Visual Art

Suprematism (1913-1920s)

Immediately prior to the Russian Revolution, a group of Russian artists formed the independent suprematist movement, so named because they believed that non-objective reality was greater than anything that could be achieved by representation; in his "The Non-Objective World: The Manifesto of Suprematism", suprematist founder Kazimir Malevich stated "By 'Suprematism' I mean the supremacy of pure feeling in creative art. To the suprematist the visual phenomena of the objective world are, in themselves, meaningless; the significant thing is feeling." Suprematist works often consist of simple geometric shapes of limited color placed at diagonals or some thoughtful arrangement on a white background. Major works by Kazimir Malevich in the suprematist style include Suprematist Composition: Airplane Flying, Black Square, Black Circle, Suprematist Composition: White on White, and Suprematism. After the communists took control of Russia, suprematism died out, much like many other abstract art movements under totalitarian governments.

Museo del Prado

In 1785, Spanish King Charles III commissioned a building to house a natural history museum, but his grandson Ferdinand VII completed the [blank] as an art museum in 1819. Deriving its name from the Spanish for "meadow," the [blank]'s holdings include not only what is universally regarded as the best collection of Spanish paintings, but also a number of works from Flemish masters, such as Diego Velázquez's Las Meninas, Francisco Goya's The Third of May, 1808, and Hieronymus Bosch's The Garden of Earthly Delights.

The National Gallery

In Trafalgar Square in London houses a synoptic collection of pre-1900 paintings assembled by government purchase and donation. It is home to British masterpieces including John Constable's The Haywain and both Rain, Steam and Speed and The Fighting Temeraire by J. M. W. Turner. The museum also boasts several major highlights of European painting, from arguably the best known of Vincent van Gogh's Sunflowers series to exemplar Baroque works like Caravaggio's Supper at Emmaus, The Judgment of Paris by Peter Paul Rubens, and the Rokeby Venus of Diego Velázquez. Major works of the Italian and north European Renaissance are also represented, including Jan van Eyck's The Arnolfini Wedding, Hans Holbein's The Ambassadors, Titian's Bacchus and Ariadne, Raphael's Portrait of Pope Julius II, and the later of Leonardo's two versions of Madonna of the Rocks.

Metaphysical painting (1910-1920s)

Influenced by the work of late 19th-century German philosophers, metaphysical painters sought to create enigmatic scenes which beckoned viewers to interpret a meaning based on symbols, suggestions, and impressions, thus foreshadowing the Surrealist paintings of the following decades. In many metaphysical paintings, human figures are represented by shadows or lifeless dummies and are placed in mysterious settings of seemingly infinite space, giving the canvasses dreamlike, eerie, and vaguely threatening qualities. Additionally, the paintings were given intentionally enigmatic titles to contribute to their cryptic effect. Metaphysical painting was based on the works of Italian artists Giorgio de Chirico (The Disquieting Muses, The Song of Love, Melancholy and Mystery of a Street, Le Reve Transforme), Giorgio's brother Alberto Savinio, and former Futurist Carlo Carra (The Oval of Apparition). The metaphysical painting movement came to an end in the 1920s after an argument between de Chirico and Carra over who had founded the group.

Futurism (1909-1914)

Inspired by the scientific and technological advances of the start of the 20th century, a group of Italian artists came together to form the Futurist movement in 1909, seeking to represent the glory of machines and speed in their art; in his "The Futurist Manifesto", Filippo Marinetti declared that "a roaring motor car which seems to run on machine-gun fire, is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace." The Futurists used a cubist-inspired approach to represent figures in multiple states at once, thus giving their works an animated yet shattered feel. Notable Futurists include Umberto Boccioni (Unique Forms of Continuity in Space, Development of a Bottle in Space, The City Rises, Dynamism of a Cyclist), Giacomo Balla (Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash, Abstract Speed + Sound), Carlo Carra (Funeral of the Anarchist Galli), and Gino Severini (Armored Train in Action, Dynamic Hieroglyphic of the Bal Tabarin). Although Marcel Duchamp is not usually associated with Futurism, his Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 (which caused an uproar at the Armory Show in 1913) displays many characteristics of Futurist painting.

Rijksmuseum (RYKES-"museum")

Located in Amsterdam, this is the national museum of The Netherlands. Currently housed in a Gothic Revival building designed by P. J. H. Cuypers and completed in 1885, its most distinguished works include Rembrandt's Night Watch, Franz Hals's The Merry Drinker, and Jan Vermeer's The Milkmaid.

Uffizi Gallery

Located in Florence, Italy, the [blank] was originally designed by Giorgio Vasari to serve as offices for the Florentine magistrates under Cosimo de' Medici — hence the name [blank], meaning "offices." After Cosimo I died in 1574, the new grand duke, Francis I, commissioned the conversion of its top floor into a galley. Its outstanding Renaissance holdings include The Birth of Venus and La Primavera, both by Sandro Botticelli, and Titian's Venus of Urbino.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Located on the edge of Central Park and colloquially known as "the Met," its main building on Fifth Avenue was designed by Richard Morris Hunt. Its collection includes El Greco's View of Toledo, Jacques-Louis David's The Death of Socrates, and John Singer Sargent's Madame X

The Art Institute of Chicago

Located on the western edge of Grant Park in Chicago, the main building of the [blank] was built for the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition and features two lion statues at its entrance (which are often decorated for special occasions, e.g. with jerseys when Chicago sports teams are in the playoffs). It has an outstanding collection of French Impressionist and American works such as Georges Seurat's A Sunday on La Grande Jatte, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec's At the Moulin Rouge, Grant Wood's American Gothic, and Edward Hopper's Nighthawks.

