bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Gide, André (1869–1951)
Authors: Geary Keohane Elizabeth
Published: September 2018

André Gide (1869–1951) is frequently viewed as a pillar of modern French literature. From his early experimentations with Symbolism to the deeply confessional life writing that perhaps best defines his output, as encapsulated by his multi-volume Journal, Gide’s long and prolific career produced a wide variety of works. Gide himself was well aware of his constant tendency to hop among genres and themes, each new work always seeming to reject the preceding one. Perhaps the defining moment of Gide’s adult life occurred in Algiers in 1895 when, tantalized by the so-called exoticism of North Africa, and admitting his desire for the young male musician playing for the room, he came out. L’Immoraliste (The Immoralist, 1902), arguably his best-known work in the English-speaking world, focuses on Michel, who, finding a new zest for life, remains largely unapologetic for his sexual transgressions. From 1908 onwards, Gide held, as a founding member, a powerful editorial role at La Nouvelle Revue Française. Si le grain ne meurt (If It Die) and Corydon, both published in 1924, essentially revealed his homosexuality to his readership, while 1925 saw the publication of what is widely recognized as his greatest contribution to Modernism: the highly self-reflexive novel Les Faux-Monnayeurs (The Counterfeiters). He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1947.
Mayakovsky, Vladimir (1893–1930)
Authors: Krylova Natalia
Published: September 2018

Vladimir Mayakovsky (МАЯКОВСКИЙ, ВЛАДИМИР) was a leading Russian poet of the twentieth century and representative of Russian Futurism, a modernist trend that emerged as an attempt to approximate the utopian future through art. Mayakovsky brought experiment and innovation to poetry, drama, cinematography and graphic design, thus changing the entire palette of Russian art.

He made his literary debut in 1912 as a co-author of the scandalous Russian Futurist Manifesto A Slap in the Face of Public Taste (Poshchechina obshchestvennomu vkusu). His concern with the flagrant social injustices of the time aggravated by the First World War led him to write a trilogy of early programmatic poems culminating in A Cloud in Trousers (Oblako v shtanakh, 1915). During this formative period, Mayakovsky met and fell in love with Lili Brik, a woman who would become his life-long muse and the personification of love, faith, and revolution in his oeuvre. The new aesthetic discourse he developed subsequently facilitated the poet’s passionate acceptance of the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 that promised to solve all of the tragic controversies of the past. After thirteen years of devoted service to the revolutionary ideals, he gradually became disappointed with the actual social and ethical outcomes of the Revolution.
Nouveau Roman
Authors: Baetens Jan , Langlois Christopher
Published: September 2018

The ‘Nouveau Roman’ or ‘New Novel’ is used to refer to a literary and critical movement in France during the 1950s and early 1960s. Later, more experimental developments in the late 1960s and early 1970s will be labeled the ‘New New Novel’. Although the Nouveau Roman quickly became associated with the work of Alain Robbe-Grillet, Marguerite Duras, Nathalie Sarraute, Michel Butor, Claude Simon, and Robert Pinget, to name only the most notable, it never crystallized into so dogmatic an ideology of literature and art as had the Surrealism of André Breton during the 1920s and 1930s.
Billone, Pierluigi (1960–)
Authors: Cassidy Aaron
Published: September 2018

Pierluigi Billone is an Italian composer. Following early studies in guitar and composition in Sienna and Milan, he studied with Salvatore Sciarrino before moving to Germany, where he was awarded a number of grants and residencies (Schloss Solitude Stuttgart, Heinrich-Strobel Foundation, Akademie der Künst Berlin) and studied with Helmut Lachenmann at the Musikhochschule Stuttgart before moving to Vienna.

Billone’s work is principally characterized by a raw, earthy, primeval soundworld and by a ritualistic, pre-linguistic approach to musical material and form. His compositions tend toward limited, focused, elemental sounds, and despite a certain sense of physicality and violence are often quite spare and sparse in texture. Unlike many of his contemporaries, Billone’s work has focused almost exclusively on acoustic instruments (with the exception of a handful of works which include electric guitar and some early works requiring amplification) and is comprised predominately of solo and chamber music.
Musique Concrète
Authors: Dack John
Published: September 2018

Musique Concrète (concrete music) is a music genre that developed from the technology of radio broadcasting. The inventor of Musique Concrète, the Frenchman Pierre Schaeffer (1910–1995), realized the significance of hearing sounds over the radio where any visual reference to a source is removed. This is known as the acousmatic situation. Standard radio dramas contain dialogue, sound effects and music that support the unfolding of the narrative; these are usually sounds that are recognized by listeners without difficulty.
Gaudier-Brzeska, Henri (1891–1915)
Authors: Brockington Grace
Published: September 2018

Born in St Jean-de-Braye, France, Henri Gaudier-Brzeska had a catalytic effect on the development of modernist sculpture in Britain. In 1911 he moved to London, where he produced his most significant works. At the outbreak of the First World War he enlisted in the French army and was killed in action on 5 June 1915 at the age of 23. His career was brief but prolific, and has become emblematic of the growth of Modernism in Britain shortly before the War. As an artist he was self-taught, taking his inspiration from a number of sources including museum collections in Paris and London, Rodin and other European Modernists and non-European artefacts. Among avant-garde groups, he associated most closely with the Vorticists, signing their manifesto in 1914 and contributing articles to their magazine, Blast (1914 and 1915). He also worked across the factions of the London art world and his practice was eclectic; he used whatever materials came to hand, combining the virile negrophilia of Red Stone Dancer with the naturalistic figuration of Maternity (both 1913).
Höch, Hannah (1889–1978)
Authors: Norton Sydney Jane
Published: September 2018

