9 famous couples with a creative bond – DW – 03/18/2023 (2024)

Love can power creativity. Here is a selection of world-renowned artist couples who have mutually inspired each other.

Musician and Beatles member John Lennon (l) and artist Yoko Ono worked on several collaborative works together, including their famed 1969 "bed-ins for peace" in Amsterdam and Montreal, protesting the Vietnam War. Their aim was to encourage peaceful solutions to conflict. The idea was inspired by the "sit-ins" of the 1960s that looked to bring about political change, as well as social justice.

Even after John Lennon was murdered in 1980, Yoko Ono continued to create art. A pioneer within the 1960s Fluxus movement, she has made films and delved into experimental music. This image shows a piece from her "The Learning Garden of Freedom" exhibition in Porto, Portugal in 2020, in which the artist, who turned 90 in February 2023, pursues her exploration of political themes.

Artists Jeanne-Claude (l) and Christo, born in Morocco and Bulgaria respectively, met and married in Paris in the 1950s. They collaborated for decades on huge installations at remarkable locations, including Paris' Pont Neuf and L'Arc de Triomphe (the latter artwork installed posthumously); London's Hyde Park; and New York City's Central Park; as well as at sites in Italy, Japan and California.

Christo and Jeanne-Claude's installations often included massive pieces of fabric, such as with the renowned work "Wrapped Reichstag" in Berlin. The duo completed their wrapping of the German Parliament building on June 24, 1995. In the following two weeks, some five million visitors flooded the site. It became a festive scene as people from around the world celebrated the artistic wonder.

The Indian artist couple, whose work encompasses sculpture, installation and more, has a huge following. Kher, born in the UK in 1969, has lived in New Delhi since the 90s and is one of India's top-selling artists, with a noted elephant sculpture fetching $1.5 million (€1.4 million) in 2010. Kher was among Vogue's Cultural Icon of the Year winners in 2021. Subodh Gupta is likewise successful.

Bharti Kehr has exhibited her work around the world, including her piece shown here titled "Six Women" in the 2018 "Facing India" exhibition in Wolfsburg, Germany. More recently, in September 2022, her huge patinated bronze sculpture "Ancestor" graced the entrance to New York City's Central Park.

Siri Hustvedt (l) and Paul Auster are both international best-selling authors whose works have been translated into many languages. Auster has written novels such as "The New York Trilogy" and "Moon Palace." Hustvedt, who holds a PhD in English, is a poetic novelist, essayist and feminist chronicler. Married for over 40 years, they say in interviews that they still read aloud to each other.

Auster's novels have been very popular among German readers. The author has also tried his hand as a filmmaker, adapting and directing different books for the screen, including "Smoke" (1995), "Blue in the Face" (1995) and "Lulu on the Bridge" (1998, film still above), which stars Harvey Keitel, Willem Dafoe and Mira Sorvino.

Portia de Rossi (l) made it big with the hit US series "Ally McBeal" in the 90s, and later, in "Arrested Development." An arts lover, she founded the General Public company to promote reproduction of artworks to bring them closer to people outside of art galleries. She is married to US talk show extraordinaire and comedian Ellen Degeneres.

Ellen DeGeneres is best known as a talk-show host, but she started out as a comedian; she came back to her roots in her 2018 Netflix special "Relatable." She is also executive producer of "Green Eggs and Ham," a spin-off of the popular Dr. Seuss kids' book, starring the voices of Diane Keaton and Michael Douglas. Here, DeGeneres (center) celebrates the 2019 premiere of the Netflix animated series.

South Africa's jazz power couple of the 60s had only a short marriage. Trumpeter Masekela and singer Makeba collaborated on "Soweto Blues," about the Soweto uprising of 1976, following South Africa's then apartheid government's decision to make the originally colonialist Afrikaans a standard instruction language in schools. Police squashed the uprising, leading to the death of hundreds of people.

South African singer and activist Miriam Makeba, born in 1932 near Johannesburg, would go on to become known as "Mama Africa." Her rendition of "Pata Pata" would become an international hit in 1967, catapulting her to fame, and was just one of her works that would impact the Western world with the music of Africa. Her 1980s' collaborations with Paul Simon (see link) would also become legendary.

US photographer with Jewish roots Alfred Stieglitz (l), of New Jersey, and US painter of the Midwest Georgia O'Keeffe were a perhaps unlikely couple. He was almost twice her age. Stieglitz founded the photography magazine "Camera Works," and also in 1905 the famous gallery 291 in midtown Manhattan, which exhibited European and American avant-garde artists. O'Keeffe was an up-and-coming painter.

Georgia O'Keefe would go on to forge a legacy of her own. She is renowned the world over for her detailed, suggestive flower paintings. One notable O'Keefe quote: "Still, in a way, nobody sees a flower — really — it is so small; we haven't time, and to see takes time, like to have a friend takes time."

Mexican artist Diego Rivera (l), born in 1886, and Frida Kahlo, nearly 20 years his junior, had one of the most renowned, and tumultuous, relationships in art history. They met through their involvement with the Mexican Communist party and married in 1929, then divorced and remarried. Despite their ups and downs, the way they painted each other shows that they mutually inspired each other.

Kahlo blended surrealistic and folk-art styles in her works. An accident at the age of 18 confined her to bed for months during recovery. Employing an easel with a mirror, she painted countless self-portraits chronicling her physical pain and her feelings of isolation. Later, she also dealt with her emotional suffering during her relationship with Rivera in her work, such as here, in "Diego y yo."

Considered a pioneer of abstraction in Western art, Wassily Kandinsky (l) was born in Moscow in 1866. First studying law, he began to paint at the age of 30. Settling in Munich in 1896, he enrolled in the Academy of Fine Arts. He and German painter Gabriele Münter (l) joined forces to become some of the most famous painters of Expressionism. Münter became a co-founder of the group "Blaue Reiter."

Kandinsky would travel extensively across Europe from 1906 to 1908. Straddling Russia and Europe, his large, expansive works would morph from European landscapes into abstractionist conceptualism. He would ultimately teach at the transformative Bauhaus School of Design, beginning in 1922. This image shows "Kohlgruberstrasse" (1908), in Murnau, where Gabriele Münter and Wassily Kandinsky lived.