Famous Foreign Painters

❖ Andy Warhol (; born Andrew Warhola Jr.; August 6, 1928 & died on – February 22, 1987)
Andy Warhol was an American visual artist, film director, and producer who was a leading figure
in the visual art movement known as pop art. Beginning out as a commercial artist, he brought
the ethos of promotion into fine art, even going so far as to say, “Making money is art.” Such
attitudes blew away the existential declarations of Abstract Expressionism. Warhol began
painting in the late 1950s and received sudden notoriety in 1962, when he exhibited paintings of
Campbell’s soup cans, Coca-Cola bottles, and wooden replicas of Brillo soap pad boxes.
Andy Warhol is known for his bright, colourful paintings and prints of subjects ranging from
celebrities including Marilyn Monroe and Mohammed Ali, to everyday products such as cans
of soup and Brillo pads. In May 9, 2017, Warhol's screenprint of Marilyn Monroe, Shot Sage Blue
Marilyn (1964) achieved $195m at an evening sale held by Christie's New York.
❖ Pablo Picasso
Pablo Picasso, in full name, Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno Crispín
Crispiniano María Remedios de la Santísima Trinidad Ruiz Picasso, also called (before 1901)
Pablo Ruiz or Pablo Ruiz Picasso, (born October 25, 1881, Málaga, Spain—died April 8, 1973,
Mougins, France), Spanish expatriate painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist, and stage
designer, one of the greatest and most-influential artists of the 20th century and the creator
(with Georges Braque) of Cubism.
Pablo Picasso is implicitly synonymous with modern art, and it doesn’t hurt that he fits the
generally held image of the fugitive genius whose goals are balanced by a taste for living big.
Picasso’s technique used imagination to create abstract works that explored form and structure.
Picasso used colors and brush strokes to give texture to his figures which he broke down into
geometric shapes. He built paintings in layers and used color to fragment the shapes of objects.
Women of Algiers (Version O) (1954–55) sold at auction for a record-breaking $179 million in
2015.
❖ Vincent van Gogh
Vincent van Gogh, in full Vincent Willem van Gogh, (born March 30, 1853, Zundert,
Netherlands—died July 29, 1890, Auvers-sur-Oise, near Paris, France), Dutch painter, generally
considered the greatest after Rembrandt van Rijn, and one of the greatest of the post-
Impressionists.
Van Gogh is known for being psychologically unstable. Henri Gastaut, in a study of the artist's life
and medical history published in 1956, identified van Gogh's major illness during the last 2 years
of his life as temporal lobe epilepsy precipitated using absinthe in the presence of an early limbic
lesion. But his art is among the most popular and most famous artists of all time. Van Gogh’s
technique of painting with flurries of thick brushstrokes made up of vivid colours squeezed
straight from the tube would inspire subsequent generations of artists.
Sold in 1990 for a whopping $83 million, Portrait of Dr Paul Gachet, painted in 1890, is the most
expensive Van Gogh painting.
❖ Leonardo da Vinci
Leonardo da Vinci, (Italian: “Leonardo from Vinci”) (born April 15, 1452, Anchiano, near Vinci,
Republic of Florence [Italy]—died May 2, 1519, Cloux [now Clos-Lucé], France), Italian painter,
draftsman, sculptor, architect, and engineer whose skill and intelligence, perhaps more than that
of any other figure, epitomized the Renaissance humanist ideal.
The original Renaissance Man, Leonardo is known as a genius, not only for masterpieces such as
the Mona Lisa, The Last Supper and The Lady with an Ermine but also for his designs of
technologies (aircraft, tanks, automobile) that were five hundred years in the future.
In a break with the Florentine tradition of outlining the painted image, Leonardo perfected the
technique known as sfumato( blurring lines between subjects that adds perspective to painting),
which translated literally from Italian means "vanished or evaporated." Creating imperceptible
transitions between light and shade, and sometimes between colors, he blended everything
"without borders, in the manner of smoke," his brush strokes so subtle as to be invisible to the
naked eye.

Leonardo was fascinated by the way light falls on curved surfaces. The gauzy veil, Mona
Lisa's hair, the luminescence of her skin – all are created with layers of transparent color, each
only a few molecules thick, making the lady's face appear to glow, and giving the painting an
ethereal, almost magical quality.
The painting Salvador Munti was sold at auction for US$450.3 million on 15 November 2017 by
Christie's in New York to Prince Badr bin Abdullah Al Saud.
❖ Michelangelo
Michelangelo was a triple threat: A painter (the Sistine Ceiling), a sculptor (the David and Pietà)
and architect (St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome). Make that a quadruple warning since he also wrote
poetry. Aside from the aforementioned Sistine Ceiling, St. Peter’s Basilica and Pietà, there was
his tomb for Pope Julian II and the design for the Laurentian Library at San Lorenzo’s Church.
Michelangelo used the buon fresco technique, in which the artist paints quickly on wet plaster
before it dries. Some scholars believe that for detailed work, such as a figure's face, Michelangelo
probably used the fresco secco technique, in which the artist paints on a dry plaster surface.
A nude young man (after Masaccio) surrounded by two figures by Michelangelo
made €23,162,000 at Christie's in Paris.
