bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Heidegger, Martin (1889–1976)
Authors: Caruana John
Published: September 2018

Born in Meßkirch, Germany, Martin Heidegger is renowned as a leading 20th-century philosopher of existentialism and phenomenology with far-reaching influence in the Western world. Heidegger helped advance – at the same time as he radicalized – the phenomenological project initiated by his mentor, Edmund Husserl. The publication of his magnum opus, Sein und Zeit, a work ranked by his student Emmanuel Levinas as one of the five greatest texts in the history of Western philosophy, established Heidegger as a major voice in European philosophy. Demolishing the claims and pretensions of the Cartesian subject, this work also gave expression to the groundless nature of Dasein ("being-there"), its inexorable projection towards the nothingness of its being and its struggle for authenticity, ideas that would shape the work of Alberto Giacometti, Paul Celan, and Jean-Paul Sartre.

Heidegger’s relationship to modernism is simultaneously complementary and conflicted. Following in the wake of Friedrich Nietzsche’s sweeping philosophical attack, Heidegger’s work looms large as one of the most important philosophical critiques of the Western tradition, inspiring a wide-range of modernist and postmodern artists and theorists. Yet his mature work also exhibits a notable conservative streak that runs counter to some of the experimental and innovative thrust of modernist culture.
New Criticism
Authors: Hines Andy
Published: September 2018

Formed in response to philological, historical, and moral methods of teaching literature in the mid-1930s, the New Criticism was an American critical movement that insisted poetry should be read as a distinctive object of communication, not a moralizing lesson or a biographical example. The New Critics sought to make the formalist interpretation of poetry the focus of literary education. While their hermeneutics de-emphasized the role of politics, history, and authorial intent, the push for the acceptance of criticism in the academy was part of a political effort to preserve tradition in the face of mass culture.
Tarkovsky, Andrei (1943–1986)
Authors: Oveisy Fouad
Published: September 2018

The cinema of Andrei Tarkovsky stands at the zenith of high-modernist cinema. Amongst the many technical achievements that characterize Tarkovsky’s total art approach to cinema, a few stand out: the fragmented and free floating diegeses of his films, which often defy the teleology of metanarratives; a wide array of poetry and paintings, grafted onto the plot as philosophical subtext; long takes, intricately choreographed, with many optical illusions; an insistence on reducing the role of color in order to enhance the "expressiveness" of the image (Johnson 188); and, finally, a spare cinematic score that is often mainly a "refrain" to accentuate emotional climaxes (Tarkovsky 158). Thematically, a number of key metaphysical, autobiographical, and historical motifs also recur in his films. The ethical crisis of the human in a universe devoid of humanistic faith; the playful authority of memory over subjectivity, the simultaneous and conflicting alterity and interiority of Nature, and the dilemma of the instrumentality of technology and reason to the capitalistic ratio exemplify some of his main concerns.
French New Wave
Authors: Ionita Maria
Published: September 2018

The French New Wave is a term associated with a group of French filmmakers and the films they directed from the late 1950s until the mid-1960s. Its most representative directors were championed by the influential magazine Cahiers du Cinéma, and include François Truffaut, Claude Chabrol, Jacques Rivette, Jean-Luc Godard, and Eric Rohmer. Since most of these directors were also prolific film critics, the New Wave is also notable for the important body of theoretical work it produced, particularly the auteur theory introduced by André Bazin, one of the Cahiers’ founders.
Mass Observation
Authors: Walker Ian
Published: September 2018

Mass Observation was founded in 1937 by filmmaker Humphrey Jennings, poet Charles Madge, and ethnologist and explorer Tom Harrisson. It was originally conceived as a project to capture the dominant image of the day by collecting reports and observing people’s behavior. The group was influenced by filmic montage, André Breton’s writing on coincidence and the surrealist image, and Bronislaw Malinowski’s theories of "participatory observation" in anthropology. The movement’s methodology quickly evolved from a surrealist-inspired experiment into a more scientifically-orthodox project that was pursued on a wide-scale until 1949. Mass Observation had three distinct periods: an early interdisciplinary period that can be related to Jennings’s involvement; a further period when following Jennings’s departure and Malinowski’s essay in First Year’s Work, Mass Observation pursued a more orthodox scientific approach; and a final stage which saw its collaboration with the Ministry of Information and eventual transformation into a market research firm.
Rocha, Glauber (1939–1981)
Authors: Baker Peter
Published: September 2018

Glauber Rocha de Andrade (Vitória da Conquista, 1939–1981) was a Brazilian film critic, screenwriter, producer, and director. Arguably the most important director of the cinema nôvo (New Cinema) movement of the 1960s and 1970s, he began his career as a film critic, writing for well-known Brazilian journals about Italian neorealism and the French New Wave – two crucial influences on his own work. His writings criticized Brazil's commercial cinema and called for a new type of film that would represent the reality of Brazilian life. His most famous essay in this regard is "Estética da Fome" ("An Esthetic of Hunger," 1965). The essay reflects on the neo-colonial condition of Brazilian cinema through the analogy of the starvation of the Brazilian people and the intellectual starvation of its cinematic tradition; anti-colonial revolutionary violence is the only possible solution to these plights. This theoretical viewpoint is reflected in his Deu e o Diabo na Terra do Sol (Black God, White Devil, 1964), a film which earned him recognition on the international scene and in Brazil as the unchallenged leader of a new generation.
Tezuka, Osamu (1928–1989)
Authors: Ting Grace
Published: September 2018

