President Ford didn’t actually say “Drop Dead” to the city of New York in 1975, but it didn’t matter—the city was suffering, and there wasn’t going to be much help from the federal government. In the Bronx, landlords burned down their own buildings for insurance money, basic utilities and services suffered as city workers went on strike, and crime and police corruption were rampant. But none of this precluded artists from living and working in the city and ultimately creating art that showcased both the city’s heaven and hell.

1. Thomas Struth

A scholarship brought Thomas Struth to New York in December 1977, and he called it “a life changing experience.” He found the city “very intimidating and scary. For the first two weeks, I could hardly speak, I was so shocked by it.” With money from his parents to purchase equipment, he set out with his 5×7 camera to “photograph the streets, and hope that they might reveal their nature.” Ruefully, on the first day, he was “immediately attacked by homeless, drunk guys.” He also recalled: “I had no money for taxis, so I carried everything by foot and on the subway.”

Traveling the length and width of the island, Struth captured street scenes from the Financial District to Harlem, Chelsea to the United Nations Plaza. The images were shot in the early morning to avoid sharp contrasts between shadow and light, infusing them with a documentary, dispassionate quality. Crosby Street, SoHo, New York is one of the most iconic in the series, its depiction of dereliction striking to contemporary viewers used to the area’s luxury boutiques and expensive restaurants.

2. David Wojnarowicz

David Wojnarowicz was drawn to the Symbolist poet Arthur Rimbaud, seeing himself in the poet’s impassioned pursuit of an art that infused all aspects of one’s life. Other similarities are even more striking: both men were openly gay, experienced periods of impoverishment and vagrancy, were enfants terribles of their respective scenes of New York and Paris, and died tragically at the same age of 37.

Wojnarowciz turned his interest into art. The series Rimbaud in New York, first printed in Soho Weekly News in 1980, encompasses several hundred photographs. In each, a slender male figure (Wojnarowicz called on several friends to model for him while he remained behind his borrowed camera) with a paper mask of Rimbaud affixed to his head appears in both public and private spaces of the city. The images are liberating in their presentation of queerness, but the city life they depict is also often lonely or discomfiting.

Rimbaud shoots up, has sex, holds a gun to his head, haunts the gay cruising grounds of the West Side Piers, and stands in dark shadows, isolated and always wearing the same inscrutable expression. In the piece above, Rimbaud is in Times Square. In the 1970s and 1980s, the area was far from the Disneyfied playground for tourists and theatergoers that it is today. It was sordid and sketchy, filled with porn theaters, peep shows, video stores, and grungy diners. Rolling Stone called 42nd Street “the sleaziest block in America” in 1981, but for Wojnarowicz and other artists, it was a site of constant aesthetic fascination.

3. Camilo Jose Vergara

Camilo Jose Vergara Vergara arrived in New York from Chile at the beginning of the decade, enrolling in a sociology program at Columbia University in 1970. When he moved to New York, he gravitated toward Harlem, the South Bronx, and the Lower East Side, where he began taking photos that would eventually form the Old New York (1970-1973) series of which Duane Street is a part.

Vergara is perhaps best known for his Tracking Time series, in which he revisits the same places in a city—storefronts, residences, libraries, train stations—over the years, chronicling their evolution or erosion. He says: “I’m really interested in issues, what replaces what, what’s the thrust of things. Photographers don’t usually get at that—they want to show you one frozen image that you find amazing. For me, the more pictures the better.”

The Old New York series includes images of children playing, burnt-out cars and piles of debris, movie theaters and bodegas, painted brick walls, political posters, chatting neighbors, and vestiges of the built environment and modes of living that were quickly vanishing (in one photograph, a man is driving a horse and cart, seemingly his primary mode of conveyance. In another, the two World Trade Center towers are in the process of being built, looming over the older portions of the neighborhood). The series gives the viewers a look at a city undergoing a profound transformation, whether from the wrecking ball, patterns of immigration, city policies, or cultural shifts.

4. Tseng Kwong Chi

Tseng Kwong Chi was born in Hong Kong in 1950 and immigrated with his parents and sister to Vancouver, Canada. As a young man, he studied in Paris at the Academie Julian and eventually made his way to New York in 1978, settling in among the downtown art scene. In the city, Chi formed relationships with luminaries such as Andy Warhol, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and Julian Schnabel. He also became Keith Haring’s official photo-chronicler. Like too many other gay men in New York in the 1980s, Chi died young from complications due to AIDS.

Chi’s East Meets West series features the artist in black-and-white standing before iconic tourist sites such as Disneyland, the London Bridge, and the Grand Canyon. In New York, he posed before the Statue of Liberty, the World Trade Center towers, the Empire State Building, and the Brooklyn Bridge, all while wearing dark sunglasses and a classic Mao suit.

Even though he lived in the “grungy” part of New York, his photos showed the more glamorous places that still drew tourists (despite a 1975 NYPD-issued pamphlet entitled Welcome to Fear City: A Survival Guide for Visitors to New York). He genuinely celebrated the city’s famous historical, architectural, and cultural sites while offering a subtly humorous commentary on the relationship between insider/outsider.

5. Christy Rupp

In the summer of 1979, it seemed like rats ran the city of New York. A three-week strike by tugboat operators and another by apartment maintenance workers meant the streets were filled with rotting mountains of garbage. Over 130 buildings were declared menaces to public health, and the Board of Health Director warned of “a perilous increase in rodent and insect infestation.” Reports of higher rates of rat bites filled news reports. A woman was reportedly attacked by rats in downtown Manhattan one night, only escaping from the swarm by jumping into her car.

Christy Rupp, a young “eco-artist,” as she labeled herself, had officially settled in the city in the summer of 1977. During the sanitation strike, she was living on Fulton Street and saw firsthand how the conditions made by humans emboldened the rats to defend what they saw as their space.

In Rat Patrol, Rupp took one of the ubiquitous posters from a subway car sanitation ad, which featured a lifesize photo of a rat, disturbing facts about its behavior, and a concluding warning in bold that exhorted the viewer to “Starve a Rat Today” by being careful with their garbage. Rupp had the rat photo offset-printed and began, as she recalled, “pasting these up as a way to mark areas that were infested, so people could avoid walking through dangerous areas in which rats were defending their territories.” She did not want to “defend rats…[but] point out how we had created a habitat for them, and they would naturally occupy it.”

6. Fab Five Freddy

Fab Five Freddy, born Fred Braithwaite in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn, was one of the most revered street artists of the 1970s and 1980s, decorating walls and subway cars with his signature style. He became deeply interested in art in college, particularly admiring the Pop artists, many of whom he would soon become friends with. He said of Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat in 1991: “Andy was the biggest influence on me. I hung around with him as much as I could. For me and Jean-Michel [Basquiat], coming from where we were coming from, being young black males in this happening downtown scene, we were just operating on another planet, and Andy was it.”

Freddy’s most famous work is arguably the Campbell’s Soup train, which debuted in early 1980 and ran for several years. A collaboration with friend and fellow graffiti artist Lee Quinones, the train features eight soup cans, some referencing past art movements such as Dada and Pop Art, with others featuring versions of Freddy’s name. Lee and Freddy, along with a few friends helping spray, worked quickly in the night, racing against the dripping of the paint in the cold air, the fumes in the tunnel, and the ever-present threat of the train moving or the police finding them. Painting a subway car was a surefire way to get your work noticed. It was also a way to show that art did not need to be on a canvas to be art. It could be embedded in the fabric of the city itself.

7. Peter Hujar

By the 1970s, the West Side piers were crumbling, derelict, and dangerous. The diminishing of commercial shipping after WWII left them unused and prone to rot and decay. The collapse of a portion of the West Side Highway in 1973 further sealed them off from the rest of the city. But these modern ruins did not stay abandoned for long, as they attracted young people, many of them unhoused, as well as artists and gay men.

There, under the sun with the waters of the Hudson below them, men could sunbathe and carouse. In the dark, dank halls and holes of the pier edifices, they could cruise, fornicate, and watch. Art historian Douglas Crimp, who visited the piers in their heyday, remembered that “the abandoned and dilapidated industrial piers presented extraordinary opportunities for experimentation and mischief.”

It was a utopia of sorts in a period before AIDS, a site of sexual and personal liberation. David Wojnarowciz said of them: “What I loved about [the piers] was that they were about as far away from civilization as I could walk, and I really loved that sense of detachment. It was like sitting with the entire city at your back and looking across the river.” However, the piers were also dangerous, with criminals preying on people otherwise occupied and “gay bashers” spoiling for a fight—and, of course, the piers themselves were in many cases literally crumbling into the water.

Peter Hujar captured both the human visitors and the atrophying structures they frequented, finding a sordid beauty even amid the ruins. In Hallway, Canal Street Pier from 1983, the walls and roof peel away, and the floor is covered with debris, but the hallway and the doorways beckon with the promise of privacy. The light streaming from the open roof has an almost spiritual tone. Hujar’s photos are of a place that would not last much longer. Even beyond the obvious decay captured in the images, it is clear that this isolated, utopian space was not fated for forever.

8. Perla de Leon

While many parts of the city were suffering in the 1970s, the Bronx was a special case. Block after block, the borough was filled with crumbling and burned-out buildings, piles of debris, abandoned cars, and boarded-up windows. Whereas popular narratives of the time blamed its blight on the working-class, mostly Black and Brown, residents, it was the city’s “urban renewal” policies and greedy landlords who were responsible for the destruction.

The South Bronx was slated as an “Enterprise Zone,” meaning the city encouraged factories to move in and said they would give their owners tax incentives to do so. Normally, the destruction of buildings would be accomplished with wrecking balls and demo crews, but the city looked the other way as landlord-arsonists did the work instead. The Bronx was burning, as the common refrain went.

However, De Leon’s 1979-1980 photographic project of the Bronx, South Bronx Spirit, was not about the burning. She had grown up in Hamilton Heights, Harlem, and was drawn to the South Bronx while working with a grammar school as part of a grant program (she taught children pin-hole photography with shoe boxes since there was no equipment at the school). With her own camera, she captured the people who lived in the neighborhood, showing how the fires were not the defining feature of their existence.

She said in an interview: “Everyone has captured the fires as they would happen. It was always in the news. It didn’t interest me as much. You can see it, obviously, in the background and in the photographs, but I wanted to show more of the life that was there. I feel that my photographs capture the spirit of the kids. For me, it’s just resilience.”

