# Greatest artists of the C20th



## Sid James

On another thread, BuddhaBandit said he thought the greatest artists of the C20th for him would be Stravinsky, James Joyce, Louis Armstrong & Pablo Picasso.

Who, according to you, were the greatest artists of the C20th? Include all fields - music, visual arts (including film), literature...(& the reasons why)

I want to see what people think, so I'll comment later...


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## andruini

I think Stravinsky, Picasso and Joyce would be on my list too.. I would add Hitchcock, Bergman, Cocteau or Kubrick in the film area.. And maybe I'm alone on this one, but I would go with Samuel Beckett in literature too.. And Dylan Thomas.. And artists, apart from Picasso, I'd go with Dali, Chagall and Kandinsky..
I can't quite agree with Armstrong, but I'll go with Miles Davis or John Coltrane.. 
And The Beatles, of course!


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## bdelykleon

Thomas Mann, Alban Berg, Paul Klee. Just to give a German taste to the list...

And if the Beatles are among the greatest artists of C20th, I am Margareth Thatcher.


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## Conservationist

Andre said:


> Who, according to you, were the greatest artists of the C20th?


Lit:

Joseph Conrad
William Faulkner
Ernest Hemingway
Ferdinand Celine
William S. Burroughs
Thomas Wolfe
Tom Wolfe
Michel Houellebecq
Aldous Huxley

Music:

Brian Eno
Kristian Vikernes
Robert Fripp
Gustav Holst

Visual:

John Milius
Alex Cox

Politics:

Josef Stalin


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## LvB

Andre said:


> Who, according to you, were the greatest artists of the C20th? Include all fields - music, visual arts (including film), literature...(& the reasons why)


Yes, those reasons are very important, as the criteria will influence the list considerably. Broadly speaking, I would count quality of technique, profundity of content, and extent of influence as the determining factors; this, though, means that my list will be weighted toward the earlier part of the century, as it is still be too early to fairly assess many more recent figures (and, of course, the question of influence shifts its ground constantly over the years). I exclude mere popularity, as this is most easily manipulated and least grounded in the quality of the work.

Having started out with overmuch confidence (  ), I quickly grind to a halt, and offer only some suggestions (there are so many works I don't know, and thus so many artists of all sorts who I cannot possibly judge even remotely fairly):

Music: Schoenberg, Stravinsky, possibly Shostakovich
Film: Bergman, Hitchcock, Ozu, possibly Eisenstein
Painting: Picasso, Edward Hopper, possibly Rauschenberg
Literature: Thomas Mann, Joyce, Conrad, Proust, possibly Faulkner & Hemingway
Drama: Brecht, Strindberg (a transitional figure, but several of his greatest works are 20th C, and his influence expanded exponentially after his death in 1912)

Oh, I give up; there are too many claimants whose voices are clamoring to be heard....


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## bdelykleon

Please, Shostakovich no.


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## BuddhaBandit

Well, I'll expand my original list and give three per type of art:

Music: Igor Stravinsky, Louis Armstrong, and Béla Bartòk
Visual Art: Pablo Picasso, Marc Chagall, and Jackson Pollock
Literature: James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, and Jorge Luis Borges
Film: Alfred Hitchcock, François Truffaut, and John Huston*

Why these figures? That would take thousands of words... but, if somebody asks about a choice, I'll justify it.

*I'm a HUGE Woody Allen fan, so it kills me to leave him of this list. But, in perspective, I think these three made better films than Allen.


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## Mirror Image

BuddhaBandit said:


> *I'm a HUGE Woody Allen fan, so it kills me to leave him of this list. But, in perspective, I think these three made better films than Allen.


There are a lot of people who made better films than Allen. He's terrible. Nothing funny about him, except for maybe the way he looks at people...that's pretty funny.










I mean look at him. He could very easily play a serial killer in a movie.


