bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Phillips, Duncan (1886–1966)
Authors: Pocock Antonia
Published: September 2018

Art collector Duncan Phillips founded one of the first museums in the United States devoted to modern European and American art. Incorporated in 1918 and opened to the public in 1921, the Phillips Collection predated the Museum of Modern Art (established 1929) and the Whitney Museum of American Art (established 1931). It was housed in Phillips’ childhood home, an 1897 Georgian Revival house in the Dupont Circle neighborhood of Washington D.C. After graduating from Yale University in 1907, Phillips pursued his passion for art; for the rest of his life, Phillips collected and wrote about art. The sudden death of his father in 1917 and older brother in 1918 prompted him to found a museum in their memory, originally called the Phillips Memorial Art Gallery. Phillips served as the museum’s director until his death in 1966, when his wife, the artist Marjorie Acker, took his place. When she died in 1972, their son, Laughlin Phillips, assumed directorship. Rather than pursuing comprehensiveness, Phillips developed in-depth collections of the works of his favourite artists, including Honoré Daumier, Pierre Bonnard, George Braque, Karl Knaths, Arthur Dove, John Marin, Oskar Kokoschka, and Paul Klee.
Fugard, Athol (1932--)
Authors: Ardoin Paul
Published: September 2018

Athol Fugard has been a novelist and memoirist (of sorts), but is best known for his pioneering political work in the theatre as a writer, director, and actor. He was often all three at once, as in the case of Blood Knot (1961, 1987), upon which extensive revisions to his original script emerged during his time as one of the play’s leads. A South African by birth, Fugard focused many of his most famous works on the meanings and consequences of Apartheid. These political explorations owe a debt to Bertolt Brecht in both their form and desired effect.

Fugard’s very Brechtian modernism returns its focus again and again to performance (often race as performance) and language (particularly the material nature of language). Characters in his plays frequently become play actors themselves, with their stacked performances aimed at opening a Brechtian rift (or eliciting a modernist shock) that forces audience interrogation of the very ideas of reality and performance. The Island (1972) features two political prisoners performing Antigone and debating whether costumes work to entrance or estrange.
Puvis (de Chavannes), Pierre-Cécile (1824–1898)
Authors: Raybone Samuel
Published: September 2018

Pierre Puvis de Chavannes was a French painter and draughtsman, active between 1850 and 1898. He achieved wide acclaim during his lifetime and profoundly influenced modernism. After the 1850s, Puvis produced two kinds of works which shared many formal characteristics, but differed greatly in intention and effect. The first strand consisted of large murals commissioned for various public buildings around France. In the 1860s, Puvis developed a decorative style based on a high-minded classicism, characterized by washed-out colors, flattened forms with little modeling, strongly outlined figures, rhythmically arranged compositions and a proto-modernist economy of brushstroke. Puvis was attentive to the architectural contexts of the murals: their flattened pictorial space harmonized with the two-dimensionality of the wall and their mute palette and repetitive composition matched the prevailing Beaux-Arts architectural style. The subject of these murals celebrated the values of bourgeois France: national patrimony, stability, tradition and the family. Puvis applied these decorative principles to the second strand of his work, private easel paintings. In contrast, these paintings frustrated easy interpretation; they depicted psychologically challenging, ambiguous, and unsettling scenes. It was to these highly innovative paintings that subsequent Post-Impressionist and Symbolist artists would look with greatest enthusiasm.
Redon, Odilon (1840–1916)
Authors: Handler Sophie
Published: September 2018

Odilon Redon was a French painter, printmaker, draughtsman, etcher, and pastellist. His ability to master various materials and techniques has often left him associated with no single oeuvre or style in particular. Nevertheless, Redon is chiefly considered a key visual artist of the Symbolism movement. His fierce rejection of realism, passionate endorsement of self-consciousness, and his interest in the relationship between image and text cemented Redon as a significant though often underestimated contributor to modernism. Redon’s belief that images should function equally well with or without text established the artist as a provider of a new form of illustration, which operated as a sort of visual stimulant more profound than mere words. Furthermore, the modernist tendency towards scrupulous and somewhat masochistic analyses of every aspect of existence, often manifested in aesthetic introspection, is clear in both Redon’s dreamy yet disturbing artwork and his journal entitled À Soi-même [To Oneself] (1867–1915). His relationship with key French writers, such as Charles Baudelaire and Stéphane Mallarmé, and his production of increasingly surreal and abstract artwork resulted in his adoption by a plethora of modernist movements, including art nouveau, Surrealism, Expressionism and Fauvism.
Sickert, Walter (1860–1942)
Authors: Furness Tom
Published: September 2018

Walter Sickert is widely acknowledged as one of the most important figures in modern British art. He was instrumental in furthering acceptance of Impressionist art in Britain and in the progression of modern British painting during the pre-war period in his capacities as both a painter and a writer for periodicals such as New Age. Sickert’s works demonstrate an abiding interest in the surface of pictures and the essence of paint as a material. The painting Minnie Cunningham at the Old Bedford (1892) shows Sickert at the confluence of his two great influences. Inspired by the tutelage of Whistler, its thin washes of wet paint and a shallow pictorial space depict a theatrical subject matter much favored by Edgar Degas. A decade later, in early 20th-century London, Sickert found his place as the elder statesman amongst artists including Spencer Gore, Harold Gilman and Malcolm Drummond in the Camden Town Group and London Group. Through his teaching at, among others, the Westminster School of Art, he imparted his devotion to everyday, urban subjects and his dispassionate recording of visual fact to future generations of figurative artists including William Coldstream and David Bomberg.
Bhirasri, Silpa (1892–1962)
Authors: Chotpradit Thanavi
Published: September 2018

