20 articles
Arshile Gorky
Arshile Gorky, born Vostanik Manoug Adoian (1904 to 1948), was an Armenian-born American painter who linked European surrealism with abstract expressionism, becoming a pivotal figure in American modernism.
Arthur Dove
Arthur Dove (Arthur Garfield Dove, 1880–1946) was an American painter and collagist, the first twentieth-century American artist to make purely abstract paintings, exhibiting nonobjective pastels at Alfred Stieglitz's 291 gallery in 1912.
Beauford Delaney
Beauford Delaney (1901–1979) was an American modernist painter from Knoxville, Tennessee, known for pastel portraits of prominent African Americans, Greenwich Village street scenes, and luminous yellow abstractions.
Ben Shahn
Ben Shahn (1898–1969) was a Lithuanian-born American painter, muralist, and photographer, a leading Social Realist who depicted workers and social injustice from the Great Depression onward.
Bill Traylor
Bill Traylor was an African American self-taught artist, born into slavery in Alabama, who made over 1,000 drawings and paintings beginning around 1939 at about age 85.
Charles Burchfield
Charles Burchfield (1893–1967) was an American painter best known for watercolor landscapes of nature scenes and small-town and industrial America, honored with the first one-person show at MoMA in 1930.
Charles Demuth
Charles Demuth was an American painter from Lancaster, Pennsylvania, known for watercolors and for Precisionism, with works including My Egypt and I Saw the Figure 5 in Gold.
Charles Sheeler
Charles Sheeler was an American painter and photographer whose sharply defined, geometric images of barns, skyscrapers, and factories made him a central figure of the Precisionist movement.
Charles White (artist)
Charles Wilbert White (1918–1979) was an American artist whose figurative drawings and prints depicted African American history, labor, and dignity over a four-decade career in Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles.
Florine Stettheimer
Florine Stettheimer was an American painter, poet, and theatrical designer who chronicled Jazz Age New York and designed the sets for Gertrude Stein's opera Four Saints in Three Acts.
John Marin
John Marin (1870–1953) was an early American modernist painter and etcher known for semi-abstract views of Manhattan and Maine, and received a MoMA retrospective in 1936.
John Steuart Curry
John Steuart Curry was an American painter and muralist of the 1930s Regionalist movement, alongside Thomas Hart Benton and Grant Wood, known for Tragic Prelude in the Kansas State Capitol.
Mark Tobey
Mark Tobey (1890–1976) was an American abstract painter known for "white writing," a technique of dense calligraphic lines developed from his study of East Asian calligraphy.
Marsden Hartley
Marsden Hartley (1877–1943) was an American Modernist painter, poet, and essayist born in Lewiston, Maine, whose Berlin War Motifs fused Synthetic Cubism with German Expressionist color.
Milton Avery
Milton Avery (1885–1965) was an American painter of figural, genre, and landscape subjects in simplified forms and flat color, influencing Rothko and Color Field painters.
Oscar Howe
Oscar Howe, known to his people as Mazuha Hokshina, was a Yanktonai Dakota painter from South Dakota whose 1958 letter challenging defined "Indian art" opened the field to individual expression.
Pablita Velarde
Pablita Velarde, whose Tewa name Tse Tsan means "Golden Dawn," was a Tewa painter from Santa Clara Pueblo known for paintings of Pueblo life made with hand-ground earth pigments.
Robert Henri
Robert Henri, born Robert Henry Cozad, was an American painter and teacher who led the Ashcan School and organized the independent 1908 exhibition of The Eight.
Rockwell Kent
Rockwell Kent (1882–1971) was an American painter, printmaker, and illustrator known for stark landscapes of Newfoundland, Alaska, and Greenland and his celebrated woodcut-illustrated 1930 edition of Moby Dick.
Yasuo Kuniyoshi
Yasuo Kuniyoshi (国吉康雄, 1889 to 1953) was a Japanese-born painter who spent his career in New York and became a leading figure of American modernism.