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Perhaps one of the most striking Expressionist painters in all of history, Edvard Munch was a Norwegian Symbolist painter who lived from 1863 to 1944.  He began painting in 1880 after leaving engineering school and in 1881, he enrolled in the Royal School of Art and Design of Kristiania.  While he studied under the influence of Post-Impressionists, Munch felt that the style wasn’t very representative of his reasons for painting.  Instead, he focused more on creating situations within his paintings which were filled with emotional content and expressive imagery.

His most famous painting, The Scream, was painted in 1893.  It is a good representation of his classic style of work, which focuses more on a shallow backdrop which is a minimal space for his frontal figures to grab attention.  Munch wanted to produce convincing images depicting states of mind and psychological conditions.  The characters in his works of art often embody a certain psychological condition, appearing more symbolic than realistic.

In the late 1930s, the Nazi occupation of Germany declared much of Munch’s work to be degenerate and they removed it from German museums.  This offended Munch deeply, as he felt that he had close ties to Germany throughout his youth.  He retired to Oslo and spend the rest of his life there, producing art up to his death in 1944.

Frida Kahlo is one of the most recognized painters of the modern world. She is an icon to the feminist movement and to women, even today because of the strength, love, and compassion she showed throughout her life.

She was born in Coyoacan in 1907, in Mexico City. At the age of 6 she was hit with the terribly debilitating disease of polio, and this disease severely affected  one of her legs, but she did not allow this to stop her.  She wanted to study medicine but in 1925 she was in a terrible accident.  While recovering, she began to paint the reflections of her physical and mental pain.  She is considered one of the best surrealist painters of her time and she expresses both depression and happiness.  Her themes reflect her pain, her happiness, her obsession for children, and the native folklore of her country. She once wrote “Whether my paintings are an honest expression of my being. My themes reflect my feelings, my mood swings, the profound actions that life has produced in me.”

She was married to Diego Rivera the famous Mexican muralist in 1929 and the relationship, although non conventional, was extremely passionate. Diego was everything to Frida, her lover, her universe and her man.  She became internationally known while travelling to New York with Diego and a modern day icon to the modern day woman. A woman who was strong and yet sensitive, she expressed who she was and what she felt through her paintings.

Widely regarded to be one of the leading influences in the world of Pop Art, Roy Lichtenstein was a famous artist who helped to usher in the Pop Art period of the Modern Art movement.  His works were often incredibly stylistic, based on different panels, which he took from comic books and adapted into his paintings.  Lichtenstein felt that his work was not representative of American art, however, but was of a more industrial nature.  One of his aims was to find art where it already existed in the world and if the piece was particularly striking to him, to reproduce it through his own eyes, giving it his own interpretation and vision.  There are many critics out there who feel that Lichtenstein merely copied works of other artists, but this is simply not true.  By representing the image through his own eyes, with his own interpretation, Roy Lichtenstein makes a commentary on what exactly it is in art that speaks to us.

Born in New York City in 1923, Lichtenstein was exposed to art during his school years, at an early phase.  He took a quick interest and studied art all through his early school years.  He went to Ohio State University for its studio courses in fine arts, pausing partway through his studies to serve in the Army during World War II and after.  Later, upon graduation, he was granted an MFA and began teaching off and on, while working as a painter experimenting in Cubism, Expressionism, and Abstract Expressionism.

In 1960, he began to teach at Rutgers University and a fellow professor ignited his interest in Pop Art.  Lichtenstein began to make his paintings, using images that he derived from cartoons and commercial advertising.  His artworks as well as his technique are very expressive, as Lichtenstein often used Benday Dots to express color.  His paintings have since become highly recognizable, as they make bold statements about Pop Culture, often presenting their ideas through the image of pulp comic art.

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Paul Cézanne was considered the father of modern art. His work laid the foundations for the transition of art from the nineteenth to the twentieth century. During his life, Cezanne was a painter who was ignored by the public art world. He had few friends and, until 1895, presented his paintings only occasionally. He was appreciated only by a few impressionists and at the end of his life; he was also recognized by the new generations.

