From the cubist earthquake of 1907 to the graffiti-charged canvases of the 1980s, these are the ten painters who taught the twentieth century how to see itself.

No century asked more of painting than the twentieth. Photography had already claimed the job of recording the world, so painters went looking for everything a camera could not do: the inside of a mind, the shape of a spiritual idea, the violence of a war, the hum of a supermarket shelf. Between Picasso’s generation and Basquiat’s, the rules were rewritten more times than in the previous five hundred years combined. Perspective was shattered, color was set loose from description, the brush itself was sometimes abandoned for dripped house paint or a silkscreen squeegee. By the time the century closed, a painting could be almost anything, and that freedom is the era’s great gift.

Choosing ten names from such a crowded field means favoring influence over fame, and breadth over sameness. Our ten changed how painting was made or understood, not merely how much it sold for, and together they stretch from Stockholm to Havana, from Paris studios to a barn floor in Long Island. A few are household names; one or two, we suspect, will be genuine discoveries even for seasoned gallery-goers. They appear in no particular order, because a century this restless refuses to be ranked.

1. Pablo Picasso

1881-1973

Every list of this kind begins here, and for once the cliché is deserved. With Les Demoiselles d’Avignon in 1907, Picasso broke five centuries of perspective into angular shards, and the cubism he developed alongside Georges Braque became the seed of nearly every abstraction that followed. He reinvented himself relentlessly across seven decades, from melancholy blue harlequins to neoclassical bathers to the howling political fury of Guernica, painted in 1937 in response to the bombing of a Basque town. Start with Guernica itself: eleven feet tall, entirely in grays, and still the century’s most searing image of war.

2. Henri Matisse

1869-1954

If Picasso liberated form, Matisse liberated color. At the 1905 Salon d’Automne his blazing, unnaturalistic canvases earned his circle the mocking name fauves, wild beasts, and painting never went back to polite description. His genius was to make radical work feel like pleasure: a red room, an open window, dancers in a ring of pure vermilion and blue. Bedridden after surgery in his final years, he invented one last medium, cutting painted paper with scissors into works like The Swimming Pool. Start with The Red Studio of 1911, a room dissolved into a single saturated field of red.

3. Hilma af Klint

The secret pioneer

Here is the discovery. Years before Kandinsky’s celebrated breakthroughs, this Swedish painter (1862-1944) was already making large, fully abstract canvases, guided by her spiritualist beliefs and shown to almost no one. Her series The Ten Largest, begun in 1907, unfurls swirling botanical geometries on canvases over three meters tall, and she stipulated that her work stay hidden for twenty years after her death, convinced the world was not ready. She was right about the wait but wrong about the welcome: the Guggenheim’s 2018 exhibition of her work became the most visited show in that museum’s history. Start with The Ten Largest, No. 7, Adulthood, and recalibrate everything you thought you knew about who invented abstraction.

4. Salvador Dalí

1904-1989

Surrealism had many painters, but Dalí gave the movement its public face and its most indelible images. Trained to an old-master polish, he used flawless technique to render the impossible: melting watches, crutch-propped flesh, deserts that behave like dreams. He called his method paranoiac-critical, a deliberate cultivation of delusion, and he carried it beyond the canvas into film, collaborating with Luis Buñuel on the scandalous Un Chien Andalou in 1929. Start with The Persistence of Memory from 1931, a painting smaller than a tea tray that has colonized the world’s imagination of what a dream looks like.

5. Georgia O’Keeffe

1887-1986

O’Keeffe built an American modernism that owed nothing to Paris. Her magnified flowers of the 1920s forced viewers to actually look at things they thought they knew, and her later canvases of bleached skulls and pink New Mexico cliffs gave the desert Southwest its defining painter. In 1946 the Museum of Modern Art gave her its first retrospective devoted to a woman, and she kept innovating for decades after, painting the view from airplane windows in her seventies. Start with Jimson Weed/White Flower No. 1 from 1932, a single blossom scaled up to the size of a landscape.