Silpa Bhirasri (born Corrado Feroci) was an Italian sculptor and the first principal of Silpakorn University (formerly the School of Fine Arts, known as Rongrian Praneetsilpakam and Rongrian Silpakorn). He was a pivotal figure in the institutional development of modern art in Thailand in the 1930s and 1940s. As a state-hired sculptor who had resided in Siam (now Thailand) since the time of absolute monarchy, he sculpted the figure of King Vajiravudh (reigned 1910–1926) in 1925 in a classical style. After the 1932 Revolution, classical art, which had been the royal taste, was replaced with a stark classicism that emphasized the strong body and exaggerated muscles that one may also find in Fascist art. Bhirasri’s interests in classicism shifted in direction from naturalism to stark-realism after 1932 when art patronage changed hands from the court to the commoners’ government. His design for the bases of Democracy Monument depicting the scenes from the 1932 Revolution and Thais’ working lives showed this style of muscular bodies and was likely inspired by M. Piacentini’s The Arch of Victory in Italy. He was later honored by the state as the "Father of Thai modern art" and as the founder of the art education system.
Garner, Hugh (1913–1979)
Authors: Sharpe Emily Robins
Published: September 2018

Hugh Garner was a British-Canadian writer, journalist, and editor. His fictional writings reflect on the experiences of marginalized individuals, echoing his own early experiences of poverty and unemployment. Garner and his family moved from Batley, England, to Toronto, Ontario, when he was six years old, and settled in the working-class neighbourhood of Cabbagetown. The Great Depression forced Garner to leave high school in search of work to support himself and his family. He held a wide variety of jobs, working as a bicycle messenger, a factory labourer, a newspaper copy boy, and even riding freight trains across North America to pursue short-term and seasonal farm jobs. Politicized by these experiences, Garner volunteered in the Spanish Civil War, serving with the Abraham Lincoln Battalion of the communist International Brigades. After the Fascist victory in 1939, he enlisted with first the Royal Canadian Artillery and then the Royal Canadian Navy in World War II. With the war’s conclusion he returned to Toronto where he made a career of his writing, managing to support his wife, Alice Gallant, and their two children, Barbara and Hugh Jr, through the publication of short stories, novels, plays, radio and television scripts, and articles, and through his editorial work at Saturday Night Magazine and New Liberty Magazine.
Spratling, William (1900–1967)
Authors: Morrill Penny
Published: September 2018

North American architect, artist, silversmith, and author William Spratling left an active artists’ community in New Orleans’ French Quarter in 1928 to join a circle of intellectuals in Mexico City. Spratling’s desire to stay in Mexico, coupled with the cultural and economic changes that were taking place as a result of the Mexican 1910 revolution, led Spratling to establish a small silver workshop in Taxco. From his perspective, this small mountain town had been producing silver for hundreds of years without benefiting its own people. This tiny workshop, the Taller de Las Delicias, in which craftsmen produced silver jewelry and decorative objects, tinware, and woven textiles, rapidly developed into a large-scale handwrought industry. Spratling’s success was dependent on five key ingredients: the presence of a designer/director; the workshop setting in which advancement was based on accomplishment; the use of traditional materials that were locally available; designs based on pre-Columbian art and contemporary folk crafts; and the development of a market for Mexican silver. His lasting contributions are his powerful works in silver, his donation of hundreds of pre-Columbian objects to museums in Mexico, and the training of silversmiths and maestros, many of whom established their own workshops based on his model.
Suwannakudt, Paiboon (1925–1982)
Authors: Veal Clare
Published: September 2018

Paiboon Suwannakudt (Tan Kudt) was a neo-traditional Thai painter, who is credited as being one of the key figures in the modern reinvigoration of Thai mural painting. A graduate from the first group of students to study at the School of Fine Arts (later Silpakorn University), Paiboon originally wanted to be a sculptor like his teacher, Silpa Bhirarsri, but was encouraged to learn mural painting instead. From the reign of Rama V (r. 1868–1910), the Thai elite’s preferences for European art forms meant that by the 1950s Thai mural painting was a stagnant practice. Silpa Bhirasri’s encouragement of Paiboon to take up mural painting may then be viewed as part of his wider interest in the reinvigoration of traditional Thai art practices and their acceptance as legitimate fine art forms. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, Paiboon studied painting by making visits to craftsmen working in the mural painting tradition and by copying murals at several temple compounds, including Wat Po, which is located near Silpakorn University. Paiboon’s work and his position as an artist were emblematic of a neo-traditional position: while he maintained a certain level of fidelity to the notion of tradition through his choice of subject matter and careful study of mural conventions, he also professed a degree of creative variation from traditional norms and a certain level of anti-conservatism.
Gascoyne, David (1916–2001)
Authors: Gifford James
Published: September 2018

