bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Sojo, Vicente Emilio (1887–1974)
Authors: Ojeda Tovar Roberto Elias
Published: September 2018

Vicente Emilio Sojo was born in Guatire, Miranda State, Venezuela on 8 December 1887, a son of Francisco Reverón and Luisa Sojo. He was a self-taught composer, conductor, choirmaster, and pedagogue, and arguably the most influential figure of the first half of the Venezuelan twentieth century. In 1896, he undertook his first music studies with Henrique León (1854–1895) and Régulo Rico (1878–1960). While studying and performing, Sojo also worked as a tobacco producer and house painter due to difficult economic conditions.

In 1906 he relocated to Caracas, and in 1909 he auditioned for the School of Music and Declamation (today José Angel Lamas Music School) where he studied solfège, music theory, harmony, composition, and violoncello with Ignacio Bustamante (?–1921), Andrés Delgado Pardo (1870–1940) and Eduardo Richter (1874–1912), respectively. In the meantime, he acted as Choirmaster for the San Francisco Chapel and the Caracas Cathedral. In 1921 he started his teaching activities at the School of Music and Declamation, where he was later appointed as Headmaster in 1936 and held his position until 1964. On 23 March 1926 he was married to Efigenia Montero, until her early death in 1932.
Tavener, John Kenneth (1944–2013)
Authors: Moody Ivan
Published: September 2018

John Tavener was an English composer. He studied at the Royal Academy of Music in London, where his composition teachers were Lennox Berkeley and David Lumsdaine. His earliest success was with the cantata The Whale, first performed at the inaugural concert of the London Sinfonietta in 1968. This was followed by Celtic Requiem in 1969. Both works were recorded on the Beatles’ Apple label. Tavener began teaching at Trinity College in 1969.

Tavener was extremely prolific. Among his most significant compositions of the following decades are ÚltimosRitos (1972), the opera Thérèse (1973–76), Akhmatova: Requiem (1979–80), Ikon of Light (1984), Orthodox Vigil Service (1984), and Akathist of Thanksgiving (1986–87). The huge unexpected success of The Protecting Veil for solo cello and orchestra (1987) brought his music to the attention of a wider audience than ever before. Subsequent large-scale works of significance are Resurrection (1989), Apocalypse (1993), Fall and Resurrection (1997), Total Eclipse (1999), The Veil of the Temple (2001), Laila (2004), Sollemnitas in ConceptioneImmaculataBeataeMariaeVirginis (2006) and Requiem (2007). Tavener was knighted in the 2000 honours list.
Technique de mon langage musical
Authors: Broad Stephen
Published: September 2018

Technique de monlangage musical [The Technique of My Musical Language] is a treatise by the French composer Olivier Messiaen (1908–1992), setting out some of the features of his compositional style and the processes that he had developed by the time of its publication in 1944. Technique gives an insight into both the mechanics of his compositional approach and the inspirations on which it draws, drawing copiously on examples from his own music and the music of others. These included his approach to melodic shaping (rooted in plainchant, folksongs, and certain fragments of earlier music); harmony (including the so-called "modes of limited transpositions" and various "special chords"); and rhythm. There is also a preliminary discussion on birdsong that predates his sophisticated use of birdsong in the 1950s, and a worklist to 1942, indicating "significant" works.

Technique was never updated by the composer and so does not reflect later developments. These are accounted for in the posthumously published Traité de rythme, de couleur, et d’ornithologie (1994–2002).

Technique de monlangage musical was originally published by Alphonse Leduc in two volumes. It was translated into English in 1956 by John Satterfield and into German in 1966 by Sieglinde Ahrens. In 2000, Leduc produced a single-volume version.
Kerr, Alfred (1867–1948)
Authors: BeeBee Tom
Published: September 2018

Born Alfred Kempner, Alfred Kerr is remembered as one of Germany’s most important theatre and film critics and as a writer with literary ambitions who worked tirelessly to establish criticism as its own genre; in particular, his voluminous writing on playwriting, stagecraft, and performance demonstrates the crucial role of the critic in co-constructing theatre as a social medium. His importance lies in his support for progressive tendencies in literature, in his championing of innovative dramatists whose works were remembered by posterity (for example, Henrik Ibsen, Gerhart Hauptmann, Arthur Schnitzler, and Frank Wedekind). It is the highly polished and witty style of his writing that makes his critiques more memorable than many of the plays he wrote about. Kerr’s influence was strongest in the period from 1895 to the end of World War I, though he continued to write into the Weimar and Nazi periods. His GesammelteSchriften [Collected Works] were published between 1917 and 1920. The first five volumes, Die Welt im Drama [The World in Drama] bring together in book format Kerr’s numerous theatre reviews of the previous twenty-five years. Kerr’s books were burned by the Nazis. He was forced to spend most of the 1930s and 1940s abroad, taking British citizenship and returning to Germany only shortly before his death. In addition to criticism, Kerr also wrote poetry, memoirs, and travel narratives.
Ananthamurthy, U. R. (1932–2014)
Authors: H. Nikhila
Published: September 2018

Udupi Rajagopalacharya Ananthamurthy is a major figure of the modernist literary movement in Kannada, a professor of English, a literary critic, and a leading public intellectual in Karnataka.

