Vincent Willem van Gogh Dutch: [ˈvɪnsɛnt ˈʋɪləm vɑn ˈɣɔx] ( listen);[note 1][1] (30 March 1853 – 29 July 1890) was a Dutch Post-Impressionist painter whose work had a far-reaching influence on 20th-century art. His best-known works include portraits, self portraits, landscapes, still lifes, olive trees, cypresses, wheat fields and sunflowers. In just over a decade, he produced over 2100 artworks, including around 860 oil paintings. Critics largely ignored him until his 1890 suicide, at 37, following years of anxiety, poverty and mental illness.Born to upper middle class parents, Van Gogh was thoughtful and intellectual as a child, and as a young adult deeply religious and keenly aware of modernist trends in art, music and literature.
Pablo Ruiz y Picasso, also known as Pablo Picasso (/pɪˈkɑːsoʊ, -ˈkæsoʊ/;[2] Spanish: [ˈpaβlo piˈkaso]; 25 October 1881 – 8 April 1973), was a Spanish painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist, stage designer, poet and playwright who spent most of his adult life in France. Regarded as one of the greatest and most influential artists of the 20th century, he is known for co-founding the Cubist movement, the invention of constructed sculpture,[3][4] the co-invention of collage, and for the wide variety of styles that he helped develop and explore. Among his most famous works are the proto-Cubist Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907), and Guernica (1937), a portrayal of the Bombing of Guernica by the German and Italian airforces at the behest of the Spanish nationalist government during the Spanish Civil War.
