Visual Artist

Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci , April 15, 1452 – May 2, 1519) was an Italian polymath; a scientist, mathematician, engineer, inventor, anatomist, painter, sculptor, architect, botanist, musician and writer. Born as the illegitimate son of a notary, Piero da Vinci, and a peasant girl, Caterina, at Vinci in the region of Florence, Leonardo was educated in the studio of the renowned Florentine painter, Verrocchio. Much of his earlier working life was spent in the service of Ludovico il Moro in...

Auguste Rodin (born François-Auguste-René Rodin; November 12, 1840 – November 17, 1917) was a French artist, most famous as a sculptor. He was the preeminent French sculptor of his time, and remains one of the few sculptors widely recognized outside the visual arts community. Although Rodin is generally considered the progenitor of modern sculpture, he did not set out to rebel against the past. He was schooled traditionally, took a craftsman-like approach to his work, and desired academic...

Robert Rauschenberg (born Milton Ernst Rauschenberg; October 22 1925 – May 12 2008) was an American artist who came to prominence in the 1950s transition from Abstract Expressionism to Pop Art. Rauschenberg is perhaps most famous for his "Combines" of the 1950s, in which non-traditional materials and objects were employed in innovative combinations. While the Combines are both painting and sculpture, Rauschenberg has also worked with photography, printmaking, papermaking, and performance....

Claude Monet (French ) also known as Oscar-Claude Monet or Claude Oscar Monet (November 14, 1840 – December 5, 1926) was a founder of French impressionist painting, and the most consistent and prolific practitioner of the movement's philosophy of expressing one's perceptions before nature, especially as applied to plein-air landscape painting. The term Impressionism is derived from the title of his painting Impression, Sunrise. Monet was born on November 14, 1840 on the fifth floor of 45 rue...

Considered one of the most influential contemporary American artists, Carrie Mae Weems has investigated yearning, loss, cultural identity, and the visual consequences of power throughout her renowned career.  Weems received her B.A. from the California Institute of the Arts and an M.F.A. from the University of California at San Diego, and studied folklore at the University of California, Berkeley with the late Alan Dundes.  She was awarded the Pollack Krasner Foundation Grant in...

Paul Jackson Pollock (January 28, 1912 – August 11, 1956) was an influential American painter and a major force in the abstract expressionist movement. He was married to noted abstract painter Lee Krasner. Pollock was born in Cody, Wyoming in 1912, the youngest of five sons. His father was a farmer and later a land surveyor for the government. He grew up in Arizona and Chico, California, studying at Los Angeles' Manual Arts High School. During his early life, he experienced Native American...

Andrew Warhola (August 6, 1928–February 22, 1987), better known as Andy Warhol, was an American artist and a central figure in the movement known as pop art. After a successful career as a commercial illustrator, Warhol became famous worldwide for his work as a painter, an avant-garde filmmaker, a record producer, an author, and a public figure known for his membership in wildly diverse social circles that included bohemian street people, distinguished intellectual, Hollywood celebrities and...

Nan Goldin (born 1953) is an American fine-art and documentary photographer. Goldin was born in Washington, D.C., and grew up in an upper-middle-class Jewish family in the Boston, Massachusetts suburb of Lexington. After attending the nearby Lexington High School, she enrolled at the Satya Community School in Boston, where a teacher introduced her to the camera in 1968; Goldin was then fifteen years old. Her first solo show, held in Boston in 1973, was based on her photographic journeys among...

Elizabeth Peyton (born 1965) is an American painter who rose to popularity in the mid 1990s. She is a contemporary artist best known for stylized and idealized portraits of her close friends, pop celebrities, and European monarchy. In the mid-80s, she studied fine arts at the School of Visual Arts in New York City. Her first successful exhibition in New York City was held in a room of the Chelsea hotel (mainly drawings). People who wished to see the exhibition would just go to the reception of...