Tezuka Osamu was a manga (comic) artist, animator, and film director often called the "God of Manga" for his enormous lasting impact upon the manga and animation industry of post-World War II Japan. First attracting attention in 1947 with his manga Shin takarajima (New Treasure Island), he was extraordinarily prolific until his death in 1989. He is best known for his series Tetsuwan Atomu (Iron-Armed Atom, 1952–1968), which suggested utopian desires while also posing darker questions concerning possibilities for peace and diversity in postwar Japan. In 1961, he established the animation studio Mushi Production and adapted the series as the first Japanese animated television series, aired from 1963 to 1966. Ultimately, he produced several hundred manga titles, many of which he adapted as animated films and television series while also producing original animations. A master of innovation, he forged the path for new possibilities for manga and animation, particularly with his groundbreaking contributions in applying cinematic techniques to his works. Tezuka’s work suggests the close-knit ties between film, manga, and TV animation in Japan. In particular, scholar Marc Steinberg has discussed the significant role of Tetsuwan Atomu in establishing precedents for the postwar anime media mix in Japan, especially with its style of limited animation made for television and Tezuka’s business model incorporating transmedia character merchandising.
The British Documentary Film Movement (1926–1946)
Authors: Davis Thomas S.
Published: September 2018

The British Documentary Film Movement refers to the film units pioneered by John Grierson. With the benefit of state sponsorship, Grierson and the filmmakers that gathered around him experimented with avant-garde film techniques to develop a socially conscious cinema. Grierson’s film units and the documentary culture they created were also an important part of the debates around aesthetic innovation and political commitment that circulated throughout Britain in the 1930s and 1940s. Grierson’s group disseminated their ideas and theories in publications such as Sight and Sound, Cinema Quarterly, World Film News, and Documentary News Letter.

Grierson coined the term "documentary" in a review of Robert Flaherty’s film Moana in The New York Sun in 1926. In this first use, documentary was nearly synonymous with the French documentaire, which typically refers to expedition films. In the coming years, Grierson would theorize documentary in more specific terms. His most famous and most lasting definition comes from an essay in a 1933 edition of Cinema Quarterly. Documentary, he claimed, was "the creative treatment of actuality." Grierson believed documentary could borrow formal techniques from the great Russian filmmakers (Eisenstein, Vertov, and Pudovkin) to dramatize scenes and practices from everyday life.
Von Sternberg, Josef (1894–1969)
Authors: Loyo Hilaria
Published: September 2018

Born in Vienna as Jonas Sternberg to impoverished Orthodox Jewish parents, Josef von Sternberg (1894–1969) migrated to New York in his teens; there he changed his name and endured the hardships of immigrant life. After working on a succession of film jobs, he eventually became a director. The experience gained on the various skills involved in the movie-making process would serve him to claim an absolute, almost craft-like control over his films, often dismissing the work of his collaborators. Self-proclaimed "a Hollywood’s messiah of film art," von Sternberg consciously sought an anti-realistic approach to the cinema. His skillful lighting, often combining strokes of light and shade in sharp chiaroscuro, and his expert use of décor, costumes, props, and actors yielded compositions that conferred a poetic and abstract dimension upon his films, often at the expense of dialogue and narrative coherence.
Diaghilev, Serge (1872–1929)
Authors: Quinton Laura
Published: September 2018

Impresario, critic, curator, and founder-director of the Ballets Russes (1909–1929), Serge Diaghilev was a towering figure and pioneer of early 20th-century modernism. Through his various projects, Diaghilev offered a cosmopolitan, dynamic, and synthetic vision of art that revolutionized the multiple disciplines with which he came into contact. With the Ballets Russes, in particular, the impresario created a significant space for experimentation by artists of the Russian and Western European avant-garde. Among the visual artists he commissioned were Léon Bakst, Alexandre Benois, Mikhail Larionov, Natalia Goncharova, Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, André Derain, Juan Gris, Max Ernst, Joán Miró, Pavel Tchelitchev, and Georges Rouault. Composers linked to the Ballets Russes include Igor Stravinsky, Sergei Prokofiev, Claude Debussy, Maurice Ravel, Richard Strauss, Erik Satie, Francis Poulenc, Darius Milhaud, Henri Sauguet, and Manuel de Falla. The company was also a major platform for the choreographers Michel Fokine, Vaslav Nijinsky, Léonide Massine, Bronislava Nijinska, and George Balanchine, innovative artists whose careers Diaghilev significantly advanced and developed. Through his commissions, Diaghilev brokered partnerships among artists that guided the avant-garde in new directions. A perfectionist with serious business acumen and immense resolve in the face of financial and artistic reverses, he played an active creative role in all his company’s productions. Although a proponent of modernism and internationalism in art, Diaghilev was also a romantic, remaining throughout his life a champion of Russia’s cultural riches, past as well as present. So closely was Diaghilev’s forceful, larger-than-life personality linked to the identity of the Ballets Russes that within months of his death in 1929 the company collapsed.
Emak Bakia (1926)
Authors: Ionita Maria
Published: September 2018

