December’s Top 300 Artist Searches Driven by Scandal and Street Art

It was a big month for little-known artists.

British photographer David Hamilton at an exhibition of his pictures in Stuttgart, Germany. Photo BERND WEISSBROD/AFP/Getty Images.

What artists are artnet’s users most commonly searching for? Every month, we put the results of these searches under the microscope in order to analyze what drives artists’ rising and falling popularity.

As he had for the previous two months, controversial British photographer David Hamilton, known for his depictions of nude adolescent girls, topped the list. The 83-year-old artist was found dead at his Paris home in November, after four former models came forward and accused him of rape.

As in past months, the top 10 are dominated by popular street artists like KAWS and Banksy; edgy photographers including Nobuyoshi Araki, Diane Arbus, Robert Mapplethorpe, and Jock Sturges; and household names like Pablo Picasso and Andy Warhol.

The most dramatic move on the list, which artnet tracks month to month, is a meteoric rise by German figurative sculptor Otto Schmidt-Hofer (1837–1925), at number 35. The artist came out of nowhere to claim the spot; he hasn’t been in the news and has had no dramatic auction sales recently, and his auction high, according to the artnet Price Database, is just above $26,000. That price was achieved in 2008.

 

This was a big month for little-known artists on the list. American sculptor Jack Dowd landed nearby at number 40 despite no previous appearances; Brooke Shields–obsessed American artist Garry Gross leapt from number 144 to 46; and French comic book artist Gotlib debuted at 70.

See the list of top artists for December below:

