bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Yahia Turki (1901–1969)
Authors: Gerschultz Jessica
Published: September 2018

Yahia Turki was a Tunisian painter and pioneering modernist. In addition to Quranic education, Turki attended school at the Collège Sadiki, Lycée Carnot and Lycée Alaoui. He received a scholarship from the French Protectorate for classes at the Centre d’art de Tunis, facilitated by Alexandre Fichet and Pierre Boyer. In the 1920s Turki worked in the colonial bureaucracy and as a cartoonist, and was the first Tunisian artist to exhibit in the Salon Tunisien in 1923. He lived and painted in Paris from 1926 to 1928 and from 1931 to 1935, frequenting the studios of artists such as Matisse and Derain. Turki’s primary medium was oil on canvas. A member of the Groupe des Dix in 1947 and founding member of the École de Tunis in 1948, he influenced younger artists in his quest to reconcile Tunisian national identity within an inherited system of artistic practices. The thematic content of his work reflected this struggle. Turki portrayed Tunisia through scenes of quotidian life, architectural spaces, landscapes, still lifes, and portraits. He painted murals in the École d’Agriculture de Moghrane in the 1950s. Turki assumed the presidency of the École de Tunis from Pierre Boucherle after Tunisian independence in 1956.
Valentim, Rubem (1922–1991)
Authors: Heeren Alice
Published: September 2018

Rubem Valentim was born in 1922 in Salvador in the state of Bahia. A self-taught artist, Valentim starts his career in the 1940s acting alongside artists like Mario Cravo Júnior and others in effervescent new artistic milieu of the state of Brahia. As art historian Roberto Conduru has noted, Valentim, similarly to other artists working in the 1940s and 1950s in Latin America, responded to Joaquín Torres-García’s Universalimso Constructivo. Nevertheless, Valentim also learned from artists such as Alfredo Volpi and Milton Dacosta carrying their geometric stylistic principles into his own symbolic world heavily influenced by Afro-Brazilian religions. From the 1960s onwards, besides small-scale objects and paintings, Valentim also began working in large-scale murals, installations, and public art pieces, the most famous being his marble mural for the NOVACAP building in Brasília. Valentim found a common thread between the modernist rationality of Constructivism and the geometric lines of Afro-Brazilian visual culture. His work manifested local values and themes, while acting in the process of building a Brazilian national identity, and also figuring into the universal debates central to modernism. Paulo Herkenhoff points to how the double axe of Xangô, a recurrent theme in Valentim’s work with its double edge blade acts as a metaphor for the artist’s endeavor, working between Constructivism and Afro-Brazilian mythology. Valentim has become an exponent of Brazilian art and is especially praised for shedding light into the visual world of Afro-Brazilian religions. He showed at the now iconic 1966 World Festival of Negro Arts in Dakar, Senegal and at the 16ª Bienal Internacional de São Paulo and in 1977. In 1998, the Museu de Arte Moderna da Bahia (MAM-BA) inaugurated a special room in his sculpture garden in the artist’s name.
Weston, Edward (1886–1958)
Authors: Hartel, Jr. Herbert R
Published: September 2018

Edward Weston was one of the leading photographers of the Western and California landscape in the early 20th century and one of the pioneers of photography as abstract art.
White Savages Group
Authors: Soo-hyun Mok
Published: September 2018

The White Savages Group (Baek-man Heo) was founded in 1930 when Kim Yong-jun (1904–1967) published his manifesto "Upon Founding the White Savages Group" in a major Korean newspaper. Along with Kim Yong-jun, the White Savages Group was organized by Kil Jin-seop (1907–?), Ku Bon-ung (1906–1953), Lee Ma-dong (1906–1980), and Kim Ung-jin (1907–1977), all of whom were Western-style painters who had studied in Tokyo.
Widayat, Haji (1919–2002)
Authors: Clark Christine
Published: September 2018

A prolific and influential Javanese artist, Haji Widayat is recognized for his "dekora-magis" (magical-decorative) contribution to Indonesian art. Throughout his five-decade artistic career he experimented widely, working in an array of themes, styles, and media. Greatly admired for his extraordinary versatility and imagination, Widayat freely appropriated and adapted imagery from various cultural sources creating his own distinctive modern expression. He is best known for paintings of enchanted, fantastical worlds inspired by nature, myths, and folklore, religious literatures, and primordial states; his work featured Javanese legends, Judeo-Christian narratives of genesis and creation, and Papuan statues. Widayat often portrayed dense forests, deep-sea fish, birds in trees, primitive objects, and events around him rendered through a rhythmic repetition of flat meticulous motifs that densely filled the entire field. Alongside these stylistic investigations, he regularly explored abstraction and other modernist tropes. Although he predominantly produced oil and acrylic on canvas and watercolor on paper, he practiced etching and dry-point printing and painting on ceramics, and at times sculpture. Widayat was also an inspirational art educator: he lectured for over 30 years at the Akademi Seni Rupa Indonesia (ASRI – Indonesian Academy of Fine Arts) in Yogjakarta.
Yi In-sŏng (1953–)
Authors: Jungsil Jenny Lee
Published: September 2018