Emak Bakia (Basque for "Leave me alone") is a 16-minute long black-and-white silent film directed by Man Ray. Subtitled a "cine-poem," it features no obvious narrative.
Hoyer, Dore (1911–1967)
Authors: Toepfer Karl Eric
Published: September 2018

Dore Hoyer was perhaps the most innovative figure in German modern dance in the years between 1935 and 1965. This was a period in which political and historical circumstances in Germany severely marginalized the powerful and turbulent dance culture of the Weimar Republic and compelled modern dancers to work within a highly fragmented artistic environment in isolation from each other. Although Hoyer constantly sought opportunities to develop ensemble dance pieces, her artistic significance rests on her work as a solo dancer. She embodied the extraordinary capacity of an isolated soloist and modern dancer to transform oppressive constraints on dance and on bodily expressivity into intensely emotional, existential, and political experiences. Because of her, it is possible to see that the astonishingly imaginative Weimar dance culture did not come to an end with the advent of the Nazi regime in 1933, nor did the movement remain stagnant within a discouraging artistic atmosphere. Partly for this reason, later German dancers, including Susanne Linke and Arila Siegert, have recreated her solos as integral works in the contemporary dance repertoire.
Maslow, Sophie (1911–2006)
Authors: Rossen Rebecca
Published: September 2018

Sophie Maslow, a prolific choreographer and significant contributor to American modern dance, was often characterized as a populist or people’s choreographer because she was inspired by the struggles and experiences of ordinary people. Combining modernism with humanism, Maslow’s work depicted emotional and universal experiences (a hallmark of mid-century modern dance) while also envisioning a more just and equitable society. Throughout her more than 50-year career she drew from a variety of sources, including folk traditions, rural and urban American life, and literature. During the 1930s, while a soloist with the Martha Graham dance company, she began choreographing her own work and joined the New Dance League, the precursor to the New Dance Group, a collective of choreographers who viewed dance as a form of social activism.
Neoclassicism
Authors: Kant Marion
Published: September 2018

Neoclassicism in dance is part of the historicist modernist movement of the first third of the 20th century; it indicates an approach that redefines movement in relation to music and makes it independent of the narrative plot by placing form over content. The term was first applied to characterize George Balanchine’s (1904–1983) Apollo (1928) to Igor Stravinsky’s (1882–1971) music, but was soon extended to the choreographer’s works to music by Peter Tchaikovsky (1840–1893) such as Serenade (1934).
Schottelius, Renate (1921 – 1998)
Authors: Fortuna Victoria
Published: September 2018

German-born dancer and choreographer Renate Schottelius was a pioneer of modern dance in Argentina. Following early training in classical and modern dance in Berlin, she immigrated to Argentina in 1936, where she presented original work and in 1944 joined former Denishawn dancer Miriam Winslow’s company based in Buenos Aires. In 1953 Schottelius travelled to the United States, where she studied with Louis Horst, Doris Humphrey, Martha Graham, Agnes de Mille, José Limón, and Hanya Holm. Schottelius’s choreography synthesizes her roots in German Ausdruckstanz and the U.S. modern dance tradition, reflecting not only her personal artistic biography, but also the confluence of modernist styles circulating through Argentina by the mid-20th century. In addition to her artistic contributions, Schottelius was at the forefront of initiatives to support modern dance production in Argentina, most notably the Friends of Dance Association (1962–1972). Over the course of her extensive performance and teaching career Schottelius also worked internationally at the Royal Swedish Opera, the Cullberg Ballet, and the Boston Conservatory of Music, Dance, and Theatre. A keen teacher of dance technique and composition, she mentored many influential Argentine modern dancers, including Oscar Araiz and Ana María Stekelman. Schottelius acted as artistic advisor to the Contemporary Ballet of the General San Martín Municipal Theatre until her death in Buenos Aires in 1998.
Shawn, Ted (1891–1972)
Authors: Scolieri Paul A.
Published: September 2018

The self-proclaimed "Father of American Dance," Ted Shawn attained international prominence as a professional dancer and choreographer. Along with his wife Ruth St. Denis, Shawn founded Denishawn, the first U.S. modern dance company and school. Shawn thus helped to establish dance as a theatrical art in the United States by emphasizing that dancing is a sacred, nationalist, and artistic form of human expression, thereby challenging prevailing attitudes that associated dancing with prostitution, social degeneracy, and commerce. He also led an artistic crusade to legitimize dance as a profession for men. Although he rejected the term "modern" to describe his brand of theatrical dancing, he was essential to the development of modern dance in the United States in that he trained its pioneers Martha Graham, Doris Humphrey, and Charles Weidman, as well as generations of modern dancers both at the Denishawn schools in the 1910s and 1920s and later at his University of the Dance at Jacob’s Pillow, a school and festival that continues today.
Taylor, Paul (1930–)
Authors: Kane Angela
Published: September 2018

American choreographer Paul Taylor has made important contributions to dance modernism and postmodernism. His early choreography aligned him ideologically with New York’s avant-garde, most particularly with visual artist Robert Rauschenberg who designed all but one of Taylor’s dances through the 1950s. The work was "objectivist" in that it privileged action over emotion and it presaged the more radical deconstructions of the Judson Church choreographers by almost a decade. Though some of his subsequent choreography used more traditional modes of representation, the majority of Taylor’s dance-making has been essentially non-narrative. He has created over 140 works across six decades, and his large active repertory is a rich source for rethinking definitions of dance "isms."
Wiesenthal, Grete (1885–1970)
Authors: Kolb Alexandra
Published: September 2018

