From 1895 till 1897 he attended classes a the Ecole des Arts Decoratifs. He exhibited for the first time at the Salon de la Societe des Artistes Francais in 1899. His early works were impressionistic in style and were favorably received by the art market. In 1905 and 1907 he held his first two solo exhibitions. In 1908 he met and married the musicologist Gabrielle Buffet who made a decisive contribution to his development. Their views concerning art were completely in tune with the most avant garde ideas of the era. As a natural consequence, Picabia abandoned his Pointillism and Impressionism and was then influenced by Fauvism and, later, Cubism. In 1911 he met Apollinaire and Marcel Duchamp. Orphism led to Cubist compositions and in 1912 he exhibited with the group Section d’ or.

His financial security permitted him to travel to New York to see the important exhibition The Armony Show, where the Cubist work Danses a la source I was exhibited. He was the only European artist who made the trip and for that reason the press besieged him. The painter declared: “I don’ t paint what my eyes see. I paint what my spirit sees, what my soul sees.” His most characteristic Orphic works Udnie and Je revois en souvenir ma chere Udnie were done in 1913 and they already displayed a primitive dynamism clearly influenced by the dynamic geometric shapes of the buildings of New York City, but iconographically the painter’ s experiences were based on the theories of consciousness, theories related to the way a musical work is engaged with, which had been worked out together with Gabrielle Buffet. In New York Picabia had and exhibition of watercolors at the gallery run by the photographer Alfred Stieglitz. The coexistence of organic and mechanical systems intimated the next stage of his work, the mechanical one, as it were. His close friendship with Marcel Duchamp led him into his Dada period.

Lange Pier, as he became known because of his height, became member of the painters guild of Antwerp in 1535 and moved to Amsterdam in 1556. Mostly famous for his market scenes and his kitchen scenes, he also painted other subjects, including religious works, where the scene often takes place within a market scene, historical paintings, still lifes and portraits.

The father of three sons, who also became painters, he was the patriarch of a long line of artists; most distinguished among them was his nephew and student Joachim Beuckelaer. His contribution to the flourishing Flemish art in the 16th century was on a par to that of Bruegel’s.

He was the son of a coal miner and was born in a mining region. He settled in Paris in 1927 and worked in an automobile factory for Renault Citroen, while at the same time taking night classes in painting and sculpture.

In 1931 he joined the Union of Revolutionary Painters and Writers where he met Louis Aragon, Andre Malraux, Fernand Leger, Jean Helion and Francis Gruber.
His production of personal work began two years later. In 1936 he met Picasso and the following year the exhibition of Guernica at the International Exhibition of Paris would make a strong impression on him and influence his work.

During the Nazi occupation he became deeply involved in the Resistance in the National Front of the Arts. In May 1941 he exhibited with a group of 20 artists at the Braun Gallery. The strong colors which dominated their works and the practically abstract nature of the compositions were an open provocation to the conqueror. After the Liberation these artists became known as the post-war School of Paris.

His first solo exhibition was held in 1939 and was presented by Gromaire; it was followed by many others.

Starting in 1947 he began to dissociate himself from Socialist Realism which had been adopted by the Communist Party, and at the same time took a stance against painting which had begun to dominate French painting.

In 1951 Picasso suggested they work together to the produce of pottery at Valloriz, keeping him busy for the next two years, at the same continuing with a series of works. Oliviers and Paysans. During the period of his cooperative endeavors with Picasso, he also started the series Maternites and L’ Homme a l’ Enfant.

The subject matter of his works was influenced by his political activity in the service of which he had placed his work. At the end of the Sixties he was involved with the subject of war, though later he turned toward nature. He was involved with stage and costume design and the making monumental sculptural works of day.

He adopted a variety of technique, while in the closing years of his life he turned almost exclusively to water-colors. Though he considered abstract painting to be a denial of reality, in his later work there are many abstract elements. His work occupies an important place in post-war-French painting.

Jacques Fouquieres, a painter and drafter of numerous landscapes, was most probably a student of Jan Brueghel I as well as of Joos de Momper II. Soon after 1616, he found himself in Heidelberg, where he worked for Frederic V, electoral prince of the Palatinate of the Rhein. In 1621, he moved to France, where his landscapes became exceptionally popular. Luis XIII commissioned a series of topographic views of French cities from him in order to decorate the Grande Galerie in the Louvre. In the studies regarding his topographic work, there have been noted influences and relations with the work of Flemish and Dutch artists, such as Brueghel, Momper, Jacques d’ Arthois, Lodewijk de Vadder, Esaias van de Velde, as well as influences by artists, whose work features prominent elements of the Italian style, such as Paul Bril and Claude Lorrain. Few of the artist’s signed works have survived.

The friend of Manet and Whistler, Fantin-Latour was very intimately connected with the Impressionists; however, he was mostly influenced by Courbet (whose student he had been) and Delacroix. His oeuvre, inextricably linked with the Dutch tradition of the 17th century, consists of portraits (mainly featuring many figures), imaginary scenes, inspired from literature and music, and above all still lifes. It is to the latter, in fact, that he owed his success, mainly in the circles of the British collectors, who were avid admirers of his bouquets.