The Most Influential People Across History
Find the most influential people in 24 academic disciplines and numerous subdisciplines
Find famous and important people related to your research. This is an excellent tool for research papers, topic papers, and building a bibliography. Using our influence-based algorithm, our rankings synthesize data from Wikipedia, Wikidata, Semantic Scholar, and CrossRef.
Students and researchers now have a fast and reliable way to find influential thinkers from 24 disciplines and 300 sub-disciplines (and growing). If you want to find history’s most influential philsosophers, or the world’s most influential mathematicians currently, now you can.
We also provide custom rankings of people by discipline as well as interviews with influential academics who are currently active.
To use this tool, select the discipline (and optional subdiscipline) relevant to your research, and specify influential academics by history, world, or US. Even results that are counterintuitive are often enlightening (our algorithm always picks up a signal).
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List of the most influential people in Computer Science,
#14501
Raja Ravi Varma
1848 - 1906 (58 years)
Raja Ravi Varma was an Indian painter and artist. His works are one of the best examples of the fusion of European academic art with a purely Indian sensibility and iconography. Especially, he was notable for making affordable lithographs of his paintings available to the public, which greatly enhanced his reach and influence as a painter and public figure. His lithographs increased the involvement of common people with fine arts and defined artistic tastes among the common people. Furthermore, his religious depictions of Hindu deities and works from Indian epic poetry and Puranas have received profound acclaim.
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Paul Nash
1889 - 1946 (57 years)
Paul Nash was a British surrealist painter and war artist, as well as a photographer, writer and designer of applied art. Nash was among the most important landscape artists of the first half of the twentieth century. He played a key role in the development of Modernism in English art.
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Naum Gabo
1890 - 1977 (87 years)
Naum Gabo, born Naum Neemia Pevsner , was an influential sculptor, theorist, and key figure in Russia's post-Revolution avant-garde and the subsequent development of twentieth-century sculpture. His work combined geometric abstraction with a dynamic organization of form in small reliefs and constructions, monumental public sculpture and pioneering kinetic works that assimilated new materials such as nylon, wire, lucite and semi-transparent materials, glass and metal. Responding to the scientific and political revolutions of his age, Gabo led an eventful and peripatetic life, moving to Berli...
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Giovanni Battista Tiepolo
1696 - 1770 (74 years)
Giovanni Battista Tiepolo , also known as Giambattista Tiepolo, was an Italian painter and printmaker from the Republic of Venice who painted in the Rococo style, considered an important member of the 18th-century Venetian school. He was prolific, and worked not only in Italy, but also in Germany and Spain.
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Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot
1796 - 1875 (79 years)
Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot , or simply Camille Corot, was a French landscape and portrait painter as well as a printmaker in etching. A pivotal figure in landscape painting, his vast output simultaneously referenced the Neo-Classical tradition and anticipated the plein-air innovations of Impressionism.
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Marsden Hartley
1877 - 1943 (66 years)
Marsden Hartley was an American Modernist painter, poet, and essayist. Hartley developed his painting abilities by observing Cubist artists in Paris and Berlin. Early life and education Hartley was born in Lewiston, Maine, where his English parents had settled. He was the youngest of nine children. His mother died when he was eight, and his father remarried four years later to Martha Marsden. His birth name was Edmund Hartley; he later assumed Marsden as his first name when he was in his early twenties. A few years after his mother's death when Hartley was 14, his sisters moved to Ohio, leaving him behind in Maine with his father where he worked in a shoe factory for a year.
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Dean A Fergusson
#14508
Tintoretto
1518 - 1594 (76 years)
Tintoretto was an Italian painter identified with the Venetian school. His contemporaries both admired and criticized the speed with which he painted, and the unprecedented boldness of his brushwork. For his phenomenal energy in painting he was termed Il Furioso . His work is characterised by his muscular figures, dramatic gestures and bold use of perspective, in the Mannerist style.
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John L. McNulty
1898 - Present (128 years)
The Very Right Reverend Monsignor John L. McNulty, Ph.D., was an American Roman Catholic Domestic prelate and the 13th President of Seton Hall University. McNulty received an A.B. and an M.A. from Seton Hall. He received his Ph.D. from NYU in 1935 and a Dipl. from d’ Écoles Supérieures at the Lille Catholic University in 1937. McNulty was ordained a priest of the Roman Catholic Church in 1925. He was an educator at Seton Hall University from 1928 and its president from 1949 - 1959, succeeding James F. Kelley. McNulty was invested as a Domestic Prelate of His Holiness Pius XII in 1950. Seton...
