The seminal surrealist: Exploring Dali's grandiose and grotesque oeuvre Picasso called Dali "an outboard motor that's always running." Dali thought himself a genius with a right to indulge in whatever lunacy popped into his head. Painter, sculptor, writer, and filmmaker, Salvador Dali (1904-1989) was one of the century's greatest exhibitionists and eccentrics--and was rewarded with fierce controversy wherever he went. He was one of the first to apply the insights of Sigmund Freud and psychoanalysis to the art of painting, approaching the subconscious with extraordinary sensitivity and...

Freewheeling
Tamara de Lempicka, icon of Art Deco

Tamara de Lempicka (1896 1980) lived art in the fast lane. With an appetite for glamour and fame as much as Left Bank bohemianism, she fled her native Russia after the Bolshevik revolution and set about taking Paris by storm. Her prolific, monumental oeuvre remains one of the most vivid documents of 1920s Art Deco.

De Lempicka s style deployed cool colors and tight, post-cubist forms into an at once neoclassical and voluptuous figuration. Her subjects, often nude,...

Supreme Feeling
Kazimir Malevich, pioneer of abstraction

After flirtations with Realism, Impressionism, and Symbolism, Kiev-born Kazimir Malevich (1878-1935) found his metier in dissolving literal, representational figures and landscapes into pure emotionally-charged abstraction. In 1915, he created what is widely lauded as the first and ultimate abstract artwork Black Square, a black rectangle on a white background, hailed as the -zero point of painting, - a seminal moment for modern and...