His interactions with socialists Ram Manohar Lohia, Jayaprakash Narayan, and Shantaveri Gopalagowda during his student days, and his close association in Mysore with Gopalakrishna Adiga and a group of writers who identified themselves with the Navya literary movement in Kannada became formative influences in his literary career. Ananthamurthy wrote his first published novel, Samskara (1965), in England where he had gone to pursue his PhD on a Commonwealth Fellowship. In Samskara, a death in a Brahmin agrahara gives rise to incisive scrutiny of the caste order and a journey of ruthless introspection for the protagonist, Praneshacharya. The novel, and the film version that followed in 1970, became controversial and were criticized for their peceived attack on the Brahminical order. Over the years, however, Samskara has achieved iconic status and has been widely discussed in academia, both in India and abroad. The novel has been translated into many Indian languages, as well as English, Russian, French, German, Hungarian, and Swedish.
Bose, Buddhadeva (1908–1974)
Authors: Dev Amiya
Published: September 2018

Buddhadeva Bose was a major Bengali poet, who showed an exemplary dedication to modernism. He was a novelist, short-story writer, essayist, playwright, children’s writer, and translator who authored over 150 titles. Born in Comilla, he grew up in Noakhali and Dhaka (all in Bangladesh now). While attending college, he started a monthly publication with Ajit Datta called Pragati (Progress, 1927–1929). At 23, he moved to Kolkata. With a distinctive book of poems and a novel to his credit, BandīrBandanā (Prisoner’s Song) and Sādā (Response) respectively, he took up writing as his profession. At 26, he married Protiva Som, a singer who later became a fiction writer as well.

By age 26, he had begun teaching at Ripon (now Surendranath) College. Within a year, he founded a periodical, Kavitā (Poetry, 1935–1961), with Premendra Mitra and Samar Sen. Kavitā was solely devoted to poetry, and became an important venue for multiple generations of poets. He also began publishing new poetry, including an anthology of modern Bengali poetry (ādhunikBānglāKavitā, 1940, which he later edited himself) and a series of sixteen-pagers, EkPaysāyEkti (Poems a Paysa Each).
Generation of ‘27
Authors: Restrepo-Gautier Pablo
Published: September 2018

Generation of ‘27 was a group of poets in Spain also known as Generation of 1925, Generation of the Dictatorship (referring to Primo de Rivera’s regime), Generation of the avant-garde, and Generation Lorca-Guillén, among other appellations. The term "Generation of ‘27" arises from a gathering of Spanish avant-garde poets on 16 and 17 December 1927, to commemorate the 300th anniversary of the death of Andalusian baroque poet Luis de Góngora y Argote (1561–1627).

The term most often designates a group of ten poets born between 1891 and 1905: Pedro Salinas (1891–1951), Jorge Guillén (1893–1984), Gerardo Diego (1896–1987), Federico García Lorca (1898–1936), Vicente Aleixandre (1898–1984), Dámaso Alonso (1898–1990), Emilio Prados (1899–1962), Luis Cernuda (1902–1963), Rafael Alberti (1902–1999), and Manuel Altolaguirre (1905–1959). In a broader sense, the term may also include other artists such as painters Salvador Dalí (1904–1989) and Maruja Mallo (1902–1995), filmmaker Luis Buñuel (1900–1983), and musician Rosa García Ascot (1902–2002). Most members of the group met in Madrid at the influential cultural center known as the Residencia de Estudiantes.
Hansson, Ola (1860–1925)
Authors: Hron Irina
Published: September 2018

Ola Hansson was among the most innovative and ground-breaking authors and critics of early Swedish modernism. With his delicate prose sketches Sensitiva amorosa he established himself as the central figure of Swedish decadence. He played a crucial role in introducing both Nietzsche and Strindberg to the German public. In 1889 he married the authoress Laura Marholm (née Mohr) (1854–1928), and in the same year they left Sweden. The couple moved several times between Germany, France, Switzerland, and Turkey. Both of them suffered from incipient mental disorder. In 1925, Ola Hansson died in Turkey and was buried in Sweden in 1926. Hansson is acknowledged as one of the major (albeit initially misjudged) innovators of modern Swedish literature. His earlier texts are highly valued for their subtle psychology as an answer to the programmatic literature of the Swedish 1890s, while his later texts display a tendency towards the political ideas of pan-Germanism.
Harford, Lesbia (1891–1927)
Authors: Pottroff Christy
Published: September 2018

Lesbia Harford was an Australian writer and political activist. Despite these seemingly complementary roles, she did not view her writing as an instrument for social change, and very few of her poems are overtly political. Harford’s poetry is both social and romantic, addressing themes of love, work, and domesticity. Her writing negotiates the world of imperfections through a minimalist style. Harford attended the University of Melbourne and graduated with a Bachelor of Laws in 1916. During her undergraduate years, Harford, already committed to social justice, became embroiled in anti-war and anti-conscription activism. Rather than pursuing a legal career, she embodied her socialist politics and worked at a clothing factory. She later joined the Industrial Workers of the World. Only a few of Harford’s poems were published during her lifetime. New interest in reclaiming marginalized writing led to the discovery of Harford’s lost novel, The Invaluable Mystery, in the Australian Archives. Published in 1987, the novel concerns an urban working-class woman and her struggle to survive independently during the Great War.
Jensen, Johannes V. (1873–1950)
Authors: Krouk Dean
Published: September 2018

