bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Grupo de Renovacion Musical (1942–1948)
Authors: Quevedo Marysol
Published: September 2018

The Grupo de Renovacion Musical was a school of Cuban composers that emerged out of the Conservatorio Municipal de La Habana during the 1940s. The young composers were pupils of Spanish-born composer José Ardévol, who served as the leader and mentor of the group. After the premature deaths of Amadeo Roldán and Alejandro García Caturla (1939 and 1940 respectively), Ardévol took over some of their duties as music professor at the Conservatorio Municipal. Ardévol and his pupils saw a need for Cuban composers to focus on compositional techniques and strongly believed that all composers should master traditional compositional methods, such as traditional counterpoint, sonata form, and fugues (most commonly used by composers of the Baroque and Classical periods) in order to fully develop their music-writing abilities. They also rejected the obvious nationalism that Roldán and Caturla had popularised and that was also found in the works of many other Latin American composers from the previous generation. Instead, they preferred the neoclassical trends of Europe—mostly of France and Spain—with composers Igor Stravinsky and Manuel de Falla serving as their models. However, they never denied the importance of the legacy established by Roldán and Caturla for future generations of Cuban composers. The group acknowledged that Roldán and Caturla were visionaries in their own time, influential through their compositions, which brought Cuban music up to date with contemporary music developments in the U.S., Latin America, and Europe, and for introducing the use of traditional Cuban music elements to contemporary art music—particularly the use of rhythm and percussive instrumentation.
Dovzhenko, Alexander [ДОВЖЕНКО, Олександер Петрович] (1894–1956)
Authors: Nebesio Bohdan Y.
Published: September 2018

The Ukrainian film director, artist, and writer Alexander Dovzhenko was born in Sosnytsia (Chernihiv region) and graduated from the Hlukhiv teachers’ college in 1914. He continued his studies at the Ukrainian State Academy of Arts in Kiev (1917–1919) and in Berlin, where he worked at the Ukrainian consulate (1922–1923). Dovzhenko began his career as a cartoonist for the newspaper Visti VUTsVK in Kharkiv but switched to cinema in 1926. He wrote screenplays and directed films for the VUFKU [All-Ukrainian Photo Cinema Administration] studios in Odessa (1926–1928) and Kiev (1929–1932). To avoid being persecuted as a Ukrainian "nationalist" during Stalin’s region of terror, Dovzhenko fled to Moscow in 1932, where he continued working at the Mosfilm studio for the rest of his life.

Dovzhenko learned the filmmaker’s craft through directing two short comedies and a feature-length film titled Sumka dypkur’iera [The Diplomatic Pouch] (1927), a spy thriller. Zvenyhora (1927), an epic tale hailed by critics as the founding work of Ukrainian national cinema, established his reputation in Ukraine. The formal complexity and strong pacifist message of Arsenal (1929) brought Dovzhenko recognition in European avant-garde circles. Zemlia [Earth] (1930), whose subject was the transition to collectivized agriculture, became Dovzhenko’s best-known work and cemented his international reputation as the "poet of cinema." Dovzhenko’s silent films were criticized in the Soviet Union for their "nationalist deviations" but received praise abroad, especially in Western Europe. His final film in Ukraine, Ivan (1932), marks the transition to sound in Ukrainian cinema.
Im, Kwon-taek (1936--)
Authors: Cook Ryan
Published: September 2018

Im Kwon-taek, one of the most prominent South Korean filmmakers, helped to pave the way for the international success of the New Korean Cinema of the 1990s. He debuted in 1962 and first worked in commercial genres, reliably filling production quotas. His early work included action and Korean War films produced under military government policies that promoted anti-communist propaganda. During the 1980s Im made the transition to art films and gained international recognition. With his 1981 film Mandala, he became the first South Korean filmmaker to tour the international festival circuit. His 1993 film Sŏp’yŏnje [Sopyonje] about singers practicing the traditional pansori form of music, broke box office records in Korea. Exploring themes in Korean history and aesthetics, Im became a representative of the national cinema and his suffering heroines have been interpreted as symbols of the Korean nation. Im revisited the art of pansori in his 2000 film Ch’unhyangdyŏn (Chunhyang), a retelling of a story about love across social classes derived from the 17th-century pansori repertoire. A recurring subject in Korean film history, the story of Chunhyang had been adapted at least seventeen times. Im’s return to the subject echoed the ethnographic tendencies of China’s Fifth Generation filmmakers, whose work was similarly both national in inspiration and global in ambition.
Iranian New Wave
Authors: Torres Hortelano Lorenzo J.
Published: September 2018

The Iranian New Wave began when a group of young Iranian directors—following developments in the Iranian cultural arena with origins in the political and social changes of the 1950s and 1960s—started, in the mid-1960s, to make films that broke radically from the conventions of Film Farsi, the mainstream Iranian cinema that no longer satisfied the audience. These directors shared some characteristics: many had been educated abroad, and some were initially engaged in film criticism and showed a passion for modern literature. In fact, the interaction between literature and cinema is a main feature of the Iranian New Wave or Mowj-e No. The 1960s was a "golden era" of Iranian literature, one which influenced films such as Khest va Ayeneh [The Brick and the Mirror] (1965) by one of the forerunners of the New Wave, the writer Ebrahim Golestan, who employed modern techniques of storytelling in it. Although Golestan’s masterpiece is set in Teheran, many New Wave films deal with rural areas and their visual significance. Unlike the French New Wave [Nouvelle vague] or Italian Neorealism, the directors started filming without a significant theoretical framework, and engaged in cinema as a work-in-progress.
Lachenmann, Helmut (Friedrich) (1935--)
Authors: Heile Björn
Published: September 2018