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## andruini

Whoa, do not diss Allen.. You may not find him funny but to neurotics around the worls he's an idol..
Doesn't get better than Manhattan and Stardust Memories.. Two of the best films ever right there..


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## Mirror Image

andruini said:


> Whoa, do not diss Allen.. You may not find him funny but to neurotics around the worls he's an idol..
> Doesn't get better than Manhattan and Stardust Memories.. Two of the best films ever right there..


Yeah, I'll continue to diss Allen, because quite frankly, I don't like him. Nothing funny about him except for the way he looks at people....that's pretty funny:


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## BuddhaBandit

He was easily one of the best comedy directors of all time. And his ear for dialogue is perhaps unparalleled- Annie Hall consists of nothing but people talking, yet it is endlessly entertaining. And his characters are totally original- not just neurotic, but neurotic in a way we can sympathize with.

As I said, there may be better directors, but there aren't many.


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## Mirror Image

BuddhaBandit said:


> He was easily one of the best comedy directors of all time. And his ear for dialogue is perhaps unparalleled- Annie Hall consists of nothing but people talking, yet it is endlessly entertaining. And his characters are totally original- not just neurotic, but neurotic in a way we can sympathize with.
> 
> As I said, there may be better directors, but there aren't many.


Well that's your opinion, which I happily disagree with and let's just leave it at that.


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## Conservationist

andruini said:


> You may not find him funny but to neurotics around the worls he's an idol.


Many of us only want to encourage healthy people...

I'm in agreement with MI here: Allen is overrated and not very artistic. I can see why he entertains, but if I wanted pure entertainment, I'd watch interviews with the Cannibal Corpse guys.


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## Sid James

I think that, since I think musical genres other than classical should be included, Elvis Presley should be on the list...


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## BuddhaBandit

Andre said:


> I think that, since I think musical genres other than classical should be included, Elvis Presley should be on the list...


I might put Frank Sinatra on the list before Elvis, because of Sinatra's championing of the Great American Songbook and because of his arguably superior voice.


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## Sid James

BuddhaBandit said:


> I might put Frank Sinatra on the list before Elvis, because of Sinatra's championing of the Great American Songbook and because of his arguably superior voice.


Fair enough...



Conservationist said:


> Lit:
> 
> Joseph Conrad
> William Faulkner
> Ernest Hemingway
> Ferdinand Celine
> William S. Burroughs
> Thomas Wolfe
> Tom Wolfe
> Michel Houellebecq
> Aldous Huxley





BuddhaBandit said:


> Literature: James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, and Jorge Luis Borges





LvB said:


> Literature: Thomas Mann, Joyce, Conrad, Proust, possibly Faulkner & Hemingway


Would any of you guys add George Orwell?


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## BuddhaBandit

Andre said:


> Would any of you guys add George Orwell?


He would be in my top 15 (for literature), but not at the very peak. Orwell's work was less concerned with creating complex characters than with commenting on English society, and it depends a little too much on allegory. After I read a truly great work, I see the characters and scenarios recreated and reenacted wherever I go. Orwell's Burmese Days produces that affect on me, but none of his other novels and poems do. He was a great social critic, but not an A+ writer.


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## StlukesguildOhio

Richard Strauss, Prokofiev, Sergei Rachmaninoff, Stravinsky, Karol Szymanowski, Shostakovitch, Edward Elgar, Giacomo Puccini, Gustav Mahler, Claude Debussy, Frederick Delius, Jean Sibelius, Ralph Vaughan Williams, Maurice Ravel, Béla Bartók, Aaron Copland, Olivier Messiaen, Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Miles Davis, Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Max Beckmann, Pierre Bonnard, Paul Klee, Jean Dubuffet, Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud, Mark Rothko, Anselm Kiefer, Ingmar Bergman, Serge Eisenstein, Stanley Kubrick, Alfred Hitchcock, Orson Welles, T.S. Eliot, Marcel Proust, Italo Calvino, J.L. Borges, Pablo Neruda, Ranier Maria Rilke, William Faulkner, Franz Kafka, Samuel Beckett...