David Gascoyne was a British poet and novelist active in English surrealism and post-surrealism. His novel Opening Day (1933) was one of the earliest prose surrealist works in English, and he actively translated the Parisian surrealists across the 1930s, partnering with and then replacing Samuel Beckett in this capacity. Gascoyne’s A Short Introduction to Surrealism (1935) is one of the pivotal introductions of surrealism to English literature. He joined the Communist Party in 1936 and went to Spain that year during the Spanish Civil War but was disillusioned. He grew closer to Lawrence Durrell and Henry Miller in Paris, adopted much of Miller’s anarchist revision to surrealism, and identified deeply with Durrell’s The Black Book (1938). His poetry from this point moved increasingly to religious and existential materials immediately prior to World War II, and, with Herbert Read, he was among the first English writers to respond to existentialism. He suffered a breakdown in 1964 and largely stopped writing. He later resumed friendships with Durrell and Robert Duncan, visiting both in the 1980s. Gascoyne’s homosexuality also left him alienated, having brief relationships while attached to female literary influences, including Antonia White, Anaïs Nin, and Kathleen Raine. In 1975 he married Judy Lewis, whom he met in Whitecroft Hospital on the Isle of Wight.
Tibetan Modernism
Authors: Soon Simon
Published: September 2018

The emergence of Tibetan modernism strongly reflects the social and political changes that the "roof of the world" underwent throughout the 20th century. Central to this process were attempts by artists to negotiate between Tibet’s Buddhist tradition and modern thought. Gendun Choephel is largely recognized today as the pioneering figure in Tibetan modern art. Following the Communist takeover of Tibet and the establishment of an exile government in Dharamsala, artistic movements developed both within Tibet and in India. Increasingly, a diasporic and global community of Tibetan artists based largely in the West has also gained prominence. Many modern artists saw themselves as creative innovators, moving away from Tibet’s scroll- and mural-painting discourse, yet at the same time also drawing on this unique stock of religious iconographies to forge expressions of Tibetan modernity. In more recent times, artists from the Sweet Tea Artists’ Association generation have also adopted more contemporary artistic vernaculars in their art practice. These artists, among them Gongkar Gyatso and Tsering Nyandak, have also gained international followings. Though many of these artists are based overseas and belong to the exile community, the longing for homeland, the desire to express sensitive political issues through their art practices, and the search for a Tibetan identity through their art remain central to their artistic explorations.
Prince Twins Seven Seven (1944–2011)
Authors: Raimi-Abraham Feyi
Published: September 2018

Prince Twins Seven Seven was a Yoruba artist of the Oshogbo School. He is one of the most significant artists of modern art in Africa. Twins’s work is deeply influenced by Yoruba culture and mythology. His work is also influenced by the writings of the Yoruba folklorist Amos Tutuola. Emerging at a time when indigenous religions were being rejected in favor of Christianity and Islam, the Oshogbo School gave artists like Twins the platform to defy the norm by portraying images of native beliefs and deities. Twins is important to African modern art as a foremost artistic custodian of Yoruba heritage. His work is featured in major collections and exhibitions worldwide. In 2005, he was appointed UNESCO Artist for Peace in recognition of his contribution to the promotion of dialogue and understanding among peoples.

Born in Ogidi, Twins’s career started in music and theater arts. Whilst developing his painting and sculpting skills with the Mbari Mbayo Group in Osogbo during the early 1960s, Twins also attended workshops given by Susan Wenger, Ulli Beier, and Georgina Beier. Initially drawing with ink on paper, Twins’s art developed into modern art as he began to create abstract works using various materials, techniques, and colors.
Unit One
Authors: Fowler Alan
Published: September 2018

Unit One was a group of painters, sculptors, and architects formed in London in 1933 by the artist Paul Nash. "Unit" referred to the group’s unity of purpose, and "One" to each member’s individual style. Its unifying aim was to reflect contemporary modernism, including Surrealism and abstraction. The painters were John Armstrong, Edwin Burra, Tristram Hillier, and Paul Nash—all influenced by Surrealism—and the abstract artists John Bigge, Ben Nicholson, and Edward Wadsworth. The sculptors, Barbara Hepworth and Henry Moore, were making biomorphic forms, while the architects Wells Coates and Colin Lucas were designing in a modernist style. The group launched with a London exhibition in 1934 which then toured provincially. A book, Unit One, edited by the art critic Herbert Read, accompanied the exhibition and carried statements by all the group’s members. The exhibition and book generated intense public controversy about the nature of modern art, although the group itself broke up in 1935 as a result of differences between its members.
Vohou Vohou
Authors: Vincent Cédric
Published: September 2018

