Top 10 American Contemporary Painters

The United States of America holds a pivotal position in the history of Modern and Contemporary Art, a journey marked by boundless creativity and innovative endeavors. The advent of the 20th century witnessed the emergence of illustrious figures like Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko—artists who redefined artistic norms and ingeniously shaped art as we know it today. As we move into the Contemporary Era, we confront a fundamental question: Who are today’s most influential American contemporary painters?

This article endeavors to identify the top ten painters who have contributed significantly to the ongoing evolution of Contemporary Art in the United States. As always, we offer a reasoned selection using the analytical research tool of Artfacts, ranking artists based on objective data and career facts, measuring their pertinence in the art world before examining their artistic methodologies, historical context, and contributions. In doing so, we recognize the enduring impact of American artistry and its ability to inspire and transcend boundaries.

Even though our selection of artists is factual, objective, and thus reasoned, one must also add it is not absolute. A common flaw is that the algorithm favors an older generation of artists as it—rightfully—strongly values the longevity of an artist’s career. As a result, there is often an apparent lack of diversity and inclusivity, as illustrated in this all-male selection. From this perspective, painting seems to be somewhat stuck in the past compared to other artistic disciplines such as Performance Art, Installation Art, or, more closely related, Collage Art. One could also argue the uncertain time delimitation between what is Modern Painting and what is contemporary painting. In this case, instead of opting for painters active today, we have crawled all painters who have been active during the contemporary era—roughly from 1960 up to this very day.

Numerous iconic contemporary painters just fell short of the top ten. Therefore, I cannot help but share my disappointment in not seeing female painters in this top ten, such as Helen Frankenthaler and her enigmatic fields of washed paint, Agnes Martin’s intriguing grids, Nicole Eisenman’s colorful and intimate portraits, and Vija Eisenman contemplative pictures of the sea and stars. Or what about artists of color, such as Kerry James Marshall and his characteristic black figures populating his large canvases, Julie Mehretu’s abstract mark-making, Kehinde Wiley’s colorful portraits, or Mickalene Thomas’ complex patterns in his figurative pictures?

Nevertheless, the selected artists are as iconic as it gets, and as good as it gets. Therefore, let’s dive into our reasoned top ten of the most pertinent American painters today.

10. Frank Stella

Frank Stella was born in Malden, Massachusetts, in 1936 and has since become one of the most innovative figures of the twentieth century. After earning a bachelor of arts degree in history from Princeton University in 1958, he relocated to New York City, where he continues to reside and create.

Throughout his illustrious career, Stella’s exceptional ability to reinvent himself and his art has been a defining feature. From the early 1960s, he embraced a series-based approach to his work, gaining immediate recognition with his “Black Paintings,” characterized by parallel patterns in black house paint separated by pinstripes of unpainted canvas. Over the ensuing decades, Stella transitioned to a more exuberant use of color, shapes, and curving forms, pioneering innovative narratives and abstractions in his paintings, prints, sculptures, and architectural installations. His artistic trajectory can be described as an evolution from Minimalism to Maximalism.

Frank Stella’s artistic prowess has been exhibited globally since 1959, with several retrospectives dedicated to his oeuvre. His masterpieces grace the collections of major museums worldwide, including Tate in London, Folkwang Museum in Essen, Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice, Ludwig Museum of Contemporary Art in Budapest, Kunstmuseum Basel, Brooklyn Museum and Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, Art Institute of Chicago, Hirschhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, and Kawamura Memorial Museum of Art in Japan. Stella’s profound impact on the art world continues to reverberate through time, solidifying his status as a pioneering and influential artist of our era.[1]

9. Jean-Michel Basquiat

Jean-Michel Basquiat, born in 1960 in New York City and tragically passing away in 1988, was a prodigious artist whose life and work left an indelible mark on the contemporary art world. As a young man of Haitian and Puerto Rican heritage, Basquiat ventured into the bohemian underbelly of New York’s vibrant underground scene at a tender age, immersing himself in the worlds of jazz, noise music, and street poetry. Known by the pseudonym SAMO, he adorned downtown Manhattan walls with sophisticated aphorisms, carving a unique space for his artistic voice.

