bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Marais, Eugène (1871–1936)
Authors: Terblanche Etienne
Published: September 2018

Eugène Marais played an astounding number of roles: he was poet, fictionalist, essayist, naturalist, radical experimenter, hypnotist, medical doctor, psychologist, equestrian, prospector, businessman, journalist, advocate, war agent, political arbiter, farmer, literary mentor, spellbinding teller of children’s stories, and more—all rolled into one dazzling, humorous, magnetic, dark, and anachronistic personality. He lived, learned, and worked in an equally astounding array of places, including Pretoria (where he was born), Boshoff, the Paarl, Johannesburg, London (where a chimpanzee stayed with him in his room), the Waterberg, Mozambique, Erasmus, Durban, and Heidelberg (South Africa).
McKay, Festus Claudius ‘Claude’ (1889–1948)
Authors: Frölich Sören
Published: September 2018

Claude McKay was a Jamaican poet, novelist, essayist, activist, and editor. He is best known for his involvement in the New Negro movement of the early twentieth century (also known as the Harlem Renaissance). He helped introduce radical politics and a sophisticated use of Primitivism into African-American literature and wrote important political poems like ‘If We Must Die’. Today McKay is best known for his 1928 novel Home to Harlem. A lifelong traveller, he provided crucial connections between US racism and international struggles. He also was an avid Marxist and associated with the Communist Party until late in life, when he converted to Catholicism. He angered and alienated writers, critics, and even friends with his aversion to the black elites and genteel literary critics. Long valued as an exponent of Primitivism in the Harlem Renaissance, in recent scholarship he has been recognized for his radical poetry, his writings in Jamaican Patois, his international efforts, and his theoretical considerations of race and gender to political struggles of black working people across and beyond the United States.
Modernism in Bengali literature
Authors: Bandyopadhyay Sibaji
Published: September 2018

Just as ‘modernity’, ‘modernism’ too has variegated histories. Years back—to be precise in 1961—Carl E. Schorske had zeroed in on Vienna to chart out a general chronicle for the European trend of modernism (1981). He claimed, if modernism were to be understood as an intellectual movement with its sights set on cherished nineteenth-century binaries, such as, rationalism and romanticism, individualism and socialism, realism and naturalism, then various twentieth century ‘Viennese Schools’ supplied ample ammunition to batter them all. Schorske’s belief was that the gesture of ‘shaking off the shackles of history’ which most broadly characterized European modernism could be most effectively foregrounded if one hazarded to give a symptomatic reading to the ‘new culture-makers in the city of Freud’.

Needless to say, such an approach for Bengal would prove to be disastrous. Nonetheless, it is worth recording that whatever one may ascribe to the expression ‘Bengali modernism’, it mostly sprang from and flourished in Kolkata, the city of Rabindranath.
Modernism in Hindi Literature
Authors: Trivedi Harish
Published: September 2018

The advent of modernism is Hindi literature is commonly dated to the publication in 1943 of an anthology of seven young poets, Tar Saptak (Septet). Besides a selection of his poems, each poet here contributed a prefatory statement of his poetic creed which, together with the introduction by the editor-contributor, Satchidanand Hiranand Vatsyayan ‘Agyeya’, effectively added up to a manifesto. A second Tar Saptak (1951) and then a third (1959), comprising seven newer poets each, consolidated virtually the whole canon of modernist poetry in Hindi, while a belated fourth anthology of seven more poets (1978) signalled no less clearly the exhaustion and decline of the Hindi modernist movement.

At about the same time as the first of these anthologies ‘Agyeya’ published a novel of his own, Shekhar: Ek Jivani (in two parts, 1941, 1944). This autobiographical bildungsroman describes, with astonishing psychological intensity, successive acts of mounting rebellion by the hero: against parental authority, against religious belief and practice, against social conventions, and then against British rule, as a member of a bomb-throwing revolutionary group. The novel opens with him in a prison cell, fully expecting to be hanged. It was instantly acclaimed as the first work of modernist fiction in Hindi and indeed as one of the greatest Hindi novels ever written.
Modernism in Kannada Literature
Authors: Tharakeshwar V. B.
Published: September 2018

Modernism, known in Kannada as ‘Navya’, emerged as a literary movement in the 1950s. This period saw writers deliberately moving away from the Romanticism of the Navodaya period, which is considered an age of literary renaissance shaped by complex interaction with colonialism and the West. In contrast to Navodaya, which reflected nationalist sentiments, the Navya period emerged in the context of the formation of the Indian nation-state. The newly formed Indian nation-state aroused considerable expectations, and their betrayal led to anti-Congress (the ruling party), anti-Jawaharlal Nehru (the first Prime Minister of India) sentiments among the intellectuals and the literati. It was a post-Gandhi era of disappointment and disillusionment in literature. Navya was also partly in response to the leftist progressive movement, called Pragatisheela in Kannada, which arose in 1940s and continued in the 1950s. Pragatisheela literature, prominent in short stories and novels, focused on social issues such as poverty, the importance of context in shaping one’s personality, and the plight of the common man, and it employed realistic narration. Modernist poetry was shaped by its opposition to Navodaya writing, while modernist short stories and novels emerged as a reaction to Pragatisheela literature.
Modernism in Malayalam Literature
Authors: Satchidanandan K.
Published: September 2018

