A SMALL Master LIST OF GREAT ARTISTS,
AND THEIR IMPORTANCE TO ME, AND TO ART HISTORY
(in my opinion)
An important part of my art education was getting exposed to art, and finding work that spoke to me, and wanting from there to learn more about it and the artists who made it. Creating this graphic novel and studying art in this way completely surprised me by generating, by far, my greatest inspiration and excitement about art’s history that I’ve ever experienced. My hope is that this project will expose you to art that affects you, that you’d like to learn more about.
As rich and significant and wide-ranging as all of art history is, it was necessary to narrow my study of it for this project; not due to a need to edit down my inclusion of art history, but rather because any story, let alone a comic book story, is necessarily narrative in structure, and certain styles and periods of art are less narrative by design. And so, as a result, I felt older periods were limiting and less proper in portraying people’s fashions, street scenes, living situations, or just simply non-religious imagery, in the context of my story of modern day spies. The same for more recent, more abstract modern periods, which were (for the most part) no longer representational in a way I could figure out to incorporate into the telling of my stories.
That said, I did my best to try and include as much, and as wide a history, as I could. These limitations meant perhaps a slightly-too-heavy preponderance of work from the (almost exclusively White Male) French impressionist and following post-impressionist periods, and for this I apologize. However, in my neglecting to include your favorite artists or favorite pieces, please keep in mind that these periods were still essentially influential and fascinating within the history of art, AND that this graphic novel is volume one of a multi-volume story, leaving opportunities for deeper explorations.
Below are – for me – a not-nearly-comprehensive-enough list of phenomenal artists, or at least artists with phenomenally fascinating (or horrible or despicable) lives, who were important to my artistic growth, or to creating this graphic novel, or (in my opinion) to the importance of the history of art.
Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (Italian, 1571-1610)
Diego Rodríguez de Silva y Velázquez (Spanish, 1599-1660)
Rembrandt van Rijn (Dutch, 1609-1669)
-Rembrandt’s Self-Portraits
Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes (Spanish, 1746-1828)
Joseph Mallord William Turner (English, 1775-1851)
Honoré Daumier (French, 1808-1879)
Camille Pissarro (French, 1830-1903)
Édouard Manet (French, 1832-1883)
Manet’s model, Victorine Meurent (French, 1844-1927)
– Manet’s Luncheon on the Grass (1862)
– Manet’s A Bar at the Folies-Bergère (1882)
Paul Cézanne (French, 1839-1906)
– Cézanne’s Bathers
– Cézanne’s Self-Portraits
– Cézanne’s Portraits of Madame Cézanne
Claude Monet (French, 1840-1926)
– Monet’s Trains
– Monet’s Park Scenes
– Monet’s Seine
– Monet’s Water Lilies
– Monet’s Poplars
– Monet’s Haystacks
– Monet’s Bridges
– Monet’s Cathedrals
– Monet’s Seasides
Edgar Degas (French, 1834-1917)
– Degas’ Self-Portraits
– Degas’ Horse Races
– Degas’ Ballerinas
Berthe Morisot (French, 1841-1895)
Mary Cassatt (American, 1844-1926)
John Singer Sargent (American, 1856-1925)
George Seurat (French, 1859-1891)
– Seurat’s A Sunday on La Grande Jatte (1884)
Vincent van Gogh (Dutch, 1853-1890)
– Van Gogh’s Self-Portraits
– Van Gogh’s Portraits of Roulin
– Van Gogh’s Bedroom
Paul Gauguin (French, 1848-1903)
– Gauguin’s Tahiti
– Gauguin’s Self-Portraits
Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (French, 1864-1901)
Gustav Klimt (Austrian, 1862-1918)
– Klimt’s landscapes
Egon Schiele (Austrian, 1890-1918)
– Schiele’s Self-Portraits
Edvard Munch (Norwegian, 1863-1944)
Henri Matisse (French, 1869-1954)
Pablo Picasso (Spanish, 1881-1973)
– Picasso’s Early Work (thru 1897, age 16)
– Picasso’s Expressionist and Post Impressionist Influence (1897-1901)
– Picasso’s Blue Period (1901-1904)
– Picasso’s Rose Period (1904-1906)
– Picasso’s African Period (1906-1909)
– Picasso’s Cubism (1908-1914)
– Picasso’s Neoclassicism (1917-1925)
– Picasso’s Surrealism (1925-1932)
– Picasso’s Late Work (1932-1973)
– Picasso’s Self-Portraits
Piet Mondrian (Dutch, 1872-1944)
Georges Braque (French, 1882-1963)
Marevna (Marie Vorobieff) (Russian, 1892-1984)
Henri Rousseau (French, 1844-1910)
Chaïm Soutine (Russian, 1893-1943)
Amedeo Modigliani (Italian, 1884-1920)
James E. Allen (American, 1894-1964)
Marcel Duchamp (French, 1887-1968)
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (German, 1880-1938)
René Magritte (Belgian, 1898-1967)
– Magritte’s Paintings of Pipes (Treachery of Images)
– Magritte’s Dominion of Light (or Empire of Light)
Salvador Dalí (Spanish, 1904-1989)
Edward Hopper (American, 1882-1967)
– Hopper’s Houses
– Hopper’s City
M.C. Escher (Dutch, 1898-1972)
Giorgio Morandi (Italian, 1890-1964)
Georgia O’Keeffe (American, 1887-1986)
Frida Kahlo (Mexican, 1907-1954)
Thomas Hart Benton (American, 1889-1975)
Jackson Pollock (American, 1912-1956)
Mark Rothko (Russian, 1903-1970)
Francis Bacon (Irish-born, 1909-1992)
– Bacon’s Popes
Roy Lichtenstein (American, 1923-1997)
Lucian Freud (British, 1922-2011)
– Freud’s Self-Portraits
Antoni Tàpies (Spanish, 1923-2012)
Cy Twombly(American, 1928-2011)
Jay DeFeo (American, 1929-1989)
David Hockney (British, 1937-)
Robert Arneson (American, 1930-1992)
– Arneson’s Self-Portraits
Wayne Thiebaud (American, 1920-2021)
– Wayne Thiebaud’s City Scapes
GENERAL ART PERIODS
African Art
Egyptian Art
Ancient Western Sculpture
Asian Landscapes
Medieval Portraits
The Renaissance
Ukiyo-e (Japanese woodblock prints)
OTHER THEMES
An Art Exhibit in Gotham City
Artists Explore One Idea
Self-Portraits
Violence
Read the comic book, “Brush with Peril”:
BACK TO MASTER LIST
Small List of Great Artists
Small List of Museums