Hannah Höch was a German painter and photomontagist who also worked in modern domestic handicraft, fabric and fashion design. She is primarily known for the photomontages she made during the early part of her artistic career, when she was the only female member of the revolutionary avant-garde group Berlin Dada (1916–1922). Höch’s works were, on the whole, less stridently political than those of her fellow Dadaists, who, in addition to their literary and artistic creations, conveyed their revolutionary ideas in public demonstrations and written manifestos. In contrast, Höch focused primarily on her art, often meshing the domestic realm with the public sphere of Dada. By interweaving these two seemingly disparate realms, the artist was better able to examine constructions of female identity and gender relations. Höch resided in or around Berlin for most of her life. Over the span of her fifty-two-year career her style shifted from social commentary to Surrealism to abstraction, a progression which makes her œuvre impervious to art historical categorization.
Rousseau, Henri Julian Félix (1844–1910)
Authors: Protz Uta
Published: September 2018

A highly original artist who was largely self-taught, the French painter Henri Rousseau is widely considered the most celebrated of naïve artists and an important pioneer of Surrealism. Not known to have travelled outside France, he is best known today for his large jungle scenes, of which he painted at least twenty-five. Full of lush foliage and exotic animals, they were inspired by images in the popular press as well as visits to the Exposition Universelle of 1889 and the Jardin des Plantes, an important botanical garden and zoo in Paris. Besides his jungle scenes, Rousseau also painted history paintings celebrating the still young Third Republic, suburban landscapes showing the life of the petite bourgeoisie, still lifes and portraits, such as the full-length Portrait of a Woman (c. 1895) and the two smaller portraits representing the artist and his second wife (c. 1900–03) once owned by Pablo Picasso. Not lacking in confidence, but always striving for recognition, Rousseau appreciated the support he received from the poet Guillaume Apollinaire and the painter Robert Delauney, both of whom became close friends. Whereas certain members of the avant-garde admired Rousseau’s paintings for their charm and innocence, others, however, regarded them as outright eccentric.
Taller de Arte Mural (1945–1946)
Authors: Wolf Olivia
Published: September 2018

The Taller de Arte Mural (Mural Art Workshop) was founded in 1945 by a group of leading Argentine-based artists with a common vision of promoting Muralism as a nation-wide public art program. The workshop was comprised of Antonio Berni (born 1905, Rosario; died 1981, Buenos Aires), Juan Carlos Castagnino (born 1908, Mar del Plata; died 1972, Buenos Aires), Manuel Colmiero Guimaraes (born 1901, Pontevedra, Galicia, Spain; died 1991, Salvaterra de Miño, Galicia, Spain), Lino Enea Spilimbergo (born 1896, Buenos Aires; died 1964, Unquillo, Córdoba, Argentina) and Demetrio Urruchúa (born 1902, Pehuajó, Argentina; died 1978, Buenos Aires). Together, these artists collaborated to produce the renowned murals of the Galerías Pacífico in Buenos Aires.
Hyppolite, Hector (c. 1894–1948)
Authors: Dansie Marta
Published: September 2018

Haitian painter Hector Hyppolite (born: c.1894 (uncertain) in Saint Marc, Haiti; died: 1948 in Port-au-Prince, Haiti) is best known for his inventive depictions of Haitian religious practices called voodoo (vodou in Haitian Creole), and his portraits of spirits or loa. Hyppolite was one of Haiti’s most celebrated artists from the mid-20th century onwards, a period that has been termed a renaissance for Haitian art. Hyppolite joined the Centre d’Art, a studio and exhibition space for artists in Port-au-Prince, Haiti in 1945. In the three years before his sudden death in 1948 his work was prodigious, consisting of hundreds of paintings, exhibited in Haiti and abroad during his lifetime. Soon after Hyppolite delivered his first paintings to the Centre d’Art, André Breton bought several, displayed them in Paris, and claimed Haitian painting for Surrealism. Hyppolite’s prominence during the early days of the Centre d’Art, founded in 1944, made him a leading figure in Haiti’s so-called naïve art movement. Hector Hyppolite’s eccentric persona fuelled his popularity with foreign audiences. Collectors and critics were as fascinated by Hyppolite’s polemic lifestyle as much as by his paintings. Hyppolite clearly understood that myth-making is part of the modern artist’s toolkit. His untimely death in 1948, as his reputation as an artist was growing, left many questions about his life unanswered.
Michaux, Henri (1899–1984)
Authors: Hetrick Jay
Published: September 2018