Vohou Vohou refers to a group of artists from Côte d’Ivoire who came together at the beginning of the 1970s. The main members were Youssouf Bath, Théodore Koudougnon, Mathilde Moreau, Kra N’Guessan and Yacouba Touré. Vohou emerged as a movement of pictorial research in which "materials of retrieval" and abstract painting could be made to redefine a new specificity within the multifarious identity of the Ivoirian artist. Kra N’Guessan defines Vohou as "neither a style, nor a school, it is a spirit" (Kra 1990: 98). Vohou artists aimed to emancipate themselves from the Western canon taught in the Abidjan art school by challenging classical painting methods. They drew inspiration from the cultural traditions of West Africa (glyphs, esoteric symbols), and used recycled materials in their immediate environment (chewed paper, beads, strings, bird feathers, wood, sand etc.) as alternatives to expensive and imported materials such as canvas and oil paints. They painted with recycled objects and natural pigments mixed with organic materials. At the same time, they renounced any tendencies toward figuration in order to develop a radical dialogue with abstract painting. This principle of self-sufficiency referred to an indigenous mindset while contributing to an artistic avant-garde. "We want to Africanize Ivorian painting!" wrote Youssouf Bath in the manifesto La Révolution Vohou. In that way, the Vohou movement appears as a belated realization of artistic movements that escorted the idea of ​​national culture since Independence, such as the concept of Natural Synthesis founded by the painter Uche Okeke in Nigeria.
Żarnower [Żarnowerówna], Teresa (1895–1950)
Authors: Głuchowska Lidia
Published: September 2018

Teresa Żarnower was a Polish painter, graphic artist, sculptor, and stage/architectural designer. One of the most prominent representatives of Polish Constructivism, Żarnower was also linked to the Yiddish avant-garde and belonged to the pioneers of functional typography and photomontage. As co-founder and the main representative of the Polish group Blok, she edited the group’s magazine Blok (1924–1926). Together with her closest collaborator, Mieczysław Szczuka, she made this publication a forum of International Constructivism, promoting machine aesthetics and a utilitarian approach to art.

Beginning in 1915, Żarnower studied sculpture at the School of Fine Arts in Warsaw; in 1919 she was awarded the prize for the best student of the year. She also received a prize by the Ministry of Art and Culture for her diploma work, Masculine Nude (1920). Żarnower held her first exhibition in the Spring Salon of the Society for Fine Arts Promotion in 1921, and co-organized the Exhibition of New Art in Vilnius in 1923, as well as Blok group shows in Warsaw in 1924–1925. She exhibited her works in the Berlin gallery Der Sturm (1923), at the International Exhibition of Modern Art in Bucharest (1926), at the first International Modern Architecture Exhibition in Warsaw (1926), and at the Modern Architecture Exhibition in Moscow (1927).
Volpi, Alfredo (1896–1988)
Authors: Maroja Camila
Published: September 2018

One of Brazil’s greatest colorists, Alfredo Volpi (b. 1896, Lucca, Italy; d. 1988, São Paulo, Brazil), immigrated with his parents to Brazil in 1897 and was trained as a painter-decorator by the age of fifteen. This training instilled in him a passion for artistic processes, as evidenced in the painter’s lifelong habit of stretching his own canvases and preparing tempera paint, a technique he embraced after discovering Giotto in an influential visit to Italy in 1950. His initial production is mostly figurative. Noteworthy from this early period are his 1939–1941 marine landscapes made in Itanhaém, following his encounter with the painter Ernesto De Fiori. From the 1950s onwards his artworks became more abstract. He painted the characteristic colonial façades and decorative little flag pennants (literally, bandeirinhas or "little flags"), which poetically evoke popular taste and local tradition. Although his oeuvre cannot be easily inserted into artistic movements, Volpi participated in the unofficial Santa Helena Group in the 1930s, with painters like Mário Zanini and Francisco Rebolo. Additionally, Brazilian Concrete artists identified him as their precursor. Indeed, despite never embracing the theoretical program of the group, Volpi exhibited in the famous National Concrete Art Exhibitions [ExposiçõesNacionais de Arte Concreta] in 1956 and 1957. Other important shows include the May Salon [Salão de Maio] (1939) and the II São Paulo Biennal [II Bienal de São Paulo] (1953), which bestowed on him the national prize for painting together with Emiliano Di Cavalcanti.
Grassic Gibbon, Lewis (1901–1935)
Authors: McAllister Brian
Published: September 2018

Lewis Grassic Gibbon, a pseudonym for James Leslie Mitchell, was a key writer of the early 20th-century Scottish Renaissance, most famous for his trilogy A Scots Quair—Sunset Song (1932), Cloud Howe (1933), and Grey Granite (1934). While the majority of critical attention has focused on this trilogy, Mitchell published a wide body of work, ranging from historical fiction to archaeological adventure to science fiction. His work often reflects a leftist, anarcho-socialist politics and a diffusionist worldview, in which modern civilization progressively distances humanity from a primitive, utopian state of being. Mitchell published seventeen books, fifteen between 1931 and 1934, before dying at the age of thirty-four.
Xul Solar (1887–1963)
Authors: Saavedra David Fernando Cortés
Published: September 2018

