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Spanish, 20th century, male.

Active in France from 1958.

Born 26 February 1937, in Madrid.

Painter (including mixed media), watercolourist, decorative designer, sculptor, engraver, draughtsman. Scenes with figures, figures, portraits. Stage sets.

Nouvelle Figuration, Figuration Narrative.

Eduardo Arroyo was educated at the Lycée Français in Madrid and then at the School of Journalism. At the age of 21, he left Franco's Spain for Paris, where he was to remain in exile for some 20 years. Although his original intention was to be a journalist rather than a painter, he saw painting as the most accessible and effective medium for his main aim, which was political militancy. He taught himself to paint, but this was made easier by the fact that it was not so much any possible aesthetic dimension to the work that interested him, but rather its immediate intelligibility and the power of the image. He brought together a mixture of techniques to create the effective image. Collage in its various forms was a constant feature of his style. In his early work, he often turned to what was then called 'Modification': that is, taking either a genuine picture from a second-hand shop, or a reproduction (as in the case of a work by Goya, Velázquez or Miró), and superimposing pictorial additions to alter the meaning, generally with the aim of being controversial and often humorous as well. He rapidly became a master of minimalist techniques, and soon began to exhibit at group shows. Some of these early shows were at the traditional exhibition centres, such as the Salon des Grands et Jeunes d'Aujourd'hui and the Salon de Mai. He was an influential member of the Salon de la Jeune Peinture, where he exhibited from 1960 onwards, and his exhibitions there between 1964 and 1969 (with Aillaud and Récalcati) triggered militant activity that led to a temporary change in the group's name....

French, 20th century, male.

Born 26 June 1909, in Dijon; died 6 December 1996, in Paris.

Painter, collage artist, engraver, draughtsman. Wall decorations, designs for mosaics, stained glass windows, tapestries, stage costumes and sets.

A pupil at the École des Beaux-Arts in Lyons in 1930, Bertholle studied in Paris from 1932-1934, and subsequently attended classes run by the painter Roger Bissière at the Académie Ranson, where he met his friends and associates Manessier, Etienne-Martin, Le Moal and Véra Pagava. He was artistic director of the Gien porcelain factory from 1943-1957, and taught at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris from 1965-1980. He was a member of the Institut de France, a Chevalier of the Légion d'Honneur and a Commander of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. Initially an admirer of Puvis de Chavannes, whose work he had encountered at the city museum in Lyons, Bertholle later discovered Manet (at the Paris Exposition Universelle of 1932), and through the latter, Van Gogh and Renoir. Following his early, highly-coloured Expressionist period, Bertholle was greatly influenced by the Flemish fantasies of Breughel and Heironymus Bosch, and ultimately by the Surrealists - as may be seen in his painting of the ...

French, 20th – 21st century, male.

Born 24 February 1958.

Painter (including mixed media), collage artist, engraver, draughtsman, illustrator, poster artist. Stage sets.

Olivier de Cayron is a self-taught painter whose work betrays the influence of Pollock, Dubuffet and, on occasion, Michaux. In 1985, he was one of the co-founders of the ...

French, 20th – 21st century, male.

Born 11 March 1947, in Vic-Fezensac.

Painter (including gouache), collage artist, watercolourist, draughtsman (including charcoal), lithographer, designer. Stage sets.

Jean-Paul Chambas has exhibited since 1969 at the Salon de la Jeune Peinture and since 1973 in Italy, where he lived for a period. The Galerie Fabrice Galvani in Toulouse mounted a comprehensive exhibition of his work in ...

American, 20th – 21st century, male.

Active also active in France.

Born 1957, in Concord (New Hampshire), United States.

Painter, sculptor, collage artist, pastellist, draughtsman, engraver, screen printer, illustrator. Stage sets.

Neo-Expressionism, Citationism.

George Condo is an American artist who lived in Paris before moving to New York in the early 1980s. There, he met Andy Warhol, Julian Schnabel, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and Keith Haring, and he worked with Beat Generation authors William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg. In 1999 he received an award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Condo remains traditional in his choice of mediums, using only oil, charcoal, pastel, and collage, although his manner is extremely spirited. His art is a type of condensation of much contemporary pictorial art and may just as easily be inspired by Japanese landscapes from the late 19th century as by works by Matta or Masson, Velazquez’s Las Meninas – already revisited by Picasso – or the motifs of Matisse. There are also homages to forgotten painters like Basquiat and even comic book heroes and advertisements. The great diversity of his subjects and styles does not detract from the quality of his paintings, which are intended to be as anonymous as the products in a supermarket....

Austrian, 20th century, male.

Born 1930, in Vienna.