Although it is difficult to trace the beginnings of modernism in Malayalam literature to a single author or text, there is general agreement about its high points: the publication of ‘Kuruksetram’ (Kuruksetra, the scene of the battle of Mahabharata: composed 1951–7; published 1960) by K. Ayyappa Paniker (1930–2006) in poetry and Khasakkinte Itihasam (The Legends of Khasak, 1969) by O.V. Vijayan (1930–2005) in fiction. Some earlier works of these authors, for instance Paniker’s ‘Oru Surrealistinte Premaganam’ (The Love Song of a Surrealist, 1952) and Vijayan’s ‘Moonnu Yudhdhangal’ (Three Wars, 1957) have been seen retrospectively as displaying features of modernism. Early signs of literary modernism may also be found in the fiction of Vaikom Mohammed Basheer, especially Shabdangal (Voices, 1947) with its non-linear narration and bleak attitude to life, and Chagmpuzha Krishna Pillai’s posthumously published Baudelairean poem Padunna Pishachu (The Devil that Sings, 1949), with its surreal images and obsessive preoccupation with evil. Poets such as N.V. Krishna Variyar, M. Govindan, and G. Kumarapillai and the playwright C.J. Thomas are regarded as transitional figures whose work presages modernism. However, it was Paniker’s ‘Kurukshetram’ that marked a decisive departure in poetry by freely mixing meters, breaking linear structure, and expressing in fresh, sometimes surreal, images the dilemma of contemporary life.
Muktibodh, Gajanan Madhav (1917–1964)
Authors: Goulding Greg
Published: September 2018

Gajanan Madhav Muktibodh was a prominent poet for both modernism and left-oriented progressive Hindi literature. His development of the imaginary, his generic innovation of the ‘lambi kavita’ (long poem), and his engagement with the confluence of aesthetics, politics, and ethics formed a new model for modernist Hindi poetry. He became a leading figure in Nai Kavita (new poetry) after his inclusion in the seminal 1943 poetry anthology Tar Saptak (The Higher Octave), and published individual poems, fiction, and criticism throughout his life, but it was his first volume of poems, Chand ka Munh Teḍha Hai (The Moon Wears a Crooked Smile), published at his death, which had the greatest impact on his posthumous reputation.
Murry, John Middleton (1889–1957)
Authors: Ross Shawna
Published: September 2018

John Middleton Murry, born in Peckham, London on 6 August 1889, was a prolific English writer best known today as the husband and literary executor of Katherine Mansfield. The son of an internal revenue clerk, determined to overcome his lower-middle-class surroundings, Murry won a scholarship to Christ’s Hospital, Sussex, and another to Brasenose College, Oxford, where he graduated with a first in Classics. He founded the journal Rhythm, beginning the editorial and critical labours that defined his reputation during his life. Murry edited a succession of literary magazines—most influentially, the Athanaeum. He steadily produced volumes of literary criticism, politics, religion, and other non-fiction until his death, drawing attention (and often ire) for his radical politics and his critical disagreements with T.S. Eliot.
Navodaya (New Birth) Period
Authors: Boratti Vijayakumar M.
Published: September 2018

Navodaya (New Birth) period, generally dated from 1900 to 1940s, refers to the beginning of modern Kannada literature, owing largely to the influence of Western education, literature, and modernity. Many Kannada scholars called it a period of renaissance in Kannada literature. These decades saw several writers taking on the responsibility of nurturing modern Kannada literature through translations from European languages. Poetry, the short story, the novel, drama, folklore, and criticism found new scope, shape, and meaning at this time, with poetry dominating the literary scene. Most of the writers active in the Navodaya were middle-class, English-educated scholars.
Ramaswamy, Sundara (1931–2005)
Authors: Venkatachalapathy A.R.
Published: September 2018

Sundara Ramaswamy spent his early boyhood in Kottayam, Kerala. After his family’s return to Nagercoil in 1939 he lived there until his death. Nagercoil is at the cultural intersection of Tamilnadu and Kerala. This bilingual milieu is central to his writing, and he is one of the few Indian writers who are widely regarded in two linguistic cultures as their own.

Sundara Ramaswamy grew up ‘half-knowing’ Malayalam, Sanskrit, and English. An attack of juvenile arthritis saw him barely reach school final. He did not learn Tamil until he was 18. Sundara Ramaswamy was introduced to most Malayalam writers ‘at the first signs of the dawn of modernism in Malayalam literature’.
Russian Modernism (1890–1934)
Authors: Douglas Clayton J.
Published: September 2018

Russian modernism arose as a rejection of positivism and the realism of the major nineteenth-century Russian novelists such as Lev Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and Ivan Turgenev. In its first phase it was marked by a rekindled interest in poetry, mysticism, and symbolism. There was also a tendency to seek a fusion of different forms of artistic expression: poetry, music, painting, and theatre. Playwrights reflected the move away from naturalism towards the theatricality of commedia dell’arte and metadrama (the play within the play). In prose there emerged a new decorative style and new themes such as sexuality. The Russian Revolution of 1917 signalled an important shift towards the avant-garde. Poets adopted radical new poetic forms, glorified the new machine age or hearkened back to the pre-historical roots myth, and experimented with invented, abstract language. Prose writers shifted towards a stark new factual style that incorporated documents and slogans. Their themes were the revolutionary changes in Russia and their own inadequacy in the face of the new Soviet man. The avant-garde received its death-blow with the promulgation of Socialist Realism as the mandatory style for all publishing authors at the All-Union Writers’ Conference in 1934.
Sri Sri (1910–1983)
Authors: Rao Tirupati
Published: September 2018

