Most Notable Artist in History

 Andy Warhol Campbell's Soup, 1968

Andy Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup Cans are perhaps the most well-known images of American modern
art. Initially created as a series of thirty two canvases in 1962, the soup cans gained international
acclaim as a breakthrough in Pop Art. Andy Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup Cans are perhaps the most
well-known images of American modern art. Initially created as a series of thirty two canvases in
1962, the soup cans gained international acclaim as a breakthrough in Pop Art.
Warhol’s inspiration for the series developed from his personal life. He explains “I used to drink it. I
used to have the same lunch every day, for 20 years, I guess, the same thing over and over again.”
This sense of repetition was definitely both internalized by the artist and embodied by commercial
mass culture. Initially, the debut of the Campbell’s Soup Cans was widely contested as many viewers
struggled to grapple with such flagrant appropriation of a commonplace object. However, Warhol
would take the themes of repetition and mass production further by creating two portfolios of
Campbell’s Soup Can screen prints in 1968.
 Vincent Van Gogh: Starry Night

Starry Night is one of the most recognized pieces of art in the world. It is absolutely everywhere, too.
It can be seen on coffee, mugs, t-shirts, towels, magnets, etc. Honestly, it sometimes feels as if the
painting’s fame has exceeded that of its creator. It is a magnificent piece of art. That Starry Night
resonates with so many people is a testament to how its beauty is timeless and universal.

THE STORY OF STARRY NIGHT

Vincent van Gogh painted Starry Night in 1889 during his stay at the asylum of Saint-Paul-de-Mausole
near Saint-Rémy-de-Provence. Van Gogh lived well in the hospital; he was allowed more freedoms
than any of the other patients. If attended, he could leave the hospital grounds; he was allowed to
paint, read, and withdraw into his own room. He was even given a studio. While he suffered from the
occasional relapse into paranoia and fits - officially he had been diagnosed with epileptic fits - it
seemed his mental health was recovering.
Unfortunately, he relapsed. He began to suffer hallucination and have thoughts of suicide as he
plunged into depression. Accordingly, there was a tonal shift in his work. He returned to incorporating
the darker colors from the beginning of his career and Starry Night is a wonderful example of that
shift. Blue dominates the painting, blending hills into the sky. The little village lays at the base in the
painting in browns, greys, and blues. Even though each building is clearly outlined in black, the yellow
and white of the stars and the moon stand out against the sky, drawing the eyes to the sky. They are
the big attention grabber of the painting.

 Salvador Dali- The Persistence of Memory (1931) by Spanish artist and Surrealist icon Salvador
Dalí is one of the rare works of art that can be conjured with the mention of two simple words:
melting clocks.Like Van Gogh’s Starry Night (1889) and Picasso’s Les Demoiselles
 D’Avignon (1907), The Persistence of Memory attracts visitors from all over the world to
the Museum of Modern Art as a work that has come to represent an entire movement. The
Surrealist vision brings an uncanny landscape to life with unnerving accuracy—when you imagine
how a clock would melt, this is how it would melt. It would droop, distort, and elongate. “My
whole ambition in the pictorial domain is to materialize the images of my concrete irrationality
with the most imperialist fury of precision,” Dalí wrote in his book Conquest of the Irrational.

 Da Vinci’s artistic prowess is manifested in Mona Lisa and the Last Supper paintings. The two
paintings put Da Vinci on the world map and until now he is regarded as the best painter of all
time. Historical sources reveal that Da Vinci did not work on the two paintings during the same
time. Da Vinci painted the Last Supper painting before he started working on the Mona Lisa
painting. The events in the renaissance period influenced the majority of Da Vinci’s paintings
including Mona Lisa and the Last Supper. This paper will compare and contrast Mona Lisa and
the Last Supper paintings done by Leonardo Da Vinci.
 The Last Supper painting was specifically done for Da Vinci’s master known as Duke
Ludovico. The Last Supper is a sacred painting that represents the last meeting that Jesus
held with his disciples a few moments before his death.
 The painting shows Jesus taking the last supper with his disciples as he disclosed to them
who among his disciples would betray him. The painting is influenced by the chronology of
Jesus that is recorded in the book of John chapter 13.
 On the other hand, Mona Lisa is a secular painting that depicts an Italian woman with a
very attractive smile seated on an arm chair. The woman has an enigmatic expression on
her face. The identity of the woman in the painting is not exactly known but sources
suggest that the woman in the Mona Lisa painting is Lisa Del Giocondo who was the wife of
a rich Italian merchant.
 Pablo Picasso- Displayed near the entrance of the Republican’s pavilion, Guernica was the first
thing many visitors saw. The complex composition, with Picasso’s characteristic Cubist figures
and disquieting representation of space, was not easy to read. A braying horse occupies the
painting’s centre, stumbling over its fallen rider sprawled below and lit by the spiked rays of
a light bulb above. A bellowing bull on the left seems to encompass a wailing mother with her
child laying slack in her arms. A ghostly figure emerges from an opening to the right, holding a
gaslight, while a woman closer to the foreground hangs her arms in despair. Farther back, flames
and possibly ruins consume a howling figure. The dramatic subject is subdued, painted in
the grisaille technique, a method using a neutral monochrome palette. Picasso said very little
about the painting’s meaning, leaving interpretation to viewers, critics, and art historians.
Although clear as an emotional response to war’s senseless violence, the painting, with its
mismatched subjects, confounded world’s fair viewers.