Broadway Boogie Woogie, by Piet Mondrian.

Mondrian's De Stijl works are a still further abstraction, such that the canvas is often divided up into rectangular "tile patterns," as in Composition with Red Blue and Yellow. The painting simultaneously echoes the bright lights of a marquee, resembles a pattern of streets as seen from above, and creates a feeling of vitality and vibrancy, not unlike the music itself. This work can also be found at the MOMA.

Christina's World, by Andrew Wyeth

Named after Christina Olson, who lived near the Wyeths' summer home in Cushing, Maine. In the 1948 painting, Christina lays in the cornfield wearing a pink dress, facing away from the viewer, her body partly twisted and hair blowing slightly in the wind. In the far distance is a three-story farmhouse with dual chimneys and two dormers, along with two sheds to its right. A distant barn is near the top middle of the painting. One notable aspect is the subtle pattern of sunlight, which strikes the farmhouse obliquely from the right, shines in the wheel tracks in the upper right, and casts very realistic-looking shadows on Christina's dress. The Olson house was the subject of many [artist] paintings for 30 years, and it was named to the National Register of Historic Places for its place in Christina's World.

Tate

Originally known as the National Gallery of British Art when opened in 1897, it was renamed for its benefactor, sugar tycoon Sir Henry [blank]. The original [blank] Gallery has been renamed [blank] Britain, and there are now three additional branches: [blank] Modern in London, [blank] Liverpool, and [blank] St. Ives in Cornwall. The [blank] awards the Turner Prize, a highly publicized award for British artists, and its collection includes Whaam! by Roy Lichtenstein and many works by J. M. W. Turner.

Expressionism (1905-1930s)

Originating in Germany at the start of the 20th century, Expressionism sought to present the world from a purely subjective perspective, shaping images to maximize emotional effect and evoke certain moods or ideas. As such, Expressionists favored meaning and emotional experience over physical reality. Two major sub-movements of Expressionism were The Bridge (Die Brücke) and The Blue Rider (Der Blaue Reiter):

I and the Village, by Marc Chagall

Painted in 1911, I and the Village is among [artist]'s earliest surviving paintings. It is a dreamlike scene that includes many motifs common to [artist], notably the lamb and peasant life. In addition to the two giant faces—a green face on the right and a lamb's head on the left—other images include a milkmaid, a reaper, an upside-down peasant woman, a church, and a series of houses, some of them upside-down. I and the Village is currently housed at MOMA.

Louvre

Perhaps the world's most famous museum, the [blank] is located on the right bank of the Seine River in the heart of Paris. Housed in the [blank] Palace, which was a royal residence until 1682, the [blank] was permanently opened to the public as a museum by the French Revolutionary government in 1793. During renovations carried out in the 1980s, a controversial steel-and-glass pyramid designed by I. M. Pei was installed at its entrance. Works housed within the Sully, Richelieu, and Denon Wings of the [blank] include ancient Greek sculptures such as the Winged Victory of Samothrace and the Venus de Milo, Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa, and Eugène Delacroix's Liberty Leading the People.

Campbell's Soup Can, by Andy Warhol

Pop Art parodies (or perhaps reflects) a world in which celebrities, brand names, and media images have replaced the sacred; [artist]'s series of Campbell's Soup paintings may be the best illustration of this. Like the object itself, the paintings were often done by the mass-produceable form of serigraphy (silk screening). Also like the subject, the [artist] soup can painting existed in many varieties, with different types of soup or numbers of cans; painting 32 or 100 or 200 identical cans further emphasized the aspect of mass production aspect in the work. The same approach underlies [artist]'s familiar series of prints of Marilyn Monroe, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, and other pop culture figures.

Museum of Modern Art aka "MoMA"

Situated in Manhattan, it has been connected with the Rockefeller family since its founding in 1929. Its collection includes Vincent van Gogh's The Starry Night, Pablo Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, Salvador Dalí's The Persistence of Memory, and Piet Mondrian's Broadway Boogie-Woogie.

The Blue Rider (Der Blaue Reiter) (1911)

So named because of the founders' love for horses and the color blue (and the namesake of an early painting by Kandinsky), The Blue Rider was formed in Munich mainly around Wassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc. Its members began to reject representational art and move towards abstraction, as they saw abstraction as a means of conceiving the natural world in terms that could surpass representation; according to Kandinsky's influential essay Concerning the Spiritual in Art, blue is the color of spirituality, and the darker the blue, the more it awakens the human desire for the eternal. In addition to Kandinsky (The Rider, Composition VI, Improvisation 28, The Cow) and Marc (Large Blue Horses, Fighting Forms, Animals in Landscape), other members of The Blue Rider include Alexej von Jawlensky (Variation), Marianne von Werefkin, August Macke (View into a Lane), and Gabriele Munter (Dorfstrasse in Blau).

