Albert Einstein

(1879-1955)

German-born theoretical physicist who is widely

considered to have been one of the greatest physicists of

all time. While best known for the theory of relativity,

he was awarded the 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics for his

work on the photoelectric effect.

In 1999 Einstein was named Time magazine's "Person of the

Century". In popular culture the name "Einstein" has

become synonymous with genius.

Einstein’s work, while brilliant in that he could reduce

tremendously complex ideas down to fundamental

explanations, he introduced uncertainty and relativity

into a world that had relied on the absolute certainty of

explanations like Isaac Newton’s belief in a world

operating on absolute laws of gravity and motion.

Sigmund Freud

1856-1959

Sigmund Freud was a Jewish-Austrian neurologist and

psychiatrist who co-founded the psychoanalytic school of

psychology. Freud is best known for his theories of the

unconscious mind, especially involving the mechanism of

repression. He was focused his attention to the value of

dreams as sources of insight into unconscious desires.

He is commonly referred to as "the father of

psychoanalysis" and his work has been highly influential

in the masses' imagination — popularizing such notions as

the unconscious, defense mechanisms, Freudian slips and

dream symbolism — while also making a long-lasting impact

on fields as diverse as literature, film, Marxist and

feminist theories, literary criticism, philosophy and

psychology. However, some of his theories remain widely

disputed.

Freud’s theories that the unconscious mind did not always

operate rationally weakened people’s faith in reason

Thomas Stearns Eliot

1888-1965

TS Eliot was a poet, dramatist and literary critic. He

received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1948. He wrote

the poems, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock", The

Waste Land, "The Hollow Men", "Ash Wednesday" and Four

Quartets; the plays, Murder in the Cathedral and The

Cocktail Party, and the essay, "Tradition and the

Individual Talent". Although Eliot was born an American,

he moved to the United Kingdom in 1914 (at age 25) and

was naturalized as a British subject in 1927 at age 39.

The horrors of World War I made writers think about ideas

that had long been accepted as reasonable and hopeful.

Eliot wrote that western man had lost his spiritual

value. He described the post war era as a “Wasteland”

that was without hope and faith.

William Butler Yeats

1865 – 1939

Yeats was an Irish poet, dramatist, mystic and public

figure, brother of the artist Jack Butler Yeats and son

of John Butler Yeats. He signed his works W. B. Yeats.

Yeats, was perhaps the primary driving force behind the

Irish Literary Revival and was co-founder of the Abbey

Theatre. Yeats also served as an Irish Senator. He was

awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1923 for what

the Nobel Committee described as "his always inspired

poetry, which in a highly artistic form gives expression

to the spirit of a whole nation".

Yeats spoke of his thoughts about a dark and dreary time

ahead for mankind in the poem, “The Second Coming.”

Things fall apart

The center cannot hold

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.

Franz Kafka

1883-1924

Franz Kafka was one of the major German-language fiction

writers of the 20th century. A middle-class Jew based in

Prague, his unique body of writing — many incomplete and

most published posthumously — has become amongst the most

influential in Western literature.

Kafka's works – including the stories Das Urteil (1913,

"The Judgement"), In der Strafkolonie (1920, "In the

Penal Colony"); the novella Die Verwandlung ("The

Metamorphosis"); and unfinished novels Der Prozess ("The

Trial") and Das Schloß ("The Castle") – have come to

embody the blend of absurd, surreal and mundane which

gave rise to the adjective "kafkaesque".

The horrors of World War I made a deep and lasting

impression on many writers. Kafka wrote eerie novels

where the characters were caught up in threatening

situations that they cannot understand or escape. The

books made sense to people who survived the terrible

years of World War I.

James Joyce

1882-1941

James Augustine Aloysius Joyce was an Irish writer and

poet, widely considered to be one of the most influential

writers of the 20th century. Along with Marcel Proust

and Virginia Woolf, he is a key figure in the development

of the modernist novel. He is best known for his landmark

novel Ulysses (1922). His other major works are the short

story collection Dubliners (1914) and the novels A

Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) and

Finnegans Wake (1939).

Joyce’s writings reflect Freud’s theories about the

unconscious aspect of the human mind. In some of Joyce’s

books, he uses a technique called “stream of

consciousness” which shows the narrator’s thoughts and

feelings. Joyce broke away from normal sentence

structure, grammar and vocabulary in a bold attempt to

show how the mind thinks.

Jean-Paul Sartre

1905-1980

Jean-Paul Charles Aymard Sartre, normally known simply as

Jean-Paul Sartre was a French existentialist philosopher

and pioneer, dramatist and screenwriter, novelist and

critic. He was a leading figure in Twentieth-Century

French Philosophy.

Existentialist philosophers attempt to explain their

search for meaning in life. They believe that there is

no universal meaning (one explanation) for life. Every

person creates the meaning for their life by the choices

they make and the actions they take. Everyone is born

into different circumstances so there are endless

possibilities for people to make meaning of their lives.

Friedrich Nietzche

1844 – 1900

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche) was a German philosopher.

His writing included critiques of religion, morality,

contemporary culture, philosophy, and science. In 1889 he

suffered a mental collapse and lived the remainder of his

life as an invalid under the care of his mother and

sister, until his death in 1900.