Winner of the 1944 Nobel Prize in literature, the novelist and poet Johannes V. Jensen was Denmark’s major 20th-century literary figure. Much celebrated for his historical novel KongensFald [The Fall of the King] (1900–1901), Jensen also penned the poetry collection Digte 1906 [Poems 1906], which had a substantial influence on Scandinavian modernism. Jensen’s wide travels in Europe, Asia, and the United States left a mark on his cultural, aesthetic, and anthropological interests. He encountered the new marvels of technology and industry at the Paris World’s Exhibition in 1900, which he described in Den gotiske Renaissance (1901), a collection of travel reportage that calls for a new, vigorous aesthetics and psychology to match the modern age.
Serapion Brothers
Authors: Shulga Jekaterina
Published: September 2018

The Serapion Brothers was a collective of writers who formed a group in Petrograd in 1921 under the leadership of Evgeny Zamyatin and Viktor Shklovsky. The group was named after Serapion—a hermit who believed highly in creativity—from E. T. A. Hoffmann’s collection of stories The Serapion Brethren (1819–1821). The group members were united by their belief in freedom of creativity and the rejection of ideologically controlled literature, rather than through a devotion to a singular vision or artistic style; their individual writing styles differed widely.

The emergence of the Serapion Brothers was enabled by the more liberal atmosphere of the Soviet Union’s New Economic Policy period (NEP, 1921–1928). The group had its first meeting on 1 February 1921 at the House of Arts in Petrograd; the Serapions were united by their location as much as by their artistic inclinations. The original group included Nikolai Tikhonov, Veniamin Kaverin, Mikhail Zoshchenko, Victor Shklovsky, Vsevolod Ivanov, Elizaveta Polonskaya, Ilya Gruzdev, Mikhail Slonimsky, Lev Lunts, Vladimir Pozner, Nikolay Nikitin, and Konstantin Fedin.
Vvedensky, Aleksandr Ivanovich (1904–1941)
Authors: Anemone Anthony
Published: September 2018

Known during his lifetime as a failed avant-garde poet who went on to a successful, if minor, career as a children’s writer, Vvedensky is acknowledged today as one of the most important voices of the Leningrad poetic avant-garde in the late 1920s and 1930s. A co-founder of the short-lived but influential Obedinenie real’nogo iskussta or OBERIU (The Association for Real Art), Vvedensky is one of the creators of Russia’s first literature of the Absurd. Starting from the premise that language and logic were unable to convey the truth of reality, Vvedensky rejected the traditional conventions of Russian poetry and sought the key to human cognition in the concept of the absurd [bessmyslitsa].
Yehoshua, A. B.
Authors: Halevi-Wise Yael
Published: September 2018

A leading Israeli writer and cultural figure since the 1960s, Avraham B. Yehoshua’s work was recognized, even when he was a young man, as representing a "new wave" in modern Hebrew literature. His absurd plots and obsessive protagonists signaled a break with the realist style and ideological collectivism characterizing the literature of a generation that had fought to establish the State of Israel in 1948. By contrast, the "new wave" writers moved toward abstract modernism, identity fragmentation, and absurd plots that, in Yehoshua’s case, revolve around dysfunctional families and tensions between nations and generations.

His first novel, Ha-Meahev [The Lover] (1977) surprised readers accustomed to his short stories, as it moved away from an abstract surrealism to engage more directly with Israeli reality in the aftermath of the Yom Kippur War of 1973. The social and political engagement of his subsequent fiction is so strong that all of his novels can be called condition-of-Israel novels, even when they are set in historical rather than contemporary contexts, as in his 1997 novel, Masah el Tom Ha-Elef [A Journey to the End of the Millennium], set in the Middle Ages, and his 1990 novel, Mar Mani [Mr. Mani], a postmodern historical novel composed of five complex conversations going back in time to cover two hundred years of Jewish life around the Mediterranean basin.
Atkinson, Madge (1885–1970)
Authors: Carter Alexandra
Published: September 2018

A dancer, choreographer, educator, and writer, Madge Atkinson worked during the second and third decades of the twentieth century on the development of the dance form known as Natural Movement. Based in Manchester, she was active in the theater, presented her own choreographic work from her studio, established a school, and taught widely. Atkinson was concerned with the systematic development of skill and artistry, based on an extension of the natural functions of the human body. Her work was disseminated nationally and internationally through the teaching of graded syllabi and the craft of choreography. She made a significant contribution to dance in the early twentieth century through her role as a female artist and her privileging of a holistic but skilled approach to movement, from which evolved a new dance language. In accord with the ethos of the times but in her own unique way, she constructed and contested the concept of the "natural" in theater dance.
Nazemi, Abdollah (1937--)
Authors: Shay Anthony
Published: September 2018

Abdollah Nazemi founded the Pars National Ballet, a semiprivate dance company, in 1966. It was the first known instance of a Western-style modern dance group to be established in Iran by an Iranian. National Radio and Television of Iran largely supported and funded the company, and most of the choreographies created by Nazemi and his colleagues were performed on television. Nazemi was trained in the Ministry of Culture and Art’s ballet program, a school of the National Ballet of Iran. He began his professional career in the National Ballet of Iran, eventually performing lead roles in many classical and Iranian-themed choreographies. After the establishment of the Islamic Republic in 1980, which banned all dance performances, Nazemi emigrated to Los Angeles. He attempted to continue the Pars National Ballet, but was forced to operate in greatly reduced circumstances.
Page, Ruth (1899–1991)
Authors: Meglin Joellen
Published: September 2018

Ruth Page was a Chicago-based dancer, choreographer, and director of ballet companies whose experimentalism, disregard for genre boundaries, and affinity for collaboration led her in directions at once cosmopolitan and modern. Her theatrical inventions were urbane and often risqué, leading to clashes with censors despite the popular appeal of her works. Regardless of their mixed critical reception, her ballets combined eclectic tastes with her unique sensibility as a woman drawn to the unconventional and offbeat for the greater part of the twentieth century.

