When art went Whaam! American painter Roy Lichtenstein (1923–1997) pioneered a new epoch in American art, bursting onto a scene dominated by Abstract Expressionism in late 1950s New York and defining a new art vocabulary for a new era....

Pierre Koenig’s modern materials There are few images of 20th-century architecture more iconic than the nighttime view of Case Study House #22. At its eagle’s nest promontory above Los Angeles, the building is a vision of streamlined glass and steel, its slick lines echoing the twinkling city boulevards below....

The life and work of Glasgow School pioneer Charles Rennie Mackintosh Scottish architect, designer, and painter Charles Rennie Mackintosh (1868-1928) was one of the earliest pioneers of modern architecture and design....

Louis Isadore Kahn and a luminous modernist language Louis Isadore Kahn (1901-1974) treated each building like a temple....

Yves Klein, the artist who owned ultramarine In the mid-1950s, Yves Klein (1928–1962) declared that “a new world calls for a new man....

The charge of 20th-century expressionism Although it only lasted three turbulent years, the afterburn of the Blaue Reiter (1911-1914) movement exerted a tremendous influence on the development of modern European art....

The unique El Greco vision To his contemporaries in late 16th-century Venice, El Greco (1541­-1614) was a contrary fellow, an innate artist blessed with extraordinary talent, but stubborn in the pursuit of his own path....

Changing the course of 20th-century art When is a urinal no longer a urinal? When Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968) declared it to be art. The uproar that greeted the French artist\"s Fountain (1917), a porcelain urinal installed in a gallery, sent shock waves through the art world establishment that reverberate right through to today....

Fernando Botero\"s fulsome and frolicking forms Fernando Botero is an artist with his own style. For more than six decades, the Colombian\"s \\\"Boterismo\\\" technique has captured collectors, institutions, and public spaces worldwide with a unique, fleshy, overblown approach to the human body....

William Morris (1834-1896) was one of the greatest creative figures of the 19th century. As a visionary designer, as well as a manufacturer, writer, artist, and socialist activist, he pioneered the Arts and Crafts movement of the Victorian era, and left an extraordinary influence on architecture, textile, and interior design....

Enigmatic and ambiguous in its role as both setting and subject, the landscape has been one of the most important genres in painting for centuries....

With his geometric structures perched upon the hillsides, beaches, and deserts of California, John Lautner (1911-1994) was behind some of the most striking and innovative architectural designs in mid-20th-century America....

While some architects have a signature style, Renzo Piano seeks to apply coherent ideas to extraordinarily different projects. His buildings impress as much for their individual impact as for their diversity of scale, material, and form....

Italian-born Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni (1475-1564) was a tormented, prodigiously talented, and God-fearing Renaissance man. His manifold achievements in painting, sculpture, architecture, poetry, and engineering combined body, spirit, and God into visionary masterpieces that changed art history forever....

The onset of Expressionism In the German city of Dresden on June 7, 1905, the foundation of the Die Brucke artists’ group (1905–1913) is widely regarded as the birth of Expressionism....