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[German Version] (1471, Kronach – Oct 16, 1553, Weimar), painter, copper etching and wood engraving artist, has gone down in history as Saxon court artist in Wittenberg, friend, and de facto official portrait-painter of Luther. Before he was called by elector Frederick the Wise to Wittenberg as court painter in 1504, he spent a number of years in Vienna. His first documented painting is the Crucifixion (1503, Munich, Alte Pinakothek), which displays characteristics of the Danube School. In Wittenberg he was quick to open a studio (in 1507 the fi…

[German Version] (Nov 10, 1880, New York – Aug 19, 1959, London). This British sculptor, originally from America (knighted in 1954), received his first major commission for O. Wilde's gravestone (1912, Père-Lachaise, Paris). It combined Old Assyrian influences with the cubist forms that characterize his other works. With The Rock Drill (1914, destroyed), Epstein gave form to the archetype of modern man in the machine era. In the late 1910s, he turned increasingly to religious themes, which, despite his Orthodox Jewish upbringing, also included Christian subject matter (e.g. The Ris…

[German Version] (Feb 22, 1882, Brighton – Nov 17, 1940, Harefield, now London), made his name primarily as a sculptor and bookmaker (typography and illustration). One of the most important stone-carvings with a religious theme created before his conversion to Catholicism in 1913 is the portrayal of the Madonna with Nursing Child (1910, National Museum, Cardiff). His semi-abstract figures with a preference for erotic details are influenced by Egyptian and Greek art, but also by post-impressionism (Impressionism). Likely his most prominent sacral…

[German Version] (Mar 30, 1853, Zundert, The Netherlands – Jul 29, 1890, Auvers-sur-Oise, France). An expressionistic Dutch painter of the Post-Impressionist period (Impressionism, Expressionism), Vincent van Gogh is considered the prototype of the unappreciated artist whose life and work are characterized by excess (cf. e.g. the 1956 filming of Irving Stone's novel Lust for Life). Having initially aspired to a career as an art dealer, he became a lay preacher in the Belgian coal-mining district of Le Borinage in 1879, where he shared the poverty a…

[German Version] is the internationally acknowledged American art movement of the 1940s/1950s, which developed mainly independently of Europe and which is of singular importance since it signals the shift of the Western art center from Europe to the United States. Abstract expressionism is also known by the names “New York School,” stressing its geographical l…

[German Version] (Nov 15, 1887, Sun Prairie, WI – Mar 6, 1986, Santa Fe, NM), one of the most outstanding American painters of her century, and not only because her career, in the course of which she produced almost 1,300 works, lasted about 60 years. Her art, a distinctive mixture of abstraction and organic forms based on nature studies, celebrates sensual sublimity (e.g. Jack-in-the-Pulpit, no. IV, 1930, National Gallery of Art, Washington). O’Keeffe was influenced by American trends (Arthur Dove’s organic abstractions and Tonalists), as is emphasized in …

[German Version] I. Life – II. Work – III. Impact (May 21, 1471, Nuremberg – Apr 6, 1528, Nuremberg), painter, illustrator, graphic artist, and art theorist. I. Life After serving an apprenticeship under his father as a goldsmith, Dürer commenced a three-year training in painting on Nov 30, 1486 in the studio of a neighbor, the painter Michael Wolgemut, whose woodcutting technique for illustrating books had a strong influence ¶ on him. Between 1490 and 1494, Dürer undertook a journey through the Upper Rhine valley on …

[German Version] (Jun 7, 1848, Paris – May 8, 1903, Atuona, Marquesas Islands, South Pacific). After several voyages to the South Sea islands, the French painter Paul Gauguin eventually settled there. Initially influenced by Impressionism, he developed his own unique interpretation of symbolism, which included a simplified visual structure, broad areas of color, and ¶ subject matter pointing beyond its overt content. This bent for transcendence led him to religious themes, as in the painting Vision after the Sermon: Jacob Wrestling with the Angel (1888, National Gallery of Sco…