Yi In-sŏng was a Western-style modernist painter born in Taegu in southern Korea. It was there that he learned the basic techniques of Western-style painting from Sŏ Tong-jin, the renowned watercolorist, before studying modernist painting at the Taiheiyō School of Fine Arts, Tokyo. During the 1930s, Yi's paintings won awards in Japan at official art exhibitions like The Imperial Exhibition of the School of Fine Arts (Teiten) and the Ministry of Education Exhibition (Bunten). In 1929, Yi's work was accepted into the Chosŏn Art Exhibition and, until 1944, both his watercolors and oils consistently won recognition there, forming the basis of Yi's reputation as perhaps the most famous and influential artist in colonial Korea. Yi painted mostly figures, still life, garden landscapes, and Western-style interior scenes in Impressionist and Post-Impressionist styles. Some of his oils on canvas identify him with the Local Color style, which, among other things, promoted the portrayal of distinctively ethnic figures in local but exotic landscapes. It remains controversial, however, whether Yi's work should be understood as representing his historical consciousness as a Korean artist or as an opportunistic compromise supporting the colonialist strategy of encouraging nostalgic portrayals of the Korean countryside in order to position Korea as peripheral to the advanced center of Japan.
Baron, Dvora (1887-1956)
Authors: Jelen Sheila
Published: September 2018

Dvora Baron, a major writer of the Modern Hebrew Renaissance, or the Tehiyah, was one of the only woman writers to gain recognition in the Hebrew literary canon of the period. Born on December 4, 1887 to the town rabbi of Ouzda, on the outskirts of Minsk, Baron was educated by her father and her elder brother in ways that were highly unusual for girls of her geographical, historical, and religious milieu at the turn of the twentieth century. Women and girls, not systematically educated in Hebrew texts, were largely unable to bring their Hebrew textual skills to bear in the creation of a modern Hebrew literary idiom. Baron was a rare exception and much of the scholarship on Baron’s literary corpus focuses on her unusual achievement as a woman in the Modern Hebrew literary arena.
Buckler, Ernest (1908–1984)
Authors: Dvorak Marta
Published: September 2018

Ernest Buckler (1908–1984) was a walking paradox. Born in the bookless society of poor, rural Nova Scotia, he earned a BA in mathematics and philosophy at Dalhousie University and an MA in philosophy at the University of Toronto, alongside Hugh MacLennan and Northrop Frye respectively, before going back to the Annapolis Valley to farm by day and write by night. He is best known for his pastoral first novel, The Mountain and the Valley (1952), which garnered as high critical acclaim in the US and Canada as the novels published concurrently by established American writers, notably John Steinbeck’s East of Eden and Ernest Hemingway’s comeback The Old Man and the Sea. The simultaneous publications illustrate the coexistence of early and late modernisms and their correlation to geopolitical space, notably center and margin. Later hailed as a ‘pioneer in Canadian writing’ by Margaret Laurence and a ‘pathbreaker for the modern Canadian novel’ by Margaret Atwood, Buckler nonetheless refracts the interrogations of modernity beyond national borders and connects with writers and thinkers ranging from Ralph Waldo Emerson to James Joyce, Marcel Proust (see Purdham), and Albert Camus.
The Cantos
Authors: Templeton Erin
Published: September 2018

The Cantos is a series of 120 long poems by the American poet, essayist, and cultural critic Ezra Pound. Pound began work on them as early as 1904, publishing the first three in Poetry magazine in 1917. The poems were originally published in eleven separate book-length installments, with each individual canto numbered sequentially in Roman numerals. They are highly allusive, polyphonic, and notoriously difficult.

Pound had been interested in epic poetry from his collegiate days, and his ideas about its form were influenced by many of his poetic predecessors: Homer, Vergil, Dante, Spenser, and Milton. But in addition to western poetic traditions, Pound studied classical Chinese and Japanese art and philosophy. These interests led him to translate works by Confucius and Li Po, but they also led to his theory of phanopoeia, the importance of the visual elements of a poem. He was particularly interested in ideograms and the way that such characters combined multiple layers of representation, both semantic and visual. Over time, Pound’s poetic project became an ambitious attempt at a complex and dynamic structure of meaning that was an aesthetic object in itself and a representation of the process of interpretation, which engages Odysseus, Elizabeth I, Thomas Jefferson, and a large cast of other characters.
Cavafy, C. P. (1863–1933)
Authors: Georganta Konstantina
Published: September 2018

C. P. (Constantine Petrou Photiades) Cavafy, the youngest of seven brothers, was born in Alexandria, Egypt, where he spent most of his life working as a clerk at the Ministry of Public Works. His parents were natives of Constantinople and founding members of the Greek community of Alexandria. Cavafy published his first poem, ‘Bacchial’, in the Leipzig periodical Hesperus in 1886 and ever since opted for publishing privately or in newspapers and periodicals rather than in book form. His poetic oeuvre consists of 154 poems and was published posthumously in Alexandria in 1935 and in Athens in 1948. Further editions of his unpublished poems, prose and essays followed from the 1960s onwards.
Celan, Paul (1920–1970)
Authors: Roelans Jan
Published: September 2018

