All artists have to begin somewhere. An artist usually achieves fame using a signature style instantly recognizable as their own. The contemporary world of painting boasts multiple genres of realism and abstraction, the result of bold pioneers experimenting with their craft in the quest for more meaningful self-expression. Often, these painters began their careers conservatively with traditional techniques before striking out on their own, coming up with styles completely unrecognizable from their early works.
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10 Odilon Redon (1840–1916)
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French artist Odilon Redon began his career in monochrome. His charcoal paintings and lithographic prints were exclusively black and white, called noirs. Redon exploited the suggestive possibilities of black to explore the world of dreams, fantasy, and imagination, producing mysterious and bizarre imagery. Representative of his noir series is The Eye (1882), in which an eyeball morphs into a balloon carrying a severed head up into the sky, symbolizing the attainment of a higher plane of consciousness.
In the 1890s, Redon’s art radically transformed to the opposite extreme. After years of using monochrome, Redon’s paintings became an explosion of vivid, pastel colors. This change may have come as a result of Redon’s joy at the birth of his second son, Ari, in 1889. “If the art of an artist is the song of his life, a solemn or sad melody, I must have sounded the key-note of gaiety in color,” Redon wrote.
After 1900, Redon painted portraits, mythological subjects and floral still lifes, all awash in vibrant color. His dreamlike compositions make Redon a precursor of Surrealism.[1]
9 Gustav Klimt (1862–1918)
Austrian artist Gustav Klimt trained as an architectural painter at the Kunstgewerbeschule (Vienna School of Arts and Crafts) and excelled in the classical Academic style, a realistic style depicting ancient and historical subjects. It is characterized by polished technique, meticulous brushwork, and figures in staged and theatrical poses. Klimt’s early works are showcased in the ceiling frescoes of the Burgtheater, commissioned by Emperor Franz Joseph.
In 1892, Gustav’s brother and father both died, leaving him devastated and effecting a profound change in his art. In 1894, Klimt was commissioned for three paintings for the Great Hall of the University of Vienna. Fully expecting Klimt to execute them in the style for which he had already won acclaim, the university officials were shocked to behold human figures in tortured and sexual poses, seemingly suspended in empty space. They found the images dark, unsettling, and baffling and refused to install the paintings in the Great Hall. It was the last time Klimt accepted a commission. He was on his own.
Klimt broke away from conservatism and founded the art group Vienna Secession with fellow modernist rebels. The early 20th century saw Klimt’s style undergo another transformation. Inspired by Byzantine mosaics and Japanese art, Klimt incorporated elements of both into his paintings. From the Japanese, he adopted the flat, decorative patterns; in the use of gold, he copied the Byzantines.
In this “Golden Period” of his career, he created his most iconic masterpieces like The Kiss and Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer, works that are not only visually appealing but also deeply symbolic.[2]
8 Kazimir Malevich (1879–1935)
Ukrainian painter Kazimir Malevich described his initial impulse of creativity, “For the first time I saw light reflexes of a blue sky and pure and transparent tones. Since then I began working with light painting, heartwarming and sunny… Since then I have become an impressionist”. Malevich adored Claude Monet as an artistic Messiah who founded new principles of painting. His early works clearly exhibit his love affair with Impressionism.
In 1907, after meeting avant-garde artists like Wassily Kandinsky (discussed below), Malevich’s style underwent a decided shift. From 1912-13, he executed works in Cubo-Futurist style, with an emphasis on geometric shapes to define figures in space. From there, it was but a small step toward the style Malevich would be identified with—Suprematism.
More radical than Cubism or Futurism, Suprematism featured flat, abstract areas of paint in which pure artistic feeling, not the visual depiction of objects, is “supreme.” The 1915 work Black Square epitomized Suprematist principles: nothing more than a black square on a white background. But to Malevich, it was anything but simple. The square represented feelings perceived free of logic and reason, leading to absolute truth. The white symbolized nothingness.
In the 1930s, the Soviet regime under Joseph Stalin prescribed the Social Realist style for all art, and Malevich was forced to comply. He had not lost his love for Impressionism and considered his Suprematism as just an outgrowth of his desire to push further the principles of Impressionism. Even so, in the figurative art of his later years, we can still detect the geometrical shapes of Suprematism.[3]
7 Piet Mondrian (1872–1944)
Dutch artist Piet Mondrian was a leading figure in the abstract art movement De Stijl (The Style), whose works are recognizable for their use of straight lines, right angles, primary colors, and black, white, and gray in combination that embodies Mondrian’s spiritual awareness of a harmonious cosmos.
