Profoundly influenced by the welded sculptures of Julio González and of Picasso, David Smith devoted himself entirely to metal sculptures, constructing compositions from steel and scrap material. Almost single-handedly, Smith changed the nature of sculpture in America, giving it a passion, a seriousness and an identity it did not previously possess.

Jackson Pollock (1912–1956) was a major figure in the abstract expressionist movement and the most influential American painter of the twentieth century. Although he died at the age of 44, he left an unsurpassed body of work.

Son of Fred Klein and Marie Raymond,both painters,Yves Klein took the  European art scene by storm in a brief career that lasted just eight years,from  1954 to 1962.“For color!

Born on the shores of Lake Van (Armenia) and emigrated to the United States  in 1920,Arshile Gorky (c.1902-1948) was one of the greatest American  painters of the twentieth century and a seminal figure in the Abstract  Expressionist movement.

Installed in France since the forty s of the last century, Zao Wou-Ki has joined, like no other artist, the knowledge of Chinese painting and calligraphy with the individualist and subjective experience of the western abstract art. Impressed by Paul Klee s paintings and impeled by Henry Michaux and Andre Malraux, two of the most active French intellectuals of the second post war, Zao Wou-Ki has kept deepening in his particular introspective journey for over five decades. All his work seems to restore an immense inner landscape, no exempt of dissonances and shadows.

A leasing figure in the emergence of abstract expressionist painting in New York, Willem de Kooning arrived in the United States in 1926 as a twenty two years old stowaway from Holland.

Giorgio Morandi s lifelong pursuit of his poetic vision in still-life and landscape paintings as well as engravings and etchings has given him a deeply revered position in the history of modern art. This volume presents the work of this private and enigmatic twentieth century Bolognese artist. Influenced by the work of Giotto, as well as Cézanne, the metaphysical painters, and the cubists, Morandi s work defies any label.

A central figure in twentieth century art, the influence of Marcel duchamp 1887-1968 was a crucial to the development of Surrealism, Dada and Conceptual Art. Brother of the artist Raymond Duchamp Villon and half brother of the painter Jacques Villon, Duchamp began to paint in 1908. In 1912, he painted the definitive version of Nude Descending a Staircase, this was shown at the Salon de la Section de Or of that

As this book explains Giacometti spent his life, exorcising this existential and formal void through a return to the human figure. The question that dominated his work was how to restore in art the sense of the presence of the being in space. Giacometti sought tirelessly to establish his contingent volume, which became increasingly slender and threadlike, and to seize its finiteness in a reality, however banal it might be. He began to develop heads and nudes modeled in the void, in that experience of nothingness that opposed his quest for the absolute, a metaphor of the human condition.

Dubuffet was one of the most remarkable artists of the 20th century. An enemy of culture and of the art of museums, he was an anarchist and an atheist, and anti military and unpatriotic in his attitudes. As such, he was a rebel who rejected all labels or categories, asserting there is no such thing as abstract art, either that or art is always abstract.