Paul Celan (a pseudonym of Paul Antschel) is one the most distinctive German-language poets of the second half of the twentieth century. Born in 1920 in Czernowitz in the Bukovina (today Ukraine), into a German-speaking Jewish family, he grew up in a multicultural society where German, Rumanian, Ukrainian and Yiddish were spoken. In 1941 Czernowitz was occupied by the fascist Rumanian ‘National Legionnaire’ government, which started deportations. Celan’s parents died in 1942 in a Nazi labor camp. After the war Celan moved via Vienna to France, where he married the graphic artist Gisèle de Lestrange and worked as a lecturer in German. His reputation as a poet was established by the poem ‘Todesfuge’ (‘Death Fugue’), which recounts the experience of the death camps. His poems would, however, rapidly evolve into a darker, almost reticent style struggling with the possibility of representing the Shoah. Most of his poems are fairly short and are forced to revisit and reshape the German language after its moral destruction by the Nazis. Celan was awarded the most important German literary prize, the Georg Büchner Prize, but never felt comfortable in the German literary scene and was unnerved by neo-fascist activism. He translated a vast amount of poetry and prose from different languages into German and saw this achievement as equal to writing poetry. Seven volumes were published at the time of his death by suicide in Paris in 1970.
Concrete Poetry
Authors: Cisneros Odile
Published: September 2018

In general, ‘concrete poetry’ refers to a type of literary composition where the material aspects of a text (layout, typography, sound, etc.) are foregrounded and reinforce its symbolic or semantic values, rendering form and meaning highly interdependent. Concrete poetry is often associated with visual and sound poetry, making these categories sometimes interchangeable. However, going beyond mere imitation, in concrete poetry, sound and visual elements effectively become both the structures and content of the text.
Cope, (Robert Knox) Jack (1913–1991)
Authors: Hall Molly
Published: September 2018

‘Jack’ Cope was a South African novelist, poet, editor, and short story writer. Born June 3, 1913 in Mooi River, Natal, South Africa, he spent his early career as a local journalist in Durban before moving to London, England as a foreign political correspondent. As a pacifist, he met with hostility there during the years of World War II and returned demoralized to South Africa to work as a cultural critic and editor for an anti-apartheid newspaper, The Guardian, in Cape Town until 1955. After leaving the newspaper, he separated from his wife of sixteen years and began his infamous affair with South African poet Ingrid Jonker in the early 1960s. During this time he also became the editor of Contrast, a bilingual literary magazine in English and Afrikaans, continuing as editor there for twenty years until 1980.

During that time, he was also the editor of several volumes of South African poetry, and his book The Dawn Comes Twice (1969) was banned by the government. Best known for his novels and short stories, he wrote about the racial history of South Africa, focusing on events such as the Bambata Rebellion in 1906 in The Fair House (1955).
Corbière, Tristan (1845-1875)
Authors: Saussy Haun
Published: September 2018

Dead at thirty, and author of a barely-noticed book of verses printed for hire by a firm specializing in erotica, the small-town eccentric and invalid Tristan Corbière (1845-1875) was destined for oblivion. But Paul Verlaine’s short book Les Poètes maudits (1878) put him in the company of Rimbaud, Mallarmé and Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, and ensured that he would continue to be read.
Desnos, Robert Pierre (1900-1945)
Authors: Amaral Genevieve
Published: September 2018

Robert Pierre Desnos (1900-1945) was a surrealist French poet whose diverse work included scripts for film and stage; journalism; essays; advertisements; cantatas; children's fables; and political tracts. His principal works are of experimental poetry and prose, though after breaking with the Surrealists he often employed more classical forms and produced commercial works for radio and newspapers. His preferred themes included dreams, mythology, voyages, eroticism and love. Desnos died in an internment camp in 1945.

From 1922-1927 Desnos contributed regularly to La Révolution Surreáliste and co-signed collective Surrealist tracts. He showed a gift for hypnogogic sleep and automatic writing, leading André Breton to call him the poet ‘closest to surrealist truth’. His longer surrealist works Deuil pour deuil (Mourning for Mourning, 1924) and La Liberté ou l'amour! (Liberty or Love!, 1927) combine narrative prose and lyric poetry, and involve extensive linguistic play, such as puns and homonyms. He often illustrated his own works, or collaborated with artists like André Masson, Joan Miró, and Pablo Picasso.
Döblin, (Bruno) Alfred (1878-1957)
Authors: Heidt Todd
Published: September 2018

Alfred Döblin’s contributions to modern literature consist primarily of his montage style, epic narrative structures and critical eye toward contemporary culture. His masterpiece Berlin Alexanderplatz. Die Geschichte vom Franz Biberkopf (Berlin Alexanderplatz. The Story of Franz Biberkopf) brought international acclaim and is often credited as the first German-language city novel. He was Jewish and thus fled the Nazi regime, settling in Hollywood for a time. He returned to Germany as a French Cultural Officer; however, he found Germany unwilling to cope with the recent past. Feeling out of place in Germany, he emigrated again in 1953 to France, and he died in 1957.