The Austrian dancer and choreographer Grete Wiesenthal was a transitional figure at the crossroads of ballet and modern dance. Initially trained and employed as a ballet dancer at the court opera in Vienna, she soon became disillusioned with the aesthetic traditionalism of ballet and in 1907 embarked on an independent career. Performing with two of her sisters and later as a soloist, she devised a new dance style and technique that emphasized bodily expressivity with motivational impulses provided by music. In the context of Viennese modernism, Wiesenthal’s work offered a novel interpretation of the Viennese waltz as a theatre dance form, oscillating between art nouveau and symbolism. She was groundbreaking in the Austro-German dance scene, exploring female creativity and individualism while contravening balletic principles. Although her career began in Vienna, she toured extensively across much of Europe and overseas, notably in New York, and hence extended her influence internationally. Wiesenthal shared with female contemporaries Anna Pavlova and Isadora Duncan a natural grace, expressive artistry, and flexibility of hands and arms. However, unlike Pavlova, Wiesenthal transgressed the confines and repertory of ballet – for instance, eschewing pointe work. Like Duncan, her body image was liberated, but she was less daring in her choice of costumes – for instance, dancing in sandals rather than barefoot – and drew inspiration from local cultural traditions and not from Greek antiquity.
Williams, Charles H. (1896–1978)
Authors: Paris Carl
Published: September 2018

In a career spanning 1910–1951, Charles H. Williams was a pioneering educator, author, choreographer, and athletic director at the Hampton Institute in Virginia, an all-Black school that focused on the vocational education of young people. His interest in dance came from his work developing new ways to connect physical education, creative movement, and recreation with self-improvement and moral development. Echoing the New Negro philosophy of the Harlem Renaissance and paralleling the efforts of Edna Guy, Hemsley Winfield, and Asadata Dafora, he believed that dance served the important purpose of connecting African Americans to their heritage. Inspired in part by his association with modern dance pioneer Ted Shawn, he founded the Hampton Institute Creative Dance Group in 1934. At a time when higher education was largely segregated, this non-professional African-American concert dance group toured nationally and, in so doing, created a place for modern dance within historically Black colleges and an audience for modern dance among the Black middle-class.
Benjamin, Walter (1892–1940)
Authors: Spiropolou Angeliki
Published: September 2018

Walter Bendix Schönflies Benjamin was a philosopher, essayist and literary critic associated with the Institut für Sozialforschung (Frankfurt Institute for Social Research). Initially trained in idealist philosophy, Benjamin developed his own version of Marxian historical materialism in the late 1920s, mixed with elements of Judaic mysticism.
Directors/Directing
Authors: Switzky Lawrence
Published: September 2018

Although some official has organized the acting and scenery in theatrical performances since ancient Greece, the director only emerged as a significant creative figure in the late nineteenth century. Directors introduced innovative acting methods, modernized staging through new technologies such as electric light and mechanized scenery, proposed theories about the function of the theater in social and political life, and provided unified interpretations of complex plays. As the self-designated authors of productions, directors often competed with playwrights and actors for artistic control, a tension that continues to characterize the division of labor in theaters.
García Pardo, Luis (1910–2006)
Authors: Cobas Martín
Published: September 2018

The Uruguayan architect Luis García Pardo studied architecture in the School of Architecture of the Universidad de la República, where he graduated in 1941. He belonged to a generation of Uruguayan architects that studied in a school permeated by the modern movement, mainly through travels (to Europe, in the context of the Grand Prix), European publications, and professors such as Julio Vilamajó (1894–1948). Together with colleagues Raúl Sichero and Ildefonso Aroztegui he adopted a revised version of the International Style, in works where geometric and formal purity is associated with cutting-edge technical and structural execution and, in the case of García Pardo in particular, the integration of the fine arts and other design areas to the architectural project – notably in the landscape design with Roberto Burle Marx.

His defense of a universal modernity was no impediment for a heterogeneous body of work that included experimentations with newly developed construction systems for social housing and, in his last period, a series of urban proposals characterized by a remarkable formal and organizational freedom.
Mendes, Gilberto (1922–2016)
Authors: Bezerra Márcio
Published: September 2018

Gilberto Ambrósio Garcia Mendes was born in Santos (São Paulo state), on 13 October 1922. Despite his unorthodox musical career — he did not start to study music until the age of nineteen, and, in addition, worked in a bank until his retirement in 1975 — he has achieved wide recognition as one of the leading Brazilian composers of the present. He is a local pioneer in the fields of chance, concrète, and microtonal music, mixed media, and musical action.
Stein, Gertrude (1874–1946)
Authors: Perelman Bob
Published: September 2018

