Norman Rockwell

popular name: Andy Warhol

date_of_death: February 22, 1987

age: 58

cause_of_death: Post-operative cardiac arrhythmia

claim_to_fame: Artists

best_know_for: Andy Warhol was an American artist, film director, and producer who was a leading figure in the visual art movement known as the Pop Art movement. Like his contemporaries Robert Rauschenberg and Roy Lichtenstein, Warhol wryly responded to the mass media of the 1960s. His silkscreen-printed paintings of cultural and consumer icons, featuring Marilyn Monroe and Elizabeth Taylor, as well as Campbell's Soup cans and Brillo boxes, would make him one of the most famous artists of his generation. Before becoming a pop icon, Warhol graduated from the Carnegie Institute of Technology in 1949, moving to New York to pursue a career in commercial illustration. Warhol's illustrations for editorials like Vogue and Glamour during the 1950s led him to financial success. In 1964, Warhol rented a studio loft on East 47th Street in Midtown Manhattan, which was later known as the Factory. Quick to realize the cult of celebrity, the Factory acted as a hub for fashionable movie stars, models, and artists who became fodder for his prints and films, as well as a performance venue for The Velvet Underground. The prolific artist worked across painting, sculpture, and new media throughout the 1960s and 1970s.

popular name: LeRoy Neiman

date_of_death: June 20, 2012

age: 91

cause_of_death: Long term effects of circulatory issues

claim_to_fame: Artists

best_know_for: LeRoy Neiman, the painter and sketch artist was best known for evoking the kinetic energy of the world’s biggest sporting and leisure events with bright quick strokes. Neiman's easily recognized style was known for his brilliantly colored, expressionist paintings and screenprints of athletes, musicians, and sporting events. Neiman also was a contributing artist at Playboy magazine for many years and official painter of five Olympiads. Neiman was a media-savvy artist who knew how to enthrall audiences with his instant renditions of what he observed. In 1972, he sketched the world chess tournament between Boris Spassky and Bobby Fischer in Reykjavik, Iceland, for a live television audience. He also produced live drawings of the Olympics for TV and was the official computer artist of the Super Bowl for CBS. One face he recorded over and over again was that of Muhammad Ali. Those painting and sketches, representing 15 years of the prizefighter’s professional life permanently reside at the LeRoy Neiman Gallery at the Muhammad Ali Center in Louisville, Kentucky. Today fans can visit the grave of artist LeRoy Neiman at Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx, NYC.

popular name: Vincent van Gogh

date_of_death: July 29, 1890

age: 37

cause_of_death: Suicide - Gunshot wound

claim_to_fame: Artists

best_know_for: Vincent van Gogh was a Dutch Post-Impressionist painter who posthumously became one of the most famous and influential figures in Western art history. In a decade, he created about 2,100 artworks, including around 860 oil paintings, most of which date from the last two years of his life. They include landscapes, still lifes, portraits, and self-portraits, and are characterised by bold colours and dramatic, impulsive and expressive brushwork that contributed to the foundations of modern art. His early works, mostly still lifes and depictions of peasant labourers, contain few signs of the vivid colour that distinguished his later work. In 1886, he moved to Paris where he met members of the avant-garde, including Émile Bernard and Paul Gauguin, who were reacting against the Impressionist sensibility. As his work developed he created a new approach to still life and landscape. His paintings grew brighter as he developed a style that became fully realised during his stay in Arles in the South of France in 1888. During this period he broadened his subject matter to include series of olive trees, wheat fields and sunflowers. During his lifetime van Gogh was not commercially successful and, struggling with severe depression and poverty, committed suicide at the age of 37. He was laid to rest at Auvers-Sur-Oise Communal Cemetery in Auvers-Sur-Oise, Val-d'Oise, France.