bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Dangar, Anne (1885–1951)
Authors: Peers Juliette
Published: September 2018

Anne Dangar is a singular figure in the Australian experience of modernism. Forgotten in her homeland throughout the 20th century due to her long-term residence in France, she is the only Australian who played a demonstrably productive and expansive role in Cubism. From the 1930s, her synthesis of rural French folk pottery with cubist-style surface decoration was an idiosyncratic and unexpected interpretation of modernism. It also tangibly validated the links that Albert Gleizes made between past and present, and medieval and modernist, through a practical direct articulation of his somewhat arcane and specialized derivation of Cubism. Gleizes’ vision of the cultural strength of traditional French rural life and the centrality of Catholicism within his aesthetics increasingly shaped Dangar’s art practice by offering spiritual as well as technical support. Her conversion to Catholicism, in contradiction to her conventional Protestant family, was the outcome of her view of herself as disciple to Gleizes’ holistic social and sacred mission.
Figari, Pedro (1861–1938)
Authors: Von Hartenthal Mariana Westphalen
Published: September 2018

Together with his contemporary Joaquín Torres-García, Pedro Figari is one of the major names of 20th-century Uruguayan art. Unlike Torres-García and his Taller del Sur, however, Figari is not associated with any school or movement, and he left no direct follower. In eloquent brushstrokes, his paintings—oil on canvas or, more often, oil on cardboard—portray the people and landscape of the River Plate region. The sky occupies most of the surface of his external scenes, in which the intensity of colors and lack of shadows make it hard to tell whether it is day or night. The low horizon alludes to the vastness and flatness of the pampa, populated by gauchos, horses, and the massive ombú trees. Subjects are engaged in celebrations, dances, funerals, and everyday activities that take place under the open sky, but also in small-town streets, patios, and interiors. In an unprecedented move for a Uruguayan painter at the time, Figari gave prominence to the life of black Uruguayans, especially in his series portraying candombes (Uruguayan celebrations of African origin, accompanied by music and dance). These depictions, however, may seem stereotyped and racist to 21st-century eyes.
Fox, Ethel Carrick (1872–1952)
Authors: Peers Juliette
Published: September 2018

British trained painter Ethel Carrick Fox married Australian artist Emmanuel Phillips Fox in 1905 and spent her five-decade career closely associated with Australian artists. Although based in Paris, she frequently visited Australia between 1908 and 1952. By 1910 she had become quite active and high profiled in Paris, surprising at the time for an artist who was both English speaking and female. She was elected a sociétaire of the Salon d’Automne in 1911, and served on its selection committee in 1912. Fox was also active in organizations promoting women artists in Paris, serving as vice president of the Union des femmes peintres et sculpteurs in 1912, and exhibiting with progressively orientated groups such as the LibreAesthetique in Brussels, 1909. While the advent of World War I diminished her career internationally, until her death in 1952 she was renowned in Australia for her cosmopolitan outlook, her work in public and patriotic fundraising, and her activities as a de facto agent in Paris for Australian-based artists. Fox was also widely admired for setting an example as an enterprising woman artist, painting and exhibiting extensively whenever she was in the country. On her first visit to Australia in 1908 the women artists of Melbourne held a reception in her honor, and during both this visit and her second visit in 1913–1916, she was frequently interviewed by Australian reporters regarding her opinions of art in Paris.
Gómez, Pedro Nel (1899–1984)
Authors: Gordon Catherin
Published: September 2018

Born in Medellín, Colombia on July 4, Pedro Nel Gómez influenced a generation of artists as the first muralist in Colombia, and as a radical figure who insisted on the independence of artistic creation. Not only was he a controversial figure, but he earned significant recognition for accomplishments as artist, architect, civil engineer, urban planner, and diplomat. Gómez developed a form of social realism that sought to reflect the essence of the reality experienced during this period. Between 1935 and 1938 he completed his first mural series in fresco at the Municipal Palace of Medellín. In the mural triptych entitled de la Bordadora a los Telares, el Problema del Petróleo y la Energía, y el Trabajo y la Maternidad the artist contends with issues of industrialization and labor conditions. This work also reflects his commitments to national development as a member of the Board of Public Works in Medellín. After World War II, the question of nuclear arms becomes a central motif in Gómez’s mythical realism. The artist’s artistic accomplishments contributed to the development of Modern Art in Colombia, and comprise the heart of the nation’s cultural heritage.
Grupo Santa Helena
Authors: Couto Maria de Fátima Morethy
Published: September 2018

The Santa Helena Group, made up mostly of wall painters, artisans, and amateur easel painters, had its origins in Brazil in the second half of the 1930s. This group, different from the Brazilian modernists of the 1920s, was made up of individuals with modest social backgrounds. Many were children of Spanish or Italian immigrants and studied in vocational courses such as Liceu de Artes e Ofícios de São Paulo, or the EscolaProfissionalMasculina do Brás. The group began with the friendship between Francisco Rebolo Gonsales and Mário Zanini. Both took a drawing night-course at the EscolaPaulista de Belas-Artes, where they met Alfredo Volpi, Clóvis Graciano, and Manuel Martins. Fulvio Pennachhi, Mário Zanini, Aldo Bonadei, Humberto Rosa, and Rullo Rizzotti were also part of this group, albeit in different moments of its short-lived existence. The Santa Helena Group never intended to be an avant-garde movement, or to change the art milieu. They never wrote a manifesto or engaged in activities that challenged the artistic canon. Their priorities were repertoire (theme) and technique; they valued the artisan aspect of the painter’s work and did not intend to continue any vanguard principles from the first phase of the Brazilian modernist movement.
Japanese-Korean Artistic Exchange (20th Century)
Authors: Youngna Kim
Published: September 2018

