Painting The Century: 101 Portrait Masterpieces 1900–2000 was an international exhibition held at the National Portrait Gallery in London in 2000–2001 that exhibited a painting representing each year of the 20th century. A book of the same name was published by the National Portrait Gallery by Robin Gibson

Robin Warwick Gibson

Robin Warwick Gibson, OBE was a British gallery curator and art historian best known for his work at the National Portrait Gallery in London between 1968 and 2001, including eight years as Chief Curator...

 with an introduction by Professor Norbert Lynton

Norbert Lynton

Norbert Lynton was Professor of the History of Art at the University of Sussex.He has published on architecture and on modern artists including Paul Klee, Ben Nicholson, William Scott. With Erika Langmuir, he coauthored the 'Yale Dictionary of Modern Art'...

 that illustrates all works exhibited.

Artists and subjects

Artists included Frank Auerbach

Frank Auerbach

Frank Helmut Auerbach is a painter born in Germany although he has been a naturalised British citizen since 1947.-Biography:Auerbach was born in Berlin, the son of Max Auerbach, a patent lawyer, and Charlotte Nora Burchardt, who had trained as an artist...

, Francis Bacon

Francis Bacon (painter)

Francis Bacon , was an Irish-born British figurative painter known for his bold, austere, graphic and emotionally raw imagery. Bacon's painterly but abstract figures typically appear isolated in glass or steel geometrical cages set against flat, nondescript backgrounds...

, Salvador Dalí

Salvador Dalí

Salvador Domènec Felip Jacint Dalí i Domènech, Marquis de Púbol , commonly known as Salvador Dalí , was a prominent Spanish Catalan surrealist painter born in Figueres,Spain....

, Otto Dix

Otto Dix

Wilhelm Heinrich Otto Dix was a German painter and printmaker, noted for his ruthless and harshly realistic depictions of Weimar society and the brutality of war. Along with George Grosz, he is widely considered one of the most important artists of the Neue Sachlichkeit.-Early life and...

, Lucian Freud

Lucian Freud

Lucian Michael Freud, OM, CH was a British painter. Known chiefly for his thickly impasted portrait and figure paintings, he was widely considered the pre-eminent British artist of his time...

, Alberto Giacometti

Alberto Giacometti

Alberto Giacometti was a Swiss sculptor, painter, draughtsman, and printmaker.Alberto Giacometti was born in the canton Graubünden's southerly alpine valley Val Bregaglia and came from an artistic background; his father, Giovanni, was a well-known post-Impressionist painter...

, George Grosz

George Grosz

Georg Ehrenfried Groß was a German artist known especially for his savagely caricatural drawings of Berlin life in the 1920s...

, David Hockney

David Hockney

David Hockney, CH, RA, is an English painter, draughtsman, printmaker, stage designer and photographer, who is based in Bridlington, Yorkshire and Kensington, London....

, Howard Hodgkin

Howard Hodgkin

Sir Gordon Howard Eliot Hodgkin CH, CBE is a British painter and printmaker. His work is most often associated with abstraction.-Early life:...

, R.B. Kitaj, Oskar Kokoschka

Oskar Kokoschka

Oskar Kokoschka was an Austrian artist, poet and playwright best known for his intense expressionistic portraits and landscapes.-Biography:...

, Amedeo Modigliani

Amedeo Modigliani

Amedeo Clemente Modigliani was an Italian painter and sculptor who worked mainly in France. Primarily a figurative artist, he became known for paintings and sculptures in a modern style characterized by mask-like faces and elongation of form...

, Pablo Picasso

Pablo Picasso

Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Ruiz y Picasso known as Pablo Ruiz Picasso was a Spanish expatriate painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist, and stage designer, one of the greatest and most influential artists of the...

, John Singer Sargent

John Singer Sargent

John Singer Sargent was an American artist, considered the "leading portrait painter of his generation" for his evocations of Edwardian era luxury. During his career, he created roughly 900 oil paintings and more than 2,000 watercolors, as well as countless sketches and charcoal drawings...

, Egon Schiele

Egon Schiele

Egon Schiele was an Austrian painter. A protégé of Gustav Klimt, Schiele was a major figurative painter of the early 20th century. His work is noted for its intensity, and the many self-portraits the artist produced...

, Walter Sickert

Walter Sickert

Walter Richard Sickert , born in Munich, Germany, was a painter who was a member of the Camden Town Group in London. He was an important influence on distinctively British styles of avant-garde art in the 20th century....

, Marty St.James

Marty St.James

Marty St James is Professor of Fine art in the School Art and Design at the University of Hertfordshire and is perhaps best known nationally and internationally, for his portrait of Olympic swimmer Duncan Goodhew: The Swimmer – commissioned in 1990 by the National Portrait Gallery and recently...

.