9. Alvin Baltrop

Like Peter Hujar, Alvin Baltrop was a frequent perambulator of the piers. He had taken up photography as a young man. After a stint in the Navy during the Vietnam War, he made his way back to New York, where he had been born in 1948. As a queer man himself, the piers beckoned with their seemingly unfettered freedom. He purchased a moving truck and used it as a mobile developing lab and a place to live while photographing Pier 52.

His thousands of images captured the place’s allure as well as the pitfalls of this ruin on the outskirts of civilization—languid sunbathers in front of Gordon Matta-Clark’s Days End, a work of art that consisted of large cuts into the walls and ceilings of the pier; police standing over a dead body that had been fished out of the water; naked men embracing, posing, sleeping, and cruising; the piers themselves, rotting, crumbling, sinking into the river.

Baltrop did not attain the same sort of recognition as other chroniclers of the pier, his images often being seen as too inclined to the lewd or tawdry. It was not until after his death that his body of work emerged as a powerful and empathetic chronicle of gay life before AIDS decimated the community and of city spaces before they were cleaned up and homogenized.

Sergio Bessa of the Brooklyn Museum sees Baltrop’s work as “diaristic,” but “maybe unbeknownst to him, there was an idea of an archive, of documentation. I don’t know if at the time he was aware of that, but now you look back and you have this unbelievable archive of those piers.” Baltrop himself commented: “Although initially terrified of the piers, I began to take these photos as a voyeur [and] soon grew determined to preserve the frightening, mad, unbelievable, violent, and beautiful things that were going on at that time.”

10. Hiram Maristany

Hiram Maristany was born and raised in New York to parents who had migrated to the city from Puerto Rico. His beloved neighborhood was East Harlem, or El Barrio, and it was there as a young man that he met like-minded young activists and became part of the Young Lords Party. He remained an integral part of the Nuyorican (Puerto Ricans living in New York) political and cultural movement in the 1970s, lending his photography skills to chronicle the Garbage Offensive and the occupation of the First Spanish United Methodist Church. A founding member and eventually the director of El Museo del Barrio, Maristany was deeply committed to using his camera and his curatorial and community-organizing skills to celebrate the arts of his people.

His photographs are documentary in nature, capturing the everyday realities of life in El Barrio. The neighborhood was a poor one, and the images of it that tended to circulate in the media were often voyeuristic and one-dimensional. While Maristany wanted to show the difficulties of the neighborhood, he also wanted to show the real people who lived, played, and worked there.

Maristany said in 2021: “One of the things that I had to deal with as a young man was that all the images depicting Puerto Ricans were negative. We were either committing a crime or a crime was being perpetrated against us. We were always in handcuffs. Our sisters were depicted as teenage mothers—without any morals or ethics. I was very distressed and angry about it. I wanted to try and do something about it.”

Gustav Klimt was an Austrian painter who was one of the figureheads of the Vienna Secession. The artist is recognized today for his most famous works, such as The Kiss, which was painted in 1907-08 and is currently displayed in the Belvedere Palace in Vienna. A significant feature of Klimt’s works was the abundance of female figures portrayed, be it drawings of nudes or intricately finished oil paintings. In fact, women were often the primary subjects both in his paintings and drawings. Klimt painted women in depictions of religious and mythological narratives as well as in portraits, often with extensive ornamentation.

Gustav Klimt: The Painter of Women

In Gustav Klimt’s oeuvre, women appear in many forms—from erotic creatures to elite society ladies. Many of these compositions depict partially or fully nude women, as has been the tradition in Western art for centuries, but Klimt broke several conventions in terms of style and subject matter when depicting nude women. These works were made after a number of models who Klimt hired for his studio, who were paid a higher fee for their service than the usual rate. At the same time, the artist was known to have had intimate relationships with some of his models. The artist never married but was claimed to have fathered fourteen children.

The early 20th century was also a time when women’s role in society was changing. Women moved outside the domestic space and became more active in educational and professional spaces. In fact, many of Klimt’s models were professionals and relied on modeling to earn a living. At the same time, the rising popularity of the suffrage movement gave women space in the public and political spheres, which would not have gone unnoticed by artists like Klimt. His portrayal of women was thus influenced by this context wherein society was in a transitional state, holding on to old values while trying to embrace the new.

Women as Ornament: Klimt’s Golden Phase

Painting women with extravagant ornamentation was a common practice in fin-de-siècle Vienna. This style of painting was centered around decorative elements, as can be seen in Klimt’s employment of abstract patterns and designs. Being the son of a gold engraver, Klimt became renowned for his use of gold in paintings between 1901-1909, which is recognized as his Golden Phase. It became an important material for creating decorative paintings, and women in his works seemed gilded and glorious. It can be said that Klimt saw the female form as equivalent to decoration—he mostly painted decorative works, and his subjects were almost exclusively women. This has also led to arguments by feminist scholars that Klimt reduced the identity of the women he portrayed to their aesthetic value, particularly with certain works such as the Portrait of Adele Bloch Bauer I painted in 1907.

Adele Bloch-Bauer was the wife of one of Klimt’s patrons, Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer, who commissioned Klimt to paint this portrait in 1903. The artist was at the peak of his Golden Style, which becomes clear as soon as one looks at the painting. Adele sits or stands in the center of the frame, surrounded by gold, with only her arms, shoulders, and head visible. Her skin is pale, but she has rosy cheeks. She is wearing a floor-length dress that is entirely golden, merging into the gold background. The golden background is punctuated with a variety of patterns in black, white, blue, and red. Due to the overwhelming use of gold in the painting, this portrait is often referred to as The Woman in Gold. It has also been suggested that Klimt had an intimate relationship with Adele Bloch-Bauer, though there is no clear evidence.

Mythological Women

Apart from commissioned portraits, Klimt also painted women from mythological stories. However, this artist’s representation of traditional mythical themes had a modernist twist, such as in the paintings Judith I, Pallas Athene, and Water Serpents. Displayed in 1901 at the 10th Secessionist Exhibition, Judith I (or Judith and the Head of Holofernes) is meant to represent the story of Judith, a Biblical figure who seduced and beheaded Holofernes, a general who was sent to attack her hometown. She has been famously depicted in the act of beheading or holding the head of Holofernes in her hands by Renaissance painters such as Caravaggio and Artemisia Gentileschi.

Klimt painted the same theme but with Judith at the center and the head of Holofernes in her left hand, cut off from the frame. Klimt’s portrayal of Judith focuses on her sexuality with her chest exposed, lips parted seductively, sleepy eyes, and her body decorated with gold. Despite being portrayed erotically, Judith appears fearsome and powerful, taking charge of her own sexuality and using it as a weapon. She embodies the femme fatale, combining sexuality and violence and implementing her agency.

This oil painting of the Greek goddess of art and wisdom was symbolically significant for the Viennese Secessionists. She instantly comes across as a powerful figure—her intense gaze holds the viewer, and the shimmering gold armor illuminates her. The background depicts Hercules and Triton in an encounter, which was an allegory to the changing cultural ideals of the time with new art pushing against traditional styles. Pallas Athena was also depicted in the poster of the first Secessionist exhibition in 1898, and the production of this oil painting solidified her importance as a symbol of the Secession.

This consisted of two works—Water Serpents I and Water Serpents II—painted between 1904 and 1907. These paintings depict water nymphs surrounded by colorful patterns. These paintings are also highly decorative depictions of women in the nude, as was the common theme in Klimt’s Art Nouveau works. It has been suggested that while the painting is supposed to represent mythical figures, Klimt used this as a means to represent lesbian relationships.

This is particularly true in Water Nymphs II, which depicts women in a sensual embrace. Klimt not only held unconventional artistic ideals but also challenged conservative social norms through these paintings by suggesting same-sex intimacy.

Gustav Klimt’s Version of Eroticism and Challenging Artistic Norms

Klimt’s portrayal of women often has a sense of eroticism to them. He painted and sketched many nudes, including the depictions of mythical women shown as sensual beings. Klimt also studied the female body through sketches by exploring different—often erotic—poses, including a series of drawings depicting women pleasuring themselves. His portrayal of the female body was a cause for social disapproval due to the unconventional way he handled the subject. Two of his works broke important traditional rules that truly set him apart as a revolutionary artist—Nudas Veritas and Hope.

Translating to Naked Truth, Nuda Veritas was one of Klimt’s most controversial paintings. The painting was completed in 1889, showing a young woman in the nude. The controversial aspect of this work was Klimt’s decision to depict pubic hair on the woman, something that had not been done before. Traditionally, nude images of women did not depict body hair, so the depiction of pubic hair certainly raised eyebrows. This painting was an allegory for the naked truth artists present without any barriers, an idea that was foremost for the Secessionists and is also emphasized in the text on top of the painting, which translates to: “if you cannot please everyone with your actions and your artwork – please only a few: to please many is bad.”

Hope, a painting depicting a nude pregnant woman, is one of the most revolutionary works by the artist. Traditionally, women have been depicted in the nude throughout art history. However, not many works showing pregnancy and pregnant women can be found, despite the process being a natural part of life. Klimt’s decision to take up the task of depicting this subject fits within the artist’s ideals and makes him stand out in art history. He was not concerned with maintaining traditional notions of beauty and aesthetics—instead, Klimt challenged these norms and painted a pregnant model nude.

The model’s name was Herma, and she is depicted in her profile with her loose, fiery hair giving her a sexual dimension. In the background, Klimt depicted disfigured faces and a skull looming over the woman at the center. The symbolism of these figures is not well-defined, but they likely present a contrast to the pregnant woman who is illuminated in the composition and is turning away from these dark figures. Klimt was certainly a painter of women and sought his subjects from a wide range of sources, from mythological scenes to commissioned portraits. His perception and representation of women challenged many traditional rules and social conventions, which is why the artist is considered a revolutionary figure in Western art.

He portrayed women as taking charge of their sexuality and being powerful creatures, such as Judith and Pallas Athena. Still, at the same time, he often treated them as ornamentation or desirable objects. The transitional nature of the late 19th and early 20th centuries led to an expansion in women’s role in society. Still, the emergence of the Art Nouveau style in fin-de-siècle Vienna reinforced the image of women as decorative and erotic beings, and this duality was embraced by Klimt.