Japan was the most active among the East Asian countries in embracing Western civilization during the late 19th century. At the same time, the 500-year-old Joseon Dynasty (1392–1910) of Korea remained highly conservative. While Japan emerged as the dominant power of the region, Korea eventually collapsed, falling into Japanese colonial rule for 35 years (1910–1945). Due to these political conditions, Japanese art was highly prevalent in the work of Korean artists during this time, and Western art was mostly filtered through Japan. Korean artists nurtured a curiosity and passion for modern culture during the colonial era. Painters began using Western materials such as oil paints, and Western-style sculptures also emerged. In addition, a modern system of art exhibition was implemented. In previous eras, artisans working with paint, stonemasonry, carpentry, and metal casting were somewhat scorned, and therefore had a very low social status. However, as new cultural changes took hold, people working in these media gained a newfound respect as artists.
Kim, Whanki [김환기] (1913–1974)
Authors: Kyungso Min
Published: September 2018

A leading figure of the first generation of Korean abstract artists, from the mid-1930s Kim Whanki shaped a distinctive style by grafting Korean lyricism into modernist art practices. In 1943, Kim, along with some fellow Japanese-trained painters, formed a group called the New Realist School [신사실파] whose style combined realistic forms and abstract structures. Kim’s influential status in Seoul’s artistic community led him to serve as a professor at Seoul National University [국립서울대학교] and Hongik University, Seoul [홍익대학교]. In his earlier works, ceramics, traditional symbols, semi-nude women, and natural motifs were core subjects. The objects were rhythmically rendered in geometrical shapes, terse lines, and simplified colors and forms. Since the mid-1960s, he gradually eliminated recognizable images, and his work took on a monochrome hue. Dots of many sizes enclosed by layered squares and lines drawn toward different directions suggest islands on the sea or clouds in the sky, which engendered thematic continuity with previous works. The highly refined formal expression and a meditative sense of color in Kim’s paintings earned him formidable acclaim both at home and abroad.
Kofi, Vincent Akwete (1923–1974)
Authors: Kwami Atta
Published: September 2018

Vincent Akwete Kofi was born in Odumasi-Krobo, Ghana. After training at Achimota College, which had the first and foremost art department in West Africa, he continued his studies at the Royal College of Art, London (1952–1955), and Columbia University, New York (1959). While in New York, he learned metal casting and, with the assistance of the Harmon Foundation, produced a film on bronze casting. Upon his return to Ghana he taught at the Winneba Teacher Training College (1961–1969) and was Head of Fine Art, College of Art (KNUST), Kumasi (1969–1974). He was a member of the Ghanaian delegation at the First World Festival of Negro Arts, Dakar, 1966, and in 1971 he visited India at the invitation of the Government. His early influences were his Krobo environment and his artistic father, the Presbyterian minister James Kofi (1890–1976), who made drawings and teaching aids for Nature Study classes. During the mid point of his career Kofi drew inspiration from his days at Achimota College (c. 1945–1951), where the pervasive atmosphere of optimism and hope for a new Africa fired Ghanaian nationalism and the independence struggle. Kofi believed that he could fuse lessons from the history of modernism in the arts, "creatively and objectively," only by an immersion in his Ghanaian heritage. His sculptures, Awakening Africa (1959–1960) and Blackman’s Stoicism (1964), highlighted Pan-Africanism, and the decolonization process that was spreading across Africa.
Krauss, Rosalind Epstein (1941--)
Authors: Robbins Christa Noel
Published: September 2018

Born and raised in Washington, D.C., Rosalind Krauss is an art historian, critic, and theorist whose writing is focused on modern and contemporary art. First introduced to modernist art through the art collections that populate D.C., Krauss went on to earn her bachelors in art history at Wellesley College, before earning a doctorate in the field at Harvard University (1963–1969). Krauss’s doctoral thesis, which addressed the modernist sculptures of David Smith, was published under the title Terminal Iron Works in 1971, and remains one the most influential accounts of the sculptor’s work. While at Harvard she first met Michael Fried and, through Fried, Clement Greenberg; it was within their spheres of influence that she began to publish art criticism in journals such as Art International and Artforum while still in graduate school. In the early 1970s, Krauss broke publicly with the formalist criticism then being advanced by Greenberg and Fried. She has since become known for her advocacy and advancement of poststructuralist interpretations of art, as is represented in her editorial work for the journal October, which she co-founded in 1976.
Lawrence, Jacob (1917–2000)
Authors: Hill Catrina
Published: September 2018