 ❖ Henri Matisse
Henri Matisse, in full Henri-Émile-Benoît Matisse, (born December 31, 1869, Le Cateau, Picardy,
France—died November 3, 1954, Nice), artist often regarded as the most important French
painter of the 20th century. He was the leader of the Fauvist movement (emphasized painterly
qualities and strong colour over the representational or realistic values retained by
Impressionism) about 1900, and he pursued the expressiveness of colour throughout his career.
No artist is as intimately attached to the delights of colour as Henri Matisse. His work was all
about twisted curves rooted in the ideas of symbolic art and was constantly concentrated on the
beguiling satisfaction of colour and tone.
Matisse used pure colors and the white of exposed canvas to create a light-filled atmosphere in
his Fauve paintings. Rather than using modeling or shading to lend volume and structure to his
pictures, Matisse used contrasting areas of pure, unmodulated color.
L'Odalisque, harmonie bleue, painted in 1937 by Henri Matisse, worth $33.6 million and became
the evening's most expensive work, also setting a new world auction record for the artist.
❖ Jackson Pollock
Jackson Pollock, in full Paul Jackson Pollock, (born January 28, 1912, Cody, Wyoming, U.S.—died
August 11, 1956, East Hampton, New York), American painter who was a
leading exponent of Abstract Expressionism, an art movement characterized by the free-
associative gestures in paint sometimes referred to as “action painting.” During his lifetime he
received widespread publicity and serious recognition for the radical poured, or “drip,” technique
he used to create his major works.
Hindered by addiction, self-doubt, and awkwardness as a conventional
painter, Pollock transformed his faults in a short but intense period between 1947 and 1950
when he performed the drip ideas that connected his fame. Avoiding the easel to lay his paintings
flat on the floor, he used house paint right from the can, throwing and dropping thin skeins of
pigment that left behind a solid record of his movements.
Number 17A by Jackson Pollock. Griffin bought the painting in 2015 for $200 million from the
David Geffen Foundation.
❖ Rene Magritte
René Magritte, in full René-François-Ghislain Magritte, (born November 21, 1898, Lessines,
Belgium—died August 15, 1967, Brussels), Belgian artist, one of the most
prominent Surrealist painters, whose bizarre flights of fancy blended horror, peril, comedy, and
mystery.
The name René Magritte is widely recognized by art lovers and agnostics alike, and for good
reason: He utterly transformed our expectations of what is real and what is not. When someone
describes something as “surreal,” the chances are good that an image by Magritte pops into his
or her head.
Magritte settled on a deadpan, illustrative technique that clearly articulated the content of his
pictures.
Sotheby's Modern and Contemporary Art Evening Sale's most expensive lot was Rene
Magritte's L'Empire des Lumieres (The Empire of Light) painting. It sold for £59.4 million pounds
(around US$78.4 million dollars), which set a new auction record for the Belgian Surrealist
Master.
❖ Salvador Dalí
Salvador Dalí, in full Salvador Felipe Jacinto Dalí y Domenech, (born May 11, 1904, Figueras,
Spain—died January 23, 1989, Figueras), Spanish Surrealist painter and printmaker, influential
for his explorations of subconscious imagery.
Dalí was effectively Warhol before there was a Warhol. Like Andy, Dalí courted celebrity almost
as an adjunct to his work. With their melting watches and eerie blasted landscapes, Dalí’s
paintings were the epitome of Surrealism, and he cultivated an equally outlandish appearance,
wearing a long-waxed moustache that resembled cat whiskers. Ever the consummate showman,
Dalí once declared, “I am not strange. I am just not normal.”
Dalí frequently described his works as “hand-painted dream photographs.” He applied the
methods of Surrealism, tapping deep into the non-rational mechanisms of his mind—dreams, the
imagination, and the subconscious—to generate the unreal forms that populate The Persistence
of Memory.
Sold for nearly £13.5 million at Sotheby's London on 10th February 2011, Portrait De Paul Eluard
is the most expensive Dali painting ever sold.
❖ Frida Kahlo
Frida Kahlo, in full Frida Kahlo de Rivera, original name Magdalena Carmen Frieda Kahlo y
Calderón, (born July 6, 1907, Coyoacán, Mexico—died July 13, 1954, Coyoacán), Mexican painter
best known for her uncompromising and brilliantly coloured self-portraits that deal with such
themes as identity, the human body, and death. Although she denied the connection, she is often
identified as a Surrealist.
The Mexican artist and feminist icon was a performance artist of paint, using the medium to lay
bare her vulnerabilities while also constructing a persona of herself as an embodiment of
Mexico’s cultural heritage. Her most famous works are the many surrealistic self-portraits in
which she maintains a regal bearing even as she casts herself as a martyr to personal and physical
suffering—anguishes rooted in a life of misfortunes that included contracting polio as a child,
suffering a catastrophic injury as a teenager, and enduring a tumultuous marriage(A tumultuous
relationship is essentially an overpowered relationship in terms of physical and emotional
manifestations. Couples are more inclined to feel more and express more. This can be good, but
it can also be a bad thing, especially if it causes pain for either of you.) to fellow artist Diego
Rivera.
Intimate Frida Kahlo Self-Portrait Sells for $34.9 Million, Smashing Auction Records. Name of the
painting self-portrait Diego y yo.