100 American painters, Alice Neel to Yayoi Kusama, in one long list
Creating a comprehensive list of the top 100 American painters from the last 100 years is a significant undertaking. Here is a curated list that spans diverse artistic movements and styles, organized alphabetically to ensure variety across realism, abstraction, conceptualism, and contemporary art.
Top 100 Masters of American Painters (Last 100 Years)
A-D
Alice Neel (1900 1984)
Neel painted portraits of friends, neighbors, and strangers in Spanish Harlem and Greenwich Village while abstraction dominated. Critics only began taking her seriously in the 1960s. Her nude self-portrait from 1980 is among her best-known works.
Andrew Wyeth (1917 2009)
Wyeth painted the people and landscapes around Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, and Cushing, Maine, mostly in tempera and watercolor. His best-known work, Christina’s World (1948), hangs in the Museum of Modern Art. He received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1963.
Archibald Motley (1891 1981)
Born in New Orleans, Motley grew up in Chicago and painted the city’s Black South Side in bright color and jazz-influenced rhythm. He studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. A 2014 retrospective, Jazz Age Modernist, renewed attention to his work.
Barkley L. Hendricks (1945 2017)
Hendricks painted life-size portraits of Black Americans in sharp clothing against plain backgrounds. He trained at Yale and also worked in photography. He taught studio art at Connecticut College for over three decades.
Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960 1988)
Basquiat rose from the Lower East Side graffiti scene as part of the SAMO duo. His paintings combine text, symbols, and references to history, race, and celebrity. He became the youngest artist to exhibit at documenta 7 in 1982, and he died at 27.
Romare Bearden (1911 1988)
Bearden made collages from clipped newspapers and magazines, often showing Harlem and Black life. He worked as a social worker for years while building his art career. He received the National Medal of Arts in 1987.
Benny Andrews (1930 2006)
Andrews painted expressive figures and added collaged fabric and paper to his canvases. After serving in the Air Force, he studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. In 1969 he co-founded the Black Emergency Cultural Coalition, and he taught at Queens College for decades.
Beverly Buchanan (1940 2015)
Buchanan trained in medicine and public health before turning to art full-time in 1977. She is known for her drawings, sculptures, and photographs of rural Southern shacks. Her temporary outdoor “ruins” confronted histories of enslavement and segregation.
Charles White (1918 1979)
White grew up on Chicago’s South Side and trained at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. His mural The Contribution of the Negro to American Democracy (1943) at Hampton University is among his best-known works. He taught at the Otis Art Institute from 1965 until his death.
Chuck Close (1940 2021)
Close made large photorealist portraits built on grids, copying photographs one square at a time. He studied at the University of Washington and Yale. After a spinal artery collapse left him paralyzed in 1988, he kept painting from a wheelchair.
Cy Twombly (1928 2011)
Twombly’s paintings combine scribbled marks, writing, and references to classical myth. He studied at Black Mountain College in North Carolina, where Franz Kline and Robert Motherwell taught. He settled in Rome, where he lived for much of his life.
David Hammons (b. 1943)
Hammons uses found objects and everyday materials, such as chicken bones, basketballs, and sledgehammers, to address race and the art world. He studied with Charles White at the Otis Art Institute. He moved to New York in 1974 and often sells his work outside galleries.
Dorothea Tanning (1910 2012)
Tanning was a self-taught Surrealist painter who was inspired by the 1936 MoMA exhibition Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism. Her self-portrait Birthday (1942) is among her best-known works. She lived with Max Ernst in France until his death in 1976, then wrote poetry and memoirs.
E-H
Ed Ruscha (b. 1937)
Ruscha, born in Omaha, Nebraska, is linked to West Coast Pop art. He turned words and phrases into paintings and made artist’s books, including photographs of Los Angeles such as Every Building on the Sunset Strip. He moved to Los Angeles in 1956.
Edward Hopper (1882 1967)
Hopper painted quiet scenes of American city and small-town life, where light and isolation are central. He trained as an illustrator before turning fully to painting. His Nighthawks (1942) is among the most recognized images in American art.
