bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Ku Ponung (구본웅, 具本雄) (1906–1953)
Authors: Lee Jungsil Jenny
Published: September 2018

Ku Ponung was a modern artist and critic active during the Japanese colonial period and the Korean War. Due to his spine curvature and eccentric personality, Ku was likened to the French painter Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1864–1901) and called "The Seoul Lautrec." Ku attended the Taiheiyō School of Fine Arts in Tokyo, where he was introduced to Fauvism, Expressionism, Surrealism, Cubism, and other modern Western art styles. He later pioneered the acceptance of these styles in Korea.

Many of Ku’s oil paintings were lost during the Korean War, but several portraits and still lifes survive. Ku worked closely with contemporaneous writers, and his friendship with the modern poet Yi Sang is well known. Ku also edited and published the literary magazine Ch’ŏngsaekchi. After the liberation of Korea from Japan in 1945, Ku worked to revitalize Korean art by experimenting with various formats and media, including traditional ink painting and newspaper illustration. His attempt at artistic revival continued, even during the turmoil of the Korean War.
Archives Internationales de la Danse [International Archives of Dance (AID)] (1931–1952)
Authors: Andus L’Hotellier Sanja
Published: September 2018

The Archives Internationales de la Danse (AID) was a pioneering dance foundation created by Rolf de Maré in Paris in 1931. Devoted to dance in all its forms and global manifestations, this unique venue comprised a dance museum, library, archive, a sociology and ethnography section, conference hall, and an exhibition and performance space. Created as a response to the institutional void for dance, AID focussed its activities in four general areas—exhibitions, choreography competitions, research, and publication. Between 1932 and 1947 AID produced thirteen exhibitions and three international choreographic competitions, in addition to promoting research through its collections and ethnographic projects, and publishing a quarterly journal, La Revue des A.I.D. (The AID Review), from 1933 to 1937. In a landscape marked by the preeminence of classical dance, AID supported modern forms of choreography, the exploration of non-Western traditions, and the creation of an innovative research environment.
Lassaw, Ibram (1913–2003)
Authors: Thyssen Esther T.
Published: September 2018

A sculptor of the New York School, Ibram Lassaw was born to Russian parents in Alexandria, Egypt. The family immigrated to Brooklyn, NY, in 1921, where Lassaw learned modeling, casting, and carving. He discovered avant-garde art at the Brooklyn Museum in 1926, and continued to study sculpture at the Clay Club from 1927 to 1932. An active participant in New York modernist circles, Lassaw was a founding member of the American Abstract Artists Group (1935), and The Club (1949). Lassaw’s interest in cosmic and religious themes culminated in abstract sculptures for Jewish synagogues, such as Pillar of Fire (1953) at Temple Beth El, Springfield, MA. Known for his web-like structures, Lassaw dripped, fused, and spattered metal, embracing the resulting accidental contours that accrued on his gridded designs, as in Galactic Cluster #1 (1958, Newark Museum). He wielded the oxyacetylene torch like a paintbrush and the intricately structured wires twist, turn, and redouble like skeins of paint by Jackson Pollock. His work was included in the 1959 Kassel Documenta, which showcased American Abstract Expressionism.
Latiff, Jaafar (1937--)
Authors: Galloway Charlotte
Published: September 2018

Jaafar Latiff, born in Singapore, established his reputation as an abstract artist in the 1960s. He was self-taught; however, his talent saw him easily find work as an art educator, a role in which he has continued for much of his career. After experimenting with Realism and later abstract painting, Latiff turned to the medium of batik—a well-known traditional technique for decorating textiles with strong ties to Malay and Indonesian identity—in the late 1960s. Latiff integrated the conventional techniques of batik with his abstracted art style, creating contemporary batik patterns that challenged preconceived ideas of tradition. He has continued to focus on the batik technique, further stretching the boundaries between tradition and transformation. Latiff’s abstractions are characterized by his generous use of color in large swaths, giving the impression of being worked on a canvas. Indeed, he experiments with acrylics in his batik works. More recently, Latiff has included Islamic motifs in some of his designs, adding a further layer of complexity to the understanding of batik, tradition, and cultural change. Recognized internationally as a leader in batik design and innovation, Latiff’s work is exhibited regularly in major exhibitions and his work is found in public and private collections.
Lim, Cheng Hoe (1912–1979)
Authors: Galloway Charlotte
Published: September 2018

Born in China, Lim Cheng Hoe moved to Singapore with his parents in 1919. Acknowledged as a notable early Singaporean artist, he showed artistic talent at an early age. In contrast to many of his contemporaries, he embraced Western art aesthetics, and was influenced by his early art teacher, the realist painter Richard Walker. Lim was greatly interested in painterly styles, and always strived to improve his own techniques. He is renowned for his excellent drawing skills, works in pastel, and watercolors. In 1969 he became a founding member of the Singapore Watercolour Society. His art practice was a passionate pastime while his work and family took precedence.

