Jackson Pollock began his career as a rather "normal" abstract artist, using paint and brushes conventionally. After World War II, he developed his "drip method," which saw Pollock lay a canvas on the floor of his studio, take a paintbrush, and splatter the canvas with the paint from above it. This "drip method" created vivid paintings of different colors and textures that had no traditional forms.

Rene Magritte began his career as a surrealist, but as he grew older began moving from strange shapes to placing familiar images in odd poses. By the 1950s and 1960s, Magritte was focusing on specific images again and again, such as men in suits and bowler hats and green apples. These came together in his most famous work, The Son of Man, which is a straightforward portrait of a man in a black suit and bowler hat, but with an apple obscuring his face.

Frida Kahlo entered the international art world thanks to her marriage to the older painter, Diego Rivera, in 1929. Because of her immense artistic talent and Rivera's appreciation and promotion of her work, Kahlo soon became well known in her own right as a painter. Most of Kahlo's work was self-portraits, featuring only her head, but which she would often surround with indigenous Mexican imagery, allusions to literature, or references to her turbulent marriage and troubled life.

Jean Dubuffet coined the term "art brut" to describe his own personal style, which focused on "low culture" and eschewed traditional culture. While initially inspired by abstract art, such as cubism and expressionism, Dubuffet pushed the boundaries of abstract art to make it be more visceral. Dubuffet believed authentic art was that which engaged directly with humanity, outside of intellectual theorizing.

Mark Rothko essentially took abstract art to a logical place, creating massive canvases that featured only a few large swaths of color. While seemingly simple, these "colorforms," Rothko's own term, feature multi-layered paint and subtle gradations. Rothko developed the style shortly after World War II, and the creation of these paintings made Rothko world famous.

Robert Raushenberg began creating mixed media paintings he called "Combines" in the mid-1950s, after he began collecting found objects and pieces of trash on the streets of New York City. Rauschenberg's use of consumer products lumped him in with "Pop Art" as a pioneer of the genre, while his use of sculptural forms pioneered modern art forms that departed from traditional sculpture or canvas.

One of the most remarkable things about Pablo Picasso's career is that he had so many different stages and styles, and he first gained recognition for his "Blue Period" in the first decade of the twentieth century. Named for the predominant hue Picasso employed, these post-impressionist paintings owed much to Post-Impressionists, like Paul Cezanne and Vincent Van Gogh, as well as the Renaissance Spanish master El Greco. This work was completely different from Picasso's later abstract and cubist works.

Faith Ringgold, born in 1930, taught art at the high school and college levels, and sought in her own work to blur the lines between craft and high art. Her main medium has been traditionally-made quilts, which feature high art images that reflect the African-American experience. Ringgold's work has been important for creating more widespread appreciation of both African-American folk art and professional artists.

Marc Chagall was born in Belarus in 1887, and worked in France and the Soviet Union, before having to leave for the United States after the Nazi occupation of Paris. Chagall had worked in various modernist styles, like cubism and expressionism, and his background made him even more prominent after World War II. Remarkably, Chagall was commissioned to create replacement stained glass windows in French churches that had been damaged by German bombing.

Cezanne's desire to play with shapes, colors, and form in both his still-life and landscape paintings was influential to the artists who developed cubism in the early twentieth century. The cubists' use of geometry and mathematics have a clear forerunner in Cezanne's examination of the various geometric shapes present in his still-life paintings. Additionally, Cezanne's ability to convey an image that was not perfectly realistic showed the possibilities in abstract art.