The 20th Century’s Most Influential Artists: The Lives and Art of Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dali, Andy Warhol, and Jackson Pollock

Summary

In their biography of Pablo Picasso, Hans Ludwig and Chris Jaffe note that “for him, art was always adventure: ‘To find is the thing.’” Indeed, there is perhaps no artist who produced more art than Picasso, whose enormous oeuvre (which spanned most of his 91-year life) contained a countless number of paintings and drawings. Picasso also worked in other mediums as well, notably sculpture and lithography, and his constant experimentation with form makes him a useful case study through which to chart the growth of Modernism as an artistic movement and many of the artistic trends that would dominate the 20th century. At the same time, one of the challenges involved in examining Picasso’s body of work is the sheer breadth of it all.

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).

To truly grasp the significance of Jackson Pollock in 20th century art, it’s necessary to understand the dramatic departure he initiated away from the straightforward compositions associated with the social realist art of the 1930s, a Depression-era period in which political art offered readily comprehensible narratives that were grasped by viewers with little artistic training.

Few artists of the 20th century were as enigmatic as Andy Warhol, who once remarked, “If you want to know all about Andy Warhol, just look at the surface of my paintings and films and me, there I am. There’s nothing behind it.” This statement is hardly out of character for the famous artist.