Haring’s rapidly dashed-off combinations of hieroglyphics and coloring-book outlines epitomized these developments, as his work went from street to gallery and finally to the auction house, where it ultimately fetched millions of dollars. Cut down by AIDS in 1990 at age 31, he left behind a legend that rivaled Warhol’s and that of his coeval, Jean-Michel Basquiat.

Capturing lightning in a bottle, Haring reflected a cultural moment in New York that matched the louche glamor of Paris in the 1920s. Both milieus witnessed an influx of creatives prompted by larger historical forces: the aftermath of World War I for the French capital, and municipal bankruptcy for NYC during the 1970s, when white flight to the suburbs collapsed the city’s tax base. NYC became nearly as empty as its coffers, clearing a space for a tsunami of artistic aspirants—many of whom, ironically, were escaping suburbia, where they’d come of age amid the fruits of postwar prosperity and a firehose stream of television programming.

Thanks to television, Boomers grew up immersed in sitcoms, variety shows, dramas, commercials, and B-movies that introduced its impressionable audience to genres such as horror and sci-fi. Just as important, TV brought world-shattering events—JFK’s assassination, civil rights protests, the Vietnam War—into suburban living rooms. The result transformed images into a generationally shared shorthand.

It’s no surprise, then, that artists shaped by midcentury mass media—which also included rock-and-roll music and comic books—saw that the high-minded abstractions of 20th-century modernism had been exhausted after Conceptual Art and Minimalism, driving a return to representation. For Haring, this meant reviving a kind of Pop Art that was even more energetic and democratized than the original.

“Keith Haring: Art Is for Everybody” will be on view at the Broad Museum, Los Angeles May 27–Oct. 8, 2023; the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, from Nov. 11, 2023–Mar. 17, 2024; and the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, April 27–Sept. 8, 2024.

But while his efforts were initially lumped in with those of Pop artists Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, and James Rosenquist, notably in curator Walter Hopps’s 1962 exhibition “New Paintings of Common Objects” at the Pasadena Art Museum, Thiebaud’s place in American art was something of a puzzle: On the one hand, his work spoke to the rampant consumerism occasioned by a postwar prosperity ignited by waves of returning veterans joining the middle class. On the other hand, his work didn’t deal with brands (as Warhol did with Campbell’s Soup and others) or the mass media. There was no way to read a implicit criticism of pop culture into Thiebaud’s canvases, the way one could with, say, a painting like Rosenquist’s F-111 (1964–65).

And then there was his technique. The effects of Thiebaud’s thick swirls of pigment were far removed from the slick facture of Warhol’s silkscreened paintings, Lichtenstein’s benday dots, and the broad, smooth brushwork that Rosenquist brought from his days as a commercial billboard painter.

Claes Oldenburg was, perhaps, the Pop artist who came closest to sharing Thiebaud’s sensibility. The subject matter of his “soft” sculptures—Brobdingnagian versions of quotidian objects stitched together from vinyl and stuffed with kapok fiber—often included foodstuffs such as hamburgers, French fries, and yes, slices of cake. But even here, the analogy with Thiebaud was imprecise.

The truth is, for all his associations with Pop Art, Thiebaud was really a kind of quirky realist, putting him in league with figurative artists such Alex Katz or Philip Pearlstein. More interestingly, Thiebaud’s oeuvre echoed that of another Northern California painter, Robert Bechtle, who, like Thiebaud, tuned in to the cultural reverberations of America’s booming suburbs.

A retrospective of Thiebaud’s work will be on view at the Fondation Beyeler in Basel, Switzerland, through May 21, 2023.

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The sculpture depicts the biblical David holding the sling with which he will kill Goliath. At issue here was its heroic full frontality, which unapologetically exposes David’s family jewels. (The Florentine museum that houses the statue, one of the most famous and admired artworks in the world, has invited the school’s students and their parents to come view the work in person; Florence’s mayor has extended a similar invite to the former principal.)

