Who is Who in Fine Art

Dutch Post-Impressionist painter who produced over 2,000 works in a decade of intense activity before his death at 37 — the most productive and transformative decade in the history of painting. His letters to his brother Theo are among the greatest documents of artistic self-examination in any language: precise, passionate, and philosophically serious about what colour can do that words cannot. He argued that colour carried emotional truth directly, without the mediation of representation, and his paintings — The Starry Night, the Sunflowers series, the wheat fields, the self-portraits — enact this argument rather than stating it. He sold one painting in his lifetime.

Can help you study: The theory and practice of colour in painting, the Post-Impressionist movement, the relationship between mental life and artistic production, the letters to Theo as a document of artistic thinking, and the argument that emotional truth can be carried by purely visual means.

Russian-German painter and theorist who, around 1910, made the first completely abstract paintings — compositions of colour and form answering to inner necessity rather than external appearances. His theoretical writings, especially Concerning the Spiritual in Art and Point and Line to Plane, gave abstraction its intellectual foundations. A Bauhaus master whose teaching linked painting to music, mathematics, and emotion. Cross-posted from Das Bauhaus.

Can help you study: The origins of abstract art, Kandinsky’s colour and form theory, Concerning the Spiritual in Art, the relationship between painting and music, and the Bauhaus teaching of visual fundamentals.

Swiss-German artist whose work is almost unclassifiable — surreal, expressionist, abstract, and childlike all at once — and whose Pedagogical Sketchbook and Paul Klee Notebooks are among the richest accounts of how visual art thinks. His Bauhaus teaching treated drawing as the movement of a point through space: line as the trace of a journey. Cross-posted from Das Bauhaus.

Can help you study: Paul Klee’s visual theory and the Pedagogical Sketchbook, drawing as movement, the relationship between line and thought, colour as emotional structure, and how to think with images.

Bauhaus master who taught that a colour is never seen in isolation but always relative to its context, and spent decades proving it in his Homage to the Square series. His Interaction of Color is the most rigorous and perceptually honest account of colour in the history of art education. Cross-posted from Das Bauhaus.

Can help you study: The relative nature of colour perception, Albers’s Interaction of Color, the Homage to the Square, and the disciplined, empirical study of seeing.

German artist and choreographer who led the Bauhaus stage workshop and made the dancer into an abstract figure inhabiting geometric space. His Triadic Ballet places costumed figures — padded, extended, geometricised — in mathematically defined sequences. He sought to understand the human body in terms of the laws of space. Cross-posted from Das Bauhaus.

Can help you study: The Triadic Ballet and Bauhaus theatre, the human figure as geometric form, dance and spatial analysis, the staging of abstraction, and Schlemmer’s theory of the body in space.

Painter, engraver, and satirist. Hogarth invented the moral narrative in paint — sequential pictures that tell a story of human folly, from A Harlot's Progress to A Rake's Progress to Marriage A-la-Mode. His Analysis of Beauty (1753) proposed a serpentine Line of Beauty. Soane owned the original paintings of A Rake's Progress.

Can help you study: Moral narrative in art, 18th-century London, engraving and printmaking, satirical art, the Analysis of Beauty, sequential visual storytelling.