Pablo Picasso

The most famous artist of modern times, most versatile and most fruitful, was horn in Malaga, only son of a painter who symbolically handed over his brushes when the boy was 13. From 1892, Pablo studied at Coruna and Barcelona art schools and, for a few months in 1897, at the Royal Academy in

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Paul Cezanne

French painter, a key figure among those who experienced impressionism and moved on to a more considered and constructive art, and for several reasons seen as the father of modern art. He was born in Aix-en-Provence and, apart from a period (1861-70) in Paris, lived and worked in and near Aix in isolation. The strength and

Paul Gauguin

French painter, whose life as well as work has been seen as representing an all-out rejection of western civilization. He was born in Paris, lived in Peru during 1851-55, and then again in France. From 1865 to 1871, he was in the merchant service and the French navy. He took up painting in 1871

Piet Mondrian

Dutch painter, born at Amersfoort and trained at the Amsterdam Academy. He first followed the naturalism of the Haguc school but awareness of new tendencies and also an interest in Theosophy led him to become more selective from among the form’s before him and the colors on his palette. By 1908, he was using

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Richard Hamilton

British painter, trained in art in evening classes and through advertising work, then at St Martin’s School and the Royal College of Art, all in London. To this he added in 1940 a course in engineering drawing and further art study at the Slade School. In 1952-53 he taught design at the Central School

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Robert Delaunay

His early work was dependent on impressionism and neo-impressionism; then came the impact of Cezanne and some awareness of early cubism, also an impulse towards bright color from the young Russian painter, Sonia Terk, who became his wife in 1910. From 1909 he was painting series – Saint-Severin, Eiffel Tower, The City – in which rhythmically disrupted or patterned forms

Victor Vasarely

Hungarian-French painter, trained in Budapest and influenced by constructivist ideas. He moved to Paris in 1930 and in the late 1940s evolved his characteristic idiom and method. In abstract paintings he explored ambiguities of form and space and sensations of movement through patterns of black and white and contrasting colors, becoming known as a leading op painter in the 1960s.

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Vincent van Gogh

Dutch painter active mainly in France and counted a post-impressionist. Almost unknown in his lifetime, he was, during his years as full-time artist, totally dependent on his brother, Theo, who worked for the dealer Goupil in Paris, and supplied him with paints and canvases. Vincent wrote many letters to him, also to other relatives

Vladimir Tatlin

Russian artist, called the father of constructivism though he rejected the role and was regarded in 1920s Western Europe as the man who led art into technology and industrial production. He was essentially poetic, capable of leadership but loved for his quiet ways, his craftsman’s skills and his playing and singing of Russian folk music on

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Willem de Kooning

Dutch-American painter, born in Rotterdam, Netherlands. He worked in a commercial art firm and attended art evening classes before emigrating to New York in 1926. In the mid 1940s he emerged as, with Pollock, the creator of American abstract expressionism. For years he had painted figures, balancing an Ingres-like conception of form with an anti-classical

William Blake

English poet, painter, illustrator and printmaker, an outstanding figure in what later became known as romanticism, now renowned for his visionary work in words and images and for his opposition to the academic priorities of his time, particularly those taught by Reynolds. The son of a London hosier, he attended a drawing school at the