Though enraged custodians of public decency might not know this from reproductions, David’s genitalia occupy a loud and proud place in Michelangelo’s composition when seen in real life. The sculpture, measuring a colossal 17 feet high while perched a pedestal measuring nearly half that, features a penis that, while smallish in proportion to the figure, cannot be ignored.

An embodiment of youthful athleticism informed by ancient Greek statuary, David indubitably resides at the summit of sculptural achievement. But how and why did it come to exist? It’s a surprisingly long story, one that begins well before Michelangelo worked on the piece, starting in 1501 and finishing in 1504.

In 1464 the Overseers of the Office of Works of Florence Cathedral commissioned the sculptor Agostino di Duccio to create a statue of David. A gigantic block of marble was wrested from the famous quarry at Carrara and transported to Florence, where Di Duccio began work. But he quit two years later, having only roughed out the legs, feet, torso, and some drapery. The project lay fallow for a decade until another artist Antonio Rossellino took up the chisel, but he was fired shortly thereafter.

For the next 26 years, the block lay exposed to the elements outside the cathedral’s workshop, until a call was put out for artists to complete the job. Among the names considered was Leonardo da Vinci’s, though the gig ultimately went to Michelangelo.

The sculpture was brought to fruition, but there was a problem: The statue was originally intended for the cathedral roof—which accounts for David’s immense scale, as it was meant to be seen from afar. But it weighed six tons, far too heavy for hoisting. Instead, it was installed next to the entrance to the Palazzo Vecchio in June of 1504. In 1873, it was moved indoors to the Accademia Gallery, when it was determined that cracks were forming as a result of the site’s uneven ground. A replica took its place in the piazza.

In 1991, a deranged artist named Piero Cannata, attacked the sculpture with a hammer and managed to smash one of David’s toes before being stopped. He later said he was acting on the orders of a painter’s model from 16th-century Venice.

Today’s perpetrators of moral panic would be likely be appalled to learn that Michelangelo was homosexual, and that David arguably represents a proto-expression of queer aesthetics. But no amount of censorship will alter the fact that David lets it all hang out.

After the operation, much of Guernica lay in ruins. Estimates of civilian casualties have never been firmly established, varying from less than 200 to more than 1,000 out of a total population of 7,000. But while the carnage would be far surpassed in future air campaigns against cities such as Warsaw, Rotterdam, Coventry, and Dresden, Guernica holds a special place in the annals of infamy, thanks largely to the efforts of one person: Pablo Picasso.

Picasso cemented the event in memory with his masterpiece Guernica (1937), a cri de coeur that’s become an icon of antiwar sentiment. Painted almost entirely in grisaille, and measuring 11 by 25.6 feet, Guernica sets its mise-en-scène in a manger where animals and people, including a mother and child, are seen in a frenzy of anguish.

Guernica ranks as Picasso’s second-most important painting after Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907), with which it shares the same epic impact, though with a greater sense of gravity. But beyond matters of tone, the difference between the two paintings was that Les Demoiselles was painted by an artist known mainly by an intimate circle, while Guernica was painted by an artist who’d achieved international stardom.

Read Part 1: 1890s to 1920s here.

The estate, located not far from Cannes on the French Riviera, was one of many expansive properties owned by Picasso that attested to the fame and fortune he’d accrued over a legendary 70-year career. But another salient feature of Picasso’s life took form in the woman who stood by his bedside that day: his second wife, Jacqueline Roque, who was 45 years his junior. The age differential was typical of Picasso’s relationships with the scores of women he’d bedded, taken as mistresses, fathered children with, and been prone to emotionally abusing.

Today Picasso’s reputation as a womanizer and sexual predator has clouded his legacy as the colossus of 20th-century art, the explosive figure who birthed modernism and created the template for the artist as a superstar whose brilliance excuses all manner of sins. That attitude hasn’t aged well, and neither has the misogyny that percolates throughout Picasso’s work. In this respect, he was hardly alone among the men of his generation, but his views on women were coarse even for the standards of the day. “There are only two types of women,” he once said, “goddesses and doormats.” His thoughts on matrimony were just as unenlightened, and even violent in tone: “Every time I change wives, I should burn the last one. . . . You kill the woman, and you wipe out the past she represents.” Still, the women in Picasso’s life played a huge role in his art, as muses and as subjects who both fascinated and terrified him.