Page is best known for her 1938 Americana ballet Frankie and Johnnie, which she choreographed with Bentley Stone. A closer look at Page’s works over a lifetime reveals how she incorporated modernist currents: futurism, abstraction, primitivism, African-American jazz and vernacular dancing, popular entertainments (circus, Broadway revue, floor show), cityscapes, syntheses of voice and movement in danced poems and dance-plays, and re-creations of operas as ballets.
Primus, Pearl (1919–1994)
Authors: Kowal Rebekah J.
Published: September 2018

Dancer and choreographer Pearl Primus made significant strides toward securing a vital role for dance artists of color in American modern dance. Sparked by the Depression era mandate that dance aid the cause of social justice, Primus imagined and represented the world through the lens of the African diaspora. Her early performances fueled a critical debate within modern dance circles over reigning priorities regarding artistry, authenticity, and innovation. Travel to Africa for a year in 1949 prompted her to reconsider her assumptions about theatricality in modern dance from the perspective of ritual experience. A student of anthropology throughout her life, Primus pioneered approaches to choreography and to dance pedagogy that adapted ethnographic research, obtained largely through participant-observation, to the stage. Increasingly, over the span of her life, Primus participated in an international discourse about the African diasporic cultural continuum, advocating that black dance be defined on its own terms and not in relation to white dance aesthetics or cultural standards.
Rainer, Yvonne (1934--)
Authors: Miller Stefanie
Published: September 2018

Yvonne Rainer is a key figure of both American postmodern dance and avant-garde feminist cinema. Rainer was a founding member of New York City’s Judson Dance Theater, a hub of postmodern dance experimentation in the 1960s. In her choreography, Rainer rejected the spectacle, virtuosity, and drama exhibited by classical ballet and modern dance, choosing instead to present functional, task-like, neutral movement. Her approach to choreography, which refused to provide easy pleasure, is demonstrated in her "No Manifesto" (1965). Between 1966 and 1969, Rainer began to experiment with film, creating several short works that play with the antihumanist idea that bodies can be equated with objects. In the 1970s Rainer turned her attention exclusively to feature-length experimental filmmaking. Her films in the 1970s and 1980s are works of bricolage that use radical juxtapositions of sound and imagery to create experiences of discontinuity that challenge conventional narrative cinematic structures. Rainer’s first feature-length film, The Lives of Performers (1972), blends fiction and reality by including rehearsal footage from previous dance works, and featuring several dancers from her company, Grand Union, as characters in the film. Rainer’s early films have been described as almost structuralist, owing their inspiration to filmmakers such as Maya Deren, Hollis Frampton, and Andy Warhol.
Reda, Mahmoud (1930--)
Authors: Shay Anthony
Published: September 2018

Mahmoud Reda, a pioneer in the modern staging of traditional and folk dance in the Arab world, began his movement career in gymnastics and other sports. He was a member of the Egyptian gymnastic team in the Helsinki Olympics in 1952. He toured Europe with Astaria, an Argentinian dance company, before returning to Egypt to found his own company, the Reda Troupe. In the choreophobic atmosphere of Egypt in the 1950s in which dance was equated with prostitution, and with a little funding from friends and family, he managed to give a highly successful concert that attracted critical acclaim and eventual government support. In order to succeed with the Egyptian public of the time, he offered dances that sanitized belly dance, eliminating the overtly sexual sharp vibrations associated with that genre and introducing instead soft undulating movements for the women and highly athletic movements for the men. With this newly invented tradition of Egyptian dance, he added narrative elements in his dances that created a nostalgic world of Egyptian villages in which youths and damsels wore highly stylized costumes that only vaguely resembled actual rural clothing styles.
Abela, Eduardo (1889–1965)
Authors: Hartman Joseph
Published: September 2018

Cuban artist and cartoonist Eduardo Abela (born 1889 in San Antonio de los Baños; died 1965 in Havana) is considered an early progenitor of the Cuban Vanguardia, a 20th-century avant-garde art movement that incorporated European modernist techniques, such as Expressionism, Cubism, and Surrealism, into synthetic images of Cuba’s multifaceted culture. Like many of his colleagues, Abela explored Cuban themes in his art while living abroad in Spain and Paris in the 1920s. During his European residency, Abela created nostalgic and somewhat stereotypical images of Cuba’s rural landscape, peasantry, and Afro-Cuban populations. Abela’s Afro-Cuban themed works, in particular, came at the height of "negro fashion" in France. His paintings from this period are most often associated with a Eurocentric view of primitivism: a vision of things African as earthy, sensual, and exotic. After his return to Cuba, Abela served as a cartoonist for the Cuban newspaper El Diario del Marina from 1930 until 1934. During this period in his career, Abela created acerbic editorial cartoons as a protest against the notorious President-cum-Dictator Gerardo Machado. Abela later founded a short-lived art studio called the Free Studio of Painting and Sculpture in 1937. He served as Cuba’s cultural attaché to Mexico from 1941 to 1946 and to Guatemala from 1947 to 1952. He continued to paint until his death in 1965.
Abueva, Napoleon V. (1930--)
Authors: Guazon Tessa Maria
Published: September 2018

