The Blue Guitar, David Hockney & Wallace Stevens 'Copy'

One of the most prolific and revolutionary artists the world has ever seen, Pablo Picasso had a tremendous impact on the development of 20th-century modern art. Although he is best known for his association with the Cubist movement, which he founded with Georges Braque, Picasso’s influence extends to Surrealism, neoclassicism and Expressionism.

“Every act of creation is, first of all, an act of destruction,” the Spanish artist proclaimed. In Picasso's Cubist paintings, he emphasizes the two-dimensionality of the canvas, breaking with conventions regarding perspective, foreshortening and proportion. Picasso was inspired by Iberian and African tribal art. One of his most famous pre-Cubist works is Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907), a painting considered immoral and shocking at the time for its depiction of nude women whose faces resemble Iberian tribal masks.

Picasso made many portraits in this style, most often of the women in his life, their expressively colored faces composed of geometric shards of surface planes. In Woman in a Hat (Olga), 1935, he painted his first wife as an assemblage of abstract forms, leaving the viewer to decipher the subject through the contrasting colors and shapes. Picasso was a tireless artist, creating more than 20,000 paintings, drawings, prints, ceramics and sculptures. Tracing his life’s work reveals the progression of modern art, on which he had an unparalleled influence.

Browse an expansive collection of Pablo Picasso's art on 1stDibs.

The art of David Hockney is always engaging in its pleasant ambiguities: his prints, drawings and paintings are warm but somehow aloof; filled with light yet often dark and brooding in subject; simple, frank and mundane, but also ethereal and complex. The artist’s stature in the contemporary art world is such that, in a 2011 survey of one thousand British painters and sculptors, he was named the most influential British artist of all time.

Hockney grew up in Bradford, in the northern English county of Yorkshire, studying at the Bradford School of Art from 1953 to ’57, and at the Royal College of Art in London from 1959 to 1962. Though he was educated in art at a time when abstraction dominated the field, Hockney stuck resolutely to figurative painting and drawing.

Hockney's early paintings suggest a search for a style, veering from Expressionism to a grotesquerie suggestive of James Ensor. But Hockney found himself almost the moment he arrived in Los Angeles, in 1963. The move from the gray and rainy Britain to a world of bright sunshine and sparkling water brought Hockney a sense of freedom and an artistic epiphany. He would spend most of the next five years in L.A., painting luminous pictures, such as A Bigger Splash (1967), of things that made him happy: swimming pools, manicured lawns, palm trees, stucco buildings and luxuries like shower stalls. Hockney also painted people, almost always his friends. His California portraits such as Beverly Hills Housewife (1966) are considered to be his finest work. They are at once grandly scaled, intimate and poetic.

In the 1970s, Hockney moved back to Britain and spent much of his time on photography and printmaking. He returned to painting in the 1980s, and to subjects like still lifes, seascapes and portraits. Hockney has always been fascinated by the use of technology in art — he’s credited with inventing the technique of joining Polaroid photos in a collage to form a panoramic picture — and has been using the Brush app to paint on an iPad. Because he is prolific and works in a wide range of mediums, Hockney’s art is available at many price points. His consistently striking and provocative work should have a place in any comprehensive collection of contemporary art.

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