He was born in France part of a great influential family. He received a large inheritance, which kept him from having financial troubles while he pursued his chosen career in painting.

He left for Paris from Aix where he met other Impressionists. At the beginning of his career, he was interested on landscape paintings, which were painted large and heavy in very imaginative ways. However, his interest in working from direct observation evolved into a painting style with great impact on the influence to the Impressionists of his time because of the simplification of geometry and optical phenomenal effect of his arts to the viewers. His work bridged the Impressionism arts of the 19th century and the 20th century’s.

His works showed a great sense of mastery. The brushstrokes were highly recognizable; use of small strokes of the brush and color planes were created forming complex fields on the eye and the observed art in his paintings. Cézanne exerted study on geometry in his artworks.

Cézanne expressed an interest in the representation of contemporary life, painting the world as close as

possible to what he actually viewed in it, without worrying about idealizations, thematic or an involvement in style. He fought to develop an observation of the real world seen through the most accurate method of representing himself in his paintings.

Still Life paintings, watercolors and numerous self-portraits were among his many other works. Paul Cézanne died of pneumonia and his remains were buried in Aix-en-Provence in France. He lived from 1839 to 1906.

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Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijin, is one of the greatest painters in art history and probably the most important painter in Dutch history. He was an artist that stylized to perfection the Baroque art movement.  He became especially well know for his portrait work.

In his religious and portrait work he uses every aspect to portray his classic style and Baroque realism, which was the popular movement of the time. But his religious work is noted for the humanity and empathy he showed all human beings. This emotional empathy showed through in all of his biblical themed work. During his lifetime as a painter, he not only produced some of the most important pieces we have of the period, but he also taught every important Dutch painter during his twenty year height as a painter.

He was born in 1606, the ninth child to a miller and a baker’s daughter.  As a youth he became apprenticed to a Leiden history painter and later with Pieter Lastman in Amsterdam. After he left his apprenticeship, he opened his own studio in 1624 and in 1627 he began to accept students.

Big commissions did not begin to come in for him until 1629, when he was discovered by a statesman named Constantijn Huygens, who began to bring him important commissions in portraiture.  In 1631 he moved to Amsterdam, and quickly became well known. Among one of his most moving works was the painting he did of his wife, on her death bed in 1642.

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When people have a weak sense of what they like or dislike in as far as art, and these people tend to go with fads, styles, popularity or color schemes, this is known as the meme factor. The meme effect can take away an individuals’ true taste and can be so powerful that even true art connoisseurs decide that any art piece and loves anything and everything.  This is the inability to decide between a piece of work that is appealing and one that is not. This is where the fads, fashions, and symbols begin and true art appreciation ends.

This creates the subjectivity of art, where the greatness and liking of art have nothing to do with whether the piece is actually good, but with popularity, consensus, and the market, all facets that are moldable in our society.

The truth is that famous artists, musicians, novelists, painters who have created a large quantity of art work , will in all likelihood create a great deal of work that is not up to par, after all it is illogical to think that all of their work will be masterpieces.

The meme factor explains why artists such as Van Gogh, were not appreciated at all at certain times. Today they are considered among the best artists of humankind.  It is interesting to see that during his lifetime, Van Gogh sold only one painting, while today, his painting Portrait of Dr. Gachet (1905) has sold by as much as 82,5 million dollars.

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Edward Hicks was a famous American Folk art painter that took his inspiration from stories, mostly biblical stories, but many of local stories, farms and landscapes of New York and Pennsylvannia. Hicks was a Quaker and believed in the prophecy of Isaiah, and many of his paintings reflect that.  His paintings reflect justice and gentleness of men and beasts, just as prophesied.

What is strange, that as well known as his paintings became, art was only secondary to Hicks. He considered himself more of a preacher than an artist and only started painting late in life.  He started painting when he was mid aged and at one point almost thought that it was contrary to his religion, but at the same time he felt that it brought meaning to his life.  When he passed away, those that mourned him mourned him as a preacher, and not as a pastor. It wasn’t until much later that his art became sought after by great collectors. This is a man that took his inspiration from the life around him, from his natural surroundings and from his strong religious beliefs.