Döblin was born the fourth of five children in Szcecin (modern-day Poland). His father abandoned the family when Döblin was still young, motivating his mother to relocate to Berlin in 1888. He grew up in working-class neighborhoods and studied medicine. His first publication, Lydia und Mäxchen (1906), parodically and self-reflexively deals with Döblin’s role as author, but found little readership. In 1912 he married Erna Reiss, with whom he had four sons. He published a collection of short stories, Die Ermordung einer Butterblume (The Murder of a Buttercup), in 1913. The title story features a salesman who absent-mindedly knocks the flower off a buttercup during a walk. His resulting fear of nature’s revenge for this misdeed (often read as a symbolic rape) escalates to neurotic levels. Döblin here combined his literary talents with his medical training, which included training in psychiatry.
Head, Bessie Amelia (1937–1986)
Authors: MacKenzie Craig
Published: September 2018

Novelist, short-story and non-fiction writer Bessie Head was born in a Pietermaritzburg psychiatric institution, her white mother Bessie Amelia Emery (née Birch), who had had a long history of mental illness, having unexpectedly become pregnant (the identity of Head’s black father has never been discovered). Head grew up in foster care until the age of 13; thereafter the welfare authorities placed her in an Anglican mission orphanage in Durban. In 1961 she met and married fellow journalist Harold Head in Cape Town; their only child, Howard, was born in 1962. After the break-up of her marriage in 1964 she relinquished South African citizenship and took up a teaching post in Serowe, Botswana. Plagued by ill health and mental instability, she died in Serowe with six published works to her name and an international reputation as one of Africa’s foremost woman writers.

Head’s first novel, When Rain Clouds Gather (1968), deals in predominantly realist fashion with the flight from South Africa of a young black political activist, his resettlement in Botswana and marriage to a Batswana woman. Her second novel, Maru (1971), which derives its name from its eponymous central character, is an altogether more complex work.
Irish Literary Revival
Authors: Hu Jane
Published: September 2018

The Irish Literary Revival — also known as the ‘Irish Literary Renaissance’ or ‘The Celtic Twilight’ — describes a movement of increased literary and intellectual engagement in Ireland starting in the 1890s and occurring into the early twentieth century. As a literary movement, the Irish Literary Revival was deeply engaged in a renewed interest in Ireland’s Gaelic heritage as well as the growth of Irish nationalism during the nineteenth century. Indeed, the Irish Literary Revival was only a part — though a significant one — of a more general national movement called the ‘Gaelic Revival’, which engaged in Irish heritage on the intellectual, athletic, linguistic, and political levels. For instance, the Literary Revival coincided with the formation of the Gaelic League in 1893, which sought to revive interest in Irish language and culture more broadly. The Irish Literary Revival is also sometimes referred to as the Anglo-Irish Literary Revival because it revitalized Irish literature not through the Irish language, but in English. In addition, many of its leading members were part of the Anglo-Irish Protestant class. As a movement, the Irish Literary Revival is difficult to encapsulate, partly because of the range and reach of its various members, and also because the work that emerged from it was often experimental and widely diverse in focus, style, and genre.
Queneau, Raymond (1903–1976)
Authors: Ferguson Sam
Published: September 2018

Raymond Queneau was a French novelist, poet and essayist of very broad interests (leading to his directorship of the prestigious Encyclopédie de la Pléiade from 1959 onwards), particularly associated with the formal construction of his works, a linguistic ingenuity aimed at reducing the gulf between colloquial and written language (a project which Queneau referred to as le néo-français), and a sense of humor drawing on the absurd. Initially connected to the Surrealist group of André Breton (1896–1966), and later with the Collège de 'Pataphysique founded in 1948 inspired by the absurdist works of Alfred Jarry (1873–1907), Queneau was in 1960 a founding member of OuLiPo (a contraction of ‘Ouvroir de littérature potentielle’, or ‘Workshop of potential literature’), an association of authors producing works of literature governed by strict formal constraints. Queneau’s Cent mille milliards de poèmes (One hundred million million poems, 1961), in which the verses of ten sonnets can be combined to form a huge number of poems, is characteristic of OuLiPo, but similar formal preoccupations can be seen in Queneau’s earlier works, such as his Exercises de style (1947), in which a single short anecdote is told in 99 different ways. His most popular work, the 1959 novel Zazie dans le métro, was made into a film of the same name directed by Louis Malle in 1960.
Themba, Daniel Canadoise D’Orsay (Can) (1924–1967)
Authors: Masemola Kgomotso
Published: September 2018

Born in the Marabastad township of Pretoria, Can Themba distinguished himself early by winning the Mendi Memorial Scholarship, which enabled him to attend Fort Hare University, from where he graduated with a BA in 1947. He went on to earn a teacher’s diploma from Rhodes University. The same year that he graduated he published his first short story in the student journal The Fort Harian. He taught for brief spells at the Western Native High School and the Central Indian High School on the outskirts of Johannesburg, but was always more interested in writing than teaching. He won the first Drum magazine short story competition for his work ‘Mob Passion’ in 1953, competing with a thousand entries from home and abroad, including works by Cyprian Ekwensi and Bloke Modisane. Peter Abrahams, one of the judges of this competition, was highly impressed with his writing. Later, Langston Hughes was to be similarly impressed. Soon Themba was catapulted from his erstwhile teaching career into full-time journalism on both Drum and Africa! magazines.