Jacob Lawrence was an artist and educator, as well as the first African American artist of the 20th century to achieve critical acclaim and sustained mainstream recognition. Lawrence’s work is typically described as a mix between synthetic cubism and social realism. It consists of narrative compositions with bold color and patterns, distorted proportions, tilted space, and abstract forms. Lawrence is best known for his series The Migration of the Negro (1940–1941). The narrative series is comprised of sixty panels accompanied by captions, depicting scenes of everyday life for working-class black communities before, during, and after migrating from the agrarian South to the large, industrial cities of the North between the Wars. The paintings were done in bright tempera on small board panels and are a blend of social realism and modernist abstraction. The series is owned jointly by the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C. and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Lawrence also completed multi-panel works on historical figures including John Brown, Frederick Douglass, Toussaint L’Ouverture, and Harriet Tubman. He carefully researched the lives of the historical figures he depicted, spending many hours at the New York Public Library.
Liu Kang (1911–2004)
Authors: Yow Siew Kah
Published: September 2018

Liu Kang is recognized as one of the founders of Singaporean modern art. However, he was born and educated in China, and moved to Singapore in 1937 at a time when the island was still part of the British Empire. His art was therefore never about Singapore in a straightforward sense. Rather, his historical significance lies in creating Chinese-inflected modern paintings in Singapore, which combined European modernism, traditional Chinese painting, and the folk cultures of Nanyang, a Chinese term referring to the area south of China reachable by sea-vessel. After Liu arrived in Singapore, he became part of a group of Chinese painters and writers who had produced creative works centered on Nanyang since at least the early 20th century. Using the modernized Chinese painting of his formative years, he expanded its iconography to include the landscapes and peoples of Nanyang, producing some of the best-known works of his oeuvre. These include Chopping Firewood (1956), Outdoor Painting (1954) and Artist and Model (1954). Creating a syncretic painting with elements from the three cultures became the artist’s modus operandi that remained largely unchanged for the rest of his career.
Matsumoto, Shunsuke (松本竣介, 1912–1949)
Authors: Tsunoda Takuya
Published: September 2018

Matsumoto Shunsuke was an oil painter and essayist active in the years up to and through the Pacific War. His best-known paintings, most of which feature figures in urban landscapes, include several self-portraits such as Standing Figure (1942). Matsumoto contracted spinal meningitis at the age of eleven, which eventually led to the loss of his hearing, an event that steered him towards the career of professional artist, and encouraged him to become immersed in reading and the literary arts. Later, it also rendered him ineligible for the draft. At seventeen he dropped out of high school and moved to Tokyo, where he studied oil painting at the Pacific School of Fine Arts (Taiheiyô Bijutsu Gakkô) for three years. In 1935 he became a member of the avant-garde NOVA Art Society, the first of several exhibition collective and artist groups in which he would participate. Other groups including the Nikakai, the Nine-Room Society (Kyûshitsukai), and the Newcomers Painting Society (Shinjin Gakai). Like Ai Mitsu, Asô Saburô, and others with whom he associated, Matsumoto expanded his style to accommodate expanded Japanese interest in Abstraction and Surrealism during the 1930s, but he largely retained his interest in painting intimate portraits, set in non-idealized cityscapes, throughout his career.
Modern Chinese Woodblock Prints
Authors: Cox Matt
Published: September 2018

The history of Chinese Modern prints is intimately tied to social and political developments in 20th-century China. On May 4, 1919, a protest against the provisional government’s feeble response to the treaty of Versailles and the Japanese occupation attracted left-leaning students and artists to the city of Beijing. Amongst the protestors, a cluster of artists and writers used the immediacy of the woodblock to mass-produce subversive and anti-Japanese political images and messages. Under the mentorship of Lu Xun (鲁迅, 1881–1936), one of China’s greatest Modern literary figures, they adopted the nianhua (年画, new year calendar prints) or xinnian huazhi (flowery new year calendar) as a vehicle for experimentation with wood block printing. The Creative Woodblock Movement pioneered by Lu Xun sought to undermine the petit-riche ownership of the woodblock and re-contextualize art as the property of the masses. In order to reconcile the aims of the Creative Woodblock Movement with the tastes of the rural populations Lu Xun advocated the adoption of familiar peasant pictorial devices in the production of a new art.
Mono-ha
Authors: Clarke Neilton
Published: September 2018

Mono-ha refers to a unique art movement, its artists active in Japan most visibly from 1968 to 1975. Translating as the school of things, these artists brought "things" [mono]—earth, wood, metal, glass, cotton, stone, paper and the like—together, usually with minimal artistic intervention and in an essentially unaltered state. Following a reductive logic, arrangement was integral to Mono-ha activity, which posited the artist as a coordinator attempting to bring about new perceptions of matter, materials, and the spatial relationships between them. Centered around approximately ten young artists, whose outcomes were frequently sculptural and site-specific, the emergence of Mono-ha is usually thought to have coincided with the creation of Phase—Mother Earth in Suma Rikyu Park, Kobe by Tama Art University or 'Tamabi’ graduate Nobuo Sekine (b.1942--), as part of the first Open Air Contemporary Sculpture Exhibition in October, 1968. It comprised a cylinder-shaped hole dug in the ground, 2.2 metres wide and 2.7 metres deep, beside which stood a tower of the hole’s excavated earth, compacted into the same cylindrical shape and mirroring the void from where it came. Later recalling it, Sekine remarked on being mesmerized by the sheer physicality of what stood before him upon its completion.
Murayama, Tomoyoshi (1901–1977)
Authors: Lewis Diane Wei
Published: September 2018

