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Georgia Totto O'Keeffe was a major figure in American art since the 1920s.

Born in Wisconsin into a family of dairy farmers, Georgia did her schooling in Wisconsin and Virginia, before enrolling at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1905. In 1907 she attended the Art Students League in New York City, where she studied with William Merritt Chase, and met her future husband, photographer Alfred Stieglitz.

In 1912, between a series of teaching assignments, she attended a class at the University of Virginia Summer School, where she was introduced to the cutting edge ideas of Arthur Wesley Dow by Alon Bement. Dow's teachings encouraged artists to express themselves through harmonious designs of line, color, and shape. O'Keeffe turned to abstraction, and created a series of charcoal drawings that are among the most innovative of any art produced in the period. These greatly impressed  Stieglitz, who exhibited 10 of her drawings in a group exhibition in New York, and later her first one-person show.

In1918, on Stieglitz’s invitation, O’ Keeffe moved to New York to paint for a year. The two of them fell in love, and eventually married in 1924.

Soon after she moved to New York, she began working primarily in oil, which represented a shift away from her having worked mainly in watercolor in the 1910s, and by the mid-1920s, she began making large scale paintings of natural forms from close up, as if seen through a magnifying lens.

During the 1920s, O'Keeffe made both natural and architectural forms the subject of her work. She painted her first large-scale flower painting in 1924, Petunia, No. 2,, which was first exhibited in 1925, and completed a significant body of paintings of New York buildings, such as City Night, and New York--Night, 1926, and Radiator Bldg--Night, New York, 1927.

By the mid-1920s, she had become known as one of America's most important artists. Her work commanded high prices; in 1928 six of her calla lily paintings sold for US$25,000, which was at the time the largest sum ever paid for a group of paintings by a living American artist.

In the summer of 1929 O'Keeffe visited New Mexico, and here started a love affair that lasted over 20 years. Between 1929 and 1949 she spent part of almost every year working there, collecting and painting bones, painting the area's distinctive architectural and landscape forms, returning to New York every fall. In the fall of 1934, she discovered Ghost Ranch, an area north of Abiquiu, whose painted desert of dramatically colored, enormous cliffs and hills inspired some of her most famous landscapes.

In the 1940s, and she was given two one-woman retrospectives, the first at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1943 and another in 1946 at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the first ever given by that museum to a woman. She was also awarded honorary degrees by numerous universities, the first by the College of William and Mary in 1938, and in the mid-1940s, the Whitney Museum of American Art sponsored a project to establish the first catalogue of her work.

After Stiegitz's death in 1946, O'Keeffe spent the next three years mostly in New York settling his estate, and in 1949 she moved to New Mexico permanently. During the 1950s, O'Keeffe produced a series of paintings featuring the architectural forms --patio wall and door--of her adobe house in Abiquiu. Another distinctive painting of the decade is Ladder to the Moon, 1958, and as a result of her first world travels in the late 1950s, she produced an extensive series of paintings of clouds Above the Clouds I, 1962/1963, inspired by what she saw from the windows of airplanes.

By the early 1970s, O'Keeffe's eyesight began to be compromised by macular degeneration. O'Keeffe met potter Juan Hamilton in 1973, who  taught her to work with clay and helped her complete her book, Georgia O’Keeffe, published in 1976, as well as the Perry Miller Adato video project, Georgia O'Keeffe, which aired on national television in 1977. She completed her last unassisted work in oil in 1972, The Beyond, and worked unassisted in watercolor and charcoal until 1978 and in graphite until 1984.

O'Keeffe died at the age of 98, and was cremated and her ashes scattered around the Pedernal.

François-Auguste-René Rodin (1840 –1917) was a radical French sculptor of the academic classical tradition that was taught at the École des Beaux Arts in Paris.

Born in a working class family in Paris, Rodin was refused admission to the Beaux Arts academy, but trained in the tradition at a local trade school for decorative sculpture. He later moved to Belgium, where he developed his inherent flair to produce intricate, tumultuous, multi-dimensional surfaces.