Painter, draughtsman, engraver, illustrator, sculptor, collage artist, decorative designer. Scenes with figures, figures. Stage sets.

Groups: Hundsgruppe (Dog’s group), Phantastischer Realismus group.

Ernst Fuchs enrolled at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Vienna in 1945. From 1946 to 1950, he was a pupil of Gütersloh, whom Salvador Dalí considered the most important painter of his time (after himself). In around 1950, he was one of the founders of the Viennese ...

German, 20th century, male.

Born 1924, in Düsseldorf.

Assemblage artist, painter (including gouache), engraver, illustrator. Stage costumes and sets.

Group 53.

Horst Egon Kalinowsky studied at the Staatliche Kunstakademie in Düsseldorf from 1945 to 1948. In 1949-1950, he spent some time in Italy, where he stayed in Rome and Venice. From ...

American, 20th century, male.

Born 24 July 1927, in New York.

Painter, collage artist, engraver. Portraits, still-lifes, landscapes. Stage sets, artists’ books.

Alex Katz studied at Cooper Union from 1946 to 1949, then at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine, where he obtained two studentships. He taught at the Cooper Union. In 1994, Cooper Union Art School created the Alex Katz Visiting Chair in Painting with the endowment, provided by the sale of ten paintings donated by the artist.

In the 1960s, he produced small collages of home landscapes–rows of trees and beaches from his native Maine–and still-lifes. He showed a short-lived interest in the techniques involved in working from photographs. Since the mid 1950s, he has worked from life, concentrating on portraits and the representation of flowers, sometimes presented in Cutouts, painted on both sides and set on a pedestal.

Indifferent to the still powerful hold of Abstract Expressionism and alien to Pop Art, he benefited from the renewed interest in Realism at the end of the 1960s, without succumbing to Hyperrealism and the need for rivalry with the camera. His painting remained figurative, taken from life, his subjects restricted to a close circle: his wife Ada, their son Vincent, his friends Rauschenberg and Ginsberg, artists, poets, and dancers. He captures private moments in the diversely secret smiles, the figures he picks out from the crowd; the soft hues, though contrasted with the deep colours of the backgrounds, confirm the feeling of intimacy. However, the big screen close-up frames contradict it, as do the elliptic simplification of the drawing, its economical outline, broad flat tints and, from ...

Russian, 20th century, male.

Active since 1975 in France.

Born 5 July 1940, in Moscow.

Painter (including gouache/mixed media), watercolourist, engraver, decorative designer, sculptor. Stage sets.

Yuri Kuper was the son of a violinist, and studied at the academy of fine art in Moscow from 1957 to 1963...

Japanese, 20th century, male.

Active in France from 1970.

Born 4 October 1944, in Kyoto.

Painter (including gouache), engraver, draughtsman, sculptor, installation artist. Figures. Stage sets.

Akihiko Kuroda studied art history but then abandoned painting until 1974. In 1985 he founded the magazine Noise. He lives and works in Paris. His work is very free, born out of spontaneity; his forms seem to spring to life from his line. Influenced by Chinese calligraphy, his early works have delicate graffiti or stabbing signs against dark backgrounds. He works with great economy of means, creating incisive figures and frozen silhouettes that stand out against monochrome backgrounds. He usually uses lively colours in flat areas outlined in black or white. When working in other media, his attitude to the painted surface is always restless, making it silent or complex by turns. In some of his more recent work in black and grey, the ‘nothingness of space’ contains points, dots, curves, lines, brushstrokes, vortices of matter, geometric forms tossed casually down. Primarily a painter, Kuroda has also produced a large number of posters and book covers, notably for ...

American, 20th – 21st century, male.

Born 19 August 1949, in Pasadena.

Painter (including gouache), collage artist, draughtsman, performance artist, lithographer. Stage sets, stage costumes.

Robert Kushner studied at the University of California, San Diego, where he received a BA. In 1971 he travelled in Iran, Afghanistan, Turkey, Europe and India with Amy Goldin. He lives and works in New York. His early work in the 1970s was performance art in which his costumes (or lack of them) were as important as the performance. He was a founder of the Pattern and Decorative movement of the 1970s, and his numerous decorative works are inspired by Matisse. He views his work as a continuation and update of a vast conservative tradition, and believes in the importance of beauty in everyday life....

French, 20th century, male.

Active in Paris.

Born 18 February 1885, in Paris; died 1954, in Paris.

Painter (gouache), collage artist, sculptor, engraver, draughtsman, illustrator. Stage sets.

Henri Laurens had barely left school when he started sculpting first as an apprentice with an interior designer, then as a carver-setter whilst attending night school and teaching himself modelling. In 1910 he stayed briefly at that sanctuary for down-and-out artists, La Ruche, where Archipenko and Léger were also staying. Until 1911 and the advent of Cubism, he worked in total isolation. Then he met Braque, with whom he formed a lasting friendship, as well as Fernand Léger and Juan Gris, though he did not join their group. Only after World War II would his work meet with a degree of recognition....