Nietzsche's writing has a distinctive style, focusing on

paradoxes rather than standard philosophy. By the second

half of the 20th century Nietzsche came to be considered

a significant figure in modern philosophy, and his

influence remains substantial within and beyond

philosophy, notably in existentialism and postmodernism

Nietzsche wrote that modern, western society had focused

so much on reason, democracy and progress that it crushed

creativity and individual action. He wanted people to

model the values of classical heroes who relied on pride,

assertiveness, and strength. His ideas had a huge impact

on politics in Germany and Italy in the 1920s and 1930s.

Paul Klee

1879-1940

Paul Klee was a Swiss painter of German nationality. He

was influenced by many different art styles in his work,

including expressionism, cubism and surrealism. He and

his friend, the Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky, were

also famous for teaching at the Bauhaus school of art and

architecture.

Throughout his career Paul Klee used color in a variety

of unique and diverse means, in a relationship that has

progressed and evolved in a variety of ways. For an

artist that loved so much of the natural world, it seems

rather odd that Klee originally despised color, believing

that it was in itself, little more than a decoration to a

work.

Eventually, Klee would learn to manipulate color with

great skill, ironically coming to teach lessons on color

mixing and color theory to students at the Bauhaus. This

progression in itself is of great interest because his

views on color would ultimately allow him to write about

it from a unique viewpoint among his contemporaries.

Wassily Kandinsky

1866 –1944

Wassily Kandinsky was a Russian painter, printmaker and

art theorist. One of the most famous 20th-century

artists, he is credited with painting the first modern

abstract works.

Kandinsky was born in Moscow but spent his childhood in

Odessa. He enrolled at the University of Moscow and chose

law and economics. Although quite successful in his

profession—he was offered a professorship (chair of Roman

Law) at the University of Dorpat—he started painting

studies (life-drawing, sketching and anatomy) at the age

of 30.

Prior to World War I, and especially after, artists

rebelled against traditional methods and realistic styles

of painting. They wanted to show the inner world of

emotions and imagination instead of realistic images.

Kandinsky and Klee used bold colors and exaggerated or

distorted lines in their painting.

Georges Braque

1882 – 1963)

Georges Braque was a French painter and sculptor whose

earliest works were impressionistic, but he later adopted

a Fauvist style. The Fauves, a group that included Henri

Matisse and Andre Derain among others, used brilliant

colors and loose structures of forms to capture the most

intense emotional response. He developed a more subdued

Fauvist style.

The same year, Braque's style began a slow evolution as

he came under the strong influence of Paul Cézanne, an

impressionist painter, who died in 1906, and whose works

were widely exhibited in Paris.

Braque's paintings of 1908–1913 began to evidence his new

interest in geometry and simultaneous perspective. He

conducted an intense study of the effects of light and

perspective and the technical means that painters use to

represent these effects, appearing to question the most

standard of artistic conventions. In his village scenes,

for example, Braque frequently reduced an architectural

structure to a geometric form approximating a cube, yet

rendered its shading so that it looked both flat and

three-dimensional. Beginning in 1909, Braque began to

work closely with Pablo Picasso who had been developing a

similar approach to painting. Both artists produced

paintings of neutralized color and complex patterns of

faceted form, now called Analytic Cubism

Along with Pablo Picasso, Braque developed cubism and

became one of the major figures of twentieth-century art.

Violin and Candlestick, Paris, spring 1910, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

Still Life on a Table: "Gillette."

Pablo Picasso

1881 – 1973

Pablo Ruiz Picasso was a Spanish painter and sculptor.

His full name is Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan

Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Crispín Crispiniano de

la Santísima Trinidad Ruiz y Picasso. One of the most

recognized figures in 20th century art, he is best known

as the co-founder, along with Georges Braque, of cubism.

It has been estimated that Picasso produced about 13,500

paintings or designs, 100,000 prints or engravings,

34,000 book illustrations and 300 sculptures or ceramics.

In late 1906, Picasso started to paint in a truly

revolutionary manner. Inspired by Cézanne's flattened

depiction of space, and working alongside his friend

Georges Braque, he began to express space in strongly

geometrical terms. These initial efforts at developing

this almost sculptural sense of space in painting are the

beginnings of Cubism.

Self-portrait, 1896 Self-portrait 1906

Bullfight, 1934

Guernica, 1937

Salvadore Dali

1904 – 1989

Salvador Felipe Jacinto Dalí Domènech, Marquis of Pubol or Salvador Felip

Jacint Dalí Domènech known popularly as Salvador Dalí, was a Spanish (Catalan)

artist and one of the most important painters of the 20th century. He was a skilled

draftsman, best known for the striking, bizarre, and beautiful images in his surrealist

work. His painterly skills are often attributed to the influence of Renaissance masters.

His best known work, The Persistence of Memory, was completed in 1931. Salvador

Dalí's artistic repertoire also included film, sculpture, and photography. He

collaborated with Walt Disney on the Academy Award-nominated short cartoon

Destino, which was released posthumously in 2003.

Widely considered to be greatly imaginative, Dalí had an affinity for doing unusual

things to draw attention to himself. This sometimes irked those who loved his art as

much as it annoyed his critics, since his eccentric manner sometimes drew more

public attention than his artwork. The purposefully sought notoriety led to broad

public recognition and many purchases of his works by people from all walks of life.

Dali, like other surrealist artists, tried to link the world of dreams with real life.

Surrealism, which means “beyond or above reality,” was inspired by Freud’s ideas

about the unconscious and the artwork has a dreamlike, unrealistic character to it.

The Persistence of Memory, 1931

The Temptation of Saint Anthony, 1946