6. Frida Kahlo

1907-1954

Kahlo turned the self-portrait into an instrument of unflinching autobiography, painting her own chronic pain, her Mexican identity, and her turbulent marriage to Diego Rivera with a directness the genre had never seen. Working from her blue house in Coyoacán, she fused folk retablo traditions with modernist candor, and roughly a third of her paintings are portraits of herself. The surrealists claimed her, but she famously insisted she painted not dreams but her own reality, and in 1939 the Louvre acquired her self-portrait The Frame. Start with The Two Fridas from that same year, twin selves holding hands, hearts exposed and connected by a single vein.

7. Wifredo Lam

1902-1982

The second discovery on our list, and one of the century’s great correctives. Born in Cuba to a Chinese father and a mother of African and Spanish descent, Lam absorbed cubism and surrealism in the Paris of Picasso, then sailed home in 1941 and turned modernism’s tools back toward the Afro-Cuban world that European painters had only borrowed from. His masterpiece The Jungle, finished in 1943, crowds the canvas with hybrid figures, part sugarcane, part mask, part moonlit limb, and it hangs today at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Start there, and watch modern art’s story widen beyond Europe in a single painting.

8. Jackson Pollock

1912-1956

In 1947 Pollock laid his canvas on the floor of a Long Island barn and began flinging, dripping, and pouring paint from above, and the center of the art world moved from Paris to New York almost overnight. The drip paintings made the act of painting itself the subject; critics coined the phrase action painting to describe it. Life magazine asked in 1949 whether he was the greatest living painter in the United States, a question that turned a private struggle into public myth, and his death in a car crash at forty-four sealed it. Start with Autumn Rhythm (Number 30) from 1950 at the Metropolitan Museum, seventeen feet of controlled chaos that resolves, the longer you look, into something like weather.

9. Andy Warhol

1928-1987

Warhol collapsed the wall between fine art and the checkout aisle. His thirty-two Campbell’s Soup Cans, first shown at the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles in 1962, declared that the most ordinary American image deserved a gallery wall, and his silkscreened Marilyns, Elvises, and electric chairs made repetition itself a form of meaning. From his silver-walled studio, the Factory, he ran painting like a production line and predicted celebrity culture decades before it arrived. Start with the Marilyn Diptych of 1962, fifty faces of Marilyn Monroe fading from candy color into smudged black and white, glamour and mortality on one canvas.

10. Jean-Michel Basquiat

1960-1988

Basquiat began as SAMO, spraying cryptic poetry on downtown Manhattan walls, and within a few years had dragged the energy of the street into painting’s inner sanctum. His canvases layer crowned heads, anatomy diagrams, jazz heroes, and crossed-out words into a raw, brilliant shorthand for Black American experience, and at twenty-two he was among the youngest artists ever included in a Whitney Biennial. He collaborated on canvases with Warhol, burned impossibly bright, and died at twenty-seven, leaving a body of work the century is still catching up to. Start with Untitled from 1981, the electric skull-like head that has become the emblem of his decade.

Final thoughts

What binds these ten, across such wildly different styles, is nerve. Each of them decided that painting could do something it had never done before, whether that meant fracturing a face into planes, hiding a life’s work from an unready world, or hanging a soup can where a saint used to go. Between them they gave the twentieth century its visual vocabulary: abstraction, surrealism, the monumental self-portrait, the drip, the silkscreen, the crown. The century’s painting begins in a Málaga-born prodigy’s Paris studio and ends in a downtown New York loft, and at every step it insisted that seeing is something we learn, and can learn again.

Any honest list leaves giants on the doorstep. Wassily Kandinsky, whose theories gave abstraction its public founding text, and Mark Rothko, whose floating fields of color turned painting into a place you stand inside, both missed the cut by the width of a brush hair. Consider them your next visits, and if this era has caught your imagination, stay with us: CreARTivity’s explorations of art history and the exhibitions that shaped it are the natural next room in the gallery.

Corrected on 2 October 2026. An earlier version of this article described Pablo Picasso as Barcelona-born. The correct information is that he was born in Málaga, Spain, on 25 October 1881.

Sources consulted

Wikipedia, Pablo Picasso
The Museum of Modern Art, Georgia O’Keeffe (1946 exhibition)