Famous Artists
1. Marc Chagall: Marc Chagall was born on July 7, 1887 in Vitebsk, Russia. In 1932 he moved to France. He lived in the United States from 1941 to 1948, and then returned to France. He died in France on March 28. 1985.
His painting styles are Expressionism and Cubism. In his paintings, he often painted violinists because he played the violin and also in memory of his uncle, who also played. He was also famous for his paintings of Russian-Jewish villages.
FAMOUS WORKS : Over Vitebsk, The Violinist, The Praying Jew, I and the Village.
2. Salvador Dali: Salvador Dali was born in Spain in 1904. When he was a child, he showed strange behavior and often interrupted his class in school. As he got older, he started to paint pictures that came from his dreams. His dreams and his paintings were scary and unreal.
Dali went to art school in Madrid, Spain. He got kicked out, and never finished. He even spent time in jail. However, he continued to paint, and his art style became known as Surrealism. Salvador Dali drew everyday items, but changed them in odd ways. For example, one of his paintings is of melting clocks.
Before he died at the age of 85 in 1989, Dali had created works in film, ballet, opera, fashion, jewelry, and advertising illustrations.
FAMOUS WORKS : The Persistence of Memory, Crucifixion, The Sacrament of the Last Supper.
3. Leonardo Da Vinci: In 1452, Leonardo Da Vinci was born in an Italian town called Vinci. He lived in a time period called the Renaissance, when everyone was interested in art. Even though Da Vinci was a great artist, he became famous because of all the other things he could do. He was a sculptor, a scientist, an inventor, an architect, a musician, and a mathematician. When he was twenty, he helped his teacher finish a painting called The Baptism of Christ. When he was thirty, he moved to Milan. That is where he painted most of his pictures. DaVinci's paintings were done in the Realist style.
FAMOUS WORKS: Mona Lisa, The Last Supper, Madonna and Child, The Virgin of the Rocks.
4. Paul Klee: Paul Klee was born in Switzerland on December 18, 1887. He loved cats. He painted the a lot. He had at least 8,926 works of art. In these works of art, he used simple lines and strong colors. He also used simple shapes to make important parts of the painting. Klee painted in many styles, but a lot of them were in the Primitive and Surrealist styles.
FAMOUS WORKS: Fish Magic, Around the Fish, Landscape with Yellow Birds.
5.Henri Matisse: Henri Matisse was born on December 31, 1869 in Le Cateau Cambresis, France. He first got a degree in law and then decided to becoe an artist. He studied for three years with Gustave Moreau. He learned a lot by copying paintings by other great artists, such as Raphael.
Matisse was one of the founders of a type of art called Fauvism. He liked to do paintings with people because it made it easy for him to express his feelings about life. He especially liked to paint women, because he said they held the answer to the mystery of life. Matisse also did many pieces of art using cut paper. He was also a sculptor and an etcher.
Because Matisse had cancer, he became confined to a wheelchair. From his wheelchair, he completed one of his most famous works, painting the inside of the Chapelle du Rosaire. Matisse died in 1954.
FAMOUS WORKS: Chapel of the Rosary in Vence, The Snail, Beasts of the Sea, Creole Dancer, La Fougere Noire.
6. Claude Monet: Claude Monet was born in 1840 on November 14 in Paris. He grew up in LeHaver, near the sea. Even when he was young he was a very good artist. His pictures were so good that an art supply store let him hang his pictures in their window.
Monet's parents did not want him to become an artist because they thought he would not make a good living. That did not stop him though. When he was 20, he studied art at an inexpensive art school in Paris.
Monet often went on trips around France to paint. Sometimes, his friend Camille came along. Camille later became Monet's wife. They had two sons, Jean and Michel. In 1878, Camille got sick and died. A few years later, Monet got married again to a woman named Alice.
Later, Monet and his family moved to Giverny, a small town near Paris. This is where he painted his Impressionist wheatstack and cathedral paintings that became very famous. Their house also had a wonderful garden with a lily pond that had a Japanese bridge across it. These were his favorite things to paint.
Monet died in 1926 in Giverny. Many people came to his funeral. Unlike many artists, he was famous even before he died. Now his house in Giverny is a museum that is visited by many people.