Srirangam Srinivasa Rao (1910–83), popularly known as Sri Sri, was a widely acclaimed Telugu poet and public personality who championed the cause of oppressed people for more than five decades. Sri Sri is known as Mahakavi (great poet) in Telugu poetry. Born in Visakhapatanam, Sri Sri graduated in zoology from Madras Christian College in 1931. He was the editor of Vishakha weekly (1932) and news editor of Andhra Prabha daily (1939–42). He worked in All India Radio, New Delhi (1942), as a laboratory assistant in a military establishment in Lucknow (1943), as an employee in Nizam Nawab Reform Secretriate (1946), and as an employee in Anandha Vani (1946–9). He settled in Royapettah, Madras in 1947.
Tsvetaeva, Marina (ЦВЕТАЕВА, Марина) (1892–1941)
Authors: Forrester Sibelan
Published: September 2018

One of the best-known and influential Russian modernist poets, Marina Tsvetaeva (1892–1941) wrote lyric and narrative poetry, plays, autobiographical and memoir prose, and essays in literary history and criticism. Her biography is so full of incident that it can tend to crowd out her poetry in studies of her life. Born in Moscow, she began her poetic career among the Moscow Symbolists but never joined a poetic school. She wrote all through the revolution and made a splash when she was able to publish again in the early 1920s. After emigrating in 1922 she wrote and published a great deal of poetry, but later she switched largely to prose, at least in part because it was easier to publish. Her culminating book of poetry is After Russia (Paris, 1928). Tsvetaeva returned to the USSR for family reasons in June of 1939. There she worked as a translator; she committed suicide in August 1941. Since her work began appearing more widely in the 1960s, Tsvetaeva has been recognized as a ground-breaking poet, impacting writers and poets all over the world, and she is of particular interest to feminist critics and scholars.
Art Deco
Authors: Jordan Sharon
Published: September 2018

Art Deco was the predominant decorative style in Europe and the United States between the World Wars, before spreading internationally and reaching its climax in the mid-1920s. It is known primarily for its opulence in materials and sense of elegant glamour, luxury, and prosperity in its design. Art Deco’s alternating geometric vocabulary and reliance on stylized natural forms, including flowers, animals, and female figures in the decorations, were applied to objects in every area of the decorative arts, including furniture, jewellery, graphics, bookbinding, glassware, and ceramics.

In the United States, its ascendant stepped forms were ideally suited for the early developments in urban skyscraper architecture. Like the Art Nouveau, which it replaced in popularity, Art Deco was an all-encompassing style in which all aspects of an interior and exterior were coordinated in design. The streamlined curve of Art Deco was embraced by industrial designers in consumer products including the automobile and household products now being made from Bakelite and other new plastics.
Artists’ Front of Thailand, The
Authors: Chapakdee Thanom
Published: September 2018

The Artists’ Front of Thailand (AFT) formed in 1974, immediately following the violent political events of October 1973. The group came together for the purpose of mapping contemporary art and its manifestations, and to shed light on the cultural value of the term ‘Art for Life, Art for People’ (Silapa phua Chiwit, Silapa phua Prachachon). In the 1970s, many cultural and artists groups rose up to take part in the democratic sphere, and this quickly evolved into a form of Socialist Realism which was integrated with Marxist and Maoist ideology. At that time, the Communist Party of Thailand (CPT) movement was expanding in both urban and rural areas in Thailand. Faced with new freedoms and sharing a hunger for change, the Artists’ Front of Thailand successfully created art to fit this purpose, dealing with subjects such as poverty, nationalism, racism, anti-capitalism, and imperialism, while exhibiting a cynical attitude towards modernity. This was balanced by the figurative nature of their works, a style long ignored during the heyday of abstract art. While the Artists’ Front of Thailand movement lasted only two years, it left a significant legacy of ‘Art for Life’ and its aesthetics.
Hamdi Bey, Osman (1842–1910)
Authors: Shaw Wendy
Published: September 2018

Osman Hamdi was the founding director of the Imperial Academy of Fine Arts (later renamed the Istanbul Academy of Fine Arts, today part of the Mimar Sinan University). He was also the most powerful director of the Imperial Museum (today the Istanbul Archaeology Museum), an important arts legislator, the first Ottoman archaeologist, and one of the most skilful and prolific painters of the Ottoman era. Osman Hamdi’s legacy persists in his numerous small-scale portraits of his cosmopolitan family and large-scale allegorical paintings that reflect on the relationship between Ottoman identity and European Orientalist style. Often staging himself and his family members in anachronistic dress and in unlikely settings drawn from examples of early Ottoman architecture, his works offer an image of the Ottoman past replete with dignity and agency that contradicts Orientalist tropes such as laziness, violence, or lasciviousness. The complex juxtaposition of figures and objects often suggests a sharp sense of irony concerning the relationship between modernity and the past as staged through historicism offered both through the museum and through the Orientalist painting tradition. His most famous paintings include The Man with the Tortoises (1906; also known as The Tortoise Trainer) and The Sharp Side of the Sword (1908; also known as The Weapons Merchant).
Lim, Hak Tai (1893–1963)
Authors: Low Yvonne
Published: September 2018