Émile Bernard was born in 1868 in Lille, northern France, as the son of a textile merchant. The artist created his first drawings and paintings when he was 14 years old and two years later, he joined the studio of Fernand Cormon in Paris. Cormon’s studio was well-known among Parisian artists and was attended by Henri Toulouse-Lautrec, Louis Anquitin and even Van Gogh. Here, Bernard practiced sketching plaster casts and working with live models. He also developed a friendship with Toulouse-Lautrec and Anquitin.

Émile Bernard as a Young Artist in Paris

Bernard was one of the artists of the Petit Boulevard in Paris, as Van Gogh named the younger generation of French artists in the city, including Georges Seurat, Anquetin, Toulouse-Lautrec, Paul Signac, and a few others. Bernard was fairly young when he joined this group but soon became an important part of this community. He met Van Gogh in Paris in 1886-87, and the two artists soon developed a professional relationship, learning from each other. It was during this time that Bernard, along with Anquetin, started experimenting with flat forms and using pure color. Apart from Japanese prints, their inspiration lay in stained-glass windows and medieval enamels. These stylistic experiments soon developed into Cloisonnism.

The Cloisonnist Style

Cloison in French translates to sections or partitions. The Cloissonist style was, therefore, characterized by thick, bold lines that create partitions on the painting surface, which are then filled with pure, unmixed colors. Traditional pictorial perspective was left behind in this style, creating a simplified and flat composition where forceful lines and saturated color impart intensity and a decorative effect to the painting. An important feature of Bernard’s works was a lack of details and shadows, which, on the contrary, was the cornerstone of realism. His paintings prioritized highlighting the essential aspects of the subject to convey its essence, which included the major forms, lines, and colors. He boiled down the subject to its primary properties and painted highly simplified figures. To summarize, Bernard focused on subtracting over adding; that is, his Cloisonnist works were composed of lesser details and colors to focus on what was significant and essential without the interruption of a myriad of components.

The Birth of Symbolist Painting

Bernard took off from Paris in January 1888 for Pont-Aven in Brittany. He had spent around two months in the village in 1886, where he became acquainted with Gauguin, but it was only in 1888 that their friendship developed. The two artists worked together and experimented with a style that was to become the beginning of Symbolism in painting, the ideology wherein artistic expression was linked to the artist’s subjectivity. Here, form, line, and color are simplified for emotional expression.

In Pont-Aven, Bernard created a painting titled Breton Women in the Meadow, and around the same time, Gauguin painted Vision After the Sermon. These paintings were instrumental in the development of Symbolism—the scenes were painted from memory or the imagination, only concentrating on their essential aspects through a simplification of pictorial elements. However, these paintings were also a factor in the rift that emerged between the two artists. Despite being painted around the same time, only Gauguin’s work was recognized as the origin of Symbolism in art by Symbolist critic and poet Albert Aurier in 1891. Bernard was offended and claimed that his work preceded Gauguin’s, but there is no consensus in art historical research regarding this issue. The artists had their last contact that year.

After the break with Gauguin, along with Van Gogh’s death in 1890, the young Bernard’s productivity declined. Nevertheless, he was an important member of the avant-garde artists in late 19th-century Paris and created some exceptional works, making a significant contribution to modern art.

1. Breton Women in the Meadow (1888)

In the summer of 1888, Bernard was experimenting with the Cloisonnist style in Pont-Aven, Brittany. Breton Women in the Meadow was one of the results of this experiment and is one of Bernard’s most famous works. Dominated with yellow-green and black, this composition is a great example of Bernard’s Cloisonnist style. The composition lacks traditional perspective with the lack of shadows or a horizon, making it completely flat. The artist’s free treatment of line in this work creates an undulating effect, and Bernard keeps the overall composition simplified.

As mentioned above, Bernard was a religious man, and Breton Women in the Meadow has Christian undertones. The painting depicts a scene of a pardon in Pont-Aven, which was a religious occasion during which people gathered to participate in devotional practices. While there has been disagreement among scholars regarding the painting’s depiction of a Pardon due to the lack of any recognizable Christian iconography, it is highly possible that Bernard chose to focus on the social aspect of the religious occasion by presenting a gathering of women and children. Today, the painting is in the collection of Musée d’Orsay, Paris, and is titled Le Pardon by the museum.

2. Vase of Flowers & Cup (1887-88)

Vase of Flowers & Cup is one of nineteen known still-lifes painted by Bernard in 1887-88. As can be seen in this composition, Bernard painted highly simplified forms of the objects depicted without any realistic detailing. The background wall, as well as the table on which the vase and cup are placed, are painted with broad, almost invisible brushstrokes forming large areas of unsaturated color. The figures of the flowers, the vase, the cup, and the decoration on the cup are distinguishable through thick outlines.

As mentioned before, Bernard sought the essential qualities of the subjects he depicted by simplifying forms and colors. He believed that simplification paved the way for understanding the essence of the subject, which he held to be in higher regard than a realistic reproduction. This is proved even further in Vase of Flowers & Cup when we discover that the blue background was an overpainting. Bernard had originally planned to paint a window on the right side of the composition but decided to leave it plain. While there is no explicit explanation from the artist for this decision, it can be taken as an attempt at simplicity. Today, this painting sits in the Van Gogh Museum collection in Amsterdam.

3. Self-Portrait With Portrait of Gauguin (1888)

This self-portrait by Bernard hearing a hat with a portrait of Gauguin hanging on the background wall was painted at the request of Van Gogh. The Dutch artist had originally urged Bernard and Gauguin to paint portraits of each other while they were working together in Pont-Aven. However, Bernard, a much younger artist, was hesitant to paint Gauguin, who was 20 years older. On Van Gogh’s further persuasion by invoking the practice of painting portraits among Japanese artists, the two French artists sent him their self-portraits with a portrait of the other in the background.

As can be seen in the composition, the actual portrait of Gauguin is nothing more than a sketch, while the self-portrait is painted with much more attention, with thick lines contouring Bernard’s figure. Yet, Gauguin’s portrait is placed in the center of the composition, and Bernard’s face is cut off in the corner—almost as if he is making an appearance in the composition dedicated to Gauguin. On the top right of the canvas, there is an inscription dedicating this painting to Van Gogh, who was very fond of this self-portrait. This painting was saved by Van Gogh and is today kept as a symbol of the friendship between these artists in the Van Gogh Museum.

4. The Buckwheat Harvesters (1888)

For this work, Bernard chose to depict harvesters, which are a common theme in realist paintings but portrayed them as stock figures through silhouettes without recognizable features. All we see are human laborers performing the necessary act of harvesting a crop. The Buckwheat Harvesters was painted in Brittany, where buckwheat was grown in abundance. The dominating vermillion in the painting gives a fiery impression but is meant to represent the buckwheat crop, which turns this color in the fall.

Bernard considered this work a counterpart to the first painting in this list, Breton Women in a Meadow. These paintings were displayed together in two different exhibitions—the Volpini Exhibition of 1889 and the 1892 Salon des Independants exhibition. Both paintings are easily distinguishable as works from Brittany due to the traditional clothing of Breton women. The works show Bernard’s Cloisonnist achievements through flat compositions and a strong use of line. Further, both paintings have contrasting color schemes, which suggests that Bernard had planned for them to be a pair. However, The Buckwheat Harvesters today sits in a private collection, and the two paintings are no longer displayed together.

5. Émile Bernard’s Brothel Scene (1888)

Several artists, including Henri Toulouse-Lautrec, adopted the theme of prostitution in the late 19th century. Sex work had become an essential aspect of modern Parisian life and was of interest to young artists who connected their artistic theories to their social environment. The central subject of Brothel Scene seems to be the woman in red seducing the man on her right sitting at the table. Behind him stands another woman, the owner of the brothel, watching over the prostitute.

Currently in the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, Brothel Scene creates an interesting contrast in Bernard’s oeuvre while also exemplifying the artist’s ability to capture the essence of his subjects and themes. He chose brothels as a contemporary subject to depict city life in Paris, while his Breton works personify the countryside through harvesters and landscapes. Apart from the above watercolor, Bernard painted numerous brothel scenes as brothels were common in Montmartre, the Parisian street that was a meeting point for artists. These works are either sketches or watercolors and were often accompanied by a poem that acted as a verbal commentary on prostitution.

Rene Magritte was one of the most prominent Belgian artists of the modern era, closely associated with the Surrealist movement. Although he opposed being categorized as a Surrealist, he nonetheless shared the movement’s profound interest in language and text. However, Magritte saw it as something ephemeral and conditional. In his paintings, Magritte often left written notes or commentary that did not always make immediate sense. Read on to learn more about Rene Magritte’s use of text in his art.

Surrealism & Text: Divorcing Words From Their Meanings Before Rene Magritte

Surrealism started primarily as a literary movement that would gradually expand its principles to painting, sculpture, photography, and film. Andre Breton, the ideological leader of the movement and the author of its manifestos, was a poet and thus was aware of the intricacies of language and its questionable adequacy to the described concepts. He sensed deep and transformative changes in the language of modernity. Little by little, as he wrote, authors began to distrust words, realizing that the boundaries of language were too narrow to grasp the depth of human feeling and expression.

Breton cited Symbolist poet Arthur Rimbaud, who attributed colors to vowels, as the first poet to think of liberating words from their meanings. In his opinion, the duty to signify should be replaced with the poetry of words themselves and the reaction of one word to another. In other words, prescribed meanings were inherently inferior to the rhythm of language and constructed meanings. To construct them, one had to abandon control over words and turn off their reason.

To experiment, Surrealists studied trance, hypnosis, meditation, rituals, and chemical ways to alter one’s consciousness. They were also interested in spiritualism and mediums, yet never believed in their possibility of contacting the dead. Rather, the Surrealists believed it was one of the options to open the door to the unconscious thought processes and desires unbound by rules and morals. The state of trance, just like drugs or alcohol, often provoked irrational and chaotic speech that was radically different from the normative one.

Surrealist studies of verbal and written language were partially fueled by their interest in Eastern cultures and religions. Upon encountering philosophical and cultural systems so radically different from the West, they realized how different systems of meaning could be and how imperfect all of them were.

In visual art, Surrealist exploration of text manifested itself in seemingly nonsensical titles divorced from the work’s visuals. The connection was either cryptic or related to the rhythms of letters, sounds, and brushstrokes. The malfunctioning titles provoked the viewer to search for a clue on their own, interpreting the work according to their own traumas and experiences.