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Bronzino
1503 - 1572 (69 years)
Agnolo di Cosimo , usually known as Bronzino or Agnolo Bronzino, was an Italian Mannerist painter from Florence. His sobriquet, Bronzino, may refer to his relatively dark skin or reddish hair. He lived all his life in Florence, and from his late 30s was kept busy as the court painter of Cosimo I de' Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany. He was mainly a portraitist but also painted many religious subjects, and a few allegorical subjects, which include what is probably his best-known work, Venus, Cupid, Folly and Time, c. 1544–45, now in London. Many portraits of the Medicis exist in several versions ...
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François Boucher
1703 - 1770 (67 years)
François Boucher was a French painter, draughtsman and etcher, who worked in the Rococo style. Boucher is known for his idyllic and voluptuous paintings on classical themes, decorative allegories, and pastoral scenes. He was perhaps the most celebrated painter and decorative artist of the 18th century.
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Duccio
1255 - 1319 (64 years)
Duccio di Buoninsegna , commonly known as just Duccio, was an Italian painter active in Siena, Tuscany, in the late 13th and early 14th century. He was hired throughout his life to complete many important works in government and religious buildings around Italy. Duccio is considered one of the greatest Italian painters of the Middle Ages, and is credited with creating the painting styles of Trecento and the Sienese school. He also contributed significantly to the Sienese Gothic style.
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Charles Grafly
1862 - 1929 (67 years)
Charles Allan Grafly, Jr. was an American sculptor, and teacher. Instructor of Sculpture at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts for 37 years, his students included Paul Manship, Albin Polasek, and Walker Hancock.
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Juan Gris
1887 - 1927 (40 years)
José Victoriano González-Pérez , better known as Juan Gris , was a Spanish painter born in Madrid who lived and worked in France for most of his active period. Closely connected to the innovative artistic genre Cubism, his works are among the movement's most distinctive.
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Jean Metzinger
1883 - 1956 (73 years)
Jean Dominique Antony Metzinger was a major 20th-century French painter, theorist, writer, critic and poet, who along with Albert Gleizes wrote the first theoretical work on Cubism. His earliest works, from 1900 to 1904, were influenced by the neo-Impressionism of Georges Seurat and Henri-Edmond Cross. Between 1904 and 1907, Metzinger worked in the Divisionist and Fauvist styles with a strong Cézannian component, leading to some of the first proto-Cubist works.
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Dragomir Hurmuzescu
1865 - 1954 (89 years)
Dragomir M. Hurmuzescu was a Romanian physicist and inventor, teacher at the University of Iași and the University of Bucharest, and a correspondent member at the Romanian Academy. He is the founder of the electrotechnics science in Romania and a scientific collaborator of Marie and Pierre Curie.
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Morton Lippmann
#14518
Albert Laessle
1877 - 1954 (77 years)
Albert Laessle was an American sculptor and educator. He taught at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts for more than twenty years and is best remembered as an animalier. He won the 1918 Widener Gold Medal.
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William John Swainson
1789 - 1855 (66 years)
William John Swainson FLS, FRS , was an English ornithologist, malacologist, conchologist, entomologist, and artist. Life Swainson was born in Dover Place, St Mary Newington, London, the eldest son of John Timothy Swainson the Second , an original fellow of the Linnean Society. He was cousin of the amateur botanist Isaac Swainson. His father's family originated in Lancashire, and both grandfather and father held high posts in Her Majesty's Customs, the father becoming Collector at Liverpool.
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Robert Fulton
1765 - 1815 (50 years)
Robert Fulton was an American engineer and inventor who is widely credited with developing the world's first commercially successful steamboat, the . In 1807, that steamboat traveled on the Hudson River with passengers from New York City to Albany and back again, a round trip of , in 62 hours. The success of his steamboat changed river traffic and trade on major American rivers.