  1. David Hamilton
  2. Jock Sturges
  3. Banksy
  4. Andy Warhol
  5. Nobuyoshi Araki
  6. Pablo Picasso
  7. Diane Arbus
  8. KAWS
  9. Robert Mapplethorpe
  10. Helmut Newton
  11. Keith Haring
  12. Nan Goldin
  13. Jean-Michel Basquiat
  14. Alec Monopoly
  15. Roy Lichtenstein
  16. Marc Chagall
  17. Salvador Dalí
  18. Joel-Peter Witkin
  19. Victor Vasarely
  20. Yayoi Kusama
  21. David Hockney
  22. Francesca Woodman
  23. Sally Mann
  24. Fernando Botero
  25. Bernard Buffet
  26. Gerhard Richter
  27. Takashi Murakami
  28. Shepard Fairey
  29. Joan Miró
  30. Damien Hirst
  31. Jeff Koons
  32. Yoshitomo Nara
  33. Liu Bolin
  34. Sebastião Salgado
  35. Otto Schmidt-Hofer
  36. René Magritte
  37. Alexander Calder
  38. Anish Kapoor
  39. Tanja Playner
  40. Jack Dowd
  41. Andy Goldsworthy
  42. Wayne Thiebaud
  43. Robert Rauschenberg
  44. Grayson Perry
  45. Jim Dine
  46. Garry Gross
  47. Cy Twombly
  48. Konstantin Razumov
  49. Thomas Ruff
  50. Henri Matisse
  51. Tracey Emin
  52. Anselm Kiefer
  53. Alex Katz
  54. Wolfgang Tillmans
  55. Frank Stella
  56. Milo Manara
  57. Brainwash
  58. Peter Doig
  59. Philip-Lorca diCorcia
  60. Candida Höfer
  61. Otto Dix
  62. Vik Muniz
  63. George Condo
  64. Jackson Pollock
  65. Chuck Close
  66. David LaChapelle
  67. Andreas Gursky
  68. Pierre Soulages
  69. Emil Nolde
  70. Gotlib
  71. Niki de Saint Phalle
  72. Egon Schiele
  73. Francis Bacon
  74. Gregory Crewdson
  75. Irina Ionesco
  76. William Klein
  77. Robert Arneson
  78. Raoul Dufy
  79. Georg Baselitz
  80. John Baldessari
  81. Maurice Utrillo
  82. Tom Wesselmann
  83. Cindy Sherman
  84. Jean Dubuffet
  85. Ed Ruscha
  86. Marina Abramovic
  87. Harland Miller
  88. Barbara Kruger
  89. Peter Max
  90. Yves Klein
  91. George Grosz
  92. Daniel Richter
  93. Duane Michals
  94. Saul Leiter
  95. Jenny Holzer
  96. Rufino Tamayo
  97. Christian Boltanski
  98. Fernand Léger
  99. Robert Longo
  100. Herb Ritts
  101. Maurice de Vlaminck
  102. Karel Appel
  103. Bettina Rheims
  104. Kehinde Wiley
  105. Helen Frankenthaler
  106. Bert Stern
  107. Henri Cartier-Bresson
  108. Larry Clark
  109. Pierre et Gilles
  110. Bernd and Hilla Becher
  111. Antoni Tàpies
  112. Will McBride
  113. Sigmar Polke
  114. Man Ray
  115. Thomas Struth
  116. Peter Paul Rubens
  117. Grandma Moses
  118. Sam Francis
  119. Josef Albers
  120. William Kentridge
  121. Paul Klee
  122. Georg Emanuel Opitz
  123. Ellsworth Kelly
  124. Annette Messager
  125. Wassily Kandinsky
  126. Julian Opie
  127. David Lynch
  128. Peter Blake
  129. Bridget Riley
  130. Max Ernst
  131. Sol LeWitt
  132. Imi Knoebel
  133. Joseph Beuys
  134. Robert Indiana
  135. Alberto Giacometti
  136. Käthe Kollwitz
  137. Walasse Ting
  138. Richard Prince
  139. Jenny Saville
  140. Christopher Wool
  141. Margaret Keane
  142. Franz Frank
  143. Kees van Dongen
  144. Mel Ramos
  145. Agnes Martin
  146. Robert Motherwell
  147. Raymond Pettibon
  148. Marcel Dyf
  149. Hiroshi Sugimoto
  150. Gerda Wegener
  151. Louise Bourgeois
  152. Arman
  153. Lucio Fontana
  154. Raphael Soyer
  155. Graham Sutherland
  156. Albert Marquet
  157. Martin Parr
  158. Richard Estes
  159. Edward Burtynsky
  160. Joan Mitchell
  161. C. Escher
  162. Günther Uecker
  163. Brassaï
  164. RETNA
  165. Moïse Kisling
  166. Anton Pieck
  167. Harry Benson
  168. Pierre-Auguste Renoir
  169. Kiki Smith
  170. Claude Monet
  171. Willem de Kooning
  172. Tony Cragg
  173. Gustav Klimt
  174. Jasper Johns
  175. Diego Rivera
  176. Nick Brandt
  177. Dennis Sheehan
  178. Swoon
  179. Ellen von Unwerth
  180. Jan Saudek
  181. Erwin Olaf
  182. Lucian Freud
  183. Aslan
  184. Jeremy Mann
  185. Ernesto Neto
  186. Francis Picabia
  187. Georges Braque
  188. Ronald Ventura
  189. Friedensreich Hundertwasser
  190. Kara Walker
  191. Sonia Delaunay
  192. Irving Penn
  193. Markus Lüpertz
  194. Wolf Kahn
  195. Edward Weston
  196. Adrian Ghenie
  197. Gio Ponti
  198. Hans Hartung
  199. William Eggleston
  200. Erwin Wurm
  201. Paul Jenkins
  202. Harding Meyer
  203. Richard Avedon
  204. Arnulf Rainer
  205. Serpieri
  206. Mark Ryden
  207. Robert Doisneau
  208. Julie Mehretu
  209. James Rosenquist
  210. Andres Serrano
  211. Michael Carson
  212. Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot
  213. Wifredo Lam
  214. Andrew Wyeth
  215. Jonathan Meese
  216. Maurizio Cattelan
  217. Per Kirkeby
  218. Pierre Bonnard
  219. Zdzislaw Beksinski
  220. Yaacov Agam
  221. Vivian Maier
  222. Bernar Venet
  223. Auguste Rodin
  224. Fritz Aigner
  225. Zao Wou-Ki
  226. Shirin Neshat
  227. Manolo Valdés
  228. Le Corbusier
  229. Georges Rouault
  230. Annie Leibovitz
  231. Stanley Donwood
  232. Yue Minjun
  233. Duane Hanson
  234. Miquel Barceló
  235. James Rizzi
  236. Marilyn Minter
  237. Sean Scully
  238. Lee Ufan
  239. Lyonel Feininger
  240. Günther Förg
  241. René Gruau
  242. Donald Judd
  243. Peter Lindbergh
  244. Janet Fish
  245. Vernon Ward
  246. Jörg Immendorff
  247. John Cage
  248. Norman Rockwell
  249. Mark Rothko
  250. Jean Prouvé
  251. Milton Avery
  252. Richard Serra
  253. Ernst Ludwig Kirchner
  254. Guglielmo von Plüschow
  255. Roberto Matta
  256. Jean Paul Riopelle
  257. Pierre Alechinsky
  258. Patrick Hughes
  259. Vanessa Beecroft
  260. Eduardo Chillida
  261. Edgar Degas
  262. Erich Heckel
  263. Edvard Munch
  264. Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec
  265. Niclas Castello
  266. Sue Coe
  267. Ansel Adams
  268. André Kertész
  269. Richard Diebenkorn
  270. Peter Beard
  271. George Platt Lynes
  272. Lucien Clergue
  273. Julian Schnabel
  274. Heinrich Zille
  275. Karl Schmidt-Rottluff
  276. Stephan Balkenhol
  277. Alphonse Mucha
  278. Elizabeth Catlett
  279. Piet Mondrian
  280. Massimo Vitali
  281. Rodney Smith
  282. Ismail Gulgee
  283. Kazuo Shiraga
  284. Claude Lalanne
  285. Mel Bochner
  286. Cecily Brown
  287. Romero Britto
  288. William Christenberry
  289. Marie Laurencin
  290. Carmen Herrera
  291. Henri Fantin-Latour
  292. Max Liebermann
  293. Alice Neel
  294. Qi Baishi
  295. Albrecht Dürer
  296. Georges Mathieu
  297. Henry Moore
  298. Thomas Hart Benton
  299. Montague Dawson
  300. Charlotte Perriand

 


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