Tomoyoshi Murayama was a multi-disciplinary Japanese artist associated with the interwar avant-garde and leftwing theater movements. After briefly attending Tokyo Imperial University, Murayama moved to Berlin in 1922, where he met Herwarth Walden and participated in The Great Futurist Exhibition at the Galerie Der Sturm. Upon returning to Japan, Murayama held his first solo exhibition in Tokyo in 1923, where he developed a theory of ‘conscious constructivism’ that called for the incorporation of everyday life into aesthetic practice. As the founding member and spokesman of the art collective Mavo, Murayama challenged prevailing notions of pure art—his mixed media assemblages included references to popular culture and industrial materials. In addition to his mixed media pieces, Murayama produced work across a range of media including children’s illustration, commercial design, theater, and film. Murayama’s theater affiliations included the Kokoro-za Theatre and the New Cooperative Theatre, and he designed the constructivist-style set for the Tsukiji Little Theatre production of From Morning Till Midnight (1924). An active member of proletarian art associations, Murayama was detained multiple times under the Peace Preservation Law, and was forced to renounce his political affiliations in 1933. In 1940, the New Cooperative Theatre and New Tsukiji Little Theatre were disbanded, and Murayama imprisoned. Following his sentence, Murayama spent the remainder of the war in Korea and Manchuria, returning to Japan after the war in 1945. His late novel Shinobi no mono (1960–1962) was adapted as a film series, play, and television program. Prior to his death, he completed a four-volume autobiography.
Morrison, George (1919–2000)
Authors: Morris Kate
Published: September 2018

George Morrison was a Native American (Chippewa) painter who played an active role in the formation of Abstract Expressionism. Morrison attended the Art Students League in New York City from 1943–1946, and was considered a member of the New York School, exhibiting alongside Franz Kline, Willem de Kooning, Ad Reinhardt, Louise Bourgeois, Mark Rothko, and others. Morrison’s paintings rarely contained overtly Indian signifiers, yet his early interest in nature and the unconscious, as well as his engagement with Surrealist practices such as automatism, made him an ally of modern primitivism. His experimentation with non-figural and biomorphic forms led him to develop a mature style of abstraction that combined color field and gestural approaches: he is best known for large-scale paintings, drawings, and wood collages that convey rhythmic and tactile sensations of the urban and natural environments. From 1970 to 1983 Morrison was a member of the faculty of Studio Arts at the University of Minnesota, and from 1983 until his death in 2000 he lived and worked on the Grand Portage Indian Reservation on the shore of Lake Superior. In 2004, Morrison was one of two artists featured in the inaugural exhibition of the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian.
Ngwenya, Malangatana (1936–2011)
Authors: Collier Delinda
Published: September 2018

Malangatana Ngwenya was born in 1936 in Matalana, in what was then the Portuguese colony of Mozambique. He is Mozambique’s most important artist and one of the best-known African modernists. Malangatana was committed to two elements of subject matter that are characteristic of African modernism: the present state of Africans under and after colonialism, and representations of pre-colonial African tradition—not as a "clash of cultures" or primordial connection to roots, but as a strategic choice. His work is markedly two-dimensional, with depthless figures and lines flat against the field of vision, eliminating any notion of his pictures as illusionistically "African". These techniques of flattening translated into many murals that he executed in Mozambique and elsewhere. Malangatana worked with mural artists from Chile, Mexico, South Africa and the United States, and their styles and techniques are visibly influenced by one another. Malangatana actively sought out his contemporaries and consistently worked with artists from under-represented social groups.
Nimsamer, Chalood (1929--)
Authors: Mukdamanee Vichaya
Published: September 2018

Beginning his career in the 1950s, Chalood Nimsamer became one of the most influential contemporary Thai artists. Recognized as a Thai national artist in 1998, Chalood is also a distinguished senior professor who helped develop Thai traditional art in the context of modernism. Most of his work portrays the relationship between local Thai culture and the traditional spirit of Thai people. The variety of his artistic forms, including drawing, painting, printmaking, mixed media, and installation, represent simplicity and calmness, which the artist claims is a unique characteristic of Eastern culture. His fine, delicate drawing lines and gentle colors reflect the love and generosity of rural society. Chalood first gained recognition in the Thai art scene with his early series of tempera paintings, oil paintings, and wood cuts, in which he was inspired by the images of rural women in their daily life. The artist used techniques found in traditional Thai art—organic shapes, vivid colors, and gold leaf—to portray the simple life of Thai people. As a result of these works, including Thai Farmers (1955) and Songkran (1956), Chalood received many awards from the National Art Competition and eventually gained the title of an artist of distinction (in the field of painting) in 1959.
Nnaggenda, Francis (1936--)
Authors: Kyeyune George
Published: September 2018