Henri Michaux was a Belgian artist and writer who can be situated—however roughly—at the borders of Surrealism and Art Informel. At the age of twenty he dropped out of medical school in order to sail the world, setting in motion a restless series of voyages of expatriation that took him not only to South America, Asia, and finally to Paris, but also through several artistic mediums: poetry, fantastical stories, drawings, paintings, and one film. Stylistically, Michaux drew inspiration from the works of Comte de Lautréamont and Paul Klee. In the late 1950s, he frequently experimented with various drugs (mescaline, in particular) not in a hedonistic pursuit of pleasure, but instead in search of a kind of poetico-scientific knowledge of the inner movements of the mind, which he referred to as the marvelous normal (contrary to André Breton’s absolute marvelous). Although Michaux is perhaps most well known for his stories about a pseudo-autobiographical anti-hero named Plume, the entire trajectory of his visual work—first in his invented hieroglyphic Alphabets, then in his tachist paintings and mescaline drawings—can be seen as a series of failed attempts to create a means of expression adequate to the marvelous normal.
Precisionism
Authors: Root Colin
Published: September 2018

Precisionism was a modernist art movement during the 1920s and 1930s in the United States, in which painters produced a ‘‘machine aesthetic’’ by rendering precise, geometrical forms in their works. A group of American painters originally called ‘‘The Immaculates,’’ the Precisionists celebrated new industrial landscapes of skyscrapers, factories, bridges, and other mechanized phenomena. Although they were never a formalized school and worked without a manifesto, Precisionism reflected both the exciting dynamism of the ‘‘Roaring Twenties’’ as well as the streamlined simplicity of the Great Depression. Their images produced an ambivalent attitude toward mechanization, at once praising its efficiency while condemning its dehumanization. Appearing immediately after a host of other influential modernist movements such as Cubism and Futurism, Precisionists merged the impulse toward abstraction with a photographically realistic eye. While no artist worked exclusively as a Precisionist, there were several for whom it was a formative style. Perhaps the most prolific artists who produced Precisionist works were Charles Sheeler, Charles Demuth, and Georgia O’Keeffe. Together, these three painters and several others created a distinctly American brand of imagery that was a celebration of nationhood as much as a celebration of mechanization.
Regionalists, The
Authors: Kuykendall Lara
Published: September 2018

The visual artists known as the Regionalists rose to prominence in the United States during the 1930s. They advocated the use of realistic styles to depict the lives and environs of everyday Americans. The most well-known Regionalists were Thomas Hart Benton, Grant Wood, and John Steuart Curry, whose paintings and prints chronicled the agrarian Midwest. During the Great Depression, Regionalism was seen as a comfortingly accessible mode of art. It appeared to celebrate American cultural history using a realistic figural style that repudiated abstraction, which was understood to be a European import. The populist art group Associated American Artists successfully marketed and sold lithographs by many Regionalists to middle-class patrons across the country, thereby extending Regionalism’s influence to those who were not accustomed to owning works of art. The Regionalists’ views of American life were not exclusively flattering, but their approach differed from the critical approach of Social Realists like Ben Shahn or Philip Evergood, whose works illuminated injustices they perceived in contemporary life. The regionalist heyday drew to a close with the advent of World War II and the development of Abstract Expressionism.
Akhmatova, Anna (1889–1966)
Authors: Renner-Fahey Ona
Published: September 2018

Anna Akhmatova was one of Russia’s most famous poets and arguably its most famous woman poet. During her formative years, she belonged to a literary movement known as Acmeism. The Acmeist poets — who included her first husband Nikolay Gumilyev, as well as the great poet Osip Mandelstam — strove to move away from the dominant Symbolist aesthetic and work toward higher clarity and precision. Akhmatova’s early lyric poetry found great success, but the Communist years proved very difficult for her. Her famous poems Poem Without a Hero [Poema bez geroia] and Requiem [Rekviem] address the oppressive historical period in which she lived.
Taeuber, Sophie (1889–1943)
Authors: Obler Bibiana
Published: September 2018

Artist Sophie Taeuber’s career spanned a variety of movements, including Dada and Constructivism, and media, such as textile arts, interior design, architecture, painting, and sculpture. Although based in Switzerland for most of her life, she was born a German citizen, became Swiss around 1905, and French in 1926. She received a progressive education at Wilhelm von Debschitz’s Teaching and Experimental Studios for Applied and Fine Arts, Munich (1910–1914), with a break in 1912–1913 to study at the School of Applied Arts, Hamburg. From 1916–1929 Taeuber was a professor at the Zurich School of Applied Arts, teaching textile design and weaving. Her turned-wood puppets and set designs for the play King Stag (1918), commissioned for the Zurich Marionette Theater, garnered critical acclaim. In addition to establishing a reputation as an innovative applied artist, Taeuber participated in Dada from its inception in 1916, partly as a result of her friendship with Hans Arp, whom she met in 1915, and also through her membership in Rudolf von Laban’s dance troupe, which performed at various Dada events. After World War I, Taeuber increasingly turned to interior architecture and fine art, leaving the applied arts almost entirely behind once she moved to Paris in the late 1920s.
Tamayo, Rufino (1899–1991)
Authors: Locatelli Valentina
Published: September 2018