Lim’s best-known paintings are of river scenes; he and a group of his contemporaries became known as the Singapore River Artists. Lim is also known as a portraitist. His artworks attract a strong following among collectors and are skillful renditions of Singaporean life, depicting its people going about their daily routines and the natural world around them, and straddling the transition from a traditional society to a modern one. Lim’s works are held in a number of institutional collections including the National Heritage Board Singapore and National University of Singapore Museum.
Monochrome Movement [Tansaekhwa]
Authors: Supavatanakul Pitchapa Cheri
Published: September 2018

Monochrome painting, otherwise known in Korea as Tansaekwa, was an art movement that emerged after the Korean War, lasting from the late 1960s through to the 1980s. It rose to prominence during an era of strict censorship and rapid industrialization in the 1960s and the 1970s. The policies imposed by South Korea’s then-president Park Chung-hee restricted direct political messages, thus actuating the emergence of hidden themes in abstractions within the limitations administered by the state. The Monochrome movement’s pioneer, Park Seobo (1931--), worked both with abstract artists who were critical of the government and with the National Documentary Paintings Project, producing government-commissioned artworks that advocated nationalism. Through abstraction, Monochrome paintings can raise awareness without being overtly political, and still resonate Korean tradition without submitting to the confines of the artistic establishment of the time. The Monochrome movement responded not only to political censorship, but also to the established standards of the Korean art world, eliminating notions of representation and the distance that sets the image apart from the canvas.
Mughani, Kamal al (1943–2009)
Authors: Sherwell Tina
Published: September 2018

Kamal al Mughani was born 1943 in Gaza, and studied Fine Arts at the Academy of Fine Arts in Alexandria. Soon after his return to Palestine, the 1967 war broke out, following which he moved to the city of Ramallah in the West Bank, where he taught in United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) schools. He was imprisoned by the occupation forces between 1969–1972. In 1985 he established The Fine Arts School at Al-Najah University in Nablus, and was a member of the Palestinian Association of Artists.

Al Mughani was known for his works that addressed the resistance struggle, using motifs such as the Palestinian map, the rifle, the dove of peace, the kufiyyeh, and the fedayeen (freedom fighters). Many of his works were printed as posters. In the 1980s, his paintings moved to explore Palestinian folklore. He created numerous works that included popular symbols, such as Palestinian traditional dress and handicrafts, where the Palestinian peasant woman was a recurring theme in his work, symbolizing steadfastness on the land and the keeper of traditions.

Al Mughani has received a number of awards during his lifetime, including the Soviet Artists Union Award in 1979; the Dundee Municipality Medal, Scotland, in 1981; and the Second Golden Sail Award, Kuwait, in 1989.
Nasiri, Rafa al- (1940–2013)
Authors: Shabout Nada
Published: September 2018

Born in Tikrit, Iraq, Rafa al-Nasiri earned a bachelor’s degree in printmaking from the Institute of Fine Arts in Baghdad in 1959. From 1959 to 1963, he pursued further studies at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing, where he studied printmaking with Huang Yu Yi. In 1967, he received a scholarship from The Gulbenkian Foundation to study at the Gravura in Lisbon, between 1967 and 1969. After returning to Baghdad, he headed the graphics department at the Institute of Fine Arts. He was a founding member of the New Vision Group (Jama’t al-Ru’yya al-Jadidah) in Baghdad, along with artists Dia Azzawi, Mohammed Muhriddin, Ismail Fattah, Hachem al-Samarchi, and Saleh al-Jumaie. After leaving Baghdad, al-Nasiri taught at the University of Yarmouk, Jordan, and at the University of Bahrain for several years before settling in Amman, Jordan. He is the author of a number of essays and books on Iraqi graphic art and Iraqi modern art. His experiments in printmaking have influenced the subsequent generations and played an instrumental role in the development of a strong tradition of Iraqi printmaking.
Nguyễn Phan Chánh (1892–1984)
Authors: Proctor Ann
Published: September 2018

Nguyễn Phan Chánh (also known as Hô`ng Nam) was a member of the first class of students at the École des Beaux-Arts d’Indochine, Hanoi, in 1925. Born in Hà Tĩnh Province, Chánh received a Sino-Vietnamese education prior to studying in Hanoi (1925–1930). He is known for scenes of village life painted on silk, previously considered a medium for ancestor portraits. Many of his early paintings included poems written in Sino-Vietnamese calligraphy. He developed a distinctly modern Vietnamese style of silk painting, using areas of flat color echoing the manner of local prints, to create tender paintings of subtle colors. His women are generally depicted in clothes typical of those dating prior to the introduction of the modern ao dai. During his lifetime his paintings were included in a number of overseas and local exhibitions. The Game of Squares (1931) was well received when it was exhibited in Paris in 1931. As one of the originators of Vietnamese modern art, Chánh lived through difficult war-years, at times painting patriotic, but never bellicose works. He taught art intermittently and was a member of the Vietnamese Fine Arts Association (1957–1983). In 1972, for his 80th birthday, a retrospective exhibition of his work took place at the Museum of Fine Arts, Hanoi.
Nikakai [Society of Progressive Japanese Artists] [二科会] (1914--)
Authors: Loh Kazuhara Eve
Published: September 2018