To borrow a phrase that film critic Pauline Kael bestowed on the British actor Bob Hoskins, Picasso was “a testicle on legs,” a man whose appetites were as prodigious as his artistic production. And therein lies the rub: To celebrate Picasso, you must separate the artist from his art, a tall order given how canceled he’d be if he were still with us. Yet his achievements are so overwhelming that to ignore them or his life would amount to willful blindness.

Read Part 2: 1920s to 1970s here.

City, as it’s called, is the handiwork of artist Michael Heizer, who constructed it over a period of 50 years at the cost of $40 million, marking it as a watershed achievement of a genre that Heizer helped to pioneer: Land art.

Not to be confused with outdoor sculpture, which uses nature as a backdrop for an object that could potentially be moved elsewhere, Land art (a term used interchangeably with Earth Art or earthworks) is site-specific—that is, linked directly to its location so that it can exist only there and nowhere else.

Emerging during the late 1960s and early ’70s, Land art was coeval with the nascent environmental movement as well as the larger countercultural ethos that played out in the art world as a rejection of the entire system for creating and distributing art. Since Land art shunned urban environments altogether, it was arguably the most radical expression of this idea.

Cubism’s emergence in the early 1900s signaled a seismic break with artistic tenets that had held sway since the revival of Greco-Roman art during the Renaissance. While those conventions had been under assault for much of the 19th century, Cubism delivered the final blow, paving the way for the avant-garde movements that followed.

Every child starts out as an artist, bringing home drawings and ceramics that wind up occupying pride of place on the family’s refrigerator door or mantelpiece. Of course, not every kid grows up to be an artist, let alone a famous one. Still, however big their interest in art, most children could probably learn something by hearing or reading about the lives of artists. More that just the specifics about a period or certain body of work, such narratives relay the virtues of creativity and sticking to one’s dreams no matter the obstacles—life lessons, in other words, that are worth imparting to any child, regardless of age. Luckily, there are scores of artist biographies aimed at kids, from toddlers to high-schoolers. We’ve assembled a list of 12 scintillating titles about modern and contemporary artists, all of which combine writing and imagery to tell their stories.

1. C. Ian White, Grandpa and the Library: How Charles White Learned to Paint
Known for a robust, realist style that spoke to his strengths as a draftsman, Charles White (1918–1979) was a key chronicler of African American life whose work covered a period from the 1930s to the 1970s. But as C. Ian White points out in this story about his grandfather’s art education, the elder White started on his path toward art renown through an experience familiar to children of working parents: On her way to her job every day, White’s mother would drop him off at the public library, where he would spend the day drawing the goings-on he observed or reading books about art while under the watchful eyes of the librarian. On Saturdays, his mother would take him to the Chicago Art Institute to encourage ambitions that eventually blossomed into a celebrated career.
Ages 4 to 8.

Buy: Grandpa and the Library: How Charles White Learned to Paint $18.94

2. Jan Greenberg, Action Jackson
The controlled chaos of Jackson Pollock’s drip painting may be especially relatable to kids, and through this handsomely illustrated picture book they’ll experience the artist at the height of his powers. Action Jackson focuses on the period during 1950 when he painted his masterpiece, Number 1 (also known as Lavender Mist), with words and images taking young readers through his process. Pollock was famous for working in a small barn, where he’d place his canvas on the floor, moving around its edges to apply paint by flinging it from a stick with a twist of the wrist. The book opens with Pollock setting up, then follows along as he paints. The narrative weaves in quotes from the artist and his peers along with descriptions of his early life, in a lyrical tone that’s more than matched by impressionistic watercolor illustrations by Robert Andrew Parker that are often laid out in two-page spreads.
Ages 6 to 10.

