Random Artist Generator

The Random Artist Generator picks one to five famous visual artists per click from a list of 36 painters and sculptors, and shows each one with a portrait and their birth and death years. The list runs from the Renaissance (Botticelli, Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo) through the Impressionists and modernists (Monet, van Gogh, Picasso, Kahlo) to Warhol, Basquiat and Yayoi Kusama. It is a quick way to land on an artist to study, sketch in the style of, or use as a quiz answer.

One thing to be clear about up front: this is a generator of painters and sculptors, not musicians. If you searched for a random music artist, singer or musician, the Random Singer Generator and Random Rapper Generator are the pages you want.

How it works

Enter a number from 1 to 5 and press Generate Artist. Each result is a card with the artist's name, their years in parentheses, and a portrait image of the artist. Press again and the list is reshuffled, so five presses will get you through most of the 36 without much repetition.

Who is in the list

The 36 artists are the names most likely to appear in an art-history survey, grouped roughly by period:

• Renaissance and Baroque – Sandro Botticelli, Leonardo da Vinci, Albrecht Dürer, Michelangelo, Raphael, Caravaggio, Peter Paul Rubens, Artemisia Gentileschi, Gian Lorenzo Bernini, Diego Velázquez, Rembrandt, Jan Vermeer.
• Japanese ukiyo-e – Katsushika Hokusai and Utagawa Hiroshige.
• 19th century – Eugène Delacroix, Édouard Manet, Edgar Degas, Claude Monet, Mary Cassatt, Paul Cézanne, Paul Gauguin, Vincent van Gogh.
• Early 20th century – Henri Matisse, Gustav Klimt, Pablo Picasso, Amedeo Modigliani, Diego Rivera, Georgia O'Keeffe, René Magritte, Salvador Dalí, Frida Kahlo.
• Postwar and contemporary – Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock, Andy Warhol, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Yayoi Kusama.

Four of the 36 are women (Gentileschi, Cassatt, O'Keeffe, Kahlo, plus Kusama makes five), two are Japanese and two Mexican; the rest are European and American. Bernini is the only one known primarily as a sculptor, though Michelangelo and Degas sculpted too. There is no genre, period or nationality filter, so if you only want Impressionists you will need to keep pressing.

Ways to use it

• Art-study prompts. Generate one artist a day and spend ten minutes looking at their work. The lifespan on the card tells you the period before you search.
• Drawing challenges. “Draw your coffee cup in the style of whoever comes up” is a well-worn sketchbook exercise, and the mix of Hokusai, Rothko and Dürer keeps it from getting predictable.
• Quiz and classroom rounds. Generate five artists and ask students to put them in chronological order, name one work each, or match them to a movement.
• Picking a museum route. Big collections are overwhelming; letting the generator choose three names gives you a short list to actually find.

Other people generators

For famous people beyond the art world, the Random Famous Person Generator and Random Celebrity Generator cover a much wider mix, and the Random Actor Generator does the same for film. Everything similar is listed under all people & character generators.