By the late 1950s Themba’s colleagues had been forced into exile because of the political situation in South Africa. He himself was shamed into voluntary exile in Swaziland after he had been fired, as a consequence of his addiction to alcohol.
Almada Negreiros, José Sobral de (1883–1970)
Authors: Muñoz Antonio Trinidad
Published: September 2018

José Sobral de Almada Negreiros was a Portuguese artist (mainly writer and painter) and a most dynamic and multifaceted figure in early 20th-century Portuguese culture. Moving constantly between literature and the visual arts, he produced a multidisciplinary oeuvre. Both in his literary work, which includes poetry, short stories, drama, and essays, and in his painting and graphic work, Almada Negreiros took a rebellious and combative stance towards traditional academism and aesthetic conservatism. One of the main advocates of avant-garde in Portugal, he also championed the modernization of the country, motivated by the ideal of "educating the people through scandal."

Born in the then Portuguese African colony of São Tomé e Príncipe, Almada Negreiros lost his mother at the age of three. Because his father was organizing the Pavilion of Portuguese Colonies for the 1900 World Fair in Paris, he spent his childhood and adolescence in a boarding school in Lisbon. Later on he attended a secondary school in Coimbra and the International School in Lisbon. Almada Negreiros would never obtain a university degree; he was a self-taught artist and a fervent reader and drawer from a very young age. In 1911 he started his career as a collaborator of the newspaper A Sátira; a year later, he participated in the I Salão dos Humoristas (first Salon of Humorists), an exhibition of caricatures and graphic humor in Lisbon.
Zhu, Tianwen (1956– )
Authors: Tsai Chien-hsin
Published: September 2018

In Taiwan, the Zhu family is like the Brontës of England, known for their literary achievements. Zhu Tianyi, youngest of the three, is a fluent essayist. Zhu Tianxin, the second daughter, has been publishing essays and stories since high school. In her novella The Old Capital—echoing a novel of the same name by the Japanese Nobel laureate Kawabata Yasunari—a second-person narration of Taiwan’s colonial past and present unfolds. The most outspoken of the sisters, Zhu Tianxin never hesitates to confront political authority in her stories.

In contrast, Zhu Tianwen’s gestures are ever so gentle, and her expression lyrical. She is not a prolific fiction writer. To date, she has published only two full-length novels and a small number of short narratives. Yet their stylistic exuberance and expressive intelligence more than make up for her modest output.

Taiwanese by birth, Zhu Tianwen shows a strong sense of attachment to her spiritual homeland, China, especially in her writings before the 1980s. The influence comes from two men: her father, Zhu Xining, and Hu Lancheng. The two Chinese men were both forced by political circumstances to leave China. They became close friends and neighbors in 1976.
Nadine Gordimer (1923–)
Authors: Kannan Trisha
Published: September 2018

Nadine Gordimer is a preeminent South African writer and activist. Born in Springs, Transvaal, South Africa, to Jewish immigrants, Gordimer was briefly educated at a Catholic school for girls, before eventually being pulled out of formal schooling by her mother. She spent a year at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg in 1945, and has lived in Johannesburg since 1948.
Hedayat, Sadegh (1903–1951)
Authors: Tagharobi Kaveh
Published: September 2018

Sadegh Hedayat was an Iranian writer and intellectual who was responsible for introducing Modernism to Iranian literature. His short stories and novellas are the best examples of such literary forms in Persian literature, which up until then was exclusively defined by its old traditions of classical poetry. Hedayat also contributed to the Iranian experience of modernity by forming intellectual circles and promoting critical thinking on the norms and traditions of Iranian culture and society. While his main literary contributions were short stories and novellas, he also wrote plays, essays, satirical pieces, folklore studies, travelogues, and translated several works by European modernist authors into Persian. His own works, in turn, were translated into other languages. Most notably, his magnum opus The Blind Owl has been translated into some thirty languages, including French. Among the main themes running through his works are the absurdity of human existence, the psychological sufferings and alienation of modern characters, and the hypocrisy, follies, and tribulations of the traditional Iranian lower class. While in his twenties Hedayat spent some years in Europe, and during that time not only did he learn a great deal about Western culture, but this knowledge also gave him a deeper understanding of Iranian society and culture. He always maintained a sharp critical outlook toward his environment, and this was reflected in both his work and personal life.
Battiss, Walter (1906–1982)
Authors: Peter Judy
Published: September 2018

Walter Battiss was a leading South African painter, printmaker, author, educator and academic, well known for his non-representational oil paintings, impressionistic water colours and symbolic prints. During the 1930s, Batiss made ground-breaking contributions to the disciplines of painting and print-making in South Africa.
Benn, Gottfried (1886–1956)
Authors: McIsaac Peter
Published: September 2018

A practising physician throughout his life, Benn ranks among the most influential and controversial twentieth-century German poets and intellectuals. After achieving notoriety with the Expressionist poem cycle Morgue und andere Gedichte, Benn published poems, novellas, essays and dramas leading up to his election to the Prussian Academy in 1932. Benn was an outspoken supporter of the Nazi Party from 30 January 1933 until 30 June 1934 (the ‘Night of the Long Knives’), when he withdrew from the party in disillusionment. Following a publication ban in 1938, Benn spent the remainder of the Nazi era writing privately. Banned by the Allies until 1948, Benn regained prominence due to his poetry collection Statische Gedichte (1948; Static Poems, 1991) and essays such as ‘Probleme der Lyrik’ (1951). Benn received the Büchner Prize in 1951, though his affiliation with the Nazis complicates his cultural legacy.
Bernays, Edward (1891–1995)
Authors: Beard David
Published: September 2018