Elaine de Kooning (1918 1989)
De Kooning was a painter, critic, and teacher tied to Abstract Expressionism. She painted portraits of friends and was commissioned to paint President John F. Kennedy. Later, her work drew on prehistoric cave art.
Elizabeth Murray (1940 2007)
Murray made large, shaped canvases that push the edge of painting toward sculpture. She studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and Mills College before moving to New York in 1967. The Museum of Modern Art gave her a retrospective in 2006.
Ellsworth Kelly (1923 2015)
Kelly was a pioneer of hard-edge abstraction, known for simple shapes and intense color. He worked as a camouflage artist in the Army during World War II, then studied in Paris on the G.I. Bill. He later settled in Spencertown, New York.
Eva Hesse (1936 1970)
Born in Hamburg, Hesse made sculpture from latex, fiberglass, rope, and cord. She studied at Yale under Josef Albers. Her short career is associated with Postminimalism, and she died in New York in 1970 at age 34.
Fairfield Porter (1907 1975)
Porter kept figurative painting alive during the rise of Abstract Expressionism. He painted family members, domestic interiors, and landscapes around Southampton, New York, and Maine. He also wrote art criticism for ARTnews and The Nation.
Faith Ringgold (1930 2024)
Ringgold made story quilts that combine painted scenes and fabric. Her American People series addressed civil rights and feminism. She grew up in Harlem, and her children’s book Tar Beach won a Caldecott Honor in 1992.
George Tooker (1920 2011)
Tooker painted figures in egg tempera, a method drawn from Italian Renaissance painting. His scenes of urban isolation reflect postwar unease. He received the National Medal of Arts in 2007.
Georgia O’Keeffe (1887 1986)
O’Keeffe painted close-up flowers, desert landscapes, and animal bones. She was one of the first American artists to practice pure abstraction. She moved to New Mexico in 1949, and her Jimson Weed/White Flower No. 1 (1932) sold for $44.4 million in 2014.
Grace Hartigan (1922 2008)
Hartigan was an Abstract Expressionist who added figures and popular imagery to gestural abstraction. She was the only woman included in the Museum of Modern Art’s The New American Painting. She taught at the Maryland Institute College of Art from 1964.
Hans Hofmann (1880 1966)
German-born Hofmann was one of the most influential art teachers of the twentieth century. His New York school, opened in 1933, trained many Abstract Expressionists. He devoted himself fully to painting after 1958.
Helen Frankenthaler (1928 2011)
Frankenthaler developed the stain technique, pouring thinned paint onto raw canvas. This method helped launch Color Field painting. After seeing Jackson Pollock’s drip paintings, she reworked her approach to scale and process.
Horace Pippin (1888 1946)
Pippin was a self-taught painter who was wounded in World War I. He began painting in the 1930s after burning images into wood panels. The Museum of Modern Art showed his work in 1938, and his war scenes remain widely discussed.
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Jacob Lawrence (1917 2000)
Lawrence painted the history and daily life of Black Americans in a style he called “dynamic cubism.” His 60-panel Migration Series (1940 to 1941) is among his best-known works. He later taught at the University of Washington in Seattle.
James Turrell (b. 1943)
Turrell creates light installations and skyspaces that frame the sky through openings in ceilings. He is linked to the Light and Space movement that emerged in Los Angeles. His long project Roden Crater, near Flagstaff, Arizona, is a naked-eye observatory still in progress.
Janet Sobel (1893 1968)
Sobel was a self-taught painter who began working in her forties. In the 1940s she poured and dripped paint across her canvases, an all-over method later linked to Jackson Pollock. Her work appeared at Peggy Guggenheim’s Art of This Century gallery in 1945.
Jasper Johns (b. 1930)
Johns is known for paintings of flags, targets, maps, and numbers. His first flag painting dates to 1954 to 1955. He is often linked to Pop art and to his friend Robert Rauschenberg. He received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2011.