The subjects included Anna Akhmatova

Anna Akhmatova

Anna Andreyevna Gorenko , better known by the pen name Anna Akhmatova , was a Russian and Soviet modernist poet, one of the most acclaimed writers in the Russian canon.Harrington p11...

 by Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin

Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin

Kuzma Sergeevich Petrov-Vodkin, was an important Russian and Soviet painter and writer.-Early years:...

, Charlie Chaplin

Charlie Chaplin

Sir Charles Spencer "Charlie" Chaplin, KBE was an English comic actor, film director and composer best known for his work during the silent film era. He became the most famous film star in the world before the end of World War I...

 by Fernand Léger

Fernand Léger

Joseph Fernand Henri Léger was a French painter, sculptor, and filmmaker. In his early works he created a personal form of Cubism which he gradually modified into a more figurative, populist style...

, Edith Sitwell

Edith Sitwell

Dame Edith Louisa Sitwell DBE was a British poet and critic.-Background:Edith Sitwell was born in Scarborough, North Yorkshire, the oldest child and only daughter of Sir George Sitwell, 4th Baronet, of Renishaw Hall; he was an expert on genealogy and landscaping...

 by Pavel Tchelitchew

Pavel Tchelitchew

Pavel Tchelitchew was a Russian-born surrealist painter, set designer and costume designer. He left Russia in 1920, lived in Berlin from 1921 to 1923, and moved to Paris in 1923. In Paris Tchelitchew became acquainted with Gertrude Stein and, through her, the Sitwell and Gorer families...

, Leigh Bowery

Leigh Bowery

Leigh Bowery was an Australian performance artist, club promoter, actor, pop star, model and fashion designer, based in London. Bowery is considered one of the more influential figures in the 1980s and 1990s London and New York art and fashion circles influencing a generation of artists and...

 by Lucian Freud

Lucian Freud

Lucian Michael Freud, OM, CH was a British painter. Known chiefly for his thickly impasted portrait and figure paintings, he was widely considered the pre-eminent British artist of his time...

, David Bowie

David Bowie

David Bowie is an English musician, actor, record producer and arranger. A major figure for over four decades in the world of popular music, Bowie is widely regarded as an innovator, particularly for his work in the 1970s...

 and Iman by Stephen Finer

Stephen Finer

-Work:Finer participated in "British Art from the Arts Council Collection 1940-80" at the Hayward Gallery, 'Collazione Inglese ll' at the Venice Biennale and was in the touring exhibition, 'Men on Women', 'The Portrait Now' at the National Portrait Gallery and 'Painting the Century 101 Portrait...

, Lenin by Isaak Brodsky

Isaak Brodsky

Isaak Izrailevich Brodsky , was a Soviet painter whose work provided a blueprint for the art movement of socialist realism. He is known for his iconic portrayals of Lenin and idealized, carefully crafted paintings dedicated to the events of the Russian Civil War and Bolshevik Revolution.Brodsky was...

, a self-portrait by Edvard Munch

Edvard Munch

Edvard Munch was a Norwegian Symbolist painter, printmaker and an important forerunner of expressionist art. His best-known composition, The Scream, is part of a series The Frieze of Life, in which Munch explored the themes of love, fear, death, melancholia, and anxiety.- Childhood :Edvard Munch...

, Somerset Maugham by Graham Sutherland

Graham Sutherland

Graham Vivien Sutherland OM was an English artist.-Early life:He was born in Streatham, attending Homefield Preparatory School, Sutton. He was then educated at Epsom College, Surrey before going up to Goldsmiths, University of London...

, Elvis Presley

Elvis Presley

Elvis Aaron Presley was one of the most popular American singers of the 20th century. A cultural icon, he is widely known by the single name Elvis. He is often referred to as the "King of Rock and Roll" or simply "the King"....

 by Andy Warhol

Andy Warhol

Andrew Warhola , known as Andy Warhol, was an American painter, printmaker, and filmmaker who was a leading figure in the visual art movement known as pop art...

, Andy Warhol

Andy Warhol

Andrew Warhola , known as Andy Warhol, was an American painter, printmaker, and filmmaker who was a leading figure in the visual art movement known as pop art...

 by Jean-Michel Basquiat

Jean-Michel Basquiat

Jean-Michel Basquiat was an American artist. His career in art began as a graffiti artist in New York City in the late 1970s, and in the 1980s produced Neo-expressionist painting.-Early life:...

, Boy/Girl - the artists children by Marty St.James

Marty St.James

Marty St James is Professor of Fine art in the School Art and Design at the University of Hertfordshire and is perhaps best known nationally and internationally, for his portrait of Olympic swimmer Duncan Goodhew: The Swimmer – commissioned in 1990 by the National Portrait Gallery and recently...

.

External links

• National Portrait Gallery exhibition description
• Details of the book of Painting the Century 101 Portrait Masterpieces 1900-2000 ISBN 1-85514-289-9 (hardback); ISBN 1-85514-313-5 (paperback)