One of the most influential composers to emerge from Germany following the post-war avant-garde movement, Helmut Lachenmann has remained committed to the legacy of integral serialism while also seeking to overcome what he has regarded as its limitations. His personal breakthrough came with the development of what he calls musiqueconcrèteinstrumentale in which he employs extended playing techniques for traditional instruments, often resulting in noise-like timbres. In his writings, he has contrasted his own composition with what he considers the ‘‘symphonic sound’’ of the traditional ‘‘esthetic apparatus,’’ arguing that listening to his music can liberate audiences from their habits and thus open them up to new experiences. His thought, with its demanding ethos concerning the social function of the composer, is heavily influenced by the philosophy of Adorno; the aforementioned ‘‘esthetic apparatus’’ is indebted to the latter’s ‘‘culture industry,’’ and Lachenmann likewise shares Adorno’s concept of the ‘‘sedimented history in the material.’’ The sometimes polemical dialectics of his writings, particularly of his earlier texts, has led the composer Hans Werner Henze to infamously describe Lachenmann’s work as musicanegativa, characterized primarily by the denial of habit and beauty as conventionally understood. From a later perspective, it seems more fruitful to concentrate on Lachenmann’s approach to creating sound, ‘‘building an instrument’’ as he calls it, and the new listening experiences this offers, as opposed to dwelling on what he eschews (combining existing sounds). His concern for the energetic properties of sound can be likened to the concept of the ‘‘molecular’’ in the philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari.
Pudovkin, Vsevolod Illarionovich (1893–1953)
Authors: Eubanks Ivan
Published: September 2018

Vsevolod Pudovkin was a Soviet actor, director, and film theorist working during the first half of the 20th century. He studied chemistry at Moscow State University, and after fighting in World War I he enrolled at film school, only to quit in order to work as scriptwriter and assistant director to Lev Kuleshov. Like Kuleshov, Pudovkin believed editing to be the fundamental authorial act in filmmaking. He saw the shot, and the objects depicted therein, as raw materials with latent meaning that emerged only in the context provided by montage. For example, he would splice historical footage into his fictional films, as if it were part of his story, such as the shots of a real grandmaster in Chess Fever (1925), or of the pre-revolutionary stock exchange in The End of St. Petersburg (1927). He also strove to compose montages that would simulate the way the brain and the eye construct visual perceptions. Pudovkin’s silent films are the best-known applications of his theories, including those named above as well as Mother (1926), his adaptation of a novel by Maxim Gorky, and Heir to Genghis Khan (1928; also called Storm over Asia). His writings, especially Film Technique (1929) and Film Acting (1933) have proved to be very influential. In 1928 Pudovkin joined Sergei Eisenstein and Grigori Alexanderov to write "A Statement on Sound."
Mingus, Charles (1922–1979)
Authors: Garlitz Dustin
Published: September 2018

Charles Mingus (1922–1979) was an American jazz bassist, composer, and bandleader. He held strong social and political views and composed songs on civil rights, such as ‘‘Fables of Faubus,’’ from his modern jazz album Mingus Ah Um (1959), and ‘‘Meditations on Integration’’ (1964). Other compositions of Mingus’s musical modernism include the cool jazz-inspired anthem ‘‘Haitian Fight Song’’ (1957). The bassist first gained a reputation for performing on the cool jazz scene of Los Angeles, California in the postwar 1940s. Mingus would later relocate to New York City in the early 1950s, gaining a reputation as a bandleader who composed, performed, and recorded modern jazz that was distinctly hard bop in some settings, post-bop in other contexts, and contained characteristics of the avant-garde, blues influences, and the music of black church gospels that he was exposed to at an early age.
Atatürk, Mustafa Kemal (1881–1938)
Authors: Kocamaner Hikmet
Published: September 2018

A military officer in the Ottoman army, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk was the leader of the Turkish national resistance movement and the founder and first president of the Republic of Turkey. After the Allies defeated the Ottoman Empire in World War I and started partitioning its territories, in 1919 he began to lead a national resistance movement in Anatolia. In 1920 he organized a provisional national assembly in Ankara, functioning independently from the Ottoman administration. Having successfully liberated Anatolia and eastern Thrace from foreign occupation as a result of the Turkish War of Independence (1919–1923), he founded the Republic of Turkey (1923), with himself elected by the assembly as its first president (1923–1938). He institutionalized political, economic, social, legal and educational reforms aimed at modernizing and secularizing Turkey and forging a new national identity. These included the abolishment of the caliphate (1924), the secularization and nationalization of education (1924), the adoption of new civil, commercial, and penal codes based on European models (1926), and the replacing of Arabic script with the Latin alphabet (1928). The principles of his reforms, commonly referred to as Kemalism, have defined the fundamental characteristics of the Republic throughout most of its history: republicanism, nationalism, populism, secularism, statism, and revolutionism.
Bataille, Georges Albert Maurice Victor (1897–1962)
Authors: Pecora Vincent P.
Published: September 2018