In 1981, Basquiat shed his SAMO persona and began painting and drawing on salvaged materials, later transitioning to canvas and paper, ingeniously utilizing found materials from the urban environment. His creative output was ceaseless, fueled by an insatiable passion for words, music, and mixed media. The amalgamation of these elements infused his work with an unparalleled sense of urgency and excitement. Within a short period, Basquiat’s unique artistic language and content, bridging cultures and articulating alternative histories, gained widespread acclaim, catapulting him into the art world’s Neo-Expressionist art boom. A defining moment occurred in 1985 when he graced the cover of The New York Times Magazine, epitomizing cool and capturing the burgeoning international art market’s attention.

Despite his charismatic public image, Basquiat’s artistic brilliance lay in his ability to blend drawing, painting, history, and poetry to create an innovative form of expression. He masterfully combined materials and techniques, balancing diverse aesthetic forces, resulting in paintings that exuded potent contrasts—control and spontaneity, savagery and wit, urbanity and primitivism. Notably, his art served as a poignant commentary on the harsh realities of race, culture, and society, elevating his work beyond traditional boundaries.[2]

8. Ellsworth Kelly

Ellsworth Kelly, born in Newburgh, New York, in 1923, stands as an influential figure whose innovations during the late 1940s and early 1950s reverberated through the realm of abstract art for decades. His pioneering contributions encompassed the development of monochrome and multi-panel painting, a steadfast commitment to integral forms, and the incorporation of chance and seriality, all of which played pivotal roles in abstract art’s departure from expressionism in the 1960s. Yet, Kelly’s approach to abstraction was uniquely grounded in the particular rather than the universal. Drawing inspiration from found compositions, such as the fold of a cigarette packet or the contour of a grape leaf, he charted a new frontier of artistic possibilities, declaring, “Everywhere I looked, everything I saw became something to be made, and it had to be made exactly as it was, with nothing added.”

Over an illustrious seven-decade career, Ellsworth Kelly translated these found compositions into a multifaceted array of artworks, spanning paintings, sculptures, drawings, prints, and photographs, each exuding a visual power that transcended artistic movements. His unwavering artistic vision ensured that each creation bore his distinctive mark, even as he ventured into uncharted territories of form and materials. Kelly’s artistic process displayed unwavering rigor, driven by a relentless translation of his observations of the world, often described as “fragments of visual experience.” A characteristic of his practice was a propensity to revisit earlier works and sketches, allowing nascent ideas to mature at their own pace. This unhurried gestation, as aptly explained by John Coplans in 1969, contributed to one of contemporary art’s most consistently surprising bodies of work.

Having spent time in France from 1948, where he immersed himself in classical and modern art, Kelly returned to New York in 1954, where he held his debut exhibition at the Betty Parsons Gallery two years later. In 1973, the Museum of Modern Art in New York organized his first retrospective, and since then, his work has been showcased at esteemed institutions worldwide, including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, Tate Gallery in London, Haus der Kunst in Munich, and Centre Pompidou in Paris. Ellsworth Kelly’s artistic legacy continues to shine brightly, as his profound contributions to the world of abstract art resonate with admirers and practitioners alike.[3]

7. Cy Twombly

Cy Twombly (1928–2011), a highly influential artist, forged a gestural vocabulary in which every line and color exudes energy, spirituality, and significance. He emerged as a prominent figure in the mid-1950s after extensive travels across Europe and North Africa, creating artworks that seamlessly blended the personal with the mythological, unleashing narratives, language, and inner visions through intimate, abstract notations.

