bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Rice, Ron (1935–1964)
Authors: Guilford Josh
Published: September 2018

Ron Rice was a central figure in the 1960s American avant-garde cinema. His films are closely affiliated with beat literature given their emphasis on improvisation and spontaneity, their engagement with themes such as social marginality, drugs, travel, and sexuality, and their documentation of artistic subcultures in San Francisco’s North Beach, Mexico, New York City, and Venice, California. As is suggested by his use of the neologism "Dazendada" to describe his work, Rice was influenced equally by the historical avant-garde (Dada, Soviet Cinema) and distinctly late-modern American cultural developments such as free jazz and the popularization of Zen Buddhism. At the same time, the comedic dimensions of his films have invited comparisons to silent slapstick cinema.

Rice only completed three works before his death by pneumonia at the age of 29: The Flower Thief (1960), Senseless (1962), and Chumlum (1964). An additional feature, The Queen of Sheba Meets the Atom Man (1963/1982), was assembled posthumously.
Richardson, Dorothy (1873–1957)
Authors: McCracken Scott
Published: September 2018

Dorothy Richardson (17 May 1873–17 June 1957) was an English writer who pioneered experimental modernist prose. Her major work was Pilgrimage, a thirteen-volume narrative. The first part, or ‘Chapter-volume,’ Pointed Roofs, was published in 1915. A collected edition, containing the twelfth chapter Dimple Hill, was published in 1938. The unfinished, thirteenth chapter, March Moonlight, was published posthumously as part of a new collected edition in 1967. Pilgrimage is narrated exclusively through the consciousness of its heroine, Miriam Henderson. The technique is challenging for the reader, who is given little in the way of context or the familiar reference points of nineteenth-century realism. For Richardson, however, it opened the way to a new ‘feminine realism,’ where Miriam’s identity is not bound by the demands of marriage or family. The result is an open-ended, unfinished – and perhaps unfinishable – text, which is as significant in the history of women’s writing as it is for the history of twentieth-century literature. In the 1920s, Richardson’s work was routinely cited alongside James Joyce and Marcel Proust. Her reputation declined after 1945, but revived with second-wave feminism in the 1960s and 1970s. Since that time, critical interest in Richardson has grown steadily, and she now has an established place in the modernist canon.
Strike (Sergei Eisenstein, 1925)
Authors: Nieland Justus
Published: September 2018

The first feature film of legendary Soviet director Sergei Eisenstein, Strike, is an anatomy of the germination of collective action, its surveillance within modern networks of power, and its violent repression. Based on the 1903 strikes at Rostov-on-the-Don, Strike was conceived as part of a never finished seven-film cycle entitled Toward the Dictatorship of the Proletariat. Made in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution, the film is the first of a series of Eisenstein’s filmic mythologies of revolutionary action – here an historical strike – that includes Battleship Potemkin (1926), a film about a famous mutiny, and October: Ten Days that Shook the World (1927), a picture about the revolution itself. Strike is, of course, a propaganda film for the nascent Soviet state, and rooted in an aspiration towards documentary actuality. But it is also one of the director’s most formally exuberant, theatrical films. Its dazzling display of technical trickery (superimpositions, double-exposures, shifting frame dimensions, hyperactive irises and dissolves), and its non-naturalistic performance styles, betray the strong influence of popular culture on the young Eisenstein. The director’s indebtedness to the anti-psychological, externalized approaches to acting characteristic of 1920s Soviet constructivist theatre of the 1920s – the biomechanical principles of Vsevolod Meyerhold, or the illogical, gag-based performance styles of the Factory of the Eccentric Actor (FEKS), a Petrograd-based acting workshop with which the young Eisenstein was associated – is also evident in Strike’s pile of gags, acrobatics, and clown routines. Strike illustrates Eisenstein’s early desire to structure his films as sensational attractions, whose aggressive montages – as in Strike’s famous intercutting of the slaughtering of an ox and the murder of the striking workers by tsarist forces – were calculated to manipulate spectators’ emotions and allegiances. During the 1930s, under the pressure of a new Soviet demand for Socialist realism, Eisenstein would disavow as youthful excesses the formal experiments of Strike that continue to astonish audiences.
The 400 Blows (1959)
Authors: Ionita Maria
Published: September 2018

The 400 Blows (Les 400 Coups), a black-and-white French feature film directed by François Truffaut, is one of the most influential works of the French New Wave. Strongly autobiographical, it tells the story of Antoine Doinel, a troubled Parisian boy struggling with an indifferent family life and stultifying school discipline, who is placed in a reform school after he commits a series of petty crimes. Truffaut chose the actor Jean-Pierre Léaud to play Doinel’s character in not just 400 Blows, but in four subsequent films. Influenced by Jean Vigo’s 1933 short Zero for Conduct, the film is notable for its simple, poetic realism and its unsentimental look at childhood, which is a radical departure from the edulcorated symbolism of films like Albert Lamorisse’s 1953 White Mane. Its use of innovative camera techniques, such as long tracking shots, jump cuts, and dissolves reflects Truffaut’s preoccupation with auteurism, in particular with Alexandre Astruc’s notion of the "camera pen" (camera-stylo) as the main expressive tool in the director’s arsenal. The film’s social commentary, though oblique, is unmistakable: Truffaut critiques the conformism, rigidity, and traditionalism of not only French society, but also of French cinema. The 400 Blows is rebellious but hardly optimistic and its iconic final image, of a freeze-frame of Doinel looking directly into the camera places some of the responsibility of his struggle on the viewers.
East West Dance Encounter (1984)
Authors: Coorlawala Uttara Asha
Published: September 2018