Georges Bataille (September 10, 1897–July 9, 1962) was a French writer who synthesized ideas from many disciplines. He converted to Catholicism at the start of World War I, joined a seminary, and had abandoned the Church by 1920, entering into psychoanalysis and also suffering from tuberculosis. He embarked on a pilgrimage to transgression, combining sadistic pain, sexual pleasure, and the sacred ecstasy of sacrifice. By day, he was a librarian at the Bibliothèque nationale, focusing on medieval artefacts; his nights he devoted to brothels. He drew ideas from Gilles de Rais, the Marquis de Sade, Friedrich Nietzsche, Marcel Mauss, and Alexandre Kojève’s reading of Hegel. Bataille was a dissenting surrealist, finally breaking with André Breton after they formed the anti-fascist Contre-attaque circle. Bataille, Michel Leiris, and Roger Caillois founded the Collège de Sociologie (1937–1939), devoted to sacred forms of transgression, and the journal Acéphale. His major novels, Histoire de l’oeil [Story of the Eye] and Le Bleu du Ciel [Blue of Noon], later achieved cult status. Bataille developed Mauss’ work on the gift and potlatch into a notion of dépense [expenditure], rejecting the utilitarian labor theory of value ("restricted economy") for the idea that sexual, moral, economic, and political value is produced by the glorious "general economy" of waste and destruction. Bataille applied this idea to fascist psychology and throughout La Part maudite [The Accursed Share], his grandiose history of economics, the scapegoat, and the dépense of the Marshall Plan after WWII.
Keynes, John Maynard (1883–1946)
Authors: Davis Michael T.
Published: September 2018

John Maynard Keynes, CB, FBA, first baron Keynes of Tilton, was an economist, moral philosopher, and patron of the arts. The tension between ethical and scientific approaches to economics remained a creative force in Keynes’ economic writings and work as a government economist. During Keynes’ education at Cambridge, he was elected a member of the secret society known as the Apostles. Like other Apostles of the time, Keynes read G. E. Moore’s Principia Ethica (1903), which could be said to have formed his personal moral philosophy for the rest of his life. Keynes also became deeply involved in the Bloomsbury Group, especially with Vanessa Bell. Though Keynes had little in the way of formal education in economics and was largely self-taught, his lectures in economics at Cambridge quickly demonstrated his ability in the field. At the end of World War I, Keynes represented the Treasury at the Versailles Peace Conference in Paris, but resigned, convinced that the reparations required of Germany inevitably would lead to dangerous political and economic results. Keynes’ most influential work is The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (1936), which established the foundations of Keynesian economics. In 1944 Keynes participated in the Bretton Woods Conference. Two of its main accomplishments were the establishment of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.
Lenin, Vladimir (1870–1924)
Authors: Pecora Vincent P.
Published: September 2018

Vladimir Lenin (born Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov) was the most prominent figure in the translation of Marxist political economy and theories of proletarian revolution into successful practice. Marxism-Leninism was the first theoretical program of the first existing revolutionary communist state, put into effect between the Russian Revolution of 1917 and Lenin’s death in 1924, and became a model for subsequent communist parties and revolutions around the world. Lenin’s communist ideals were formed as a young man; he participated in earlier failed uprisings in Russia in 1902 and 1905, and lived much of his life in exile. Lenin’s fundamental contributions to Marx’s basic ideas about the inevitable decline of capitalism, as articulated in Das Kapital (1867), and about the development and triumph of a proletarian dictatorship in the service of the destruction of bourgeois state, in The Communist Manifesto (1848) written with Friedrich Engels, were twofold.
Nwoko, Demas (1935--)
Authors: Christopher Shaw P.E. , Sijuwade Amber Croyle
Published: September 2018

Across the spectrum of fine art and design, Demas Nwanna Nwoko has made his mark as a central contributor to a neo-traditionalist philosophy at the foundation of Nigerian modern art. Nwoko began his formal studies at the Nigerian College of Art, Science and Technology, Zaria, in 1957 and soon joined fellow art students Uche Okeke and Bruce Onobrakpeya in founding the Zaria Arts Society (Zaria Rebels) in 1958. Forming an intellectual framework dubbed "natural synthesis", the Rebels cultivated a deep knowledge of indigenous artistic forms, defining a culturally independent artistic practice that would accompany Nigeria’s impending independence from British colonialism. To this end, Nwoko’s earliest paintings, including Ogboni Chief (1960) and Praise Singer (1960) highlight the subjects of everyday Nigerian life. His sculptural works, like Adam and Eve (1965), draw studied inspiration from the Nok terracotta heads of 300 BC. The same philosophical approach remains central to Nwoko’s architectural work, for which he is most widely known. The first of his building projects, The New Culture Studio and Residence (1967–) provides both an aesthetic example of Nigerian-centered design and an ideological home from which his theatrical works and New Culture Magazine (1978–1979) were produced. His most renowned site, the Dominican Institute, Ibadan (1970–1975), exemplifies innovation in the use of modern building methods grounded in indigenous expression.
Osun Osogbo Sacred Grove
Authors: Probst Peter
Published: September 2018