From an early age, Francis Nnaggenda knew he wanted to be an artist. Born in 1936, Nnaggenda was raised in rural Uganda where he became intimately connected with traditional life. He grieved over the way modernization was undermining the stability of African communities. Becoming an artist, he thought, was going to be the best and most practical way of raising his voice against a skewed development process that he was witnessing. With such strong opinions, Makerere Art School proved to be inconsistent with his aspirations. The School had at the time of the run up to independence abandoned the curriculum that was respectful of Ugandan art-making traditions which Margaret Trowell, its founder, had developed. Under Cecil Todd, Trowell’s successor (1958), Makerere Art School was instead reviewing its curriculum towards an emphasis on knowledge of world art, technique and skills acquisition. Elimo Njau and Sam Ntiro, Trowell’s direct and highly regarded protégés became Nnaggenda’s allies. The duo was opposed to Todd’s scholarly approach to art education and in the early 1960s, they prepared Nnaggenda for the daunting task of redefining traditional life along modern lines. In taking an alternative route in pursuit of an artistic career, Nnaggenda’s experiments in sculpture left an indelible mark on Uganda’s modern art landscape to which Makerere can lay no claim.
Okundaye, Nike (1951--)
Authors: Scott Victoria
Published: September 2018

Chief (Mrs.) Oyenike Monica Okundaye, better known as Nike, is a painter and textile artist who has had a profound impact on the preservation and promotion of the indigo-dyeing and batik arts of Nigeria. She was initially recognized in the 1970s for her work in batik. In recent years, her interest has turned to painting. She formed a unique partnership with Nigerian artist, Tola Wewe in which they both work on the same canvas. The overall composition of the joint work tends to follow Wewe’s style while the detail and layering of textile-inspired patterns is contributed by Nike drawing on her deep knowledge of the Yoruba adire textile tradition. Together they create a unique contemporary expression of a deep Nigerian aesthetic sensibility. Nike plays a prominent role in Nigeria’s vital contemporary art scene as an artist, entrepreneur and educator. She is well known and respected at home and abroad. She serves as an adviser to national and state governments on cultural matters and she travels widely to lecture and represent Nigerian art on the international stage. As well as galleries in Oshogbo and Abuja, Nike owns and directs one of the largest galleries in West Africa, the Nike Gallery in Lagos where she shows works by fellow Nigerian artists. Nike herself designed the buildings that house her businesses.
Bunting, Basil (1900–1985)
Authors: Copestake Ian
Published: September 2018

Basil Cheesman Bunting was a British poet, closely associated with Northern England and with late modernist poetics. A close friend of Ezra Pound’s, Bunting worked on the Transatlantic Review with Ford Madox Ford, but did not achieve widespread literary recognition until the 1950s and 60s. His most celebrated work is Briggflatts, an autobiographical long poem published in 1966.

Basil Cheesman Bunting was born in Scotswood-on-Tyne, Northumberland, on 1 March 1900, the son of Thomas Lowe Bunting, a local doctor, and Annie Cheesman, from a local mining family, and was educated at the Quaker schools of Ackworth and Leighton Park. This early pacifist background saw him arrested at 18 as a conscientious objector, and sentenced to imprisonment at Wormwood Scrubs and Winchester prisons. In the early 1920s, Bunting enrolled at the London School of Economics and began to experience London literary life. He left the School without a qualification and travelled to Paris. In 1923, while he was working on the Transatlantic Review under Ford Madox Ford, his influential friendship with Ezra Pound began.
The Santiniketan School
Authors: Kumar Raman Siva
Published: September 2018

The Santiniketan School refers to a small group of artists who were active in Santiniketan, a small university town north of Calcutta, from 1921 to the 1950s. The most prominent among these artists are Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941), Nandalal Bose (1882–1966), Benodebehari Mukherjee (1904–1980) and Ramkinkar Baij (1906–1980). Their work marks a departure from the historicist moorings of the earlier nationalist movement in Indian art and the development of a contextual modernism sensitive to the physical and cultural environment, as well as to the historical moment in which the artists lived. While Rabindrath Tagore provided the framework, Nandalal Bose fashioned its pedagogic program, which was more broad-based than that of colonial art schools and more modern in outlook. Although it began with anti-colonial and pan-Asian interests, the school’s stress on freedom, and the individual pursuit of elective affinities and eclectic assimilations, meant that it became more cosmopolitan and modernist over the years. Bound by shared concerns rather than a common style, the school represents the most fruitful modernist movement in pre-independence India. Defined more loosely, the Santiniketan School represents a larger circle of artists trained at Santiniketan, encompassing a wider geographical and temporal boundary, and thus includes Satyajit Ray (1921–1992) and K. G. Subramanyan (1924--) among its later luminaries.
Cecil Edwin Frans Skotnes (1926–2009)
Authors: Stephenson Jessica
Published: September 2018

