bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Finite-dimensional representations constructed from random walks
Authors: Erschler Anna , Ozawa Narutaka
Published: September 2018

Given a 1-cocycle

b

with coefficients in an orthogonal representation, we show that every finite dimensional summand of

b

is cohomologically trivial if and only if

\| b(X_n) \|^2/n

tends to a constant in probability, where

X_n

is the trajectory of the random walk

(G,\mu)

. As a corollary, we obtain sufficient conditions for

G

to satisfy Shalom's property

H_{\mathrm{FD}}

. Another application is a convergence to a constant in probability of

\mu^{*n}(e) -\mu^{*n}(g)

,

n\gg m

, normalized by its average with respect to

\mu^{*m}

, for any finitely generated infinite amenable group without infinite virtually abelian quotients. Finally, we show that the harmonic equivariant mapping of

G

to a Hilbert space obtained as an

U

-ultralimit of normalized

\mu^{*n}- g \mu^{*n}

can depend on the ultrafilter

U

for some groups.
Connections on equivariant Hamiltonian Floer cohomology
Authors: Seidel Paul
Published: September 2018

We construct connections on

S^1

-equivariant Hamiltonian Floer cohomology, which differentiate with respect to certain formal parameters.
Ausdruckstanz (1910–1950)
Authors: Manning Susan
Published: September 2018

The term Ausdruckstanz became common usage after World War II to designate a widespread dance practice in the early and middle decades of the 20th century that flourished in German-speaking Europe. Ausdruckstanz emerged from the life reform movement of the early 20th century that promoted diverse practices of physical culture as a way of contesting the industrialisation and urbanisation of modern life. Émile Jaques-Dalcroze’s expansion of eurhythmics at Hellerau in the few years immediately preceding World War I, and Rudolf Laban’s and Mary Wigman’s explorations of movement on Monte Verita during the years of the war, anticipated the dramatic growth of Ausdruckstanz in the 1920s and early 1930s. Students flocked to the many studios that offered amateur courses in Tanz-Gymnastik (‘dance gymnastics’) alongside professional training and certification. The most talented graduates then embarked on their own careers as educators and choreographers of solo, group, and mass dance. Leading dancers crisscrossed Central Europe on tour, and some ventured as far as the Americas and East Asia. The rise of National Socialism after 1933 decisively affected Ausdruckstanz: while many dancers remained in Germany and Austria and collaborated with the National Socialists, others went into exile due to their leftist political commitments and/or their Jewish heritage. In the Americas, in Australasia, and in Palestine, émigrés, working together with other dancers, developed and disseminated Ausdruckstanz, integrating its practices and principles with a range of other dance forms, including ballet and modern dance.
De Maré, Rolf (1888–1964)
Authors: Steichen James
Published: September 2018

Rolf de Maré was a Swedish-born impresario, art collector, and philanthropist. Born into one of Sweden’s wealthiest families, he began collecting modern art at an early age, gaining entrée to the leading artists of the day through his relationship with the painter Nils Dardel. De Maré was the founder and sole patron of the Ballets Suédois, or Swedish Ballet, created as a vehicle for the dancer and choreographer Jean Börlin. Although the company was in existence for only five years, it proved to be the most notable rival to Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, on which it was self-consciously modelled and which it would, in turn, influence. In addition to modern art and ballet, de Maré had a strong interest in Asian and African folk art and artefacts, amassing significant collections in these areas over the course of his many travels. De Maré’s collections constitute the core holdings of two major dance research centres, for which he provided institutional leadership and financial support: the Archives Internationales de la Danse (AID) in Paris and the Dansmuseet (Dance Museum) in Stockholm.
Mercé y Luque, Antonia Rosa (Stage Name: La Argentina; b. 4 September 1888, Buenos Aires, Argentina; d. 18 July 1936, Bayonne, France)
Authors: Bennahum Ninotchka
Published: September 2018

Antonia Rosa Mercé y Luque, known by her stage name La Argentina, was the most celebrated Spanish dancer of the early 20th century. Greatly influenced by the modernist productions of the Ballets Russes who sought political refuge in neutral Spain during World War I, La Argentina fused the modernism of the Spanish School of Music to the Escuela Bolera, or Spanish Bolero School of classical dance, adding many rhythmic and choreographic stylizations from Romani flamenco and other complex regional styles of folk dance she had learned on ethnographic trips throughout Spain. This hybrid vision resulted in a polyrhythmic, African and Hispano-Arab-Sephardic fusion of musical and choreographic cultures whose artistic influence can still be felt along the Iberian Peninsula. With this rich and varied musical and choreographic vocabulary, and a full company of Romani, Spanish, and European dancers and musicians, La Argentina took Europe, the Americas and Asia by storm. Between her first tour to New York in 1915 and her final European performances in 1936, she introduced and cultivated global audiences by performing, touring, writing, publishing and giving afternoon lectures on the subject of the Spanish dance,
Nettleford, Rex (1933–2010)
Authors: Sörgel Sabine
Published: September 2018

