Art
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Marina Abramović *XI 30 1946 — The Life You Give
Marina Abramović, born November 30, 1946, in Belgrade, Yugoslavia [now in Serbia]), is a performance artist known for works that dramatically tested the endurance and limitations of her own body and mind. Abramović was raised in Yugoslavia by parents who fought as Partisans in World War II and were later employed in the communist government…
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Claude Monet *XI 14 1840 — The Life You Give
Oscar-Claude Monet, born November 14, 1840, in Paris, France, is the painter who became the initiator, leader, and unswerving advocate of the Impressionist style. In his mature works, Monet developed his method of producing repeated studies of the same motif in series, changing canvases with the light or as his interest shifted. These series were…
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Francis Bacon *X 28 1909 — The Life You Give
Francis Bacon, born October 28, 1909, Dublin, Ireland, is the painter whose powerful, predominantly figural images express isolation, brutality, and terror. The son of a racehorse trainer, Bacon was educated mostly by private tutors at home until his parents banished him at age 16, allegedly for pursuing his homosexual leanings. Self-taught as an artist, he…
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Alberto Giacometti *X 10 1901 – The Life You Give
Alberto Giacometti, born October 10, 1901, in Borgonovo, Switzerland, is the sculptor and painter, best known for his attenuated sculptures of solitary figures. His work has been compared to that of the existentialists in literature. Giacometti displayed precocious talent and was much encouraged by his father, Giovanni, a Post-Impressionist painter, and by his godfather, Cuno…
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Mark Rothko * IX 25 1903 — The Life You Give
Mark Rothko, born September 25, 1903, in Dvinsk, Russian Empire [now Daugavpils, Latvia], is the painter whose works introduced contemplative introspection into the melodramatic post-World War II Abstract Expressionist school. His use of color as the sole means of expression led to the development of Color Field Painting. Early life and education Rothko was born…
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Jenny Holzer *VII 29 1950 — The Life You Give
Jenny Holzer was born in 1950 in Gallipolis, Ohio. She received a BFA in printmaking and painting from Ohio University, Athens, Ohio, in 1972, and an MFA in painting from the Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, in 1977. Holzer then moved to New York and enrolled in the Independent Study Program at the Whitney…
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Lovis Corinth *VII 21 1858 — The Life You Give
Lovis Corinth, born Franz Heinrich Louis on July 21, 1858, in Tapiau, East Prussia [now Gvardeysk, Russia], is the German painter known for his dramatic figurative and landscape paintings. Corinth underwent a lengthy period of academic artistic training that began in 1876, when he enrolled at the Academy of Königsberg. He studied in Munich from…
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Kurt Schwitters *VI 20 1887 — Das Leben, das Du gibst / The Life You Give
Kurt Schwitters, born June 20, 1887, in Hannover, Germany, is the Dada artist and poet, best known for his collages and relief constructions. Soon after World War I Schwitters was attracted by the emerging Dada school, a nihilistic literary and artistic movement dedicated to the destruction of existing aesthetic values. Denied membership in the Berlin…
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Albrecht Dürer *V 21 1471 — The Life You Give
Albrecht Dürer, born May 21, 1471, in the Imperial Free City of Nürnberg, Germany, is the painter and printmaker generally regarded as the greatest German Renaissance artist. His vast body of work includes altarpieces and religious works, numerous portraits and self-portraits, and copper engravings. His woodcuts, such as the Apocalypse series (1498), retain a more…
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Joseph Beuys *V 12 1921 — The Life You Give
Joseph Beuys was born in Krefeld, a small city in northwest Germany. He was an only child, to the merchant Josef Jakob Beuys and his wife Johanna Maria Margarete Hulsermann. The two were a devout Catholic couple of the northern Rhine-Westphalian middle-class. Just months after Beuys’s birth, the family moved south to the industrial town…
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Max Ernst *IV 2 1891 — The Life You Give
Max Ernst, born Maximilian Ethelbert Ernst, on April 2 1891, in Brühl, Germany, was painter, sculptor, graphic artist, and poet. A key member of first Dada and then Surrealism in Europe in the 1910s and 1920s, Max Ernst used a variety of mediums—painting, collage, printmaking, sculpture, and various unconventional drawing methods—to give visual form to…
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Agnes Martin *III 22 1912 — The Life You Give
Agnes Martin, born March 22 1912, in Macklin, Saskatchewan, Canada, is known as a painter. She moved to the U.S. in 1931 and became a U.S. citizen in 1950. She studied at Columbia University and taught at the University of New Mexico. In 1958 she had her first solo exhibition. Martin was a prominent exponent…
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Anselm Kiefer *III 8 1945 — The Life You Give
Anselm Kiefer, born March 8, 1945, in Donaueschingen, Germany, is the painter who became one of the most prominent figures in the Neo-Expressionist art movement of the late 20th century. Kiefer abandoned his law studies at the University of Freiburg in 1966 to pursue art. He subsequently studied at art academies in Freiburg, Karlsruhe, and…
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Édouard Manet *I 23 1832 — The Life you Give
Edouard Manet’s last major work was the Bar at the Folies Bergere, exhibited at the Salon in 1882 (the year before Manet’s death). Manet’s Luncheon on the Grass (Dejuner sur l’herbe) was shown at the Salon de Refuses in 1863. Like Olympia, shown two years later, it was roundly rejected by art critics and the…
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Eva Hesse *I 11 1936 — The Life You Give
Eva Hesse created innovative sculptural forms using unconventional materials such as latex and fiberglass and gave minimal art organic, emotional, and kinetic features. She scorned good taste and the decorative, creating sculptures out of repeated units which embodied opposite extremes. These extremes were born from the extremes of her own life. Hesse is recognized as…