Associated with the most important figures of the literary and artistic avant-garde of Buenos Aires, the Argentinean painter and polyglot Xul Solar was key in connecting European movements like Expressionism, Constructivism and Dadaism to Latin American modernism. He contributed to the modernist project via the convergence in his work of depurated (simplified) flat colorful figuration and a complex iconography of pre-Columbian and religious derivation. Xul Solar lived during his youth in San Fernando, Argentina, and was equally inclined towards music and the visual arts. During a long period of travel throughout Europe, he encountered several artistic movements—from the Italian Renaissance to die Brücke—and studied linguistics and theosophy. Enthralled by his experiences abroad, Xul Solar returned to Argentina in 1924, joining the artist group Martín Fierro and elaborating on projects begun in Europe such as the creation of his artificial language, Panlingua. His fascination with elaborate semiotic systems also led him to create the game PanChess. Xul Solar’s visual works varied throughout his career from geometric abstraction to schematic figuration, from fantastic paintings to symbolic portraits. Xul Solar remains one of the most influential Latin American artists of the modern period.
The Japan Art Institute [Nihon Bijutsuin 日本美術院]
Authors: Kazuhara Eve Loh
Published: September 2018

The Japan Art Institute was a Japanese art institute focused on the teaching, research, and exhibition of Nihonga-style art, established by Okakura Tenshin in 1898. Tenshin, who left the Tokyo School of Fine Arts the same year, brought along with him notable artists like Hashimoto Gahô [橋本雅邦], Yokoyama Taikan [横山大観], Hishida Shunso [菱田春草], and Shimomura Kanzan [下村観山]. In the initial years, the Institute received substantial funding from William S. Bigelow, a wealthy doctor from Boston who was a colleague of Tenshin’s. The Institute set out to focus on research, production, and exhibition. Two sections were set up in order to achieve this—the first section was in charge of production of painting and crafts, while the second was preoccupied with preservation and conservation technology. It was the first section that endeavored to create a new style of Nihonga (Japanese-style painting) in accordance with Tenshin’s ideals. In the years following 1906, the Institute ran into financial difficulties and, with its main members away in foreign countries, it entered a period of hiatus.
Artaud, Antonin (1896-1948)
Authors: Jannarone Kimberly
Published: September 2018

Antonin Artaud was a French writer and theatre-maker of the early twentieth century. His work includes manifestos, correspondence, poetry, criticism, drama, film acting, and theatre directing. His impassioned writing combines impulses of historical avant-garde movements and the apocalyptic atmosphere of the interwar era. His legacy in the world of arts and letters is that of a visionary: his creative output, largely unedited, is scattered across genres but unified by a set of themes, obsessions, and impulses, such as the split between ‘real’ life and social life and the need for violence to regenerate civilization.

Born in Marseilles in 1896, Artaud spent much of the First World War in a sanatorium, where he developed a life-long addiction to opiates. He moved to Paris in 1923, working in theatre there for the next thirteen years with major experimental directors including Georges Pitoëff and Charles Dullin and acting in films directed by Carl Dreyer, Abel Gance, and Fritz Lang.

Suffering setbacks in his financial and artistic life, he travelled to Mexico in 1936 to participate in the peyote rituals of the Tarahumara Indians. His mental health, never strong, deteriorated quickly around this time. He spent from 1937 to 1946 in asylums. When he was transferred to a clinic near Paris in 1946, he was greeted with enthusiasm by artists who had read his work while he was confined.
Green, Henry (1905–1973)
Authors: Shuttleworth Antony
Published: September 2018

Henry Green was the pen name of Henry Yorke, a well-regarded novelist working in the mid-twentieth century. Living in London, Yorke worked much of his life as a businessman for his family’s engineering firm. He published nine novels between 1926 and 1952. In the later part of his life he was affected by worsening alcoholism, and became increasingly housebound. He died in 1973.

Born to a family with aristocratic connections, Green was educated at Eton, which he described as ‘a humane concentration camp’, and Oxford, where he was a contemporary of Evelyn Waugh and Anthony Powell and where he published his first novel. Blindness (1926) examines the effects of a blinding injury on a young man’s development into an artist. In 1929 Green married Mary Adelaide (‘Dig’) Biddulph.

Most of Green’s novels draw on autobiographical experience. Living (1929), a depiction of factory life in the English Midlands, is informed by a period Green spent working on the factory floor of the family firm. Caught (1943) makes use of his work with the London Fire Service. Although Green’s early writing dealt with similar subjects to his contemporaries’ (working-class life, the threat of war), it did so in distinctive ways. Living and Party Going (1939) employ an unusual syntax, in which grammatical articles are used sparingly if at all. The prominent use of gerunds (‘doting’, ‘loving’) is a noticeable Green trait.
Beckett, Samuel Barclay (1906–89)
Authors: Tang Yan (Amy)
Published: September 2018

Samuel Barclay Beckett is widely considered one of the most influential writers of the twentieth century. Born in Ireland and living in France for half of his life, he wrote prose, dramatic works, poems, and criticism in both English and French. He started to write fiction after he met James Joyce and other intellectuals in Paris in the 1920s. His research on languages, literature and philosophy at Trinity College, Dublin, and at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris provided a solid basis for his works. His popularity grew rapidly after the Second World War, particularly after the publication of his groundbreaking play, En attendant Godot (1953, Waiting for Godot), and his trilogy, Molloy (1951), Malone meurt (1951, Malone Dies), and L’innommable (1953, The Unnamable). He was not only a prolific modernist who innovated avant-garde prose, theatre, radio, television, and cinema; he also joined the French Resistance during the Second World War and the post-war reconstruction. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1969.
Bloch, Ernst (July 8, 1885, Ludwigshafen - August 4, 1977, Tübingen)
Authors: Perlea Georgiana
Published: September 2018