 Another is the Weeping Woman is based on an image of a woman holding her dead child. It
is taken from Picasso’s anti-war mural, Guernica. Picasso painted both works during the
Spanish Civil War (1936-39). It was in response to the bombing of the Basque town of
Guernica. The attack was carried out in April 1937 by Nazi Germany’s air force, in support of
Spain's Nationalist forces. Hundreds of people were killed. The figure of the Weeping
Woman is based on artist and photographer Dora Maar. Maar photographed Picasso's
making of Guernica.

 The Pivotal Blue and Rose Periods

The experience of Pablo Picasso's art is reflective of the artist's journey of personal transformation
and exploration during his Blue and Pink Periods, a period of roughly five years between 1903 and
1907. During this time, Picasso explored his own emotional depths through his art, producing
paintings such as Tragedy of 1903 during his Blue Period, a period characterized by sorrow and
tragedy. In contrast to the dark tones of the Blue Period, the Pink Period of 1905 was imbued with the
artist's feelings of joy and lightheartedness, seen through works such as Girl on the Ball. Nevertheless,
Picasso was still in a period of introspection and by 1907 had left behind his periods of self-
exploration and embraced the style of Cubism seen in his painting Les Demoiselles d'Avignon. It is
plain to see that the story of Picasso's artistic journey is complex and enriching, reflecting his
contemplative, moody temperament as he battled to find his place in the world.
 Les Demoiselles d’Avignon marks a radical break from traditional composition and perspective in
painting. It depicts five naked women composed of flat, splintered planes whose faces were
inspired by Iberian sculpture and African masks. The compressed space they inhabit appears to
project forward in jagged shards, while a slice of melon in the still life at the bottom of the
composition teeters on an upturned tabletop. Picasso unveiled the monumental painting in his
Paris studio after months of revision. The Avignon of the work’s title is a reference to a street in
Barcelona famed for its brothels.
 Henri Matisse - The Dance and the Music
In 1909 Matisse received an important commission. An extremely wealthy Russian industrialist named
Sergei Shchukin asked Matisse for three large scale canvases to decorate the spiral staircase of his
mansion, the Trubetskoy Palace, in Moscow. The large and well loved painting, Dance I at MoMA is
somewhat disingenously titled. Although it is full scale and in oil, Matisse did not consider it more
than a preparatory sketch. Yet a comparison between the initial and final versions is instructive.
Matisse borrowed the motif from the back of the 1905-06 painting Bonheur de Vivre, although he has
removed one dancer.
 The Music (La Musique) is a painting made by Henri Matisse in 1910. The painting was
commissioned by Sergei Shchukin, who hung it with Dance on the staircase of his Moscow
mansion. Matisse made the painting without any preparatory sketches, and thus the
painting bears many traces of modifications. One can virtually trace the steps Matisse took
to find the intended effect. Like in The Dance, the aim was to show man's attainment of a
state of completeness by immersion in creativity.