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## Conservationist

Andre said:


> Would any of you guys add George Orwell?


No, he's a plagiarist and a dangerous idiot.


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## Sid James

Conservationist said:


> No, he's a plagiarist and a dangerous idiot.


Why do you say that?

& what do people think about adding D. H. Lawrence to the literary list?


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## Conservationist

Andre said:


> Why do you say that?


Orwell's rather idiotic, transparent book was a response to Huxley -- written twelve years later and super-simplified.

Huxley's the genius, Orwell the pretender.

It's kind of like having rich parents, or affirmative action... if you come up with a popular illusion, people will like you more than you actually merit.


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## Mirror Image

Larry David - One of the most brilliant comedic minds of the 20th Century:


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## Conservationist

He looks thoughtful. Not sure I'd rank comedy up there with the arts.

For me:

1. Real literature
2. Real classical
3. Real visual art
4. Real performing arts
5. Real martial arts
6. Real science and philosophy

Trump anything the mainstream's come up with. And no one seriously claims that stuff's on par except ego-deprived jazz fans and other underperforming cognitive dissonance types.


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## Mirror Image

Conservationist said:


> Trump anything the mainstream's come up with. And no one seriously claims that stuff's on par except ego-deprived jazz fans and other underperforming cognitive dissonance types.


Do you have some kind of problem with people who listen to jazz, Conservationist? It seems, to me, that you do and you've made a lot of posts telling everybody how you feel about jazz fans.

I guess you feel the same way about me, then don't you? I was listening to jazz way before I was listening to classical music. In fact, jazz is still my one true love. As much as I love classical, it doesn't satisfy me like jazz does. I can't help what I like just like you can't help what you like. You like metal? Awesome, but don't sit there and degrade people who don't.

Why continue to make generalizations about people who enjoy jazz?


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## Conservationist

Mirror Image said:


> I guess you feel the same way about me, then don't you?


No, I think you're lovely. A bit of the drama, but your intentions are clearer than most and you don't seem as prone to the pomposity, which is like a caricature of classical fans from a sitcom -- who would have thought reality imitates entertainment!


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## Mirror Image

Conservationist said:


> No, I think you're lovely. A bit of the drama, but your intentions are clearer than most and you don't seem as prone to the pomposity, which is like a caricature of classical fans from a sitcom -- who would have thought reality imitates entertainment!


Well thanks...I guess? I think there are good people out there, like many found on this forum, who love classical music and don't perpetuate the typical classical stereotype. I would be one them.


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## Dedrater

Mirror Image said:


> There are a lot of people who made better films than Allen. He's terrible.


I agree. When I was younger, I bought into the concept of quirky, arty movies replete with esoterica and meek irony. I recently watched the very end of Annie Hall for the first time in years, though, and had to laugh at the absurdity of the ending monologue, which more or less echoed every loser's thoughts in modern society to a T. This guy is no artist.


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## Pierrot Lunaire

*This looks fun!*

These are my favorites artist's of the 20th century, not "the greatest" (I just can't do that). Please don't take it to seriously.

Music:
Claude Debussy, György Ligeti, Arnold Schoenberg, Olivier Messiaen, Morton Feldman, Gérard Grisey, Béla Bartók, Alfred Schnittke, Alexander Scriabin, Iannis Xenakis

Literature:
Jorge Luis Borges, Franz Kafka, William Faulkner, T. S. Eliot, Paul Valéry, A. R. Ammons, Wallace Stevens, Julio Cortázar, Geoffrey Hill, Paul Celan

Painting:
Paul Klee, Sigmar Polke, Robert Delaunay, Joan Miró, Mark Rothko, Antoni Tàpies, Lyonel Feininger, František Kupka, R. B. Kitaj, Pierre Bonnard

Cinema:
Stanley Kubrick, Carl Theodor Dreyer, Dziga Vertov, Chris Marker, Alain Resnais, Yuriy Norshteyn, F. W. Murnau, Andrei Tarkovsky, Federico Fellini, Sergei Parajanov


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## Huilunsoittaja

Ohhhhh I wouldn't know. I'm too young. I'm at the point I've lived more of my life in the 21st century than the 20th. But I also live in a hole in the ground, with my 3 top dead people filling 90% of my MP3 player.