FAMOUS WORKS: Morning Haze, Marine Near Etretat, Lily Pond.
7. Pablo Picasso: Pablo Picasso was born in Malaga, Spain on October 5, 1881. His father, Jose Ruiz, was also an artist. Picasso painted in many styles, including Cubism and Expressionism. He also sculpted. In cubism, he tried to show the dimensions of the objects in his paintings. When he painted in the classical style, his shapes were round and soft. In cubism, his shapes were square and hard.
When Picasso painted, he had a blue period and a rose period. For about three years in his early twenties, he used mostly light blue colors in his paintings. The rose period came after the blue period. It began after he moved from Spain to France.
Because he could work in multiple styles, Picasso became very famous. He used great lines and color in his paintings.
FAMOUS WORKS: Guernica, Three Musicians, The Three Dancers, Self Portrait: Yo Picasso.
8. Pierre-Auguste Renoir: Pierre-Auguste Renoir was born February 25, 1841 in Limoges, France. When Renoir was young, he was a shoe tailor and a dress maker. When he was 13 be began decorating porcelain dishes. He was also close friends with Claude Monet.
Renoir believed that a person should work with his hands. He felt that working with his hands was what made him a working man. Some of his most famous paintings are portraits of women and groups of people. Renoir's paintings were done in the Impressionist style. People felt his use of color and light in his paintings, plus his talent for painting people, were what made his paintings so beautiful.
FAMOUS WORKS: Le Bal au Moulin de la Galette, Jeanne Samary, Bathers, The Swing.
9. Henri Rousseau: Henri Rousseau was born in Laral, France in 1844. He served in the French Army and also worked as a toll collector. At the age of 40, Rousseau retired to paint. He also played the violin and gave art and violin lessons. He had no art schooling, but his paintings were admired by other artists of his time, such as Paul Gauguin and Georges Seurat. Seurat's paintings were done in the Surrealistic style.
FAMOUS WORKS: The Sleeping Gypsy, The Happy Quartet, Jungle with a Lion.
10. Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec: Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec's style was Realism and Postimpressionism. Lautrec liked painting people and things he knew. Some other things he liked to paint were posters of nightclubs and paintings of houses.
FAMOUS WORKS: Portrait of Vincent Van Gogh, Moulin-Rouge, At the Moulin Rouge, The Jockey.
11. Vincent Van Gogh: Van Gogh was born in Holland in 1853. He worked at many jobs, such as at an art gallery, a school, a bookstore, as a preacher, and at last, he became an artist. He didn't have a very happy life. He painted sad paintings with poor people in them. His paintings were always very dark until he saw some colorful Japanese paintings. Then Van Gogh started painting happier paintings. Most of his work was in the Postimpressionist style.
One day, he moved to live with his brother because he was unhappy where he lived, and he wanted to find someone to paint with. When he finally found someone, he wished he hadn't. Van Gogh and the other artist did not get along. After this, Van Gogh became so sad that he cut part of his ear off!
After these things happened, he painted one more gloomy painting. It was called Wheatfield with Crows. After he finished it, he shot himself.
FAMOUS WORKS: The Starry Night, Wheatfield with Crows.
12. Andy Warhol: Andy Warhol was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in 1928. Andy was born with a natural talent for art. His mother encouraged him with his drawings. His teachers thought he had such a good talent for art that he should go to weekend art class. When his family saved enough money to send Andy to art college, he went to Carnagie Institute of Technology, where he studied design and illustration. That's where he developed his unusual art style.
When he graduated from school he went to New York City for a job. He got jobs doing magazine illustrations, decorating department store windows, greeting cards, record albums, book covers, and suns, clouds, and raindrops for television weather reports. He still was not satisfied because he was not famous.
His friend suggested he draw every day items. This was called Popular, or Pop Art. Now, that made him famous! Being famous was his dream. People liked his pictures because they were bright, attractive, and familiar. Warhol liked getting peoples ideas for new drawings.
He also tried making films. One of his films was a man sleeping for six hours. Warhol died in 1987. By that time, he was a famous artist. His artwork made people think of the important, everyday things in their lives.
FAMOUS WORKS: Campbell's Soup Can, 100 Soup Cans, Money.
http://library.thinkquest.org/J001159/famart.htm 