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Another famous artist who was inspired by his own imagination and inner thoughts was Rene Magritte. He was born into a middle class family, his father, a tailor, and his mother a milliner.

Rene Magritte was a Belgian artist, born at the end of the 19th century. He began to draw in 1910 when he began to take private art classes. When he was 12 his mother committed suicide, and many of his first paintings, a series of paintings of people with cloths obscuring their faces, may have been influenced from his witnessing the retrieval of his dead mothers body from the river.

In 1927 he had his first surreal exhibit and was criticized terribly for it. His failure caused him to move to Paris where he continued to show his paintings.

As it occurs in many other cases, most of the interest in his work did not occur until some time after his death. His work is mostly fantasy based, but has a somber mood and style to it. It is said that his work may have influenced the Pop, conceptual, and minimalist art movements. His work showed with younger contemporaries who later took on the fauvist and pop style.

A known French painter born in 1864, Henri Marie Raymond de Toulouse-Lautrec Monfa was the firstborn in an aristocratic family in France. He suffered different illnesses which affected him greatly physically. His legs retained its child-like size but his torso developed to an adult-size. His inability to participate in many activities that others enjoyed led Toulouse-Lautrec to be involved in art. He was an important Impressionist painter, lithographer and art nouveau illustrator.

He was unable to maintain a stable relationship with women, due to his many insecurities. These insecurities and frustrations made Toulousse Lautrec develop in painting a way of escaping from reality, in a similar way as did Gauguin or Van Gogh.

Lautrec would become the painter of modernity, abandoning conventional style to form part of Post Impressionism. Night Scenes and cartoon-like portraits of the people of the night became his favourite painting motifs. He was drawn to the Bohemian lifestyle in Paris in the area of Montmartre. He painted a series of posters for Moulin Rouge and other nightclubs where he was held in a very special seat in the cabaret. He stayed in brothels for weeks where he painted the prostitutes as his models in their natural environment.

In less than 20 years of career, Toulouse-Lautrec made 363 prints and posters, 275 watercolors and 737 canvases. Included in his works were 5,084 drawings, ceramics, glassworks and many lost works. He was known along with Cézanne, Van Gogh and Gauguin for Impressionist arts. He was known for the excellent way he captured people in their environment, in which they were given individuality in his artworks. They were dispassionate and sympathetic in nature at the same time, as described. His style gave emphasis on contour and linear. Long thin brushstrokes were applied in his paintings.

Toulouse-Lautrec was not admitted in the Salon of Paris since his Works of art were considered unacceptable. This made him look for alternative ways of showing his art to the public, so the main public could get to know his Works of art. He even used newspapers. His Works were exposed either in solitary, or with the groups, or with his friends, such as Van Gogh.

His lifestyle led him to alcoholism and to his admission in a sanatorium. Complications of both alcoholism and syphilis were the cause of his death at Malformé, the family estate. He died before he reached his 37th birthday and he was buried in Verdelais, Gironde, near his birthplace in France.

Synthetism was a style of art within post-impressionism that Paul Gaugin favored in 1890. It was his belief that visuals from the memory reproduced in painting are called art. A style of painting wherein artworks produced from remembered pictures was integrated, simplified, and made. Cloisonnism was also a used style; colored flat areas outlined with black lines are its main qualities of producing the art.

Synthetism implied a radical change from Impressionism. In Synthetism planear surfaces became important. Also the contour of the figures (silhouette) was important and they were often emphasized in the paintings

In Synthesism, what became important to paint is the idea that the painter has after a given experience. The artist’s memory takes away the superfluous part and retains only the essence. This way, it is achieved the synthesis of shape and colour. The important thing is how the image is remembered, not so much how it really looks like.

Gauguin is a great example of Synthesism. He represents primitivism and bohemian style. He is the perfect example of an artist who sought the necessity to unify art and life. Gauguin abandoned western civilization (he was a stock agent) in search of the primitive art and civilization. He went to live to Tahiti. He valued this art not so much for being different, but especially for its authenticity. He was in a constant search of himself. He found himself and peace in Tahiti.