Joan Mitchell (1925 1992)
Mitchell was a second-generation Abstract Expressionist known for gestural paintings inspired by landscapes. She studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and moved to France in 1959. Her will created the Joan Mitchell Foundation, which supports working artists.
Judy Chicago (b. 1939)
Chicago is a feminist artist best known for The Dinner Party (1974 to 1979), a table with place settings honoring women in history. In 1970 she started the first feminist art program in the United States at Fresno State College. She studied at the Art Institute of Chicago and UCLA.
Julie Mehretu (b. 1970)
Mehretu is an Ethiopian American painter whose layered canvases draw on city maps, architectural plans, and weather charts. She studied at the Rhode Island School of Design. She received a MacArthur Fellowship in 2005.
Kehinde Wiley (b. 1977)
Wiley paints contemporary Black subjects in the manner of Old Master portraits, set against patterned backgrounds. In 2017 he was commissioned to paint Barack Obama’s official portrait for the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery. He earned his MFA from Yale in 2001.
Kerry James Marshall (b. 1955)
Marshall paints figurative works that center Black life and history, often in dialogue with Western art. He studied at the Otis Art Institute, where Charles White was a teacher. He received a MacArthur Fellowship in 1997 and lives and works in Chicago.
Lee Bontecou (1931 2022)
Bontecou made wall reliefs from welded steel, canvas, and found materials in the 1950s and 1960s. Donald Judd was an early supporter. She was the only woman represented by the Leo Castelli Gallery in the 1960s, and she withdrew from exhibiting in the early 1970s.
Louise Bourgeois (1911 2010)
Born in Paris, Bourgeois moved to New York in 1938 and worked in latex, marble, bronze, and fabric. She is known for large spider sculptures, including Maman (1999). Her 1982 retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art raised her profile.
Louise Nevelson (1899 1988)
Nevelson made monumental wooden wall assemblages, usually painted black, white, or gold. She studied with Hans Hofmann and had her first solo show in 1941. Louise Nevelson Plaza in Lower Manhattan was completed in 1979.
Lyonel Feininger (1871 1956)
Born in New York, Feininger worked in Germany as a painter, cartoonist, and Expressionist. He taught at the Bauhaus from 1919 to 1926. He emigrated to New York in 1937 and died there in 1956.
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Mark Bradford (b. 1961)
Bradford builds map-like abstract paintings from layered paper and found urban materials. He grew up in South Los Angeles and studied at CalArts. He received a MacArthur Fellowship in 2023, and the Museum of Modern Art acquired his painting Death Drop (2023).
Mark Rothko (1903 1970)
Rothko painted large fields of color arranged into soft-edged rectangles. He is a central figure of Abstract Expressionism and Color Field painting. Fourteen of his canvases form the permanent installation at the Rothko Chapel in Houston.
Marsden Hartley (1877 1943)
Hartley painted bold Maine landscapes and later pure abstraction. Alfred Stieglitz gave him a solo show at his 291 gallery in 1909. He also wrote essays and poetry, and his Portrait of a German Officer (1914) is among his best-known works.
Martin Puryear (b. 1941)
Puryear is a sculptor who makes handmade forms in wood, steel, and other materials, drawing on craft traditions. He served in the Peace Corps in Sierra Leone and studied printmaking in Stockholm. He earned his MFA from Yale in 1971.
Mary Cassatt (1844 1926)
Cassatt was an American painter who lived mostly in France. Edgar Degas invited her to show with the Impressionists in 1877. She is known for scenes of mothers and children in domestic settings.
Mickalene Thomas (b. 1971)
Thomas makes portraits of Black women using rhinestones, acrylic, and enamel. She reworks compositions from Manet and Picasso to center Black women within art history. She earned her BFA from Pratt and her MFA from Yale.
Milton Avery (1885 1965)
Avery simplified landscapes and figures into flat, glowing areas of color. Critics often compared him to Matisse. He settled in New York in 1925 and influenced younger painters, including Mark Rothko.