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Jean-Baptiste Greuze
1725 - 1805 (80 years)
Jean-Baptiste Greuze was a French painter of portraits, genre scenes, and history painting. Biography Early life Greuze was born at Tournus, a market town in Burgundy. He is generally said to have formed his own talent; at an early age his inclinations, though thwarted by his father, were encouraged by a Lyonnese artist named Grandon, or Grondom, who enjoyed during his lifetime considerable reputation as a portrait-painter. Grandon not only persuaded Greuze's father to give way to his son's wishes, and permit the boy to accompany him as his pupil to Lyon, but, when at a later date he left Ly...
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Denis Papin
1647 - 1713 (66 years)
Denis Papin FRS was a French physicist, mathematician and inventor, best known for his pioneering invention of the steam digester, the forerunner of the pressure cooker and of the steam engine. Early life and education Born in Chitenay , Papin attended a Jesuit school there. In 1661, he attended the University of Angers, from which he graduated with a medical degree in 1669.
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Giovanni Bellini
1430 - 1516 (86 years)
Giovanni Bellini was an Italian Renaissance painter, probably the best known of the Bellini family of Venetian painters. He was raised in the household of Jacopo Bellini, formerly thought to have been his father, but now that familial generational relationship is questioned. An older brother, Gentile Bellini was more highly regarded than Giovanni during his lifetime, but the reverse is true today. His brother-in-law was Andrea Mantegna.
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David Alfaro Siqueiros
1896 - 1974 (78 years)
David Alfaro Siqueiros was a Mexican social realist painter, best known for his large public murals using the latest in equipment, materials and technique. Along with Diego Rivera and José Clemente Orozco, he was one of the most famous of the "Mexican muralists".
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Albrecht Altdorfer
1480 - 1538 (58 years)
Albrecht Altdorfer was a German painter, engraver and architect of the Renaissance working in Regensburg, Bavaria. Along with Lucas Cranach the Elder and Wolf Huber he is regarded to be the main representative of the Danube School, setting biblical and historical subjects against landscape backgrounds of expressive colours. He is remarkable as one of the first artists to take an interest in landscape as an independent subject. As an artist also making small intricate engravings he is seen to belong to the Nuremberg Little Masters.
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Gutzon Borglum
1867 - 1941 (74 years)
John Gutzon de la Mothe Borglum was an American sculptor best known for his work on Mount Rushmore. He is also associated with various other public works of art across the U.S., including Stone Mountain in Georgia, statues of Union General Philip Sheridan in Washington D.C. and in Chicago, as well as a bust of Abraham Lincoln which was exhibited in the White House by Theodore Roosevelt and which is now held in the United States Capitol crypt in Washington, D.C.
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Alexander Stirling Calder
1870 - 1945 (75 years)
Alexander Stirling Calder was an American sculptor and teacher. He was the son of sculptor Alexander Milne Calder and the father of sculptor Alexander Calder. His best-known works are George Washington as President on the Washington Square Arch in New York City, the Swann Memorial Fountain in Philadelphia, and the Leif Eriksson Memorial in Reykjavík, Iceland.
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Jayant S. Vaidya
Jayant S. Vaidya is a British-Indian surgeon-oncologist and clinical academic who, together with Michael Baum and Jeffrey Tobias, developed the technique called targeted intra-operative radiotherapy . He is a professor of surgery and oncology at the University College London, London and the author of two books on breast cancer, one on tobacco eradication, and over 200 academic articles.
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Carlo Carrà
1881 - 1966 (85 years)
Carlo Carrà was an Italian painter and a leading figure of the Futurist movement that flourished in Italy during the beginning of the 20th century. In addition to his many paintings, he wrote a number of books concerning art. He taught for many years in the city of Milan.
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Lee Greene Richards
1878 - 1950 (72 years)
Lee Greene Richards was a famous Utah portrait artist. Many of his works can be found at the City and County Building in Salt Lake City, Utah. Biography Richards was the son of Levi W. and Lula Greene Richards. His father was the son of Levi Richards who was the brother of Joseph Smith's physician in Nauvoo, Illinois. He was actually named Levi after his father but went by Lee. Levi W. Richards and his mother Sarah Griffith Richards had been painters. Lee Richards was raised as a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and in 1895 he served as an LDS missionary in England....