Lim Hak Tai, a Chinese émigré artist based in Singapore, was the founding principal and dean of the Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts (NAFA). Established officially in 1938, with support from Jimei School Overseas Fellowship Association and the Society of Chinese Artists, NAFA was the first local academy offering tertiary art education in South-east Asia and was instrumental, under Lim’s leadership, in nurturing Malayan (present-day Singapore and Malaysia) modern art practitioners. Modelled primarily on the curriculum of Xiamen Academy of Fine Arts, NAFA offered training in both Western art and Chinese painting.
Murakami, Saburo (村上三郎) (1925–1966)
Authors: Robinson Joel
Published: September 2018

Saburo Murakami was a member of Group Zero in Japan. This collective was founded by Akira Kanayama, Kazuo Shiraga, and Atsuko Tanaka in 1952, but was merged with Gutai in 1955. Murakami took up training under Tsuguro Itoh in 1949, but was also an avid student of philosophy and aesthetics. His paintings—large-scale tactile colour-field pictures with paint, plaster, and resin peeling, splashed, scraped, or dripped, like Sakuhin (1959)—attest to the sway of a theatrical abstraction or Art Informel in post-war Japan. However, Murakami is better known for his ‘paper-breakthrough’ happenings, like At One Moment Opening Six Holes (1955), which saw the artist noisily strike, burst, or hurl himself through large tautly stretched paper screens, sometimes arranged serially.
Taller de Gráfica Popular
Authors: Caplow Deborah
Published: September 2018

The TGP was founded in Mexico City in 1937 and although it is still in existence at present, it maintained its original form until the end of the 1950s, which will be the period focused on here. The TGP was primarily a workshop for graphic art, and produced thousands of handmade prints and posters. Images by artists of the TGP are distinguished by their sympathetic depictions of Mexican workers, their portrayals of Mexican life and history, and their focus on the effects of fascism and Nazism both in Mexico and in Europe. The TGP played a dynamic role in the development of a Mexican political art movement and a modern Mexican cultural identity.
Rees, Lloyd (1895–1988)
Authors: Gray Anne
Published: September 2018

Lloyd Rees is known for his landscapes celebrating the area around Sydney and the south coast and for his masterly drawings. He was born in Brisbane on 17 March 1895 and studied art at Brisbane’s Central Technical College. He moved to Sydney in 1917 and then worked as a commercial artist for Smith & Julius Studios. For 40 years, between 1946 and 1986, Rees taught Art at Sydney University’s Faculty of Architecture, which gave him the freedom to paint without being concerned about sales. He made many trips to Europe, and was particularly inspired by the French and Italian countryside.
Symbolism Overview
Authors: de Rosnay Emile Fromet , Ioffe Dennis , Rowe Samantha
Published: September 2018

Symbolism is a late-nineteenth-century literary movement centred mostly around the work of poets such as Stéphane Mallarmé, Arthur Rimbaud, Paul Verlaine, Philippe Villiers de L’Isle-Adam, and the later Maurice Maeterlinck, as well as novelists like Joris-Karl Huysmans and Edouard Dujardin. Although Tristan Corbière died in 1875, he is an important figure associated with the movement thanks to his image as a poète maudit (‘poet of the damned’) and to this poetic style. A broad term that occasionally extends to early twentieth-century modernists like T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, and Ezra Pound, Symbolism is traditionally dated from circa 1870 to 1900. (The term ‘Symbolist’ was coined by Jean Moréas in the review La Vogue in 1886.) The movement became more international in the 1890s with the emergence of European Symbolism such as Russian Symbolism, German Symbolism etc., and with poets such as Emile Nelligan in Canada. Of equal importance is its influence as an artistic movement. Symbolism reacted to broader cultural tendencies related to scientific and literary Positivism such as Realism and Naturalism, and the language of the popular press, particularly as it appeared in the form of best-sellers. Where popular language informs the public with moral narratives, Symbolist language tries to avoid such a reduction.
Acmeism
Authors: Goloubeva Irina , McGarry Matthew
Published: September 2018

Acmeism [АКМЕИЗМ] was a major literary movement of the Russian Silver Age. Although difficult to date precisely, scholars generally agree that Acmeism unofficially began with the closing of the major Symbolist publication Vesy [The Scales], coinciding with the appearance of the journal Apollon in 1909, and ended with the execution of its nominal founder, the poet Nikolay Gumilyev (1886–1921), shortly after the Russian Civil War. Conceptualized as a new school of poetry by two disaffected poets from the Tsekh Poetov [Poets’ Guild], Gumilyev and Sergey Gorodetsky, Acmeism became one of the major currents in the post-Symbolist Russian literary avant-garde, competing with the more vociferous Futurism for advancing contemporary Russian poetry into the future. Despite the movement’s brief history and its seemingly conformist alignment with Symbolism, major Acmeist poets such as Anna Akhmatova (1889–1938) and Osip Mandelstam (1891–1938) placed Acmeism firmly on the map of both Russian and European modernism, on a par with Aleksandr Blok’s Symbolism and Vladimir Mayakovsky’s Futurism.
Celtic Twilight, The (1893; revised 1902)
Authors: Beauchesne Nicholas
Published: September 2018