Guggenheim

The [blank] Museum is located in Manhattan's Upper East Side. Founded as "The Museum of Non-Objective Painting," in 1959 it moved into its current home, a Frank Lloyd Wright building that features a spiral ramp connecting the exhibition areas. Focusing on modern art, its holdings include the world's largest collection of paintings by Wassily Kandinsky.

Guggenheim Museum Bilbao

The [blank] opened in 1997 and is — like its sister institution in New York — less famous for its collection than its building, a Frank Gehry design that seems to be an abstract sculpture all its own. Richard Serra's The Matter of Time is permanently installed here.

Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, by Pablo Picasso

This painting depicts five women in a brothel. However, the images of the women are partly broken into disjointed, angular facets. The degree of broken-ness is rather mild compared to later Cubist works, but it was revolutionary in 1907. The rather phallic fruit arrangement in the foreground reflects the influence of Paul Cézanne's "flattening of the canvas." The two central figures face the viewer, while the other three have primitive masks as faces, reflecting another of [artist]'s influences. It is currently housed at the MOMA.

Fauvism (c. 1905)

Upon seeing a number of Fauvist paintings in the same room as a classical sculpture at the 1905 Salon d'Automne exhibit, critic Louis Vauxcelles described the sculpture as "Donatello chez les fauves" ("a Donatello amongst wild beasts"), thus coining the art movement's name with an insult. To maximize the expressiveness of their canvases, Fauves disregarded figure modeling and color harmonies in favor of large brushstrokes with broad flat areas of violently contrasting colors. The poorly received Fauves — accused by critic Camille Mauclair of "flinging a pot of paint in the face of the public," an accusation first leveled by John Ruskin against James Whistler — were led by Henri Matisse, whose Woman with a Hat (a portrait of his wife, who is also depicted in his The Green Stripe) was singled out for attacks before being purchased by Gertrude and Leo Stein. Other Fauves include André Derain (Charing Cross Bridge, Houses of Parliament at Night) — who co-founded the movement with Matisse — Raoul Dufy (Regatta at Cowes), Maurice de Vlaminck (The River Seine at Chatou), and Kees van Dongen (Woman with Large Hat). Fauvism died out almost entirely by 1908.

Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2, by Marcel Duchamp

Was painted in 1912 and created a sensation when shown at the 1913 Armory Show in New York, where one critic referred to it as "an explosion in a shingle factory." Painted in various shades of brown, Nude Descending a Staircase portrays a nude woman in a series of broken planes, capturing motion down several steps in a single image. The painting reflects a Cubist sense of division of space, and its portrait of motion echoes the work of the Futurists.

Cubism (1907-1930s)

With a name also coined by Louis Vauxcelles, cubism was developed almost entirely by Pablo Picasso, whose Les Demoiselles d'Avignon introduced the movement in 1907. Influenced by the simple geometries of African masks, Picasso's Cubism sought to allow an object to be viewed from many sides at once by breaking down the figures into angles and shapes. Cubism as a whole can be subdivided into three movements: analytical cubism (1907-1912), synthetic cubism (1912-c. 1930), and curvilinear cubism (1930s). Analytical cubism was highly experimental, showing jagged edges and sharp multifaceted lines, such as in Picasso's Girl With a Mandolin. Synthetic cubism was inspired by collages and featured flattened forms of normal objects, such as in Picasso's Mandolin and Guitar. Curvilinear cubism contrasted with the flattened and firm edges of synthetic by featuring more flowing, rounded lines, such as in Georges Braque's Houses at l'Estaque. Besides the aforementioned pioneers of cubism, Picasso (whose other Cubist works include Guernica and The Poet) and Braque (Pitcher and Violin, Viaduct at l'Estaque, Still Life with Metronome), other prominent Cubists include Juan Gris (Portrait of Picasso, Guitar and Pipe), Jean Metzinger (Deux Nus, Tea Time), Robert Delaunay (Simultaneous Windows on the City, La Ville de Paris), Albert Gleizes (The Bathers, Portrait de Jacques Nayral), Fernand Leger (Still Life with a Beer Mug), and Henri Le Fauconnier (L'Abondance).

American Gothic, by Grant Wood.

[Artist] painted his most famous work after a visit to Eldon, Iowa, when he saw a Carpenter Gothic-style house with a distinctive Gothic window in its gable. Upon returning to his studio, he used his sister Nan and his dentist, Dr. Byron McKeeby, as the models for the two figures. The pitchfork and the clothing were more typical of 19th-century farmers than contemporary ones. [Title] is among the most familiar regionalist paintings, and it is said to be the most parodied of all paintings. It hangs at the Art Institute of Chicago, where it was submitted for a competition by [artist] upon its completion in 1930 (he won a bronze medal and a $300 prize).

