The 20 Coolest Artist Couples

It is not uncommon for people working in the same field to fall in love. There are many artists who meet their soul mates at gallery openings or through mutual friends and decide to spend their lives together. Celebrities in their own right, their lives are already on display and getting involved with someone that shares their passion and lifestyle can be a blessing and a curse. That being said, not all couples are created equal so here is a list of the ones that we think made the right choice to be together. Read on for The 20 Coolest Artist Couples.

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Media: Architecture (Rem Koolhaas) and Oil Painting (Madelon Vrisendorp)

Location: London

Koolhaas is a Dutch architect and Professor in Practice of Architecture and Urban Design at the Harvard Graduate School of Design and was named one of TIME's "World's Most Influential People" in 2008. His wife, Madelon, is one of the co-founders of The Office for Metropolitan Architecture in Rotterdam, as well as an artist. Vrisendorp's favorite piece is the "Flagrant Delit" that appeared on the cover of her husband's book.

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Media: Drawing and Oil Painting (both)

Location: Germany

Kandinsky taught at the Phalanx school in Munich where Münter was a student in 1902. They became romantically involved and frequently traveled together, even though Kandinsky was still legally married. Their professional and romantic relationship lasted for 12 years, and during that time, they helped form the expressionist group, Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider), as well as the Neue Kunstlervereinigung (New Artist's Association).

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Media: Sculpture (Antony Gormley) and Oil Painting (Vicken Parsons)

Location: London

Parsons paints small landscapes and architecture, while her husband Gormley builds sculptures in London. The two showed together for the first time in March 2012. Parsons, preferring the more private life, said she would never do it again.

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Location: France

The Dada and Surrealist painters met in a gallery in New York, later fell in love over a game of chess, got married, and moved to France, where they had equally impressive artistic careers. Ernst is considered one of the pioneers of the Surrealist movement, and Tanning's work shifted in different directions during her long life and career.

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Medium: Oil Painting (both)

Location: New York and Long Island, NY

Pollock and Krasner had the kind of relationship that many artist couples have, in that, one seemed to gain more popularity than the other. Jackson Pollock benefitted from Krasner's formal training, while Krasner became more free, even though she was arguably more famous as an artist before the relationship.

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Media: Film and Photography (both)

Location: Paris

Successful model Lee Miller moved to Paris to apprentice for Man Ray and actually became his photographic assistant and muse. A lot of Man Ray's photographs during that time were taken by Miller to give him more time to work on his painting. Lee Miller was the one who discovered solarisation, a technique that would become Man Ray's trademark.

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Medium: Printmaking (both)

Location: New York

The two artists became lovers as well as collaborators in the mid to late '50s and created pieces that are said to have "lead the push away from Abstract Expressionism and toward Pop Art." Their relationship is often not mentioned, even though it had a great impact on their work.

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Medium: Architecture (both)

Location: Los Angeles

The Eames are recognized as two of the most influential architectural and furniture designers of the 20th century. A documentary about their lives was released in 2011, entitled Eames: The Architect and the Painter.

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Location: Los Angeles

"Romantic induced realism" is how Jeremy Weiss describes the work he and his wife do. Operating under the name "Day 19," the duo have worked together since 1997 and tied the knot in 2002. They are known most for their portraiture of musicians and other celebrities.

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Media: Film Photography and Mixed Media (both)

Location: London

Gilbert Proesch (right) and George Passmore (left) met in 1967 and said it was love at first sight. The often controversial and provocative artists create work that is huge in scope. In a Brooklyn Museum article, the author said that their work "considers the entire cosmology of human experience and explores such themes as faith and religion, sexuality, race and identity, urban life, terrorism, superstition, AIDS-related loss, aging, and death."

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Location: San Juan, Puerto Rico

Their collaboration dates back to 1995, and their work is described as "a set of experiments that test whether ideas such as authorship, nationality, borders, and democracy adequately describe today's increasingly global and consumerist society." Together they have had major exhibitions at the Dallas Museum of Art in 2006 and Kunsthalle Zurich in 2007.

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Media: Digital Art and Photography (both)

Location: New York

The couple met in their hometown, Amsterdam, while attending the Vogue Academy of Fashion Design. They have been at the forefront of fashion photography since their breakthrough in 1994 and have done countless shoots for elite fashion magazines and ad campaigns.

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Media: Digital Art and Design (both)

Location: New York

In 2012, after operating for nearly 20 years as Sagmeister Inc., Stefan announced that he was renaming the company Sagmeister & Walsh. The announcement came in the form of an ad that featured both parties standing nude in an office, an homage to the ad that Sagmeister used 19 years prior to announce the opening of the company. Naturally, it was met with some controversy. Prior to the partnership, 25-year-old Jessica Walsh worked at the company, and Sagmeister said that her contribution was "gigantic," so they decided that she needed to have a more senior role.

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Medium: Environmental Art (both)

Location: New York

The couple met in 1958 when Christo was commissioned to paint Jeanne-Claude's mother. Christo had lost his Bulgarian citizenship for fleeing his home country, and Jeanne-Claude became estranged from her parents after becoming pregnant with Christo's child before wedding another man. They began collaborating in 1961 and moved to New York in 1964, where Christo began showing in several galleries. The couple's work was the focus of at least four documentaries, and it was shown at Documenta 4 in Kassel. Their larger installations hung in cities all around the world.

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Medium: Oil Painting (both)

Location: Paris

Gilot met Picasso when she was 21-years-old and became his muse, but she also produced well-respected work of her own. They spent 10 years together and had two children but were never married.

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Medium: Oil Painting (both)

Location: New York

The de Koonings were Abstract Expressionist painters who were a part of a group that would later be known as the New York School. The couple married in 1943 and had a rocky relationship filled with affairs and rumors of heavy drinking, but they never finalized the divorce.

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Media: Oil Painting (Georgia O'Keeffe) and Film Photography (Alfred Stieglitz)

Location: New York

When they met in 1916, Stieglitz was famous and in his fifties, while O'Keeffe was an unknown Texas art teacher in her twenties. They married in 1924 and lived together in New York until O'Keeffe's growing fame took her to New Mexico. They had over 20,000 pieces of letter correspondence, which were collected for a book entitled "My Faraway One: Selected Letters of Georgia O'Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz.

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Medium: Performance Art (both)

Location: Netherlands

Abramovic and Ulay formed an artistic collective after they met in 1976, referring to themselves as "the other" and parts of a two-headed body. They performed many pieces together, including one where they breathed into each other's mouths until they passed out seventeen minutes later from the intake of carbon dioxide. In 1988, the couple decided to part ways, so they walked from either side of The Great Wall in China and met in the middle to say goodbye. In 2010, Abramovic was performing The Artist Is Present at MoMA, a show where she shared a minute of silence with each stranger that sat in front of her. Ulay arrived unannounced, sat across from Abramovic, and the couple cried and reached out to one another across the table.

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Media: Acrylics and Aerosol (both)

Location: Los Angeles

The Australian couple has been in a relationship, both artistic and romantic, for the past seven years and collaborate on every single piece of art that they create. In their canvas work, Myles paints the buildings, and Dabs handles the characters, but they say that the work is all theirs, not just the portion that each has created.

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Medium: Oil Painting (both)

Location: Mexico

Kahlo and Rivera's relationship is well-known because of the work they produced and for its volatility. The couple married in 1929, divorced because of infidelity and violence in 1939, and remarried a year later. Though he was championed as the greatest living artist in Mexico, Rivera believed that his wife held the title.

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