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## StlukesguildOhio

Breaking them into distinct fields I would go with the following:

*Visual Arts (painting, sculpture, collage...)*- Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Claude Monet (died 1929- did many of his most influential works in the 20th century), Pierre Bonnard, Max Beckmann, Paul Klee, Joseph Cornell, Jean Dubuffet, Francis Bacon, Mark Rothko

*Music-* Richard Strauss, Claude Debussy, Igor Stravinsky, Bela Bartok, Giacomo Puccini, Sergei Rachmaninoff, Benjamin Britten, Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, Miles Davis, Thelonius Monk, Muddy Waters, Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, The Rolling Stones...

*Literature-* Marcel Proust, Franz Kafka, William Faulkner, T.S. Eliot, Rainer Maria Rilke, Fernando Pessoa, Federico Garcia-Lorca, Ernest Hemingway, J.L. Borges, Pablo Neruda, Samuel Beckett, Thomas Mann, Hermann Hesse, Eugenio Montale, Italo Calvino, W.B. Yeats...

*Film-* Fritz Lang, Orson Welles, Billy Wilder, David Lean, Ingmar Bergmann, Stanley Kubrick, Alfred Hitchcock, Francis Ford Coppola, Sergei Eisenstein, Akira Kurosawa, Martin Scorsese, John Ford, Jean Renoir, Andrei Tarkovsky...


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## Almaviva

StlukesguildOhio said:


> Breaking them into distinct fields I would go with the following:
> 
> *Visual Arts (painting, sculpture, collage...)*- Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Claude Monet (died 1929- did many of his most influential works in the 20th century), Pierre Bonnard, Max Beckmann, Paul Klee, Joseph Cornell, Jean Dubuffet, Francis Bacon, Mark Rothko
> 
> *Music-* Richard Strauss, Claude Debussy, Igor Stravinsky, Bela Bartok, Giacomo Puccini, Sergei Rachmaninoff, Benjamin Britten, Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, Miles Davis, Thelonius Monk, Muddy Waters, Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, The Rolling Stones...
> 
> *Literature-* Marcel Proust, Franz Kafka, William Faulkner, T.S. Eliot, Rainer Maria Rilke, Fernando Pessoa, Federico Garcia-Lorca, Ernest Hemingway, J.L. Borges, Pablo Neruda, Samuel Beckett, Thomas Mann, Hermann Hesse, Eugenio Montale, Italo Calvino, W.B. Yeats...
> 
> *Film-* Fritz Lang, Orson Welles, Billy Wilder, David Lean, Ingmar Bergmann, Stanley Kubrick, Alfred Hitchcock, Francis Ford Coppola, Sergei Eisenstein, Akira Kurosawa, Martin Scorsese, John Ford, Jean Renoir, Andrei Tarkovsky...


I like many of the same artists... we seem to have similar tastes. Wow, you know Fernando Pessoa!:cheers:


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## tdc

StlukesguildOhio said:


> Breaking them into distinct fields I would go with the following:
> 
> *Visual Arts (painting, sculpture, collage...)*- Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Claude Monet (died 1929- did many of his most influential works in the 20th century), Pierre Bonnard, Max Beckmann, Paul Klee, Joseph Cornell, Jean Dubuffet, Francis Bacon, Mark Rothko
> 
> *Music-* Richard Strauss, Claude Debussy, Igor Stravinsky, Bela Bartok, Giacomo Puccini, Sergei Rachmaninoff, Benjamin Britten, Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, Miles Davis, Thelonius Monk, Muddy Waters, Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, The Rolling Stones...
> 
> *Literature-* Marcel Proust, Franz Kafka, William Faulkner, T.S. Eliot, Rainer Maria Rilke, Fernando Pessoa, Federico Garcia-Lorca, Ernest Hemingway, J.L. Borges, Pablo Neruda, Samuel Beckett, Thomas Mann, Hermann Hesse, Eugenio Montale, Italo Calvino, W.B. Yeats...
> 
> *Film-* Fritz Lang, Orson Welles, Billy Wilder, David Lean, Ingmar Bergmann, Stanley Kubrick, Alfred Hitchcock, Francis Ford Coppola, Sergei Eisenstein, Akira Kurosawa, Martin Scorsese, John Ford, Jean Renoir, Andrei Tarkovsky...


A lot of good names I'd agree with, but listing Debussy but not Ravel and the Stones but not the Beatles are two areas I'd respectfully disagree with.


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## StlukesguildOhio

Wow, you know Fernando Pessoa!

And Alberto Caeiro, Álvaro de Campos, Ricardo Reis, Bernardo Soares, etc...


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## tdc

StlukesguildOhio said:


> I would go with the following:
> 
> *Music-* Richard Strauss, Claude Debussy, Igor Stravinsky, Bela Bartok, Giacomo Puccini, Sergei Rachmaninoff, Benjamin Britten, Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, Miles Davis, Thelonius Monk, Muddy Waters, Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, The Rolling Stones...


Now, is this list just your personal favorites? If so disregard the rest of this post.

_But_ if you are saying these are the greatest then there are some other questions I'd have:

Elvis didn't even write his own music...could he really be listed along side with the great classical composers? If so, why? Didn't Willie Dixon write a lot of Muddy Waters music? Shouldn't his name be mentioned too? What about Robert Johnson? Where is Mahler? (not to mention a lot of other modern composers - Ravel, Takemitsu, Rorem etc) If The Stones and Johnny Cash are good enough to make the list, then, shouldn't dozens of other folk and rock acts also be good enough? (Zeppelin, Floyd, Hendrix, Dylan, The Beatles etc.)

But again, if you just were listing off your personal favorites than I understand, and you don't really have to answer any of the questions, its all good.


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## jhar26

tdc said:


> Elvis didn't even write his own music...could he really be listed along side with the great classical composers?


Not arguing for or against Elvis, but Heifetz, Horowitz, Karajan, Rostropovich or Callas didn't write their own music either but most would nevertheless agree that they were giants.


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## tdc

jhar26 said:


> Not arguing for or against Elvis, but Heifetz, Horowitz, Karajan, Rostropovich or Callas didn't write their own music either but most would nevertheless agree that they were giants.


Thats true, and admittedly this is a grey area. I would agree these guys are giants, but are they in the same league as the actual composers? Could they be called some of the greatest artists of the 20th century? Its an interesting question...

As far as rock goes stealing others music seems to be pretty much how this art form survives. There is no doubt such greats as The Stones, Zeppelin and Clapton, went through phases of being virtual cover bands, and no doubt even their 'original' material owes a great debt to their earlier work and influences. As far as Elvis well, I guess he just never felt the need to ever compose? I'm not denying he still has a valid place in all this, but how could one say his place is higher than say Chuck Berry or Buddy Holly who were also front runners and writing their own music? It seems to suggest sex appeal and having the right look contributes somewhat to an artist 'greatness' in the rock genre.


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## jhar26

tdc said:


> As far as rock goes stealing others music seems to be pretty much how this art form survives. There is no doubt such greats as The Stones, Zeppelin and Clapton, went through phases of being virtual cover bands, and no doubt even their 'original' material owes a great debt to their earlier work and influences. As far as Elvis well, I guess he just never felt the need to ever compose? I'm not denying he still has a valid place in all this, but how could one say his place is higher than say Chuck Berry or Buddy Holly who were also front runners and writing their own music? It seems to suggest sex appeal and having the right look contributes somewhat to an artist 'greatness' in the rock genre.