National artist Napoleon Abueva is a pioneer of modernism in sculpture. He trained at the University of the Philippines School of Fine Arts, mentored by Guillermo Tolentino, whose classical style placed him alongside the forerunners of Conservatism in Philippine art at the turn of the century. The modernist vein in Philippine art can be characterized as having increased emphasis on the formal aspects of the design, the expressiveness, the depiction of the unsightly, the shift from urban to rural subjects, the exploration of genre themes, and the heightened awareness of national identity and its manifestations in art. These were greatly evident in Abueva’s early works, which exhibited his versatility, the expanse of his interest in varied themes and subject matter, his skillful manipulation of material as conveyed through form rendered in varying degrees of complexity. His works encompass a panorama of themes and styles and by turns, can be classified as figurative, constructivist, or abstract. They may appear minimalist in silhouette and composition, such as his Allegorical Harpoon (1964), figurative like his many commissioned works for institutions, such as those in the University of the Philippines campuses, or stylized and functional, as the furniture and house parts he designed and made.
Angkatan Pelukis Se-Malaysia
Authors: Soon Simon
Published: September 2018

Angkatan Pelukis Se-Malaysia [APS—All Malaysian Painters’ Front] is recognized as one of the first Malay art collectives in Malaysia. It functions as both a social club as well as a promoter of realism as a painterly style, specifically amongst the Malay community. This was a radical development in its time, given that traditional Islamic Malay society had a culturally strong proscription against the depiction of the human figure. To this end, it was active in holding exhibitions and art classes for members and art enthusiasts in post-war Kuala Lumpur. The society originated in the Malay Arts Council, which was established in 1956 at the United Malay National Organization (UMNO) political party’s headquarters in Kuala Lumpur. The founding of APS is connected to the migration of Java-born painter Hoessein Enas to Malaya in 1948 during the Indonesian revolution. He would soon gain his reputation as a highly skilled portrait painter and would become the Malay Arts Council’s first chairman. The APS drew inspiration in part from the organization that Hoessein Enas co-founded in Medan in 1944, called Angkatan Seni Rupa Indonesia, not to be confused with Akademi Seni Rupa Indonesia, which is the art school established in Yogyakarta in 1950.
Apollo (1909–1917)
Authors: Chuchvaha Hanna
Published: September 2018

Apollo (Apollon, 1909–1917) was the third and last major Russian modernist art periodical before the revolution of 1917. Edited by the art critic and art historian Sergei Makovsky (1877–1962), and from 1911 by both Makovsky and Baron Nikolai Vrangel’ (1880–1915), the journal ran for 91 issues. Aiming to craft an ideal art periodical, Apollo continued the aesthetic program of its forerunners, the World of Art and The Golden Fleece. According to its title and editorial manifesto, the creation of art works was seen as an act of worshipping Apollo, while the principle of Apollonianism alluded to Friedrich Nietzsche’s dichotomy of the Apollonian and the Dionysian. Apollo was a consistent propagator of contemporary art trends and defined a new stage in the development of Russian modernism. The periodical was international in scope; it devoted articles to Russian and European artists and art shows and featured sections dedicated to visual arts, literature, dance, theater, and music.
Burliuk, David (БУРЛЮК, ДАВИД) (1882–1967)
Authors: Ioffe Dennis , Kochman Adrienne
Published: September 2018

Deemed by many as the founding father of Russian Futurism, David Davidovich Burliuk was a painter, writer, poet, performance artist, journal editor, and publisher. Burliuk is considered to be a major figure of both the Russian and Ukrainian avant-garde movements. He began his artistic career in the first decade of the twentieth century at the Royal Academy in Germany and at L’ecole des beaux arts in France. He became famous in his homeland in 1912 when the Futurist manifesto A Slap in the Face of Public Taste was published at his initiative. The co-authors of this provocative text were Alexei Kruchenykh, Vladimir Mayakovsky, and Velimir Khlebnikov. Burliuk was instrumental in establishing the public stance of Russian Futurism by lecturing, performing and publishing multiple collections of art and poetry. The main heroic activities of the Russian Futurists orchestrated by Burliuk took place in the pre-war and inter-war period. After the Revolution Burliuk moved to the Far East, then to Japan, and eventually settled in the USA where he died at the age of 85.
Butler, Reginald Cotterell [Reg] (1913–1981)
Authors: Hudson Kitty
Published: September 2018