The Nikakai, or Second Section Association, was established in 1914 as a reaction to the Japanese government-sponsored exhibition known as the Bunten. The motivation behind the formation of the Nikakai was prompted by events happening within the Nihonga (Japanese-style painting) category at the Bunten. In 1912, officials at the Bunten divided Nihonga into two sections, with the additional section catering for submissions that were considered more progressive or that belonged to the "new faction" [Shinp] [新派]. The Yôga (Western-style) artists, on the other hand, increasingly felt similar dissatisfactions with the judging panel and wanted a separate category also. In 1913, a petition was made for their demands but was rejected. As a result, the Nikakai was set up the following year by Yamashita Shintarô [山下新太郎] (1881–1966), Ishii Hakutei [石井栢亭] (1882–1958) and other artists. The association also organizes exhibitions known as the Nikaten, which accepts submissions for painting (excluding Nihonga), sculpture, design and photography. Members of the Nikakai are said to be forbidden to submit to government-sponsored exhibitions such as the Bunten and Teiten. Today the association remains the largest independent oil painting organization in Japan.
Nseir, Leila (1941--)
Authors: Lenssen Anneka
Published: September 2018

Leila Nseir was one of the first women artists in Syria to achieve institutional recognition during the national art movement. In 1961 she traveled to Cairo to study oil painting at the Faculty of Fine Arts alongside other Syrian, Egyptian, and Arab students. The Cairo academic study structure emphasized technical skill and the observation of social and labor realities, which was crucial in defining the artistic values of her generation of politically aware artists. Upon returning to Cairo, Nseir worked as an art educator while also regularly exhibiting in national exhibitions. In the 1960s, her paintings explored themes of oppression and imperialist aggression. Active in the Syndicate of Fine Artists in the 1970s, she contributed to conferences and pan-Arab art exhibitions, and participated in sketching tours at refugee camps and fedayeen training programs. She began to develop a post-Cubistic style of simplified ink drawing. In later decades, Nseir primarily focused on representations of the female subject. Often working with acrylic colors and resist techniques, she painted arrays of stacked figures exhibiting signs of emotional and physical distress.
Ocampo, Galo (1913–1985)
Authors: Curtin Brian
Published: September 2018

Galo Ocampo was a Filipino painter known for rejecting academic tradition and embracing Western modernism. He worked as a curator for the Presidential Museum at Malacañang Palace, and was later appointed director of the National Museum. Ocampo graduated from the School of Fine Arts at the University of the Philippines. He later taught at the University of Santo Tomas and, in 1971, he led the Department of Fine Arts at Far Eastern University. Stylistically, his paintings showcase the influence of Cubism, Surrealism, and Expressionism on his works. Often blending Christian themes with references to Filipino indigeneity, one of his most controversial works—The Brown Madonna (1938)—uses Filipino subjects in its use of the "Our Lady and Child" image, while also including references to the Philippines (specifically, bamboo trees and a bahaykubo [vernacular house]). In 1956 the Archbishop of Manila sent Ocampo Rome to design stained glass windows for both the Santo Domingo Church and the Manila Cathedral. Ocampo was honored with a 1982 retrospective at the Museum of Philippine Art in Metro Manila.
Oiticica, Hélio (1937–1980)
Authors: Heeren Alice
Published: September 2018

Hélio Oiticica was born in 1937 in Rio de Janeiro and studied at the Museum of Modern Art in Rio de Janeiro with Ivan Serpa in the 1950s, later moving to New York and engaging with the 1960s artistic milieu in the United States. Oiticica was an exponent of the Brazilian modernism group Frente in the 1940s and early 1950s, and influenced by abstract geometric tradition the artist experimented with the two-dimensionality of the pictorial field to the point that his works in the late 1950s transitioned to participatory works. Together with other artists of the Neoconcrete group such as Lygia Clark and Lygia Pape, Oiticica’s trajectory marked an extremely important shift in Brazilian art towards sensorial works with a concern with the place for the spectators. The strategies of Oiticica, particularly from his break with the two-dimensional space, his engagement with marginalized members of Brazilian society, to his large installations sensorial and participative works of the 1960s and 1970s, influenced an entire generation of artists in Brazil and abroad, and his works are part of some of the largest collections of modern art in the world such as MoMA and Tate Modern.
Osman, Ahmad (1907–1970)
Authors: Radwan Nadia
Published: September 2018

Ahmad Osman was a prominent Egyptian sculptor and decorator. He studied at the School of Decorative Arts in Cairo under the English painter and decorator William Arnold Stewart (1882–1953). After graduating in 1927, he received a scholarship to study at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Rome. When he returned to Egypt in 1933, he was appointed professor at the School of Applied Arts in Giza (former School of Decorative Arts). He worked as the director of the Sculpture Department at the School of Fine Arts in Cairo in 1937 before establishing the Faculty of Fine Arts in Alexandria, where he became its first director in 1957. Osman was commissioned to sculpt and decorate several public monuments in Egypt. While his early sculptures employ characteristics of Italian classicism, his later works shifted to a more realistic style in depicting the features of the Egyptian peasants in their daily activities.
Pan no Kai (active 1908–1912)
Authors: Szostak John
Published: September 2018