Buy: Action Jackson $8.99

3. Sarah Suzuki, Yayoi Kusama: From Here to Infinity
This biography of one of the most (if not the most) famous living artists (b. 1929) pairs short texts by author Sarah Suzuki with vivid illustrations by Ellen Weinstein in a crisp, brightly colored style well suited to Yayoi Kusama’s extraordinary life and the graphic punch of her signature polka dots. The books begins with Kusama’s childhood in Japan, where her family ran a seed farm and plant nursery for flowers and vegetables. This inspired her to draw pictures of pumpkins while still in elementary school—the first stirrings of an artistic ambition that would strain against the societal strictures placed on women in Japan. Her escape to New York in the late 1950s is neatly encapsulated by an image of the artist looking down on midtown from the Empire State Building, just one of many illustrations that succinctly capture Kusama’s journey to worldwide acclaim.
Age 13 and up.

Buy: Yayoi Kusama: From Here to Infinity! $16.49

4. Andrea D’Aquino, A Life Made by Hand: The Story of Ruth Asawa
Ruth Asawa (1926–2013), a Japanese-American artist, activist, and educator working on the West Coast, was virtually unknown in the art world until her rediscovery during the 2010s. This was despite the fact that she studied under Josef Albers at the legendary Black Mountain College and enjoyed some early success during the 1950s, when she exhibited at venues such as the Whitney Biennial, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the São Paulo Biennial. Andrea D’Aquino pays homage to the work of Asawa (best known for her nature-inspired woven-metal basket sculptures) as well as her life, which included her family’s incarceration at several internment camps during World War II and other brushes with anti-Asian prejudice. D’Aquino recalls Asawa’s story by combining charcoal, colored pencil, and collage made with monoprinted paper into elegant illustrations that chime with the artist’s ineffable aesthetic.
Ages 5 to 8.

Buy: A Life Made by Hand: The Story of Ruth Asawa $12.69

5. Cara Manes, Sonia Delaunay: A Life of Color
Sonia Delaunay (1885–1979) was among the first painters to explore pure abstraction through vivid color combinations organized within overlapping circles. These works were inspired by a patchwork quilt she made for her infant son, Charles, who plays an important role in this delightful tale taking mother and child on a fantastical journey in a flying automobile. Based on a 1925 Citroën convertible that Delaunay (who also worked in fashion) customized with her own design, the car propels Delaunay and Charles on a joyride through a landscape of the shapes, colors and patterns that informed the artist’s work. Written by MoMA curator Cara Manes and illustrated by Fatinha Ramos, the book envisages the painter offering lessons on art and life to Charles as they zoom across Europe.
Ages 4 to 8.

Buy: Sonia Delaunay: A Life of Color $19.95

6. James Warhola, Uncle Andy’s: A Faabbbulous Visit with Andy Warhol
When your uncle is one of the world’s most famous artist, paying him a visit is bound to be an adventure. So it goes with this true story of a young James Warhola traveling in 1962 from rural Pennsylvania to New York with his family to drop in, unannounced, on their illustrious relation, Andy Warhol (1928–1987). James’s father, Andy’s oldest brother, works in a junkyard, and it’s his idea to pile everyone in the car for an impromptu trip East. Warhola recounts his stay, helping his uncle work on one of his paint-by-numbers canvases—Do It Yourself (Sailboat)—rudely awakening him in the morning, and catching him without his signature silver wig. (“Of course, we all knew Uncle Andy was bald, just like Dad and Uncle John.”) A warm recollection of a beloved relative, Warhola’s tale is also a reminder of the blue-collar roots of the artist who became the Pope of Pop Art.
Ages 5 to 9.

