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Artwork-level Analysis - A unique feature of TheArtStory

The Art Story is the only resource where you will find consistent and detailed analysis of the most important works of each artist and movement.

Pablo Picasso

Banksy

Andy Warhol

Jean-Michel Basquiat

Takashi Murakami

Leonardo da Vinci

Artemisia Gentileschi

Jeff Koons

1907

Les Demoiselles d'Avignon

In both content and execution, this painting shocked the art world and Picasso’s close friends. Although nude women as subjects were not unusual, blatantly portraying prostitutes in aggressively sexual postures was extraordinary. Picasso's studies of tribal art are most evident in the mask-like rendered faces, imagery that suggests their sexuality as being not just aggressive, but primitive.

Picasso radically took his experimentation with space to another level in this work. He abandoned three-dimensionality, which had been customary since the Renaissance, and instead presented a flattened picture plane that is broken up into geometric shards. For example, the leg of the woman on the left is painted as if seen from several points of view simultaneously, making it difficult to distinguish the leg from the negative space around it.

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2004

Kissing Coppers

Although the artist remains relatively anonymous, Banksy’s art has become some of the world’s most recognizable images. With his signature stencil aesthetic, his creations utilize satire, subversion, dark humor, and irony to create messages for the masses.

In this iconic image, two British male police officers in full uniform kiss. Composed on the side of a Brighton pub, the piece caused quite a stir, provoking both members of the public and the police force to show up for their own prized selfies. It was replaced with a fresh copy protected by a Perspex case when the original was removed and flown to the United States to be sold at auction. Bansky is largely responsible for catapulting guerrilla work into the mainstream as a viable form of art.

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1962

Gold Marilyn Monroe

Inspired by his work as a highly paid commercial illustrator in New York, Andy Warhol’s screen-printed images of everyday consumer objects and visual imagery from mainstream media would come to define the Pop Art movement. As reigning king, he helped blur the boundaries between high and low art, bringing what was normally considered “commercial” into the fine art lexicon.

His iconic work featuring Marilyn Monroe became a testament to both the artist’s and society’s obsession with fame. After her death from an overdose of sleeping pills, in 1962 the world became ever more obsessed with her fragile legend. Warhol’s likenesses of her, borrowed from a publicity still from her movie Niagara, helped feed that obsession by perpetuating her image within celebrity popular culture.

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1981

Untitled (Skull)

Transitioning from graffiti artist on the streets to celebrity gallery darling in only a few short years, Jean-Michel Basquiat is one of the most celebrated modern artists. His work was a refreshing jumble of many different styles and techniques, often mixing words and text with abstracts and symbols, resulting in a highly personal iconography.

In this early canvas-based work, painted when he was only twenty years old, a patchwork skull is featured, a pictorial equivalent of the monster from Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, constructed as a sutured sum of incongruent parts. Suspended before a background that suggests aspects of the New York City subway system, the skull is at once a contemporary graffitist's riff on a long Western tradition of self-portraiture, and the "signature piece" of a streetwise bohemian.

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1996

727

Known for his brightly colored and cheerful works, in which Japanese pop culture and the country’s rich artistic legacy merge, Takashi Murakami has enjoyed astronomical fame in the contemporary art world. His Pop Art-like aesthetics catapulted modern Japanese obsessions such as anime into the mainstream art world.

His work is typified in this triptych, combining the artist’s signature avatar Mr. DOB, who sits centrally poised and tragically laughing. 727 is a reference to the Boeing American airplanes that flew over Murakami’s childhood home while heading to U.S. military bases, a direct nod to the U.S. presence in post-WWII Japan that he often revisits in his art. Through this type of work, he crafts a subtle critique of Japan’s contemporary consciousness as well as the West’s intruding influence upon it.

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c. 1503

Mona Lisa

The first example of a “Renaissance man,” Leonardo da Vinci was a genius in many fields, including invention, painting, sculpture, and architecture. Known as the quintessential key figure of the Italian High Renaissance, his artworks contributed greatly to the aesthetic and techniques popularized during the time.

The Mona Lisa is an iconic example, still revered and studied today, for these exact qualities. The innovative half-length portrayal shows a woman, said to be the wife of a Florentine merchant, seated on a chair. The use of sfumato creates a sense of soft calmness, which emanates from her being, and infuses the background landscape with a deep realism. Chiaroscuro creates a profound depth in this piece, which keeps the eye moving across the painting. But it is her enigmatic smile that magnetizes the viewer, along with the mystery of what's behind that famous smile.

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1610

Susanna and the Elders

Centuries ahead of her time, Baroque painter Artemisia Gentileschi was one of the first and only female artists to achieve success in the seventeenth century. She was known for her realism and accomplished use of chiaroscuro, but it was her radical knack at placing women and their stories at the center of her works that presented a unique personal perspective on the cultural and social norms of the period, hundreds of years prior to the birth of Feminism.

Boldly portrayed in this accomplished piece, painted by the artist when she was only 17 years old, two voyeuristic elders spy on the virtuous Susanna while she is bathing, then attempt to blackmail her into having sexual relations with them with false accusations of adultery. Susanna's response is uncommonly central to the painting, demonstrating Gentileschi's unprecedented psychological realism, particularly in her presentation of women.

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1995-99

Balloon Flower (Red)

Jeff Koons derives inspiration from the role of material objects in our lives and the consumerism of society as a whole. Whether children’s toys, porcelain figurines, or glossy pages of a magazine selling products and lifestyles targeted to our personal pleasures, tastes, and desires, he blows up our obsessions with tongue firmly planted in cheek. He also creates an ingenious reversal of economic logic in the way that many of his pieces look cheap but are expensive, or are expensive versions of items initially made to be cheap, therefore questioning the fickleness of audience, market, and commercial success.

His most famous works to date are towering sculptures of balloon animals; this one stands over ten feet tall, weighing in excess of a ton. According to the artist, its shiny exterior is intended to "manipulate and seduce" unlike the cheap rubber it imitates. This intention is duly carried out by the highly immaculate reflective material that lures a viewer in so close that the overall composition fades and they are left confronted with their own distorted and imperfect mirror image.

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Art History Timelines

These interactive timelines are used to graphically and logically illustrate the progression of visual art.

They aim to educate and introduce topics using technology and the interactive capabilities of the web.

What is The Art Story?

The Art Story is your guide to understanding and enjoying the best of the visual arts.

Whether you are interested in - an artist (Michelangelo, Pablo Picasso, or Kara Walker), an art movement or artistic direction (Impressionism, Performance, or The Baroque), or even an art concept (The Readymade, Renaissance Humanism, or Collage) - we have specialized pages covering your topic of interest.

Each page is written to get you the information you need quickly. We focus on what is important about each topic, and what makes it interesting, striving to present you with the perfect summary.

Welcome to our huge, and ever-growing effort!