Rene Magritte: Words and Images, 1929

Rene Magritte is perhaps the most famous modern artist from Belgium. His clearly recognizable style and set of symbols are familiar even to those who rarely visit museums. Like many others from his generation, Magritte started his artistic career as an Impressionist before moving on to more progressive and daring forms of art.

Many professionals attribute the strange recurring shapes and elements in his art to his personal experiences. For instance, the recurring motif of a human face completely concealed by fabric is sometimes interpreted as a memory of Magritte’s mother’s suicide. After she threw herself into a river, her body was found with her dress covering her face. Most historians believe that Magritte never actually saw his mother’s body and relied on the words of the artist’s nurse. Still, the impact of his mother’s death on Magritte was harsh enough to settle some images in his mind.

Magritte himself was a highly educated and opinionated artist who did not limit himself solely to painting practice. For quite a while, his writings were overlooked, but now, more and more art historians and lovers turn to them. Lumped together with other Surrealists, Magritte actually opposed the title. He never truly accepted the ideology of Andre Breton, although he sometimes operated within its framework. In his writings, he rejected Breton’s obsession with automatism, claiming that automatic writing and drawing was a matter for psychologists rather than artists.

In 1929, Rene Magritte published a work titled Words and Images. This, however, was not a drawing or a painting but an essay that blended written language with pictorial one. Magritte designed 18 panels that explored the relationship between text, drawing, and the physical world these instruments were supposed to reflect. He mentions that some objects can exist without names, and some assume names that already exist, such as the French word le canon, which refers both to an artillery cannon and the accepted standard of any sort. In some cases, an image of an object can replace the word for it in the text, and a word can substitute (although inaccurately) the actual object. Moreover, the purpose of an object is never the same as the purpose of its image or the word for it: you cannot ride a painted horse and cannot eat a description of a restaurant dish.

The Interpretation of Dreams, 1930s

In his paintings from the late 1920s, Magritte deliberately replaced the names for their objects with something unexpected and unusual, aiming to trigger a chain of associations and provoke confusion. Magritte’s first work directly built around the relationship between visuals and text was a series. Titled The Interpretation of Dreams, it was a collection of realistically painted images with nonsensical titles—a horse was labeled as the door, a knife as the bird, and so on. Deliberately mismatched words and images forced the viewer to think about the absurd conventionality of language and how words on themselves mean nothing without a collective agreement to indicate something.

Another significant trait of Magritte’s works was their background. The artist made the canvas look like a typical school blackboard. The choice was hardly merely stylistic. By using the universally recognized image, Magritte brought his audience back to the time when they just started to learn the peculiarities of written and spoken language and to study the connection between them. Children are taught to accept the rules of the game without asking questions. In the Surrealist mind, however, childish perception, with the purity of its experiences, was the key to the unconscious. Childhood was a mythical concept and a condition between the material and metaphysical world, holding within itself endless intellectual and spiritual resources.

The Treachery of Images, 1929

Magritte’s obsession with the dissonance between the real, the painted, and the textual further revealed itself in one of his most famous works. The Treachery of Images represented a rather simple illustration painting of a pipe with a handwritten commentary that this was not, in fact, a pipe. Although the image provokes initial confusion, the viewer soon comes to the conclusion that the artist was right. You can neither smoke this pipe nor hold it in your hands. Thus, the image effectively gets divorced from the experience of an actual pipe and represents nothing but a dysfunctional symbol.

This image was reportedly inspired by a commentary by a gallery visitor who claimed that what he saw was not art. By treating words in this way, Magritte presented language as conditional and unsubstantial, highlighting its inherent inferiority to the world of real physical objects. The same applies to visual language, which is capable of convincing illusions and manipulation but not of directly altering reality.

Rene Magritte and The Living Mirror

A sequel to Magritte’s other works on visual and textual symbols, The Living Mirror exploited an approach we would now call conceptual. Instead of actually painting the image conceived in his mind, Magritte described it in white bubbles on a black background—a person laughing, birds singing, a closet cabinet, and a horizon line.

By using text, Magritte managed to incorporate many more effects than he could cram into a painting. He was able to address not only our eyes but also our hearing (the cries of birds), spatial perception (horizon), emotion (a person laughing), and even some tactile senses (a closet cabinet and personal associations with it). Each viewer’s mind is doing the work on their own based on personal experiences. No version of The Living Mirror would be the same, and each one of them would have equal rights to exist. Thus, language seems to be universal but lacks precision, and that, perhaps, is both its flaw and advantage.

Born on the same day at the same hour, Christo and Jeanne-Claude spent most of their lives together as partners in life and work. Their large-scale installations usually involved wrapping objects or manipulating fabric, creating the illusion of movement. One such project was the Running Fence, a white nylon wall that crossed 25 miles of Californian hills. Read on to learn more about the artistic significance of the Running Fence, the famous work by Christo and Jeanne-Claude.

Who Were Christo and Jeanne-Claude?

Christo (Christo Vladimirov Javacheff) and Jeanne Claude (Jeanne-Claude Denat de Guillebon) were famous artists who shared professional and personal lives for more than five decades. They were born on the same day at the same hour in 1953 and spent most of their lives creating large-scale works that interacted with already existing landscapes.

They came from dramatically different backgrounds. Christo was born in Bulgaria to the family of a fabric factory owner, who lost his business after World War II. As a poor art student, Christo traveled through Europe painting portraits. One such commission was for Jeanne-Claude’s mother in 1958.

Jeanne-Claude was born into a privileged family of French officers in Tunisia, studied in Switzerland, and could have lived a conventional life—had it not been for her meeting with Christo. In 1961, they began creating works together. Jean-Claude died in 2009, and Christo continued to work on their artistic projects for ten more years until he passed away in 2020.

The Origins & Legal Battles of “Running Fence”

Many of Christo and Jeanne Claude’s works were in some way connected to the movement of fabric and the idea of wrapping something in it. They used draperies, so prominent in art of all ages, as separate artistic materials that gave fluidity and dynamism to objects, and transformed them into purely aesthetic elements, erasing their functions. Another important component of their works was their impermanence. Christo and Jeanne-Claude always limited the lifespan of their installations and never repeated those that were already presented once.

The idea for the Running Fence came to Christo and Jeanne-Claude seemingly out of nowhere. In the winter of 1972, they saw a long snow-covered fence that somehow emphasized the landscape it separated with its thin white line. They decided to reconstruct it in California, by asking sixty local farmers permission to use their land. It took them almost two years to obtain all necessary permissions, as California authorities were concerned about the possible ecological impact of the work, as well as the actual artistic value of it. After eighteen public hearings, the couple finally received all the necessary permissions. The construction work began in 1976.

California was not Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s first choice. The initial project had much more grave and politically charged connotations, as it was intended to be built in West Berlin. The fabric fence was supposed to cover the view of the Berlin Wall as if erasing it from the city. However, obtaining permission for such a project in Germany was next to impossible, and artists decided to sacrifice political connotations to ensure the realization of their project.

Constructing the “Running Fence”

The structure of the Running Fence consisted of 238,400 square yards of white nylon fabric, 2,000 steel poles, 145 miles of steel cable, 350,000 hooks, and 13,000 anchors that connected the structure to the ground. The crucial part of Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s concept was its complete reversibility. After the project was finished, the artists planned to remove the work leaving no trace of its past presence, and give the remaining materials to construction workers so they could either sell them or repurpose them for their own needs. Economic sustainability was another important aspect of Jeanne-Claude and Christo’s work, as they fully financed their projects on their own, selling artworks specifically created for raising money.

The construction took four months and involved more than 400 workers. All of them were local residents who were fully paid by Christo and Jeanne-Claude. The final result was a flowing white wall 16 feet tall and 25 miles long. The artists considered all paperwork and blueprints for the project equally important parts of the work, as well as the 400-page report on the ecological impact of the work on local ecosystems.

Over its short two-week existence, the Running Fence attracted more than 2 million visitors. The thin white strip of a fence seemed to be constantly moving, shaped by the wind and highlighted by rays of sun. One end of the wall dropped directly into the Pacific Ocean, and the other hit US Route 101.

The Reception and Influence of the “Running Fence”

In 1989, just a few months before the demolition of the Berlin Wall, Russian-American poet Joseph Brodsky visited Berlin. Born in Leningrad (currently Saint-Petersburg, Russia), in 1940, Brodsky was expelled from the Soviet Union for his anti-Soviet stance and unconventional poetry in 1972 and spent the rest of his life in the USA. During his trip to Berlin, Brodsky wrote a poem. He called the Wall the “concrete forerunner of Christo” that runs through cities and fields that were colored with scoured blood. Although there is no proof that Brodsky and Christo knew each other, the poet likely visited the couple’s exhibitions or at least read about them.

The Berlin Wall and Christo and Jean-Claude’s fence look formally similar, yet represent entirely different purposes: separating communities versus building them, constructing artificial borders versus cherishing the natural landscape. Despite the appearance of permanence and stability, from the historical point of view the Berlin Wall proved to be not much more durable than the nylon structure of Christo and Jeanne Claude.

Running Fence became one of the key works that invited other artists to interact with environments in a sustainable way, and consider natural landscapes as already existing artistic expressions. Over time, it also developed new political connotations regardless of the artists’ involvement. In 2016, after the first presidential victory of Donald Trump and his announcement of plans to build a wall separating the US from Mexico, conceptual artist Luis Camnitzer published a petition addressed to the president. He proposed to commission Christo with the creation of the new Running Fence version, turning “a racist project into a public art event.”

Adolf Hitler considered himself a man of culture. However, his taste in art was narrow, rigid, and ideologically driven. He believed that art should serve the state, glorify the Aryan race, and reflect only moral and racial purity. Anything that deviated from realism, did not glorify the human figure in heroic ways, or was created by Jewish or politically opposed to Nazism artists, was considered degenerate, corrupt, and dangerous.

Adolf Hitler’s Disdain for Modern Art

Hitler’s personal disdain for modernist and avant-garde art grew from his own frustrations. Before politics, he had tried to become a painter, applying unsuccessfully to the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts. He favored classical forms, technical precision, and clear representation, and he judged all other styles as morally and culturally inferior. This personal bias became state policy after 1933, when the Nazis systematically suppressed art they considered subversive.

In 1937, the infamous Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art) exhibition took place in Munich. The Nazis had confiscated thousands of artworks from museums across Germany. In the exhibition, nearly 650 were all displayed cramped up, almost one onto the other, in order to condemn modern art as something that represented the decline of society and morality. It mocked movements such as Post-Impressionism, Cubism, Expressionism, and Surrealism, among others. The artists included in the exhibition were humiliated, vilified, and lost any sort of recognition within the German state. Some were even forced into exile. Entartete Kunst had another goal, though: to warn the German citizens that art should match the Nazi ideals. Otherwise, it would be doomed.