Ernst Bloch was a German Marxist philosopher. Fleeing the Nazis in 1934, he lived in exile in Switzerland, France, Czechoslovakia, and the US. In 1949 he returned to a chair of philosophy in Leipzig (GDR) and, after the erection of the Berlin Wall (1961), in Tübingen (FDR). Bloch’s eccentric Marxism did not become popular until 1968. His The Spirit of Utopia (1923), an offshoot of Jewish apocalyptic literature cast in the poetic-aphoristic style of Expressionism, aimed extravagantly to weave the tenets of Marxism into a speculative cosmogony in the gnostic tradition. To Bloch, the Marxist call to overhaul society was a ‘concrete utopia’: a compelling expression of millennia-old messianic thought, which envisions the grand transformation, material as well as spiritual, as something to be not awaited but always attained. Utopia, be it Marxism or Anabaptism, is a finality that is present, yet still unrealized. Flamboyantly metaphysical and a lifelong Bolshevik, Bloch insisted that his monist cosmology supported Communism, specifically Leninism, against reformist diversions. This, he argued in The Principle of Hope (1977), is because Marxism, apocalyptic in outlook, is committed above all to actuating its promise.
Cézanne, Paul (1839–1906)
Authors: Hamlin Amy Kelly
Published: September 2018

Paul Cézanne was a French painter, whose innovative techniques and original interpretations of traditional genres made him perhaps the most influential artist in the early history of modernism. Affiliated primarily with Post-Impressionism, Cézanne famously declared: ‘I wanted to make of Impressionism something solid and enduring like the art in the museums’. Along with his Post-Impressionist contemporaries Paul Gauguin, Vincent Van Gogh, and Georges Seurat, Cézanne advanced the lessons of the Impressionist painters with whom he was initially affiliated. His grasp of colour and composition, however, reflect his study of Éugene Delacroix and Nicolas Poussin. But it was Cézanne’s ability to represent underlying structures in nature, while retaining gestural but disciplined brushstrokes, that earned him the admiration of artists such as Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso.
Conrad, Joseph (1857–1924)
Authors: Peters John
Published: September 2018

Joseph Conrad was one of the foremost British novelists of the modernist period. Many of the narrative innovations he developed appeared a decade or more before similar technical experimentation became the norm among modernist writers. Furthermore, his radical skepticism was a stark contrast to the Edwardian optimism evident in the years prior to the First World War and anticipates the disillusionment so many modernist writers felt during the post-war era. Best known for ‘Heart of Darkness’, Lord Jim, Nostromo, The Secret Agent, ‘The Secret Sharer’, and Under Western Eyes, Conrad influenced numerous writers who followed him, such as William Faulkner, Graham Greene, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and an entire generation of African writers who often found themselves in dialogue with Conrad {-} for example, Chinua Achebe and J. M. Coetzee.
Genet, Jean (1910-1986)
Authors: Makkar Jap-Nanak
Published: September 2018

Jean Genet was a poet, novelist, autobiographer and playwright within the Theatre of the Absurd movement. He wrote licentiously on homosexuals and outlaws, and explosively about the dispossessed and powerless, in works such as Journal du Voleur (1949, The Thief’s Journal [1954]), Un Chant d’Amour (1950, Song of Love), Les Nègres, Clownerie (1957, The Blacks: A Clown Show [1960]), and Les Paravents (1961, The Screens [1962]). His contemporaries recognized him as a unique innovator: Jean-Paul Sartre celebrated Genet’s life in a biography, Jacques Derrida discussed Genet’s construal of the autobiographical mode in Glas, and Jean Cocteau described him as the ‘greatest writer of the modern era.’
Lawrence, D. H. (1885-1930)
Authors: Nally Claire
Published: September 2018

David Herbert Lawrence (1885–1930) was born in Eastwood, near Nottingham, England. He composed poetry, several travel books, expressionist paintings, short novels and stories, literary criticism and plays. However, he is best known for his novels: Sons and Lovers (1913), The Rainbow (1915), Women in Love (1920), and Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928). His non-fiction works include Movements in European History (1921), Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious (1922) and Studies in Classic American Literature (1923). His fictional writing focuses on social class, the tensions between the rural and the industrialized landscape, issues of Englishness and nationhood, and gender and sexuality. In representing sexuality and a stern critique of war and imperialism, Lawrence endured the censorship and prohibition of some of his key texts. Unlike other writers, such as Virginia Woolf or James Joyce, Lawrence is often portrayed as being on the periphery of literary Modernism. However, his marginalized social position and relationship with other writers of the time also make him central to modernist criticism.
Picasso, Pablo (1881-1973)
Authors: Brauer Fae
Published: September 2018