The Celtic Twilight is a collection of folk tales gathered by William Butler Yeats during his interviews with members of the rural working class in western Ireland. These tales feature larger-than-life Irish personalities, Celtic mythological figures, eerie landscapes, strange beasts, theurgic cults, haunted houses, ghosts, and faeries (or the Sidhe). The Celtic Twilight has since become an important document of Irish national culture. Tim Wenzell has observed that ‘from an existence almost entirely devoid of the material [of a written history], it becomes necessary for the poor people of Ireland to defer to their imaginations’ to fashion one. As surely as the rural people of Ireland continued to imagine and invent a cultural history, so too did Yeats. The Celtic Twilight can be seen as a Yeatsian ‘antithetical’ cultural history, an invented history relying as much upon creative vision as it does upon established facts or academic rigour. As Kathleen Raine explains in her introduction to the 1981 Smythe release of The Celtic Twilight, ‘the imagination of the people transmutes fact into legend; and that legend, recorded in The Celtic Twilight just as Yeats heard it, he raised to a greater grandeur in The Tower’. Indeed, the invention of legend and myth, whether Celtic or personal, fascinated Yeats right up to the end of his life.
Jeffers, (John) Robinson (1887–1962)
Authors: Bubel Katharine
Published: September 2018

Renowned as the ‘poet of Carmel-Sur’, Robinson Jeffers held a place of prominence in American literature from the mid-1920s through to the 1930s. He lived in seclusion with his family at Tor House, which he built from sea-worn granite on a promontory in Carmel, California. In Carmel he developed his signature style of graphically tragic narrative poems and verse dramas, typically set in the surrounding landscape and accompanied by meditative lyric poems exploring related themes. Jeffers eschewed high modernism’s post-symbolist aesthetics for what he saw as its withdrawal from reality, crafting instead a free verse style that employed long, rhythmically stressed lines and a solemn tone. His prosody and themes are coloured by his non-anthropocentric philosophy, which he named inhumanism. Jeffers’ critical acclaim turned to disfavour during the Depression and the Second World War; his popularity fluctuated, and finally dwindled. Critical interest in Jeffers’ works was renewed in the 1970s and 1980s, and readership has since increased, particularly due to the timeliness of his acute environmental aesthetics.
Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso (1876–1944)
Authors: Versari Maria Elena
Published: September 2018

Filippo Tommaso Marinetti was founder and leader of Futurism, the first intellectual and artistic movement that explicitly defined the codes of avant-garde practice in the twentieth century. His work extended across a multiplicity of fields: journalism, poetry, literature, theater, visual arts, politics, but it’s probably his all-encompassing activity as a cultural leader and fosterer of innovation that made him one of the preeminent intellectuals of his time. He implemented and systematized the practice of diffusing avant-garde ideas through manifestos, performances, and happenings, capitalizing on a deliberately magnified antagonistic relation with the tastes of the public at large. His experimentations in visual/verbal relations and stage performances, which led to the creation of free-word poetry and synthetic theater, were pivotal for the development of new modernist codes in poetry and the performing arts.
Pasternak, Boris (1890–1960)
Authors: Swift Megan
Published: September 2018

Major Russian poet and writer, Pasternak, was recognized as a leading, original poetic talent with the collection My Sister Life (written 1917, published 1922). My Sister Life is a celebration of the fecundity of nature, of love, artistic creation, and the thrilling experience of revolutionary change. Beginning in the late 1920s, Pasternak felt increasingly isolated and out of step with Soviet literary culture. After 1934 he focussed his talents on literary translation, producing some of the finest translations of Shakespeare into Russian. In 1956 Pasternak completed Doctor Zhivago, his long-dreamed-of novel about an individual hero caught up in revolutionary Russia. Pasternak was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1958. An international scandal flared after he at first accepted the distinction and then was pressured by Soviet authorities to refuse it with the words "Considering the meaning this award has been given in the society to which I belong, I must reject this undeserved prize which has been presented to me." Doctor Zhivago was adapted as a major motion picture by director David Lean in 1965, and again by Giacomo Campiotti in 2002.
Readymades
Authors: Child Danielle
Published: September 2018

In 1916, the French artist Marcel Duchamp coined the term "readymade" to describe a body of his own work in which everyday and often mass-produced objects were given the status of a work of art with little or no intervention by the artist beyond signing and displaying them. He began to produce these works in Paris, beginning with Bottle Rack (1914) and Bicycle Wheel (1913). (Duchamp, however, did not explicitly acknowledge these works until his move to New York in 1915.) These two works present examples of the two distinct types of readymades: readymade unaided and readymade aided. The most well-known readymade is Duchamp’s Fountain (1917), which was famously refused entry into an exhibition with no entry conditions. Much later, Fountain became symbolic of the emergent shift from modernism to postmodernism in the 1960s, with the group of artists who gathered around the composer John Cage, including Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, sometimes referred to as the neo-avant-garde. It was during this period that Duchamp’s account of the function of the readymade was consolidated into the now common understanding, which is that "readymade" constitutes an object chosen by an artist and declared to be art.
Jolas, Eugene (1894–1952)
Authors: Hanna Julian
Published: September 2018