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T. Earl Pardoe
1885 - 1971 (86 years)
Thomas Earl Pardoe was the first head of the Brigham Young University drama program. One of the main theaters in the Harris Fine Arts Center at BYU is named for him and his wife, Kathryn Bassett Pardoe, who was also an influential drama teacher at BYU.
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Bernardo Bellotto
1721 - 1780 (59 years)
Bernardo Bellotto , was an Italian urban landscape painter or vedutista, and printmaker in etching famous for his vedute of European cities – Dresden, Vienna, Turin, and Warsaw. He was the student and nephew of the renowned Giovanni Antonio Canal Canaletto and sometimes used the latter's illustrious name, signing himself as Bernardo Canaletto. In Germany and Poland, Bellotto called himself by his uncle's name, Canaletto. This caused some confusion, however Bellotto’s work is more sombre in color than Canaletto's and his depiction of clouds and shadows brings him closer to Dutch painting.
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Fritz von Uhde
1848 - 1911 (63 years)
Fritz von Uhde was a German painter of genre and religious subjects. His style lay in-between Realism and Impressionism, he was once known as "Germany's outstanding impressionist" and he became one of the first painters to introduce plein-air painting in his country.
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Peter Janssen
1844 - 1908 (64 years)
Johann Peter Theodor Janssen was a German historical painter. Biography Janssen was born in Düsseldorf, son of the engraver , by whom he was first instructed before studying at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf under Karl Ferdinand Sohn and Eduard Bendemann. He is principally known through a series of decorative works whose monumental style and sound naturalism won him a reputation as one of the foremost historical painters of his time. He became a professor at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf in 1877 and its director in 1895, and was elected a member of the Prussian Academy of Arts in 1885. In Berli...
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Liu Haisu
1896 - 1994 (98 years)
Liu Haisu was a prominent twentieth-century Chinese painter and a noted art educator. He excelled in Chinese painting and oil painting. He was one of the four pioneers of Chinese modern art who earned the title of "The Four Great Academy Presidents".
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Domenico Ghirlandaio
1448 - 1494 (46 years)
Domenico di Tommaso Curradi di Doffo Bigordi , professionally known as Domenico Ghirlandaio, also spelt as Ghirlandajo, was an Italian Renaissance painter born in Florence. Ghirlandaio was part of the so-called "third generation" of the Florentine Renaissance, along with Verrocchio, the Pollaiolo brothers and Sandro Botticelli. Ghirlandaio led a large and efficient workshop that included his brothers Davide Ghirlandaio and Benedetto Ghirlandaio, his brother-in-law Bastiano Mainardi from San Gimignano, and later his son Ridolfo Ghirlandaio. Many apprentices passed through Ghirlandaio's workshop, including the famous Michelangelo.
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Kræsten Iversen
1886 - 1955 (69 years)
Kristen "Kræsten" Iversen was a Danish artist who is remembered both for his paintings and his painted glass windows. He was a member of the Bornholm school of painters and a professor at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts .
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Wilhelm Trübner
1851 - 1917 (66 years)
Wilhelm Trübner was a German realist painter of the circle of Wilhelm Leibl. Biography Trübner was born in Heidelberg. He was the third son of a silver- and goldsmith, Johann Georg Trübner, and his wife Anna Maria. In 1867 he began training as a goldsmith in Hanau, and met classicist painter Anselm Feuerbach who encouraged him to study painting. In that year he began studies at the Kunstschule in Karlsruhe under Karl Friedrich Schick. He was influenced by artists he met in Karlsruhe, such as Hans Canon and Feodor Dietz. In 1869 he began studying at the Kunstacademie in Munich, where he was greatly impressed by an international exhibition of paintings by Leibl and Gustave Courbet.
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Hans Schuler
1874 - 1951 (77 years)
Hans K. Schuler was a German-born American sculptor and monument maker. He was the first American sculptor ever to win the Salon Gold Medal. His works are in several important museum collections, and he also created many public monuments, mostly for locations in Baltimore, Maryland and in the Washington, D.C. area. For over a quarter of a century he served as president of the Maryland Institute College of Art.