Edward Louis Bernays retains a place in the history of modernity for synthesizing Freudian psychology, political communication (or propaganda) and the media. The fruit of that synthesis, modern public relations theory, changed the way governments relate to their citizens and the ways businesses relate to their customers.
Bernstein, Eduard (1850–1932)
Authors: Perlea Georgiana
Published: September 2018

Eduard Bernstein was a prominent politician in the German Social Democratic Party (SPD), which in the late nineteenth century was the largest workers’ party in Europe. With August Bebel and Karl Kautsky, he wrote the SPD’s official platform, the Erfurt Program (1891), and also edited the SPD’s central organ, Vorwärts. However, he spent many years exiled in London: ties to the Fabian Society tinged his views with English practicality and moderation. Against the Marx-Engels party orthodoxy, which awaited the logical implosion of capitalism, Bernstein suggested in The Prerequisites for Socialism and the Tasks of Social Democracy (1899) that gradual changes, peacefully enacted within the existing order, are more likely to bring about social justice. He critiqued the theory of surplus value and argued for protectionism where Marx had favoured free trade as catalyst for the catastrophe. His is an evolutionary socialism, commending in all matters strategic compromise and piecemeal reforms. This rightist deviation from the party line was labelled ‘revisionism’ and sparked a vigorous debate. Bernstein was vilified. Before World War I, reformism nonetheless dented the standard doctrine of the SPD (embodied by Kautsky) at the same time as radicals (including Karl Liebknecht, Rosa Luxemburg, and Lenin) were challenging it from the left, preparing a revolution proper.
Art Brut
Authors: Alexander Alisa
Published: September 2018

Art brut is a term and phenomenon created by the French artist and writer Jean Dubuffet (1901–1985). It refers to works of art created by artists who seemed to stand outside of culture—or more specifically the mid-20th century European art world and its institutions. Dubuffet sought a kind of art more radical than the avant-garde, which he thought had become increasingly homogenous and empty of invention. Modern artists no longer provided a sufficient critique of culture, so his search for a new and revolutionary art led him to fringes of society. "Art brut" translates to "raw art," as Dubuffet viewed this kind of art to be "uncooked" by culture. He looked for works which owed "nothing to the imitation of art that one can see in museums, salons, and galleries; works which the artist has entirely derived (invention and manner of expression) from his own sources, from his own impulses and humours, without regard for the rules, without regard for current convention" (Prospectus et tousécritssuivants, 1967). Art brut artists were often eccentric personalities, psychiatric patients, non-professional artists, and prisoners. Most importantly, these artists created works that aimed to express the maker’s pure, unmediated vision, without any knowledge of or regard for previous traditions. Therefore, art brut creations are not unified in terms of formal qualities or medium, but rather by the status of the creator.
Bluvshtain (Sela), Rachel (1890–1931)
Authors: Segal Miryam
Published: September 2018

Rachel Bluvshtain was the most salient and recognizable symbol of Labour Zionism in the 20th century and remains one of the most popular Hebrew poets in Israel into the 21st century.

Bluvshtain was born to a Jewish family in Russia. As a young woman on her first visit to Palestine, she decided to join a Jewish settlement there, abandoning her plan to study art in Italy. Although her poems came to be associated with Labour Zionism and the Jewish pioneers in early 20th century Palestine, her poetic career began only once she left her work collective due to illness, and ended about a decade later with her death at the age of 40.

Her short modernist lyric poetry betrays Russian acmeist and French imagist influence. Many of Bluvshtain’s poems capture and express a momentary thought, feeling, or memory. Their vocabulary and syntax are seemingly straightforward, they contain only a few images, and are concise. Bluvshtain’s style and her poems’ explicit celebration of simplicity allowed her to be read initially as a naïve contributor to ‘women’s poetry.’ A few scholarly works have since revised this critical assessment by showing the intertextual play, ambivalent language, and critique of contemporary poetic expectations embedded in her poems.
Bosman, Herman Charles (1905–1951)
Authors: MacKenzie Craig
Published: September 2018

A short-story writer, novelist, poet and journalist, Bosman was born in Kuils River near Cape Town, but spent most of his life in the Transvaal, and it is the Transvaal milieu that features in almost all of his writings. He became known in the 1940s for his ‘Oom Schalk Lourens’ stories, and his use of this simple-seeming but wily narrator has ensured his place in South African literature as one of the country’s most enduring and best-loved storywriters. Schalk Lourens features in the short-story collections Mafeking Road (1947) and Unto Dust (1963), while Bosman’s prison memoir, Cold Stone Jug (1949), set the trend for this important genre in South Africa.