In a dance career spanning over 40 years, Rex Nettleford was perhaps the most influential choreographer to shape Jamaican dance theatre as it is known today. Starting out as a member of Ivy Baxter Dance Group in the late 1950s, he and Eddy Thomas founded the National Dance Theatre Company (NDTC) of Jamaica, and the company’s inaugural performance, Roots and Rhythms, took place on Jamaican Independence Day in 1962. An eminent political sociologist and long-time vice-chancellor of the University of the West Indies, Rex Nettleford always connected his dance career to his scholarly pursuits in Caribbean cultural studies and historiography. Among his voluminous writings, two books – Dance Jamaica: Cultural Definition and Artistic Discovery (1985) and Dance Jamaica: Renewal and Continuity (2009) – document the ongoing history and development of the National Dance Theatre Company of Jamaica from its original inception as a celebration of political independence through its struggles for self-definition to its worldwide reputation today. All along, Nettleford’s choreography aimed to strengthen the Africanist legacy of Caribbean dance by promoting African culture as the grassroots expression of Afro-Caribbean identity and by incorporating Jamaican folk dance as integral to Caribbean modern dance.
Lye, Len (1901–1980)
Authors: Leskosky Richard J.
Published: September 2018

New Zealand native Len Lye was an experimental innovator in painting, sculpture, documentary film, and animation. After studying indigenous art in Samoa, he emigrated to England in 1926. His early paintings anticipated abstract expressionism and he later became associated with surrealism, showcasing multiple works in London’s 1936 International Surrealist Exhibition. During World War II, Lye made live-action films for the British government and, after migrating to the US in 1944, for the March of Time series. His kinetic (motorized) sculptures figured prominently in international exhibits throughout the 1960s.

Best known for his experimental animation, Lye was more concerned with depicting motion than the moving figures. He pioneered camera-less filmmaking – which he called ‘direct cinema’ – by applying paint to clear film stock (Colour Box, 1935) and scratching images on the emulsion of exposed film (Free Radicals, 1958). He also manipulated the three colour matrices of the Gasparcolor process to create textured film images (Rainbow Dance, 1936) and explored the potential of the rayogram, Man Ray’s camera-less photographic process (Colour Cry, 1952). His imagery often suggests that of the Pacific Island tribes with whom he lived in his youth, and he frequently utilized jazz scores in his films. Disney studio animators studied Lye’s films while working on Fantasia, and he influenced many avant-garde filmmakers including Norman McLaren, Ian Hugo, and Stan Brakhage.
Starevich, Vladislav (1882–1965)
Authors: Leskosky Richard J.
Published: September 2018

Pioneering puppet animator Vladislav Starevich was born to Polish parents in political exile in Moscow. He initially filmed ethnographic and entomological subjects for Moscow’s Khanzhonkov studio. In 1910, while unsuccessfully trying to film two male stag beetles fighting over a female (they stopped moving whenever stage lights came on), he realised he could recreate the desired action by manipulating jointed beetle carcasses under the camera one frame at a time. His subsequent puppet films employed realistic insect and other animal puppets in satiric tales that challenged Romantic ideals. Prekrasnaya Lyukanida [Beautiful Leukanida] (1911), a Helen of Troy spoof with beetles, was the first Russian film sold abroad. Mest kinematograficheskogo opertora [The Cameraman’s Revenge] (1911), a tale of marital infidelity, is one of the very first depictions of characters seeing themselves on the screen at a cinema. Starevich directed live-action features as well, but after immigrating to France in 1919, made only puppet films, including the feature Le Roman de Renard [The Tale of the Fox] (1937), a decade-long project. His puppet films were intrinsically surreal; Fétiche mascotte [The Mascot] (1933), which inaugurated a series starring stuffed toy dog Fétiche, also notably displayed Expressionistic elements in its staging and lighting.
Kazan, Elia (1909–2003)
Authors: Oveisy Fouad
Published: September 2018

Elia Kazan is arguably one of the most influential directors of mid-century mainstream America. Kazan is renowned for his introduction of the Moscow Art Theatre’s method acting into American film and theatre, his semi-documentary style of shooting on location, and a thematic variance that ‘reflects changes and tensions in the national culture’ (Neve 2) of the US. His 19-film oeuvre continues to exert great influence in its pioneering of cinematic realism.

Kazan’s career can be divided into two parts: the socially conscious films he produced before his testimony in front of HUAC (House Un-American Activities Committee), and those produced afterward, which reflect on the traumatic effect this event had on his life. Nevertheless, an unforgiving dedication to contemporary social and political dilemmas resonates throughout his films: Gentleman’s Agreement (1947) deals with anti-Semitism, his masterpiece On the Waterfront (1954) concerns workers’ rights, and his adaptation of John Steinbeck’s East of Eden (1955) focuses on the modern American familial crisis. After the successful staging of plays by Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller, Kazan’s film adaptation of Williams’ play in A Streetcar Named Desire (1951) further cemented his reputation as a dramaturge and actors’ director. Kazan’s long-take style of shooting, corroborated by an acute attention to mise en scène, grants a suspenseful yet clear atmosphere to the rather simple diegeses in all his films.
Lévy-Brühl, Lucien (1857–1939)
Authors: Guédon Cécile
Published: September 2018

Lucien Lévy-Brühl was a French philosopher who taught philosophy at the Sorbonne from 1899 to 1927. Investigating the psychology of ‘primitive’ societies, his book Les Fonctions mentales dans les sociétés primitives (1910) made a distinguished contribution to the study of archaic religion and mythology, shaping the budding discipline of anthropology. Lévy-Brühl’s interest in irrational as well as mystical forms of engagement with the world – thought to be characteristic of ‘primitive’ societies – inflected subsequent research towards a pluralistic and relativistic sociology.
Das, Kamala (1934–2009)
Authors: Mokkil Navaneetha
Published: September 2018

Kamala Das, one of the best-known bilingual writers from India in the twentieth century, consistently pushed the boundaries of what could be represented in literature through her poetry in English, autobiographical writings and novellas in English and Malayalam, and a large body of short stories in Malayalam. Through the conscious deployment of the confessional voice in her poetry and life writings and the intricate entanglement of the public and the private in her fictional worlds, Das carved a space for the explorations of the affective realm and physicality in modern Indian literature.