Eugene Jolas was a journalist, editor, translator, and poet who embodied the transatlantic character of modernism between the World Wars. The task of transition, the Paris-based literary journal he edited with his wife Maria Jolas and others between 1927 and 1938, was to translate European culture for Americans, and vice versa. transition’s list of contributors reads like a Who’s Who of the international avant-garde. Jolas’ wealth of contacts in the literary world arose from his previous job writing the column ‘Rambles Through Literary Paris’ for the Chicago Tribune Paris edition. The romantic, imagination-driven strain of modernism that Jolas promoted led to a close relationship with Expressionism and Surrealism. Publishing non-anglophone experimental writing in translation or (after 1933) in the original language was a major focus of transition. Jolas also provided English translations of key European modernist texts outside the magazine, including Alfred Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz (1931).
Spectralism
Authors: Drott Eric
Published: September 2018

Spectralism is a tendency in contemporary art music that takes the material attributes of sound as the point of departure for composition. Originating in France and Romania in the 1970s, partly in reaction to the perceived hegemony of serialism and other high modernist styles, since the 1980s the influence of spectral ideas and techniques has spread across Europe, Asia, and North and South America. Its most prominent representatives are Gérard Grisey (1946–98), Tristan Murail (1947--), and Horatiu Radulescu (1942–2008).

In France, spectralism grew out of the work conducted by the circle of composers associated with the new music ensemble l’Itinéraire, founded in 1973 by Murail and Roger Tessier. Although the "spectral" moniker was not applied to the music of Grisey, Murail, or other members of this group until 1979, when composer Hugues Dufourt coined the term for a radio program outlining their compositional philosophy, many of the basic precepts of the spectral aesthetic had already taken shape by the mid-1970s. Foremost among these was the call to return to sound. Exploring the psychoacoustic properties of sound, it was argued, would provide a more secure foundation for musical communication, pointing a way beyond the abstractions of serial technique. This renewed attention to the materiality of sound led to a heightened appreciation for the interdependence of its constituent parameters (frequency, duration, intensity, timbre), which stood in contrast to their dissociation in serial theory and practice.
West, Rebecca (1892–1983)
Authors: Randall Bryony
Published: September 2018

Rebecca West was a novelist, journalist, essayist, and travel writer, and a central figure in twentieth-century literary and political culture. Her The Return of the Soldier (1918) was the first World War I novel to be written by a woman. She was in her lifetime particularly celebrated for her travel writing, notably Black Lamb and Grey Falcon (1941), and her coverage of the Nuremberg trials for The New Yorker, published as A Train of Powder in 1955. Time magazine called her "indisputably the world’s number one woman writer" in 1947.

Rebecca West (born Cicely Isabel Fairfield) and her two older sisters were brought up by their mother in London and Edinburgh, having been abandoned by their father when she was eight years old. Her political interests were evident from a young age; her first publication was a letter written to The Scotsman when she was just fourteen, defending the suffragist National Women’s Social and Political Union (she was later to publish an appreciation of Emmeline Pankhurst, "A Reed of Steel," in 1933). In young adulthood she supported herself through her journalism while training as an actress, taking the nom de plume Rebecca West from the freethinking heroine of Henrik Ibsen’s Rosmersholm (although she later distanced herself from both the play and the character).
Zola, Emile (1840–1902)
Authors: Bowles Emily
Published: September 2018

Emile Zola was a key figure in French realism and a leading figure of the naturalist movement. A prolific novelist, journalist, and theorist, he is best known for his reflections on contemporary French society in the ambitious twenty-novel Les Rougon-Macquart cycle, a series focussed on the fortunes of one family over several generations. Zola sought to express new scientific ideas about heredity and environmental factors in the development of human behavior, as well as to use his fictional family to represent the paradoxical nature of a corrupt yet dynamic society, emerging out of the Second Empire. Over more than twenty years, Zola’s novel cycle examined nineteenth-century French society through social, political, and artistic lenses, causing controversy within the literary establishment for his representations of the working class, changing morality and sexuality at the end of the century, and the emerging concerns of modernity. These themes were also more broadly expressed in Zola’s thirty-one novels, five short-story collections, diverse literary criticism, several plays, and a long journalistic career. His political writings culminated in Zola penning the infamous "J’Accuse…!" open letter regarding the Dreyfus Affair to the President of France, as the final move in his campaign on behalf of Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish officer who was wrongly convicted of communicating French military secrets to Germany in 1894.
‘Abduh, Muhammad (1849–1905)
Authors: Yaser Mirdamadi
Published: September 2018

Muhammad ‘Abduh along with Jamal al-Din Al-Afghani (1838–1897) are widely considered as the co-founders of Muslim modernism, mainly in, though not confined to, Sunni Islam. An Egyptian jurist, theologian, exegete, grand mufti (Islamic legal counselor) of Egypt, journalist, and liberal religious reformer, he had a considerable role in the modernization of Al-Azhar, the most important center of Islamic learning in Sunni Islam and in Islamic activism in the whole Muslim world. He left a diverse and even seemingly paradoxical legacy behind him, ranging from salafism to liberalism.
Adorno, Theodor Wiesengrund (1903–69)
Authors: Pecora Vincent P.
Published: September 2018