Bosman was educated at Jeppe Boys’ High School, the University of the Witwatersrand and Normal College, where he qualified as a teacher. In January 1926 he received a posting to the Groot Marico in the remote Western Transvaal, as it was known then. Despite its short duration, this stay later inspired almost all of his 150 short stories. In July 1926, on vacation at the family home in Johannesburg, he became embroiled in a family quarrel and shot and killed his step-brother David Russell. He was tried and sentenced to death—a sentence that was later commuted to imprisonment for ten years with hard labour. He eventually served four years of this sentence and was released on parole in August 1930.
Black Mountain College
Authors: Saletnik Jeffrey
Published: September 2018

Between 1933 and 1957, Black Mountain College served as an unlikely crucible of modernism. Despite its isolated location near Asheville, North Carolina, at various times its permanent and summer faculty included the likes of Anni Albers, Josef Albers, Ilya Bolotowsky, Jean Charlot, Lyonel Feininger, Joseph Fiore, Buckminster Fuller, Walter Gropius, Karen Karnes, Franz Kline, Willem de Kooning, Jacob Lawrence, Robert Motherwell, Beaumont Newhall, Amédée Ozenfant, Xanati Schawinsky, Ben Shahn, and Jack Tworkov. These artists and architects were joined by composers John Cage, Lou Harrison, Ernst Krenek, David Tudor, and Stefan Wolpe; writers and poets Robert Creeley, Charles Olsen, and M.C. Richards; as well as critic Clement Greenberg, musicologist Heinrich Jalowetz, and choreographer Merce Cunningham. There are few evident commonalities among the practices of this mix of European émigrés and Americans, yet the educationally progressive ethos of the College appealed to each of them. Its founding program was predicated upon a belief that the arts were central to higher education and that the practice of democracy would benefit from their curricular integration. Participation was prioritized in all activities, particularly in learning.
Der Blaue Reiter [The Blue Rider]
Authors: Grimm Dagmar
Published: September 2018

Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider) was an affiliated circle of artists of varying disciplines loosely organized by the visual artists Wassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc in 1911/12 in Munich.

The recognition of the spiritual undercurrents of the work of Der Blaue Reiter artists is reflected in their name: the oblique association of the "Blue Flower" of German Romanticism can be read as demonstrating the intentions of the founders in suggesting the link to their historical Romantic precursor, while the "Rider" points to their forward thrust and advocacy on behalf of modern art.

The origin of the name has not been reliably ascertained but is often linked to the title of a painting by Kandinsky of a horse and rider (1903), which was found to have been altered (possibly to suggest the link), and which was also negated in an explanation by Kandinsky himself.
Dewey, John (1859–1952)
Authors: La Shot Derek
Published: September 2018

John Dewey was an American philosopher, educational theorist, and one of the three major pragmatists, along with William James and Charles Saunders Peirce. After obtaining a doctorate at Johns Hopkins, he began his academic career at the University of Michigan, where he established a psychology laboratory that studied stimulus reflexes. Later, at the University of Chicago, he turned to the reform of primary and secondary education and founded programs that could better integrate immigrants into American culture. He defended democracy, envisioning it as a sense of community in which the individual interests of all could eventually be understood. Individualism necessitated the appeal to mutual dependence and institutions, which were tested and constantly changed over time for the greater good, in a kind of perpetual scientific experiment. Central to his thinking on education was the notion of experience. Knowledge, he held, was always obtained after reflection upon concrete experiences. In this model, called the "Dewey flux," one generates abstractions (mental ideas) after having concrete experiences. These abstractions in turn then have to be rendered material—Dewey’s version of the "hermeneutic circle." The mission of progressive education, for Dewey, was to get students to become conscious of this perpetual "flux" between concrete experiences and abstractions.
Duchanee, Thawan (1939–2014)
Authors: Mukdamanee Vichaya
Published: September 2018

Thawan Duchanee, awarded National Artist in 2001 by the Office of the National Culture Commission of Thailand, is one of the best-known artists in Thailand, both for people in the art scene and the general public. He first gained recognition in 1967 with the exhibition of his early series of paintings, in which he represented spiritualized power by drawing on a variety of forms of idealized Thai beliefs and images from his own imagination. His work is beautiful and complex but is easily understood by international audiences. Tawan’s most famous artworks often consist of human and animal forms, which are inspired by Buddhism, Eastern philosophy, and Thai literature. With his excellent knowledge of anatomy, Tawan has designed various beautiful figures that are full of imagination and emotion. Some are depicted with strong muscles engaged in a variety of aggressive actions, while some are created to represent feelings of calm and peacefulness. Violent expression is often mixed with graceful and complicated patterns created in the volumes of light and shadow. Most of Tawan’s enormous artworks use black and white tones with perhaps only a few colors. The movements of characters cover the entire canvas. Some his artworks are quickly and skillfully painted, mimicking the brushwork of Chinese painting, while some are elegantly created by the small lines of ballpoint pens.
Cabaret Voltaire
Authors: Greeley Anne
Published: September 2018

The Cabaret Voltaire, housed within the Holländische Meierei bar at Spiegelgasse 1, in Zürich’s Niederdorf district, was the original breeding ground for the Zürich Dada movement. Co-founded in February 1916 by the German writer and performer Hugo Ball, and his lover and future wife, professional cabaret singer, and poet, Emmy Hennings, the venue was conceived as an ‘‘artists’ local’’ [Künstlerkneipe] and promoted as a ‘‘centre for artistic entertainment.’’ Its name, however, bespoke a more political objective: so-called after the 18th-century Enlightenment philosopher and aggressive social reformer, Voltaire, who, in his satirical novel Candide, derided the religious and philosophical optimism of the time. The cabaret was thus envisioned by Ball as a modern ‘‘Candide,’’ or stage from which to protest positive appraisals of the unfolding World War I and the ostensibly rational society that had produced it. On its opening night, February 5, 1916, the cabaret drew future Dadaists as well as core cabaret performers Marcel Janco, Tristan Tzara, and Hans/Jean Arp, who were soon joined by Richard Huelsenbeck at Ball’s behest.
Ikhlāṣī, Walīd [وليد اخلاصي] (1935–)
Authors: Berg Lovisa
Published: September 2018