Despite contemporaneously sharing the art scene with figures like Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, Twombly diverged from the dominant aims of American postwar abstraction. While prevailing trends sought to abandon historical narratives, he focused on ancient, classical, and modern poetic traditions. In the late 1950s, he relocated to Italy, producing vibrant, diagrammatic works, imbuing them with erotic allusions and sly humor while retaining their abstract intensity. Soon after, the colorful palette gave way to more austere grays and blues in the “blackboard” paintings, characterized by terse, white scrawls and loops reminiscent of chalk on a blackboard. As Twombly continued his artistic exploration in various locations—including Rome, Lexington, and his final residence in Gaeta, Italy—places, landscapes, and natural forms became prominent motifs in his drawings, collages, photographs, and watercolors.

For Twombly, the poetic and the rational intertwined harmoniously. Embracing collage in 1959 and incorporating it more frequently in 1971, he aligned himself with the legacy of Dadaists like Rauschenberg and Johns. Everyday visual information, such as travel postcards, reproductions of artworks, scientific illustrations, and personal drawings, found its way into his work, facilitating an exploration of both structure and meaning. Throughout his artistic journey, Twombly captured the essence of his daily life in photographs, documenting the lush landscapes of Virginia and the coastlines of Italy, as well as close-up details of ancient architecture and sculptures, studio interiors, and still-life compositions of objects and flowers. In the early 1990s, he employed specialized copiers to enlarge Polaroid images on matte paper, resulting in subtle distortions echoing the timeless qualities of his paintings and sculptures.[4]

6. Jasper Johns

Jasper Johns, born in 1930, grew up in South Carolina and moved to New York in 1953, where he encountered and collaborated with prominent figures in the avant-garde scene, including Robert Rauschenberg, John Cage, and Merce Cunningham. This group’s artistic ideas fundamentally reshaped the American avant-garde, challenging conventional notions of artistic intent by incorporating found imagery and chance. He shifted away from Abstract Expressionism, propelling the art world toward new frontiers encompassing Pop art, Minimalism, Conceptual art, and beyond.

Over the span of six decades, Jasper Johns continued his artistic exploration, delving into new symbols and images to construct an extensive and enigmatic personal lexicon that remains unmistakably his own. His artistic language boasts a unique continuity, with motifs from a single painting resurfacing years later in a sculpture, drawing, print, or another painting. Johns’s creative philosophy seeks to capture life’s fragmented nature, acknowledging the occurrence of diverse experiences and offering vivid indications of those differences within his work.

Johns’s contributions have profoundly impacted American culture, and his artistic journey has been celebrated in one-person exhibitions at esteemed museums worldwide. Career surveys of his work have been showcased at prestigious institutions such as the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of Art in New York, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Royal Academy in London, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, solidifying his position as a preeminent figure in the realm of contemporary art.[5]

5. Alex Katz

Alex Katz, born in 1927 in Brooklyn, developed a unique approach to contemporary representational painting during the 1950s in New York—a period marked by the dominance of Abstract Expressionism. Over seven decades, he has crafted a celebrated body of work as a pre-eminent painter of modern life, drawing inspiration from diverse sources, including films, billboard advertising, music, poetry, and his close circle of friends and family. His artistic process primarily involves working from life, employing carefully composed strokes and planes of flat color to express line and form. Katz’s admiration for Henri Matisse’s sense of color, composition, and economy of means is evident in his work, as is his interest in the American vernacular tradition.

Among Katz’s most recognizable works are large-scale canvases featuring simplified figures set against monochrome backgrounds that minimize any contextual distractions. The recurrent subject of his wife, Ada, whom he married in 1958, appears in countless paintings, exemplifying the enduring influence of his personal relationships on his art. Additionally, his collaboration with renowned choreographer and dancer Paul Taylor in 1960 sparked Katz’s exploration of motion representation, a theme that permeates his depictions of models and dancers.

Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, Katz’s canvases expanded in size, and he ventured into creating multi-panel paintings with dramatically cropped figures and faces. Television greatly influenced him during this period, particularly the grand scale of cinema screens. In the late 1980s and 1990s, he dedicated much attention to large-scale landscape paintings, characterized as ‘environmental,’ which showcased the rural splendor of his summer home in Lincolnville, Maine, a place he frequents annually. Variations on the theme of light filtering through branches appeared repeatedly in Katz’s works throughout the 1990s and 2000s. In the new millennium, he delved into painting an abundance of flowers, covering canvases with blossoms, a subject he had initially explored in the late 1960s with close-up renderings of single flowers or small clusters. In the 2010s, he introduced multiple tightly cropped images of the same subject, sequenced across the canvas-like frames in a film strip, employing various angles to create an impression of an environmental portrait.

Alex Katz resides and works in New York after studying at the Cooper Union School of Art in New York and the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine. Internationally renowned, his work has been the subject of over 200 solo exhibitions, including at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Institute of Contemporary Arts, London; Baltimore Museum of Art; Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin; Sara Hildén Art Museum, Tampere, Finland; National Portrait Gallery, London; Albertina, Vienna; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Serpentine Galleries, London; Tate Liverpool; Musée de l’Orangerie, Paris; and Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid.[6]

4. Roy Lichtenstein

Roy Fox Lichtenstein (1923–1997) was a prominent artist closely associated with the Pop art movement, which he played a crucial role in originating. Born in New York, he developed a passion for drawing, science, and jazz music from a young age. In 1961, Lichtenstein created one of his earliest Pop paintings, Look Mickey, a pivotal work that incorporated cartoon characters and imitated the Ben-Day dot printing process used in commercial art.

The success of his first solo show with Leo Castelli in 1962 marked a turning point, leading him to concentrate exclusively on his art and eventually gaining international recognition. Lichtenstein experimented with various mediums, including ceramics, aluminum, brass, and printmaking, completing significant public sculptures and murals. In his later works, Lichtenstein continued to expand his technique and subject matter, exploring unexpected themes such as the painterly gesture, the female nude, and Chinese landscape painting. His artistic contributions were recognized with the award of the National Medal of Arts in 1995, a testament to his enduring impact on American art.

Throughout his career, Lichtenstein also explored diverse subjects, such as landscapes, consumer-product packaging, adaptations of famous artworks, geometric elements, parodies of Abstract Expressionism, and war scenes. Despite the varied topics, all his works confronted the challenge of representing three-dimensional forms on a two-dimensional surface.[7]

3. Ed Ruscha

Ed Ruscha, born in 1937, is renowned for his innovative approach to painting and his incorporation of words as form, symbol, and material in his works. His artistic journey began in 1956 when he relocated from Oklahoma City to Los Angeles to attend the Chouinard Art Institute.

Initially influenced by Abstract Expressionism, Ruscha shifted his focus to advertising tropes, infusing humor and wit into his diverse media artworks, blurring the lines between sign and substance. He explored the dual identity of painting as both object and illusion, a concept that led to his first word paintings. Ruscha’s artistic exploration extended beyond painting, as he delved into photography and the creation of artists’ books.

In the 1960s, Ruscha’s paintings focused on the fluidity and noise of language. His artistic evolution continued through the years, and he held several solo exhibitions, including showcasing his reverse-stencil drawings featuring phrases rendered in various substances. Ruscha’s experimental style and use of the American vernacular have left a profound impact on contemporary artists worldwide, and he remains influential as technology and internet platforms transform human communication today.[8]

2. Robert Rauschenberg

Robert Rauschenberg (1925–2008) left a lasting legacy of innovation that has captivated multiple generations of artists. His interdisciplinary practice positioned him as a leading figure in the artistic landscape that followed Abstract Expressionism. Throughout the early 1950s, his work evolved from incorporating dirt and gravel into dark canvases to the monochromatic exploring light and shadow perception. His travels with Cy Twombly to Italy and North Africa in 1952 inspired the creation of collage and assemblage-based works with found images and objects.

