After his fiftieth birthday Eugene Atget limited his diet to milk, bread, and bits of sugar; he honed in on his hygiene and lived to perfect his art. Peculiar in his habits and devoted to the development of photography, Atget struggled unnoticed for most of his life. It wasn't until his death that hi

19th century photography, Demure, Gritty, Improvised, Moody, Subtle

As a young man, Xu Bing developed an odd relationship to language. The son of a professor and a librarian, he spent his early years surrounded by books that he could not read. His school years coincided with the Cultural Revolution, when he and other children were sent off to camps to learn Mao's new

Absurd, Expatriate or third space artists, Subtle, Witty

Composed, Elegant, Formalist, Subtle, Urban

In a quote that encapsulates the premise of Conceptual art, Joseph Kosuth pronounced in 1969: "The 'value' of particular artists after Duchamp can be weighed according to how much they questioned the nature of art." For Kosuth, modern art is essentially self-reflective: its intention is to interrogat

Classical, Clean, Eclectic, Elegant, Repetitive, Subtle