procsilas · CC BY 2.0

One of the twentieth century's most searching portrait painters, working almost exclusively from life and demanding punishing, extended sittings from his models. His early surrealist and expressionist leanings gave way by the 1950s to a thick, unflinching realism — sombre interiors, bodies rendered without flattery — that scrutinized the psychological tension between painter and subject as much as the subject itself. Fiercely private through a sixty-year career spent largely painting friends and family, he left behind a body of work now held in major collections worldwide.