A Mexican painter and muralist of indigenous heritage, Rufino Tamayo was one of the most important representatives of figurative abstraction and poetic realism in 20th-century Latin American art. A supporter of the universalistic approach to art, in the late 1940s he started a controversy—the so called ‘‘polémica Tamayo’’—by positioning himself against the classical Mexican school and its ‘‘Big Three,’’ the muralists José Clemente Orozco, Diego Rivera and Alfaro Siqueiros. Contrary to the stress they put on art as political, Tamayo focused on its poetic and emotional aspects. Tamayo’s art is based both on Mexican figurative traditions (characterized by the rigor and geometry of pre-Hispanic sculpture and its imaginative and magical character), and on the influence of European and North American avant-garde movements, especially Impressionism, Fauvism, Cubism, Futurism, Surrealism and Abstract Expressionism. His sensibility for nature and spirituality, his interest in ordinary people, and his ability to synthesize different pictorial languages with Mexican folk art and beliefs, have made him a very popular artist, nationally and internationally. Throughout his career Tamayo directed his effort ‘‘towards the salvation of painting, the preservation of its purity and the perpetuation of its mission as translator of the world’’ (Paz 1985: 23).
Yi Chung-sŏp (1916–1956)
Authors: Lee Jungsil Jenny
Published: September 2018

Yi Chung-sŏp was a modern Korean painter known for his expressionist style. Yi’s painting was strongly influenced by the brushwork of Korean painting and calligraphy but also by the bold black contours in the work of George Rouault (1871–1958), to the extent that Yi was called ‘‘Bunka’s Rouault.’’ In 1937, Yi went to Tokyo, where he entered the private Imperial Art School (now Musashino Art School) and then the Cultural School (Bunka Gakuin). At the latter, Yi studied with Tsuda Seishu (1907–1952), an avant-garde artist who helped Yi to realize the value of Korean traditional aesthetics and who encouraged him to integrate a Korean spirit into his art. With the advent of the Korean War in 1950, Yi fled south with his family. In the following years, despite Yi’s financial and psychological difficulties, he produced a large number of works in an expressionist style. In Japan, Yi was active in such avant-garde exhibitions as Dokuritsuten and Jiyuten from 1938 to 1943, winning recognition in the main art circles in Tokyo. In 1941, Yi joined several other Korean artists active in Tokyo to establish the strongly nationalistic Chosŏn New Artist Society [Chosŏn Shinmisulga Hyŏphŏe]. Once he returned to Korea, Yi suffered from extreme poverty as a result of the Korean War, to the extent that he could not support his family, who then went back to Japan. His first and last solo exhibition was held in Seoul in 1955.
Cuéllar Serrano Gómez (1933–1982)
Authors: Ulloa Miguel
Published: September 2018

Cuéllar Serrano Gómez (CSG) is a Colombian architectural, engineering, and construction firm, which was founded in 1933 in Bogotá by the engineer José Gómez Pinzón, the engineer-architect Gabriel Serrano Camargo, and the architect Camilo Cuéllar Tamayo. Pinzon trained at the Universidad Nacional de Colombia, and Cuéllar at the London Architectural Association. In the 1940s the architect Gabriel Largacha Manrique (who had also trained at the Universidad Nacional de Colombia) joined the staff. CSG played a leading role in the modernization of Bogotá—the Colombian capital—and of the country in general. The firm’s extensive work includes projects carried out all over the country, which are as much architectural as engineering in scope. It led the way in introducing technological developments in local construction, either by importing modern technology, or by implementing new technologies tinged with local design, so that by the mid-20th century CSG was known as one of the most cutting-edge firms in Latin America.
Inclán, Pedro Martínez (1883–1957)
Authors: López Alberto José-Antonio
Published: September 2018

The urban development of modern Havana and the emergence of a planning discourse in Cuba owes much of its existence to the efforts of architect, urbanist, and professor Pedro Martínez Inclán. Through his authorship of urbanist texts and discussions that were widely disseminated among the local profession, position as a reformer through his involvement in such influential institutions as the Patronato Pro-Urbanismo [Pro-Urbanism Foundation], and role as a pedagogue to a generation of young modernists, Martínez Inclán may be regarded as one of the most important figures in the genesis of a school of Cuban regional modernity, and more importantly a locally contextualized functional Urbanism.

A native of Cienfuegos, Cuba, Pedro Martínez Inclán immigrated to the nation’s capital in 1899, eventually beginning his studies in architecture at the University of Havana’s School of Engineers and Architects. Graduating from said institution in 1910, he joined the profession and from 1913 to 1933 held the position of municipal architect of Havana. He was responsible for the first Plan Director de La Habana [Master Plan of Havana] during the presidential administration of Mario García Menocal (1913–1921), and in 1925 published a book on his views on urban design and beautification including a hypothetical 100-year design projection for a future Havana ironically titled La Habana Actual [Current Havana]. His claims that Havana’s beautification was to go hand in hand with a renewal in arterial infrastructure through broad avenues and parks predated the involvement of French planner and landscape architect Jean-Claude Forestier, who visited Cuba extensively and produced a body of planned work for the island’s capital between 1925 and 1930.
Migge, Leberecht (1881–1935)
Authors: Poppelreuter Tanja
Published: September 2018

Leberecht Migge was a German landscape architect and writer. During his early career he collaborated with architects Hermann Muthesius and Henry van de Velde. Considered pioneers of modernist architecture, van de Velde and Muthesius (among others) were the founding members of the influential DeutscherWerkbund (1907–1934, 1950--), a German association of architects, designers, and industrialists that Migge joined in 1912.