Cecil Skotnes (b. 1926, East London, Eastern Cape, South Africa; d. 2009, Cape Town, South Africa) was a print-maker, woodcarver, and educator who played a lead role in the mid to late 20th-century South African art world. Together with other young artists of the 1960s, Skotnes forged an art style with a distinctive, regional identity as well as ties to international modernism. In addition, he was a founding member of the non-racial Amandlozi Group; however, it was his role as art teacher and advocate at the Polly Street Art Centre in Johannesburg from 1952 until 1966 that was of paramount significance. Through his efforts, a generation of black urban artists were trained and were afforded a network and the patronage needed to pursue professional careers. At the time, the Polly Street Art Centre was one of the only institutions that offered black South Africans access to education in modern art media such as painting, graphics, and sculpture. Skotnes’s successful promotion of young artists in the 1950s and 1960s made Polly Street a model for other community centers that arose in the 1970s and 1980s, and many of its graduates went on to found or direct community projects such as the Community Arts Project in Cape Town and Funda in Johannesburg.
Soo-Keun, Park [박수근] (1914–1965)
Authors: Youngna Kim
Published: September 2018

Park Soo-Keun is one of the most popular Korean painters of modern times. A self-taught artist, he graduated with only an elementary school education and received no regular art classes. However, from an early age, he wanted to become an artist like Jean François-Millet whose paintings he saw in art books. The artist is known to have said, "I have a very ordinary philosophy on art that is an artist should paint the goodness and truthfulness in people. So the people I paint are of humble origins rather than diverse and complex. My favorite subjects are grandfathers, grandmothers, and young children, the ordinary people we find in our households." Indeed, his paintings are as honest and candid as are his words. He experimented with various techniques to develop his own texture. He would cover his drawing board with canvas and then apply heavy layers of white, brown and black. Taking influence from Buddhist pagodas and statues, he would paint people on top of this thickly built texture with the effect of making them look as if they were painted on rock. His figures thus grew gradually flatter, buried in the thick texture he had crafted as the composition became more condensed.
Tamari, Vera (1945--)
Authors: Sherwell Tina
Published: September 2018

Vera Tamari was born in 1945 in Jerusalem. Her parents, originally from the coastal city of Jaffa, exposed their children to visual art, music, and literature from an early age. Vera’s older brother, Vladimir, is an artist based in Japan, and her sister Tania is a classical singer. Tamari received her BA in Fine Arts at the Beirut Women’s College between 1962–1966, and then pursued her studies in ceramics in Florence between 1972–1974. In 1982 she received a Master’s of Philosophy in Islamic Art and Architecture from Oxford University. She established the first ceramic art studio in Ramallah and held the post of professor in Islamic Art and Architecture at Birzeit University in the West Bank until her recent retirement. She is active as a curator, artist, and writer.

Several major themes remain consistent in Tamari’s work throughout her career. In her early work, Tamari drew inspiration from traditional Palestinian ceramics, which she integrated along with specific references to the long history of the art form. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, her work specifically negotiated her relationship to the Palestinian landscape through three-dimensional and relief works that mapped out its terrains.
The Grass Society [草草社]
Authors: Piggott Belinda
Published: September 2018

The Grass Society, or Caocaoshe, was a formal group of ink painters founded in Shanghai in 1979. Qiu Deshu [仇德樹] (1948--) founded the group and was its youngest member. Chen Jialing [陳家泠] (1937--), once a teacher of Qiu’s, was the group’s co-founder. From the 1950s to 1990s it was possible to practice art outside the Socialist system. The underground art movement included senior artists condemned by the Cultural Revolution and unofficial artists who had given up state employment. After Mao’s death in 1976, local arts administrators began exploring problematic exhibition themes with no political focus in mediums such as watercolors, considered unsuitable for Socialist Realist art. Caocaoshe emerged within this environment.
The Lingnan School
Authors: Ma William H.
Published: September 2018

The Lingnan School was a school of modern Chinese painting, originating in and around the southern city of Guangzhou (known in the West as Canton) from the mid-1900s to the early 1950s, which used the traditional Chinese ink and brush medium. The term "Lingnan," or "south of the ridges," refers to the region corresponding to Guangdong Province today, with the capital at Guangzhou. The area was the home to many reformist thinkers and revolutionaries who eventually overthrew the last imperial dynasty, and among them were the three founders of the School: Chen Shuren (1884–1948) and the brothers Gao Jianfu (1879–1951) and Gao Qifeng (1889–1933). Unlike other modern Chinese art movements, the traditional medium was not abandoned but rather updated to serve Chinese modernism. While the techniques remained grounded in traditional Chinese painting, many of the subjects and visual effects were wholly new. New subjects such as spiders, airplanes, and ruins were included, and old subjects were reinvented to symbolize strong nationalist and political messages. A new sense of romanticism was achieved through the extensive use of atmospheric effects in the paintings.
Vietnamese Artists in Paris
Authors: Proctor Ann
Published: September 2018

Vietnam was a French colony when the artistic and cultural influence of Paris was at its peak. Despite this, few Vietnamese ventured to France in order to establish or further their artistic education. Reasons for this anomaly include the fact that prior to the middle of the 20th century few Vietnamese left the place where they were born, and that French colonial rule restricted overseas travel for their subjects. The very few artists who went to France were from privileged backgrounds, and generally traveled either under a scholarship or in association with international exhibitions, such as the Colonial Exhibition in Paris (1931) or the 1937 World’s Fair. Artists who moved overseas for political reasons rarely returned to Vietnam, but those who did return in the first half of the 20th century contributed to a radical transformation in Vietnamese painting and sculptural practice, moving Vietnamese art into a modern international framework. Changes occurred in the aesthetic and physical appearance of art works, the way arts education was received, the manner in which art works circulated, and ultimately in the societal role of the artist (prior to colonization, Vietnamese art was generally produced within specific guilds).
Wadsworth, Edward Alexander (1889–1949)
Authors: Hudson Kitty
Published: September 2018