Born Theodor Ludwig Wiesengrund to an Italian Catholic mother and an assimilated Jewish father, Adorno would take his mother’s vaguely aristocratic last name. Philosopher, aesthetician, social theorist, and musician, Adorno throughout his life remained committed to a decidedly secular and socialist European consciousness, even when dissecting German anti-Semitism in the 1940s. Yet his notion of utopian political transformation owed much to his early reading of Ernst Bloch’s insistence on a hunger for the transcendent that Bloch added to Marxian materialism. Adorno’s understanding of the work of art—a crucial element of his thinking, culminating in his Aesthetic Theory—was equally in tension over the historical necessity of its progressive secularization and rationalization. On the one hand, any "contamination of art with revelation" would uncritically embrace the mystical, fetish character of art. On the other hand, "the eradication of every trace of revelation from art" would reduce the artwork to a mere repetition of the status quo—that is, the lifeless routines of an administered society, including film and jazz, both of which Adorno denigrated.
Contemporary African Christian Art
Authors: Bridger Nicholas J.
Published: September 2018

During the twentieth century, though little noticed by most observers, the Christian demographic in Africa exploded from 9.5 million in 1900, to over 400 million by 2000—an increase of 4,000 percent. Not surprisingly, the European colonial system, which had encouraged the efforts of European missionaries as a part of their own ostensibly "civilizing" goal, saw little production, much less use, of indigenous, local religious art by and for this new and growing Christian populace. Instead, they encouraged the widespread introduction of European late Romantic era Christian imagery and materials (ref. French holy card) for both educational and devotional use. Before mid-century, a new, reformist Catholic Christian discourse began emanating from Vatican leaders, who promoted the adaptation (indigenization or inculturation) of Christian practices, including the visual arts to local cultures, including Archbishop (later Cardinal) Celso Costantini (1877–1958), Secretary of Propaganda Fide, the Church’s ministry of missionary activity.
Al-Bayati, Abdul-Wahab (1926–99)
Authors: Webster Annie
Published: September 2018

Iraqi poet Abdul-Wahab al-Bayati was one of the foremost pioneers of Arabic poetry during the twentieth century. His poetry was revolutionary in poetic form and political content. A key figure in the Iraqi Free Verse Movement, alongside Nazik Al-Malaika (1923–2007) and Badr Shakri Al-Sayyab (1925–1926), Al-Bayati defied the formal constraints of traditional Arabic poetry by experimenting with innovative rhyme schemes and metric patterns. His poems articulate a radical leftist commitment to revolutionary change across the Arab World. Such political views forced Al-Bayati to leave Iraq in 1955 and live more than half his life in exile, moving between various Arab and European countries. Over the rest of his life he maintained a difficult relationship with his homeland, an experience that had a major influence on his writing. Al-Bayati published more than twenty collections of poetry and a three-act play. He died of natural causes in Damascus.
Aldington, Richard (1892–1962)
Authors: Frayn Andrew
Published: September 2018

Richard Aldington was one of the original Imagist poets, along with his wife Hilda Doolittle (H.D.), and Ezra Pound. He was also an industrious editor of little magazines in prewar London, and a respected critic of French literature in the postwar decade. He was profoundly affected by his experiences in the Great War, which he struggled to process, and his war novel Death of a Hero (1929) is a biting, strident criticism of the British Victorian values, which he believed led to the conflict and hindered its resolution. Aldington continued to write novels throughout the 1930s, and later achieved success as a biographer. His Lawrence of Arabia: A Biographical Enquiry (1955), which questioned the veracity of T.E. Lawrence’s claims to heroism—and those made on his behalf—was attacked by conservative critics, and damaged his reputation and saleability irreparably. Aldington died in central France in 1962.
Al-Hakim, Tawfiq (1898–1987)
Authors: Lundell Michael
Published: September 2018

Tawfiq Al-Hakim (1898–1987) was an Egyptian playwright, short-story writer, and novelist generally credited with giving birth to the theater in Egypt. His fiction, in the form of several novels and short stories, is also widely canonized. Roger Allen called Al-Hakim "one of the most significant figures in twentieth-century Arabic literature" (Hutchins 1998: 9). Al-Hakim was also particularly concerned with developing an Egyptian National Theater unencumbered, though inspired, by European models. His various writings engage with themes of culture, love, rationality, the European literary canon, government corruption, experimentation of form and language, nationalism, vernacularism, colonialism, and gender.
Amin, Qasim قاسم أمين (1863–1908)
Authors: Irving Sarah
Published: September 2018

Born in Alexandria in 1863, Qasim Amin was a significant figure in the intellectual and political circles of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Egypt. He is most famous for his treatment of the "woman question," the debate over the place of women in society that took place among nationalists and Islamic religious modernizers during this period. Amin’s writings on women have earned him the title in some quarters of the "first feminist" in the Arab World, but critics have seen him instead as a promoter of colonial values and of a narrow, elite perspective stemming from his aristocratic origins and Westernized education and career.
Balmont, Konstantin (БАЛЬМОНТ, КОНСТАНТИН) (1867–1942)
Authors: Forrester Sibelan
Published: September 2018