During the 1920s Migge worked on large-scale settlement projects with Bruno Taut and Martin Wagner in Berlin (Onkel Tom’s Hütte [1926–31] and Berlin-Britz aka Hufeisensiedlung [1925–1931]), and with Ernst May in Frankfurt am Main (Römerstadt [1926–1930]). The economic crisis that followed World War I caused a severe housing shortage and in Berlin, as in Frankfurt, large-scale building programs were initiated to improve the living conditions of the working class. Gardens were incorporated into the plans of these new settlements, giving tenants easier access to nutritious foods, protecting them from fluctuating food prices, and providing spaces for physical exercise.

Having collaborated on some of Germany’s most influential settlements of the 1920s, published extensively, and completed a range of recognized projects, Migge was one of the most prolific landscape architects of his time.
Blanco, Juan (1919–2008)
Authors: Quevedo Marysol
Published: September 2018

Juan Blanco was a Cuban composer known for his work in the field of electroacoustic music. He did not limit himself to electroacoustic music composition, creating works for a variety of performing forces and settings, including chamber ensembles, choir and orchestra, symphonic orchestra, film music, ballet, and theatre. After 1959, he was an active figure in the cultural institutions established by the Revolutionary government. He not only promoted modern and avant-garde music but was also influential in the promotion of Cuban popular music and musicians.

Born June 29, 1919, in Mariel, Pinar del Río [Havana province], Cuba. Blanco moved to Havana in 1935, receiving a bachelors degree at the Instituto de Segunda Enseñanza in Havana. In 1942 he received his law degree from the Universidad de La Habana. He initially studied piano, solfege, and music theory with Leonor Feliú and, later, harmony and counterpoint with Manuel Llanes at the Conservatorio Peyrellade. In 1949, the foundation of the Sociedad Cultural Nuestro Tiempo, named Blanco secretary of the group, a position he filled until the group dissolved. Blanco ran the group’s music Section and administered the Revista Nuestro Tiempo. The Sociedad and its magazine was one of the main outlets for progressive intellectuals and for those interested in culture and the promotion of new literature, music, theatre, and visual arts in Havana society.
Scott, Michael (1905–1989)
Authors: O’Brien Sorcha
Published: September 2018

Michael Scott was the foremost proponent of modern architecture in Ireland during the mid-20th century. He specialized in public commissions, particularly hospitals and transport hubs, as well as private houses. His rural hospital designs in the late 1920s and 1930s were influenced by the work of the Finnish architect Alvar Aalto and the Dutch architect J. J. P. Oud, and emphasized linear horizontal masses, often finished with decorative limestone cladding. He was responsible for promoting the International Style both to Irish architects and the Irish government in the 1930s, and designed the award-winning Irish Pavilion at the 1939 New York World’s Fair. His later work was characterized by the sculptural use of white concrete forms (as in his own home Geragh), and the integration of artwork, bringing color and texture into his buildings. He is best known for the Corbusian design of the Dublin central bus depot Busáras, which used asymmetric organic shapes and incorporated colored mosaics on the exterior. He influenced several generations of Irish architects through his practice, and was awarded the RIBA Gold Medal for the Promotion of Architecture on his retirement in 1975.
Sakakura, Junzo (1901–1969)
Authors: Robinson Joel
Published: September 2018

Sakakura was a Japanese architect. Born in Gifu Prefecture, he lived primarily in Tokyo, where he set up a practice in 1940. His studies in Art History at the Tokyo Imperial University (1923–1927) were followed by a two-year course in construction that prepared him for a career in Le Corbusier’s Paris workshop, which lasted over five years. He visited Paris again in 1937 for the fifth meeting of the International Congress of Modern Architecture (Congrès internationaux d’architecture moderne—CIAM) and to design the prize-winning Japanese Pavilion for that year’s International Exposition. With his country at war, and few resources available at home, Sakakura committed himself to researching prefabrication in housing, and designed a residential plan for a Manchurian town in 1940. Influenced by Jean Prouvé, he operated the National Institution for the Wartime Construction of Prefabricated Architecture between 1942 and 1945. His first major commission, realized in 1951, was Kamakura’s Museum of Modern Art. The building is a Corbusian prism raised over a pond on stilts, signifying a respect for tradition—something Sakakura’s Bamboo Chair (1949) had already demonstrated. From the late 1950s on he designed a number of projects for town halls, train stations, and urban plazas. Sakakura’s status as director of the Japanese exhibitions at Milan Triennale from 1957 to 1960, coupled with his role as a consultant in the planning of Osaka’s Expo ’70 just prior to his death, secured his reputation as one of the giants of architectural modernism in Japan.
Scharoun, Hans Bernhard Henry (1893–1972)
Authors: Kiessel Marko
Published: September 2018