The East West Dance Encounter, 1984, Bombay, consisted of a week of presentations and discussion among selected performers and critics representing a range of styles, forms, and theories of dance and committed to intercultural exchange. In the evenings were public performances. Despite a long history of transformation, Indian dance in the 1980s was known more for adherence to tradition than for innovation. The East West Dance Encounter represented an early effort to acknowledge and celebrate choreographic experimentation. It highlighted projects that contended with the demands of a recently reformed tradition and those that engaged with modernist aesthetics, including expressionism and minimalism alongside postmodern initiatives like parody. This event set the stage for subsequent Dance Encounter events that continued to support modernist work in India.
Vidas Secas (Barren Lives)
Authors: Galindo Gloria
Published: September 2018

One of the most important films of Brazil’s Cinema Nôvo movement, Vidas Secas was directed by Nelson Pereira dos Santos, and based on the 1938 novel of the same name written by Graciliano Ramos. It tells the story of a poverty-stricken family in the sertão—the dry Brazilian northeast lands—in the 1940s. Shot in a modernist style reminiscent of Italian neorealist film, Vidas Secas is characterized by telling compositions, subjective shots, atomized, overexposed lighting, and sparse dialogue.
Kreutzberg, Harald (1902–1968)
Authors: Toepfer Karl Eric
Published: September 2018

Harald Kreutzberg was among the most widely known German dancers from the mid-1930s through the early 1960s, and he was certainly the most famous German male dancer of the 20th century. Though he achieved worldwide recognition as a result of his partnership with the German dancer Yvonne Georgi in the late 1920s, his fame expanded and endured entirely through his solo dance concerts around the world over four decades. Early in his career, Kreutzberg aligned himself to an expressionistic approach to dance, and he remained faithful to the expressionistic aesthetic until the end of his life. But his expressionism, rooted in a highly theatrical mode of performance, always accommodated his acute awareness of what pleased audiences whenever and wherever he performed. He was important in moving modern dance to a global, popular level of appreciation.
Tamiris, Helen (1902–1966)
Authors: Graff Ellen
Published: September 2018

Helen Tamiris was a key figure in the development of American modern dance; along with Martha Graham, Doris Humphrey, and Hanya Holm, she helped to forge the art form. Born Helen Becker to an immigrant Russian Jewish family on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, she was introduced to dance at the Henry Street Settlement House. After a brief stint in the ballet world and on the commercial stage, she gained recognition as a concert dancer with a suite of dances set to Negro Spirituals. These signature works established her reputation as a choreographic voice for the oppressed; themes of social protest inspired her throughout her career. As a political activist she promoted collective bargaining for dancers, organized collaborative ventures with other early modern dancers, and led the campaign to create a Federal Dance Project for unemployed dancers during the Depression years. She was unusual among early moderns in her desire to reach a broad popular audience, and in the 1940s and 1950s choreographed a succession of Broadway musicals, receiving critical acclaim for choreography in shows such as Annie Get Your Gun and Plain and Fancy. Her political engagement and her success in bridging the divide between high art and popular culture distinguish her among American modern dancers.
Weidman, Charles (July 22, 1901 Lincoln, Nebraska – July 15, 1975 New York City)
Authors: Prickett Stacey
Published: September 2018

Charles Weidman had a profound impact upon the development of American modern dance. Collaboration with Doris Humphrey initiated his choreographic journey: their movement experimentations evolved into a technique based on the actions of fall and recovery, and breath and suspension. They established the Humphrey-Weidman Studio and the Humphrey-Weidman Company in 1929, with Weidman working individually throughout the partnership, which lasted until the mid-1940s. One of the few American male dancer-choreographers of the period, he explored gender distinctions in dance and enabled the creation of works that delved into male–female relationships when many other major performing groups were all female. The concept of kinetic pantomime shaped Weidman’s portrayals of the everyday, such as the film-inspired comedy Flickers (1942) and Lynchtown (1936), which offered a critical commentary on the horrors of lynching. At the other end of Weidman’s aesthetic spectrum are dances known for a more formalist musicality, such as Brahms Waltzes (1961), created for the Charles Weidman Theatre Dance Company. Throughout his career Weidman crossed between the entertainment and high arts worlds, creating successful Broadway shows and nightclub revues while choreographing for opera companies and concert dance stages. Weidman’s legacy has spread through his teaching and work with prominent Broadway and modern dance performers and choreographers.
Duhart, Emilio (1917–2006)
Authors: Forster Alejandra Celedon
Published: September 2018

The Chilean architect Emilio Duhart Harosteguy is one of the most recognised modern architects and urban planners in the country. He is especially notable for the period he spent working as assistant for Walter Gropius and Konrad Wachsmann in the States and for Le Corbusier in France, whom he collaborated with in the planning of Chandigarh city in India. While Duhart was born in Temuco, he spent his childhood and primary and secondary education in France. He returned to Santiago and graduated as an architect from the School of Architecture at the Catholic University of Chile in 1941 and continued his studies at Harvard University (Master in Architecture 1942) and the Institutd’Urbanisme Sorbonne (Master in Urban Planning 1952).