Kamala Das’s exposure to books and literary production came at an early age through her mother, Nalappat Balamaniyamma, a prolific poet, and her maternal uncle, Nalappat Narayana Menon, a prominent writer and translator.
Di Yunge
Authors: Zaritt Saul Noam
Published: September 2018

Di yunge is a group of American Symbolist Yiddish writers and critics that achieved prominence during the first two decades of the twentieth century and remained active through the mid-century. The name of the group is Yiddish for ‘the young ones’, referencing not only the youth of its founding members but also the sense of newness and dramatic change that they intended to bring to Yiddish literature of the period. The group was made up largely of Eastern European immigrants to the United States who had experienced the failed Russian Revolution of 1905 and the pogroms that followed in its wake. These young writers arrived in America disillusioned with socialist and nationalist politics and instead sought out new forms of cultural expression that focused on artistic achievement in Yiddish rather than any political purpose. Taking European and Russian forms of Symbolism as models, Di yunge is the first movement in Yiddish literature to emphasize the importance of the aesthetic, focusing on the poetic potential of the everyday and on the inner life of the individual writer. Di yunge was comprised of several of the most important Yiddish writers of the twentieth century, including the poets Mani Leib, H. Leivick, Zishe Landau, I.J. Schwartz, Yoysef Rolnik, and Moyshe-Leyb Halpern and the prose writers David Ignatoff, Joseph Opatoshu, Isaac Raboy, and Lamed Shapiro. Members of Di yunge were among the first to infuse Yiddish literature with the forms and themes of international modernism.
Marriott, Anne (1913–1997)
Authors: Maguire Shannon
Published: September 2018

Joyce Anne Marriott was a Canadian modernist poet. Born and raised in Victoria, British Columbia, Marriott published seven collections of poetry and hundreds of poems in periodicals, as well as producing scripts for the National Film Board of Canada and CBC Radio. She is best known for The Wind Our Enemy (1939), a long poem written after spending several weeks with family in Saskatchewan at the height of the Great Depression. The poem combines an imagist aesthetic with social realist content, instantiating a genre that her contemporary Dorothy Livesay would later call the ‘Canadian documentary poem’. The Wind Our Enemy garnered attention by E.K. Brown in ‘The Development of Poetry in Canada 1880–1940’, published in Poetry Magazine.
Paniker, K. Ayyappa (1930–2006)
Authors: Satchidanandan K.
Published: September 2018

K. Ayyappa Paniker—poet, translator, critic, editor, and academic—was a pioneering practitioner and interpreter of the modernist impulse in Malayalam literature. His poetry in Malayalam has been collected in five chronologically organized volumes, and his collected essays run into three volumes. Besides these, he published several collections of translations of poetry and fiction, conversations, monographs in English, and works edited in English and Malayalam. In 1967, Paniker founded Keralakavita, a path-breaking journal exclusively devoted to poetry and poetics, and introduced the new Malayalam poetry to a wider readership by translating poems and editing anthologies.
Al Said, Shakir Hassan (1925–2004)
Authors: Mejcher-Atassi Sonja
Published: September 2018

Al Said was a prolific and influential artist. He was a founding member of the Baghdad Group for Modern Art (Jama’at Baghdad lil-fann al-hadith) in 1951, together with Jewad Selim and Jabra Ibrahim Jabra; and later, in 1971, of the One Dimension Group (al-Bu’d al-wahid). He wrote art manifestos for both groups in addition to his contemplative manifesto (al-bayan al-ta’ammuli), published in the cultural supplement of the Iraqi daily al-Jumhuriyya in 1966. The manifesto he wrote for the Baghdad Group for Modern Art was the first art manifesto of its kind in Iraq. It was read out at the group’s inaugural exhibition at the Museum of Ancient Costumes in Baghdad—an event that is considered by some the true birth of Iraqi modern art. The manifesto gives voice to the group’s commitment to both heritage and modernity. Its emphasis on local character drew inspiration from Islamic art, namely al-Wasiti’s thirteenth-century miniature paintings, but also from popular culture, like carpet production, and from the ancient civilizations of Mesopotamia. This meant distancing itself from the previous course of modern art in the Arab world, which was perceived as following European models, and setting out to ground modern art more firmly in a local context. It marked a reorientation in art that coincided with radical political change and the growth of Arab nationalism.
Nolan, Sidney (1917–1992)
Authors: Philp Angela
Published: September 2018