Edward Wadsworth played an important role alongside Wyndham Lewis in the short-lived avant-garde movement of Vorticism in 1913–1914. He continued to work in the abstracted, geometric style associated with the movement throughout World War I, though very little work of this period remains other than his woodcuts. After returning to England from active service in 1917, Wadsworth worked on the camouflage of shipping, known as "dazzle painting," and produced a large canvas entitled Dazzle Ships in Drydock at Liverpool (1919). The 1920s saw Wadsworth turn to the theme for which he is best known: the precise and realistic harbor scenes and maritime still lifes, largely painted in tempera. This highly individual style was often dubbed "surrealist" though Wadsworth did not encourage this association. His compositions became progressively more abstract in the early 1930s and, in 1933, Wadsworth joined the English abstract group "Unit One"; however, the following year he abruptly returned to his familiar marine paintings. Large-scale commissions included paintings for the smoke rooms of the Cunard ship Queen Mary and, during the 1939–1945 war, he produced advertising images for ICI. After 1945 his work tended once again towards the abstract, though always maintaining a link with earlier natural motifs and geometric forms.
Williams, Fred (1927–1982)
Authors: Jorgensen Darren
Published: September 2018

Fred Williams was an Australian painter and printmaker who bridged the gulf between the country’s landscape painters and contemporary art. In the 1960s he turned the sparseness of the Australian countryside into pictures that resembled the international trends toward abstraction and minimalism. These were large, sparse canvases dotted with colorful blobs that alluded to the great spaces and minimal features of the Australian countryside. Williams’s other influential series include paintings of densely packed trees in Sherbrooke Forest in the late 1950s and early 1960s, as well as landscapes of the Pilbara region in the early 1980s, just before his death. The Pilbara Series would come to be his best known work, yet they were also the most conservative of Williams’s pictures, as they portray the ranges and riverbeds of this region with a naturalism redolent of classical landscape painting. In these works, it is as if the radical break that took place in Australian art in the 1960s and 1970s had never happened—that is, that the influence of contemporary art had not succeeded in making itself felt.
Yllanes, Alejandro Mario (1913–1960)
Authors: Ramos Imma
Published: September 2018

Alejandro Mario Yllanes was a Bolivian Aymara painter, engraver, and muralist. His art career began with an exhibition in his hometown of Oruro in 1930, when he was nineteen years old. Shortly afterwards he moved to La Paz, where he worked as an illustrator for the periodical Semana Grafica, during which time he became acquainted with the artists Arturo Borda and Cecilio Guzmán de Rojas. All three Bolivian artists were influenced by the so-called indigenism or indigenismo movement, which gained momentum in Latin America from the 1920s onwards. The movement was characterized by the promotion of national pride and a nostalgic celebration of the Inca and pre-Columbian past, as reflected in literature and the visual arts. Yllanes was driven by a desire to encourage a spirit of community amongst the native Bolivians, and his works often portray locals in traditional Andean dress, carrying out pre-conquest rituals and customs. His incorporation of styles and techniques influenced by Post-Impressionism, Cubism, and Mexican Muralism show his engagement with modernist trends. The latter movement was headed by Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco, and David Alfaro Siqueiros. Their socio-political art—inspired by the Mexican Revolution—fueled Yllanes’s own work, which he combined with a rootedness to local narrative and materials.
Yōga [洋画]
Authors: Hammond J.M.
Published: September 2018

The term Yōga is used in Japan to refer to Western-style art. It is often used to specifically denote oil paintings but more widely can refer to a range of imported methods, such as watercolors, pencil drawing, etching and lithography. It is this concern with materials that has traditionally distinguished Yōga from Japanese methods of art production, rather than reference to Western pictorial devices such as fixed-point perspective. As a result of missions from Europe arriving in the 16th century, Japan’s earliest forays into Yōga were Christian paintings, at least until the religion was outlawed under the Tokugawa Shogunate, which also implemented a policy of national seclusion. But it lifted its ban on foreign books in the early 18th century, and a limited number of painters, notably Satake Shozan, Hiraga Gennai and Shiba Kōkan, turned their hand to oil painting. But the category of Yōga was not established until after the full-scale opening of Japan to the outside world in the mid-19th century. In 1856 the Shogun founded a bureau for research into Western studies, including art (the Bansho Shirabesho). One of its students, Takahashi Yuichi (1828–1894), later became a pioneer of Yōga.
Alfred Hitchcock (1899–1980)
Authors: Jacobs Steven
Published: September 2018