Gertrude Stein was a modernist writer of the twentieth century, notable for the extremity of her stylistic innovations. During the first half of her career, her radical experimentation made her a target of mockery. In 1933, she published The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, a memoir of modernist activity in Paris written in a more accessible style. Intellectually serious but amusing and filled with gossip about charismatic figures (Picasso and Hemingway, among others), it was a surprise best seller in the USA and made Stein a celebrity; she remained an affectionately regarded public figure for the rest of her life. However, at her death and for decades after, she was not a respectable object of critical attention. To university critics, Joyce, Pound, and Eliot had set the standard for literary achievement, and Stein’s work seemed a formless self-indulgence. It was not until the latter decades of the twentieth century, with the rise of a number of related intellectual and artistic forces — feminist critics and poets, the general US innovative poetic tendency, Language writing, and post-structuralism — that Stein began to be taken seriously. In the twenty-first century, while her writing still raises controversy, it is prominent in the modernist canon.
Hellman, Lillian (1905–84)
Authors: Friedman Sharon
Published: September 2018

Lillian Hellman, whose plays developed the conventions of modern theatrical realism, is among the most renowned twentieth-century American dramatists. Her oeuvre includes eight original plays, four adaptations, eight screenplays, and three widely read memoirs: An Unfinished Woman, Pentimento, and Scoundrel Time. Over the course of her career, Hellman elicited controversy for the subjects of her plays, her political alliances, and her refusal to cooperate with the House Un-American Activities Committee. In the 1950s, she was blacklisted by film producers. In the late 1970s and 1980s, she came under searing recrimination from critics who challenged the veracity of her memoirs.
Laban, Rudolf (1879–1958)
Authors: Franco Susanne
Published: September 2018

Rudolf Laban was one of the leaders of Ausdruckstanz ("expressionist dance") in Germany. He worked as a dancer, choreographer, writer, educator, movement analyst, ballet master, director of cultural institutions, and industrial consultant. During the years of World War I, he worked intensively with other dancers and artists in Switzerland on Monte Verità in Ascona and in Zurich. After the war, he returned to Germany and soon founded a network of schools and affiliated dance companies. He promoted movement choirs as a form of mass dance, and developed a system of movement notation. After the National Socialists came to power in 1933, he continued his leadership role until 1937. The following year he immigrated to Great Britain, where he spent the rest of his life, abandoning his artistic career and focussing on his theoretical research and on the educational implications of his ideas. His work became the basis for British Modern Educational Dance. His most important legacy, however, lies in his conceptual thinking on dance, including his system of writing movement by means of signs and symbols originally called Schrifttanz ("dance writing") and later Kinetography or Labanotation.
Emmanuel Lévinas (1906–1995)
Authors: Rosenblum Noah Aaron
Published: September 2018

Emmanuel Lévinas was a French philosopher of Jewish–Lithuanian origins who drew strongly on German phenomenology in his investigations of intentionality, subjectivity, and ethics. An officer in the French army, he spent much of WWII a prisoner of war. His wife and daughter survived the war in hiding; the Nazis killed most of his family remaining in Lithuania. In the 1930s, Lévinas translated Edmund Husserl and helped introduce phenomenology into France. He is most recognized for his ethical philosophy, simultaneously an extension and critique of his teacher Martin Heidegger’s ontological analysis. Lévinas argued that the infinity of the "transcendent other" is exemplified by the face-to-face encounter: the "mundane" meaning of our historical, cultural worldview "is disturbed and jostled by another presence." This other shatters the Cartesian finitude of the self, disclosing the priority of ethics over ontology and epistemology (a priority that is Nietzsche’s contribution to existentialism more broadly). Responsibility to the other founds the subject, rather than vice-versa. Via extensive Talmudic study, he came to believe that Judaism offered a privileged access to this secular truth. His two major works are Totality and Infinity: An Essay in Exteriority (1961) and Otherwise than Being, or Beyond Essence (1974).
Lopukhov, Fedor Vasilievich (1886–1973)
Authors: Scholl Tim
Published: September 2018

The most prolific choreographer of the early Soviet period, Fedor Lopukhov was associated with two seemingly contradictory developments in Soviet ballet in the 1920s: his interest in experimental dance, especially his theories of the relationship between movement and music, and his work to restore the ballets of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, notably those of the choreographer Marius Petipa, whose legacy had suffered in the chaotic years following the 1917 Revolution. Lopukhov had some connection to virtually every innovation in early Soviet ballet practice. From his attempt to stage a nonnarrative ballet to Beethoven’s Fourth Symphony in 1923 (Dance Symphony: The Magnificence of the Universe) to choreography that celebrated the October Revolution with avant-garde scenography (The Red Whirlwind, 1924), and finally, the scandals surrounding his collaborations with composer Dmitry Shostakovich (Bolt, 1931; The Bright Stream, 1935), he remained a tireless innovator and theoretician of the new Soviet dance.
Van Vechten, Carl (1880–1964)
Authors: Vogel Shane
Published: September 2018

Carl Van Vechten (b. 17 June 1880, Cedar Rapids, Iowa; d. 21 December 1964, New York City) was an American writer who wrote about music, modern dance, and literature and authored seven novels. He was an early professional dance critic in the USA. An important patron of African-American artists in the 1920s and 1930s, he guided numerous young writers through New York’s publishing houses and promoted black vernacular music and artistic achievement in venues such as Vanity Fair. In addition to his literary work, Van Vechten was also an accomplished photographer who took portraits of hundreds of prominent artists, writers, and performers. While his own creative output was substantial, one of his signal contributions to early-twentieth-century culture was as an archivist; his meticulous collection of material, ephemera, and images was organized and donated to a number of libraries.
Modernism and Film Music in Latin America
Authors: Avila Jacqueline
Published: September 2018