Duhart’s first commissions were in relation to the Chillán earthquake (1939) reconstruction, and he worked mainly in rural housing as part of the Help and Reconstruction Corporation initiatives (1941). He belonged to a group of architects that went abroad at the time, and he imported foreign ideas and modes of architectural production to Chile; the other two main modes of foreign influence were architectural publications and external visitors to the country. From 1951 he taught at the Catholic University, becoming Director of the Institute of Urbanism, Housing and Planning.
Ford, John (1895–1973)
Authors: Gerow Aaron
Published: September 2018

The film director John Ford (February 1, 1895–August 31, 1973) has been celebrated both for his mythification of the American experience and for his signature approach to cinema. Born Sean O’Feeney to Irish immigrants in Maine, Ford followed his brother Francis into the film industry and began directing in 1917. Many of his early films were Westerns, often starring Harry Carey. This attention to the genre would first culminate in The Iron Horse (1924), one of many of Ford’s films that seemed to glorify the march of American progress
Fuses
Authors: Lewis Diane Wei
Published: September 2018

Fuses (1967, 29:51 min, colour, 16 mm film on video) is a ground-breaking experimental film by American performance artist, installation artist, and filmmaker Carolee Schneemann (b.1939). Shot and assembled over several years, this nonnarrative work combines footage of Schneemann and partner James Tenney nude and having sex, glimpses of their cat Kitch and their bedroom, and scenes near a beach to create a sensuous portrait of intimacy. Fuses contains both painterly, abstract imagery as well as explicit photography of the body and sexual acts. Editing is used to play with rhythm and temporality as images are repeated, inverted, superimposed, sped up, and slowed down. Schneemann’s use of high contrast photography brings out inky black shadows that undulate with variegated shades of magenta, ocher, and green. Schneemann also scratched the celluloid and printed the edges of the filmstrip and its perforations into the image. This attention to surface, exposing what is usually hidden, echoes the display of the inner and outer contours of the body within the film. Her painstaking manipulations of the footage portray sex as a complex natural phenomenon that is saturated with unconscious patterns. In some screenings, the film is accompanied by sounds of ocean waves and gulls. According to Schneemann, Kitch the cat’s perspective offers a model for attentive but nonjudgmental viewing. Anticipating feminist themes of the 1970s, Schneemann’s intimate film challenges the abstract, cerebral, masculine aesthetic of Conceptual and Minimalist Art, emphasizing instead the autobiographical, desire, and the irrational.
Geurra, Ramiro (1922--)
Authors: John Suki
Published: September 2018

Dancer, choreographer, master teacher, theoretician, and historian Ramiro Guerra is known as the father of Cuban modern dance, which he codified in the technique known throughout Latin America as técnica cubana. In 1959, with the backing of Cuba’s Revolutionary government, he founded the national modern dance company, now known as Danza Contemporánea de Cuba. Working with practitioners of ballet, American and Mexican modern dance, Afro-Cuban folklore, and nightclub cabaret, Guerra pioneered a new dance form from the many rich sources of Cuban movement. Guerra’s contributions to Cuban modern dance have shaped generations of dancers and choreographers.
Grotesco Criollo
Authors: Loayza Milton
Published: September 2018

The grotesco criollo was a genre belonging to the commercialized theater of Buenos Aires in the 1920s and 1930s. The influence of the Italian grottesco of Luigi Pirandello is evident in the way characters are conceived as living with a false image of themselves. In the grotesco criollo the false image or mask is revealed when a character fails in his or her attempt to fit in with reality. Armando Discépolo is considered the creator of the genre. Other authors of grotescos include Francisco Defillipis Novoa and Juan Carlos Ghiano. The new genre was a conscious reworking of the sainete criollo, popular in the Rio de la Plata region at the beginning of the twentieth century. The sainetes were comic and melodramatic representations featuring the urban immigrants who crowded the patios of tenement buildings. The grotesco genre transferred the dramatic action to the interior of the Italian immigrant’s household. It typically mixed the comic and the tragic in a familial conflict involving failed expectations of success in modern life. Discépolo’s plays Mateo (1923) and Stéfano (1928) are most representative of the genre, which has influenced Argentine theater through the years, from avant-garde author Roberto Arlt to more recent playwrights such as Roberto Cossa and Griselda Gambaro.
Group Theatre (1931–41)
Authors: Malague Rose
Published: September 2018

Founded in 1931 by Harold Clurman, Cheryl Crawford, and Lee Strasberg, the Group Theatre was conceived as a company dedicated to staging socially relevant plays, with a permanent ensemble of actors trained in a new, shared technique. Its legacy can be located in the contributions it made to modern American drama, particularly through the works of member-playwright Clifford Odets, and through its practice of the Stanislavsky System, which revolutionized American acting, developing into a psychologically realistic approach widely known as "the Method."
H.D. (Hilda Doolittle) (1886–1961)
Authors: Jaussen Paul
Published: September 2018