A central figure among the post-war sculptors who came to prominence at the 1952 Venice Biennal, Reg Butler is best known for winning the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) competition to design a monument to The Unknown Political Prisoner in 1953, although the design was never fully realized as a sculpture. Butler initially trained as an architect, but started to achieve success and publicity as a sculptor with his first solo exhibition at the Hanover Gallery in 1949. His aesthetic influences were varied: from Freudian theory and Surrealism, to African and prehistoric art, as well as contemporary classicism and the post-war "art of trauma". He went on to take part in the Festival of Britain in 1951 and, in the same year, began teaching at the Slade, where he eventually became the Director of Sculpture Studies in 1966. Though his technique developed from welding to model\ling and casting in bronze, his subject matter never strayed far from the female figure. From the late 1960s until his death in 1981, Butler produced increasingly distorted and overtly sexualized female figures in painted bronze, distancing himself from his more abstract modernist contemporaries.
Caro, Anthony (1924–2013)
Authors: Hudson Kitty
Published: September 2018

Anthony Caro played a pivotal role in the development of sculpture in the 20th century. He began his career as an assistant to Henry Moore, and made his name with a ground-breaking exhibition of work at London’s Whitechapel Gallery in 1963, in which large, abstract, brightly colored steel sculptures were displayed standing directly on the ground. His role in art education was of equal significance; teaching at Saint Martin’s School of Art from 1953 to 1981, he introduced a new approach to sculpture that questioned the boundaries of the medium, and encouraged a new generation of British artists. Over his long career he continued to experiment with technique and materials—though steel remained his preferred medium—and from the mid-1960s on he often worked in series, inspired by time he spent in metal factories in Europe and the United States. Unlike most other sculptors, Caro was inspired by painting. His later work drew on the Old and Modern Masters, reinterpreting them in three dimensions. A visit to Greece led to a series based on classical pediments in 1986, and a 1992 piece entitled The Trojan War. In the 1990s, Caro began using architectural elements in his sculpture, a concept he dubbed "sculptitecture," allowing visitors to interact with the work. His achievements have been widely recognized, resulting in many public commissions, honors, and awards.
Parade
Authors: Bellow Juliet
Published: September 2018

A one-act ballet on the theme of a fairground sideshow, Parade was produced by Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, and premiered on May 18, 1917 at the Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris. According to Jean Cocteau, the poet who wrote the ballet’s libretto, the impetus for Parade originated in 1912 with Diaghilev’s command, ‘‘Astonish me!’’ To fulfill Diaghilev’s mandate, Cocteau assembled a production team drawn from the Parisian avant-garde: for the score, he recruited the composer Erik Satie, known for experimental piano compositions such as Gymnopédies (1888) and for cabaret songs performed at the Montmartre cabaret Le Chat Noir. In 1916, Cocteau secured the participation of Pablo Picasso, a painter associated with the Cubist movement of the early 1910s, to design the overture curtain, set, and costumes. Working with the choreographer Léonide Massine, this group produced a ballet-pantomime featuring familiar characters from the circus, variety shows, and cinema. Mixing various forms of art and entertainment, Parade used dance to explore the unstable relationship between elite and popular culture.
Robbins, Jerome (1918–1998)
Authors: Foulkes Julia L.
Published: September 2018

Jerome Robbins was one of the master choreographers of the twentieth century who transformed musical theater and ballet. Beginning with Fancy Free (1944), Robbins left his mark on both disciplines by his use of humor and character, and by his ability to combine movement originating in multiple idioms. This auspicious beginning led to more ballets—Interplay (1945), Afternoon of a Faun (1953), and The Concert (1956)—as well as a number of hit Broadway shows: On the Town (1944), West Side Story (1957), Gypsy (1959), and Fiddler on the Roof (1964). He traversed different genres with ease, moving from Broadway to ballet, dance to choreography, and then to directing plays, films, and television programmes. Although he made his earliest ballets for Ballet Theatre (now the American Ballet Theatre), his longest affiliation was with the New York City Ballet, where he was appointed associate artistic director in 1949, and to which—after a hiatus of more than a decade—he returned in 1969 to choreograph some of his most acclaimed ballets, including Dances at a Gathering (1969) and The Goldberg Variations (1971). Robbins’s work often defined the historic moment, marrying music, movement, and expression with such quality and intensity that his works have endured as historical and artistic landmarks.
Drysdale, Russell (1912–1981)
Authors: Gray Anne
Published: September 2018

Russell Drysdale was an Australian artist who created an original vision of the Australian landscape from the 1940s to the 1960s, portraying the emptiness and loneliness of the Australian outback and country townships in his paintings, drawings, and photographs. During World War II, he depicted everyday subjects, including groups of servicemen waiting at railway stations. He traveled numerous times to the interior of Australia, including a trip to record the drought devastation in South Western New South Wales in 1944, where he created images that convey the environmental degradation of the landscape. In 1947, he explored the Bathurst region with Donald Friend where he discovered Sofala and Hill End, an area that served as the subject matter for his art for a number of years. Drysdale painted many images of deserted country towns as well as brooding landscapes peopled with stockmen and station hands. In his paintings of Aborigines, Drysdale expressed a deep concern for the Indigenous people, often placing them within his paintings in a manner that conveys a sense of dispossession. His work was singled out by Kenneth Clark in 1949 as being among the most original in Australian art, and his exhibition at the Leicester Galleries, London, in 1950 convinced British critics that Australian artists had an original vision.
Faktura
Authors: Wünsche Isabel
Published: September 2018