Sidney Nolan is a renowned Australian artist, especially for his iconic rendering of the bushranger and anti-hero Ned Kelly. Primarily known as a painter, he worked prolifically across a wide range of media, from drawing and printmaking to murals, stage design, and collage, completing thousands of works. Born in Melbourne, Nolan studied at the National Gallery School from 1934 to 1936, though he was more interested in connecting with other artists than the conservative teaching, and preferred reading in the library to sitting in class. Interested in abstraction and modern art, he sought to challenge the vision of Australia’s popular Heidelberg School of painting.
Roszak, Theodore (1907–1981)
Authors: Kuykendall Lara
Published: September 2018

Theodore Roszak was a visual artist of the machine age. Born in Poland but raised in Chicago, Roszak trained at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and began his career in drawing, printmaking, and painting. In the 1930s his artistic practice grew to encompass photography and sculpture, and he is primarily remembered for his pioneering work with sheet metal and welded steel.
Schiaparelli, Elsa (1890–1973)
Authors: Lehnert Gertrud
Published: September 2018

Elsa Luisa Maria Schiaparelli was an avant-garde fashion designer extremely influential in the 1930s. Born in Rome into a well-to-do family, an early mésalliance with William de Wendt de Kerlo forced her to live in poverty in London and New York until she moved to Paris where she met avant-garde artists and—without ever having learned to sew—began her career in fashion. In contrast to Coco Chanel’s modernist simplicity, Schiaparelli indulged in aesthetic exaggerations and a profusion of fantastic decorations such as luxurious embroideries (realized by François Lesage, 1929–2011), often inspired by surrealist art.
Zaria Art Society, The
Authors: Ezeluomba Ndubuisi
Published: September 2018

Formed in 1958 by a group of undergraduate students in the Fine Art Department of the Nigerian College of Arts, Science and Technology (later renamed Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria), the Zaria Art Society was an ideological group that rejected the modes of teaching and producing art at the institution. Sometimes referred to as the ‘Zaria Rebels’, the group’s impetus was hinged around the euphoria of pre- and post-Independence nationalism of the time, but also the need to create new art. The idea that underpinned the formation of the Zaria Art Society was predicated on Uche Okeke’s enunciation of natural synthesis. As a concept, natural synthesis advocated the fusion of indigenous visual arts with useful Western ones. This was central to the Zaria Art Society’s ideology. These artists created works that reflected the diverse cultures of the Nigerian state.

Members of the Zaria Art Society were concerned with the increasing influence of foreign cultural values and traditions on art in Nigeria, and the consequent erasure or denial of local artistic traditions and ideas. Thus, the concept of ‘natural synthesis’ was conceived and advocated by the group’s founder, Uche Okeke. Members of the group, including Bruce Onobrakpeya, Demas Nwoko, Yusuf Grillo, Simon Okeke, Jimoh Akolo, Oseloka Osadebe, and Emmanuel Odita, responded to the ideas set forth by creating works that reflected the diverse cultures of the Nigerian state.
Eight, The
Authors: Moseman Eleanor , Sawicki Nicholas
Published: September 2018

Known in Czech as Osma and in German as Die Acht, the Eight was an artistic association at the forefront of the modern movement in Prague in the early twentieth century. It made a pivotal contribution to the development of post-impressionism, expressionism, and cubism in the Czech lands of the Habsburg Empire (Bohemia and Moravia), and first garnered attention through its exhibitions of 1907 and 1908. Bilingual in composition, the group included the artists Vincenc Beneš, Friedrich Feigl, Emil Filla, Max Horb, Otakar Kubín, Bohumil Kubišta, Willi Nowak, Emil Artur Pittermann-Longen, Antonín Procházka, and Linka Procházková.
Richter, Hans (1888–1976)
Authors: Ioniță Maria
Published: September 2018

Hans Richter was a German painter, graphic artist, and experimental filmmaker associated with a number of the European avant-garde movements, most notably Dadaism. After 1940 he moved to the United States where he continued to paint and make films.

Richter’s earliest artistic contacts were with the Blaue Reiter group and Cubism. In 1916 after being wounded and discharged from the army, he joined the Dada movement where he met Hans Arp, Marcel Janco, and, most notably, Viking Eggeling. Eggeling’s influence was crucial, since he introduced Richter to ‘orchestrations’: formal experiments similar to the musical counterpoint that sought to establish relations between opposites from which the artistic object eventually emerged.
Nono, Luigi (1924–90)
Authors: Nielinger-Vakil Carola
Published: September 2018

Luigi Nono stands out as one of the most uncompromising modernist composers of the Italian avant-garde. Together with Karlheinz Stockhausen and Pierre Boulez, Nono was one of the leading representatives of integral serialism in Europe after 1945. Nono is further known for his political music theater, his innovative spatial use of electronic music and live-electronics, avant-garde and microtonal instrumental writing, and an exceptionally lyric and communicative application of complex compositional procedures. Luigi Nono was born into a wealthy Venetian family just after Mussolini came to power. Toward the end of World War II, Nono began to study composition with G Fr Malipiero at the Venice conservatoire (1943–5) while completing a law degree at Padova University (1942–7). At the conservatoire, Bruno Maderna’s influential composition tutorials sparked a life-long interest in Renaissance polyphony and the works of the Second Viennese School. Equally fundamental was Hermann Scherchen’s conducting course (Venice, 1948). Luigi Dallapiccola’s lyric serialism was another formative influence at this time. Nono’s first major work, the Variazioni canoniche sulla serie dell’op.41 di Arnold Schönberg, was premiered under Scherchen at the Darmstadt New Music Courses in 1950. Together with Karlheinz Stockhausen and Pierre Boulez, Nono subsequently established himself as one of the leading composers of integral serialism.
Souster, Raymond (1921–2012)
Authors: Scott Conrad
Published: September 2018