Rauschenberg’s conceptual approach took shape in numerous artistic collaborations. In 1962, Rauschenberg embraced printmaking techniques, incorporating found imagery through lithography and silkscreen on canvas. His innovative approach extended beyond traditional art forms, as demonstrated by his cofounding Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.) in 1966, facilitating collaborations between artists and engineers for nonindustrial purposes.

Determined to bring art to diverse communities worldwide, he established the Rauschenberg Overseas Culture Interchange (ROCI) in 1984, organizing a six-year traveling exhibition featuring works influenced by each country visited. Emphasizing the dialogue between art and life, Rauschenberg further explored interdisciplinary collaborations with artists, musicians, choreographers, performers, and writers. Throughout his career, he continuously experimented with sculpture, painting, drawing, photography, and printmaking, creating innovative combinations that intertwined seriality, abstraction, and representation.

1. Andy Warhol

Andy Warhol (1928–1987) was a revolutionary artist whose work from the 1960s to the 1980s encapsulated the cultural spirit of New York. Renowned for imitating the aesthetics of mass media, advertising, and celebrity culture, Warhol blurred the lines between his art and its sources, creating images that have become ingrained in popular culture.

Raised in a working-class suburb of Pittsburgh, Warhol was the sole college attendee in his family. After graduating from the Carnegie Institute of Technology, he settled in New York and quickly gained success as a commercial illustrator for prominent magazines. In the 1960s, Warhol’s paintings took a transformative turn, featuring hand-painted works inspired by comics and advertisements, including the famous Campbell’s Soup Cans series. He utilized the silkscreen technique to explore various subjects, such as stamps, dollar bills, and Coca-Cola bottles, breaking down images into their graphic essentials.

Establishing the Factory on East 47th Street in 1963, Warhol surrounded himself with artists, models, and influencers, fostering a cultural hub. He delved into the allure of fame, screen-printing portraits of celebrities like Marilyn Monroe and Elvis Presley. Warhol expanded his artistic repertoire into music, publishing, and filmmaking, producing avant-garde classics. Despite a near-fatal encounter in 1968, Warhol continued to produce commissioned works and explored abstraction through series like Oxidations.

In the early 1980s, Warhol’s creativity surged, leading to collaborations with young artists and large-scale works inspired by historical masterpieces. His ability to intertwine art historical references, abstract elements, and mass media aesthetics left an indelible legacy on modern and contemporary art, blurring the lines between commercial and fine art forever. Warhol worked in various disciplines, including painting—arguably a lesser iconic part of his oeuvre.[10]

Notes:

[1] Opera Gallery, Frank Stella at https://www.operagallery.com/artist/frank-stella consulted August 1, 2023.
[2] Gagosian, Jean-Michel Basquiat at https://gagosian.com/artists/jean-michel-basquiat/ consulted August 1, 2023.
[3] Matthew Marks Gallery, Ellsworth Kelly at https://matthewmarks.com/artists/ellsworth-kelly consulted August 1, 2023.
[4] Gagosian, Cy Twombly at https://gagosian.com/artists/cy-twombly/ consulted August 1, 2023.
[5] Matthew Marks Gallery, Jasper Johns at https://matthewmarks.com/artists/jasper-johns consulted August 1, 2023.
[6] Thaddaeus Ropac, Alex Katz at https://ropac.net/artists/50-alex-katz/ consulted August 1, 2023.
[7] Gagosian, Roy Lichtenstein at https://gagosian.com/artists/roy-lichtenstein/ consulted August 1, 2023.
[8] Gagosian, Ed Ruscha at https://gagosian.com/artists/ed-ruscha/ consulted August 1, 2023.
[9] Pace Gallery, Robert Rauschenberg at https://www.pacegallery.com/artists/robert-rauschenberg/ consulted August 1, 2023.
[10] Gagosian, Andy Warhol at https://gagosian.com/artists/andy-warhol/ consulted August 1, 2023.

Last Updated on October 26, 2024