Guernica, by Pablo Picasso

[name of painting] was a Basque town bombed by the Germans during the Spanish Civil War in April 1937. [Artist] had already been commissioned to paint a mural for the Spanish Pavilion at the World's Fair, and he completed his massive, black, white, and grey anti-war mural by early June 1937. [Artist]'s Cubist approach to portraying the figures adds to the sense of destruction and chaos. Guernica was in the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in New York until 1981, when it was returned to the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia in Spain.

Harold "Doc" Edgerton

a longtime member of the MIT faculty, gained the nickname "Papa Flash" for developing techniques to capture fast-moving events using synchronized multiflash photography, with the help of a previously-obscure piece of lab equipment called the stroboscope.

Edward Steichen

a member of the Photo-Secession movement, Steichen was heavily featured in Camera Work and helped Stieglitz found 291. Steichen later abandoned pictorial photography and worked for Vogue and Vanity Fair, where he produced some of the first fashion photographs. He later served as the director of the Department of Photography at the Museum of Modern Art, where he organized the exhibition The Family of Man.

Robert Mapplethorpe

came to prominence thanks to his portraits of his longtime friend, the musician Patti Smith. He produced many celebrity portraits and still-life images of flowers, but is likely most famous for his homoerotic work depicting the BDSM subculture of 1970s New York. Shortly after his 1989 death from AIDS complications, his exhibition "The Perfect Moment" culminated in a 1990 obscenity trial in Cincinnati.

The Farm Security Administration photographers

during the Great Depression documented the plight of poor farmers. Dorothea Lange may have produced the single most enduring image among them, a portrait of Florence Owens Thompson staring worriedly into the middle distance as two of her children bury their faces in her neck, called Migrant Mother. Walker Evans, another FSA photographer, collaborated with writer James Agee on a study of three sharecropping families in Alabama, called Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Gordon Parks, whose photo of an FSA cleaning woman was both posed and titled in ironic homage to Grant Wood's American Gothic, was a pioneering African-American photographer who later directed the film Shaft.

Louis Daguerre and Joseph Nicéphore Niépce

functionally invented photography as we know it. ____________________________ created the process of heliography, which he used to create View from the Window at Le Gras, the oldest surviving photograph of a real-world scene. _______________, another pioneer, partnered with _______________ and the two developed the physautotype method, which used lavender oil. After _____________'s death, _________________ developed an even faster process, in which an iodized silver plate was exposed to light, treated with mercury fumes, and "fixed" with a solution of sodium thiosulfate; that process, daguerreotypy, bears his name.

Eadweard Muybridge

initially gained fame in the 1860s for his photographs of Yosemite Valley, published under the alias "Helios," but is now likely more famous for helping Leland Stanford—the governor of California—settle an argument regarding whether a racehorse ever has all four feet off the ground during a gallop. _______________ eventually did this to the satisfaction of the public with a series of tripwire-triggered cameras; the series of photos thus created was later exhibited in the form of a zoopraxiscope, an early motion-picture device ______________________ also invented. ______________________ also shot and killed his wife's lover, Major Harry Larkyns. He was acquitted on the basis of justifiable homicide, and the trial was later dramatized in Philip Glass's opera The Photographer.

Edwin Land

initially made his name developing filters for polarizing light. He then developed the instant, self-developing film, which worked by squeezing the negative film against a positive sheet, then using a reagent to transfer and quickly develop the image. The first commercially viable instant camera was produced and sold in 1948 by ____________'s Polaroid Corporation.

George Eastman

invention of a dry-plate process improved the robustness of photographs, which he then built further on by developing a gelatin emulsion that was applied to paper, then removed and varnished with collodion after exposure. This film, which was carried in rolls, was easier to transport than plates and allowed for multiple exposures without fully reloading a camera. ______________________'s crowning achievement was the compact, handheld Kodak camera.

Ansel Adams,

like Muybridge, gained significant fame for his photographs of Yosemite National Park, including Moon and Half Dome. With Willard Van Dyke and Edward Weston, he founded Group f/64, named after the smallest common aperture setting of cameras at the time. He also developed a method to determine the optimum exposure for a negative, known as the Zone System, enabling him to create tremendous detail within small gradation of shade in black-and-white photography.

Cindy Sherman

made a series of Untitled Film Stills, consisting largely of self-portraits posed in the style a B-movie actress, which began a series of photos in which she modified popular photographic forms to respond to the stereotyping of women in the media. Her later series Fairy Tales and Disasters began including mannequins and prosthetic limbs, which she also used as the subject of her "Sex Pictures."

Alfred Stieglitz

pioneered the artistic style of photography and founded the journal Camera Work. After a fight over the importance of pictorialism with the National Arts Club, he founded the Photo-Secession movement. The husband of painter Georgia O'Keefe, _____________________ also founded the Little Galleries of the Photo Secession at 291 Fifth Avenue, New York City, which became known as simply "291."

Matthew Brady

studied under Samuel Morse, who popularized the daguerreotype in America, and became a portrait photographer in New York. When the Civil War broke out, _____________ saw it as a potential source of memorabilia, and took photos at Bull Run in a mobile darkroom. His work expanded to hiring out crews of photographers to cover the entire war, essentially creating the practice of photojournalism. ________________ himself took portrait photos of prominent figures of both sides.