Faktura, literally "texture," is related to the Russian avant-garde’s preoccupation with the fundamental principles of the creative process. The term, applied to a work of art, addresses the way in which materials are used, the processes, the surrounding environment, and the artistic devices; it characterizes the textural structure of a work of art and the manner by which it was constructed. As a creative principle, it rejects a pictorial space based on perspective and the illusion of three-dimensional space projected onto a flat canvas. The Russian formalist critic Viktor Shklovsky considered faktura to be the single most important quality of an object of art as a constructed object: it was the evidence of its having been made. He applied the term to poetic writing as well as the visual arts; in both cases faktura offered a visual demonstration of the properties inherent in a material or construction: "The whole effort of a poet and a painter is aimed first and foremost at creating a continuous and thoroughly palpable object, an object with a faktura." The term faktura remained a fluid concept during the 1910s, its essential qualities being further defined and developed by members of the avant-garde from 1913 well into the mid-1920s. While faktura, as initially used by members of the early Russian avant-garde, was characterized by the use of natural materials and a holistic–metaphysical approach to art, it was later adapted by the Constructivists to conform to a strictly materialist ideology and utilitarian orientation in artistic production.
Gattorno, Antonio (1904–1980)
Authors: Holian Sarah
Published: September 2018

Cuban painter and illustrator Antonio Gattorno is recognized as one of the founding members of the Cuban vanguardia (avant-garde) of the late 1920s to early 1930s in Havana; a movement that sought to define a national iconography through the people and landscape of Cuba. Like many of his colleagues in Cuba, Gattorno studied painting at the San Alejandro Academy before earning a scholarship to travel to Italy, Spain, and France between 1920–1927. During this period, Gattorno studied Italian classicism and works by Paul Gauguin, which he later used to formulate his own figurative style of portraying the guajiro (Cuban peasant) that dominated the subject matter of his work for the following decade. During the mid-1920s, he also joined the Grupo Minorista, a group of Cuban leftist critics, writers, and artists who cautioned of United States imperialist influence and promoted a Hispano-Cuban vernacular culture. Gattorno signed the group’s manifesto published in the avant-garde journal Revista de avance (1927–1930) that called for a rejection of academic art and a renewal of Cuban art. Inspired by the political work of the Mexican Muralists, Gattorno also painted a number of large-scale murals (many now lost) in Havana at the Teachers’ Training College, the Capitular Room of Town Hall, and the private residence of Dr. Gustavo Gutierrez.
Group 1890
Authors: Luis Sandip K.
Published: September 2018

Group 1890 was a short-lived, but highly influential collective of Indian artists formed in 1962. It was composed of twelve members—Jeram Patel as secretary, Raghav Kaneria, M. Reddeppa Naidu, Ambadas, Rajesh Mehra, Gulam Mohammed Sheikh, Himmat Shah, S.G. Nikam, Eric Hubert Bowen, Jyoti Bhatt, Balkrishna Patel, and J. Swaminathan (the spokesperson and ideologue of the collective). The name of the group was taken from the house number of the private residence in which members had their first meeting. The collective had their first and last show in 1963 in New Delhi, inaugurated by then Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru. The catalogue essay, "Surrounded by Infinity," was written by Octovio Paz, who was then the Mexican ambassador to India. The aesthetic impact made by Group 1890 in their "primitivist" use of materials and surfaces was soon co-opted by the indigenist art of the Madras/Cholamandal school and the so-called "Neo-tantric" painters. Since the artworks of Group 1890 have, for the most part, not been preserved or documented, it is on the level of the Group’s ideology that they have been recognized as historically significant; paradoxically, in the words of Octovio Paz, their ideology consists of "the deliberate absence of any ideological meaning."
Fua Haripitak (1910–1993)
Authors: Singhalampong Eksuda
Published: September 2018

Fua Haripitak was a modern Thai artist recognized for his pioneering role in modern Thai painting and his contribution to preserving classical Thai art. He was generally considered to be an avant-garde artist in his time, as he constantly challenged academic conventions and experimented with many artistic styles including Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, and Cubism. As a student of Silpa Bhirasri (1892–1962), Haripitak never stopped learning, exploring new methods or drawing new inspirations from both Thailand and abroad throughout his lifetime. His works of art are noted for their thick, bold brushstrokes and vivid colors, through which he aimed to capture impressions and experiences of different places and the moods of each moment. His 1949 landscape painting Petchaburi won him the Gold Medal Award from Thailand’s First National Exhibition of Art the same year. Haripitak won three consecutive first prize awards in painting from the National Exhibition of Arts. In 1985, he was awarded the National Artist of Thailand in Fine Art and Visual Art.
Tsai Jui-Yueh (1921–2005)
Authors: Ya-Ping Chen
Published: September 2018