Perhaps best known as one of the founding imagists, H.D. was also a novelist, essayist and actor active throughout the entire modernist period. From her early, iconic lyrics to her late, mythological long poems, H.D. developed an aesthetic that bridged free verse, classicism, and new conceptions of identity, most notably gender and sexuality. In addition to her own work, H.D. helped shape modernism through her many friendships with other important artists and intellectuals, including Ezra Pound, Marianne Moore, D.H. Lawrence and Sigmund Freud.
Hansberry, Lorraine (1930–65)
Authors: Colbert Soyica
Published: September 2018

Born in Chicago in 1930, Lorraine Hansberry made history when her play A Raisin in the Sun premièred on Broadway in 1959 as the first work by an African-American woman to appear on the Great White Way. Realist in style, A Raisin in the Sun engaged with modern American drama’s investigation of the salience of the American Dream in the context of the Cold War, situating the deferred dreaming of the Younger family within a long history of foreclosed desire and possibility. Hansberry remains best-known for A Raisin in the Sun, but the play both exemplifies and overshadows her other accomplishments as a black lesbian artist-activist, only gesturing toward the expansive political vision of her work as a whole, including her exploration of slavery in The Drinking Gourd (1960), her treatment of apocalypse in What Use Are Flowers (1962), and her consideration of black freedom movements in Les Blancs (1964) and The Movement: A Documentary of a Struggle for Equality (1964).
Ibrahim, Ramli (1953--)
Authors: Katrak Ketu H.
Published: September 2018

Dancer-choreographer Ramli Ibrahim has a unique heritage as a Muslim who grew up in Malaysia, training in ballet, contemporary dance, and two Indian classical dance styles—Bharatanatyam under Adyar K. Lakshman and Odissi under the late Guru Deba Prasad Das. An engineering scholarship took young Ibrahim to Australia, where he studied ballet. He later performed with the Sydney Dance Company and the Australia Dance Company. Ibrahim remarks, "I use a variety of genres as my tools. I refuse to be the slave of definitions" (Puranam 2012). However, his abiding passion is with Odissi from which he innovates. Ibrahim’s work, remarks Leela Venkataraman, "defies categorisation … His creativity is an integrated experience transcending national, religious and racial boundaries" (Venkataraman 2004). Ibrahim is the recipient of the Fulbright Distinguished Artist Award, 1999, and two Lifetime Achievement Awards from Boh Cameronian (2003) and from Angarag (2006), and the Indian government’s Sangeet Natak Akademi Award (2011). He was also recognized as a "Living Heritage" individual by the government of Malaysia (2012).
Independent Theatre Movement
Authors: Yde Matthew
Published: September 2018

The Independent Theatre Movement in Europe was a primary shaping influence on modern dramatic literature and theatrical modernism. These small independent theaters were committed to freeing theater and drama from the limitations of prevailing conventions, commercial considerations, and censorship.
Beach, Sylvia (1887–1962)
Authors: Crawford John
Published: September 2018

Sylvia Beach was an American expatriate best known as the owner of the iconic Parisian Shakespeare and Company bookstore, located at 8 rue Dupuytren until 1921, and then at 12 rue de l’Odéon the Left Bank area of the city. The popular bookstore and lending library was a point of convergence for many modernist writers and artists in Paris’ thriving arts community, including Ernest Hemingway, André Gide, André Maurois, Robert McAlmon, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and James Joyce. A supporter of James Joyce, Beach was the first publisher of Joyce’s Ulysses.

Born Nancy Woodbridge Beach, Sylvia Beach spent much of her youth distancing herself from a household made uneasy by the tense marriage of her mother, Eleanor Thomazine Orbison, and father, Sylvester Beach, a Presbyterian minister who served several parishes in New England, including the prominent Princeton, New Jersey community. Beach’s early refusal of material wealth was often at odds with her father’s attempts to gain social status among affluent Princeton parishioners. However, Beach found some hope for her ambition of becoming an independent woman during a year spent in Paris in 1902, during which her father served as Associate Pastor of the American Church of Paris. This period helped develop Beach’s love for Paris, its artists, and its liberal atmosphere.
Lejárraga, María de la O (1874–1974)
Authors: Bender Rebecca
Published: September 2018

María de la O Lejárraga was a Spanish playwright, novelist, essayist, and feminist intellectual of the early twentieth century. She published under her married name, María Martínez Sierra, and also pseudonymously under the full name of her husband, the modernist writer, theater artist, and publisher Gregorio Martínez Sierra. Scholars have recently shown that many works originally attributed to him were actually penned by Lejárraga. She was a strong and unique feminist voice in literary circles and the burgeoning women’s movement in early twentieth-century Spain.
Jacobs, Lewis (1906–97)
Authors: Ivins-Hulley Laura
Published: September 2018