Margaret Bourke-White

was hired by Henry Luce to work for Fortune magazine, but became known for her work for Life, including the magazine's first cover. a picture of Fort Peck Dam. She and her future husband, the author Erskine Caldwell, produced the book You Have Seen Their Faces, a survey of sharecroppers in the South. __________________ was later a World War II correspondent, and her pictures of the concentration camps at Buchenwald and Erla broadcast the tragedy back to the U.S. She also interviewed and photographed Mohandas Gandhi before his assassination.

Auguste and Louis Lumière

were brothers who invented an improved cinematograph, which made them very early pioneers in the film industry. However, they were also important in the history of still photography, as their autochrome process was the first widely used technique that produced color photographs.

Henri Cartier-Bresson

who with Robert Capa and several others founded the cooperative Magnum Photos, was a master of candid photography who conceived of the goal of photography as the capture of the "decisive moment." His most famous photograph, an encapsulation of his philosophy, shows a man leaping from a ladder over a puddle behind the Gare Saint-Lazare train station in Paris.

Andreas Gursky

whose work tends to feature high vantage points and scenes that produce horizontal bands of color, has taken some of the most expensive photographs ever sold. Among those are his 99 Cent II Diptychon, a shot of the shelves of a 99-cent store, and Rhein II, a photograph of the Rhine River with humans and buildings digitally edited out.

Man Ray

worked with Marcel Duchamp on a series of readymades before taking up photography. His earliest works were darkroom experiments in exposure called "rayographs." His later photographic work tended toward surrealism; perhaps the most prominent example is his Violon d'Ingres, a photograph of the model Kiki de Montparnasse with the f-holes from a violin superimposed on her back. With his assistant Lee Miller, ______________________ also rediscovered the technique of solarization.

Filippo Brunelleschi (broo-nuh-LESS-kee)

(1377-1446) A friend of Donatello, [blank] was a skilled sculptor and goldsmith, whose 1401 competition with Lorenzo Ghiberti for the commission of the bronze doors of the Florence Baptistery is a frequent question topic (Ghiberti got the chief commission). As an architect, he is mainly known for the extraordinary octagonally-based dome of the cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore (also known as the Florence Cathedral and often called the Duomo, though that is just the general Italian term for a cathedral), which dominates the Florentine skyline and is across the street from the Florence Baptistery. The task required an innovative supporting framework and occupied much of his career (as described in detail in Giorgio Vasari's Lives of the Artists). Other projects include the Spedale degli Innocenti (a hospital), the Old Sacristy at San Lorenzo, and the Pazzi Chapel in the Cloisters of Santa Croce, all from 1421 to 1430.

Lorenzo Ghiberti

(1378-1455): A Florentine sculptor and goldsmith who taught both Donatello and Filippo Brunelleschi. He is best known for two pairs of bronze doors on the Florence Baptistery (associated with the Duomo, or Florentine Cathedral). He produced a single, low-relief panel to win a 1401 competition (defeating Brunelleschi) for the commission to design the 28 panels for the north doors. After that, he was given another commission to design ten panels for the east doors. This latter work, by far his most famous, was dubbed the "Gates of Paradise" by Michelangelo.

Donatello

(1386-1466): A Florentine sculptor who helped define Renaissance sculpture as distinct from that of the Gothic period. He is known for St. Mark and St. George in the Orsanmichele OR-sahn mee-KAY-lay (a Florentine church), the bald Zuccone (which means "pumpkin-head," though it depicts the prophet Habbakuk), and the first equestrian statue to be cast since Roman times, the Gattamelata in Padua. He is also known for mastering the low-relief form schiacciato.

Michelangelo

(1475-1564): A Florentine "Renaissance man" also known for architecture (the dome of St. Peter's Basilica), painting (The Last Judgment and the Sistine Chapel ceiling), poetry, and military engineering. His sculpted masterpieces include David, a Pietà, Bacchus, and a number of pieces for the tomb of Pope Julius II (including Dying Slave and Moses). He preferred to work in Carraran marble.

Andrea Palladio

(1508-1580) Born Andrea di Pietro della Gondola, [blank] designed villas in and near Venice, including the Villa Rotonda and Villa Barbaro. He integrated Greco-Roman ideas of hierarchy, proportion, and order with contemporary Renaissance styles. His Four Books on Architecture from 1570 relates his theoretical principles. Among architects heavily influenced by [blank] were Inigo Jones and Thomas Jefferson.

Gian Lorenzo Bernini

(1598-1680): A Roman who — with the rarely asked-about Francesco Borromini — defined the Baroque movement in sculpture. [blank] is principally known for his freestanding works, including David and The Ecstasy of St. Theresa. [blank]'s David differs from that of Michelangelo in that the hero is shown "in motion," having twisted his body to sling the rock. [blank] is also known for his massive fountains in Rome, including the Triton and the Fountain of the Four Rivers.