The works of the following ten artists represent the range of creativity that Hitler despised the most. Each of these artists challenged his vision of art in its own way, whether through abstraction, emotional intensity, political engagement, or the exploration of human vulnerability.

1. Pablo Picasso

One of the artists Hitler hated the most was Pablo Picasso. The Spanish artist was one of the pillars of Cubism and he had revolutionary ideals. Cubism broke any ties with traditional art and figurative representation. It transformed forms into geometric shapes and showed multiple perspectives of an object or a person at the same time. One of his paintings that the Nazis hated was Guernica (1937). It depicted the bombing of the Basque town during the Spanish Civil War. The chaotic composition, the disjointed human figures, and, of course, the harsh criticism of the political regime went in the exact opposite direction of the heroic and Aryan ideals that Hitler stood for. Naturally, the entire work by Picasso was condemned by the Nazis as corrupted and obscure.

The pamphlets that accompanied the Entartete Kunst exhibition wrote that Cubism was a symptom of society’s decay. Hitler valued order and a clear, realistic representation. He and Nazi cultural officials repeatedly framed Cubism and many modern movements as degenerate, claiming they reflected moral or mental decay and warning they could negatively influence the public. Picasso’s political engagement and international stature made him particularly symbolic to Nazi critics; his works were among those confiscated and ridiculed in the campaign. Specifically, the Nazi regime believed that through his influence, Picasso could legitimize modernism abroad and weaken Germany’s “higher” cultural ideals. They feared that widespread admiration for his visual experimentation would undermine their campaign to restore academic realism, which they believed essential to national regeneration.

2. Vincent van Gogh

Although Vincent van Gogh died decades before the Nazi era, his bold, emotionally charged canvases were singled out as symptomatic of the “degenerate” aesthetic the regime loathed. Van Gogh’s surfaces carry the artist’s hand: thick impasto, visible, agitated strokes, and jagged lines that communicate psychic intensity. Colors are unstable and expressive rather than descriptive. For Hitler, an admirer of measured draftsmanship and clear representation, Van Gogh’s visible struggle with form and color read as instability or moral pathology rather than innovation.

The criticism was about both his technique and his subjects. Van Gogh painted scenes of daily life, peasants, and poverty. All these clashed with Hitler’s propaganda. Several publications and the exhibition text framed his work as symptomatic of mental weakness and cultural decline. Thus, he was setting an example that needed to be avoided. The visible elements of his distress, vulnerability, and inner turmoil made him repulsive to the Nazis. Van Gogh was too messy and intimate to serve their heroic narratives. Furthermore, the Nazis found that his emotional and mental fragility were a psychological danger to the public, claiming that his paintings could awaken similar feelings and thoughts. His personal biography was misused as propaganda to argue that creative instability produced cultural degeneration.

3. Marc Chagall

Marc Chagall’s paintings, saturated with folkloric memory, floating figures, and dreamlike juxtapositions, ran headlong into the Nazi worldview. Chagall’s art did not prioritize nationalist heroics; it celebrated fragile, private worlds, Jewish cultural markers, and a tender, at times surreal, humanism. For Hitler’s cultural censors, that combination was doubly offensive: it was explicitly “foreign” and explicitly Jewish, two categories the regime equated with subversion.

Chagall’s works were seized and displayed in Entartete Kunst under captions that mocked their lack of realism and alleged moral vagueness. Nazi materials framed the dream imagery as evidence of cultural decadence and racial otherness. The whimsical figures and floating lovers meant something deeply human to viewers who knew his cultural references; to Nazi ideologues, those same qualities signaled rootlessness and spiritual corruption. Chagall’s persecution illustrates how Nazi aesthetics were inseparable from racial policy; content that expressed Jewish life or diasporic memory was treated not merely as an aesthetic threat but as a target of ethnic exclusion. His frequent depiction of village life, musicians, and religious symbols was portrayed by Nazi commentators as a reminder of the cultural pluralism they sought to erase, intensifying their determination to suppress his work from German public consciousness.

4. Paul Klee

Paul Klee’s deceptively spare, symbolic paintings challenged the Nazis not through shock but through elusiveness. Klee worked with simplified signs, cryptic glyphs, and subtle color relations that read like a private visual language. His works showing  animals, masks, and playful mechanistic forms asked for interpretation rather than supplying an obvious didactic message. That interpretive openness was intolerable to Hitler’s cultural program, which sought immediate, legible visual instruction.

Klee also had institutional influence; he taught and shaped younger artists’ thinking about abstraction and form. The Nazi leadership feared this pedagogical reach. In the Entartete Kunst show and its press, Klee’s pieces were presented as evidence of artistic decay and incomprehension. Critics charged that his “childlike” forms and symbolic ambiguity undermined the national moral project. Hitler’s hostility to Klee thus combined aesthetic distaste with anxiety about cultural transmission: a teacher who normalized ambiguity threatened the regime’s control of narrative and taste. Moreover, Klee’s blending of scientific diagrams, musical structure, and poetic metaphor was depicted as intellectual elitism, something the regime condemned as inaccessible to the “healthy German.” His refusal to create straightforward allegories made him a direct ideological obstacle.

5. Wassily Kandinsky

Wassily Kandinsky was particularly repulsive to the Nazis. The artist was deeply intellectual and wrote about the spirituality of art and how it was not associated with representation. This philosophy was a direct hit to the Nazi insecurities. Hitler favored only art with would support his political regime; art that would be inspiring and supportive of his nationalist virtues. Kandinsky’s inward, spiritual aims were fundamentally at odds with that.

Abstract art was another genre condemned by the Nazi regime. Kandinsky was one of the genre’s pillars, so consequently, his art was heavily criticized for promoting social decay. Moreover, there wasn’t any figuration explanatory of his work, making it even harder for the Nazis to understand; not that they wished to, it made it easier for them to label the paintings as signs of moral chaos. Officials used such artworks to, in their own way, prove that modern art could destabilize social cohesion.

Beyond mere dislike, Hitler’s apparatus framed Kandinsky’s work as a symptom to be remedied; a cultural ailment to be removed from public institutions and replaced with art that served state narratives. Kandinsky’s associations with the Bauhaus further deepened Nazi hostility, as the school was already targeted for promoting internationalism and experimental thought. His color theories were condemned as mystical nonsense unfit for a disciplined, collectivist society.

6. Otto Dix

Otto Dix provoked Hitler’s wrath because Dix refused to flatter. His visual vocabulary—raw, clinical, often grotesque—confronted viewers with the physical and moral wreckage of modern life. Dix’s experience as a soldier informed canvases that showed maimed bodies, trench mud, sex work, and the social wounds of the postwar period. In Hitler’s schema, art should make citizens proud, not force them to look at humiliation and human frailty.

Dix’s pieces were loudly denounced in Nazi propaganda as proof of cultural degeneration. The Entartete Kunst texts singled out his realism as ugly and corrosive, while regime curators physically removed his paintings from museums. Hitler’s problem with Dix was not mere taste: he feared the social effect. If art made people aware of suffering, doubt, or moral complexity, it threatened the neat heroic story the regime needed. For that reason, Dix’s empathy and forensic honesty made him a target for persecution. His war triptychs, which exposed the cost of conflict in unvarnished detail, were seen as especially dangerous to a government dependent on militaristic pride. Dix’s refusal to mythologize Germany’s past made him a permanent ideological enemy.

7. Ernst Ludwig Kirchner

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’s Expressionist canvases show modern nervousness: urban crowds, stylized nudes, and jolting color that conveyed anxiety and dislocation. His figures are often angular and taut, as if the modern city were reshaping the human body. To Hitler and his cultural apparatus, those distortions were signs of decay; not psychological nuance but moral and physical deterioration.

Kirchner’s work was seized and publicly lampooned: critics accused Expressionism of attacking traditional beauty and of encouraging social disorder. The rhetoric around Kirchner often veered into the personal, painting his art as symptomatic of a broader cultural collapse. Beyond the art, the campaign affected Kirchner’s life: public censure, shrinking exhibition opportunities, and the knowledge that one’s work was being used as evidence of a supposed national crisis. For the Nazi project, the artist’s emotional honesty and urban critique were intolerable. His association with Die Brücke, a group already linked to left-leaning cultural reform, intensified official suspicion, and Nazi critics frequently used Kirchner as an example of “sick modernity” when arguing for purges in museum collections.

8. Max Beckmann

Max Beckmann’s paintings are dense with symbolic tableaux, theatrical poses, and uneasy compositions. These are visual narratives that resist simple interpretation. He painted scene after scene of social ritual gone awry: processions, interiors, figures whose faces seem to hide moral ambiguity. Beckmann refused to create easy, inspiring myths; instead, he presented society as complex, sometimes menacing, and morally ambiguous.

Hitler’s cultural critics branded Beckmann’s ambiguity and psychological intensity as corrosive. The Entartete Kunst exhibition used his work to argue that modern art made public taste decadent. Officials treated his grotesqueness as a moral failing rather than an artistic exploration. Beckmann’s treatment under the Nazis reveals a key fear: any art that complicates the viewer’s moral response, or suggests frailty beneath civic facades, undermines the neat, edifying narratives authoritarian regimes want to tell. His layered religious references and cryptic symbolism were cited as elitist and “anti-German,” and several of his major works were paraded as examples of cultural sabotage in Nazi cultural journals.

9. Gustav Klimt

Gustav Klimt’s gilded surfaces and erotic, ornamental paintings confronted Nazi moralism with sensuality. Klimt foregrounded the body and desire in tableaux rich with pattern and intimacy. The Nazis judged such frank eroticism as moral laxity, especially dangerous because Klimt’s bourgeois patrons made his taste visible to the cultural elite.

The accusations against Klimt were framed in moral terms (corrupting sensibility, undermining discipline) but they were also political: an art that celebrated private passion on lavish, public stages did not reinforce nationalist stoicism. Nazi officials removed Klimt’s works from public collections and deployed them in Entartete Kunst to contrast “degenerate” sensuality with the austere, supposedly wholesome ideal they promoted.