Modernism in Latin America was, as in Europe, a movement that began as a reaction to late-nineteenth-century artistic currents, primarily in visual and plastic art, literature, and music. It broke down past conceptions of art and sought to find innovation and purpose in other areas utilizing nontraditional means. While waves of modernism flourished in Western Europe at the turn of the century—for example, Dadaism, Futurism, Expressionism—currents also hit the American continents. New advances in technology (particularly the development of telephones, cinema, and sound recordings), new modes of transportation, and industry helped push forward modernist ideologies through a reexamination and interpretation of reality that moved away from traditional forms. The burgeoning practice of cinema provided new juxtapositions of visual and musical art structures that served as a novel conduit for mass entertainment, education, and nationalist projects. Within Latin America, particularly in the larger film industries of Mexico and Argentina, cinema offered new opportunities for musical innovation that juxtaposed popular and folkloric music with practices from the Western art music tradition.
Modernist Theater in Catalonia
Authors: Duprey Jennifer
Published: September 2018

Modernist theater in Catalonia emerged out of the interplay between thematic and artistic innovation and the representation of sociopolitical issues such as class and cultural and political autonomy. These particular issues were mainly represented through allegory and the use of symbolism. Thematic and artistic innovation, however, found itself in unremitting tension with the continuity of a Catalan artistic and literary tradition. In general terms, Modernism (1880–1914) involved a battle against different forms of sociocultural and artistic traditionalism and thus a will to innovation. Modernists of all types shared two specific attributes. They shared "the lure of heresy that impelled their actions as they confronted conventional sensibilities" and "a commitment to a principled self-scrutiny" (Gay 2010: 4). Nevertheless, history shows that the modernists fought bitterly among themselves over basic questions of belief and unbelief. Accordingly, modernist art cannot be defined by a singular understanding of the social and the artist but instead involves the turbulent progression of both artistic movements and cultural formations. Throughout history, severe and consistent censorship of both verbal and pictorial expressions—regarded as blasphemous, obscene, and subversive—created an atmosphere of repression that was hostile to modernist innovation (Gay 2010: 18).
Nagrin, Daniel (1917–2008)
Authors: Jowitt Deborah
Published: September 2018

Over his long career, Daniel Nagrin played many roles, on and off stage. A dancer, choreographer, writer, and teacher, he achieved his greatest prominence as a solo performer, choreographing twenty-eight solos for himself between 1942 and 1982. The characters he created were usually contemporary men, often city-dwellers, and he set a number of his pieces to jazz music at a time when that was unusual in modern dance. In 1997, he wrote that "whatever I do—as a dancer—I do not try to look like something, I am someone doing something. I never do abstract dance" (1997: xv).
Palladium
Authors: McMains Juliet
Published: September 2018

New York’s Palladium Ballroom is commonly revered as the birthplace of modern Latin dancing. Known as "the home of the mambo," the Palladium was New York’s most popular venue for Latin dance music from 1947 to 1966. It featured live Latin music four nights a week, frequently played by "The Big Three" orchestras: Machito and his Afrocubans, Tito Puente, and Tito Rodríguez. Located near prominent nightclubs and theaters at 53rd St. and Broadway, the Palladium was significant for bringing Latin music to midtown Manhattan and for the racial and ethnic integration it engendered. Puerto Rican, Cuban, Italian, African-American, Irish, and Jewish patrons of all classes filled its dance floors and rubbed elbows with celebrities, especially on Wednesday nights when "Killer Joe" Piro hosted the popular mambo contest and professional show. The weekly show launched the careers of many dance teams who then performed in Catskill and Miami Beach resorts, and worked as opening acts with touring musicians. Mambo was the favorite dance of Palladium regulars, but other dances experienced surges of popularity, including the cha-cha (1954) and pachanga (1961).
Vian, Boris (1920–1959)
Authors: Lapprand Marc Didier
Published: September 2018

Boris Vian (1920–1959) may well be the Renaissance man of twentieth-century France. In his short life, he was an engineer, a jazz musician, a fiction writer, a poet, a translator, a song-writer, and for a brief time a singer, a jazz critic and one of the most flamboyant members of the Collège de ‘Pataphysique. At the age of twenty-six, he wrote L’Écume des jours [Foam of the Daze], considered today his masterpiece (which still sells just under 100,000 copies each year). That same year, after a bet, he invented a pseudo-American writer in search of a publishing house: Vernon Sullivan, whose first hard-boiled novel Vian would ‘translate’: J’irai cracher sur vos tombes [I Spit on Your Graves]. For the next five years, both Vian and Sullivan penned novels alternately, the latter having a commercial (and scandalous) success and the former remaining quite unknown. In 1951 Boris Vian gave up writing novels and started a new career, turning towards the art of the stage. His productivity remained high until his premature death. His literary success, though, is entirely posthumous.
Busoni, Ferruccio (1866--1924)
Authors: Roberge Marc-André
Published: September 2018

