Often called "the first of the moderns," Francisco Jose de Goya y Lucientes trailed legend behind him wherever he went. Even casual acquaintances were struck by Goya's surplus of personality: he was fiercely independent, an amateur toreador, a relentless adventurer, at times a street fighter, and (si

Dark, Fantastic, Intense, Parody, Romantic art, Tense

In one image, a drunken, disheveled man dips a jug into a bucket of home-brewed beer that sits next to his chair in a squalid living room. In another -- a close-up -- a woman eats a slice of pizza. She's obese, covered in tattoos, and wearing a weird assortment of shabby clothes; the pizza oozes from

Anxiety, Dark, Dystopic, Gritty, In-your-face, Young british artists

Among the foremost members of the Frankfurt School, Theodor Adorno launched a tirade against the modern world. With an arsenal of unsupported assertions strung together without obvious connecting elements, Adorno set out to critique what he called the "phantasmagoria" of commodity consumption. A c

Angry, Dark, Depressive, Dystopic, Frankfurt school, Intense, Marxism/ideology critique, Severe

When Vladek Spiegelman took his son Arthur aside one day to teach him about the Holocaust, it was more than a history lesson; it was a survival lesson. He drew diagrams of the shelter in which he had hidden his family -- not pictures, but simple, urgent drawings that mapped out, in the father's mind,

Anxiety, Avant comic art, Dark, Dramatic, Egalitarian, Expansive