His attention to detail and realistic finishes brought an unexpected charge: Rodin was accused of surmoulage (taking plaster moulds from the live model) in his work, The Age of Bronze.

After a spirited battle and vindication, in 1880 Rodin was awarded the commission to create an entry tableau for the proposed Museum of Decorative Arts. Rodin labored for 37 years on this monumental project, The Gates of Hell, depicting scenes from Dante's Inferno in high relief. However, the Museum was never built.

Many of the figures from this tableau were later offered as individual sculptures, and include some of his most famous works: The Thinker (Le Penseur, originally titled The Poet, representing the poet Dante), The Kiss (Le Baiser), Damned Women, The Three Shades (Les Trois Ombres), and the Ugolino group were a few.

Rodin effectively perfected and used the technique of marcottage (layering), wherein the same sculptural forms where repetitively incorporated through varying identities and groupings. He was captivated by dance and natural motion, and used flexible and agile amateur models to help build a lyrical movement into his works.

Rodin had a colorful personal life, including a long-term relationship with Rose Beuret, begun during his poverty-stricken early years in Belgium, and a tempestuous affair with the gifted young sculptress Camille Claudel, who was his muse and assistant for The Burghers of Calais (Les Bourgeois de Calais), and his main model for several of his works.

The Greatest of the French Masters, Rodin had a vast force of apprentices, craftsmen, and stone cutters working for him, the most renowned being the Czech sculptor Joseph Kratina.
Upon his death in November 1917, Rodin was buried in Meudon, Île-de-France, and a cast of The Thinker was placed next to his tomb.

Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio [1571 –1610], Great Master, was the first representative of the Baroque school of Art.
The maverick artist spent his early years in Caravaggio and apprenticed under Simone Peterzano of Milan, a pupil of Titian. He entered the art scene in Rome in 1592, with a style which emphasized simplicity and realism, and was closer to the Naturalism of Germany than to the stylized formality and grandeur of Roman Mannerism.
His exaggerated approach to chiaroscuro, termed tenebrism, heightened the emotional intensity of his subjects, and earned him his first major commission with the Counter-Reformation Church.  In 1599, Caravaggio contracted to decorate the Contarelli Chapel in the church of San Luigi dei Francesi with two works, the Martyrdom of Saint Matthew and Calling of Saint Matthew.
The popularity gained by these first works earned him several prestigious assignments with the Church, although his adherence to reality and propensity to work without drawings were not appreciated by all.
The volatile and tumultuous artist, however, was incessantly embroiled in drama and intrigue, and this resulted in his being constantly on the run from authorities from one place or another. This regular ostracism did not affect his art, and he continued to leave behind a line of successes in his trail – at Naples, Malta and Sicily. His work had great impact upon the young, aspiring artists in each of these places, who in turn popularized the Baroque movement across borders and time.
Ribera, Vermeer, La Tour, Rembrandt, Delacroix, Courbet and Manet are some of the famous artists influenced by Caravaggio.
Caravaggio included himself  in several of his paintings, his appearance being as the witness on the far right to the Martyrdom of Saint Ursula.

Walk through the streets of Barcelona, and you will see the most amazing play dough buildings.

Well, not really play dough, but that’s what they look like.

Soaring, twisting parabolic arches, intricately tooled metalwork grilles, flowing surfaces decorated with bits of flamboyantly colored tiles…

Has someone let a pre-schooler run wild here?

No, not at all. These are the works of Antoni Gaudi, one of the premier architects of Spain, and, indeed, the world.

Avant Garde Art Nouvelliste, his works display a distinct sculptural style, integrating nature’s organic shapes rather than straight lines. Original to the point of ridiculousness, some of Gaudi’s works have an almost hallucinatory effect on the eye.

The Casa Milà, La Colonia Güell, and the unfinished La Sagrada Família, are singular and inspiring examples of the man popularly in Spain as “God’s Architect”.