Ferruccio Busoni was an Italian composer, pianist, transcriber, editor, and writer on music who spent most of his career in Germany. A child prodigy who started composing at the age of seven and completed his formal music studies at fifteen, he became of one the most important pianists of his time, well known for his transcriptions of organ works by Bach, and a highly respected, if rather rarely played, composer. His writings on music, in some of which he longed for an extension of compositional means and resources, positioned him as a progressive thinker and a model for a young generation of composers, including Edgard Varèse and Kurt Weill.
Caturla, Alejandro (1906--1940)
Authors: Rey Mario
Published: September 2018

Alejandro García Caturla was a prominent figure in the twentieth century art music of Cuba, and leading exponent of the Afrocubanismo movement. He helped define a period in symphonic production, synthesizing African and Iberian-derived elements with novel manipulations of rhythmic and native instruments in a modern harmonic vocabulary. His assassination in 1940 tragically ended his short but prolific career.
Warner, Sylvia Townsend (1893–1978)
Authors: Suh Judy
Published: September 2018

Sylvia Townsend Warner was the author of novels, short stories, poetry, journalistic non-fiction, and literary criticism. Her works often inhabit settings at opposite ends of the modernist-era spectrum: on one hand, fantasy and fable worlds, and on the other, detailed contemporary domestic and historical settings incorporating themes of war, revolution, and class struggle. Warner is regarded as a pioneer of anti-colonial, LGBT, Marxist, and anti-fascist narrative, particularly in her novels of the 1920s and 1930s.

Warner was born and raised in Harrow, Middlesex, England, where her father was schoolmaster at the boys’ public school. She resided in London between 1917 and 1927 to work as a musicologist and editor on the Carnegie UK Trust’s Tudor Church Music Research Project. In 1926, she met her lifelong partner, Valentine Ackland, a poet and writer in her own right, and in 1930 they moved in with each other in Dorset. Both women were committed leftist activists who joined the Communist Party in 1935. In the year, Warner joined the Executive Committee of the International Association of Writers for the Defence of Culture (IAWDC), and in 1936, she served as Secretary of the Association of Writers for Intellectual Liberty (AWIL); both were anti-fascist organisations. During the war, Warner wrote anti-fascist and Marxist articles for leftist newspapers and magazines, including Time and Tide, the Left Review, the Daily Worker, and Our Time.
Cahun, Claude (1894–1953)
Authors: Fotiade Ramona
Published: September 2018

One of the emblematic figures of the French avant-garde, Claude Cahun was born Lucy Renée Mathilde Schwob on October 25, 1894 in Nantes, the niece of the modernist writer Marcel Schwob and daughter of Maurice Schwob, who directed the journal Le Phare de la Loire. Educated in France and Britain, she started publishing in the Mercure de France under the pseudonym Claude Courlis, then, from 1917, as Claude Cahun, a sexually ambivalent pen name that reflected her provocative stance on gender identity.
Carswell, Catherine (1879–1946)
Authors: McCulloch Margery Palmer
Published: September 2018

Catherine Carswell was one of an increasing number of women who tested boundaries in life and literature in the early years of the 20th century. Born Catherine Macfarlane in Glasgow, she made legal history in 1908 when her first marriage was annulled on the grounds of her husband’s mental incapacity. She supported her daughter of the marriage through journalism, writing fiction reviews for the Glasgow Herald and drama criticism for the Observer and was dismissed by the Glasgow Herald for publishing her review of D. H. Lawrence’s The Rainbow without previous editorial consent. Her compensation was a friendship and correspondence with Lawrence which lasted until his death. She published two novels, Open the Door which was copiously critiqued by Lawrence and won the Melrose prize for fiction in 1920; and The Camomile published in 1922. Her biography of Robert Burns (1930) outraged the Scottish Burns Clubs owing to its treatment of Burns as a sexual being, and her memoir of Lawrence, The Savage Pilgrimage (1932) was written in refutation of John Middleton Murry’s Son of Woman. Her work made a significant contribution to modern Scottish literature.
Cassirer, Ernst (1874–1945)
Authors: Elder Bruce
Published: September 2018

Ernst Alfred Cassirer was a philosopher and intellectual historian. The central concept of Cassirer’s system is that of symbolic form. Owing to Cassirer’s affiliations with Hermann Cohen (1848–1918) and the Marburg School, the concept is generally taken to be extension of Kant’s notion of the categories. There is some truth to the claim: Cassirer does maintain that human knowledge depends on our ability to give form to experience and that we use symbolic forms to give experience its shape. Neo-Kantians (among whom Cassirer is often counted) believed that sensation provides the material of experience, while the faculty they usually called "understanding" imposes form on the material of sensation to produce experience. However, the concept goes well beyond Kant’s ideas on the categories or their neo-Kantian extensions. Heinrich Hertz’s (1857–1894) Die Prinzipien der Mechanik (1894), especially its concept of "pictures," which linked concepts to intuition, transformed Cassirer’s Kantianism. Friedrich Theodor Vischer’s (1807–1887) Hegelian-inspired Ästhetik oder Wissenschaft des Schönen (3 vols., 1846–1857), endowed the concept with an idealist cast—indeed, a broader influence was the notion of the Idea in the German absolute Idealism. Cassirer traced the development of symbolic form through myth (Cassirer was influenced by Aby Warburg [1866–1929] and his Bibliothek Warburg), art, mathematics, science, and philosophy, identifying the stages of development as mimetic, analogical and the symbolic expression. He expounded his conception of symbolic form in the magisterial three-volume work, Philosophie der symbolischen Formen [The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms] (1923–1929).
Chan, Luis (1905–1995)
Authors: Lee Jack
Published: September 2018

