The Greatest Artists of the 20th Century: The History of the Painters Who Mastered Modern Art

Pablo Picasso is one of the world’s most famous artists, which adds to the challenge of examining his career, but it’s necessary to examine his entire career because of the way art was intertwined with his life. Even from an early age, it was clear that he subordinated any external concerns relating to his life in the interest of making art, which may have been the cause of the spirit of melancholy that can be found in his artwork. At the same time, the somber tone of some of his work can be directly contrasted against his playful formal experimentation.

In his review of Salvador Dali’s first autobiography, George Orwell declared that “One ought to be able to hold in one’s head simultaneously the two facts that Dali is a good draughtsman and a disgusting human being.” Whether or not one agrees with the famous author’s assessment, Orwell captures the polarizing nature of Salvador Dali, and the extent to which his undeniable technical virtuosity often brushed against his penchant for provoking his audiences (not to mention provoking long-entrenched standards of “proper” taste). Dali, after all, was unafraid to eschew Renaissance perspective, thereby incorporating often graphic subject matter. In other words, if Dali stands as one of the canonical figures of modern art, this involved holding both a seminal role in the canon of cutting-edge art but also a tendency to challenge audiences, challenging the contours of “Art with a Capital A.”

Abstraction had surfaced periodically across modernism and the avant-garde, principally in the works of the Surrealists and Cubists, as well as the compositions of Americans like Stuart Davis. Still, Jackson Pollock pushed abstraction well past what had come before him, raising abstraction to an extreme that seemed to somehow be both primitive and esoteric. To truly grasp the significance of Jackson Pollock in 20th century art, it’s necessary to understand the dramatic departure he initiated.