Mondrian was born in 1872, the year Claude Monet painted his Impression: Sunrise, and Mondrian’s early style naturally was Impressionist. He painted still lifes and landscapes with pure, glowing colors laid down with expressive brushstrokes like Van Gogh. In the first decade of the 20th century, Mondrian was influenced by pointillism and the Cubism of Picasso.
The evolutionary trajectory of his style tended increasingly toward abstraction. In The Gray Tree (1912), Mondrian represented the landscape with Cubist principles, painting the lines and planes with a limited palette of grays and black. He arrived at pure abstraction in Pier and Ocean (1915), interpreting the scene as a series of horizontal and vertical lines.
Mondrian called his new style Neoplasticism, and it reached maturity in the 1920s when Mondrian painted the works for which he became famous, such as Composition with Large Red Plane, which fully expressed his vision of an ordered and harmonious universe. “To approach the spiritual in art,” Mondrian said, “one will make as little use as possible of reality because reality is opposed to the spiritual.”[4]
6 Wassily Kandinsky (1866–1944)
One of the first creators of pure abstraction in modern art, Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky started out as a realist, producing lonely landscapes. Moving to Germany, he painted memories of his native Russia—brightly decorated furniture and votive pictures in the homes of the peasants were his subjects, as well as romantic historicism, lyric poetry, folklore, and pure fantasy.
In the early 1900s, Kandinsky’s art underwent a marked change as he looked for a way to express transcendent spirituality and emotion that mere copying from nature could not achieve. A foreshadowing of abstraction can be seen in The Blue Rider (1903), which, though Impressionistic in tone, had colors that almost blend together, delineating horse and rider not as we normally view the world.
Kandinsky departed even more from naturalistic art with The Blue Mountain, using distorted, vibrant colors to render the simplified and non-objective elements of a mountain, two trees, and a group of horsemen in the foreground—a dream landscape. By 1910, Kandinsky had eliminated any reference to the natural world altogether, reducing objects to pictographic symbols.
This pure abstraction was compared by Kandinsky to a musical composition: “Color is the keyboard, the eyes are the hammers, the soul is the piano with its many chords. The artist is the hand that, by touching this or that key, sets the soul vibrating automatically.” Kandinsky was forced to move to Paris when the Nazis, who considered his works “degenerate art,” came to power. He died there in 1944.[5]
5 Henri Matisse (1869–1954)
French artist Henri Matisse began as a traditionalist, influenced by the great masters he studied in the Louvre. He painted landscapes and still lifes in dark colors in the manner of Dutch masters. The 1897 oil on canvas The Dinner Table is a realistic depiction of a scene in everyday life. Matisse’s palette is naturalistic and uses dark tones.
In the early 20th century, Matisse became the leader of Fauvism, an art movement characterized by the radical use of color to express emotions rather than just realistically depicting the world. The Woman with the Red Hat (1905) is prominent among Matisse’s works in this style, which shocked viewers with its non-naturalistic hues and broad, unmodulated brushstrokes. Art collector Leo Stein called it “the nastiest smear of paint I had ever seen.”
By 1907, Matisse had left Fauvism behind as he strove for more simplified forms against flat planes of color. Throughout the interwar years, he continued the restless development of his work during his “Nice period” of light-infused interiors. “An artist should never be a prisoner of himself, prisoner of style, prisoner of reputation, prisoner of success,” he said.
In 1941, he had major surgery, which confined him to a wheelchair and unable to paint. Matisse turned to drawing and using paper cut-outs for artistic expression. This was totally unorthodox, but these cut-outs effectively took the place of paint on canvas and, in Matisse’s hands, became a kaleidoscope of animals, plants, and figures.[6]
4 Jackson Pollock (1912–1956)
Among the terms used to describe Jackson Pollock’s art are “drip paintings” or “poured paintings,” but the character of Pollock’s signature style is more complex than those. He flung, splattered, or threw paint across the canvas to produce continuous, flowing lines interspersed with scattered droplets, shocking and bewildered viewers when the paintings first appeared in the late 1940s.
Pollock was the chief exponent of Abstract Expressionism. His works were the outpourings of his own anxieties and a statement of humanity’s overall fears and feelings of entrapment in an age of Cold War and the threat of nuclear annihilation. His was one of the most radical abstract styles in modern art.
But Pollock’s early career gave no hint of his later transformation. In the 1930s, he painted realist murals, which showed him the power of painting on a large scale. Pollock had a more narrative style and subject matter, influenced by the American Regionalism of his mentor, Thomas Hart Benton. Pollock’s 1934 work Going West is representative of his early career, with its heroic, frontier subject in the spirit of Benton’s Regionalism and swirling forms reminiscent of El Greco and Van Gogh. It is an image of a pioneer journeying westward. It may have come from a family photo of a bridge in Cody, Wyoming, Pollock’s birthplace.
