Rudolph Nureyev

popular name: Robert Mapplethorpe

date_of_death: March 9, 1989

age: 42

cause_of_death: Complications from HIV/AIDS

claim_to_fame: Artists

best_know_for: Robert Mapplethorpe was an American photographer, best known for his black-and-white photographs. His work featured an array of subjects, including celebrity portraits, male and female nudes, self-portraits, and still-life images. His most controversial works documented and examined the gay male BDSM subculture of New York City in the late 1960s and early 1970s. A 1989 exhibition of Mapplethorpe's work, titled Robert Mapplethorpe: The Perfect Moment, sparked a debate in the United States concerning both use of public funds for "obscene" artwork and the Constitutional limits of free speech in the United States.

popular name: Bob Ross

date_of_death: July 4, 1995

age: 52

cause_of_death: Complications from lymphoma

claim_to_fame: Artists

best_know_for: Bob Ross, with his distinctive hair style and quiet demeanor, was a popular American painter, art instructor, and television host. The painter who gave us “happy little trees” was the creator and host of The Joy of Painting, an instructional television program that aired from 1983 to 1994 on PBS in the United States, CBC in Canada, and similar channels in Latin America, and Europe. The show consisted of more than 400 episodes, was as meditative as it was instructive. Ross was a force of pure positivity in a world without a lot of it. Never a picture of health, Bob died at the young age of 52 due to complications from lymphoma caused by long-term smoking and the effects of toxic paint fumes and cleaners.

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.