Raymond Holmes Souster has been described as a poet of place who invests Toronto, the city of his life-long residence, deeply into his writing. Having worked for some forty-five years at the downtown Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce, Souster’s immersion in a particular place certainly informed his poetic output; however, Souster the poet also ponders the human condition. On the one hand, he writes from a basis of experience: the destruction of war and the changes imposed by the rise of the modern era. On the other, his work seeks out and highlights that which is still precious despite the weight of the world he feels. Moreover, he clearly values poetry as a salve to the cacophonous imposition of modernity, and continually encourages poetic development: in addition to his substantial body of work, he has supported Canadian poetry by editing several anthologies, and as a creator of Direction (editor 1943–6); a founder of Contact (editor 1952–4); an editor of Combustion (1957–60); and a founding member of the League of Canadian Poets (president 1967–71).
Vorticism
Authors: Von Cannon Michael
Published: September 2018

In 1914, Wyndham Lewis and Ezra Pound began the British avant-garde literary and visual arts movement known as Vorticism. In addition to Lewis and Pound, its members included writers and artists such as Richard Aldington, Lawrence Atkinson, William Roberts, Helen Saunders, Dorothy Shakespear, and Edward Wasworth. David Bomberg, Jacob Epstein, and Henri Gaudier-Brzeska were also associated with the group. Responding to Impressionism, Cubism, and Futurism, the passéism of the British national character, and the rise of World War I, Vorticists produced artwork that emphasized geometric shape, hardness, motion, and power. Pound, who coined the term "vorticism," referred to the "vortex" as "the point of maximum energy." By depicting abstract motion and acceleration, they saw themselves as reacting specifically to French Cubism’s reliance on the material world and the speed-fetishism of F.T. Marinetti and the Italian Futurists. Marinetti’s understanding of movement relied on actual machines—cars, airplanes, etc.—whereas other Futurists, such as Umberto Boccioni, sought to explore the interior and exterior sensation of speed by combining abstract and concrete detail. The Vorticist competition with the Futurists was also part of their nationalistic avant-garde campaign. In contrast to what they saw as a reactionary and outdated British literature, Vorticists stressed individuality, attentiveness, and aggression in order to champion a new, modern British nation. Lewis introduced many of these ideas in the short-lived but highly influential magazine, Blast. The Vorticist movement itself disbanded in the early years of World War I.
Jones, David (1895–1974)
Authors: Gossedge Rob
Published: September 2018

David Jones, the poet, painter and engraver, was born in Brockley, Kent, in 1895. He was the youngest son of James Jones, a printer’s overseer from North Wales, and Alice Bradshaw, a former governess and talented amateur artist of Anglo-Italian descent. Although his family was English-speaking and Low Church in religious practice, from an early age Jones was drawn to the culture of his father’s Welsh ancestors, and to the rituals of the Catholic Church (he was to convert in 1921). Both influences would prove crucial to Jones’s maturity as both artist and writer.

In January 1915, after several years training as an artist at Camberwell School of Arts and Crafts, Jones enlisted in the ‘London Welsh’ battalion of the Royal Welch Fusiliers, and served as a private until the end of the First World War. He was wounded in the leg during the assault on Mametz Wood, as part of the 1916 Somme Offensive. These experiences would serve as the narrative basis of his first major literary work, In Parenthesis (1937). Though that title was meant to convey his understanding of the war as a kind of parenthesized experience for him and his fellow amateur soldiers, he remained, artistically, unable to step outside of its brackets, and each of his major subsequent works would be shaped by his time in the trenches.
Al-‘Ujaylī, ‘Abd al Salām عبد السلام العجيلي(1918/1919–2006)
Authors: Berg Lisa
Published: September 2018

‘Abd al Salām Al-‘Ujaylī was one of the most productive and versatile literary figures in twentieth-century Syria. His experiences both as a medical doctor and a politician fed into his fictional output, which is most often characterized as realist. Al-‘Ujaylī is considered one of the earliest writers of fiction in Syria. Among his over forty publications are novels, poetry collections, theater plays, travelogues, essays, and auto-biographies. His preferred genre, however, remained the short story.
Al-Bustani, Butrus بطرس البستاني (1819–83)
Authors: Luce Mark D.
Published: September 2018

Butrus Al-Bustani is known as the "father of the Arabic Renaissance" and was a leading pioneer of the Al-Nahda (النهضه) or cultural awakening. Al-Bustani sought to promote Arabic as a national language, long neglected by the Ottoman Turks, and to make it a suitable vehicle for communicating, implementing educational reform, and imparting new scientific and technical knowledge from Europe and the West. He also helped to found the Syrian Scientific Society ( الجعمية العلمية السورية Al-Ja’miyya al-’ilmiyya al-suriyya).