Born in Malaga, it was in Barcelona that Picasso first identified himself as a subversive Modernist with a critical, contestatory and transgressive praxis exposing the savagery underlying civilization and the brutality of warfare alongside the paradoxical contradictions of modernity. Living in Paris from 1901, he excoriated the deprivations of La belle époque by portraying the outcasts of Montmartre in his Blue period and circus performers in his Rose Period. Drawing upon African indigenous cultures, from 1906 he revealed how prostitutes from France's African colonies became ravaged with venereal diseases in his 1907 painting, Les Desmoiselles d'Avignon. Inspired by new scientific discoveries, sensory aesthetics and the detritus of everyday life, from 1908 he depicted bodies and objects in fragments seen, felt, heard, tasted and smelt from different positions over time, producing, by 1912, Cubist Collages and Assemblages. Retreating into Ingreseque Neo-Classicism and Crystal Cubism after World War I, from 1927 his Cubistic fragments resurfaced into metamorphoses of the body during orgasmic ecstasy. To expose the barbarity of Fascism, particularly during the Spanish Civil War, Picasso produced Minotauromachy in 1935 and, after Fascist bombing of the Basque town of Guernica in 1937, prepared his mural with that name. Despite risks to his life and artwork, Picasso refused to leave Paris during the Nazi Occupation. Long an Anarchist, Catalan nationalist and fervent Spanish Republican, Picasso joined the French Communist Party after the Liberation of Paris and remained a lifelong member. Intrepidly revealing the torture, mutilations and decimations of World War II, especially in The Charnel House, Picasso exposed the chilling horrors committed during the Cold War, particularly the rape and execution of pregnant women and their children in Massacre in Korea and Rape of the Sabine Women. Continually producing peace posters and his Doves of Peace, particularly after the inaugural World Peace Conference in 1949, Picasso remained a deeply committed pacifist and political activist until his death in 1973. This is why it was not until civil liberties were restored to Spain eight years after his death – and six years after that of Franco – that Picasso’s Guernica was finally able to leave America for its rightful home.
Hogarth Press
Authors: Battershill Claire
Published: September 2018

The Hogarth Press was a publishing company run by Leonard and Virginia Woolf. A small independent publisher, the Press produced works by modernist thinkers and writers including Sigmund Freud, T. S. Eliot, E. M. Forster, Roger Fry, Katherine Mansfield, and Virginia Woolf herself. The Press originated in the Woolfs’ drawing room at Hogarth House in Richmond, London. In 1922 the Press moved to the Bloomsbury area of London, a geographical hub for modernist publishing and the home of their social and intellectual circle, the Bloomsbury Group. Despite its domestic origins, the Hogarth Press quickly became a fully functioning publisher and an influential force in the early twentieth-century literary world. The Press published over five hundred titles between 1917 and 1946, when the firm was sold to Chatto & Windus. These books and pamphlets ranged across a wide variety of topics and approaches: everything from best-sellers to privately printed personal memorial books for family and friends came under the publisher’s imprint, with its widely recognizable ‘Woolf’s head’ logo.
Man Ray (1890-1976)
Authors: Donkin Hazel
Published: September 2018

Born Emmanuel Radnitzky, Man Ray was one of the key innovators in modernist photography, film, and object making. He began his artistic career as a painter, and while his interest in the medium endured, it was photography that brought him financial and critical success. In New York, Man Ray was introduced to the avant-garde while visiting Alfred Stieglitz’s 291 gallery and the Armory Show (1913). He met Marcel Duchamp in 1915 and, along with Picabia, the three men founded New York Dada. In 1921 Man Ray moved to Paris where he continued to produce experimental and provocative works, and was associated with the Paris dada group. Man Ray developed a lucrative portrait and fashion photography business, photographing cultural giants such as James Joyce and Pablo Picasso, earning him commissions from magazines such as Vogue. From 1924 photographic images became central in surrealist publications, and Man Ray’s intensely innovative approach was highly regarded by the founder of the group, André Breton. Man Ray developed a poetic that demonstrated the union of reality and imagination; he used found images, documentary images, film stills, and straight and experimental photography, including solarisation (a process he developed with Lee Miller). The Second World War forced him to leave Paris for the US, but he returned in 1951, where he resided until his death.
Rothko, Mark (1903-1970)
Authors: Hodge David
Published: September 2018

Mark Rothko is one of the most celebrated painters from a group that matured in the US of the 1940s, later dubbed ‘The New York School’. His work became increasingly famous in the US and Europe during the 1950s, and his status was solidified by a large retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1962. Rothko began his career as a figurative painter. From 1938, he produced an innovative style that drew on Surrealism and incorporated disparate sources from ancient Greek and Native American art to Biblical imagery. After 1945 his paintings became increasingly abstract, moving towards the style that he is most associated with today. These works involve soft, cloud-like rectangles of colour, painted in multiple layers, which produce the appearance of glowing, shimmering light. Rothko had an uneasy relationship with art critics, collectors, and institutions. In 1950, he was amongst a group known as ‘The Irascibles’, who protested that a juried exhibition of contemporary works at the Metropolitan Museum of Art was hostile to ‘advanced art.’ In 1958, he reneged on a major commission to produce murals for the Four Seasons Hotel in New York, deciding that its atmosphere was inappropriate.
Yeats, Jack Butler (1871-1957)
Authors: Barber Fionna
Published: September 2018