Probably, yes. But I don't think it's the only contributing factor to his popularity. His early hits were much more commercial sounding than those of his rivals, but they were still valid rock'n'roll (as opposed to, say, Pat Boone). He was exciting, but not as outrageous as Little Richard or Jerry Lee Lewis. He pushed all the right buttons - a case of the right man at the right place if ever there was one. And after the first rock'n'roll craze was over he just moved on to other things like those awful 60's movies, the much better Memphis recordings of the late 60's and the Elvis as Superman in a jumpsuit Las Vegas days. Some of his post-50's output is quite good, lots of it is mediocre or even terrible, but it always kept him in the charts. Most other 50's rockers were either death before the decade was over or they became nostalgia acts for the rest of their days. Even the great Chuck Berry failed to keep it going (or evolve) after his initial run was over, even though the Beatles and (especially) the Stones had created all the right circumstances to make such a thing possible for him.


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## norman bates

Conservationist said:


> He looks thoughtful. Not sure I'd rank comedy up there with the arts.
> 
> For me:
> 
> 1. Real literature
> 2. Real classical
> 3. Real visual art
> 4. Real performing arts
> 5. Real martial arts
> 6. Real science and philosophy
> 
> Trump anything the mainstream's come up with. And no one seriously claims that stuff's on par except ego-deprived jazz fans and other underperforming cognitive dissonance types.












anyway, i've not the pretension to say who are the greatest, so this is the list of my favorites: pablo picasso, fernando pessoa, frank lloyd wright, sun ra, alec wilder, gyorgi ligeti, alberto breccia, robert pete williams, chaim soutine, matt groening

and obviously many many others


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## norman bates

i've seen that no one also has put architects or comics in his list...
i've seen Feininger in one list, but i suppose he is mentioned as painter


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## Almaviva

StlukesguildOhio said:


> Wow, you know Fernando Pessoa!
> 
> And Alberto Caeiro, Álvaro de Campos, Ricardo Reis, Bernardo Soares, etc...


Nice. I particularly like his Ricardo Reis persona (if I'm recalling it correctly, it's been a while - it's the more nihilistic one, right?). Do you read Portuguese? I do. Talking about Portuguese literature, another giant is José Saramago.


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## Almaviva

norman bates said:


> i've seen that no one also has put architects or comics in his list...
> i've seen Feininger in one list, but i suppose he is mentioned as painter


Regarding one of each, I could quote Oscar Niemeyer in architecture, and Charles Chaplin in comedy.


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## norman bates

Almaviva said:


> Regarding one of each, I could quote Oscar Niemeyer in architecture,


one of the greatests, absolutely



Almaviva said:


> and Charles Chaplin in comedy.


my bad, i intended comic artists, authors and illustrators.


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## Almaviva

norman bates said:


> one of the greatests, absolutely
> 
> my bad, i intended comic artists, authors and illustrators.


Oh sorry, I read too fast, you said comic artists, not comedians. What about Hugo Pratt?


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## StlukesguildOhio

Now, is this list just your personal favorites? If so disregard the rest of this post.

But if you are saying these are the greatest then there are some other questions I'd have:

Elvis didn't even write his own music...could he really be listed along side with the great classical composers?

Sound recording changed everything. With the ability to record performances, the performer became as much of an artist as the composer. Miles Davis and Duke Ellington often took popular standards and improvised upon these. This improvisation is surely a creative, artistic act. To continue in this vein, it would seem to me that those who brought something highly unique, innovative, and influential to their manner of performance are surely worthy of recognition. Willie Dixon is rightfully a great songwriter... but it was Muddy Waters that gave the ultimate voice to those songs... and along with Elmore James, John Lee Hooker, B.B. King and a few others... to the electric blues. By the same token, Frank Sinatra and Elvis both brought a unique voice to popular music. Is Elvis equal to Richard Strauss? Probably not. But one might surely argue that his impact was greater than Ligeti's or Phillip Glass'.