Walīd Ikhlāṣī has become known as one of Syria’s most productive dramatists and novelists. Since his first short story collection in 1963 he has produced over fifty pieces of work including novels, plays, and short story collections. A well-known modernist and surrealist writer, he has introduced his own distinctive style in his writing for the theater and in his fiction. He has also been involved in work with the Arab Writers’ Union and in the editorial committees of several Syrian literary magazines, and influenced the cultural scene in Syria and the Arab world. Among Ikhlāṣī’s many plays al-ṣirāṭ (The Path) is often brought out as an example of his seemingly action-less plays which on closer examination are filled with sharp criticism of the social and political Syrian landscape. His short story collection ma ḥadatha li-‘Antara? (What Happened to Antara?) shows his engagement with Arabic cultural heritage and the use of historical references in his work.
Kim Ki-chang (1914 –2001)
Authors: Yisoon Kim
Published: September 2018

Kim Ki-chang (1914–2001), also known as Unbo, was a modern ink painter who was born in Seoul, Korea. Having lost his hearing from typhoid fever, he was unable to attend regular art school. However, in 1930, when he was seventeen years old, he became a student of Kim Eun-ho, a well-known traditional ink (Dongyang-hwa) painter. In 1931, Kim Ki-chang participated in the Joseon Art Exhibition, an organization established by the Japanese Government-General in Korea. His painting style of the time was effectively demonstrated in the delicate contours and thick surface treatment of his work The Autumn (1935). In 1937, Kim Ki-chang received the Changdeokgung Award, the highest honor awarded by the Joseon Art Exhibition, for his work Old Tale. Following Liberation in 1945, Kim’s painting style was criticized for being too much like Japanese-style painting, so he tried to remove this influence from his work by adopting bold calligraphic brushstrokes instead of delicate contours and coloring. He also sometimes made abstract paintings using elements from Cubism. In the early 1970s, Kim Ki-chang adopted primitive elements from Korean folk paintings (Minhwa), which were popular among Korean people during the Joseon dynasty. Red Bird (1977) shows how the artist abandoned elements of Cubism along with any Western techniques such as the use of perspective or realistic representation. He described his own paintings as "foolish landscapes, foolish flowers and birds" (qtd in G. Oh 1976: 137). During his last years, he painted abstract works in ink with more broad and bold brushstrokes, without being tied to a certain painting style.
Le Bon, Gustave (1841–1931)
Authors: Merrill Trevor
Published: September 2018

Gustave Le Bon was a French doctor and sociologist and a pioneering figure in social psychology. After completing medical studies in Paris he traveled extensively and wrote on a variety of topics ranging from premature burial to equitation. His interests then turned to anthropology and psychology. Beginning in 1902, his Wednesday luncheons attracted the Parisian intellectual and social elite. In The Psychology of Peoples (1894), Le Bon posited that emotions such as honor, nationalism, and religious faith (rather than reason) drive social evolution. Over time, exposure to institutions, laws, and habits creates racial or national character. Today he is known primarily for The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind (1895). Crowds are credulous, unpremeditated in their actions, and untrustworthy as a source of reliable testimony. The crowd’s "collective mind" responds to suggestions more readily than the individual minds of its members, hence its "servility" in the face of strong authority. Its "soul" is determined by three factors: (1) its number; (2) the force of contagion or imitation; and (3) hypnotic suggestion. Le Bon analyzed different kinds of crowds, including criminal crowds, electoral crowds, and parliamentary assemblies. Edward Bernays, widely regarded as the father of modern advertising, drew heavily on Le Bon’s work when formulating his ideas on propaganda and mass manipulation.
Naita, Maria (1968--)
Authors: Kyeyune George
Published: September 2018

Known for her prolific and consistent career, Maria Naita has distinguished herself as not only a major player in Uganda’s sculpture scene, but also as a supporter of budding artists. Unlike many art graduates who find jobs alongside making art, Naita has since her graduation at Makerere Art School (BA Fine art 1991 and MA sculpture 1998) chosen a career as a full-time artist combining sculpture and painting. She was born in 1968, and from an early age, Naita had become conscious of the design traditions not only of her own Ganda people, but also from the different regions of the country. Naita’s passion for anatomy and her ability to model from observation are her singular strengths. And yet she is aware that these are in themselves of little consequence if they are not backed by what she calls the "African consciousness," which, as she explains, has no tangible dimension. To express it in sculpture has been her major challenge. One of Naita’s biggest achievements is KANN Artists, a sculpture company she has put together with a goal to promote sculpture in the country.
Osaki Midori [尾崎 翠] (1896–1971)
Authors: Kakihara Satoko
Published: September 2018

Osaki Midori was a writer of short stories, poetry, essays, dramatic works, and a novel. Characterized as a Modern Girl, she is often discussed alongside writers such as Hasegawa Shigure, Kaneko Misuzu, and Nomizo Naoko. Her works feature female experiences in the city, sisterhoods and female relationships, and discussions of sensorial and aesthetic boundaries. Although she only published across two decades, her works were rediscovered toward the end of her life, and scholarship on them has continued in the decades following her passing.