Morris Graves (1910 2001)
Graves painted birds, animals, and trees with a mystical quality. Trips to East Asia and his study of Zen Buddhism shaped his work. He was a leading figure of the Northwest School and later worked mainly in tempera and gouache.
Nancy Spero (1926 2009)
Spero made political and feminist paintings, scrolls, and prints. She collaborated with her husband, Leon Golub. From 1974 she focused on images of women, in works such as Torture of Women (1976).
Norman Bluhm (1921 1999)
Bluhm was an Abstract Expressionist who studied architecture under Mies van der Rohe. He lived in Paris after World War II and returned to New York in 1956. He was a regular at the Cedar Tavern and showed with the Leo Castelli Gallery.
Norman Lewis (1909 1979)
Lewis painted social realist scenes of Harlem before turning to abstraction in the 1940s. He co-founded the Spiral group with Romare Bearden in 1963 to support the civil rights movement. His work is held by the Museum of Modern Art and the Art Institute of Chicago.
Norman Rockwell (1894 1978)
Rockwell was the illustrator behind more than 300 Saturday Evening Post covers over nearly five decades. He painted the Four Freedoms series during World War II. Later he addressed civil rights for Look magazine, and he received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1977.
Philip Guston (1913 1980)
Guston moved from social realist murals to Abstract Expressionism, then to a cartoon-like figurative style in the 1960s. His late paintings use hooded Klan figures as an allegory for racism and complicity. He was a high school friend of Jackson Pollock.
Jackson Pollock (1912 1956)
Pollock poured and dripped paint onto canvases laid on the floor, a method called action painting. He studied with Thomas Hart Benton at the Art Students League. His 1943 show at Peggy Guggenheim’s Art of This Century helped launch his career.
R-T
Ralph Goings (1928 2016)
Goings painted diners, pickup trucks, and everyday American scenes with Photorealist precision. He began this work in the late 1960s and had his first solo show in 1970. His diner interiors and countertop still lifes remain his best-known paintings.
Raymond Saunders (1934 2025)
Saunders was a Pittsburgh-born painter whose assemblage-style works combine collage, drawing, and found materials. He studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and later taught at California State University, East Bay. He worked in Oakland for decades and died in 2025.
Red Grooms (b. 1937)
Grooms is a painter, sculptor, and filmmaker known for colorful, cartoon-like scenes of urban life. He studied in Provincetown under Hans Hofmann and moved to New York in 1956. His environments, such as Ruckus Manhattan, are crowded with humorous detail.
Richard Diebenkorn (1922 1993)
Diebenkorn moved from abstraction to figurative painting in the 1950s and became a leader of the Bay Area Figurative Movement. His Ocean Park series, more than 140 abstract paintings begun in 1967, is among his best-known work. He taught at UCLA in the 1960s and 1970s.
Richard Estes (b. 1932)
Estes is a Photorealist known for cityscapes with reflective storefronts, glass, and steel. He studied at the Art Institute of Chicago and moved to New York in 1956. His first solo show took place at the Allan Stone Gallery in 1968.
Robert Colescott (1925 2009)
Colescott painted satirical retellings of well-known Western paintings, often recasting white figures as Black. He studied with Fernand Léger in Paris and later taught at the University of Arizona. He represented the United States at the Venice Biennale in 1997.
Robert Indiana (1928 2018)
Indiana is best known for LOVE, a 1966 sculpture based on a 1965 Museum of Modern Art Christmas card design. He called himself a “painter of signs” and worked with flat, brightly colored words and numbers. He lived and worked in Vinalhaven, Maine, for much of his later life.
Robert Mangold (b. 1937)
Mangold makes Minimalist shaped-panel paintings with precise graphite lines and subtle color shifts. He studied at the Cleveland Institute of Art and Yale. Early in his career he worked as a guard at the Museum of Modern Art.
Robert Motherwell (1915 1991)
Motherwell was a leading Abstract Expressionist and the editor of The Dada Painters and Poets. He is best known for the Elegy to the Spanish Republic series, which includes about 150 variants of black forms on white. He taught at Black Mountain College and Hunter College.