The Osun Osogbo Sacred Grove is part of the story of Nigerian Modernism. Situated on the outskirts of the city of Osogbo in Southwest Nigeria, the grove consists of seventy-five hectares of forestland along the banks of the Osun river. Hunting, farming, and fishing are forbidden in the grove. No permanent settlements are allowed. Instead the area is covered with a large number of sculptures and temples of various sizes and materials. Some are made of wood, others of stone and cement. Both the structures and the restrictions echo the religious character of the site. Osun is not only a river, but also Osogbo’s guardian deity who is credited with providing wealth, fertility, and protection. The origin of these structures dates back to the 1950s when the entangled forces of colonialism, Christianity, and commerce had started to erode the relationship between the city and the goddess. The cohesive force of the Osun Grove declined. People began to ignore local restrictions on hunting, fishing, and farming to the point that the grove was at risk of abandonment. To address this crisis, in 1959—one year before Nigeria gained independence—a group of Osun ritual officials approached Susanne Wenger, an Austrian artist and a convert to Yoruba religion, and asked for her help.
Pankhurst, Emmeline (1858–1928)
Authors: Weihman Lisa
Published: September 2018

Emmeline Pankhurst was born Emmeline Goulden in Manchester, England. One of the most prominent activists in the suffrage movement, Pankhurst founded both the Women’s Franchise League (1883), and the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU, 1903). She married Richard Pankhurst (1834–1898), a barrister, in 1879, and had five children: Christabel (1880–1958); Sylvia (1882–1960); Francis Henry (1884–1888); Adela (1885–1961); and Henry Francis (1889–1910). All three of the Pankhurst daughters became political activists in socialist and suffrage organizations.

In her autobiography, My Own Story, Pankhurst writes, "Men make the moral code and they expect women to accept it. They have decided that it is entirely right and proper for men to fight for their liberties and their rights, but that it is not right and proper for women to fight for theirs" (1914: 268). Pankhurst’s work connected her with many of the leading socialist, labor, and suffrage activists of her day, including Annie Besant, Keir Hardie, William Morris, Eleanor Marx, and Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence. In 1894 Pankhurst investigated conditions at the Chorlton Workhouse, which galvanized her activism. "I thought I had been a suffragist before I became a Poor Law Guardian, but now I began to think about the vote in women’s hands not only as a right but as a desperate necessity" (ibid.: 28).
Pentland, Barbara Lally (1912–2000)
Authors: Danielson Janet
Published: September 2018

Barbara Pentland was arguably the most rigorously modernist Canadian composer of her generation. During the late 1940s she adopted serial techniques and by the mid-1950s had forged her mature style: spare, elegantly constructed, abstract, yet with a rich timbral palette and surprising lyricism. She made adept use of new techniques throughout her career. She taught at the Royal Conservatory of Music in Toronto (1942–1949); then at the University of British Columbia (1949–1963). She received a Diplôme d’honneur from the Canadian Conference for the Arts (1977); honorary doctorates from the University of Manitoba (1976) and Simon Fraser University (1985); the Order of Canada (1989); and the Order of British Columbia (1993). Situated within the confluence of early women’s rights struggles and Canada’s search for identity at the official end of colonial rule in 1931, Pentland’s musical modernism lent authenticity and authority to her artistic voice: her music sounded neither British nor stereotypically feminine. As one reviewer observed, Pentland’s music had ‘‘that cool remoteness which conjures wide-open spaces and is probably as close to a national sound as anything Canadian composers have achieved.’’
Populism
Authors: Pecora Vincent P.
Published: September 2018

The most salient first use of the term populism and its cognates can be found in late 19th-century Tsarist Russia. The Russian peasant Narodniki [populists] of the 1860s and 1870s (People-ism would be an apt translation of their program of Narodnichestvo [ Народничество ]) supply a good beginning point. As Eric Hobsbawm has noted, the Narodnik program, which Marx’s very late work inclined toward, "believed that the Russian village community could provide the basis of a transition to socialism without prior disintegration through capitalist development" (1964: 49–50). Marxists of the time opposed this conflation of historical phases, but this mostly peasant and Slavophilic early populism in Russia is a telling precursor of later European and American groups who turned to notions of land, regional autonomy, and ethnic/racial bonds in the service of resistance to the deracinating effects of large-scale capitalism. Later, populism was often a reaction against the liberal nation-state’s need to manage capitalism by means of an increasingly powerful and centralized administrative apparatus. This reaction, however, took several distinct paths.
Russell, Bertrand Arthur William (1872–1970)
Authors: Davis Michael T.
Published: September 2018