 Judy Chicago-The Dinner Party

Painted by Judy Chicago- an important icon of 1970s feminist art and a milestone in twentieth-century
art, is presented as the centerpiece around which the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art is
organized. The Dinner Party comprises a massive ceremonial banquet, arranged on a triangular table
with a total of thirty-nine place settings, each commemorating an important woman from history. The
settings consist of embroidered runners, gold chalices and utensils, and china-painted porcelain plates
with raised central motifs that are based on vulvar and butterfly forms and rendered in styles
appropriate to the individual women being honored. The names of another 999 women are inscribed
in gold on the white tile floor below the triangular table. This permanent installation is enhanced by
rotating Herstory Gallery exhibitions relating to the 1,038 women honored at the table.
 Johannes Vermeer-Girl with a Pearl Earring, oil painting on canvas (c. 1665) by Dutch
artist Johannes Vermeer, one of his most well-known works. It depicts an imaginary young
woman in exotic dress and a very large pearl earring. The work permanently resides in
the Mauritshuis museum in The Hague.
 An observant and deliberate painter, Vermeer produced only 36 known works in his
lifetime, while many of his contemporaries completed hundreds.
 Girl with a Pearl Earring represents a young woman in a dark shallow space,
an intimate setting that draws the viewer’s attention exclusively on her. She wears a blue
and gold turban, the titular pearl earring, and a gold jacket with a visible white collar
beneath.
 Unlike many of Vermeer’s subjects, she is not concentrating on a daily chore and unaware
of her viewer. Instead, caught in a fleeting moment, she turns her head over her shoulder,
meeting the viewer’s gaze with her eyes wide and lips parted as if about to speak.
Her enigmatic expression coupled with the mystery of her identity has led some to compare
her to the equivocal subject in Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa (c. 1503–19). Unlike the Mona
Lisa, however, Girl with a Pearl Earring is not a portrait but a tronie, a Dutch term for a
character or type of person. A young woman might have sat for Vermeer, but the painting
is not meant to portray her or any specific individual in the same way that Leonardo’s piece
portrayed an existing person (likely Lisa Gherardini, the wife of a Florentine merchant).
 Edvard Munch's The Scream is an icon of modern art, the Mona Lisa for our time. As Leonardo da
Vinci evoked a Renaissance ideal of serenity and self-control, Munch defined how we see our
own age - wracked with anxiety and uncertainty.
 Essentially The Scream is autobiographical, an expressionistic construction based on
Munch's actual experience of a scream piercing through nature while on a walk, after his
two companions, seen in the background, had left him. Fitting the fact that the sound must
have been heard at a time when his mind was in an abnormal state, Munch renders it in a
style which if pushed to extremes can destroy human integrity. As previously noted, the
flowing curves of art nouveau represent a subjective linear fusion imposed upon nature,
whereby the multiplicity of particulars is unified into a totality of organic suggestion with
feminine overtones. But man is part of nature, and absorption into such a totality liquidates
the individual. Beginning at this time Munch included art nouveau elements in many
pictures but usually only in a limited or modified way. Here, however, in depicting his own
morbid experience, he has let go, and allowed the foreground figure to become distorted
by the subjectivized flow of nature; the scream could be interpreted as expressing the
agony of the obliteration of human personality by this unifying force. Significantly, although
it was Munch himself who underwent the experience depicted, the protagonist bears no
resemblance to him or anyone else. The creature in the foreground has been
depersonalized and crushed into sexlessness or, if anything, stamped with a trace of the
femininity of the world that has come close to assimilating it.

 Sandro Boticelli- Known as the “Birth of Venus”, the composition actually shows the goddess of
love and beauty arriving on land, on the island of Cyprus, born of the sea spray and blown there
by the winds, Zephyr and, perhaps, Aura. The goddess is standing on a giant scallop shell, as pure
and as perfect as a pearl. She is met by a young woman, who is sometimes identified as one of
the Graces or as the Hora of spring, and who holds out a cloak covered in flowers. Even the
roses, blown in by the wind are a reminder of spring. The subject of the painting, which
celebrates

 Venus as symbol of love and beauty, was perhaps suggested by the poet Agnolo Poliziano.
is widely used throughout the 15th century for decorative works destined to noble houses.
Botticelli takes his inspiration from classical statues for Venus’ modest pose, as she covers
her nakedness with long, blond hair, which has reflections of light from the fact that it has
been gilded; even the Winds, the pair flying in one another’s embrace, is based on an
ancient work, a gem from the Hellenistic period, owned by Lorenzo the Magnificent.
 About Nighthawks Edward Hopper recollected, “unconsciously, probably, I was painting the
loneliness of a large city.” In an all-night diner, three customers sit at the counter opposite a
server, each appear to be lost in thought and disengaged from one another. The composition is
tightly organized and spare in details: there is no entrance to the establishment, no debris on the
streets. Through harmonious geometric forms and the glow of the diner’s electric lighting,
Hopper created a serene, beautiful, yet enigmatic scene. Although inspired by a restaurant
Hopper had seen on Greenwich Avenue in New York, the painting is not a realistic transcription
of an actual place. As viewers, we are left to wonder about the figures, their relationships, and
this imagined world.

 Georgia O'Keeffe- “Jimson Weed”

 In 1936, cosmetics executive Elizabeth Arden commissioned O'Keeffe to paint Jimson
Weed to hang in the exercise room of the new Arden Sports Salon in New York. The result
was the largest of O'Keeffe's flower paintings. The artist placed the four blossoms in an
exuberant design that repeats the tight rhythm of the pinwheel-shaped plant. She
emphasized her subject's fresh beauty with a light, restricted palette.