Max Beckmann (February 12, 1884 – December 28, 1950) was a German painter, draftsman, printmaker, sculptor, and writer. Although he is classified as an Expressionist artist, he rejected both the term and the movement. In the 1920s, he was associated with the New Objectivity (Neue Sachlichkeit), an outgrowth of Expressionism that opposed its introverted emotionalism.

Max Beckmann was born into a middle-class family in Leipzig, Saxony. From his youth he pitted himself against the old masters. His traumatic experiences of World War I, in which he served as a medic, coincided with a dramatic transformation of his style from academically correct depictions to a distortion of both figure and space, reflecting his altered vision of himself and humanity.

He is known for the self-portraits painted throughout his life, their number and intensity rivaled only by Rembrandt and Picasso. Well-read in philosophy and literature, he also contemplated mysticism and theosophy in search of the "Self". As a true painter-thinker, he strove to find the hidden spiritual dimension in his subjects. (Beckmann's 1948 "Letters to a Woman Painter" provides a statement of his approach to art.)

Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Ruiz y Picasso, known as Pablo Picasso (Spanish pronunciation: [ˈpaβlo piˈkaso], 25 October 1881 – 8 April 1973), was a Spanish painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist, and stage designer who spent most of his adult life in France. One of the greatest and most influential artists of the 20th century, he is widely known for co-founding the Cubist movement, the invention of constructed sculpture, the co-invention of collage, and for the wide variety of styles that he helped develop and explore. Among his most famous works are the proto-Cubist Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907), and Guernica (1937), a portrayal of the German bombing of Guernica during the Spanish Civil War.

Picasso, Henri Matisse and Marcel Duchamp are commonly regarded as the three artists who most defined the revolutionary developments in the plastic arts in the opening decades of the 20th century, responsible for significant developments in painting, sculpture, printmaking and ceramics.

Willem de Kooning (April 24, 1904 – March 19, 1997) was a Dutch American abstract expressionist artist who was born in Rotterdam, the Netherlands.

In the post-World War II era, de Kooning painted in a style that came to be referred to as Abstract expressionism or Action painting, and was part of a group of artists that came to be known as the New York School. Other painters in this group included Jackson Pollock, Franz Kline, Arshile Gorky, Mark Rothko, Hans Hofmann, Adolph Gottlieb, Robert Motherwell, Philip Guston and Clyfford Still.

In September 2011 de Kooning's work was honored with a large-scale retrospective exhibition: de Kooning: A Retrospective September 18, 2011–January 9, 2012 at MoMA in New York City. Organized by John Elderfield it was the first major museum exhibition devoted to the full breadth and depth of de Kooning's career, containing nearly 200 works.

De Kooning's parents, Leendert de Kooning and Cornelia Nobel, were divorced when he was about five years old, and he was raised by his mother and stepfather. His early artistic training included eight years at the Rotterdam Academy of Fine Arts and Techniques. In the 1920s he worked as an assistant to the art director of a Rotterdam department store. de Kooning was one of the thirty-eight artists chosen from a general invitation to New York City metropolitan artists to design and paint the 105 public murals at the 1939 New York World’s Fair. His fellow muralist, David Margolis later recounted their 1932 trips to the Savoy Ballroom and de Kooning's "keen interest in jazz."

Larry Heard (born May 31, 1960,Chicago, Illinois) is a Memphis, Tennessee-based musician widely known for the Chicago-based house music he produced during the mid-1980s and continues to produce today. He was leader of the influential group Fingers Inc. and has recorded solo under various names, most notably Mr. Fingers.

Born on the South Side of Chicago, Heard grew up hearing jazz and Motown at home, and could play several instruments from a young age. Before beginning his solo musical career in 1983, he was a member of the bands Infinity (a jazz fusion cover group that included Adonis) and the Manhattan Transfer. He also worked for the U.S. government as a benefit authorizer, which enabled him to buy his first studio equipment. Although he has created much music and his career is ongoing, he best known for recording these songs, mostly from the mid-1980s:

Much of Heard's music is released and re-released under different names, which include Fingers Inc., Mr. Fingers, Loosefingers, Fingers, House Factors, and Trio Zero. Robert Owens was the vocalist on many of those tracks. Heard was also part of the duo known as the It, along with street poet Harry Dennis.

Frieder Burda (born 29 April 1936 in Gengenbach, Baden-Württemberg) is a German art collector and Freeman of Baden-Baden.

Burda was the second son of publisher Franz Burda and his wife Aenne Burda. A major art collector, in 2004 he opened Museum Frieder Burda in Baden-Baden, in a €20 million building designed by architect Richard Meier.

Together with his older brother Franz and his younger brother Hubert, Burda grew up in Offenburg. After finishing school in Offenburg, Triberg and Switzerland, he completed a print and a publishing qualification. Burda was trained in his father's business group. Later he lived in France, were became a magazine publisher. He spent several years in England and the United States before becoming a printer in Darmstadt. He developed his company into one of the leading commercial print foundries in Europe.

Included in his collection is a 1946 Jackson Pollock work, The Tea Cup.