Bertrand Russell, FRS, OM, and third earl Russell, was a mathematician, philosopher, social critic, political activist, writer, and Nobel laureate in literature. Russell was born into an aristocratic family. He was elected to the exclusive Cambridge society known as the Apostles and developed a complicated friendship with fellow Apostle G. E. Moore (1873–1958). This connection with the society, as well as Russell’s intense relationship with Lady Ottoline Morrell, would later link him to the Bloomsbury Group. Together with Alfred North Whitehead, Russell co-authored the PrincipiaMathematica (1910, 1912, 1913), an attempt to reduce the whole of mathematics to a logical system. While it failed to accomplish this, it stimulated the development of British analytical philosophy, which took inspiration from and in turn influenced the Vienna Circle of logicians and philosophers. Russell himself would not always be sympathetic to developments in later analytic philosophy, and developed a difficult but productive relationship with Wittgenstein in particular. Though not wholly a pacifist, Russell objected to World War I, emerging as a public intellectual engaged in moral, social, and political issues. Imprisoned for his opposition to the war, Russell later dedicated much time to writing popular philosophical and scientific books. In 1950 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.
Santayana, George (1863–1952)
Authors: Simon Linda
Published: September 2018

George Santayana—philosopher, poet, novelist, memoirist, and critic—was born in Madrid, the son and grandson of diplomats, and was brought to America by his mother in 1872. Raised a Catholic, he retained Spanish citizenship for his whole life and portrayed himself as an outsider to American society and culture. Santayana entered Harvard in 1882 and graduated with a doctorate in philosophy in 1889, having studied with the pragmatist, William James and the idealist, Josiah Royce. He immediately began teaching at Harvard, but became increasingly disgruntled with academic life. In 1912 he retired and left America for permanent residence in Europe. Santayana celebrated the significance of creativity and imagination in poetry, religion, science, and philosophy. He asserted that any system of philosophy or science, depending as it does on language, cannot represent foundational or essential reality, but rather is contingent on human imagination. Although James believed Santayana’s thinking was diametrically opposed to his own conception of pragmatism, Santayana saw pragmatism, especially as Charles Peirce formulated it, as a useful philosophy to determine efficacy of action. His naturalism, or intellectual materialism, held that knowledge and belief are not the result of reasoning, but of the interaction of an individual’s psyche with the natural and material environment. A prolific writer, Santayana is best known for The Sense of Beauty (1906), the five-volume Life of Reason (1905–1906), Character and Opinion in the United States (1920), and his Pulitzer Prize nominated novel The Last Puritan (1936). A speech entitled "The Genteel Tradition in American Philosophy" (1911), in which he urged philosophers and poets to move beyond the canonized writers of the past and live up to the precocious potential of the American spirit, proved influential for modernist writers.
Wilson, Woodrow (1856–1924)
Authors: Jovanovich-Kelley Monica
Published: September 2018

Thomas Woodrow Wilson served two terms as the twenty-eighth President of the United States (1913–1921) and is remembered for leading the nation through World War I. Wilson graduated from Princeton University in 1879 and briefly attended the University of Virginia Law School before earning his doctorate from the Johns Hopkins University in 1886. After an early career in academia, Wilson later became president of Princeton University (1902–1910) and served one term as governor of New Jersey (1911–1913). In the presidential election of 1912, Wilson was elected along with running mate Thomas R. Marshall on a Democratic platform that stressed individualism and states’ rights.
Zionism
Authors: Devir Nathan P.
Published: September 2018

Zionism is the umbrella term used to describe the various strains of Jewish nationalism that grew out of other 19th-century nationalist ideologies and movements. Zionist thought owes its genesis to several converging intellectual and political factors in the late modern period: the assimilation and urbanization of many European Jews during the Haskalah [the Jewish Enlightenment], which began in the 1770s; the French Revolution and the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (1789), followed by the Napoleonic emancipation of the Jews (1806); the age of European imperialism; and, significantly, the resurgence of violent anti-Semitism in Europe in the latter half of the 19th century. Unabashedly secular in nature at the outset, Zionism as an ideology sought to correct what Joseph Stalin later infamously said the Jews lacked in order to be a coherent nation: a common language, territory, economy, and psycho-social make-up.
Abdel Aleem, Mariam (1930–2010)
Authors: Dwider Sarah
Published: September 2018

Mariam Abdel Aleem was a prominent Egyptian graphic artist known for her printed works and engraving that stitched together symbols from ancient and contemporary Egypt to create abstracted compositions. These compositions often incorporated Arabic text and featured both hand-written calligraphy and appropriated or collaged text. In addition to her printed works, Abdel Aleem also produced paintings that focused on representations of Egyptian folk culture. Abdel Aleem graduated from the Higher Institute of Art Education in Cairo with a bachelor’s degree in 1954. In the years following, she studied graphic arts at the University of Southern California and received a master’s degree in Fine Arts in 1957. While in the United States, Abdel Aleem also studied at the Pratt Institute in New York. She taught printmaking as a member of Alexandria University’s Faculty of Fine Arts from its founding in 1958, and was appointed director of the Faculty in 1981. Mariam Abdel Aleem also served as a founding member of both the Association of Fine Artists in Alexandria and the Egyptian Art of Engraving Society. She frequently represented Egypt at international biennials including the Venice Biennale, the Sao Paulo Biennial, and the Graphics Biennial in Norway.
Ahmad, Yousef (1955–)
Authors: Touati Samia
Published: September 2018

A writer, an art advisor, and an artist, Yousef Ahmad has contributed significantly to the evolution of art in Qatar. Ahmad took upon himself the responsibility to document and archive the development of art in Qatar. Ahmad has developed an innovative style of calligraphic painting, whereby numerous letters and words are transformed into abstract signs and manifest abstract arrangements. Being more inclined to create large-scale works, Ahmad depicts Arabic words in their variety of shapes with a particular focus on the construction of his composition.

