1958
Jean Maurice Eugène Clément Cocteau was a French poet, playwright, novelist, designer, filmmaker, visual artist and critic. He was one of the foremost creatives of the surrealist, avant-garde, and Dadaist movements; and one of the most influential figures in early 20th-century art as a whole. The National Observer suggested that, “of the artistic generation whose daring gave birth to Twentieth Century Art, Cocteau came closest to being a Renaissance man.”
Horst Janssen was a German graphic artist, printmaker, poster and illustrator. He created many drawings, etchings, woodcuts, lithographs, and woodcuts.
There is a museum dedicated to his legacy in Horst Janssen's hometown of Oldenburg. His works are represented internationally in major museums.
Yves Klein was a French artist, renowned for his innovative use of pure color and his approach to the conceptual aspects of monochrome painting. Klein, born in 1928 in Nice, France, left an indelible mark on the art world despite his brief career, which ended with his untimely death in 1962.
Klein is best known for his invention of International Klein Blue (IKB), a deep blue hue which he registered as a trademark color and used extensively in his works. This vibrant blue, which he developed in collaboration with a chemist, represented more than just a color; it was a means of evoking the immateriality and boundlessness of space. His monochrome blue canvases, large-scale public performances, and pioneering works in performance art established him as a leading figure in the Nouveau Réalisme movement in post-war Europe.
Aside from his famous blue monochromes, Klein’s Anthropometries series, where he used nude women as 'living brushes' to transfer blue paint onto canvases, is another testament to his innovative artistic methods. These performances, often accompanied by a small orchestra playing his "Monotone Symphony" — a single, continuous note played for twenty minutes followed by twenty minutes of silence — challenged traditional perceptions of the artist's role and the creation process.
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Lin Felton, known as QUIK, is an American graffiti artist living and working in Brooklyn, New York.
At the age of ten, he was already painting on subway trains, marking the "Star 10" as he called himself at first. Two years later, he took the pseudonym QUIK, under which he later became internationally known. In the early 1980s, he was attending PRATT Institute and Parsons School of Design when he was discovered by a prominent Dutch art dealer.
Felton has developed recognizable satirical comic imagery that he extends far beyond simple taglines, introducing both social and personal issues into his paintings. The theme of racial inequality in American society became prevalent in his work, combined with cynical juxtapositions of popular cartoon characters, pin-up girls, and writing on walls.
Although today Felton's work can be seen in numerous galleries and museums in the United States, Japan, Europe and Hong Kong, his real passion remained on walls and on trains, which even landed him in jail several times.
