bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Indigenous Modernisms
Authors: McLean Ian
Published: September 2018

Indigenous modernism is not to be confused with earlier ideas of modern Indigenous art, though they do to some extent pre-empt it. In the mid-20th century, some Indigenous artists who made or responded to Western art forms were referred to as modern. For example, in 1952 the Namatjira School of landscape painting in Central Australia was dubbed modern Aboriginal art, while Ulli Bieir made similar claims about African artists in the late 1950s and 60s. In the 1960s and 70s, emerging interest in non-traditional and tourist Indigenous art resulted in scholars and auction houses applying the terms modern and contemporary to distinguish such art from traditional works. However, the concept of Indigenous modernism applies to Indigenous art in general, whether considered traditional or not. For example, bark paintings from Arnhem Land originally valued and collected as primitive art have recently been interpreted as forms of Indigenous modernism. The term Indigenous modernism, then, refers not to art that emulates Western modernisms, but to art that engages with experiences of modernity from an Indigenous perspective—a notion with profound consequences for how modernism is generally conceived and theorized. In particular, it challenges stylistic and classical accounts of modernism, and the center/periphery model of modernism. These challenges, arising from theories of alternative and multiple modernities more generally, have created new interests in modernism, but have yet to be theoretically worked through.
Dos Passos, John (1896–1970)
Authors: Hanna Julian
Published: September 2018

John Dos Passos was an American writer best known for his ‘contemporary chronicles’ of American life. His early novels, including Manhattan Transfer (1925) and the U.S.A. trilogy — The 42nd Parallel (1930), Nineteen Nineteen (1932), and The Big Money (1936) — are considered classics of American Modernism, offering a complex and multifaceted portrayal of American society from the turn of the century to the Great Depression. The depiction of urban experience in these novels reflects the cinematic montage of Dziga Vertov, the stream-of-consciousness style of James Joyce, and the dynamism and simultaneity of Italian Futurism, among other influences.

In addition to writing fiction, Dos Passos was a dramatist, poet, historian, journalist, travel writer, painter, and translator. His first two novels, One Man’s Initiation: 1917 (1920) and Three Soldiers (1921), are harrowing and highly critical accounts based on his experience as an ambulance driver in the First World War. He published a collection of free verse, A Pushcart at the Curb (1922), as well as translations of the modernist poetry of Blaise Cendrars. In the late 1920s he worked briefly as a director, playwright, and set designer at the Vsevolod Meyerhold-inspired New Playwrights’ Theater in Greenwich Village, where his associates included communist writers like Mike Gold and John Howard Lawson.
Japonisme
Authors: Rottau Nadine
Published: September 2018

The term Japonisme refers to the reception of Japanese art products and stylistic forms in Europe and the United States beginning in the second half of the 19th century and continuing until the early 20th century. Japonisme involves the collecting of Japanese products by Western artists and art lovers as well as the adaptation of East Asian motifs and forms for the creation of pictures and objects.

Paris was the center of early Japonisme; the first collectors were art critics such as Ernest Chesneau or Philippe Burty. The painters Edouard Manet and James Abbott McNeill Whistler were early enthusiasts of Japanese arts and crafts. The opening up of new possibilities for representation, mediated by Japanese color woodcuts from artists such as Utagawa (Andō) Hiroshige, had a profound effect on artistic schools ranging from Impressionism to Expressionism. Not only the means of Japanese design, but also the egality of the represented subjects, the equal treatment of nature, animals and human beings, of high art and handicraft, helped Western artists to overcome their academic traditions. Japonisme as an artistic and visual movement undertook a trans-cultural appropriation of the Japanese stylistic language, which contributed to the breakthrough of modern art in the West.
Motherwell, Robert (1915–1991)
Authors: Gilbert Gregory
Published: September 2018

Robert Motherwell was one of the central founding members of the Abstract Expressionist movement in the United States during the 1940s and 1950s and served as its major theoretical spokesman throughout his career. The youngest figure in the New York School (a synonymous term he coined for Abstract Expressionism), Motherwell was one of the few who received a formal university education, which is reflected in his extensive series of published critical writings and his prolific activities as a book editor, lecturer and art teacher. Trained in philosophy and art history, Motherwell’s diverse intellectual interests also included modernist literature, psychoanalytic theory and radical politics, which deeply informed the symbolic content of his art. Motherwell is notable for aligning the artistic traditions of School of Paris modernism with the progressive formal and thematic concerns associated with the post-war American avant-garde. In contrast to other Abstract Expressionists like Jackson Pollock or Mark Rothko, who forged signature painting styles, Motherwell actively experimented with a variety of abstract modes and media, but is most renowned for his innovative production of collages and celebrated series of paintings the ‘‘Elegies to the Spanish Republic’’.
Picabia, Francis (1879–1953)
Authors: Chadwick Stephanie
Published: September 2018