Tsai Jui-Yueh was a concert dance pioneer in Taiwan. Born under Japanese colonial rule of the island (1895–1945), Tsai was one of the first Taiwanese to study modern dance (sometimes called ‘‘creative dance’’ at the time) in Japan, first with Ishii Baku and then with his student Ishii Midori. After returning to Taiwan in 1946, Tsai established one of the first dance schools on the island and became an active dance teacher, performer, and choreographer in the postwar era. Though she was mainly trained in modern dance, Tsai taught and created ballet, modern dance, and min-zu wu-dao, the Chinese national dance form inaugurated by the KMT government (Kuomintang, the Chinese Nationalist Party) in the early 1950s, during her half-century long career. In 1983, she immigrated to Australia with her son Lei Ta-Pung and continued teaching dance until the late 1980s. Tsai’s career as a performer, choreographer, and dance teacher witnessed two important eras in Taiwan’s modern history: first, the era of colonial modernity under the Japanese regime, in which individual fulfillment brought about by ideas of modernity was interwoven with the oppressive colonial power structure; second, the period of ideological control under martial law (1949–1987), in which she suffered from political persecution, being imprisoned from 1949 to 1952, and thereafter lived and worked under the surveillance of the KMT authorities for many years.
Husain, M.F. (1915–2011)
Authors: Xaviers John
Published: September 2018

M.F. Husain has often been called India’s Pablo Picasso on account of his stature as the most representative artist of modern India. After the gain of political sovereignty, Husain projected himself as the most vociferous spokesman of the national modern. He envisaged his role as a modernist by turning to ancient Hindu mythologies as his abiding subject matter and translating them into a modernist visual language. His pictorial vocabulary drew from Picasso, Matisse, Chagall and many other modernists and appropriated their style to forge a new personal idiom that may be termed as a signature style. It was only in the 1990s when Hindu nationalism began to dictate politics that Husain’s freedom to interpret Hindu religious mythologies and depict gods and particularly goddesses in the nude that his art became a target of attack and public litigation. What was seen by him as his right as a secular Indian artist to claim the past from a modern perspective was challenged when the opponents from the Hindu Right refused to let his Muslim identity be subsumed under an overarching Indian one. Today, he is remembered more for the debates around art and censorship that he gave rise to than his extraordinary creativity that manifested in a variety of medium ranging from installation art, mural painting and film making.
Japanese Secession
Authors: Soeiro Diana
Published: September 2018

In 1920, a group of Japanese architects interested in Art Nouveu or "Jugenstil" created a society sharing a common approach concerning the future of architecture in Japan. Taking inspiration from the Austro-Hungarian version of Jugenstil (known as Vienna Secession), they decided on the name Bunriha (literally, "Secessionist Group"), becoming known as Japanese Secession. Central to the group was the attempt to secede from certain practices in the architectural profession at the time that, they felt, obligated them to use exclusively traditional styles. Like the Austro-Hungarian Secession (1897–1939), Japan was also trying to come to terms with the issue of identity. Bunriha’s manifesto claimed that architecture should not be exclusively about engineering, but should also be considered a form of artistic expression. The Secessionists respected architecture’s functionalism, but defended a broader interpretation of what that could mean, and were adamant about their refusal to disregard aesthetics.
JunYee (1942--)
Authors: Guazon Tessa Maria
Published: September 2018

Junyee, or Luis Yee, Jr., is a Filipino artist known for his large-scale and site-specific art installations, which reflect a deep awareness of ecology and environmental issues. He was born in the Philippine island of Agusan del Norte. Trained as a sculptor, Junyee has pioneered the use of materials readily available from nature for expansive, site-specific works that incorporate ephemeral material within specific locations, redefining site and space in the process. His inventive use of indigenous material—which he assembles into sprawling constellations of forms, swarms of objects, or networks of points which function like maps—conveys a concentrated appreciation of nature. His works Wood Things (1981) and Spaces and Objects (1986), for example, are sprawling assemblies of natural forms. Junyee’s installations bring the precarious state of our natural world to the fore; by incorporating natural objects into his art, he exhibits both resourcefulness and acute awareness of the finite state of natural resources. Junyee’s approach to art is characterized by a keen sense of the environment and astute knowledge of materials. Whether paintings composed with soot; free-standing and outdoor sculptures in wood or cast concrete; or sprawling site installations, Junyee’s work exhibits a feeling for form and inherent awareness of the ways art carves new spaces of experience.
Klaxon (São Paulo, 1922–1923)
Authors: Wells Sarah Ann
Published: September 2018

Klaxon (São Paulo, 1922–1923) was the first and most important of Brazil’s avant-garde artistic journals. It comprised a total of nine issues, published on a monthly basis, which included an eclectic mix of poems, short stories, essays, visual art, fragments of novels, reviews and commentaries on music and theater. In its third issue, Klaxon incorporated film criticism in Brazil (No. 3, p. 11). The journal’s collective nature was emphasized both through the content of its pages and its masthead. Key contributors included the writers Sérgio Milliet, Menotti Del Picchia, Guilherme de Almeida, and Oswald de Andrade, but it was the impact of the "pope" of Brazilian modernism, Mário de Andrade, that cemented Klaxon’s influence in Brazil. Anchored in São Paulo, Brazil’s largest and most industrialized city, Klaxon was read selectively throughout the country and in small foreign circles of Europe and Latin America; within five years of its publication, similar modernist journals had emerged in even the most peripheral regions of Brazil. Furthering this cosmopolitan orientation, Klaxon incorporated articles and images from Brazil’s burgeoning avant-garde scene as well as from France, Japan, Belgium, and Spain, and published selected works in French. Henri Bergson, Jean Epstein, Igor Stravinsky, Pablo Picasso, Jean Cocteau, Charlie Chaplin, Guillermo de Torre, and Guillaume Apollinaire were among the figures of international modernism to appear in its pages.