In 1982, Ahmad traveled to the United States, where he received his Master of Fine Arts degree from Mills College, University of California. Following his return to Qatar, Ahmad taught art appreciation for more than twenty years at Qatar University, where he met His Excellency Sheikh Hassan bin Mohamed bin Ali Al Thani. Sharing an avid love for art with HE Sheikh Hassan, Ahmad has played an instrumental role in collecting a variety of artworks which constitute the major collections of Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art and the Orientalist Museum. He also acted as the first director for Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art, then named the Museum of Arab Art.
Art Students League of New York
Authors: Robbins Christa Noel
Published: September 2018

The Art Students League (ASL) is a Manhattan art school, founded in 1875 "by artists and for artists." ASL was founded when the National Academy of Design (NAD) announced that it would temporarily suspend its studio classes. A group of ASL students used this opportunity to break out of the orbit of the conservative academy, and with the help of former NAD instructor Lemuel Wilmarth (who became the school’s first instructor and president), they announced the founding of a new school.

ASL’s primary mission is to promote and enable the creative objectives of the artists in attendance; as such the format of the school is an atelier system—a collection of semi-autonomous studios, the focus of which is determined by a professional artist who runs the studio and leads the instruction. Many of America’s best-known modern artists from the 19th and 20th centuries had a role to play in the League, including Romare Bearden, George Bellows, Thomas Hart Benton, William Merritt Chase, Thomas Eakins, Helen Frankenthaler, Hans Hofmann, Donald Judd, Lee Krasner, Jackson Pollock, Robert Rauschenberg and Mark Rothko. The ASL continues to rank among the best art schools in the United States and promote openness in terms of student admissions and artistic experimentation.
Bachi, Marwan Kassab (1934--)
Authors: Lenssen Anneka
Published: September 2018

Born in Damascus, the Syrian painter Marwan Kassab Bachi, who often goes by only the name Marwan, began his career in Damascus before immigrating to Germany, where he became a professor at the Hochschule der Künste in Berlin in 1980. Marwan’s earliest works in the mid-1950s followed a modern symbolist style inflected by folk motifs. After leaving Syria in 1957 to study painting in Berlin, he joined the studio of Hann Trier and became aligned with Germany’s post-war New Figuration movement. The subjects of his painting series in the 1960s included politicians in clamps and braces, piles of fleshy meat, and melancholy figures with elongated bodies and distorted heads. Marwan’s later work emphasizes color and texture over legibility, and in recent years, his paintings of monumental heads take form through layered fields of brush marks that verge on abstraction. Because of the repetitious and self-effacing aspect of these compositions, they can also be interpreted as explorations of Sufist principles. Marwan has maintained close ties to Arab modernist movements in art and literature for the whole of his career, and contributed drawings and sketches to the publications of friends, such as the poet Adonis and the novelist Abdul Rahman Munif, among others.
Bakusen, Tsuchida (1887–1936)
Authors: Loh Kazuhara Eve
Published: September 2018

Tsuchida Bakusen was a Nihonga (traditional-style) painter from the Kyoto Painting Circle. He was also the leading founder of the Association for the Creation of National Painting [国画創作協会] [Kokuga Sôsaku Kyôkai] (1918–1928). Bakusen moved to Kyoto in 1903 to study at Suzuki Shônen’s [鈴木松年] (1848–1918) art school. He later joined Takeuchi Seihô’s [竹内栖鳳] (1864–1942) school, thriving under his tutelage in a nurturing environment. In the years following his graduation from Kyoto Municipal Painting College, where he studied from 1909–1911, Bakusen produced Nihonga works such as Island Women (1912), which were influenced by the French post-impressionists like Gauguin, Van Gogh, and Cezanne. Bakusen exhibited at government-sponsored Bunten and Teiten exhibitions, but his dissatisfaction with the former led to a hiatus during which he established the Association and exhibited only at its exhibitions, the Kokuten. Bakusen’s work comprises figure paintings, mostly of women or children in rural landscapes. Bathhouse Maiden (1918), declared an important cultural property, and Maiko in a Garden (1924) represent some of his masterpieces.
Ben Abdallah, Jellal (1921--)
Authors: Gerschultz Jessica
Published: September 2018

Jellal Ben Abdallah is a Tunisian artist and illustrator based in Sidi Bou Saïd. He studied at the Lycée Carnot in Tunis. His early drawings appeared in the first Tunisian feminist periodical Leïla in the 1930s. Ben Abdallah participated in the Salon Tunisien in 1942 and 1945, and established an atelier in Montparnasse in Paris in 1952. During the late nationalist and early postcolonial periods, he was associated with the École de Tunis, an elite group of artists credited with forging a Tunisian artistic modernism. Ben Abdallah’s corpus of work spans miniature painting, acrylic on wood and paper, gouache, and monument design. The majority of his finely detailed paintings depict quotidian life, idyllic women, surrealist imagery, horses, marine creatures, and ethereal seascapes. From 1950 he received numerous state commissions for decorative programs in civic buildings, notably those designed by architect Olivier-Clément Cacoub, including ceramic tile panels in the Palais des Congrès in Bizerte and the Hôtel les Palmiers in Monastir. Ben Abdallah has exhibited in Tunis and abroad since 1939. Following a retrospective exhibition in 2009, in 2010 his long career was celebrated with a solo exhibition of thirty paintings at the Galerie Atrium in Carthage entitled ‘Femmes, je vous aime!’
Berk, Nurullah (1906–1982)
Authors: Shaw Wendy
Published: September 2018

An artist and writer from the Republic of Turkey, Nurullah Berk worked to promote the expression of Turkish aesthetic ideals as one of the founders of the D Group.

