On this Day

Born January 23 1920, Perlmutter referred to himself as an abstract realist, although this appears to combine two seemingly irreconcilable artistic styles. His works were typically built around recognizable urban scenes, such as railroad tracks, urban crowds and buildings or bridges. He typically overlaid his work with busy linear forms, often in bright colors – […]

Born 9 January 1900 in New Jersey, Mattei was a painter of primitive landscapes, primarily of Alaska and northern US states. Little known, he sold most of his work through a small gallery in his home town of Ogunquit, Maine. This is: Perkins Cove.

Born January 6, 1889 in Ukraine, Louis Ritman was an American impressionist painter. He is best known for his paintings of women. He moved with his family to Chicago around 1900 and studied at the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts before moving to the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. His favourite subject was the female

Born January 4 1869 in Illinois, Gearhart was an American printmaker and watercolorist. She was known for her boldly drawn and colored American landscapes, typically woodcut or linocut prints featuring California’s coasts and mountains. She worked in a traditional Japanese relief-printing method, being one of the first artists to bring this technique to Europe and

Born Dec 29 1932 in New York State, Hinman is an artist and sometime professional baseball player. After his artistic training, he served in the army for two years and then taught mechanical drawing. From here he combined these skills and specialized his artistic talents, focusing on abstract representation of 3D shapes on canvas. Using

Born 8 December 1922 in Berlin, Freud, grandson of Sigmund, became known as one of the foremost British portrait painters of the 20th Century. Early in his career, he was influenced by surrealism, but later, starker, paintings tended towards realism. Words like “sombre”, “unsettling” and “discomforting” are often used when describing his works. He worked

Born 4 Dec 1866 (according to the Julian calendar that the Russians were using at the time) in Moscow, Kandinsky claimed to be the first abstract painter, with this work, Composition V. It’s viewable in the MoMA in New York. His Blue Rider painting had already showed the direction he would later take, and he

Born 2 Dec 1859 in Paris, Seurat is known as the founder of pointillism and used this trademark style to great effect. His paintings, Sunday Afternoon at Grand Jatte and Bathers are the best known of his works, but over 200 paintings are known to exist. Seurat took a scientific approach to his art, believing

Born Nov 21 1898 in Lessines, Belgium, Magritte is well known as a thought-provoking surrealist, and in particular for his pipe that is not a pipe. This 1962 work is appropriate for our modern world and is entitled: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” – George Santayana, The Life of Reason, 1905.