The attack on Klimt’s art showed how eroticism and decorative richness were seen as threatening to the “purified” version of culture. His interest in powerful female figures was considered destabilizing for the traditional gender roles that Nazism stood for. Klimt’s depictions of female mythological characters, such as Judith or Danae, were seen through the prism of the celebration of female autonomy and sexual freedom. This kind of imagery came into conflict with the Nazi ideal woman, who self-sacrificed herself to Volk and motherhood.

10. Egon Schiele

Egon Schiele is known for his distorted figures and overt eroticism. As seen with the aforementioned artists, this was not acceptable in the Nazi art doctrine. While the painter pursued psychological exposure and vulnerability, the Nazis condemned such erotic content and the slightest sample of weakness. Such things were so far away from perfection, and the “superhuman” Hitler stood for.

Schiele’s work was prominently featured in Entartete Kunst materials as examples of sexual decadence and national contamination. The public framing presented him as evidence that modern culture had lost moral bearings. Again, the denunciation combined prudishness with political motive: art that dissected inner life and displayed bodily particularity undermined the regime’s ideal of a unified, healthy national body. Schiele’s raw honesty, therefore, made his art a target not merely of taste but of political suppression. His stark self-portraits were highlighted by Nazi commentators as pathological, and his exploration of sexuality outside marital norms was portrayed as a direct affront to racial and moral discipline.

Adolf Hitler and the Limits of Artistic Control

The artists Hitler despised provide a map of what his regime feared: inwardness, ambiguity, bodily vulnerability, political critique, spiritual inquiry, and cultural diversity. The attack on modern art was, thus, deliberate; it did not align with the regime’s propaganda. All the confiscations, the staged mockeries, and even the schoolroom purges had one goal: to replace art that promoted critical thinking and political and social critique with simple, heroic images that instructed obedience and pride.

His personal frustrations, combined with institutional power, produced a campaign that humiliated artists, emptied museums, and attempted to cleanse public life of certain modes of seeing. But even framed only through his hatred and attempts at control, these artists’ diversity demonstrates why Hitler’s program had to be so aggressively repressive: the forms he targeted were powerful precisely because they invited thought, feeling, and dissent. That, ultimately, was what he feared most.

When Van Gogh was living in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence in 1889-90, olive trees and cypresses became his most cherished subjects to paint. These trees were abundant in the region, and the artist believed they created a favorable impression of the Provençal landscape. In a letter to his brother Theo in 1889, he compared them to the willow tree in the Netherlands: “Now what the willow is in our native country, the olive tree and the cypress have exactly the same importance here.”

Vincent Van Gogh’s Olive Trees

The olive tree, with its sinuous branches, which thrived in the harsh conditions of Saint-Rémy, evoked great admiration in Van Gogh, who compared the cypress to an Egyptian obelisk and described its striking role in the Provençal landscape. Since the Provençal land was arid, not many trees bloomed there. However, olive trees took over the entire land, growing amid the dry and rocky terrain. Van Gogh produced numerous paintings of olive groves while residing at the Saint-Paul-de-Mausole asylum in Saint-Rémy. During his early days, he was confined within the asylum walls and painted several works of the interior and the garden out front. However, after some time, he was allowed to walk around the land to paint outdoors. He visited olive groves often due to his fascination with them.

Van Gogh found them visually interesting due to their serpentine branches and the ever-changing effect of the bright Provençal sunlight on their colors, as depicted in the painting above. In fact, he struggled to capture its colors and treated it as a challenge: “On the other hand the olive trees are very characteristic, and I’m struggling to capture that. It’s silver, sometimes more blue, sometimes greenish, bronzed, whitening on ground that is yellow, pink, purplish or orangeish to dull red ochre. But very difficult, very difficult.” He tackled this issue by instilling the effects of silver on the leaves and painting the shadows of the trees in blue.

In The Olive Trees or Olive trees with the Alpilles in the background, Van Gogh depicts a summer scene with a wonderful effect of greens and yellows of the olive trees on the land with blues of the mountains and the sky. A white cloud highlighted with blue and yellow swirls on top of the mountains, which are contoured with bold outlines. The swirling lines and dramatic outlines in the composition create a sense of movement in the landscape. The olive trees with their twisting branches and trunks appear to be floating away along with the undulating hills. Due to its swirling lines, Van Gogh compared this painting to The Starry Night: “These are exaggerations from the point of view of the arrangement, their lines are contorted like those of the ancient woodcuts.”

Paintings of olive groves in Provence became a means for Van Gogh to convey the bright and hot climate of the region, as well as the aridity of the land. He wrote: “The olive trees are more in character, just as in the other study and I’ve tried to express the time of day when one sees the green beetles and the cicadas flying in the heat.” The color palette consists largely of yellows, greens, and blues, while the brushstrokes are short and curving.

Cypress Trees

The cypress tree was a towering presence both in Provence and in Van Gogh’s creative imagination. He expressed his wish to paint the cypress like his Sunflowers as both were challenging and interesting to paint in terms of their colors and forms: “When I’d done those sunflowers I was seeking the contrary and yet the equivalent, and I said, it’s the cypress.” He wanted to capture the character of the cypress through its deep colors and proportions against a luminous Provençal landscape: “It’s the dark patch in a sun-drenched landscape, but it’s one of the most interesting dark notes, the most difficult to hit off exactly that I can imagine.”

Both paintings above depict a massive tree in dark green, with a distinguished quality highlighted in yellow, standing in front of a cloudy sky with shrubbery in the foreground. In one of the paintings, a yellow crescent moon peeks through on the right side of the canvas, while the other depicts two women walking in front of the cypress.

In Wheatfield with Cypresses, Van Gogh created a beautiful contrast between the dark green cypress standing amid a lively yellow wheatfield. On the left stands an olive tree painted in a lighter green, bringing together his two favorite Provençal motifs in one composition. This composition of a summer landscape sits under a blue sky with winding blue and white clouds. The entire scene, which was painted in situ, is enhanced with impasto, undulating lines, and vibrant colors that convey the bright sunlight and natural abundance of Provence. “The cypress is so characteristic of the landscape of Provence,” Van Gogh once wrote, and this painting is a testament to its position within the colorful land and azure sky of the region.

Van Gogh’s “The Starry Night”

The Starry Night, one of Van Gogh’s most famous works, also features the cypress. It is the opposite of the bright summer landscape above and depicts the region during nighttime. The swirling lines in the sky, luminous twinkling stars, and a bright moon are usually the most captivating features of the painting. However, in the center stands a tall, dark silhouette of a cypress tree. As in the daytime paintings, this tree towers over the entire region and creates a stark contrast with the blues and yellows in the background. While painted in Provence, The Starry Night depicts imaginative elements that merge Van Gogh’s memories of Dutch and Provençal landscapes.

He painted this work from his asylum window, which would not have afforded such an expansive view of the village. The church steeple in the middle of the town is reminiscent of Dutch churches, which are different from Provençal churches. And yet, he considered including the cypress necessary to complement the turbulent sky and signal the Provençal character of the painting.

Country road in Provence by night was the last painting of the cypress tree Van Gogh made in Provence. With a tall cypress reaching for the sky, it became the central Provençal feature that was embedded in his mind by the end of his stay. There is a dimly lit crescent moon and a bright North Star in the evening sky on top of the canvas, while two people walk along the road in the foreground. The meandering path is occupied by a carriage and lined with a small house, while other tall cypresses punctuate the landscape behind.

The short brushstrokes and swirling lines of the composition exemplify Van Gogh’s signature technique to instill a sense of movement in his paintings that is accentuated with an array of colors placed next to each other harmoniously. At the same time, they give the painting a dream-like effect, perfectly showing how Van Gogh viewed and remembered Provence through the cypress.

Graffiti is a relatively young form of art that nonetheless has its superstars and legends. Its questionable legal status challenges the boundaries of art and vandalism and shakes the power structure of the mainstream art world. This article will focus on the 12 most influential graffiti artists and explore their impact on street art, unique styles, and contributions to art movements worldwide.

1. TAKI 183: The Original Graffiti Artist

TAKI 183 was one of the first artists who brought graffiti art to public attention. He started his career in the late 1960s and still has not yet revealed his full name. From the limited available data, we know that TAKI is a Greek named Demetrius who lived in the Washington Heights neighborhood in New York. His nickname was a shortened version of his name and his street number. As a teenager, he worked in delivery and tagged his name on the walls on his way. By the mid-70s, he completely abandoned graffiti. Today, he leads a regular life with his business and family.

Compared to the other artists on that list, TAKI 183’s works were nothing out of the ordinary. However, he was one of the first artists to embrace the idea of leaving a personalized mark on the urban landscape and making it a continuous practice. Soon after its emergence, TAKI 183’s tag became recognizable and provoked a wave of imitators.

2. Jean-Michel Basquiat

Before becoming famous as a Neo-Expressionist artist and a friend of Andy Warhol, Jean-Michel Basquiat was a graffiti artist known under the nickname SAMO. Basquiat and Al Diaz, his close friend and an artist, developed the SAMO project together, leaving short satiric messages on the streets of New York. Sometimes, they looked like political slogans and sometimes like short texts from superhero comic books. They never specified publicly who or what SAMO was, but later, Basquiat explained it was an invented term for marijuana, which both Basquiat and Al Diaz extensively used.

In his later paintings, Basquiat heavily relied on graffiti techniques and written messages similar to those he had left in his SAMO years. In 2016, after the first presidential victory of Donald Trump, the SAMO tag began to reappear in New York, despite almost thirty years passing since Basquiat’s death. As it turned out, it was Al Diaz’s alternative to resurrect the old story in the new tumultuous times.

3. JR

JR is a French street photographer and artist who is famous for his large-scale black-and-white works. He started painting graffiti on subway trains and walls as a teenager. Occasionally, he began photographing the progress of painting and soon decided to paste these photographs as posters in various locations in Paris. Later, he developed this technique, and today, it is known for monochrome photographs, most often of people, pasted over streets, buildings, or even popular tourist sites, including the famous Louvre Pyramid. JR calls himself an artivist for blending creative expression with political and social messages. One of his most famous projects featured photographs of Israeli and Palestinian civilians pasted on both sides of the West Bank Wall.

4. Cornbread

Philadelphia-born Darryl McCray, known as Cornbread, is considered to be one of the first graffiti artists in the modern sense of the word. He began in the 1960s by tagging his nickname on the streets and leaving short messages. Soon, these messages attracted public attention and launched the quest for the real identity of an artist. After the death of a well-known criminal, the press wrongly identified him as Cornbread. As a protest act, the real Cornbread sneaked into the territory of the Philadelphia Zoo, jumped over the fence, and tagged a living elephant with a sign CORNBREAD LIVES.