Pan no Kai, or Pan Society, was a group of writers, poets, artists, and actors active in Tokyo from 1908 to around 1912. It was founded by Kinoshita Mokutarô (1885–1945), a medical doctor who, by avocation, was also active as a poet, playwright, and publisher of several periodicals, including Subaru. Kinoshita was an admirer of European culture, and named the Pan Society after the German cultural periodical Pan established in 1894 by Julius Meier-Graefe (1867–1935). Kinoshita held Pan Society gatherings at European-style restaurants situated near the Ryôkoku Bridge overlooking the Sumida River, which is considered Tokyo’s version of Paris’ river Seine. Meetings were informal affairs given over to discussing strategies for the reform and revitalization of Japanese art, literature, and theater, and to socializing over European food, wine, coffee, and music. In addition to Kinoshita, founding members included writers Nagata Hideo (1885–1949), Tanizaki Junichirô (1886–1965), and Nagai Kafû (1879–1959), oil painters Ishii Hakutei (1882–1958), Yamamoto Kanae (1882–1946), and sculptor and poet Takamura Kôtarô (1883–1956). At the group’s height of influence it included over forty members. Although the Pan Society sponsored no exhibitions and espoused no particular movement or style, it played an important role by fomenting wider interest in and knowledge of Western-style artistic modernism at a crucial time in Japan’s art and literary history.
Younan, Ramses (1913–1966)
Authors: Bardaouil Sam
Published: September 2018

Born into a middle-class family in Minieh, Egypt, Ramses Younan enrolled at the School of Fine Arts in Cairo in 1929. Due to an irreconcilable gap in creative and intellectual affinities between him and his peers and instructors, however, Younan dropped out in 1933 before finishing his diploma. In 1934, after obtaining a teaching certificate from the Syndicate of Higher Education, Younan took a job as an art teacher in a number of public schools in Tantah, Port-Said, and Cairo. In 1935, he joined The Call for Art Group founded by Habib Girji, which advocated the importance of art in the education of children. In 1939, he was one of the co-signatories of the manifesto "Long Live Degenerate Art," which was signed by thirty-seven mostly—but not exclusively—Egyptian artists and intellectuals living in Cairo at the time, who condemned the persecution of artists in Europe by Nazis and Fascists. In 1939, he and Georges Henein co-founded the Art and Liberty Group, comprising a number of intellectuals and artists who aligned themselves primarily with Surrealism. In 1941, Younan quit teaching to devote himself entirely to art and writing, and became the editor-in-chief of the leftist weekly magazine Al-Majalla Al-Jadida [The New Magazine]. He left Egypt for Paris in 1947 and worked in the Arabic Department of the French National Radio until 1956, while continuing to work as a painter and writer. After a brief time spent in the press office of the Egyptian Embassy in Paris, he returned to Cairo where he stayed until his death in 1966.
Rbati, Mohammed Ben Ali (1861–1939)
Authors: Powers Jean Holiday
Published: September 2018

Mohammed Ben Ali Rbati was an early Moroccan painter. While often referred to as an easel painter, he eschewed canvas in favor of using watercolors on paper. Rbati received early support from European artists in Tangier, where he lived for most of his life. In 1903, Rbati became the cook for Sir John Lavery, a royal portrait painter from England, and he began painting in the years that followed. Rbati had his first exhibition at the Goupil Gallery in London in 1916. Although Rbati had no formal arts training, his exposure to painting and the availability of watercolors in Tangier as a result of the sizeable British population awakened within him a desire to paint the daily scenes he was surrounded by. Rbati’s figurative watercolors on paper focus on Tangier, its Kasbah, and its inhabitants. The paintings depict a wide swath of the population, showing people walking through the streets or gathered in public squares, as well as scenes in cafés and other lavish interiors. Many of the watercolors depict large groups of men or women, and the focus is often on the larger scene than on individualizing details. Rbati consistently signed the front of his canvases, always in Arabic.
Reinhardt, Ad (1913–1967)
Authors: Marie Annika
Published: September 2018

Ad Reinhardt, the American painter and illustrator-cartoonist, was born in 1913 and raised in New York City. Reinhardt attended Columbia College, pursued graduate studies in Asian art at New York University, and taught art and art history for twenty years at Brooklyn College. As a painter, Reinhardt was committed to pure abstract painting—what he termed "art-as-art." His pursuit of abstraction brought him into contact with the American Abstract Artists in the 1930s, with the Abstract Expressionists in the 1940s, and with Color-field painting and Minimalism in the 1960s. The black square paintings, begun in 1960, are exemplary of his extreme formal reduction. Uniformly five by five feet and matte black, Reinhardt made these monochromatic paintings for the last six years of his life. Reinhardt was also a prolific illustrator and cartoonist. His work appeared in leftist publications such as the New Masses and P.M. and was used in support of political organizations such as the Artists’ Union and the American Artists’ Congress. His later cartoons were often directed at art-world corruption.
Butoh
Authors: Candelario Rosemary
Published: September 2018

The Japanese avant-garde dance, butoh, developed out of experiments and collaborations directed by Hijikata Tatsumi (1928–1986) and often involved Ohno Kazuo (1906–2010) in Tokyo beginning in the late 1950s. Butoh is stereotypically slow-moving, performed in white makeup, with shaved heads, and distorted faces and bodies. This dance genre cannot easily be pinned down to one set of movement techniques or aesthetics. Instead, its aesthetics exist on a spectrum traceable to styles established by Hijikata and Ohno. The former choreographed intricately detailed surrealist spectacles that resisted interpretation. The latter created fanciful and sublime improvised solos, aimed at expressing universal truths about life and death. As butoh has been disseminated and adapted around the world, the polarities between Hijikata and Ohno—structure versus improvisation, arbitrariness versus an assumption of unity of movement and emotion, spectacle and entertainment versus personal catharsis—are still operative. What all versions of butoh have in common is an image-based approach to generating movement, emphasis on the dissolution and transformation of the dancing subject, an intense physicality that may result in explosions of movement across the stage or a strictly contained tension beneath the surface of the skin, and themes such as death, sex, marginality, and nature.
Tantisuk, Sawasdi (1925--)
Authors: Galloway Charlotte
Published: September 2018