Buy: Uncle Andy’s: A Faabbbulous Visit with Andy Warhol (Picture Puffin Books) $7.99

7. Marina Muun, Meet the Artist: Georgia O’Keeffe
Part of the “Meet the Artist” series for kids published under the auspices of the Tate Gallery in London, this book offers an introduction to the life and work of Georgia O’Keeffe (1887–1986), one of the most important American artists of the 20th century. O’Keeffe, who spent a major part of her career in New Mexico, is celebrated for her scenes of the southwestern desert, her large-scale floral studies, and her abstractions derived from her observation of landscape and nature. A selection of her compositions, reproduced in full color, accompany details of her biography providing a sense of who O’Keeffe was and why her efforts were consequential to art history. The book also offers activities for young readers based on O’Keeffe’s work, inviting them, for example, to create their own drawings inspired by motifs found in her paintings.
Ages 5 to 7.

Buy: Meet Georgia O’Keeffe $11.95

8. Sharifa Rhodes-Pitt, Jake Makes a World: Jacob Lawrence, a Young Artist in Harlem
This picture-book biography of renowned painter Jacob Lawrence (1917–2000) was published the same year—2015—that MoMA reunited the artist’s epic, 60-panel “Great Migration” cycle for an exhibition that spring. Created between 1940 and 1941, the series gives an account of the massive movement of African Americans out of the Jim Crow South to the relative freedom and economic opportunities of northern cities. Here, Sharifa Rhodes-Pitt tells the story of the artist’s own journey from Philadelphia in 1930 to rejoin his mother in Harlem, where she had gone looking for a job three years earlier. The precocious Lawrence was 13 at the time and already a blossoming young artist who would absorb the rambunctious sights and sounds of his new home and later transmute them into his equally vivid art. Rhodes-Pitt offers a lean narrative illustrated by Christopher Myers, whose images convey the spirit of Lawrence’s own.
Ages 4 to 8.

Buy: Jake Makes a World: Jacob Lawrence, A Young Artist in Harlem $18.39

9. Fausto Gilberti, Yves Klein Painted Everything Blue and Wasn’t Sorry
A fun, read-out-loud diversion for little kids, this book is part of series produced by the renowned art publishing house Phaidon. Each is titled for a particular artist and the direction they took to earn their acclaim—without apology, as the books make clear. This volume focuses on the midcentury French avant-gardist Yves Klein (1928–1962), who became famous for using a deep shade of aquamarine that he formulated and called International Klein Blue (IKB). The story begins with how Klein was inspired while looking at the sky, then proceeds to detail the many ways the hue figured into his work, not only as his signature pigment but also in performances such as one in 1957 in which he released 1,001 blue balloons into the heavens above Paris. Employing brief stretches of text and quirky, captivating illustrations, Fausto Gilberti tells the story in a way that any child can understand.
Ages 4 to 7.

Buy: Yves Klein Painted Everything Blue and Wasn’t Sorry. $17.95

10. Jeanne Walker Harvey, Ablaze with Color: A Story of Painter Alma Thomas
The life of painter Alma Thomas (1891–1978) is an inspiring one—an object lesson in how following your dreams can pay off no matter how long it takes to reach them. She spent the bulk of her life teaching high school students in Washington, D.C., and didn’t pursue her art career in earnest until after she retired at 69. She soon became a leading figure in a 1960s abstractionist movement known as the Washington Color School. Her style of short, brightly colored brushstrokes woven into chromatic mosaics of bands, concentric circles, and other patterns garnered her the first solo show ever given to an African American woman at the Whitney Museum, as well as a place in the White House collection. Emphasizing Thomas’s commitment to helping others, this biography, illustrated by Loveis Wise, charts her journey from a Georgia childhood to international recognition.
Ages 4 to 8.

Buy: Ablaze with Color: A Story of Painter Alma Thomas $17.69

11. Faith Ringgold, We Flew over the Bridge: The Memoirs of Faith Ringgold
Faith Ringgold has spent 60 years as a painter, mixed-media sculptor, performance artist, writer, activist, educator, and—most pertinently for this autobiography—children’s book author. Here, Ringgold combines her talents as a writer and artist to offer a look at her life and the struggles she had to overcome to achieve her status as one of the most prominent African Americans in contemporary art. Ringgold was born in 1930 in Harlem, and her life has coincided with the struggle for civil rights, the Black Power movement, and the rise of feminism. But in this beautifully illustrated memoir (which also includes family photos and reproductions of her work), she focuses on the bonds of family and friendships that sustained her during a tumultuous period of American history when she was obliged to surmount the challenges of racism and the demands of raising children while making art.
Requires advanced reading skills, so best for older teens.