Sir Christopher Wren

(1632-1723) When fire destroyed much of London in 1666, [blank] was an Oxford astronomy professor who had designed his first building just four years earlier. Charles II named him the King's Surveyor of Works in 1669, and he was involved in rebuilding more than 50 London churches in the next half-century, including Saint Paul's Cathedral. An inscription near his tomb in Saint Paul's declares "Reader, if you seek his monument, look around you."

Frédéric-Auguste Bartholdi

(1834-1904): A French sculptor primarily known as the creator of Liberty Enlightening the World, better known as the Statue of Liberty. He also executed The Lion of Belfort and a statue of the Marquis de Lafayette in New York's Union Square.

Auguste Rodin

(1840-1917): A French sculptor known for stormy relationships with "the establishment" of the École des Beaux-Arts ay-kohl day boh-zar and his mistress, fellow artist Camille Claudel. His works include The Age of Bronze, Honoré de Balzac, The Burghers of Calais, and a massive pair of doors for the Museum of Decorative Arts (the Gates of Hell) inspired by Dante's Inferno. That latter work included his most famous piece, The Thinker.

Daniel Chester French

(1850-1931): An American who created The Minute Man for Concord, Massachusetts and Standing Lincoln for the Nebraska state capitol, but who is best known for the seated statue in the Lincoln Memorial.

Antoni Gaudí

(1852-1926) [blank] created many extraordinary buildings in Barcelona in the early 20th century. His Art Nouveau-inspired works include the Casa Mila and Casa Batllo apartments, known from their undulating façades, and several works for patron Eusebi Guell, including the Parc Guell, a park in Barcelona. He spent 40 years working on the Expiatory Church of the Holy Family (also known as La Sagrada Familia), which will be finished in 2026. He was also fond of using hyperbolic paraboloids in his work.

Louis Sullivan

(1856-1924) [blank] did not design the first skyscraper, but did become a vocal champion of skyscrapers as reflections of the modern age. Though most associated with Chicago, his best-known work is the 1891 Wainwright Building in St. Louis. His partnership with Dankmar Adler produced over 100 buildings. Later works, such as the Babson, Bennett, and Bradley Houses, reflect an organic architecture distinct from that of his onetime employee Frank Lloyd Wright. [blank]'s dictum that "form should follow function" strongly influenced modern architecture; his writings helped break the profession from classical restraints.

Gutzon Borglum

(1867-1941): An American known for crafting Mount Rushmore in the Black Hills of South Dakota. He is also known for The Mares of Diomedes and an unfinished (and later replaced) tribute to Confederate heroes on Stone Mountain in Georgia.

Frank Lloyd Wright

(1867-1959) Born in Wisconsin, [blank] worked under Louis Sullivan before founding a Chicago practice. His early homes, like the Robie House — which is adjacent to the campus of the University of Chicago — are in the "Prairie" style: horizontal orientation and low roofs. His "organic architecture" tries to harmonize with its inhabitants and site; examples include the Kaufmann House (also known as Fallingwater) in Pennsylvania; the Johnson Wax Building in Racine, Wisconsin; and Taliesin, his home and studio in Spring Green, Wisconsin. (There is also a Taliesin West, his home and studio in Arizona.) Other notable [blank] works are the Guggenheim Museum in New York City, the Larkin Building in Buffalo, the Unity Temple in Oak Park, Illinois, and the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo, which was one of few buildings to survive a 1923 earthquake (though it has since been demolished).

Constantin Brâncuși

(1876-1957): A Romanian sculptor who was a major figure in Modernism. He is best known for The Kiss (not to be confused with the Rodin work or the Klimt painting), Sleeping Muse, and Bird in Space. U.S. customs taxed his works as "industrial products" since they refused to recognize them as art.

Walter Gropius

(1883-1969) Though [blank] designed the Fagus Factory (Alfeld, Germany) and the Pan American Building (New York City), he is best known for founding the Bauhaus. Beginning in Weimar in 1919 and moving to a [blank]-designed facility in Dessau in 1925, the Bauhaus school emphasized functionalism, the application of modern methods and materials, and the synthesis of technology and art. Its faculty included artists Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky, and Josef Albers. [blank] would later head Harvard's architecture department from 1938 to 1952, shifting its focus to incorporate modern design and construction techniques.

Ludwig Mies van der Rohe

(1886-1969) The leading architect of the International Style of skyscraper design, [blank] (like Walter Gropius) worked in the office of Peter Behrens. He directed the Bauhaus from 1930 to 1933, shutting it down before the Nazis could do so. His works include the Barcelona Pavilion for the 1929 International Exposition; two adjacent apartment buildings at 860 and 880 North Lake Shore Drive in Chicago; the New National Gallery in Berlin; and the Seagram Building in New York, which he co-designed with Philip Johnson. [blank] asserted that "less is more" as a principle of his architectural style. His glass-covered steel structures influenced the design of office buildings in nearly every major city in the U.S.

Eero Saarinen

(1910-1961) The son of architect Eliel [blank], Eero was born in Finland but spent most of his life in the U.S. and died in Ann Arbor, Michigan. He designed many buildings on the campuses of MIT and Yale, as well as Dulles International Airport in Washington, D.C. and the TWA terminal at John F. Kennedy Airport in New York. [blank] may be best known for designing the Gateway Arch in St. Louis, though he died before it was completed. Many of his works are characterized by elegant, sweeping forms, such as the Kresge Auditorium at MIT.

