Famous Artists

Famous Artists

Some of the most famous artists are from long ago, but their work lives on in both critical acclaim and popularity. Still living artists accompany their work around the world and fine their work is in high demand by art collectors.

Some of the most famous artists include:

Leonardo Da Vinci

Paintings from the Renaissance artist Leonardo Da Vinci have come under recent scrutiny through the popularity of the novel The DaVinci Code, which speculates that the art contains hidden messages about Christianity. Although Da Vinci is best known for the Mona Lisa and The Last Supper, he was also a gifted inventor and drew up plans for airplanes and tanks. He was also a musician and spent years creating detailed sketches of human anatomy, which he based on the human dissections he performed on corpses from local hospitals.

Annie Leibovitz

Perhaps one of photography's most famous artists, Annie Leibovitz began her career as a photographer for Rolling Stone magazine. She is celebrated for her photos of celebrities, including the famous cover photo of Yoko Ono and John Lennon. She has also photographed images for an award-wining American Express campaign and for Vanity Fair magazine. She is from Connecticut.

Claude Monet

Regarded as the founder of impressionist painting, Claude Monet was born and raised in France. Monet nearly lost his sight at the height of work, but a cataract operation saved it. He is heralded for his landscape painting, including the popular Water Lily Pond. He died in December 1926.

Edvard Munch

As hundreds of college dorm rooms adorned with the infamous Scream print can attest, Edvard Munch is still a famous artist today, over 60 years after his death. A Norwegian painter who helped develop expressionism, most of Munch’s work is centered on anxiety, sadness, and mourning, basing much of his art on his early childhood experiences of losing both parents and two siblings. He died in 1944 at 80.

Georgia O’Keefe

One of the best known American painters and perhaps the best known female painter ever, Georgia O’Keefe fell in love with art is a child growing up in Wisconsin. She went on to study painting at the Art Institute of Chicago and found work as an illustrator. Her work concentrated on water colors and charcoal sketches of nature, with her most well-known pieces depicting flowers and landscapes in stunning detail.

Rodin's The Thinker

Pablo Picasso

A native of Spain, Pablo Picasso was the son of a painter and art professor. He is best known for his paintings but also produced sculptors and ceramics before dying in France in 1973. He is credited with developing cubism, an abstract artistic style which breaks up subjects to show them in different angles.

Auguste Rodin

Often imitated, the Thinker is by far the most popular of Rodin’s sculptures. The Frenchman’s work is exhibited in museums across the globe, including Philadelphia, Russia, Germany, and France. He died in 1917.

Vincent Van Gogh

The famous artist Vincent Van Gogh is almost as well-known for his difficult and tragic life as he is for his expressive paintings, such as The Starry Night. He created many self-portraits, including the one that depicts his bandaged ear, which gave rise to the story that he cut off his ear and sent it to a woman. Various explanations for the bloodied ear exist, including that he cut the ear in a fight and that he did it to apologize to a friend. In any case, Van Gogh did suffer from mental problems and spent time in a mental hospital. He is thought by many experts to have been schizophrenic. He killed himself in 1890 when he was 37-years-old.

Andy Warhol

Hailing from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Andy Warhol majored in design in college before moving to New York to work as a magazine illustrator. Known as the pop artist who made prints of Marilyn Monroe and Campbell’s soup cans, Warhol had an unmistakable style. He died following gallbladder surgery in 1987.