French, 20th century, male.

Born 18 May 1940, in Alençon.

Painter, collage artist, lithographer, draughtsman, illustrator, sculptor, writer. Stage sets.

Alain Le Yaouanc spent time in the USA in 1956 where he executed his first paintings. In 1957 he held his first exhibitions in the New Britain Museum, Mattatuck Museum, Waterbury and Connecticut. In ...

Italian, 20th – 21st century, male.

Born 1948, in Paduli (Benevento).

Painter, watercolourist, collage artist, sculptor, engraver. Stage sets.

Transavanguardia.

Mimmo Paladino lives and works in Milan and his native region. He started out in a vein of abstract painting but turned towards representational art in the mid-1970s. Subsequently, in the early 1980s, he was associated with a group of painters (notably Sandro Chia, Francesco Clemente and Enzo Cuchi) who constituted an Italian group called the Transavanguardia. Its principal theoretician was the art critic Achille Bonito Oliva, who in ...

Spanish, 20th century, male.

Born 2 February 1923, in Barcelona.

Painter, collage artist, sculptor, engraver, lithographer, illustrator, poet. Stage sets, designs for stained glass.

Albert Ràfols-Casamada learned drawing with his father, the painter Albert Ràfols y Culleres, then from 1942-1945 he studied architecture at the University of Barcelona, at the same time attending the Tarrega art school. He was self-taught as a painter and started to paint in ...

French, 20th century, female.

Born 29 October 1930, in Neuilly-sur-Seine; died 22 May 2002, in San Diego (California).

Sculptor, painter (including gouache), watercolourist, collage artist, engraver, draughtswoman, performance artist. Figures. Stage sets, artists’ books, designs (jewels/objets d’art).

Nouvelle Figuration.

Nouveaux Réalistes group.

Niki de Saint-Phalle was educated at the Sacred Heart Convent in New York, where she lived from 1933 to 1951. In 1952 she went to live in Paris with her husband, Harry Matthews, and travelled in Europe. She was a self-taught painter who painted her first canvases in 1953 and then turned to sculpture. In 1960 she met Jean Tinguely, whose companion she became. In the same year Pierre Restany founded the Nouveaux Réalistes group, and Niki de Saint-Phalle joined it in 1961....

German, 20th century, male.

Born 4 September 1888, in Stuttgart; died 1943, in Baden-Baden.

Sculptor (mixed media), painter, watercolourist, engraver, lithographer. Figures, landscapes. Stage sets.

Oskar Schlemmer was an apprentice from 1903 to 1905 in a studio of marquetry. From 1905 to 1909 he studied at the academy of fine arts in Stuttgart, where he was a fellow student of Willy Baumeister and of the Swiss Otto Meyer-Amden, who would remain his close friend and for whom he always had great admiration. From 1910 to 1912, he stayed in Berlin, where he had some contact with French painting, particularly Cézanne and Seurat. From 1912 to 1914, he was a pupil of Christian Landenberger, and especially of Adolf Hölzel, at the academy in Stuttgart. After 1915, he served in the army. He returned to Stuttgart in 1919, where he attempted to influence the direction of the academy. In 1920 he was invited by Walter Gropius to be a teacher of the Bauhaus. From 1920 to 1929 Schlemmer held several posts at the Bauhaus in Weimar, then at Dessau, first as director of the studio on stone carving, and then as director of the studio on metal. From 1929 to 1932 he was a teacher of perspective at the national schools of art in Berlin. In 1933 he was dismissed from his post by the official arrival of Nazi power, accused of promoting degenerate art....

Mexican, 20th century, male.

Born 18 August 1920, in Guadalajara (Jalisco).

Painter (mixed media/gouache), sculptor, engraver, decorative artist, draughtsman. Figures, nudes, portraits, interiors with figures, landscapes, animals. Stage sets.

Juan Soriano had no artistic training other than some instruction on 19th century Mexican and European art. When very young he apparently received advice from Roberto Montenegro and Jesús Reyes Ferreira. In 1935 he was appointed to teach in Mexico art school. He often visited Europe, especially Rome and Paris, where he lived....

Czech, 20th century, male.

Born 11 August 1899, in Cerma near Geiersberg, Bohemia; died 21 March 1942, in Prague.

Painter, watercolourist, collage artist, draughtsman, engraver, illustrator. Stage sets.

Devetsil Group, Prague Surrealist group.

Styrsky studied at the academy of fine art in Prague from 1920 to 1923...