Al-Bustani participated in the American Protestant Mission’s Bible translation project. In 1870, he completed his large Arabic dictionary The Ocean of Oceans ( محيط المحيط Muhit al-Muhit) and the first volume of his encyclopedia, the Dictionary of Knowledge (دائرة المعارف Dairat al-ma’arif) appeared in 1876. He died while engaged with this massive project. He was able to produce only six volumes. His son Salim carried on his father’s work and completed another two volumes. This encyclopedia was never completed but eleven volumes were published.
Joyce, James (1882–1941)
Authors: Ebury Katherine
Published: September 2018

James Joyce (1882–1941) was an Irish modernist author famous for his experimentalism and for writing about Dublin. All of his major works – from the short stories of Dubliners (1914), through the ironic bildungsroman A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) and the encyclopaedic Ulysses (1922), to the linguistic play of Finnegans Wake (1939) – are set in and around Dublin, filled with real people and incidents from Joyce’s life in that city. This does not mean that Joyce’s relationship with Dublin is uncomplicated – he lived in self-imposed exile in Europe for most of his life and early in his career identified the city as a ‘centre of paralysis’. Further, although Joyce’s books were not formally banned in Ireland, his work was widely disapproved of and neglected. The Bloomsday celebration, which re-enacts events from Ulysses, is a fairly recent phenomenon, pioneered in 1954, and only becoming a major event decades later. Joyce explained his use of Dublin to his friend as, crucially, a question of technique, by saying that ‘If I can get to the heart of Dublin I can get to the heart of all the cities of the world’.
Anderson, Patrick (1915–79)
Authors: Hall Molly
Published: September 2018

Canadian poet and editor Patrick Anderson was born on August 4, 1915 in Surrey, England. Though he was English by birth, and would later return to his homeland, he is often considered a Canadian poet, having produced most of his work there after immigrating in 1940. He came to Canada in 1942 to teach at a private school after attending Oxford and Columbia Universities. In this same year Anderson famously founded the Montreal literary magazine Preview with fellow poet F.R. Scott. Poets A.M. Klein and P.K. Page also ended up on the Preview’s editorial board. The work they published closely aligned with that of the English poets of the 1930s, for which they were famously criticized as having a colonial attitude, rather than attending to a native Canadian identity. John Sutherland’s First Statement, which led the attack, looked to nativist American models rather than Preview’s British paradigm. In 1945 Preview merged with this rival publication, bringing that localism into the fold, and becoming the much respected Northern Review. The Northern Review published regularly until 1956, releasing several of Anderson’s books as well. During his Canadian years, he was also for a time a professor at McGill University.
Appalachian Spring
Authors: Franko Mark
Published: September 2018

Appalachian Spring was choreographer Martha Graham’s final piece of Americana in her series of choreography that began with the solo Frontier in 1935 (music by Louis Horst), and continued on with American Document in 1938 (music by Ray Green). Aaron Copland composed the original score for Appalachian Spring, Isamu Noguchi designed the set and properties, and Edythe Gilfond designed the costumes. The Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge Foundation sponsored Copland’s score and the première of Appalachian Spring on October 30, 1944 at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. The original cast included Graham as the Bride, Erick Hawkins as the Husbandman, Merce Cunningham as the Revivalist, and May O’Donnell as the Pioneer Woman. The title was taken from Hart Crane’s poem The Bridge (Murphy 2007: 158). Appalachian Spring was acclaimed in 1944, at the height of World War II, as a patriotic affirmation of traditional American values in opposition to Nazi fascism. The regional Americanism theme of the 1930s prevalent in visual art in the 1940s was, as Martin Graebner has pointed out, "easily transmuted into the theme of rural patriotism" (1991: 7). Appalachian Spring has survived in the repertoire of the Martha Graham Dance Company to the present day. Shorn of the World War II context in which it premièred, Appalachian Spring is now considered a lyrical and psychological study.
Art Nouveau
Authors: Jordan Sharon
Published: September 2018

From the 1880s until the mid-1910s, Art Nouveau was the dominant style in art, architecture, and design in Europe, with innovative and thoroughly modern production in graphics, furniture, and applied arts. Though it incorporated elements from a range of diverse sources, the most characteristic forms of Art Nouveau were those inspired by nature, but nature that had been adapted, stylized, and aestheticized to reflect the cultural climate of the turn of the century. The origins of Art Nouveau developed out of the ideas of several leading figures during the mid-nineteenth century in their efforts to reconcile art with the increasingly industrialized methods of production dominating in the applied arts. In Britain, William Morris advocated for a unity among art, design, and applied arts that valued handcraftsmanship in well-made objects made available to the middle classes. The Arts & Crafts movement sought to counter the array of poorly designed consumer goods seen at the Great Exhibition in London in 1851, in which individual objects were frequently overwhelmed by ornamentation.
Automatism
Authors: Donkin Hazel
Published: September 2018

Both Dada and Surrealist writers and artists experimented with "automatic" creative production. Dadaists including Francis Picabia, Tristan Tzara, Hans Arp, and Kurt Schwitters wrote "automatic" poems from 1918, so called because they were transcribed without delay, serious consideration, or revision. Dada visual artists, including Arp, Sophie Tauber, and Marcel Duchamp also relinquished creative control of their works by employing chance. At the same time a group of writers in France around André Breton experimented with automatic writing as a new method of exploring the unconscious. In 1919 Breton and Philippe Soupault published Les Champs magnétiques, the result of their first experiments with automatic writing that tried to tap new poetic imagery through uncontrolled outbursts of imagination. In the period 1922–4 dream accounts were added to automatism. In the First Manifesto of Surrealism (1924) the movement is defined by Breton as "pure psychic automatism by which it is intended to express, either verbally or in writing, the true function of thought." Surrealist visual artists also explored automatism. Surrealist automatism was influential in the development of modernist visual art. Robert Matta’s (1911–2002) concerns with psychological states in the late 1930s set a precedent for American abstraction. CoBrA (1948–51), an avant-garde collective established in Europe, favored automatic techniques and influenced developments in European abstraction.
Bahr, Hermann (1863–1934)
Authors: Ifkovits Kurt
Published: September 2018