Born in Thonburi, Thailand, Sawasdi Tantisuk is a contemporary of Tawee Nandakwang; both artists were trained at Silpakorn University and the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome. As a prominent figure in early Thai modernism, Tantisuk favored watercolor, as its unforgiving and immediate characters resonated with his approach to art practice, which drew on the Buddhist philosophy wherein each action—in this case, brushstroke—cannot be undone. Tantisuk’s early works were in the impressionist genre, but following his four years in Rome, his work became more abstracted and geometric as he absorbed some of the major trends in Western art, with color and texture being characteristics of many oil paintings of the 1960s. As his career progressed, abstraction remained his favored approach to painting, though he maintained some realist elements in his watercolor outdoor scenes. Tantisuk used color to evoke emotion in his works, depicting both the serenity and wonder of the natural world and the bustle of Thai urban life. A consistent painter, he has received many awards throughout his career and has remained involved with the art profession. He received an Honorary PhD from Silpakorn University in 1991, and was Thailand’s National Artist (painting) that same year.
Stella, Frank (1936--)
Authors: Pocock Antonia
Published: September 2018

Frank Stella is a prominent American abstract artist whose deadpan aesthetic presaged Minimalism and Color Field painting. In contrast to the turbulent brushwork and improvisatory methods of Abstract Expressionism, Stella’s groundbreaking Black Paintings (1959) feature uniform surfaces and serial arrangements of forms. Born in 1936 in Malden, Massachusetts, Stella grounded his artistic education in non-objective painting. At the Phillips Academy, he studied with abstractionist Patrick Morgan, a pupil of Hans Hofmann. At Princeton University, he took studio courses with William Seitz, a scholar and practitioner of Abstract Expressionism; and Stephen Greene, an abstract painter and former student of Philip Guston. After graduating from college in 1958, Stella moved to New York City and produced gestural paintings of squares and stripes inspired by Mark Rothko and Jasper Johns. He soon abandoned painterly textures but retained the stripe as his signature motif. Stella’s work of the 1960s continued in the vein of his Black Paintings, but evolved to include metallic and Day-Glo pigments and shaped canvases. After 1970, his paintings assumed sculptural dimensions and incorporated expressionist brushwork and exuberant arabesques. Stella has continued to develop his exploratory practice to the present day.
Tamari, Vladmir (1942--)
Authors: Sherwell Tina
Published: September 2018

Vladmir Tamari was born in Jerusalem in 1942 and is the brother of artist Vera Tamari and classical music singer Tayna Tamari. He studied physics and art between 1957 and 1963 at the American University of Beirut and continued his studies at St Martin’s School of Art in London. He moved to Japan in 1970 and has lived in Tokyo for over 40 years. For his political activities, he was held for three days in an Israeli prison when returning from a family visit in 1976, and has lived in exile ever since. Tamari has been active in parallel careers as an artist, inventor and physicist. He invented and built three-dimensional drawing instruments inspired by the work of Buckminster Fuller. He also worked extensively in typography and published on Arab typography and fonts in the early 1970s. He designed the Al Quds font and patented an idea for unified letter endings. He worked with artist Mona Saudi on a book of drawings and interviews with Palestinian refugee children. Tamari primarily works in watercolors influenced by memories of the geography of his homeland and its people. His work explores vibrant images of landscapes in different degrees of abstraction and complex compositions of the pictorial space. His paintings have evolved towards abstraction, where his interest seems to lie in the translucency of colors and in the effect of light, its refractions and transformations on forms and surfaces. This also follows his scientific investigations through the invention of various optical instruments.
Varma, Raja Ravi (1848–1906)
Authors: Xaviers John
Published: September 2018

Raja Ravi Varma transformed the way Indian gods and goddesses were pictured, and he did so with oil painting—a new import in 19th-century India. By the last quarter of the 19th century, when Western art had long rejected Salon art and a modernist explosion in painterly surface was imminent, the auto-didact Raja Ravi Varma started to paint in an academic realistic style. His interaction with Western oil painting can be regarded as the advent of modernism in Indian art. It may sound paradoxical to consider the adoption of Western academic realism as modernist but in this instance, Varma’s modernism was a break from various folk or classical Indian painterly traditions. The role of the aristocratic gentleman artist, which Ravi Varma performed, differed from traditional artisans in that it entailed a scientific temperament in art-making, with awareness of anatomy, geometry (perspective), and color theory. Many scholars have claimed that Raja Ravi Varma forged a "visual unity" in India through his calendar art—chromolithographs created with imported German technology—which circulated throughout India. His work visually unified the Hindu pantheon, which had until then been as iconographically diverse as the number of dynasties that had ruled across ancient India.
Wanly, Adham (1908–1959)
Authors: Radwan Nadia
Published: September 2018