I. M. Pei

(1917-present) [blank] is among the most famous living architects. Born in China, he emigrated to the U.S. in 1935. Though he has also designed moderate-income housing, [blank] is best known for large-scale projects. His works include the Mile High Center in Denver, the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, the John Hancock Building in Boston, the East Wing of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., the Fragrant Hill Hotel in Beijing, and the recent Miho Museum of Art in Shiga, Japan. He may be best known for two fairly recent works: the glass pyramid erected outside the Louvre in 1989, and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, Ohio, completed in 1995.

Frank Gehry

(1929-present) Winner of the 1989 Pritzker Prize, [blank] is best-known today for large-scale compositions like the EMP Museum (formerly known as the Experience Music Project) in Seattle, the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, and the recent, controversial Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain. (Bilbao natives describe the latter as "the artichoke," because of its layers of abstract titanium structures.) [blank] often uses uncommon materials such as plywood and limestone; his designs range from Kobe's Fishdance Restaurant, shaped like a giant fish, to the soft-sculpture look of the so-called "Fred and Ginger" buildings in Prague. He also designs furniture: the Easy Edges line is made of laminated cardboard; the [blank] Collection consists of chairs named for hockey terms (e.g. Cross Check and Power Play).

Le Corbusier

(born Charles-Édouard Jeanneret) (1887-1965) Possibly more influential even than Wright, he wrote the 1923 book Towards a New Architecture, standard reading in architectural theory courses. One famous [blank]an quote is "A house is a machine for living in." His floor plans were influenced by Cubist principles of division of space, and the Villa Savoye (Poissy, France) is his best-known early work. He wrote of the "Radiant City" begun anew, a completely planned city with skyscrapers for residents. Applications of his approach to government buildings (such as in Brasilia or in Chandigarh, India), however, largely failed, as did many urban renewal projects produced on the same ideological foundation. Nonetheless, he influenced every other 20th-century figure on this list.

Phidias

(c. 480 - c. 430 BC): An Athenian considered the greatest of all Classical sculptors. He created the chryselephantine (gold and ivory) Statue of Zeus at Olympia (one of the Wonders of the Ancient World, now lost) and the statue of Athena in the Parthenon (now lost). He was supported by money from the Delian League (that is, the Athenian Empire) run by his friend Pericles; he was later ruined by charges of corruption generally considered to be part of a political campaign against Pericles.

Surrealism (1924-1930s)

According to André Breton's "Surrealist Manifesto," Surrealism is "pure psychic automatism, by which one proposes to express, either verbally, in writing, or by any other manner, the real functioning of thought"; inspired by the work of psychologists Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, Surrealists sought to represent an unseen world of dreams, subconscious thoughts, and unspoken communication. Similar to metaphysical painting and Dada, Surrealist works are not meant to be clearly understood — they are meant to puzzle, challenge, and fascinate by means of confusing titles, unusual arrangements of reality-based subjects, and abounding contradictions. Painters associated with the Surrealist movement include Salvador Dalí (The Persistence of Memory, Swans Reflecting Elephants, Metamorphosis of Narcissus), Joan Miró (Dog Barking at the Moon, The Tilled Field, Harlequin's Carnival), René Magritte (Time Transfixed, The Treachery of Images, The Son of Man), former Dadaist Max Ernst (Two Children Are Threatened by a Nightingale, The Elephant Celebes), Frida Kahlo (Self-Portrait with Thorn Necklace and Hummingbird, The Two Fridas, The Little Deer), former metaphysical painter Giorgio de Chirico (whose stark color contrasts and veristic style strongly influenced surrealist painting), and Yves Tanguy. Surrealist sculptors included Alexander Calder (Lobster Tail and Fish Trap, Flamingo), Meret Oppenheim (Object), and Alberto Giacometti (Woman with Her Throat Cut, L'Homme qui marche I). The Spanish filmmaker Luis Buñuel created a number of films in the surrealist style, collaborating with Dalí on Un Chien Andalou (An Andalusian Dog) — which Roger Ebert called the "most famous short film ever made" — and L'Age d'Or (The Golden Age).

De Stijl (1917-1920s)

Also known as neoplasticism, De Stijl (Dutch for "The Style") was founded in Amsterdam in 1917 and sought to create paintings that were completely abstract, with no references to nature whatsoever. De Stijl paintings are typically set on a white background, use black lines to shape rectangular spaces, use only black and the three primary colors (red, yellow, and blue), contain no modulation, and use only perpendicular lines (diagonals are forbidden). While the movement's theories were outlined by Theo van Doesburg (Neo-Plasticism: Composition VII (the three graces), Composition decentralisee, Composition in Gray (Rag-Time)), the principal practitioner of De Stijl was Piet Mondrian (Broadway Boogie Woogie, Victory Boogie Woogie, Tableau I, Composition II in Red, Blue, and Yellow, Lozenge Composition with Red, Black, Blue, and Yellow); other De Stijl painters include Vilmos Huszar and Bart van der Leck. De Stijl also manifested itself in the architectural works of Gerrit Rietvald (Schroder House, Red and Blue Chair), Robert van't Hoff (Villa Henny), and J. J. P. Oud (Gallery house at Weissenhof Estate).