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Luca Giordano
1634 - 1705 (71 years)
Luca Giordano was an Italian late-Baroque painter and printmaker in etching. Fluent and decorative, he worked successfully in Naples, Rome, Florence, and Venice, before spending a decade in Spain. Early life and training Born in Naples, Giordano was the son of the painter Antonio Giordano. In around 1650 he was apprenticed to Ribera on the recommendation of the viceroy of Naples and his early work was heavily influenced by his teacher. Like Ribera, he painted many half-length figures of philosophers, either imaginary portraits of specific figures, or generic types.
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Franklin C. Crow
#14542
Anders Zorn
1860 - 1920 (60 years)
Anders Leonard Zorn was a Swedish painter. He attained international success as a painter, sculptor, and etching artist. Among Zorn's portrait subjects include King Oscar II of Sweden and three American Presidents: Grover Cleveland, William H. Taft, and Theodore Roosevelt. At the end of his life, he established the Swedish literary Bellman Prize in 1920.
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Eli Whitney
1765 - 1825 (60 years)
Eli Whitney Jr. was an American inventor, widely known for inventing the cotton gin in 1793, one of the key inventions of the Industrial Revolution that shaped the economy of the Antebellum South. Whitney's invention made upland short cotton into a profitable crop, which strengthened the economic foundation of slavery in the United States and prolonged the institution. Despite the social and economic impact of his invention, Whitney lost much of his profits in legal battles over patent infringement for the cotton gin. Thereafter, he turned his attention to securing contracts with the government in the manufacture of muskets for the newly formed United States Army.
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Tom Thomson
1877 - 1917 (40 years)
Thomas John Thomson was a Canadian artist active in the early 20th century. During his short career, he produced roughly 400 oil sketches on small wood panels and approximately 50 larger works on canvas. His works consist almost entirely of landscapes, depicting trees, skies, lakes, and rivers. He used broad brush strokes and a liberal application of paint to capture the beauty and colour of the Ontario landscape. Thomson's accidental death by drowning at 39 shortly before the founding of the Group of Seven is seen as a tragedy for Canadian art.
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Joseph Médard Carrière
1902 - 1970 (68 years)
Joseph Médard Carrière , was an award-winning Franco-Ontarian French-language scholar. He was most noted as a collector of French folklore from the Midwest of the United States. He also served as a President of the American Folklore Society.
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William de Leftwich Dodge
1867 - 1935 (68 years)
William de Leftwich Dodge was an Americann artist best known for his murals, which were commissioned for both public and private buildings. Early life and education Dodge was born at Liberty, Virginia in the Piedmont near Lynchburg. In 1879, his mother, Mary de Leftwich Dodge, an aspiring artist, moved her family to Europe. After living initially in Munich they moved to Paris, where she worked on art. Dodge later followed her example and became an artist. He spent most of his childhood years in France, where his mother was working on art. He studied at the École des Beaux Arts and took first place in the examinations in 1881.
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Józef Peszka
1767 - 1831 (64 years)
Józef Peszka was a Polish painter and art professor; known mostly for his portraits and watercolor landscapes. Biography His first drawing lessons were with , an Austrian painter living in Kraków. He then studied painting in Warsaw with Franciszek Smuglewicz. After doing a portrait of Hugo Kołłątaj, he was introduced to members of the Great Sejm and earned a commission to do portraits of other prominent political figures; work which kept him occupied until 1792.
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Robert Anning Bell
1863 - 1933 (70 years)
Robert Anning Bell was an English artist and designer. Early life Robert Anning Bell was born in London on 14 April 1863, the son of Robert George Bell, a cheesemonger, and Mary Charlotte Knight. He studied at University College School, the Westminster School of Art, and the Royal Academy Schools, followed by a time in Paris.
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Thomas Couture
1815 - 1879 (64 years)
Thomas Couture was a French history painter and teacher. He taught such later luminaries of the art world as Édouard Manet, Henri Fantin-Latour, John La Farge, Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, John Ward Dunsmore, Karel Javůrek, William Morris Hunt, and Joseph-Noël Sylvestre.
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Sándor Bortnyik
1893 - 1976 (83 years)
Sándor Bortnyik was a Hungarian painter and graphic designer. His work was greatly influenced by Cubism, Expressionism and Constructivism. Life Born in Târgu Mureș, Transylvania, he moved to Weimar in 1922 and was connected to the Bauhaus. When he moved back to Hungary he founded an art school in Budapest, where he followed Bauhaus principles.
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