Field painting and Lyrical Abstraction.
Natvar Bhavsar is an Indian-American artist, based in Soho, New York City for nearly 50 years, noted as an abstract expressionist and color field artist.
Richard "Von" White is an abstract expressionist artist. Born Richard Elis Blair White, on the island of Jamaica in 1951, to a family of prominent businessmen and founders of the town Oracabessa. "Von" is the stage name of Richard White, an artist who specialises in pastel tropical scenes inspired by nature and the female form.
Brian Christopher Rutenberg is an American abstract painter.
Nanno de Groot was a self-taught artist. He belonged to the group of New York School Abstract expressionist artists of the 1950s. He wrote:
In moments of clarity of thought I can sustain the idea that everything on earth is nature, including that which springs forth from a man's mind, and hand. A Franz Kline is nature as much as a zinnia.
Harold Frank (1921–1995) was an American abstract expressionist artist, born in Southampton, England.
Jazzamoart is a Mexican artist best known for his painting which is mostly connected to jazz music in some way. Born Francisco Javier Vázques Estupiñán in Irapuato, Guanajuato, his talent was recognized early and he took his professional name from his dual passions of jazz and art. He is best known as a painter with over 400 individual and collective exhibitions on several continents, but he has also done monumental sculpture, stage scenery and has collaborated with musicians. He lives in Mexico City.
Samuel M. Kootz was a New York City art dealer and author whose Kootz Gallery was one of the first to champion Abstract Expressionist Art.
David Simpson is an American abstract painter who lives and works in Berkeley, California. In 1956 Simpson graduated from the California School of Fine Arts with a BFA; and in 1958 he earned an MFA, from the San Francisco State College. Since 1958 Simpson has had more than 70 solo exhibitions of his paintings in galleries and museums worldwide. His paintings have been included in hundreds of group exhibitions throughout the United States and Europe. During the early 1960s Simpson was included in two seminal group exhibitions: Americans 1963 at the Museum of Modern Art in New York curated by Dorothy Canning Miller and Post-Painterly Abstraction curated by Clement Greenberg in 1964; that traveled to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art the Walker Art Center and the Art Gallery of Toronto.
Eleanor de Laittre was an American visual artist and an early proponent of abstract, cubist-inspired, and largely non-objective art. During a period when representational art was the norm in the United States, she adhered to a style that was based on her study of paintings by Pablo Picasso, Joan Miró, Paul Klee, and Raoul Dufy. She was a member of American Abstract Artists, a group that flourished during the late 1930s and throughout the 1940s and that included among its members Josef Albers, Ilya Bolotowsky, Werner Drewes, Suzy Frelinghuysen, A.E. Gallatin, Adolph Gottlieb, László Moholy-Nagy, George L.K. Morris, and Ad Reinhardt. In 1939 de Laittre was recognized for her skill in handling the design of a painting she had placed in a group exhibition and was praised in general for her subtle handling of color. Critical appraisal of her work remained positive in the 1940s and early 1950s and toward the end of her career she was honored as one of the best-known artists among those who strove to overcome resistance to abstract art in America.
Peter Matthews is an English artist who has developed a practice of creating drawings while immersed in the ocean and paintings created over days or weeks of being in solitude along the Pacific and Atlantic coasts. He works with art materials hiked into the landscape, strapped about his person, hidden in caches along the coast and using found objects on the beach. Since 2007, his drawings made directly in the ocean record the movement of the ocean, the passage and experience of time and the live natural environment that he immerses himself into, often straddling a degree of vulnerability to his being in the process. His work is known as being produced as a lived experience while in nature alone, and he has worked in a diverse range of natural environments in México, Japan, Chile, Costa Rica, England, the U.S., Brazil and Taiwan. He has been identified as being part of a long English tradition of maritime art, whilst his abstract style has been compared to that of American expressionist Jasper Johns. His creative process has occasionally led him into danger, and has resulted in his receiving injuries. Matthews' work has been exhibited internationally, as well as being used to illustrate aspects of scientific research in marine biology.