Lewis Jacobs (1906–97) was an American film critic, historian, and filmmaker. Jacobs initially studied painting and design, and his first foray into cinema was through the Philadelphia Cinema Crafters, an amateur film club founded in the late 1920s (the first record of its existence in the Amateur Cinema League dates from 1928). In 1930, he co-founded the short-lived periodical Experimental Cinema with poet and fellow cine-enthusiast David Platt. Much of the content of Experimental Cinema dealt with Soviet montage film, but it also contained essays on filmmaking aesthetics, international directors, and workers’ film societies both in the United States and abroad. The final issue in 1935 was largely devoted to Sergei Eisenstein’s Que Viva Mexico! and published Eisenstein’s full scenario for the film. During the 1930s, Jacobs was involved with leftist film organizations in New York and made several documentaries and experimental films, including Footnote to Fact (1934). Jacobs began publishing film criticism during this period in The New York Times, his articles frequently focussing on directors like D.W. Griffith. In 1939, he published The Rise of the American Film: A Critical History. A technical, industrial, and aesthetic history; like Jacobs’ newspaper criticism, the book pays special attention to key American directors. Jacobs continued making films into the 1960s, wrote and edited books on the aesthetics of cinema and on documentary, was an early contributor to Hollywood Quarterly (subsequently renamed Film Quarterly), and taught film at the City College of New York, New York University, and the Philadelphia College of Art.
Maas, Willard (1906–71)
Authors: Key Laura E.B.
Published: September 2018

Willard Maas (1906–71) was an American filmmaker and poet. He was known for his experimental style of filmmaking and was considered part of an avant-garde group of artists who worked in opposition to the commercial film industry. The types of films he made were sometimes referred to as "film poems" for their unconventional style, blurring the traditional distinction between the media of film and poetry.

Maas was a literature professor by trade, working at Wagner College in New York City. Along with his wife, fellow filmmaker and artist Marie Menken, Maas was prominent in the New York art scene from the 1940s to the 1960s. Maas and Menken were founder members of the Gryphon Group, a set of like-minded artists who worked together on postwar experimental art and film projects. The couple was well-known for holding avant-garde salons at their Brooklyn apartment.

Maas and Menken’s tempestuous relationship was well recorded, and they are cited as inspiration for the characters of George and Martha in Edward Albee’s play, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962).

Maas’s film credits as director include Geography of the Body (1943, with Marie Menken and George Barker), The Mechanics of Love (1955, with Ben Moore), Image in the Snow (1943–8), and Narcissus (1956, with Ben Moore).
Mahle, Ernst (1929--)
Authors: Rodrigues André
Published: September 2018

Ernst Mahle is a German-born Brazilian composer, conductor, and music educator who occupies the chair number 6 of the Academia Brasileira de Música. He is also a former vice-president of the Sociedade Brasileira de Música Contemporânea.

He was born on January 3rd 1929 in Stuttgart and spent most of his childhood in Bluendz, Austria. Following the World War II, the city of Bluendz would host concerts by the most prominent students of the Conservatoire national de musique de Paris. Impressed by the dexterity of such players, Mahle decided to pursue piano and composition studies, and at age 20 he was accepted at the Staatliche Hochschule für Musik und Darstellende Kunst Stuttgart in the class of Austrian composer Johann Nepomuk David. His studies in Stuttgart ended quickly, only one year later, when his family moved to São Paulo, Brazil, in 1951. Nevertheless, Mahle developed a special interest in modal music during this period after being introduced to the music of Béla Bartók.
van Wyk Louw, Nicolaas Petrus (1906–1970)
Authors: du Plooy Heilna
Published: September 2018

N. P. Van Wyk Louw is regarded as the most prominent poet of the group known as the Dertigers, a group of writers who began publishing mainly in the 1930s. These writers had a vision of Afrikaans literature which included an awareness of the need of thematic inclusiveness, a more critical view of history and a greater sense of professionality and technical complexity in their work. Van Wyk Louw is even today considered one of the greatest poets, essayists and thinkers in the Afrikaans language.

Nicolaas Petrus van Wyk Louw was born in 1906 in the small town of Sutherland in the Western Cape Province of South Africa. He grew up in an Afrikaans-speaking community but attended an English-medium school in Sutherland as well as in Cape Town, where the family lived later on. He studied at the University of Cape Town (UCT), majoring in German and Philosophy. He became a lecturer at UCT, teaching in the Faculty of Education until 1948. In 1949 he became Professor of South African Literature, History and Culture at the Gemeentelijke Universiteit van Amsterdam. In 1960 he returned to South Africa to become head of the Department of Afrikaans and Dutch at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johanneshurg. He filled this post until his death in 1970.
Martínez Sierra, Gregorio (1881–1947)
Authors: Bender Rebecca
Published: September 2018

Gregorio Martínez Sierra was a Spanish poet, playwright, and theater director who played a key role in the Spanish theatrical avant-garde and the development of art theater during the early twentieth century. He operated the publishing house Renacimiento, which was responsible for disseminating modernist literature and foreign playwrights throughout Spain. He was married to María de la O Lejárraga (María Martínez Sierra), who was apparently the true author of much of the literature that bears Gregorio’s name. Gregorio Martínez Sierra was born in Madrid in 1881. He briefly studied law and then philology before abandoning the university to dedicate himself to poetry and theater. In 1900 he married María de la O Lejárraga, a teacher and writer from Spain’s La Rioja region. The pair immediately began to collaborate in the writing and publishing of short novels and plays that today carry the name of Gregorio Martínez Sierra. Recent scholarship as well as Lejárraga’s memoirs, however, have shown that María was in fact the main author of the majority of the literature that bears her husband’s name. In 1906 Martínez Sierra fell in love with a young actress in his theater, Catalina Bárcena, though both his marriage and literary collaboration with Lejárraga would continue until Bárcena gave birth to his daughter in 1922. Despite their separation, Lejárraga continued publishing essays and novels pseudonymously under her estranged husband’s name, and curiously no new theatrical plays by "Gregorio Martínez Sierra" would premièr after 1922.
Mathieu, Rodolphe (1890–1962)
Authors: Bazin Paul
Published: September 2018