Anglo-American director Alfred Hitchcock was one of the most influential auteurs in cinema history, making more than fifty feature films between 1925 and 1976. He is widely regarded as one of cinema’s most significant artists. Through his cameo appearances in his own films and on the television program Alfred Hitchcock Presents, he became a cultural icon. Director of famous films such as Blackmail, Rear Window, Vertigo, and Psycho, Hitchcock was a multiple nominee and winner of a number of prestigious awards, including two Golden Globes and the first BAFTA Academy Fellowship Award. He was nominated five times for an Academy Award as Best Director. His film Rebecca, nominated for 11 Oscars, won the Academy Award for Best Picture of 1940. His modernism is evidenced in the strong self-reflexivity of his films. Because the gaze itself is the pre-eminent subject of many Hitchcock suspense thrillers and somber melodramas, his work can be interpreted as a meditation on film as such.
Bloomsbury
Authors: Battershill Claire
Published: September 2018

Bloomsbury is an area of Central London located in the Borough of Camden between Euston Road and Holborn. The neighborhood is home to the British Museum and the University of London as well as a number of Georgian residential buildings arranged around manicured squares and gardens. In the context of modernist literature, art, and culture, Bloomsbury is associated with a loosely defined social circle known as "the Bloomsbury Group," "the Bloomsbury Set," or simply "Bloomsbury," a gathering of writers, artists, and intellectuals who lived and worked in the area in the early part of the twentieth century. There is some critical disagreement about exactly who belonged to the group, but some of its key figures included Leonard and Virginia Woolf, John Maynard Keynes, E. M. Forster, Roger Fry, Vanessa Bell, Lytton Strachey, and Duncan Grant. Members of the group contributed to various aspects of modernist thought and culture including feminism, analytic philosophy, psychoanalysis, macroeconomics, progressive domestic arrangements, left-oriented politics, Post-Impressionist art, and literary experimentation.
Buñuel, Luis (1900–1983)
Authors: Gerow Aaron
Published: September 2018

Luis Buñuel is the film director most often associated with Surrealism, although his own career spanned many genres, film industries, and nations. Born to a wealthy family in Aragon, he went to university in Madrid alongside such future artists as Salvador Dalí and Frederico García Lorca. His first film, the short Un Chien Andalou (1929), both inaugurated Buñuel’s long-standing concern with moments or events that cannot be explained or rationalized, and also inducted him into the Surrealist movement.
John Cage (1921–1990)
Authors: Bernstein David W.
Published: September 2018

A leading figure in the twentieth-century avant-garde, John Cage was a prolific composer, writer, and artist. His early works show Schoenberg’s influence in their use of a naive modification of the latter’s twelve-tone system. By the late 1930s Cage had begun to pursue his own compositional interests, embarking on a career as a musical innovator who, for fifty years, would send ‘shock waves’ throughout the music world. In ‘The Future of Music Credo’, a manifesto written in 1940, Cage declared that in the future the distinction between ‘noise’ and so-called ‘musical sounds’ would no longer exist.
Duncan, Isadora (1877- 1927)
Authors: Preston Carrie J.
Published: September 2018

Frequently credited with the invention of modern dance, Isadora Duncan was a choreographer, dancer, educator, international star, and author of a bestselling autobiography My Life (1927). Her choreography drew most prominently from popular social dance genres, the poses and gestures depicted in classical art, and exercises promoted by the twentieth-century physical culture movement. Her hybrid performance form combined these popular and ancient influences with expressive solo dance, live orchestral music, non-naturalistic stage décor, and inflammatory curtain-call speeches resembling modernist manifestos. In the first decades of the twentieth century, numerous artists and spectators heralded Duncan as a muse of Modernism. Yet for some contemporaries and later commentators, her understanding of dance as the expression of the soul made her seem nostalgic and anti-modern. In fact, her incongruent combination of metaphysical and materialist discourses, along with her contradictory claims of a desire for popularity and hostility toward popular audiences, highlight common tensions in Modernism. Duncan’s performances and her written and embodied manifestos influenced many spheres of twentieth-century art and culture, including Italian Futurism, the Moscow Art Theatre, Greenwich Village Radicalism, and the women’s movement.
Forster, E.M. (1879–1970)
Authors: McKee Adam  R.
Published: September 2018

One of the leading British novelists of the early decades of the twentieth century, Edward Morgan Forster is best known for his novels Howards End (1910) and A Passage to India (1924). Forster attended Cambridge University from 1897 to 1901, where he became a member of the Cambridge Apostles secret society, which included philosophers Bertrand Russell, G.E. Moore, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. Membership in this society brought him into contact with several members of the Bloomsbury Group, including economist James Maynard Keynes, Virginia Woolf’s husband Leonard Woolf, and biographer Lytton Strachey. His work is best remembered for its use of realism to denounce the repressiveness of Edwardian British culture and it is often infused with liberal humanism. Additionally, his use of third-person omniscient narrative and abundant dialogue gave Forster a unique narrative style that influenced a number of later authors. Throughout his career Forster associated with a host of writers and artists including Siegfried Sassoon, Rupert Brooke, and Christopher Isherwood. Forster was highly influenced by his travels throughout the European continent and India. His works often illustrate this interest by focusing on settings outside of England. All of the novels published in Forster’s lifetime were published before 1925, after which Forster spent his life working on nonfiction, including biographies, travel narratives, and essays.