Born in the neighborhood of Muharram Bey in Alexandria, Egypt, Adham Wanly is a leading figure of Egyptian modern painting. In 1929, together with his elder brother, Seif Wanly, he joined the studio of the Italian painter Ottorino Bicchi (1878–1949), who was a follower of the Italian Macchiaioli. After Bicchi introduced them to outdoor painting and capturing the light, colors, and shades of nature, the Wanly brothers established their own studio in Alexandria in 1935. During the 1950s, they traveled regularly to Europe, where they painted numerous landscapes, as well as ballet, opera, and theater performances. In 1957, they were named professors at the Faculty of Fine Arts in Alexandria. Two years later, the Ministry of Culture commissioned them to record the architectural heritage of Nubia before its flooding due to the construction of the High Dam in Aswan. Adham Wanly was also a talented caricaturist and regularly published his satirical drawings in Egyptian newspapers.
Warashoon, Decha (1945--)
Authors: Galloway Charlotte
Published: September 2018

Decha Warashoon was a member of the vanguard of Thai artists who brought Southeast Asian art to international attention. After graduating from the Fine Arts program of Silpakorn University in 1969, Warashoon established himself as an artist of note, winning multiple national Thai art competitions. His time at Silpakorn coincided with an overhaul of teaching methods in the arts that saw contemporary Western modernist styles actively incorporated into the curriculum. He experimented with abstraction and Minimalism, incorporating painting, printmaking, watercolors, and mixed media.

Warashoon continues to develop his artistic style, incorporating geometric and sinuous forms created in mixed media. His works are often inspired by emotional responses to life experiences, and bring together texture and muted colors. A retrospective of his works was held at the National Gallery in Bangkok in 2003, and in 2007 he was named National Artist of Thailand in the Graphic Arts, and has since taken up the post of professor at King Mongkut’s Institute of Technology at Lat Krabang.
Wood, Beatrice (1893–1998)
Authors: Rohrer Thelma
Published: September 2018

An American potter known for luster-glaze chalices and whimsical ceramic figures, Beatrice Wood was once named the "Mama of Dada." Born on 3 March 1893 into a wealthy family in San Francisco, California, raised in New York City, and a student at the Académie Julian in Paris, Wood rebelled from her traditional upbringing by 1912. Seeking a more bohemian life, she joined avant-garde art circles, became friends with Marcel Duchamp and Henri-Pierre Roché, and was influential in the New York Dada movement. During the 1930s, her early successes in ceramics provided independent income and, by 1948, she settled in Ojai, California, to continue her interest in theosophy. She established a studio developing embedded luster glazes with radiant colors and continued this work for over thirty years. Wood was recognized as a "California Living Treasure" by her native state, named an "Esteemed American Artist" by the Smithsonian Institution, and partly inspired the character "Rose" in the 1997 film Titanic. She died on 12 March 1998 at the age of 105.
Zaini, Jassim (1943–2012)
Authors: Touati Samia
Published: September 2018

Jassim Mohamed Zaini was a leading figure in the development of the fledgling Qatari art scene in the 1960s. Zaini was one of the few artists who witnessed the significant social and economic changes that Qatar underwent during the 1950s and 1960s, especially with the discovery of oil. To document his environment, Zaini resorted to realism to create works that depicted local and Gulf scenes, events and customs. However, Zaini did not confine his creativity to a given style or technique. He engaged with various styles including abstraction, Expressionism, Cubism, Impressionism, and Surrealism to highlight aspects of his subjects and the themes of identity and cultural heritage. Zaini exhibited widely, both locally and in the Middle East and North Africa. He was awarded a certificate of honor in the Arab Artists exhibitions in 1985, the Museum Award for GCC countries Riyadh in 2007, and the Qatar Gratitude Reward in Science, Art and Literacy, Doha. Following his death, a retrospective exhibit titled Jassim Zaini was held at the main activities hall at the Cultural Tower under the auspices and presence of His Excellency Dr Hamad Bin Abdulaziz Al Kuwari, Minister of Culture, Arts and Heritage, on 24 December 2013.
Zao Wou-ki (趙無極) (1921–2013)
Authors: Wu Yao
Published: September 2018

Zao Wou-ki was a French artist of Chinese birth active in the latter half of the 20th century. His paintings are stylistically akin to those of the abstract Expressionists, while paying homage to Chinese ideographic tradition. Born into a cultured family, Zao enrolled in the National Hangzhou Art Academy in 1935, where he was appointed an instructor in 1941 on the recommendation of his teacher, Lin Fengmian (林風眠, 1900–1991). Zao settled in Paris in 1948, and soon established himself in the French art world. Here, he was able to develop a synthesis of Western lyrical abstraction and Chinese poetic landscape. Through gestural brushwork and color washes, his oil canvases suggest light, space and movement, without recourse to legible imagery of nature. His prints, often reproduced as book illustrations, bear similar rich qualities and have further enhanced his reputation. Zao made public appearances during his visits to China in the 1980s and inspired young artists to experiment with abstraction. Naturalized as a French citizen in 1964, Zao was elected a member of the Académie des Beaux-Arts in 2002.
Afrocubanismo in Music
Authors: Rey Mario
Published: September 2018

Afrocubanismo was an esthetic trend in art music during the first half of the twentieth century focusing on African cultural features in Cuban society. The movement gained expression in the works of a seminal group of composers whose artistic production reflected neo-nationalistic musical concerns, thus emphasizing the manipulation of timbral and rhythmic elements in a modern harmonic vocabulary. These musical experiments marked a significant juncture in the evolution of Cuban concert music and forged an inclusive representation of race in the reformation of national cultural identity.

