Aug 05 2025
Born on August 5, 1890, in Bryansk in the Russian Empire, Naum Gabo became one of the artists who fundamentally changed what sculpture could be. Instead of thinking of sculpture primarily as a solid object carved from stone or modeled in clay, Gabo constructed forms from planes, transparent plastics, wire, metal, nylon filaments, and empty …
Aug 04 2025
Born on August 4, 1922, in Frenchton, West Virginia, Charley Harper developed one of the most recognizable visual languages in 20th-century American illustration. Cardinals became triangles and circles. Ladybugs expanded into enormous arrangements of red, black, and white. Owls stared from carefully organized patterns of feathers and foliage. Forests, shorelines, deserts, mountains, insects, mammals, and …
Jul 29 2025
Born on July 29, 1927, in Cleveland, Ohio, Alan Fenton developed a deeply personal form of abstraction during the years when New York was becoming the center of the international contemporary-art world. He worked within the broad orbit of the New York School, studied privately with Jack Tworkov and Adolph Gottlieb, became friendly with Mark …
Jul 23 2025
Born on July 23, 1914, in Krokeai, a village near Sparta in Greece, Nassos Daphnis developed one of the most rigorous approaches to color and geometric abstraction in postwar American art. His paintings can look almost startlingly simple at first: brilliant red, yellow, and blue fields; black and white divisions; circles, rectangles, diamonds, bands, and …
Jul 21 2025
Born on July 21, 1932, in Helsinki, Finland, Eero Aarnio became one of the designers who gave the Space Age its furniture. His Ball Chair looks like a private capsule waiting to be launched from a futuristic living room. The transparent Bubble Chair hangs from the ceiling like an enormous soap bubble. The Pastil can …
Jul 19 2025
Born on July 19, 1911, in Little Rock, Arkansas, Tom A. Robertson followed an artistic path that was anything but predictable. He began adulthood preparing for a career in law, became an accomplished portrait painter, experimented with modernist ideas in New Orleans, and eventually produced a remarkable group of abstract watercolors and screenprints during the …
Jul 18 2025
Born on August 18, 1871, in Turin, Italy, Giacomo Balla became one of the artists most closely associated with Italian Futurism, a movement that attempted to create an artistic language for a world transformed by machines, electricity, automobiles, aviation, mass communication, and accelerating urban life. Balla was fascinated by things that earlier painters had rarely …
Jul 12 2025
Born on July 12, 1917, in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, Andrew Wyeth became one of the most recognizable American painters of the twentieth century without ever following the century’s most fashionable artistic directions. While Abstract Expressionism, Pop Art, Minimalism, and other movements transformed the art world around him, Wyeth continued painting weathered houses, empty rooms, dry …
Jul 11 2025
Born on July 11, 1940, Toby Bluth built an unusually varied creative career that crossed animation, illustration, watercolor painting, theater, children’s books, production design, and Disney fine art. Although his older brother Don Bluth became more widely known as the director behind films such as The Secret of NIMH and An American Tail, Toby developed …
Jul 10 2025
Born in Paris on July 10, 1928, Bernard Buffet became one of the most famous—and eventually one of the most fiercely debated—French painters of the postwar era. His pictures were instantly recognizable: thin, angular figures; skeletal faces; spindly buildings; bare interiors; flowers that seemed almost brittle; and heavy black lines cutting across muted fields of …