Robert Rauschenberg (1925 2008)
Rauschenberg made Combines that merged painting and sculpture with everyday objects. He studied under Josef Albers at Black Mountain College. His first exhibition at the Leo Castelli Gallery came in 1958, and he linked Abstract Expressionism to Pop art.
Roy Lichtenstein (1923 1997)
Lichtenstein was a founder of Pop art, known for comic-strip images built from Ben-Day dots. His first one-man show in New York, in 1962, was at the Leo Castelli Gallery. He taught at Ohio State, Oswego, and Rutgers before painting full time.
Sam Gilliam (1933 2022)
Gilliam is known for draped and folded canvases that hang without stretchers. He was a leading Washington Color School painter. In 1972 he became the first Black artist to represent the United States at the Venice Biennale.
Stuart Davis (1892 1964)
Davis was an early American modernist who exhibited at the 1913 Armory Show. He studied with Robert Henri and drew on jazz and urban life in bright, abstract compositions. He died in New York in 1964.
U-Z
Theaster Gates (b. 1973)
Gates is a Chicago artist and professor at the University of Chicago whose projects combine art, urban planning, and community revitalization. He works with salvaged materials and reinterpreted histories. He studied urban planning and ceramics at Iowa State University.
Thomas Hart Benton (1889 1975)
Benton was a leading Regionalist painter and muralist who depicted everyday American life, especially in the Midwest. He painted murals for the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair. He taught at the Art Students League in New York, where Jackson Pollock was among his students.
Tom Wesselmann (1931 2004)
Wesselmann was a Pop artist known for his Great American Nude series and his collages of magazine imagery. He studied at the Cooper Union in New York. His first solo show was at the Tanager Gallery in 1961.
Walton Ford (b. 1960)
Ford makes large watercolors that reimagine natural history painting, often through the lens of John James Audubon. He studied at the Rhode Island School of Design. His works combine animal portraits with satire on colonial history and culture.
Wayne Thiebaud (1920 2021)
Thiebaud was known for brightly colored still lifes of pies, cakes, and ice cream cones, which he painted in a style he called illusionistic. He was included in the 1962 Pop art exhibitions in New York and California. He taught at the University of California, Davis, for more than thirty years.
William H. Johnson (1901 1970)
Johnson was born in South Carolina and settled in Harlem in 1918. After studying in Paris and Scandinavia, he developed a flat, folk-influenced style for scenes of Black life. He taught at the Harlem Community Art Center through the Federal Art Project.
William Merritt Chase (1849 1916)
Chase was an Impressionist painter and one of the most influential teachers of his era. He studied in Munich and later taught at the Art Students League. He ran the Shinnecock Summer School of Art on Long Island from 1891 to 1902.
Winslow Homer (1836 1910)
Homer began as a magazine illustrator and covered the Civil War for Harper’s Weekly. He later became a leading realist painter of rural life and the sea. His late seascapes, painted at Prout’s Neck, Maine, are among his best-known works.
Yasuo Kuniyoshi (1889 1953)
Kuniyoshi was a Japanese-born painter who moved to the United States in 1906. He studied at the Art Students League and often painted circus performers and women with a folk-influenced style. In 1948 the Whitney Museum gave him the first retrospective of a living artist.
Yayoi Kusama (1929 2026)
Kusama is a Japanese artist known for polka dots, net paintings, and immersive Infinity Rooms. She moved to New York in 1958 and was part of the avant-garde scene of the 1960s. She returned to Japan in 1973 and lived in Tokyo until her death in August 2026.
This list spans notable pioneers of American Realism, Abstract Expressionism, Pop Art, Minimalism, Conceptual Art, and contemporary figurative movements. Let me know if you’d like more details on any artist!
How was this list of American painters chosen?
The list covers influential American painters from the past century, arranged alphabetically to span realism, abstraction, Pop art and contemporary figurative work.
Who are the first and last artists on the list?
The list begins with Alice Neel and ends with Yayoi Kusama.