Responding to a period of political turbulence and financial decline, a group of progressive intellectuals, journalists, and members of the artistic community committed to cultural reconstruction established the Grupo Minorista in Havana in 1923. Well aware of Cuba’s ambivalent attitudes towards its African heritage, the circle sought to explore the roots of Cubanness in order to forge a more inclusive, decolonized revision of Cuban cultural history.
Miguel Aguilar Ahumada (1931--)
Authors: Díaz Nicolás Masquiarán
Published: September 2018

Miguel Aguilar Ahumada is a Chilean composer, academic, and musicologist. His value in the Chilean and Latin American musical panorama lies in his role as a key figure for understanding the development of musical institutions outside the main centres of production. His work is a benchmark in the singular transition to Chilean avant-garde music in the mid-twentieth century, particularly as an outstanding example on the adoption of the twelve-tone system. He was instrumental in promoting avant-garde music until the 1973 putsch compromised his ability to maintain his connections in Santiago. Aguilar received the Municipal Prize of Art in Music (1986), the Charles Ives Award for Composers (1996), the Regional Award in Musical Arts (2006), and the President of the Republic Award in the Classical Music category (2006).
Maderna, Bruno (1920–1973)
Authors: Roderick Peter
Published: September 2018

Bruno Maderna was an Italian composer and conductor, who made his name internationally at the Darmstadt Summer Courses in the 1950s and 60s. A musical prodigy, Maderna toured around Veneto with his family as young as age ten, amazing audiences with his violin virtuosity and intuitive conducting skills. His early life was unstable—his paternity was questioned and he lived with several guardians—and was further disrupted by the Second World War, when he was conscripted. His studies and burgeoning musical friendship with Luigi Nono was temporarily suspended, and a period serving in the Italian army was followed by involvement with the resistenza movement opposing Nazi occupiers in 1944; his membership with the Fronte di Liberazione led to his arrest in February 1945 by the S.S. After escaping the Germans, he joined with the Veronese partisans and fought in the war of liberation in the Po valley.
Cardew, Cornelius (1936–1981)
Authors: Venn Edward
Published: September 2018

Cornelius Cardew was a leading figure in British experimental music in the 1960s and a committed political activist in the 1970s. His earlier music, particularly that inspired by Cage, demonstrates on going concerns with the relationship between composer and performer, not least in the emphasis placed on improvisation. His later politically motivated music abandoned avant-garde and experimental principles in favor of a direct, tonal idiom. He died after a hit-and-run incident in East London.

Cardew’s musical education was conventional; first as a boy chorister at Canterbury Cathedral (1943–50) and then at the Royal Academy of Music (1953–57). He had a philosophical nature too, apparent in his enduring fascination with Wittgenstein’s Tractutus. Cardew familiarized himself early on with early-twentieth-century serialism and increasingly with the continental avant-garde: at nineteen, he gave (together with fellow student Richard Rodney Bennet) the London premiere of Pierre Boulez’s Structures I and taught himself guitar in order to participate in the 1957 London premiere of LeMarteau Sans Maître. Many of Cardew’s compositions of this era reflected such interests, as in his Piano Sonata No. 2 (1956).
Chávez (y Ramírez), Carlos (Antonio de Padua) (1899–1978)
Authors: Gibson Christina Taylor
Published: September 2018

Composer and conductor Carlos Chávez was a dominant force in Mexican musical life during the middle of the twentieth century. His most influential post was as director of the Symphony Orchestra of Mexico [OrquestaSinfónica, OSM], which he led from 1928 to 1948. While leading the OSM, Chávez successfully broadened concepts of classical music to include symphonic, contemporary works by Mexican composers. At the same time, he began an international guest-conducting career that continued into the final years of his life. Although best known for a handful of nationalist works composed in the 1920s and 1930s, Chávez’s compositions demonstrate a diversity of esthetic interests, from avant-garde abstraction to popular genres; regardless of the approach used in a given work, Chávez’s intellectualism and care are evident.
Dench, Christopher (1953--)
Authors: Toop Richard
Published: September 2018

Christopher Dench is one of a group of British composers who emerged in the early 1980s associated with the notion of New Complexity (other composers included Richard Barrett and James Dillon); the term was also applied to slightly older composers, such as Brian Ferneyhough and Michael Finnissy. Typical of their works were extremely intricate rhythms, often exquisite and highly personal calligraphy, use of microtones, and a generally radical approach to instrumental writing that often placed huge demands on performers.

Born in London, Dench is self-taught but, like many of his contemporaries, gained much from his contact with Michael Finnissy, the composer and pianist. In June of 1987, Dench emigrated first to Tuscany and, later, to Berlin on New Year’s Day, 1989, to take up a DAAD residency. Dench ultimately relocated to Australia on Christmas Day of the same year and became an Australian citizen in 1992.
Domingo Santa Cruz, Wilson (1899–1987)
Authors: Díaz Nicolás Masquiarán
Published: September 2018

Wilson Domingo Santa Cruz was a lawyer, composer, and academic. His career was built upon several achievements in formative, artistic, and administrative fields, making him a key figure for understanding twentieth-century Chilean music. His influence is undeniable today, particularly through his creation of formative musical institutions in Chile.
Dance and Writing
Authors: Franko Mark
Published: September 2018

The centrality of dance to aesthetic modernism led to dance becoming a major preoccupation of modernist literature and a model for the generation of the literary text. Concurrently, given the emergence of dance modernism as a performance field, other forms of writing—critical, philosophical, anthropological, and psychoanalytic—emerged to explore the phenomenon of dance as an important part of the contemporary world of art and culture. Dance artists themselves have produced a significant amount of writing and theorization.