Hermann Barr was an Austrian author, essayist, critic, editor, dramaturg, and director. His wide-ranging career spanned most of the fin de siècle’s major literary trends, such as naturalism, décadence, late Heimatkunst, and expressionism. Thanks to his strategic cultural alliances, openness to all things innovative, and multifaceted interests, he became one of the most prominent figures of Viennese modernism.

Following stays in Paris (1888–9) and Berlin as a collaborator at the Freie Bühne theater club, Bahr returned to Vienna with a sense of purpose. He began championing aesthetic modernism and associating with protagonists from the Viennese literary scene (Leopold von Andrian, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Arthur Schnitzler). As the self-proclaimed leader of the Young Vienna literary circle, Bahr became a tireless advocate and interpreter of innovative aesthetic movements, trends, and styles.

Bahr’s theater work included dramaturgy and directing with Max Reinhardt in Berlin (1906–7) and a brief term as lead dramaturg of the Burgtheater (1918). His literary work is wide in scope, encompassing many dramas, novels, and an autobiography. From 1894 to 1899 he was the co-founder, art editor, and co-editor-in-chief of the Viennese weekly journal Die Zeit. His significance for contemporary readers lies less in his literary oeuvre than in his importance as a critic, crusader, practitioner, and networker.
Balla, Giacomo (1871–1958)
Authors: van den Bergh Carmen
Published: September 2018

Giacomo Balla was an Italian painter and an important exponent of Futurism. He began his career as a self-taught artist; he inherited a passion for photography from his father, an industrial chemist as well as an amateur photographer. During his stays in Turin, Rome, and Paris, Balla gained experience at various academies and inspired many young people eager for modernity, including Boccioni and Severini.
Del Moral, Enrique (1906--1987)
Authors: Rodríguez Jimena Hogrebe
Published: September 2018

Born in Irapuato, Guanajuato, Mexican architect Enrique del Moral Domínguez (1906–1987) moved to Mexico City as a child. There, he studied architecture (1923–1928) in the National School of Beaux Arts with Juan O’Gorman and José Villagrán García, his teacher and mentor. Educated in the post-revolution years, he was interested in the construction of an architecture corresponding to Mexican identity–which had been in a continuous struggle between the new and the old–and building for the needs of the people.
Hoffmann, Josef Franz Maria (1870–1956)
Authors: Johnson Michael
Published: September 2018

Josef Hoffmann was an Austrian architect and designer who proved instrumental in formulating the aesthetics and theory of modernist design. Among the most progressive architects in turn-of-the-century Austria, he was a founder of the Vienna Secession and the Wiene Werkstätte. His early work was aligned with Jugendstil, the German and Austrian manifestation of Art Nouveau, but graduated towards an abstract, geometric simplicity that anticipated twentieth-century Modernism. Committed to the concept of the Gesamtkunstwerk (total work of art), Hoffmann applied his talents to architecture, interior design, furniture and metalwork. His greatest achievement is the Palais Stoclet in Brussels, a true Gesamtkunstwerk in which all elements are synthesized into symphonic unity.

Born in Pirnitz, Moravia (now part of the Czech Republic), Hoffmann studied at the Higher State Crafts School in Brno and at Vienna’s Academy of Fine Arts. He worked in the office of proto-modernist architect Otto Wagner, where he met future collaborator Joseph Maria Olbrich. He won the Prix de Rome in 1895, which gave him the opportunity to study classical architecture, and Mycenaean influences proliferated in his early work. Hoffmann was among the group of artists, architects and designers who seceded from the Association of Austrian Artists in 1897, objecting to what they saw as the inherent conservatism of established academies.
Isokon (1931–1939)
Authors: Johnson Michael
Published: September 2018

Isokon was a British furniture and architectural design company founded in London in 1931. Led by architect Wells Coates and plywood manufacturer Jack Pritchard, Isokon was among the first systematic attempts to introduce modernist design to Britain. The founders of Isokon were committed to the principles of European Modernism and aimed to create standardized housing and furniture based on modern materials and production processes. In interwar Britain, these designs represented radical new solutions for modern living.