Nighthawks, by Edward Hopper

As is often the case with his works, [artist] uses a realistic approach (including such details as the fluorescent light of the diner, the coffee pots, and the Phillies cigar sign atop the diner) to convey a sense of a loneliness and isolation, even going so far as to depict the corner store without a door connecting to the larger world. [artist]'s wife Jo served as the model for the woman at the bar. Nighthawks is housed at the Art Institute of Chicago.

Dada (1916-1925)

Deriving its name from a nonsense word that literally means "hobby horse" (supposedly chosen by stabbing a knife into a dictionary), Dada was an anti-art movement in Zurich, Cologne, Berlin, Paris, and New York that rejected artistic and social norms in order to protest the establishment. Fervently opposed to the useless slaughter of World War I, Dadaists rejected conventional methods of representation and exhibition: they abandoned oil and canvas, often did work on glass, and accepted "readymades" (commonplace objects selected and exhibited as works of art) as valid art forms. Dada works often relied on location or accident, such as if a glass should shatter, the artist would hail the accident as an enhancement or an achievement brought about by chance; much like many other abstract artists, Dadaists favored artistic concept over execution. The foremost proponent of Dada was Marcel Duchamp, whose readymades include Fountain, L.H.O.O.Q., Prelude to a Broken Arm, and Bicycle Wheel, in addition to the aforementioned non-Dada painting Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2. Duchamp's piece The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass), consists of two panes of glass with materials such as lead foil, fuse wire, and dust, and utilizes chance procedures; when the glass broke in a shipping crate and received a large crack, Duchamp left the cracks intact, incorporating the "accident" into the piece. Other key Dada artists include Jean Arp (Cloud Shepherd, Shirt Front and Fork), Man Ray (Lampshade, Le Violon d'Ingres), Raoul Hausmann (Mechanical Head (The Spirit of Our Time), Kp'erioum, ABCD (Self-portrait)), Hannah Hoch (Cut with the Kitchen Knife through the Beer-Belly of the Weimar Republic), Francis Picabia, and Hans Richter.

The Persistence of Memory, by Salvador Dalí

First shown in 1931, The it is probably the most famous surrealist painting. The landscape of the scene echoes Port Lligat, [artist]'s home. The ants, flies, clocks, and the Port Lligat landscape are motifs in many other [artist] paintings, and the trompe l'oeil depiction of figures is typical of his works. It currently belongs to the MOMA; its 1951 companion piece, The Disintegration of [painting], hangs at the [name of artist] Museum in St. Petersburg, Florida.

The Bridge (Die Brücke) (1905)

Founded by Ernst Kirchner in Dresden, Die Brücke is so named because members of the movement saw themselves as the bridge between traditional and modern painting. Inspired by Fauvism, members of The Bridge followed similar ideals, utilizing violent juxtapositions of color; however, paintings of The Bridge were noticeably more intense, reflecting emotional agitation through scenes of city streets and sexually charged events in country settings. Besides Kirchner (Street, Dresden, Playing Naked People, Bathers at Moritzburg), other prominent members of The Bridge include Erich Heckel (Bathers in the Reeds, Weisses Haus in Dangast), Karl Schmidt-Rotluff (Woman with a Bag, The Factory), Fritz Bleyl, Emil Nolde (Blumengarten), Max Pechstein (Under the Trees), and Otto Mueller (Landscape with Yellow Nudes).

Hermitage

Founded in St. Petersburg, Russia, in 1764 by Catherine the Great, its buildings include the Winter Palace, which was once the residence of Russia's tsars. Its most famous pieces include Rembrandt's The Return of the Prodigal Son and Henri Matisse's Red Room.

Depression-era art (1930s)

From 1929 to 1939, art in America reflected and embodied the despair associated with the Great Depression, often raising social issues and concerns of the public. American artists of the decade rejected European abstract art in favor of realism and raw human emotion in order to emphasize the true plight of the destitute. The photographer Dorothea Lange made the desperation of the Depression visible to the general public via documentary photography, such as with her works Migrant Mother, White Angel Breadline, and Ditched, Stalled and Stranded; later, Lange would document the struggle of Japanese-Americans during World War II. Painters such as Aaron Douglas and Jacob Lawrence developed the visual art aspect of the Harlem Renaissance (a period of rebirth and freedom of expression for African-Americans in the early 20th century), highlighting African-American life — such as in Douglas' Aspects of Negro Life series — and exposing social injustices committed towards Blacks — such as in Lawrence's 60-panel Migration series. Edward Hopper depicted somber and realistic scenes of city life, such as with his paintings Nighthawks, Chop Suey, Automat, and Early Sunday Morning. Similarly, Grant Wood explored country life — especially Midwestern subjects in rural Iowa — in such works as American Gothic, Daughters of Revolution, Parson Weems' Fable, The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere, Appraisal, and The Birthplace of Herbert Hoover, West Branch, Iowa.