Born in Bremen and raised in Bremerhaven, Hans Bernhard Henry Scharoun was a German architect and major proponent of expressionist and organic architecture. He studied for several years at the Technical University of Berlin, but his studies were interrupted by the beginning of World War I in 1914. Following the war, Scharoun worked on reconstruction in East Prussia and as a freelance architect. Prior to World War II, Scharoun’s building activity covered East Prussia, Wrocław (Breslau), and Berlin; after 1945 he continued his work in West Germany. In the revolutionary atmosphere following World War I, Scharoun became a member of the short-lived expressionist group Die gläserne Kette [Glass Chain]. In 1926 he joined the architectural association Der Ring [The Ring], which promoted Neues Bauen [New Building], and was engaged with private and public housing projects until 1933. During World War II Scharoun remained in Germany, working on only a few residential commissions. The Soviet military government made him city architect of Berlin in 1945–1946, after which he accepted a professorship at the Technical University of Berlin. Scharoun enjoyed a prolific building career, beginning in the mid-1950s; however, it was cut short by his death on November 25, 1972, in Berlin.
The Abbey Theatre
Authors: Reynolds Paige
Published: September 2018

The Abbey Theatre is a term that has come to encapsulate the many iterations of the National Theatre of Ireland. Located in Dublin, the Abbey Theatre was originally and literally the name of a building purchased in 1904 by the theater’s English patron Annie Horniman. The precursor of the Abbey was the Irish Literary Theatre (ILT), founded in 1897 by Lady Isabella Augusta Gregory, Edward Martyn, George Moore, and W. B. Yeats. Like many modernist movements and institutions, the ILT articulated its aims in a founding manifesto that announced the intention to stage "certain Celtic and Irish plays" and to embody "that freedom to experiment which is not found in theatres of Europe and without which no new movement in art and literature can succeed" (Gregory 1965: 9). In 1902 the ILT merged with the acting company of W. B. Fay’s Irish National Dramatic Company, and in 1903 this company was named the Irish National Theatre Society. In 1906 it became the National Theatre Society, Ltd., a professional company under the directorship of Gregory, Yeats, and J. M. Synge. The Abbey remains today the national theater of Ireland, and also houses the smaller, experimental Peacock Theatre.
Coleman, Ornette (1930--)
Authors: Garlitz Dustin
Published: September 2018

Ornette Coleman is an American jazz alto saxophonist and composer. Coleman is considered one of the founders of the avant-garde movement in jazz, which he began performing and recording in the late 1950s. The saxophonist won the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 2007, awarded on the basis of his album Sound Grammar. Coleman became known in avant-garde jazz for leading a piano-less quartet of musicians on alto saxophone, as first documented on his 1959 album Tomorrow Is The Question!: The New Music of Ornette Coleman. Later that year, he signed a contract with Atlantic Records, who first released his new jazz album The Shape of Jazz to Come. Coleman pioneered a style of avant-garde music known as Free Jazz, or music that rested completely on free improvisation in collective settings distinct to modern jazz ensemble instrumentation. This was first documented in full on the self-titled release Free Jazz: A Collective Improvisation by the Ornette Coleman Double Quartet (1961), one that featured a print of a painting by Jackson Pollock as album art. Coleman has received high praise from major musicians, musical thinkers, and figures outside of the jazz tradition, most notably Leonard Bernstein and Virgil Thomson.
Enomoto, Kenichi 榎本 健一 (1904–1970)
Authors: Fukushima Yoshiko
Published: September 2018

A Japanese comedian, also known as Enoken, Enomoto initially created popular musical comedies in Tokyo’s downtown entertainment district Asakusa. His comedy style, containing elements from both Japanese and Western theater and popular entertainment, was a product of the modernism and liberalism of the Taishō period (1912–1926)—the age of ero-guro-nansensu (literally, erotic, grotesque, nonsense), and was erotically charged, frightfully new and nonsensical but attractive. His musical comedies led to the birth of the current-day wasei [Japanese-style] musicals.

Born in Tokyo, Enomoto became a student of the Asakusa Opera singer Yanagida Teiichi and made his stage debut in 1922 as a chorus member of the Negishi Opera Company. After the 1923 Great Kantō earthquake, he moved to Kyoto and played many minor roles in silent films. In 1929 Enomoto returned to Asakusa and joined the theater company Casino Folies specializing in Western-style revues and variety shows. In 1930 he formed his own troupe, New Casino Folies. His comic and energetic acting and amusing and speedy dialogs, inspired by Western cabaret performances and Hollywood talkies, were introduced in novelist Kawabata Yasunari’s The Scarlet Gang of Asakusa serialized in the Asahi Newspaper (1929–1930) and gained high popularity.
Geijutsu-za
Authors: Swain John D.
Published: September 2018

The first iteration of the Geijutsu-za (Art Theater) was founded in 1913 by the actors Shimamura Hōgetsu (1871–1918) and Matsui Sumako (1886–1919) after they were expelled from Tsubouchi Shōyo’s (1859–1935) Bungei Kyōkai for fraternization. The lovers, Matsui in particular, had been acclaimed for their acting with Bungei Kyōkai, and they continued their successes at the Geijutsu-za. Unfortunately, Shimamura succumbed in November 1918 to the worldwide influenza epidemic, and a distraught Matsui committed suicide two months later. As a result of their deaths, the company disbanded until it was reformed in 1924 by one of the original members, the playwright and director Mizutani Chikushi (1882–1935). The revived company endured until 1945.