Russian poet, translator, novelist, essayist, polyglot, traveler, and travel writer. In the early years of the Symbolist movement Balmont was perhaps the best-known living Russian poet, representing the promise of Symbolism as a poetic school. His musical verse offered Decadent and other fashionable themes in rich metrical forms and intoxicating prosody. He published twenty-nine books of poetry in his lifetime, though the later emergence of new movements (Acmeism, Futurism) and his own prolific production and willingness to publish work of varying quality damaged his reputation with critics. He is also extremely important in Russian culture as a translator, especially of poets such as Poe, Shelley, and Whitman.
Ballets Suédois (1920–25)
Authors: Dorf Samuel N.
Published: September 2018

Rolf de Maré’s Ballets Suédois was active from 1920 to 1925. It was the chief artistic rival to Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, and de Maré was often referred to as the Swedish Serge Diaghilev. With Jean Börlin as chief choreographer, the company created twenty-four ballets in collaboration with prominent modern artists and composers, including Fernand Léger, Giorgio de Chirico, Pablo Picasso, Francis Picabia, Erik Satie, Darius Milhaud, and Cole Porter. When first launched, the troupe performed ballets in a style similar to the Ballets Russes, but de Maré’s interest in the visual arts and the vibrancy of modern, contemporary life resulted in a greater emphasis on abstraction and popular idioms in both the design and choreography of Ballets Suédois productions.
Knister, (John) Raymond (1899–1932)
Authors: Pinder Kait
Published: September 2018

Raymond Knister was one of Canada’s earliest modernist writers. Although Knister is best known as an imagist poet, he wrote and published work in a wide range of genres, including poetry, novels, short stories, book reviews, literary criticism, and one play. Born and raised in the farmlands of southern Ontario, Knister was called the ‘farmer who was poet too’ by fellow Canadian poet Dorothy Livesay. Knister’s writing career, which began in the 1920s, coincided with an age of Canadian nationalism, and despite the fact that Knister found it easier to publish in the USA. than in Canada, he was a great supporter of developing Canadian literature. Like other writers of this time, such as Morley Callaghan and A. J. M. Smith, Knister insisted upon the development of a unique national literature that would remain connected with international literary movements, like modernism, but would be neither an imitation of other literatures or produced for the ephemeral tastes of the market. Knister’s writing career was cut short when he drowned on 29 August 1932, while on holiday with his wife at Lake St Clair in Ontario.
Loos, Adolf (1870–1933)
Authors: Kotte Claudia
Published: September 2018

Born in Brno, Moravia, Austria-Hungary, now Czech Republic, Adolf Loos was a critic, architect and designer famous for his vehement rejection of ornament. Educated in Dresden, Germany, he lived in the United States from 1893 to 1896 and developed a lifelong admiration for the American way of life. In 1896, he moved to Vienna, where he practiced for the longest period of his life. Loos’s main contribution to Modernism was, however, in the realm of theory and writing. In a 1908 essay entitled ‘Ornament and Crime’ he claimed that ‘the evolution of culture is synonymous with the removal of ornament from objects of daily use’ (Bock and Loos: 167) Although his functional, rectilinear boxes such as Steiner House (1910) were met with little enthusiasm at the time, Loos’s buildings appear to anticipate the International Style of the 1920s as well as Le Corbusier’s (1887-1965) architectural purism. The stark exteriors of Loos’s work contrast with their sumptuous interiors, clad in rich woods or marble.
Niemeyer, Oscar (1907–2012)
Authors: Johnson Michael
Published: September 2018

Oscar Ribeiro de Almeida Niemeyer Soares Filho, better known as Oscar Niemeyer, was a prolific Brazilian architect and one of the leading Latin American exponents of international Modernism. Like Le Corbusier, whom he admired, he explored the aesthetic possibilities of reinforced concrete, but used the plasticity of the medium to transcend the rigid dogmatism of European Modernism, while evoking elements of the Brazilian landscape. His reputation rests primarily on the ceremonial buildings he created for the utopian capital of Brazil, but at the time of his death in 2012 he had completed approximately 600 works throughout the Americas, Africa, and Europe.

Niemeyer attended the National School of Fine Arts in Rio de Janeiro from 1929 to 1934. He worked in the office of the influential Brazilian architect and urban planner Lúcio Costa in 1932, a professional partnership that would last decades and result in many important works of modern architecture. From 1936–1943 Niemeyer was a member of the team of Brazilian architects working with Le Corbusier on the new building for the Ministry of Education and Health in Rio de Janeiro. At the age of 29, he was assigned as a draftsman for Le Corbusier, but the changes he introduced after Le Corbusier’s departure convinced Costa to appoint him as the project's lead architect. The building, a horizontal bar bisected by a vertical slab, became an icon of Brazilian architecture and attracted international recognition.
Lovecraft, H. P. (1890–1937)
Authors: Sorensen Leif
Published: September 2018

H. P. Lovecraft was an American pulp author in the 1920s and 1930s. His work, primarily published in the magazine Weird Tales, helped create the genre of weird fiction, which combined science fiction, fantasy, and horror. His stories and novels construct an elaborate fictional cosmology, opening up new possibilities for pulp writers. He maintained an active correspondence with fans and other pulp writers. By the time of his death in 1937, Lovecraft had accumulated a substantial archive of manuscripts that were published posthumously. His posthumous productivity attracted the notice of Edmund Wilson, who scathingly dismissed both the author and his fans. In the ensuing years writers ranging from Stephen King to Joyce Carol Oates have cited Lovecraft as an influence.