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## StlukesguildOhio

Nice. I particularly like his Ricardo Reis persona (if I'm recalling it correctly, it's been a while - it's the more nihilistic one, right?). Do you read Portuguese? I do. Talking about Portuguese literature, another giant is José Saramago.

Alberto Caeiro was the first hetronym. He was the completely natural/nature poet who wrote _The Keeper of Sheep_. An unselfconscious poet he reminds one of Blake or Wordsworth... or better yet, of one of the great Chinese classic poets: Tu Fu, Li Bo, or Wang Wei.

Alvaro de Campos was his follower... and probably the nihilist of whom you think. He wrote like an inspired follower of Whitman and Baudelaire: great sprawling free verse exploring the world around him... especially the gritty urban world as viewed through the haze of drugs and alcohol.

Ricardo Reis was the classicist who wrote odes and other highly formal poetic structures. Reis might have fit right in with such Parnassians as Paul Valery and early Verlaine.

Of course all (except Caeiro... who had not interest in writing about writing) wrote critical commentaries on each others works, essays, letter, etc...

A brilliant writer.

Unfortunately, no... I can't read Pessoa in Portuguese. It takes all I can manage to fudge my way through some high-school German. Luckily, Pessoa has been championed by a number of influential critics over the last decade or so (especially Harold Bloom) and can be read in a number of English translations.

Yes... I am aware of Saramago. I first came upon him shortly after he won the Nobel.


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## Xaltotun

Griffith, Chaplin, Eisenstein, von Stroheim, Dreyer, Murnau, Lang, Bunuel, Renoir, Rossellini, Kurosawa, Ozu, Mizoguchi, Ford, Hawks, Cukor, Mankiewicz, Huston, Welles, Wilder, Visconti, Bresson, Godard, Tarkovsky, Bergman... probably forgot several too.

The 20th century was the century of cinema in my view.


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## Almaviva

StlukesguildOhio said:


> Nice. I particularly like his Ricardo Reis persona (if I'm recalling it correctly, it's been a while - it's the more nihilistic one, right?). Do you read Portuguese? I do. Talking about Portuguese literature, another giant is José Saramago.
> 
> Alberto Caeiro was the first hetronym. He was the completely natural/nature poet who wrote _The Keeper of Sheep_. An unselfconscious poet he reminds one of Blake or Wordsworth... or better yet, of one of the great Chinese classic poets: Tu Fu, Li Bo, or Wang Wei.
> 
> Alvaro de Campos was his follower... and probably the nihilist of whom you think. He wrote like an inspired follower of Whitman and Baudelaire: great sprawling free verse exploring the world around him... especially the gritty urban world as viewed through the haze of drugs and alcohol.
> 
> Ricardo Reis was the classicist who wrote odes and other highly formal poetic structures. Reis might have fit right in with such Parnassians as Paul Valery and early Verlaine.
> 
> Of course all (except Caeiro... who had not interest in writing about writing) wrote critical commentaries on each others works, essays, letter, etc...
> 
> A brilliant writer.
> 
> Unfortunately, no... I can't read Pessoa in Portuguese. It takes all I can manage to fudge my way through some high-school German. Luckily, Pessoa has been championed by a number of influential critics over the last decade or so (especially Harold Bloom) and can be read in a number of English translations.
> 
> Yes... I am aware of Saramago. I first came upon him shortly after he won the Nobel.