The company’s successes from 1913–1918 were the result of Shimamura’s promotional talent capitalizing on the daring charisma of Matsui. The novelty of seeing real women, banned from the Tokyo stage for almost three centuries, and Matsui’s talent and her artistic rivalry with Kawakami Sada Yakko (1871–1946), created a rich vein for Shimamura to mine. In the second Geijutsu-za offering, Matsui created a sensation playing Oscar Wilde’s Salome. The company’s third production, Shimamura’s adaptation of Tolstoy’s Fukkatsu [Resurrection] in 1914, with Matsui playing the role of Katsusha, was one of shingeiki’s greatest popular and commercial hits.
Glaspell, Susan (1876–1948)
Authors: Gainor J. Ellen
Published: September 2018

Susan Glaspell shaped the development of American Modernism not only as an award-winning author but also as a founding member of the Provincetown Players, the groundbreaking theater company that nurtured other American modernists such as Eugene O’Neill.

Although she spent most of her career on the East Coast, Glaspell hailed from Davenport, Iowa, and attended Drake University in Des Moines. While still a teenager, she began working in journalism; after college, she joined the staff of the Des Moines Daily News, covering the State Legislature and criminal trials. Glaspell also began to write short fiction and soon decided to pursue creative writing exclusively, publishing her first novel, The Glory of the Conquered (1909), while continuing to place stories in leading magazines.
Hijikata, Yoshi (1898–1959)
Authors: Zheng Guohe
Published: September 2018

A shingeki director and one of the most important early leaders of the modernist movement in Japanese theater, Hijikata Yoshi was the cofounder of the Tsukiji Shōgekijō and an active force in Soviet-Japanese theatrical interactions.

Born into an aristocrat family, he lost his father as an infant and grew up in the houses of his maternal and paternal grandparents. Thanks to the theater-going traditions of both families, he was exposed from an early age to theater, both traditional and its emerging modern counterparts. This led to his creation, with friends, of two amateur theatres, at the age of thirteen and eighteen. At the age of twenty one, he directed The Death of Tintagiles by Maurice Maeterlinck. His choice of this mystical piece was criticized as being detached from life and reflecting his aristocratic upbringing, a criticism that "hit my weakest spot" leaving a permanent impact on him. The impact was intensified later by the realistic and engaging stage of Hirasawa Keishichi’s Worker’s Theater. It was a sharp contrast with the theater as he had known it hither to, as rich man’s pastime. Determined to make the theater his career around this time, he became a disciple of Osanai Kaoru and together they established theater directing as a respected profession in Japan.

When his paternal grandfather died of Spanish influenza in 1918, he inherited from him the title of Count. While a college student and an apprentice director he was able to accumulate a large amount of wealth, paying off family debts. Unable to stand the Japanese theater establishment of the time and in prossession of a fortune, he left for Europe in November 1922 to study Western theater.
Little Theater Movement
Authors: Chansky Dorothy
Published: September 2018

The Little Theater Movement comprised a web of amateur theater activities undertaken across much of the United States between 1912 and 1925. Little Theater opposed commercialism; its proponents believed that theater could be used for the betterment of American society and for self-expression. Little Theater founders and participants included playwrights, professors, liberal political activists, social workers, lawyers, heiresses, poets, actors, aesthetes, journalists, housewives, and students. They drew inspiration from the best-known work of the European Independent Theater Movement and from the design aesthetics of Adolphe Appia, Edward Gordon Craig, and Max Reinhardt. Eventually their values affected commercial theatre.

The Little Theater Movement is best known for four of its earliest companies: the Provincetown Players, the Washington Square Players, the Chicago Little Theater, and the Neighborhood Playhouse. No two of these were alike, suggesting the breadth and variety of the movement’s undertakings. The Provincetown Players started in 1915, when a group of New York-based writers and activists assembled at their summer beach haunt in Massachusetts to present short, original plays. The founders were idealist George Cram Cook and his writer wife, Susan Glaspell; the group is perhaps best known for giving Eugene O’Neill his start as a produced playwright. The Washington Square Players was also started by a group of iconoclastic New Yorkers. The WSP’s mission was not, however, the production of member-written, American plays, but rather the production of a variety of plays from many sources.
Itō, Michio (1893–1961)
Authors: Swain John D.
Published: September 2018

Itō Michio’s creative endeavors spanned dance, theatre, and film, just as his career spanned the Pacific and the Atlantic Oceans, however, his life as a creative artist was one of World War II’s international cultural casualties. After decades of work with people such as W. B. Yeats in Ireland, the Washington Square Players and Martha Graham in New York, and the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles, Itō was repatriated to Japan in 1943 where he continued to teach and choreograph until his death. The first son of an old samurai family whose parents encouraged their children to pursue any avenue of interest, Michio was the elder brother by eleven years of Itō Kunio, aka shingeki theater director Senda Koreya.

Itō collaborated with Yeats on his Plays for Dancers, and is probably best known for creating the role of the Guardian of the Well in (At the Hawk’s Well) 1916. His work as a dancer and choreographer in the United States is not as well remembered because almost none of that extensive body of work was preserved. He was to choreograph the opening and closing ceremonies of the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, but did not live to see that project materialize.

