The phrase "artistic ancestors" is correct and usable in written English.
It can be used when referring to previous artists or creators who have influenced or inspired one's own artistic work.
Example: "As I explore my own style, I often find myself reflecting on the techniques and philosophies of my artistic ancestors."
Alternatives: "creative forebears" or "artistic predecessors".
At one point Mr. Dunne provides shoe music to match a montage of artistic ancestors.
Like recent movies like "Hugo" and "The Artist," "Peter" is in love with the simpler, and perhaps fuller, magic once wrought by its artistic ancestors.
With their exquisitely executed images of fauna, flora and people, his creations look a lot like those by his artistic ancestors, but they often include modern updates.
Mr. Naef, too, noted the same of Evans, that he may not have been fully aware of his own artistic ancestors.
In an essay for New York magazine on the renovated Whitney, Jerry Saltz pines for "the museum's Platonic ideal: a communal effort, conducted over centuries, to preserve, interpret, and commune with artistic ancestors, archetypes, traditions, genres, and methods".
He has pursued that aesthetic through a series of works that pay further fealty to his chosen set of living artistic ancestors, living or dead, whether Dashiell Hammett or Peter Falk, Yasujiro Ozu or Michelangelo Antonioni, Pina Bausch or Sebastião Salgado or the entire iconic small-town American landscape.
Neil Young, the closest this rock band has to an artistic ancestor, should be proud.
Philip Glass, who has claimed Thomson as an artistic ancestor (and created some provocative operas himself), is in the midst of his seventy-fifth-birthday season, and New York is helping him celebrate.
"It carries a big responsibility, especially because the public is curious and it demands a lot: what does this 'new' Picasso have to offer?" The answer, he says, has nothing in common with his artistic ancestor apart from their shared name.
There are more substantial works by Marcel Duchamp, and here at least you can see an artistic ancestor of Bowie's own art of self-invention, for Duchamp was perhaps the first modern artist to play with identity when he adopted the female persona Rrose Selavy – pronouced "eros, c'est la vie".
"The Big Wheel" is a post-industrial recollection of Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968), the Dada artist whose absurdist 1913 sculpture of a bicycle wheel affixed to a kitchen stool presaged his standing in the 1970s as the decade's most influential artistic ancestor.
