Edward Hopper, the best-known American realist of the inter-war period, once said: 'The man's the work. Something doesn't come out of nothing.' This offers a clue to interpreting the work of an artist who was not only intensely private, but who made solitude and introspection important themes in his painting.

Japanese painter and wood engraver, born in Edo (now Tokyo). He is considered one of the outstanding figures of the Ukiyo-e, or "pictures of the floating world" (everyday life), school of printmaking. Hokusai entered the studio of his countryman Katsukawa Shunsho in 1775 and there learned the new, popular technique of woodcut printmaking.

Can anyone really claim those bathtubs, filled with what came to be fantasies of his wife, are great paintings? As with so many modernist icons, they take on an historical aura that over-awes aesthetic reactions and common sense. To me they are good enough depictions of humidity -- but not much else. Or maybe the else is in those bathroom tiles that (or did they?) inspire Mark Rothko to blow them up, as has recently been claimed, into his clouds of floating color?

Willem de Kooning was born in Rotterdam, Holland (the Netherlands) in 1904, and came to the United States in 1926. He soon became a close friend of Arshile Gorky and other New York artists--Jackson Pollock, Hans Hofmann, Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko--and, along with them, is credited with having most thoroughly explored abstract art.

Fernando Botero was born in Medellin, Colombia in 1932. His paintings are often social commentaries with political overtones that may seem simply humorous at first glance. His satirical portraits take on the character of human still-life. Botero studied fresco technique and art history in Florence from 1953 to 1955 and this has influenced his painting ever since.

Malevitch, a Suprematist, worked in a reductivist style, culminating in the paintings and drawings of simple squares. His work, because of its simplicity, was supposed to be accessible to the 'masses'. It was an attempt at proletarian art. The work led, eventually, to the work of the Minimalists.