Eight artists, every page

Born in Solna, Sweden, into a naval family, af Klint trained at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Stockholm and worked initially as a portraitist and botanical illustrator. From 1896 onwards she and four other women — "The Five" — held weekly séances and produced automatic drawings, leading her to a lifelong calling.

In 1906 she began the "Paintings for the Temple" — 193 works completed over nine years that include the Ten Largest, the Swan series, and the Altarpieces. Knowing the world was not ready, she stipulated in her will that the work should not be shown for at least twenty years after her death. Her recognition came with the 2018 Guggenheim retrospective.

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The Hilma af Klint Foundation holds the bulk of her work; the Guggenheim and Moderna Museet (Stockholm) have presented major retrospectives.

Born in Delft in October 1632, Vermeer was the son of an art dealer and grew up among paintings traded as inventory. He joined the Saint Luke's Guild in 1653 and twice served as its hooftman. He painted slowly — perhaps two or three works a year — and produced only about 35 surviving paintings across two decades.

Most of his works depict women in domestic interiors lit by a window on the left, rendered with a precision that suggests his use of a camera obscura. He died in 1675, aged 43, leaving Catharina Bolnes with eleven children and considerable debt. His reputation faded for almost two centuries until Théophile Thoré-Bürger rediscovered him in the 1860s.

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Vermeer's 35 paintings are distributed across museums in The Hague, Amsterdam, New York, Washington, London, Berlin, and beyond. The Mauritshuis in The Hague holds "Girl with a Pearl Earring".

Born in Hartford, Connecticut, to Russian-Jewish immigrants, LeWitt earned a BFA from Syracuse, served in the Korean War, and worked in the early 1950s as a graphic designer at I. M. Pei's firm and at MoMA's bookstore. In 1965 he began the modular open-frame sculptures that became his signature.

His "Paragraphs on Conceptual Art" (1967) and "Sentences on Conceptual Art" (1969) became foundational documents. From 1968 onwards his wall drawings — the artwork is the instructions; anyone may execute the score — re-defined what an artwork is. He was generous with younger artists and lived simply. He died in New York in 2007.

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MASS MoCA holds a 25-year survey of LeWitt wall drawings. Major institutional holdings at MoMA, Tate, Centre Pompidou, and the Walker Art Center.

Born in Matsumoto, Japan, Kusama experienced visual hallucinations from age ten — fields of dots, flowers that spoke to her — that became the lifelong source material of her work. Encouraged by a letter exchange with Georgia O'Keeffe, she moved to New York in 1958 and became central to the avant-garde with Infinity Nets, accumulation sculptures, and Infinity Mirror Rooms.

She returned to Japan in 1973 and in 1977 voluntarily admitted herself to the Seiwa Hospital for Mental Patients in Tokyo, where she has lived ever since, walking each day to her nearby studio to make work. Her career reignited globally from the 1990s onwards; her Infinity Mirror Rooms now draw queues at every major museum that hosts them.

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The Yayoi Kusama Museum opened in Tokyo in 2017. Major retrospectives have toured Tate Modern, the Hirshhorn, the Broad, and the Centre Pompidou.

Born into Paris's haute-bourgeoisie, Manet trained with Thomas Couture from 1850 and from the start refused the historical and mythological subjects the Salon expected. His "Déjeuner sur l'herbe" was rejected by the 1863 Salon and "Olympia" caused a riot at the 1865 Salon — both established him as both scandal and reference point.

The young Impressionists treated him as their unofficial leader though he refused to join their independent exhibitions, insisting on the official Salon as his battleground. His friendships with Baudelaire, Zola, Mallarmé, and Berthe Morisot shaped Parisian intellectual life. His last great work was "A Bar at the Folies-Bergère" (1882). He died in 1883.

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Major holdings at the Musée d'Orsay (Paris), the Met (New York), the National Gallery (London), and the Courtauld (London — "A Bar at the Folies-Bergère").

Born in Edo (modern Tokyo) in 1760, Hokusai apprenticed at fourteen to a woodblock cutter and at eighteen joined the Katsukawa school. He changed his professional name some thirty times across his life — each marking a stage in his development. He worked in every ukiyo-e genre: actor prints, book illustrations, surimono for poets, manuals of brush technique, the multi-volume "Manga" sketchbooks.

From around 1820 onwards, working under the name Hokusai, he produced his greatest series: the "Thirty-six Views of Mt. Fuji", the "Hundred Views of Mt. Fuji", and "A Tour of the Waterfalls of the Provinces". He wrote, late in life, that everything he produced before age seventy was not worth speaking of. He died in 1849, aged 88, still drawing.

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Major holdings at the Tokyo National Museum, the Hokusai Museum (Sumida-ku, Tokyo), the British Museum, and the Met (New York).

Born in Springfield, Ohio, Abbott moved to New York in 1918 and to Paris in 1921, where she worked as Man Ray's darkroom assistant and discovered photography by accident. She opened her own portrait studio in Paris in 1926 and returned to New York in 1929. Over ten years she photographed New York's rapid transformation, completing "Changing New York" under the WPA Federal Art Project.

After 1939 she turned increasingly to scientific photography, developing apparatus to photograph waves, magnetism, and motion — work that prefigured later science visualization by decades. She also recognized Eugène Atget's importance, bought his archive after his death, and spent decades championing it until MoMA acquired it in 1968. She lived openly with women in a time that punished it.

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The Berenice Abbott archive is held primarily by the Museum of the City of New York and the New York Public Library. Major holdings at MoMA, the Met, and the Smithsonian.

Born in Königsberg, East Prussia, Kollwitz studied painting in Berlin and Munich (women were barred from the academies, so she trained in special women's schools). In 1891 she married Karl Kollwitz, a doctor whose practice in working-class Prenzlauer Berg gave her decades of close witness to the lives of laboring families.

Her son Peter died in October 1914 in Belgium during the first weeks of the First World War; she spent the next eighteen years working on the memorial sculpture "The Grieving Parents". The Nazis forced her out of the Prussian Academy of Arts in 1933. She was evacuated from Berlin during the bombing and died on 22 April 1945, sixteen days before the war ended.

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The Käthe Kollwitz Museum has locations in Berlin and Cologne. Major holdings at the British Museum, MoMA, and the Galerie Neue Meister (Dresden).

Born in Baumgarten near Vienna in 1862 to a gold-engraver father, Klimt trained at the Vienna School of Arts and Crafts and made his early name on grand public decoration. In 1897 he broke with the conservative establishment to co-found the Vienna Secession, becoming its first president under the motto «To every age its art, to art its freedom».

His ceiling paintings for the University of Vienna (1900–1907) were attacked as obscene; he returned the fee, withdrew them, and never took another state commission. After seeing the Byzantine mosaics of Ravenna, his «golden phase» produced «The Kiss» and the «Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I». He spent summers painting square landscapes at the Attersee and encouraged the young Egon Schiele. He died in Vienna in 1918 after a stroke.

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«The Kiss» and major holdings are at the Belvedere in Vienna; the «Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I» is at the Neue Galerie, New York. Further works at the Leopold Museum and the Klimt Villa, Vienna.