Berk first studied in Paris with Ernest Laurent at the École des Beaux Arts between 1924 and 1928. Upon his return to Turkey, he became a member of the recently established Society of Independent Painters and Sculptors. He spent a year in Paris studying with André Lhote and Fernand Leger, whose Cubist modernism reflected the ideas of Henri Bergson as developed by the Puteaux Group before World War I.

Returning to Turkey in 1933, Berk became one of the founders of a society of artists that promoted independent thought and modernist ideals, known as the D Group. He also participated in the state-sponsored Homeland Tours project that sent artists to the provinces between 1938 and 1943. Berk promoted the expression of Turkish aesthetics through a vocabulary of abstraction, combining flat abstraction with patterns drawn from the popular and folk traditions of Turkey.

Woman Ironing (1950) exemplifies his combination of Cubist abstraction with national identity in its idealization of the working figure of the Turkish peasant woman, with patterns derived from traditional Turkish flatwoven carpets.
Bishop, Isabel (1902–1988)
Authors: Palm Regina
Published: September 2018

Born in Cincinnati, Isabel Bishop spent her childhood in Detroit, where she attended life-drawing classes at the John P. Wicker School of Fine Arts. In 1918, Bishop enrolled in the New York School of Applied Design for Women to study illustration, but transferred to the Art Students League in 1920. Bishop is associated with the realist painters of the Fourteenth Street School. She is best known for her depictions of young female office workers of the 1930s and 1940s, whom she observed as they navigated their way through Union Square (the location of Bishop’s first studio). Bishop, like other Fourteenth Street artists, sought to capture contemporary urban life. Her depictions of working women are notable for their time, as she did not glamorize them or transform them into sexualized stereotypes, but rather strove to portray these young, modern women as they traversed the city in daily life. Bishop was granted her first one-woman show in 1933 at the Midtown Galleries and in 1941 was elected to the National Academy of Design.
Blossfeldt, Karl (1865–1932)
Authors: Long Jonathan
Published: September 2018

Karl Blossfeldt was a sculptor and a teacher of plant modeling at the Unterrichtsanstalt des Königlichen Kunstgewerbemuseums (Institute of the Royal Arts and Crafts Museum) in Berlin, where he worked from 1898 until 1930. His reputation as a photographer rests on two books: Urformen der Kunst (Art Forms in Nature, 1928) and Wundergarten der Natur (Magic Garden of Nature, 1932). Both consist of extreme close-ups of plants, and seek to identify in natural forms the blueprints of industrial design. The images are characterized by extraordinary detail, revealing to the eye the geometrical structures and formal complexities of common flora. Blossfeldt had been using photographs since the early 1900s as tools of instruction for his design students, but the resonance of his books goes beyond instrumental applied photography. His artistic lineage has been traced to Jugendstil, while his use of the plants’ Latin names and their serial presentation link his work to the tradition of the herbarium and to the scientific photography of the 19th century. Urformen der Kunst was enthusiastically received by critics (Walter Benjamin and Lászlo Moholy-Nagy among them), and Blossfeldt’s work has also often been seen as part of the inter-war German Neues Sehen (New Vision) movement.
Damrong Wong Uparaj (1936–2002)
Authors: Galloway Charlotte
Published: September 2018

Born in Chiang Rai, Thailand, Wong Uparaj studied Fine Arts at Silpakorn University. On completion of his degree in 1964 he received a British Council grant to study at the Slade School, London in 1964, and was later awarded a Rockefeller scholarship for an MA in Fine Arts at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, which he completed in 1969. Always interested in international art practices, Wong Uparaj traveled in Europe, India, Japan, and Australia, though Thailand was always his primary inspiration. Wong Uparaj’s works were fundamentally underpinned by his Buddhist beliefs and studying Buddhism helped him find peace in life and work. Following early experimentations with abstraction and Impressionism, he settled into a distinct realist style, creating rural and urban scenes from his own imagination that focused on a simple, almost idealized view of what life could be. There is a consistent sense of serenity and stillness in his compositions. This is balanced cleverly with his use of color, such as the inclusion of large areas of yellow, green, or blue in a number of works that, while bold, skillfully enhances the aura of calm. Wong Upararaj was a highly respected artist, working across a variety of media including tempera, acrylic, woodcut, pastel, watercolor, oil, and drawing. His works are well represented in public and private collections internationally.
Dong Xiwen (1914–1973)
Authors: Geng Yan
Published: September 2018