Rodolphe Mathieu (1890–1962) was pianist, composer and pedagogue and played a role too often ignored in the musical scene of his time. His music is rigorously composed and sensuously expressive, and its amazing boldness rivals the inventiveness of the European avant-garde. Many pieces reveal Mathieu’s chromatic lyricism, including his Quintet for piano and string quartet (1942) and his Trio for piano, violin and cello (1922). At the heart of this composer’s fairly short list of works lie a few pieces for voice, sometimes accompanied by instrumental groups such as a string quartet in Deux poèmes (1928) or an orchestra in Un peu d’ombre (1913) and Harmonie du soir (1924).
Matiushin, Mikhail Vasilevich (1861–1934)
Authors: Wünsche Isabel
Published: September 2018

The musician, painter, and theoretician Mikhail Matiushin is best known for his music for the Cubo-Futurist opera Pobeda nad Solntsem (Victory over the Sun), which he wrote in 1913. Together with Elena Guro, he founded the artists’ group Soiuz Molodezhi (Union of Youth), in December 1909, and was one of the main organizers of the publications, exhibitions, and events of the St. Petersburg avant-garde in 1912–13. Matiushin stands at the center of what we today refer to as the Organic School of the Russian avant-garde. He developed the concept of Organicheskaia Kultura (Organic Culture), first with his students at the reformed Petrograd Art Academy (SVOMAS), from 1918 to 1926, and then in his research groups at the State Institute of Artistic Culture (GINKhUK), from 1923 to 1926, and the State Institute of Art History (GIII), from 1926 to 1929. In the late 1920s and 1930s he worked on a color theory, parts of which were published in 1932 as Zakonomernost izmentaemosti tsvetovykh sochetanii: Spravochnik po tsvetu (The Laws Governing the Variability of Color Combinations: A Handbook of Color). Matiushin was an influential teacher; among his students were the Ender siblings, Nikolai Grinberg, Valida Delakroa, Elena Khmelevskaia, and Nikolai Kostrov.
McKayle, Donald (1930–)
Authors: Morris Gay
Published: September 2018

In the mid-twentieth century, Donald McKayle became known for creating powerful modern dance works dealing with contemporary African-American experiences. He also helped break down color barriers in the United States, first as a black dancer working in white modern dance companies, then as a choreographer and director of an interracial dance troupe, and finally as a choreographer of Broadway shows, television programs, and films. McKayle began his professional career in the late 1940s as a dancer with the New Dance Group. He then formed his own company, which he directed while continuing to dance with other major choreographers during much of the 1950s. By the end of the 1960s, McKayle was spending an increasing amount of time on the United States’ West Coast as well as creating choreography internationally in modern dance, ballet, and popular entertainment. From 1989 to 2010, he was a professor of dance at the University of California, Irvine.
McLaren, Norman (1914–87)
Authors: Kotte Claudia
Published: September 2018

Born in Scotland, Norman McLaren was a filmmaker and one of the most inventive creators of animation films. His career is closely connected to the animation studio at the National Film Board of Canada (NFB), where he worked from 1941 to 1984. All in all, he made some fifty films in a stunning range of styles and techniques. McLaren attended the Glasgow School of Art from 1932 to 1936. While specializing in interior design he joined a filmmaking club, discovered the works of Pudovkin and Eisenstein, and made his first films. For lack of a camera and unexposed film, he experimented with old prints and painted colored ink directly onto the frames. John Grierson, the then director of the British General Post Office (GPO) Film Unit and a documentary filmmaker himself, discovered McLaren when being adjudicator at the Glasgow Amateur Film Festival in 1936 and offered him a job at his unit in London. While learning documentary filmmaking at the GPO, McLaren continued his experiments with sound and movement. During a stint in Spain where he covered the Civil War as cameraman, he developed his life-long abhorrence of war.
Messmer, Otto (1892–1983)
Authors: Gerow Aaron
Published: September 2018

Otto Messmer was a pioneering animator whose Felix the Cat was the first internationally famous cartoon character. Messmer was born in New Jersey and went to art school before beginning newspaper cartooning. After working with several animation companies, he joined with Pat Sullivan (1887–1933) to produce cartoons featuring Charlie Chaplin (1889–1977). It was their work animating Chaplin that laid part of the foundation in 1919 for the creation of Felix, a black cat whose independence, resourcefulness, and physicality resembled that of the Tramp. The Felix series, with two films produced a month, was a great success, and Felix himself became one of the first mass-merchandized characters. His attraction was due not only to the anarchic gags—as Messmer took advantage of the medium to allow Felix to morph parts of his body to extricate himself from situations—but also to a character that was both visually abstract (and thus easily appropriable) and psychologically concrete (he was always shown thinking). Audiences young and old could identify with a character who was both an adult and a child, animal and human. Sullivan’s decision not to quickly move to sound meant the end of their cinematic version of Felix (he would be resuscitated later in film and television), leaving Messmer to subsequently focus on the comic strip version of the character. Felix, however, had already been a significant influence on subsequent characters such as Mickey Mouse.
Microtonality
Authors: Young Gayle
Published: September 2018