Itō left Japan for Europe in 1912 to study voice. Once in Germany he became disillusioned with opera, but was entranced by the dance of Isadora Duncan, Pavlova, and Nijinsky. He decided to study modern dance, and entered the Dalcroze Institute in 1913. Much of his later work is influenced by eurythmics.
Free Jazz
Authors: McClure Daniel
Published: September 2018

Free Jazz emerged in the late 1950s out of the ongoing negotiation of the American jazz tradition. By the mid-twentieth century, this African-American musical tradition had developed into an array of styles variously linked to New Orleans (Dixieland) or Chicago School (1920s), swing (1930s), and bebop (1940s). If swing embodied an industrialized modern evolution of New Orleans-style jazz (deemed traditional), bebop brought the modernist ethos to jazz by attacking what some critics suggested swing was becoming: too popular, too banal and uniform. Consequently, bebop—through innovators such as Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker—disrupted the unifying structures of big band swing while complicating the musical elements of rhythm, harmony, and melody. The contours of bebop’s own progeny—the styles associated with hard bop, cool jazz, and Third Stream—gave form to free jazz. The primary innovators of Free Jazz all came from the cutting edge of 1950s hard bop and sometimes rhythm and blues, but were also influenced by the modernist, avant-garde strains in classical music in the 1940s and 1950s (which also found expression in the musical arrangements in Third Stream and cool jazz). Free jazz musicians attempted to break from the confines of Western musical tenets, European tonal harmonic theory, and the dominance of the composer—the notated score that characterized jazz compositions through bebop—while renewing the collective improvisation of New Orleans-style jazz through spontaneous interaction within a group. Free jazz musicians placed a renewed emphasis on spontaneously improvised melodies and unfixed rhythms.
Kubo, Sakae (1900–1958)
Authors: Swain John D.
Published: September 2018

Kubo Sakae was a leading shingeki playwright prior to World War II, and a shingeki socialist hero afterward. His greatest dramatic work is the epic Kazanbai-chi [Land of Volcanic Ash] (1937–1938) about the exploitation of peasant labor on farms in the northernmost-Japanese island of Hokkaido where he was born. His heroic status stems from his arrest in 1940 as a communist, his refusal to recant his socialist beliefs, and his imprisonment until the war’s end.

Although Kubo returned to writing and socialist activism after the war, political divisions within the socialist movement and in shingeki stymied his further success. In an act of personal despair and political theater (some say petulance) intended to jolt competing factions within the socialist movement to unite, Kubo committed suicide in 1958.

Kubo joined the Tsukiji Shōgekijō in 1926 after graduating from Tokyo University with a degree in German literature. He began translating plays from German. In 1928 Kubo joined Hijikata Yoshi’s new troupe, the New Tsukiji Company, and began writing his own works. The company produced Kubo’s first play of note in 1930. Shinsetsu Kokusenya gassen [The New Tale of the Battle of Coxinga] drew on ancient Chinese and Japanese lore.
Synge, John Millington (1871–1909)
Authors: Reynolds Paige
Published: September 2018

J. M. Synge (pronounced "Sing") is best known for his plays, first staged at Dublin’s Abbey Theatre, that vividly depicted rural life in Ireland. His early intellectual interests resembled those of many modernists: he traveled throughout Europe as a young man, studying language at the Sorbonne in Paris and music in Germany and Italy; he read Darwin, Baudelaire, Mallarmé, and Nietzsche, among other innovative thinkers; he published in forward-thinking periodicals. The Irish myths and tales of Lady Gregory and the beauty of the Irish language, along with the urging of W. B. Yeats, whom he met in Paris in 1896, lured Synge home to his native Ireland, where he would study closely the language and culture of the rural west. His intimacy with the cultures of the Aran Islands and the west coast of Ireland, where he lived for short stretches of time, is recorded in The Aran Islands (1907) and In Wicklow, West Kerry, and Connemara (1911), both of which included images by J. B. Yeats. Synge’s ear for language and dialect helped him to craft the poetic Hiberno-English that defined his dramatic dialog, and his eye for the nuances of Irish peasant culture is evident not only in his stage directions, but also in his photographs and travel writing.
Wannus, Saadallah (1941–1997)
Authors: al-Saleh Assad , Ziter Edward
Published: September 2018

Saadallah Wannus, Syria’s best known and most respected contemporary playwright, was born in Tartous province. His plays were deeply critical of Arab power structures and several of these plays were censored in Syria. However, his fame ensured their wide dissemination and shortly before his death from cancer his complete works were published in Syria in three volumes. Several scholars divide Wannus’s output into three periods. The first period represents Wannus’s experimentations with European Modernism, especially Expressionism and Symbolism. Typical of these movements, these plays are attentive to the stultifying social (and economic) conditions that oppress characters. The second period is often referred to as that of "politicizing theater," a phrase that Wannus discussed in the introduction to this play, Mughamarat ras al-mamluk jabir [The Adventure of the Head of Jabir the Mamluk] (1970). The period is marked by the use of indigenous tales and performance forms that directly engage members of the audience. Usually allegorical, these works draw audience attention to their own responsibility in creating and perpetuating the existing power structures. This period also marks Wannus’s engagement with Brecht. The late works feature a new attention to psychological complexity, specifically exploring how these psychologies are shaped by and help to shape oppressive power structures in the family and the state at specific historical moments.