Dong Xiwen [董希文] was a modern Chinese painter, whose art was widely appreciated in Communist China. Dong attended the National Academy of Arts in Hangzhou, and in his early career experimented with a diverse range of artistic styles and demonstrated great creative talent. His art underwent a radical change after the founding of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in 1949. After moving to Beijing in the mid-1940s, Dong Xiwen began to make art in support of the Communist Party. He joined the Communist Party in 1949, and became one of the PRC’s most prominent painters, producing compelling paintings as part of state commissions while also teaching at the Central Academy of Fine Arts. His most famous commissioned work is The Founding of the Nation, commemorating the historical moment when Mao Zedong [毛泽东] proclaimed the People’s Republic of China atop of the Tiananmen gate in 1949. This painting was recognized as a model of new political art, not only articulating communist ideology, but also acting as an exemplar of nationalized oil painting. However, Dong was later forced to revise the painting twice, removing the disgraced figures from his monumental piece.
Dreier, Katherine S. (1877–1952)
Authors: Saletnik Jeffrey
Published: September 2018

An impresario, collector, and painter, Katherine Dreier directed her attention and personal wealth to the promotion of European modernism in the United States, most notably by co-founding the Société Anonyme, Inc. in 1920 with Marcel Duchamp. Dreier guided the group’s lecture series; art and library acquisitions; publications, including the short-lived journal Brochure Quarterly; and its program of exhibitions, among them the first exclusively devoted to Fernand Léger in the United States and, in 1926, the International Exhibition of Modern Art at the Brooklyn Museum. These intermittent and often small-scale initiatives were relatively ineffective in achieving Dreier’s goal of introducing the international avant-garde to an American audience; however, the collection she assembled in the group’s name remains significant, as does her personal art collection. She deposited the former at Yale University. Dreier exhibited her own paintings at the 1913 Armory Show, among other venues.
El-Sigini, Gamal (1917–1977)
Authors: Radwan Nadia
Published: September 2018

Gamal el-Sigini is a prominent Egyptian artist, best known for his sculptures and metal work. He is renowned for representing powerful patriotic subjects by using bronze, stone, copper, wood and leather. He developed the technique of using hammered red copper for executing low-reliefs inspired by ancient Egyptian art.

El-Sigini studied at the School of Fine Arts in Cairo under the sculptor Boris Frödman-Cluzel (1878–1959). After graduating in 1938, he founded a group called "The Voice of the Artist" (Sawt al-Fannān) to promote young Egyptian artists. He was a member of the Egyptian "Group of Modern Art" founded in 1947, and in 1951, he was appointed professor at the School of Fine Arts in Cairo. He became the head of the Sculpture Department of the Faculty of Fine Arts in Alexandria in 1958 until he was named director of the Sculpture Department at the School of Fine Arts in Cairo in 1964. During his career, he was commissioned to design several projects for public monuments in Egypt as well as medals for various official events.
Galatasaray Exhibitions
Authors: Shaw Wendy
Published: September 2018

Held in Istanbul between 1916 and 1951, the Galatasaray Exhibitions were the first annual exhibitions of art established in the Ottoman Empire, remaining an important cultural event during the single-party era of the Republic of Turkey, founded in 1923. During the Great War in Europe, when the Ottoman Empire joined the Central Powers and the citizens of Entente nations left, many vacated spaces in Istanbul opened to new uses. One of these was the Italian Societa Operaia, which became the dormitory for the nearby Lycée de Galatasaray. Beginning in 1916, the main hall of this dormitory was leased every summer for an annual exhibit, which came to be known as the Galatasaray Exhibitions. Works shown at the inaugural exhibit were naturalist paintings, reflecting no awareness of contemporary modernist movements—a situation that later changed with the development of the modern nation-state of Turkey. The exhibit was juried but open to all artists, and visitors were charged admission. Several works at the 1916 exhibit received prizes from the Ministry of Education and were subsequently purchased as part of the Collection of Decorated Panels, established under the auspices of the Imperial Academy of Fine Art, which included copies of many famous European paintings.
Gemayel, Cesar (1898–1958)
Authors: Rogers Sarah Ann
Published: September 2018

Cesar Gemayel marked a transition in Lebanese art from the commissioned, academic portraits of his predecessors towards the portrayal of landscapes, nudes, and still lifes in oil and watercolor. His work is characterized by experimentation with light, color, and loose brushstrokes in the tradition of European Impressionism. Gemayel apprenticed in the atelier of Lebanese painter Khalil Saleeby (1870–1928), well known for his portraits and nudes depicted with an Impressionist focus on light. In 1927 Gemayel traveled to Paris to study at the Academie Julien (1927–30) and became an admirer of Auguste Renoir. Gemayel returned to Beirut in 1930 and dedicated himself to his art. He was a founding faculty member and one time director of the Department of Art and Architecture (est. 1943) at L’Académie Libanaise des Beaux-Arts (ALBA, est. 1937). Gemayel’s nudes in oil, pastel, and watercolor document a sustained experimentation with the effects of light-infused color and rhythmic brushstrokes. A substantial body of landscapes and still lifes depicted in various degrees of abstraction—hovering between a three-dimensional painted reality and a two-dimensional patterned surface—accompanies his figural work.