20th Century & Later
Fine Art Paintings & Artworks

Featured 20th Century Fine Artists

Wassily Kandinsky was born in 1866 in Moscow, Russia. He died in 1944 at the age of 78 in Neuilly-sur-Seine, France. Originally influenced by the Impressionist and Fauvist painters, Kandinsky helped to found the Blue Rider (or Der Blaue Reiter) group of artists, which also included Franz Marc, August Macke, Alexej Jawlensky, Lyonel Feininger, and Paul Klee. Marc and Macke were killed while serving in the First World War. [More...]

Georgia O'Keeffe was born in 1887 in Sun Prairy, Wisconsin. She died in 1986 at the age of 98 in Santa Fe, New Mexico. One of her early teachers was William Merritt Chase. In 1924, O'Keeffe married the photographer Alfred Stieglitz, who was 23 years her senior. Through Stieglitz, she was introduced to his circle of friends, including artists and photographers such as Charles Demuth, Marsden Hartley, Arthur Dove, and Edward Steichen. Starting in 1929, O'Keeffe started living in New Mexico for part of each year, moving there full-time after Stieglitz' death in 1946. [More...]

Mark Rothko was born in 1903 to a Jewish family in Daugavpils, Latvia, in what was then part of the Russian Empire. His family emigrated to the United States (Portland, Oregon), in 1913 to escape anti-semitism. He began studying art when he was 20, with Arshile Gorky and Max Weber in New York City. He is generally included among the Abstract Expressionists, although his focus on the juxtaposition of color fields marks his work as being more abstract than expressionistic. Other "color field" painters include Morris Louis, Barnett Newman, and Kenneth Noland. [More...]

Roy Lichtenstein was born in 1923 in New York City. He died at age 73 in 1997 of pneumonia in New York. Initially experimenting in cubist and then abstract expressionist styles, his first work in what was to become his trademark "cartoon" style, Look Mickey, was produced in 1961, while working as an art instructor at Rutgers University. He was soon a key artist in New York City's burgeoning Pop Art scene, along with Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Claes Oldenburg, Larry Rivers, and other New York-based Pop Artists. [More...]

M.C. Escher was born in 1898 in Leeuwarden, the Netherlands. He died at the age of 73 in 1972 in the Netherlands. In 1922 Escher visited the Alhambra, in Granada, Spain, which was to prove an enduring influence on his art. Escher is best known for his surrealist prints (lithographs and woodcuts, primarily) which feature optical illusions, distortions of perspective, and impossible objects (such as the Necker Cube and the Penrose Triangle). Other important surrealist artists include Salvador Dali, Rene Magritte, Giorgio de Chiroco, and Man Ray. [More...]

Andrew Wyeth was born in 1917 in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvannia. Wyeth was home schooled and learned art from his father, N.C. Wyeth. Wyeth is the most important figure in the Contemporary Realism school of painting. Other Contemporary Realists include Ray Ellis, Pauline Campanelli, and Ray Hendershot. His sister, Henriette Wyeth, and his son, Jamie Wyeth, are also well-known artists. Other important American realist painters include Winslow Homer, Thomas Eakins, and Edward Hopper. [More...]