Buy: We Flew over the Bridge: The Memoirs of Faith Ringgold $27.95

12. Javaka Steptoe, Radiant Child: The Story of Young Artist Jean-Michel Basquiat
Since his untimely death, Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960–1988) has grown into a legend. Starting as a graffiti artist covering walls with the tag “SAMO©,” Basquiat stormed into the 1980s New York art world as a painter imbuing his work with bare-wire ferocity, borrowing from African art (as well as Picasso’s co-opting of same) to depict Black culture and its expropriation by white America. Radiant Child looks back at Basquiat’s beginnings as the son of a Puerto Rican mother and a Haitian father, harboring from a young age the dream of becoming a famous artist. His mother encouraged him with trips to museums and lessons that art can be found everywhere. She would also help him with his drawings at times. Basquiat’s formative years are evoked through illustrations that combine graffiti and collage, much as the artist did, while also incorporating his signature images of skulls and leg bones.
Ages 5 to 9.

Buy: Radiant Child: The Story of Young Artist Jean-Michel Basquiat $15.59

Warhol came of age just as the WASP elite that had held the country in its grip since the days of the founders was being pushed aside for a meritocracy led primarily by the offspring of formerly marginalized ethnic groups from southern and eastern Europe—people, in other words, like him. Consciously or not, in his work he intuited how these changes reflected the displacement of high art by the divertissements of comic books, movies, television, and advertising. He also connected the centrifugal dynamic of this new egalitarianism to late capitalism, recognizing how both destabilized conventional hierarchies of wealth and status. (He once said of Coca-Cola, “A Coke is a Coke, and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking.”)

In other words, he foresaw our current neoliberal order. He likewise anticipated the disposable nature of our social media–addled present (“In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes”) and the triumph of money as the final arbiter of quality (“Business is the best art”).

Warhol’s adopted persona as a bewigged enigma could be construed, perhaps, as both a reenactment of the social transformations noted above and a shrewd strategy. (“I learned that you actually have more power when you shut up” is how he put it.) But his cosplaying also constituted a sort of hiding in plain sight. So, while his biographical details are concrete enough, Warhol remains a cipher.

Though he’s associated with Mannerist painting, which upended the equilibrium of Renaissance proportionality and illusionistic space, nothing quite compared to El Greco’s facture, whose brush marks, often broad and clearly visible, depicted attenuated figures that seemed to flicker like candles in the wind. He also tended to compress background and foreground, flattening his compositions into all-over schemes.

Moreover, he frequently abjured naturalistic color, imparting a bluish tint to flesh, for instance, while using fabric to introduce areas of bold hues whose highlights registered more like zig-zagging marks than as folds in cloth. It’s no surprise, then, to learn that while El Greco’s work puzzled some of his coevals, it had a huge impact on modern painters like Picasso.

El Greco’s idiosyncratic methods speak to the artistic traditions he absorbed to earn his singular place in the canon. He was born in Crete when it was a vassal state of Venice known as the Kingdom of Candia. Like all Cretan artists, he was trained in the Byzantine icon tradition, which featured otherworldly, elongated figuration and flat, gilded backdrops.

At 26 he left for Venice, where he encountered the work of Tintoretto, who was known as Il Furioso for his fast, bold brushwork. Moving then to Rome, where he crossed paths with the Mannerists, and finally to Spain, El Greco synthesized the styles of the Byzantine, Venetian, and Roman schools to produced paintings so ahead of their time, they wouldn’t be fully appreciated for 300 years.

You’ll see for yourself in our tour of El Greco masterpieces.