Luis Chan was a doyen of the Hong Kong art world whose artistic career not only witnessed but also paved the way for the development of 20th century Hong Kong art. Chan is well known for his adoption of different painting styles, and his curiosity for trying new things ultimately led him to develop a unique artistic style that marked the modernity of Hong Kong art. Between the 1920s and the 1950s, when Chan merely worked as a "Sunday painter," he followed closely a conventional Western painting style; in particular the practice of outdoor sketching in watercolor influenced by contemporary British and American watercolorists such as Frank Brangwyn, J. M. W. Turner, and John Sargent whom he admired. Chan was renowned for the quick sketching technique and bold brushwork used in his watercolor landscapes, and it was this method and the huge number of paintings that he produced that earned him the soubriquet "Watercolour King" among Hong Kong artists in the 1950s. From the onwords 1960s, Chan attempted to develop a modern style of painting by borrowing from Cubism, Constructivism, Abstract Expressionism, and Surrealism, before creating an imaginative, fanciful, and childlike style of his own.
The Waste Land (1922)
Authors: Templeton Erin
Published: September 2018

The Waste Land is an influential and experimental 435-line poem written by Thomas Stearns Eliot and first published in 1922. Structurally, it is a pastiche of different verse forms, both traditional and contemporary. The poem is richly allusive and polyvocal. It contains several different languages, as well as allusions to texts as diverse as the Upanishads, Dante Alighieri’s Inferno, and Charles Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal. A pre-publication manuscript of the poem reveals that both Eliot’s first wife Vivienne and his friend Ezra Pound helped revise the poem into its final form before its initial publication in 1922. At its core, The Waste Land is about life in London following the catastrophe of the First World War. The fragmentation of the verse form in The Waste Land mirrors the fragmentation of life in war-torn London and the increasing disorientation of urban experience.
Creeley, Robert White (1926–2005)
Authors: Salutsky Ron
Published: September 2018

Robert Creeley was a postmodernist American poet whose concern for the emotional content of the quotidian influenced Deep Image poetry, the Black Mountain School of poets, and Beat poetry.

Creeley was born in Arlington, Massachusetts, on May 21, 1926. Before the age of five he had lost his physician father, and in an automobile accident the use of his left eye. Following the death of his father, Creeley moved with his mother and sister to a small farm in West Acton, where he enjoyed spending time in the woods. The relative isolation of his upbringing made him greet even strangers generously, a grace for which Creeley was known even after he had achieved literary fame.

Following formative years in the Holderness Academy in Plymouth, New Hampshire, Creeley attended Harvard University, where he received little support for his writing. In 1944, restless and discontented, Creeley was suspended from the university for shenanigans, and subsequently sought relief and adventure in the American Field Service in Burma and India. When the war was over, Creeley returned to Harvard and helped to edit an undergraduate literary magazine, The Wake, founded as a counter to the Eliotic, New Critical bent of Harvard’s The Advocate. Through his earliest publications in The Wake, Creeley began to experiment with the quotidian subjects and diction that ran counter to the rhetorical, analytical style of poets such as Eliot and Stevens.
Chinese Revolution of 1911
Authors: Wang Jason
Published: September 2018

The Chinese Revolution of 1911, also known as the Xinhai Revolution (辛亥革命, Xinhai Geming), ended China’s centuries-old traditions of Imperialism and Feudalism, and led to the abdication of Puyi (溥仪) (1906–1967) – China’s ‘Last Emperor’ – on February 12, 1912. By ushering in the Republic of China, the Revolution initiated a process that would eventually, by the mid-twentieth century, bring about the modernization and unification of China.
Frazer, Sir James George (1854–1941)
Authors: Sanzo Joseph Emanuel
Published: September 2018

James George Frazer was a Scottish classicist, social theorist, anthropologist, and historian of religion. He was a Fellow at Trinity College, Cambridge University. In addition to his influential entries in the Encyclopedia Britannica (e.g. ‘Taboo’, ‘Totem’), Frazer published voluminous translations, editions and monographs in the fields of classics (e.g. Pausanias’s [110–180 AD] Description of Greece [1898], an edition of Ovid’s [43 BC – 17 AD] Fasti [1929]), religion (e.g. Lectures on the Early History of the Kingship [1905], Totemism and Exogamy [1910]) and biblical studies (e.g. Folk-Lore in the Old Testament [1918]). Frazer is best known, however, for his massive enterprise in comparative religion and mythology, The Golden Bough (GB).
Ginsberg, Asher Zvi Hirsh (1856–1927)
Authors: Weininger Melissa
Published: September 2018

Ahad Ha’am was born Asher Zvi Hirsh Ginsberg in 1856 in Skvira, Ukraine, to an affluent family that was religiously affiliated with the Hasidic movement, which emphasized communion with God and ecstatic practice. Like many of the Jewish intellectuals and modernizers of his generation, Ginsberg was self-taught in secular subjects and broke with religious practice in his teens.