Jack Pritchard joined the Venesta Plywood Company in 1925. At this time plywood was regarded as a cheap substitute for solid wood, but Pritchard was intrigued by its intrinsic properties of lightness, fluidity and strength, and was keen to promote it as a material for modern design. In 1929 he encountered the work of Canadian-born designer Wells Coates, who had recently created innovative plywood factory interiors and shop-fittings for Cresta, a silk manufacturer. Pritchard and Coates founded the firm of Wells Coates and Partners in 1930 to facilitate collaboration. Tensions between the two prompted reorganization, however, and the firm of Isokon Limited was founded on 31 December 1931. The name was derived from the term Isometric Unit Construction, owing to Coates’s preference for isometric drawing.
Koolhaas, Rem (1944--)
Authors: Schrijver Lara
Published: September 2018

The Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas (born in Rotterdam) has always had a keen eye for the still vibrant legacy of Modernism, calling attention to the ‘terrifying beauty of the twentieth century’. Before beginning his studies in architecture, Koolhaas went to film school and worked as a journalist. In 1968, aged nearly twenty-four, he went to study at the Architectural Association (AA) in London and soon found himself exploring the demanding but powerful language of modernity, often in opposition to the dominant culture of the ‘rice-cooking hippies’ at the AA. Since his final project ‘Exodus, or the voluntary prisoners of architecture’ (1972), his work has continued to explore both the underbelly of modernity and its heroic icons, accepting modernity as part and parcel of contemporary culture. Koolhaas’s interest in the demanding architecture of Modernism focuses not only on its formal language and style, but also on the underlying social collective it proposed. His work offered a new perspective, celebrating the energy and rigour of Modernism while also revealing its underlying characteristics. His recuperation of modernity ranged from the sensuousness of Mies van der Rohe (with materials such as velvet, brass and marble) to the brute force of Russian Constructivism (social machinery). Moreover, he included the perhaps less foreseen consequences in his studies: the endless infrastructures, neutral facades, generic spaces.
MARS Group (1933--1957)
Authors: Johnson Michael
Published: September 2018

The Modern Architectural Research Group (MARS) was a coalition of architects, academics and critics united by the aim to promote modernist architecture in Britain. Founded in 1933 as a British branch of the Congrès internationaux d'architecture moderne (CIAM), the group was an attempt to bring together practitioners and polemicists committed to the ideals of European Modernism, who had previously been isolated in the conservative design establishment of 1930s Britain. Most of the participants were British, but many were émigrés fleeing oppression in Nazi Germany. The acronym MARS was chosen to express the group’s futuristic nature.
Larsen, Nella (1891–1964)
Authors: Girling Anna
Published: September 2018

Nella Larsen was an American novelist active in the 1920s and one of the central figures of ‘Manhattan modernism.’ She is best known for two short novels, Quicksand (1928) and Passing (1929). While she is now considered a key American modernist writer, both Larsen and her work were unheard of for much of the mid-twentieth-century, only returning to prominence from the 1980s. The ‘rediscovered’ Larsen was initially claimed predominantly by black and feminist schools of criticism; however, Larsen’s passage into the canon has since involved the work of literary critics from almost every field.
Tatlin, Vladimir (1885–1953)
Authors: Johnson Michael
Published: September 2018

The Russian artist and architect Vladimir Tatlin was one of the central figures in the Russian avant-garde in the years surrounding the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. The progenitor and major theorist of Russian Constructivism, he was instrumental in developing the machine aesthetic that became a central component of modernist architecture and design. He is best known for his unrealized, but visionary design for a giant tower, the Monument to the Third International, which exemplified constructivist theory and practice.
Tokoudagba, Cyprien (1939--2012)
Authors: Biton Marlène
Published: September 2018

Cyprien Tokoudagba was born in 1939 in Abomey, former royal capital of Dahomey, nowadays Benin. As an artist appreciated locally as the restorer of the low-reliefs of the royal buildings of the historical site of Abomey, he is also well known internationally for his many exhibitions in France, Germany, United States, England, Australia, etc. While conserving certain traditional aspects of the particular values of the fon culture, as an artist he nevertheless opened them up to potential universal and modern dimensions. In so doing he made himself a personal path situated between the artistic traditions of his culture and the universe of contemporary art; thus enabling fon art to evolve while protecting its meanings and fundamental structure. Through his work over the decades and the numerous creations he completed before his death in 2012, Tokoudagba has opened the way for the young artists of Benin by setting up a space from which it is possible to work while retaining their specificity and not becoming lost in undifferentiated aesthetics.
Coughlin, Charles E. (October 25, 1891–October 27, 1979)
Authors: Jurss Jacob
Published: September 2018

Father Charles Coughlin was an influential American Catholic priest who became famous for his controversial but extremely popular radio program, which aired from October 1926 to September 1940. Coughlin’s program was mainly devoted to political and economic issues such as the plight of the American worker, the need for nativist nationalism, and the growing threat of Jewish bankers and communism. He supported Franklin D. Roosevelt during the 1932 presidential election but later turned against Roosevelt administration policies enacted during the Great Depression, which he felt were too generous to big capitalists. In 1934, Coughlin promoted the creation of the National Union for Social Justice (NUSJ), which he based on Catholic social justice principles intended to protect the rights of workers. After Kristallnacht in 1938, some major radio stations began to cancel Coughlin’s programs due to his increasing sympathy for Nazism and anti-Semitism. With the beginning of WWII in 1939, new licensing restrictions imposed by the Roosevelt administration and changes within the Catholic Church pushed Coughlin off the air. He was increasingly marginalized following the bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941.
Fleiβer, Marieluise (1901–1974)
Authors: Rinne Christine
Published: September 2018

Marieluise Fleiβer is best known for her critical dramas, though she also wrote short stories and an autobiographical novel. Fleiβer is associated with the genre of the Volksstück, called folk plays or milieu plays, which are written in dialect and intended for popular audiences. Her work and life were significantly impacted by her tumultuous relationship with Bertolt Brecht.