Jack B. Yeats was born into a remarkably creative Irish family; his father—John Butler Yeats—was a painter and his brother was the poet W.B. Yeats. His sisters Elizabeth and Lily helped to establish the Arts and Crafts studio Dun Emer (1902) and Elizabeth subsequently founded the Cuala Press (1908). Jack Yeats’s early illustrative style depicted rural subjects from around his boyhood home in Sligo, making a significant contribution to the developing imagery of the West of Ireland important in the development of an independent Irish cultural identity.
The Harlem Renaissance
Authors: Hill Catrina , Meridien Sophie , Holt Keith , Boyle Daniel , Ardoin Paul
Published: September 2018

The Harlem Renaissance was a flourishing of artistic, intellectual, musical, and literary accomplishments by African Americans between the World Wars. The movement took its name from Harlem, a neighborhood on the northern section of Manhattan Island. Harlem became the de facto center of the African American community in New York City, and many of the most important figures of the Renaissance called it home. During the Renaissance, intellectuals published ground-breaking work that explored philosophical questions and political possibilities for African Americans that would be explored throughout the twentieth century.
Howe, Irving (1920–1993)
Authors: Zaritt Saul Noam
Published: September 2018

Irving Howe was an American literary and social critic. Howe was a central figure in the circles of American democratic socialism as well as a prominent voice in post-war American literary criticism. Though he addressed a great number of literary topics and periods in his writing, Howe wrote important reflections on international literary modernism—in what Howe perceived as its last stages. Howe helped facilitate the rise of modernism in the cultural mainstream during the post-war period while remaining critical of the ways in which contemporary ideologies could appropriate the strategies of the literary avant-garde for exploitative and destructive purposes. Howe was particularly active in promoting modern Yiddish literature, initiating the translation and circulation of Yiddish writers who had previously been unknown to English-speaking audiences. Seeking to conserve a disappearing culture, Howe viewed Yiddish modernism as a compelling expression of the tension in modernity between tradition and cultural innovation.
The 1913 Armory Show, New York City
Authors: Braden Laura
Published: September 2018

The 1913 Armory Show was the first comprehensive exhibition of modern art to take place in the United States and served as America’s introduction to modernism in the visual arts. Formally titled the International Exhibition of Modern Art—but informally designated the "Armory Show," given its location at the 69th Infantry Regiment Armory in New York City—the exhibition was organized by the Association of American Painters and Sculptors (AAPS), a small group of American artists, with the goal of offering a survey of modern art from Impressionism to Cubism and to spur the establishment of modern art in the United States. The exhibition ran for four weeks (February 17–March 15, 1913) and offered more than 1,300 works by 308 artists who hailed from twenty-five nations (though American artists composed more than half of this total).
Avant-garde
Authors: Gammel Irene
Published: September 2018

The term "avant-garde" has a double meaning, denoting first, the historical movements that started in the late nineteenth century and ended in the 1920s and 1930s, and second, the ongoing practices of radical innovation in art, literature, and fashion in the later twentieth century (often inspired by the historical avant-garde and referred to as the neo-avant-garde). Within the context of modernism, historical avant-garde movements (such as Dada, Futurism, Vorticism, Anarchism, and Constructivism) radicalized innovations in aesthetic forms and content, while also engaging viewers and readers in deliberately shocking new ways. Locked in a dialectical relationship between the avant-garde and modernism, as Richard Murphy has written (1999: 3), the historical avant-garde accelerated the advent of modernism, which routinely appropriated and repackaged avant-garde experimentation in tamer forms. As the Latinate term "avant-garde" took root first France and Italy, and later in Germany and English-speaking countries, the trajectory of the avant-garde’s relationship with, or opposition to, modernism has been theorized in a myriad of different, even conflicting, ways across different cultures. Is the avant-garde an extension of, or a synonym for, modernism (as suggested in some early American criticism) or are the two concepts in opposition to each other (as proposed in Italian and Spanish criticism)?
Babel, Isaac [БАБЕЛЬ, ИСААК] (1894–1940)
Authors: Van de Stadt Janneke
Published: September 2018

Known primarily for his short fiction, Isaac Babel was one of the most important literary figures of early Soviet Russia. He was born in 1894 to a Jewish family in Odessa, a city that figures prominently in his writing. Babel rose to both national and international fame in the mid-1920s with Red Cavalry (Konarmiia), a cycle of stories depicting General Semen Budenny’s ruthless military campaign in Poland. Although he continued to write through the 1930s, Babel was forced to do so cautiously due to the rising political and creative repression under Stalin. By 1934 he was effectively reduced to what he called "the genre of literary silence." Arrested on trumped-up charges of espionage, the author was executed in 1940. His work was banned until he was formally exonerated in 1954.
Ball, Hugo (1886–1927)
Authors: Shipe Timothy
Published: September 2018

Born in Pirmasens on February 22, 1886, the German writer Hugo Ball is best known as the co-founder, with Tristan Tzara, of the Cabaret Voltaire and the Dada movement in Zurich. Active initially as an Expressionist playwright and dramaturge in Munich and as a journalist and literary critic in Berlin in the years leading up to World War I, Ball left Germany with his companion and future wife Emmy Hennings in 1915. They remained in Switzerland for the rest of their lives. Following his period of Dada activities in 1916 and 1917, Ball was a journalist for a centre-left newspaper for three years. Reconverting to the Catholic faith of his childhood, Ball spent the remainder of his life in relative seclusion in Ticino, where he wrote a series of religious books and revised his diaries for publication.