5. Swoon

Swoon, or Caledonia Curry, is a street artist who belongs to the generation of JR and Banksy. Unlike many of her colleagues, Swoon received a professional art education and began to paint on the streets to protest against the exclusive and oppressive world of art institutions. Her style heavily relies on fine art techniques and often features realistic portraits.

Swoon’s art often functions as a form of social activism. As a child of opioid-addicted parents, she advocates for better rehabilitation programs and calls for building functional communities that would provide support for its members. One of her most famous activist projects was a shelter for Haiti earthquake victims, which created jobs and offered arts and crafts courses to the residents.

6. Invader

Invader is one of the most easily recognizable graffiti artists. Unlike many of his colleagues, the anonymous French artist prefers small works to large-scale murals and hides his art in plain sight. Instead of paint, Invader uses small ceramic tiles to create images inspired by 8-bit video games from the 1970s. He sees his artworks as invasions and creates them at night, with his face and identity carefully concealed. After each successful invasion, the artist publishes a city map indicating the location and the context of each work. Invader is one of the artists who actively fights against the removal and resale of his works. He aims to integrate them into public space, making them hard to reach.

7. OSGEMEOS

Os Gemeos (The Twins from Portuguese) are two identical twins from Brazil who became famous for their colorful murals featuring yellow-skinned human-like figures. Otavio and Gustavo Pandolfo developed their signature style from the imaginary universe they created as children. Their sources of inspiration include American hip-hop culture, traditional Brazilian arts and crafts, paintings by Hieronymus Bosch, and science fiction. OSGEMEOS’ works are present in many locations worldwide, including both streets and museums. Over the years, the brothers expanded their technique to include sculptural and multimedia works apart from the usual spray can painting.

8. Eduardo Kobra

Eduardo Kobra is another famous Brazilian artist who started his graffiti career at the early age of only 11. From simply tagging the walls with his nickname, Kobra moved on to study human vision, perception, and optics to develop a formula for more expressive and emotionally impactful street art. His works are mostly large-scale colorful murals that feature portraits of famous figures associated with the space they are painted, like his Anne Frank mural in Amsterdam or Oscar Niemeyer in São Paulo. Kobra creates not murals but experiences that transform the urban landscape.

9. Keith Haring

Keith Haring, the renowned artist associated with graffiti and Pop Art, was raised in a family that included an amateur cartoonist. From a young age, Haring was inspired by old Disney movies, magazine cartoons, and comics. He was drawn to art that crossed the boundaries of galleries and interacted with a mass audience. In the early 1980s, Haring started leaving chalk graffiti drawings in the subway. His simple, stick-figure style soon became instantly recognizable, making him a popular artist.

Many of Haring’s works were centered around raising awareness about the drug addiction problem and the AIDS epidemic. Haring was diagnosed with AIDS in 1988 and spent his last years creating works for charities and foundations aimed to curb the epidemic.

10. Lady Pink

Unfortunately, not that many women artists were present on the graffiti scene in the early decades of its existence. Lady Pink, born Sandra Fabara, was one of the first women to become famous within the movement. She moved to the US as a child and started her graffiti career as a teenager while experiencing a harsh breakup. In the 1980s, she was painting subway trains in New York and soon moved to canvas painting, collaborations with brands, and commissioned projects. Lady Pink’s signature style uses conventionally feminine elements to indicate her identity in the male-dominated art movement. She also frequently refers to her Latin American heritage, using colors, ornaments, and figures associated with Latinx culture.

11. Shepard Fairey

Since the 1990s, Shepard Fairey has remained a relevant and popular street artist. His initial interaction with graffiti came through his teenage interest in punk and skateboarding cultures. His first project, which brought almost immediate recognition, was a series of stickers featuring Andre the Giant, or Andre Roussimoff, a French-Bulgarian wrestler. More recently, Fairey created the famous HOPE portrait of Barack Obama and a series of street murals worldwide that spread anti-war, anti-capitalist, and anti-xenophobic messages.

12. Banksy: The Elusive Graffiti Artist

As one of the most successful contemporary artists, Banksy is fairly critical of his fame. He allows himself to profit from and ridicule the art world simultaneously. Despite numerous theories about his identity, none have been fully confirmed.

Banksy’s art appeared on the streets in the 1990s, using his distinctive stencil painting technique. Stenciling allows him to work fast without attracting extra attention, which is crucial for the anonymous artist. His works often feature animals or figures of women and children, question power structures, highlight oppression, and condemn violence. In 2022, Banksy visited war-torn Ukraine and left seven murals there to support the Ukrainian citizens suffering from the war.

Miriam Schapiro, Judy Chicago, Carrie Mae Weems, Ana Mendieta, and Cindy Sherman are the most important American female artists of the 20th century. Each one of them had an authentic approach to art and left a significant mark on art and feminist history. They interpreted and employed feminism in their work in various ways, contributing to art as well as to the ever-expanding feminist movement. By questioning the notions of gender, identity, and body, they made their art strikingly relevant to the present day.

American Female Artists and Feminism

In the 20th century, feminist art was a powerful movement in the United States that sought to challenge the traditional roles and representation of women in art. It focused on issues such as gender, identity, body, and social inequality. The movement was characterized by a diverse array of styles, mediums, and approaches, but all shared a commitment to deconstructing the patriarchal structures within the art world and society in general. The main goal of feminist art was to bring positive change and make a difference in women’s lives.

Linda Nochlin was a pioneering art historian whose 1971 essay Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists? is often credited with launching feminist art history. In this essay, Nochlin argues that the absence of women in the canon of “great” artists was not due to a lack of talent or ambition but rather the result of systemic barriers that prevented women from pursuing careers in the arts. Her work was instrumental in reshaping how art history is studied, highlighting the importance of considering gender, class, and other social factors in understanding art.

While feminism comes in all shapes and forms, the second half of the 20th century in America was marked by the second wave of feminism, ending with the birth of the third wave in the 1990s. The second wave is known for questioning traditional gender roles and examining women’s autonomy, especially regarding bodily integrity, which became one of the focal points of the movement in the midst of the case Roe v. Wade. On the other hand, feminists of the third wave were more interested in race. They believed that the second wave expressed little sensitivity to racial differences within gender, and they wanted to change that. The actual phrase “third wave feminism” was coined by Rebecca Walker, a Black bisexual woman, in 1992.

5. Self-defined Femmagist: Miriam Schapiro

Born in 1923 in Ontario, Canada, Miriam Schapiro was an artist based in the US. Having her career spanned over four decades, she left a considerable legacy in art history and feminist art. Schapiro is best known for creating femmages, her version of collages where she especially emphasized the use of so-called feminine elements such as lace, fabric, and embroidery. This was very much a feminist act since she questioned the notion of female art. Needlework, quilting, and sewing, in general, were considered a lower form of art as opposed to high art. That is why her usage of textile and fabric was, in a sense, rebellious and empowering. She paid homage to traditional women’s art, pointing out that it should stop being seen as a craft of little artistic value but as a serious and meaningful art form.

Schapiro expressed her praise for women artists throughout art history by making portraits of important figures such as Frida Kahlo or Mary Cassat. However, her interest in the women’s question didn’t end in her art production. Miriam Schapiro expressed her feminist engagement by founding the Womanhouse with Judy Chicago, a very important feminist artist as well. This was a part of the first Feminist Art Program established at the California Institute of the Arts. They transformed a run-down Hollywood house into a women-friendly space where ideas and notions of feminism and feminist art could be discussed freely and creatively.

4. The Ultimate Dinner Party Hostess: Judy Chicago

Judy Chicago is an American feminist artist, educator, and writer. As previously mentioned, she founded the first Feminist Art Program in California in the 1970s alongside Miriam Schapiro. She is best known for her installation, The Dinner Party, which is considered to be the first epic feminist artwork. Chicago worked with over 400 people (mostly volunteers) from 1974 to 1979 to create this masterpiece.

The Dinner Party celebrates 1038 historical and mythological women from prehistory to the contemporary era. The table has places for 39 women, while the rest of them have their names inscribed on the Heritage Floor made of porcelain tiles. A fun fact is that one man’s name found its place here by mistake due to poor translation. Greek sculptor Kresilas was believed to be a woman named Cresilla. Chicago imagined this piece to be a sort of celebratory dinner where important female figures are recognized and appreciated. She placed a special emphasis on traditional female crafts such as embroidery, weaving, and pottery by making hand-painted ceramic cutlery, napkins with embroidered golden edges, and tiles. In this way, she protested against deeply embedded prejudice that female art is of lower quality and importance than male-dominated high art.

Furthermore, Chicago intended to celebrate womanhood in general. By employing a triangular shape for the table, she played the symbolism card since the triangle was linked to femininity and womanliness. A very important aspect of the Dinner Party is female sexuality as well. Chicago decided for china plates to have vulvar, floral, and butterfly-like forms as central motifs, which served as a visual association with female eroticism and physicality. Finally, the artist herself gave a powerful description of her work by saying that the table was a perfect motif to point out the way in which women’s achievements, like the endless meals they had prepared throughout history, had been consumed rather than acknowledged and honored.

3. Earth Body Artist: Ana Mendieta

Ana Mendieta was a Cuban-born artist who moved to the US at the age of 15. Her parents sent her there through Operation Peter Pan, an American government Program that enabled Cuban children to escape Fidel Castro’s regime. After studying art, Mendieta moved to New York.

Her best-known artwork is the Silueta Series, which was created between 1973 and 1980. The earth body term refers to this work in which she burnt, carved, and molded her silhouette into the landscapes of Iowa and Mexico, creating more than 200 works. The only evidence of the series is photo documentation since earth and natural conditions erased her silhouettes. The series is very much layered and multifaceted in terms of meaning and interpretation. On the one hand, Mendieta’s focus was on exploring the notions of identity and nationality. Since she felt as if she didn’t have a motherland due to her personal national background, she began to investigate her spiritual and physical connection to the earth and nature in general. In a way, she used her body to become one with the earth.