Microtonality refers to any use of pitch that departs from twelve equally-spaced tones per octave (twelve-tone equal temperament), the standard tuning established in Europe since the nineteenth century. This tuning has come to dominate music internationally through the widespread use of mass-produced instruments with standard tunings, such as electronic keyboards.
Crowley, Aleister (1875–1947)
Authors: Sorensen Leif
Published: September 2018

Aleister Crowley was an occultist, writer, and mystic who founded the spiritual philosophy of Thelema. Crowley’s work combines European, South Asian, and Chinese esoteric teachings. His fictional, poetic, and spiritual writings celebrate free will. The popular press frequently referred to him as ‘the wickedest man on earth’. Crowley died in 1947, leaving behind a vast corpus of writing, multiple followers, and a growing store of legends.

Crowley was born Edward Alexander Crowley into a wealthy Quaker family in Warwickshire. After the death of his father, Crowley rejected formal education and his parents’ religion. After withdrawing from multiple public schools and working with tutors, Crowley entered Trinity College at Cambridge in 1895. At Cambridge he met Leonard Smithers, the publisher of some of Oscar Wilde’s late work. Smithers published Crowley’s first two books of poems.
Modernism and Popular Music
Authors: Gibson Stephen
Published: September 2018

Modernism has an uneasy relationship with popular music and popular culture in general. Many modernist music movements (e.g. the twelve-tone school of Schoenberg) are diametrically opposed to popular music in both form and aesthetic. Though hardly uniform in its attitude to popular culture, certain strains of modernist thought (e.g. the Frankfurt school, and especially Adorno) have also vilified the use of popular culture references in modernist practices. Despite this rejection, several modernist composers from Stravinsky to Philip Glass have used popular music forms such as jazz and rock in their works. In a rather more remarkable turn of events, modernist and experimental music techniques have had a profound influence on various popular forms including free jazz, experimental rock and electronica.
Post-Impressionism
Authors: Beggs Margo L.
Published: September 2018

The British critic Roger Fry devised the term "Post-Impressionism" in 1910 while organizing an exhibition in London at the Grafton Galleries to introduce recent French art to the British public. For him, Post-Impressionism meant painters who "consider the Impressionists too naturalistic." He argued that Post-Impressionist painters privileged the simplicity of form and the expression of emotions over the Impressionists’ tendency to capture mere "shimmer and colour." Fry singled out Paul Gauguin, Vincent van Gogh, and Paul Cézanne for their efforts to advance Impressionism. An exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1929, organized by Alfred H. Barr, Jr., added Georges Seurat to the core group of Post-Impressionists. Barr declared that through their artistic innovations, all four artists had emerged from "the Impressionist blind-alley." While subsequent exhibitions and publications have attempted to broaden the range of artists who could be considered Post-Impressionists (for example, an exhibition organized by the Royal Academy of Arts in London in 1979), Seurat, Gauguin, van Gogh, and Cézanne continue to be celebrated as the artists who made the most noteworthy contributions to Post-Impressionism, forging the way to Fauvism, Cubism, Expressionism, and beyond.
Ramírez Vázquez, Pedro (1919–2013)
Authors: Santoyo-Orozco Ivonne
Published: September 2018

Pedro Ramírez Vázquez is arguably the father of Mexican modern architecture. He studied at the School of Architecture of the National Autonomous University of Mexico, and graduated by presenting the first thesis on urbanism in Mexico (1943). He had a prolific and influential career in his hometown, Mexico City, where some of his buildings have become landmarks of the capital, such as National Museum of Anthropology (1964), the Aztec Stadium (1966), the New Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe (1975), the Chamber of Deputies San Lazaro Legislative Palace (1980), among others. In addition to a prestigious architecture career, he also left a mark in other disciplines such as industrial design, graphic design, politics, and academia. Departing from architecture, he created a series of sculptures and some pieces of furniture. He also contributed to the graphic design of the Olympic image of 1968. As a statesman, he served as the President of the Organising Committee of the Olympic Games of 1968. As a politician, he was given the office of the Secretary of Human Settlements and Public Works from 1976 to 1982 and other posts within the Secretary of Education. As an academic, he taught composition and urban planning at the National School of Architecture, and he was a founder and first Rector of the Metropolitan Autonomous University. Through all these endeavours, Ramírez Vázquez insisted that ‘design is not a work of art, it is a service’.
Shearer, Sybil (1912–2005)
Authors: Brooks Bonnie
Published: September 2018

