Adolph Got­tlieb was an American-born painter and sculp­tor. His paint­ings were a mix­ture of abstract expres­sion­ism and sur­re­al­ism, move­ments that influ­enced his work greatly. Orig­i­nally born in 1903, Got­tlieb stud­ied art at Art Stu­dents Leauge of New York, even­tu­ally head­ing to Europe to study in France and Ger­many. After study­ing there, he returned to New ...

Saul Stein­berg was a Romanian-born Amer­i­can illus­tra­tor best known for his illus­tra­tions that appeared in The New Yorker for nearly six decades. Stein­berg stud­ied archi­tec­ture in Milan, even­tu­ally leav­ing the Fas­cist gov­ern­ment in the 1940’s and immi­grat­ing to the United States after a year in the Domini­can Repub­lic. Dur­ing this time, he sub­mit­ted draw­ings to ...

Balthasar Klos­sowski de Rola, or bet­ter known sim­ply as Balthus, is a French painter whom worked in the mid-20th cen­tury. While he painted land­scapes, still life, and por­traits, he is best known for his con­tro­ver­sial depic­tion of ado­les­cent girls and women. Balthus grew up to par­ents who were con­sid­ered intel­lec­tu­als — his father was an art ...

Paul Rand’s influ­ence still sur­rounds our cul­ture today, although you might not know it’s him. Rand cre­ated cor­po­rate iden­ti­ties for big name com­pa­nies such as ABC, UPS, and Enron. His logo for Yale was used up until last year, and he was a pro­lific designer. Rand got his start by tak­ing night classes at the ...

For this Tues­day, Arshile Gorky is the artist of choice. Born in the early 1900’s, the Amernian-American painter had a sem­i­nal influ­ence on abstract expressionism. Gorky was mostly self-taught, obtain­ing a large part of his edu­ca­tion through museum vis­its and read­ing art books and lit­er­a­ture. It helped him become famil­iar with with avant-garde Euro­pean art, ...

When I think about my early artis­tic influ­ences, Wanye Thiebaud instantly comes to mind. Best known for his cakes, can­dies, and prod­ucts of mass cul­ture, he pre­dates the Pop Art move­ment, pro­duc­ing a major­ity of his images in the late 1950’s and 1960’s. He’s also my pick for Brown Paper Bag’s new fea­ture, Time Travel ...

I’d like to start rolling out some fea­tures on Brown Paper Bag now that the site is rapidly approach­ing its two month birth­day. I’ve always enjoyed look­ing at both con­tem­po­rary and older works of art. After all, you have to under­stand where the rules came from to effec­tively break them! It’s also help­ful in pre­dict­ing ...