The early twentieth century generated a wealth of textual reflections on dance across a range of disciplines. Recognizing the fundamentally interdisciplinary characteristic of dance as reflected in the textual and visual documents of modernism, it is evident that dance is present in texts not appearing to address it directly, such as Marcel Mauss’s "The Notion of Body Techniques" (1935). In other words, to write of dance is not always to write about dance—dance movement, for instance, played an important role in modernist visual practices of abstraction. As a result, dance writing is not a distinct genre.
Donatoni, Franco (1927–2000)
Authors: Renaud Mitch
Published: September 2018

Composer and poet Franco Donatoni studied in Vienna before attending the Darmstadt summer music program, where he encountered Pierre Boulez and Karlheinz Stockhausen, among others. Donatoni took to the serial practices of Darmstadt but attempted to join them with John Cage’s project of separating the composer’s ego from the work of art. These encounters eventually led him to apply what he referred to as codes to found or borrowed material. In any given mature work, codes operate on multiple levels and control all musical parameters. His early experiments with codes, such as EtwasRuhigerimAusdruck (1967), aim for the creation of a work completely autonomous from its maker; however, Donatoni’s thinking gradually changed to acknowledge his role in the deployment of codes. Works like La souris sans sourire (1988) for string quartet demonstrate his self-defined joyous period, where he employed a wider range of materials. One of the clearest examples of his use of codes is his final piece Esa (In Cauda V) (2000), written for his student Esa-Pekka Salonen, which uses the musical spelling of Esa’s name and material from The Rite of Spring.
Gramatges [Leyte Vidal], Harold (1918–2008)
Authors: Rey Mario
Published: September 2018

Harold Gramatges was a leading composer, pianist, conductor, and educator during the second half of the twentieth century in Cuba. He was a founding member of the experimental music circle GrupoRenovación Musical and an advocate of contemporary national expression based on the mastering of the classic forms. His extensive catalogue reflects the synthesis of various esthetic tendencies with techniques of the musical avant-garde, and a compositional style frequently characterized by dissonant, contrapuntal procedures. He made important contributions to the country’s music education system.
Honegger, Arthur (1892–1955)
Authors: Waters Keith
Published: September 2018

Composer Arthur Honegger was one of a group of six young French composers, known as Les Six, in the forefront of post-WWI Parisian musical modernism. Les Six (Honegger, Francis Poulenc (1899–1963), Darius Milhaud (1892–1974), Georges Auric (1899–1983), Germaine Tailleferre (1892–1983), and Louis Durey (1888–1979)) frequently presented their work together. They were championed by author Jean Cocteau (1889–1963) and loosely associated with composer Erik Satie (1866–1925). Contemporary critics noted a seriousness and profundity to Honegger’s music that contrasted with that of the other members. Honegger’s instrumental compositions, such as his chamber and symphonic works, often cultivated large multi-movement formal structures. Several of his oratorios (for orchestra, chorus, and soloists) treated biblical topics. He also wrote operas, songs, music for ballet, and film scores. Early works, such as the 1921 oratorio Le Roi David and the 1923 symphonic work Pacific 231 (which musically depicts the acceleration and deceleration of a steam locomotive) helped seal Honegger’s international reputation as a modernist whose music was nevertheless eclectic and accessible. Much of Honegger’s music is characterized by strong motoric rhythms, use of counterpoint and contrapuntal devices (imitation and fugue), and an inclusive harmonic language that uses tonality, extended tonality, and atonality.
Mather, Bruce (1939--)
Authors: Bazin Paul
Published: September 2018

Bruce Mather is a Canadian composer. He first studied music at the Royal Conservatory of Music in Toronto (1952–57) and at the University of Toronto (1957–59), where he obtained a music degree in 1959, studying piano with Earle Moss, Alexander Uninsky, and Alberto Guerrero, and composition with Godfrey Ridout, Oskar Morawetz, and John Weinzweig.

Early in his career, Mather attended the summer festival of the Aspen Music School (1957–58). The festival became the site of a significant encounter for Mather; it was at the festival that he was introduced to Darius Milhaud, whose composition class he later registered in while studying in Paris. In addition to Milhaud’s class, Mather also enrolled in Olivier Messiaen’s class on music analysis. In 1960, Mather attended the Darmstadt summer courses where he met Pierre Boulez, whose orchestra-conducting classes he attended in Bâle (Switzerland) in 1969. Mather continued to alternate his study periods between France and America, until obtaining a masters degree from Stanford, California, in 1962 and a doctorate from the University of Toronto in 1967.

In 1974, the composer’s encounter with the franco-Russian composer Ivan Wyschnegradsky (1893–1979) marked a turning point in his career. A prominent pianist, Mather recorded the composer’s piano music with his wife, pianist Pierrette Lepage (b. 1939) and adopted Wyschnegradsky’s microtonal system of composition, which continues to mark his personal style.