In the modern dance world, Sybil Shearer was by most accounts an idiosyncratic, singular, and somewhat esoteric figure whose career spanned the second half of the twentieth century. As a dancer Shearer came of age in the 1930s, when she studied at the Bennington School of the Dance, joined the Humphrey–Weidman company, and performed with Agnes DeMille. In 1941 she presented her debut concert as a soloist in New York City and became recognized as an innovator, an original voice within the generation that followed Bennington. The following year she moved to Chicago, a decision that enhanced her reputation for curiosity, elusiveness, and mystique. She founded her own ensemble of Chicago-based dancers, the Sybil Shearer Company, created scores of short solos for herself, and was a pioneer in the photographic and film documentation of her dances in collaboration with photographer Helen Balfour Morrison. Deeply philosophical and at the same time profoundly spiritual, Shearer devoted her career as well as her inner life—it is impossible to separate her artistry from her spirituality—to a constant search for cosmic meaning, aesthetic purity, and spiritual authenticity. Strongly influenced by Rudolf Steiner, she was a true modernist in the sense that she believed deeply in universal concepts and was in constant search of the evidence and experience of those realities through choreography and dancing.
Ulysses
Authors: Slote Sam
Published: September 2018

A novel by James Joyce, written between 1914 and 1922, serialized from 1918–1920, and published in book form (to much controversy) in 1922. With T. S. Eliot’s The Waste-Land and Virginia Woolf’s Jacob’s Room, both also published in 1922, Ulysses helps establish 1922 as the peak year of Anglo-American Modernism. It is among the most stylistically diverse and boldly experimental English prose works of the twentieth century.

Ulysses takes place over the course of one single day, June 16, 1904 (now known as Bloomsday, after its central character Leopold Bloom). It consists of 18 chapters (or episodes as Joyce called them), each one covering no more than one hour. Each episode has a specific style, although the styles of most of the earlier episodes are largely similar. Joyce wrote Ulysses between 1914 and 1922, although it began life in 1906 as a quickly abandoned short story for Dubliners. Joyce’s compositional practice was largely one of revision and addition: Joyce signed off the final revisions for Ulysses on January 30, 1922, days before its publication.

Episodes from Ulysses were serialized in The Little Review from March 1918 to December 1920. Serialization was halted after the thirteenth episode ("Nausicaa") occasioned a legal action over obscenity brought on by the New York Society for the Prevention of Vice (four episodes were serialized by The Egoist, but fears of prosecution prevented a fuller serialization). Joyce’s refusal to make any concessions towards publishing Ulysses in a climate where it was liable to be judged obscene led to its being published by Sylvia Beach, the proprietor of the Shakespeare and Company bookshop in Paris.
Campobello, Nellie (1900--1986) and Campobello, Gloria (1911--1968)
Authors: Reynoso Jose
Published: September 2018

Sisters Nellie and Gloria Campobello migrated from Northern Mexico to Mexico City in 1923 where they became influential figures in the development of Mexican dance and the professionalization of dancers. During the 1930s, as dancers, choreographers, teachers, and dance administrators, the Campobello sisters joined the government’s efforts to develop a Mexican dance form that could reflect the country’s modern aspirations and revolutionary ideals, a nationalist project that started with the armed uprising of 1910. During this revolutionary period their work reflected the mestizo Modernism that Mexican muralists and musicians had been articulating since the early 1920s by combining elements from European modernist aesthetics and Mexico’s indigenous cultures. The Campobellos participated in government-sponsored cultural missions that comprised brigades of artists and teachers who, as part of Mexico’s post-revolutionary project, traveled to rural areas in order to educate indigenous populations, in subjects ranging from literacy to agricultural techniques. These nationalist efforts prompted artists and teachers like Nellie and Gloria to document traditional and indigenous costumes, crafts, musical rhythms and dances as symbols of an emerging national identity. The Campobello sisters and others like them used these materials in combination with ballet and other movement techniques in order to compose choreographic works that were representative of the nation. Gloria Campobello eventually became Mexico’s prima ballerina and the two sisters founded the Ballet of Mexico City in 1941. In addition to her work in dance, Nellie Campobello wrote several books and was the only female writer to publish narrations of the Mexican revolution based on her own childhood experiences.
Casella, Alfredo (1883--1947)
Authors: Roderick Peter
Published: September 2018

Alfredo Casella was an Italian composer, the leading member of the generazione dell’ottanta who were all born in the 1880s and who turned away from Italy’s operatic tradition in favor of new musical directions.

Casella’s musical life consisted of a number of phases. Born into a Torinese musical family and surrounded by orchestral musicians in his early years, a move to Paris at the age of twleve years broadened his horizons considerably, and offered him the chance to study with Fauré and absorb the heady musical life of that city. He lived there for various periods during the subsequent twenty years, and the music and acquaintance of Claude Debussy, Igor Stravinsky and Manuel de Falla ensured that Casella formed an entry point into Italy for much of Europe’s most innovative musical Modernism. Sachs writes that ‘he was polyglot, cosmopolitan, and ardently interested in European musical developments’ (1988: 134); added to this, he was a prodigious essayist and letter writer. Many works from this time are stylistically adventurous: Notte di Maggio (1913) is comparable to Debussy’s Jeux, while the Pagine di Guerra (1918) for two pianos are a harsh and dissonant reflection on the horrors of war, using cinematic images of trench warfare as their inspiration