Twenty years ago, in an exhibition of Mexican surrealists and before I even knew she existed, I came around a corner in the Dallas Museum of Art to be confronted by the painted autobiographies of Frida Kahlo.

It was a turning point for me in more ways than one, having proven itself to be a significant step in my decision to make art, as well as in what kind of work I would produce to this day.

“Paint what you know” is the oft-heard dictum for artists, and after a traffic accident left Kahlo, the eighteen-year-old daughter of an architectural photographer, impaled on the iron handrail of a Mexico City bus, she did just that.

Abandoning its detached, second-person study of the human condition, she traded medical schooling for self portraits in which she would turn herself inside out, saying, “I am the subject I know best.”

Even if copyright didn’t prevent me using a Frida Kahlo painting here, I think I would still hesitate to select one, her body of work in general holds such power and personal significance for me. So if a single image is what’s required, this photo better represents to me her unblinking face down of life.

Frida Kahlo, whose work surrealist André Breton called a “ribbon around a bomb”, was born on July 6, 1907. (Shown here with husband Diego Rivera. Photo by Carl Van Vechten.)

La Bohémienne Endormie (1897) by Henri Rousseau

I think Joseph Cornell could have empathized with Henri Rousseau, at least a little. Father of American collage and inventor of the Surrealist shadow box, Cornell knew all too well how it felt to be born out of place. His dreamlike constructions reveal a true Francophile, though he would never set foot in France. A half-century earlier, Rousseau had rhapsodized about his own far-flung, exotic locales, painting jungle scenes inhabited by creatures he’d only seen in the Paris zoo. In contrast to Cornell, he never set foot out of France.

But the New Yorker and the Parisian had another thing in common besides an unrequited love for someplace else. Each lost his father early in life (Cornell at fourteen, Rousseau at twenty-four) and so was forced to become the family breadwinner. Eventually, Cornell’s loss of youthful play would be channeled into assemblages that felt like arcade games, and Rousseau’s loss of youthful freedom manifested itself as travelogues on canvas, colorfully but flatly illustrated with these scenes he made up in his head.

The Sleeping Gypsy, above, is among the most iconic Rousseau works, and its innocent figuration exemplifies the naive style for which he was for years dismissed. In fact one might wonder, if he was as unassuming and childlike as his paintings, did he perhaps fantasize that he was the lion and his critics the gypsy?

Henri Julien Félix Rousseau was born May 21, 1844.

There she is, hanging out with St. Michael Defeats the Devil, Dante and Virgil in Hell, and Massacres at Chios: Greek Families Awaiting Death or Slavery. Amidst all the bombastic hubbub typical of Delacroix’s best known paintings is this little gem, Orphan Girl at the Cemetery (1824).

Except for one particular era, I’ve never wanted to live at any time in history other than right now. But the one that does call out to me as an artist is Paris in the first decade or two of the twentieth century. That’s when the tectonic plates of representational art and something altogether different began to grind one against the other, in preparation of snapping apart. You can still feel the aftershocks a century later.

Smack dab in the middle of it all was a Romanian sculptor named Constantin Brâncuşi, born on February 19, 1876 and destined to be included in one of the most significant art events of the twentieth century, the 1913 International Exhibition of Modern Art in New York. Most commonly remembered for the debut of Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase, the so-called Armory Show embodied this seismic shift in contemporary art, where Brâncuşi’s tribal-looking sculpture was juxtaposed with the work of Cézanne and Gauguin, Goya and Van Gogh, Matisse and Picasso.

But even before, Brâncuşi was on his search for new ways of looking at things: after only months he’d left the tutelage of Auguste Rodin saying, ”Nothing can grow under big trees.” Shown here is his studio as photographed by Edward Steichen around 1920. Some shapes bear a resemblance to our own Architect’s Favorite Side Table.