Yes, then it's Alvaro de Campos I liked best, although all the others are phenomenal as well, like you said. At one point I fell in love with Portuguese literature and read most of Pessoa's works, two thirds of Saramago's, Luís de Camões, and Eça de Queiroz. Then I left the Portuguese alone (like I said, it's been a while) and turned to Brazilian literature; read almost the entire works of Jorge Amado, most of the poetry of Carlos Drummond de Andrade, and read several books of one of the most incredible writers I've ever encountered, João Guimarães Rosa. His _Grande Sertões: Veredas _(translated into English with the title _The Devil to Pay in the Backlands_)in my opinion is one of the best novels ever written on Earth, of truly Joycean proportions. The problem with it is that you MUST know Portuguese to fully appreciate it, because just like _Finnegans Wake_, the linguistic aspects and multiple layers and puns are too essential to the work and can't be translated. I have never read the English translation, although I did read both the original in Brazilian Portuguese and the French translation entitled _Diadorim._ The French translator did a phenomenal job trying to reproduce the multi-layered language, but then, French is also a Romance language and it is easier to find a way around Rosa's phenomenally rich word-play. I'm not sure if the English translation can be as successful. In any case, I highly recommend this writer if you don't know him yet.


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## Conor71

StlukesguildOhio said:


> Breaking them into distinct fields I would go with the following:
> 
> *Visual Arts (painting, sculpture, collage...)*- Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Claude Monet (died 1929- did many of his most influential works in the 20th century), Pierre Bonnard, Max Beckmann, Paul Klee, Joseph Cornell, Jean Dubuffet, Francis Bacon, Mark Rothko
> 
> *Music-* Richard Strauss, Claude Debussy, Igor Stravinsky, Bela Bartok, Giacomo Puccini, Sergei Rachmaninoff, Benjamin Britten, Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, Miles Davis, Thelonius Monk, Muddy Waters, Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, The Rolling Stones...
> 
> *Literature-* Marcel Proust, Franz Kafka, William Faulkner, T.S. Eliot, Rainer Maria Rilke, Fernando Pessoa, Federico Garcia-Lorca, Ernest Hemingway, J.L. Borges, Pablo Neruda, Samuel Beckett, Thomas Mann, Hermann Hesse, Eugenio Montale, Italo Calvino, W.B. Yeats...
> 
> *Film-* Fritz Lang, Orson Welles, Billy Wilder, David Lean, Ingmar Bergmann, Stanley Kubrick, Alfred Hitchcock, Francis Ford Coppola, Sergei Eisenstein, Akira Kurosawa, Martin Scorsese, John Ford, Jean Renoir, Andrei Tarkovsky...


Great list St. Lukes!


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## starthrower

Charles Ives
Witold Lutoslawski
Frank Zappa
Charles Mingus
Wayne Shorter
John McLaughlin
Ali Akbar Khan
Andres Segovia
Bob Dylan


My favorites in literature and film have already been mentioned. I don't know jack about art.


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## starthrower

andruini said:


> I can't quite agree with Armstrong, but I'll go with Miles Davis or John Coltrane..


I'm pretty sure Miles and Trane would disagree with you about Armstrong.


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## delallan

Off the top of my head...

Federico Fellini
Ingmar Bergman
Alfred Hitchcock
Samuel Beckett
James Joyce
CS Lewis
Benjamin Britten
Sergei Rachmaninoff
Kate Bush
Tom Thomson
Lawren Harris


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## Vaneyes

Federico Fellini, Thomas Pynchon, Dmitri Shostakovich, Marc Chagall.


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## Couchie

:angel::angel::angel:

Fine Art: Kandinsky
Music: Stravinsky
Literature: Joyce
Film: Kubrick

:angel::angel::angel:​


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## Larkenfield

Painting: Picasso
TV: Rod Serling
Writing: Henry Miller and Charles Bukowski
Cinema: Fellini, Bergman 
Music: Shostakovich 
Architecture: Frank Lloyd Wright 
Documentaries: Ken Burns 
Dance: George Balanchine
Impresario: Serge Diaghilev
Jazz: Miles Davis
Humor & Wit: Woody Allen 
(Getting Even, Side Effects, Without Feathers)


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## Pat Fairlea

How about Katherine Hepburn, Stephane Grapelli, Seamus Heaney?


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