On the other hand, her work is seen as deeply feminist. Art historian Susan Best said that her Silueta Series represented a feminist space of dwelling where the female body was present in outline but absent in actuality. Mendieta expressed the powerful energy of female figuration. She referred to almost universal indigenous beliefs that earth was of a female nature, often represented as a goddess. Creating her body earth artwork, she evoked the female force that she felt was rooted in nature. Finally, the connection with nature provided her with the possibility to free herself from the societal concept of gender, male gaze, and socially constructed identity. Thanks to the earth and nature, Mendieta found liberation.

2. Woman Who Mastered the Art of Role-play: Cindy Sherman 

Cindy Sherman is an American feminist artist born in New Jersey in 1954. She is famous for her imaginative and creative self-portraits series, Untitled Film Stills, which was made from 1977 to 1980. The series consists of 69 black-and-white photos. Sherman took photographs, almost cinematic by their nature, of herself posing as various different characters and set in various places. Inspired by 1950s and 1960s films, she used wigs, makeup, and vintage clothes to create stereotypical female roles such as bombshell, schoolgirl, career woman, etc. Sherman carefully planned every shot, elaborating the setting and costume design so it could easily visually communicate with the viewer. However, her characters are always in some kind of action. That leaves the spectators with the complete freedom to speculate and imagine what is going on in the photos.

The staged nature with strong theatrical and melodramatic qualities is deliberately created by Sherman. It highlights the artificialness of socially constructed roles women are required to assume. By making photos that resemble pictures from mass media (magazines, movies, ads, etc.), Sherman made a statement about how visual culture influences and shapes collective and individual notions of femininity and identity. Society offers a limited range of roles to women, and each of them comes with instructions on how to dress, act, and look the part. In a way, we can say that Cindy Sherman gave a visual interpretation of Simone de Beauvoir’s famous thought that one is not born but rather becomes a woman. By following rules, dress codes, and behavioral norms, a person can truly be called a woman. Different personalities that Sherman assumed prove this theory.

1. Black American Female Artist Enters The Kitchen: Carrie Mae Weems     

Carrie Mae Weems is a Black female artist born in Oregon in 1953. Best known for her photographs, she rose to fame in the early 1990s thanks to her Kitchen Table Series. It consists of 20 black and white photos and 14 text panels. Carrie Mae Weems is the protagonist of these shots, posing in different scenarios that all take place in the kitchen. This approach is similar to the previously mentioned Cindy Sherman’s, but Mae Weems didn’t explore only the notion of gender and gender roles. She delved deeper into an investigation of politics, sexism, and identity, and above all, she expressed a special interest in race.

Set in the ultimate gendered space, the kitchen, these photos show the viewers the ever-shifting roles of a strong central female figure. By using a simple kitchen table, dimmed light, and uncluttered space, the artist succeeded in placing emphasis on the inner life of the protagonist, her moods and feelings. Often aware of the viewer, she directly confronts him with the roles of women. Some photos reveal her relationships with family and friends and their complex nature. While others provide insight into the relationship she has with herself. She is a wife, a mother, and a friend, but above all else, she is a Black woman.

This was a pretty groundbreaking moment when it came to the representation of African Americans in art. Until then, Black communities were practically invisible in art production and art history. That’s why The Kitchen Table Series is a significant artwork. The main characters that were depicted were finally of color. Black audiences could relate to what they were seeing since their own selves were reflected in these photos. However, it should be noted that Carrie Mae Weems’ art shouldn’t be limited to only the racial perspective. The artist herself said that the series was important in relation to the Black experience, but it was not about race. She believes that most artwork that’s made by Black artists is considered to be about Blackness, unlike work that’s made by White artists, which is assumed to be universal at its core.

Edward Hopper was an American realist painter whose famous works, such as Nighthawks, Automat, Office at Night, and Room in New York, evoke the modernizing America of the early 1900s. Hopper used clean lines and defined colors to capture the allure, yet the lonely reality, of American life in the 1930s and 1940s. With potential war on the horizon and a popularized modern way of life in which jobs were changing, and cities were growing, people’s solace lay in their inner world, which Hopper captured so well.

1. Edward Hopper Worked as a Freelance Illustrator in Advertising

Although he had always wanted to be an artist, Edward Hopper’s parents pushed him to pursue a practical career. The clean lines and certain stylistic characteristics of advertising art still found their way into aspects of his later art. As stated in the article “Hopper’s Cool: Modernism and Emotional Restraint” by Erika Doss, from the mid-1910s to the mid-1920s Hopper was hired by some of the largest advertising firms of the period and often adapted his style slightly to meet the requirements of each commission. The sort of advertisements he took on reflected that of a growing America, one where they were targeting the growing number of white-collar workers, such as advertisements for gentlemen’s hats, train travel, and growing technology, and the lifestyle around hotel management, which met leisure and business.

2. Hopper Attended the New York School of Art

Hopper attended the New York School of Art. He attended the school from 1900 to 1906, where he met influential instructors such as William Merritt Chase, who taught him oil painting, and Robert Henri, who encouraged him to paint everyday scenes. He also spent much of his life in New York, and much of his work is based on the New York City cityscape, scenery, and people. Some of his most popular works that feature New York City are Nighthawks, Early Sunday Morning, and Room in New York. These paintings capture the cityscape of the early 1900s and quiet moments that seem to peer into everyday moments of people’s lives, often from an outside view looking in.

3. His Wife Josephine Nivison Hopper Was Also an Artist

Josephine was also an artist herself. She also studied at the New York School of Art, but their relationship didn’t deepen until 1923. Josephine saw the potential and skill in Edwards’ art and pushed him to be in art shows and get his art career off the ground. Nivison was more outgoing, often networking and speaking about his art and getting it into the right museums, buyers, and galleries. It’s also recorded that she acted as his administrative support, documenting his painting sales, maintaining detailed ledgers, and handling correspondence.

Not only was she an advocate for his art, but she also modeled for his paintings. Josephine modeled for his paintings, including Office at Night, Girlie Show, Hotel Room, and Eleven A.M. Her experience in fine art and theater helped her adopt different characters and poses.

4. He Was an Introvert

Edward Hopper often painted people who were lonely or introspective in nature. While living in New York City, he captured similar introspective moments in settings such as an apartment where someone is reading, an office, a home, or a movie theater. The figures in his art are often seen not conversing with one another, but rather, in thought or their personal home or city-dwelling environment. Hopper was known for being contemplative, silent, and indifferent to social conventions. He was also described as a reclusive, serious figure who often felt most comfortable being alone.

5. Hopper Lived in Paris

In 1906, after his Art School training in New York, he drew inspiration from Impressionist artists and painted en plein air (outdoors) in Paris, France. His work captured an imaginative, impressionistic style that focused on light and the scenes around him. He also visited the city twice more in 1909 and 1910. In Paris, he preferred to paint landmarks, bridges, buildings, and streets rather than include people in his scenes, as in some of his later works. Works like Le Louvre et la Seine capture a moment in time from his stint in Paris. The painting sticks with one of his iconic themes of a landscape devoid of figures, creating a mood of solitude and calm.

6. Hopper Captured the Loneliness of the Modern Lifestyle

In America, especially in urban settings, as technologies such as radios, cars, and urban architecture proliferated, perhaps people’s urban loneliness also increased. Hopper often captured the quiet moments of loneliness, retreat, or withdrawal that people felt in a modernizing America. We can see this sense of solitude in Edward Hopper’s works like Automat. Here, a modern woman, dressed nicely, is shown either having come from work or a social occasion, sitting alone at a table at a New York City Automat.

Automats were self-service cafeterias where one could pay and grab food from behind glass coin-operated vending windows. Offering convenience and a quick meal, this lets us know the woman takes part in this atmosphere and is dressed for the part in modern life. She sits alone in the space where the background is simple and dark behind her, showing only the reflection of the lights and no other company.

7. Edward Hopper Was 6 Feet 5 Inches Tall

Hoper was a tall man, often towering above his counterparts. His nickname was grasshopper due to his tall and slim physique. At the age of 12, he was already 6 feet tall. This standing out appearance, likely reinforced his individualistic and isolated nature. His height added to his shy nature, but also his individualistic image.

8. Hopper’s Art Was Often Inspired by Movies

Since movie theaters were still fairly new in his time, Hopper enjoyed watching movies and pulled inspiration from cinema. If he ran into a creativity block, he would spend much time at the theater, reflecting on films and personal experiences of watching movies.

He’d often use a camera-like perspective in his art, especially when framing his works, using doorways, windows, or mirrors to create a sense of distance. These various outside-looking-in angles created a sense of an outsider observing a scene. This brings the viewer into the scene as a sort of bystander and spectator, similar to viewers watching a movie, where the audience is not always actively involved in the scene.

9. Edward Hopper’s Art Inspired Alfred Hitchcock

In many ways, it’s not surprising that Alfred Hitchcock drew inspiration from Hopper, in that both of their art forms often displayed a sense of suspense, loneliness, voyeurism, and shadowy or mysterious figures. Specifically, it is noted that Hitchcock drew inspiration for his films Psycho (1960), Rear Window (1954), and Shadow of a Doubt (1943).

In Psycho, the iconic stark Victorian mansion was inspired by the large Victorian house from Edward Hopper’s work House by the Railroad (1925). In Rear Window, the film’s cinematography, set design, and even name reflect Edward Hopper’s artwork. Often, Edward Hopper’s art invites viewers to see people or figures through a window, a central motif in the film. This voyeuristic, isolating nature is evident in Edward Hopper’s Night Windows (1928), which depicts windows aglow at night, the outside viewer looking in on a woman wearing only a light pink slip, partially out of view, in the space of her room. Hitchcock’s film Shadow of a Doubt was also inspired by many of Hopper’s artworks, particularly by the similarities between its dimly lit scenes and tense atmosphere.

10. Edward Hopper Rarely Made Statements About His Art

Hopper was known to have communicated little about his artworks. His wife, Jo Nivison Hopper, often handled most of the social interactions surrounding his art. Edward often wanted his works to speak for themselves, or for viewers to interpret what they saw. In the rare moments when he commented on his work, he often focused on emotion, light, and subconscious elements in his artworks.

One of his rare comments states, “The inner life of a human being is a vast and varied realm and does not concern itself alone with stimulating arrangements of color, form, and design.” Edward Hopper argued that his works were not merely about loneliness but rather about a deeper “inner life.” He also often wanted to create art that came directly from life and the natural scenes around him. To him, art was deeply personal and an expression of the inner subconscious. Certain elements, such as the use of light, figures, and the inner world, came together in his own interpretations and furthermore, invited viewers to bring their own thoughts to each work.