In the 1940s, Pollock found the means of articulating the unconscious in Surrealism. He abandoned the symbolic imagery of his early works and experimented with more abstract means of expression, moving a step closer to his famous drip technique. Full Fathom Five appeared in 1947, one of Pollock’s first works to display his signature style.[7]
3 Mark Rothko (1903–1970)
Born Marcus Rothkovich in what is now Latvia, Mark Rothko immigrated with his family to the U.S. to escape antisemitic persecution. He began painting in 1925, and by the 1930s, Rothko was under the influence of Expressionism, characterized by stifling urban scenes rendered in acidic colors.
Depicting social issues realistically was popular during the Depression, and Rothko’s Entrance to Subway is representative of the genre, capturing the isolation of city life. Rothko, however, toned down the strict realism and opted to use color to evoke mood and emotion, making it more Impressionistic.
In the 1940s, Rothko dabbled in Surrealism before making a revolutionary shift to abandoning figures and forms in his paintings and applying pure color to express emotion. The large rectangular forms hovering over a field of soft, luminous color for which Rothko will forever be associated is called Colorfield Painting. It is meant to overwhelm the viewer and lift them to a transcendental experience. “The people who weep before my pictures are having the same religious experience I had when I painted them. And if you, as you say, are moved only by their color relationships, then you miss the point,” Rothko said.
To critics of Rothko’s work, they were “a daub” and the “work of a house painter, not an artist.” Yet his paintings fetch some of the highest prices in the art world, as in 2012 when Orange, Red and Yellow (1961) sold for $86.9 million at Christie’s New York.[8]
2 Pablo Picasso (1881–1973)
By age eight, Pablo Picasso had already learned to paint in oils. When he officially began his career in his teens, Picasso was a realist, employing colors taken from life and applied with naturalistic brushstrokes to depict everyday subjects, especially portraits and religious themes.
Picasso maintained his realist style throughout the 1890s. By the end of the decade, however, he became interested in a more freeform, avant-garde style. “The world today doesn’t make sense,” Picasso said, “so why should I paint pictures that do?” A close friend’s suicide drove him to depression, and his art took on a cold, somber, monochromatic bluish hue. This “Blue Period” was characterized by themes such as people living in poverty or despair.
Picasso’s gloom soon lifted, and by 1904, he entered his “Rose Period.” His art transformed into warmer colors depicting subjects like harlequins, acrobats, and circus performers. Next, Picasso became fascinated with Primitivism, which was based on African art. In his “African Period,” Picasso depicted figures in a more abstract fashion inspired by African masks. This tendency to abstraction led Picasso to the style he is famous for: Cubism.
Monochromatic, topsy-turvy geometric forms depicting a subject at multiple angles all at once dominate Picasso’s early art of this period. Later, his pieces became polychromatic, with a simplicity inspired by collage art. After briefly returning to naturalistic painting in the first half of the 1920s in his flirtation with Neoclassicism, Picasso tried Surrealism with its dreamlike depictions, twisted geometric forms, skewed perspective, and bright palette.
Until his death in 1973, Picasso continued to produce works with an eclectic mix of styles that influenced him throughout his life.[9]
1 Salvador Dali (1904–1989)
The most famous Surrealist in art history, Salvador Dali, began as an Impressionist, showing a talent for capturing the nuances of light and shadow in the Catalan landscapes of his childhood in his early works. “Every day I realize more and more how difficult art is… but also every day I rejoice and like it. I keep on admiring the great French Impressionists, Monet, Degas, and Renoir. I wish they would become the strongest guiding forces in my life,” the 15-year-old Dali wrote in his diary.
It was not to be so. In 1927, Dali made a sudden turnaround. “Impressionism is a pictorial trend that is completely dead. That is to say, it has passed, like all ancient art, into history,” he wrote. He had begun studying the psychoanalytic theories of Sigmund Freud, the metaphysical paintings of Giorgio de Chirico, and the Surrealism of Joan Miro. Dali became fascinated with using psychoanalytic methods to explore the unconscious for imagery he could translate into art.
From then on, Surrealism would define Dali’s works in their reinterpretation of reality and distortion of perception. He practiced automatism, turning over conscious control of the creative process to his unconscious and intuition.
In the 1930s, Dali took this practice up a notch by tapping into his subconscious through systematic irrational thought and a self-induced paranoid state. The resulting “hand-painted dream photograph” he would paint, Dali believed, would be universally understood since unconscious experience is accessible to everyone.[10]