A cavalier individualist, Francis Picabia became an internationally renowned avant-garde artist, spearheading Paris and New York Dada with his friend Marcel Duchamp and also contributing to Dada in Zurich and Barcelona. Picabia was a car enthusiast who embraced modernity, viewing the machine as a form expressive of the modern spirit from which he drew a new and revolutionary artistic idiom. Picabia also drew upon the tenets of the Puteaux Group and, upon arriving in New York to exhibit at the Armory Show in 1913, was lauded as a leading Cubist. He worked for a time in Orphic Cubism, a blend of Cubist, Futurist, and Fauvist themes and techniques to which he added ‘‘abstracted’’ industrial and biomorphic forms. Although he maintained an interest in the figure, Picabia is known primarily for his early dialogue with abstraction and his development of a quasi-machine aesthetic. He looked to industrial diagrams for artistic inspiration and, upon returning to New York in 1915, during a period of involvement with photographer and modern arts patron Alfred Stieglitz’s famous 291 Gallery and journal, produced the famous Mechanomorph series. Depicting Stieglitz and his entourage as bizarre, seemingly dysfunctional, industrial forms, Picabia’s Mechanomorphs shaped the visual vocabulary of New York, and later Paris, Dada. Picabia’s ironic stance in relation to art and culture has prompted scholars to interpret his conflation of human and machine parts as also playful punning of morality, sexuality, and blind faith in technology.
Pointillism
Authors: Chadwick Stephanie
Published: September 2018

Pointillism is a technique developed by Neo-Impressionist painter Georges Seurat (1859–1891) whereby paint is meticulously applied in small daubs or dots. Interested in color and optical theories, the Neo-Impressionists (Seurat, Paul Signac, Camille Pissaro, and other artists) applied Pointillist daubs (rather than more sweeping Impressionist brushstrokes) in conjunction with a closely related process known as Divisionism. With the goal of creating well-crafted harmonies of contrasts, the points of paint were applied, in analogous and complementary clusters, over gradated fields of local colors (such as green for grass) to form mutually enhancing fields of complementary hues. Using these techniques, unmixed (or divided) points of pigment were applied with the idea that the colors would blend in the eyes and minds of the viewer. Although this optical blending does not fully occur, these techniques produce a sense of vibrancy as the viewer’s eyes attempt to synthesize the multi-colored points. Although Pointillist and Divisionist techniques were intended to produce undulating color and light effects, the Neo-Impressionists’ concern for scientific principles, ordered composition, and artistic craftsmanship tended to result in more rigidly structured paintings than those of the Impressionists.
Semana da Arte Moderna de 1922 [Modern Art Week, São Paulo 1922]
Authors: Ann Wells Sarah
Published: September 2018

Arguably the single most influential event of the historical avant-gardes in Latin America, Brazil’s Modern Art Week (São Paulo, 1922) put forth a vision for new art that would prove influential throughout the 20th century. A three-day event held at São Paulo’s Municipal Theater, the Modern Art Week provided a point of connection for different artists and also displayed a new phenomenon to Brazil’s bourgeois public: the heady mix of ‘‘isms’’ which were circulating in cosmopolitan European circles, including Expressionism, Surrealism, and others. Up until then, this vision had only been articulated in Brazil in piecemeal fashion. The Modern Art Week incorporated dance, music, theater, literature, visual arts, and architecture, and featured artists and writers who would become some of the most influential in the boom of Brazilian modernism that was to follow, among them Mário de Andrade, Oswald de Andrade, Manuel Bandeira, Anita Malfatti, and Tarsila do Amaral. Influenced by Brazil’s rapid industrialization and modernization, the event featured a heterogeneous group that, together, displayed the ambivalent modernization process that characterizes Brazilian modernism more broadly. Unlike many of their avant-garde contemporaries in Latin America and abroad, women artists played key roles in the Modern Art Week and in Brazilian modernist art more generally, especially in visual culture and dance.
Simultaneism (simultanéisme)
Authors: Alvizu Josh
Published: September 2018

Neither a movement, nor a group of loosely connected artists, Simultaneism instead describes a tendency in modernist avant-garde art and literature from roughly 1912 through to the 1920s, primarily but not exclusively in Paris. It is also known as ‘‘simultanism’’ [simultanisme] or ‘‘simultaneity’’ [simultanéité]. Artists such as Robert Delaunay, Sonia Delaunay-Terk, Marc Chagall, and others from the Orphist group, along with writers including Henri-Martin Barzun, Blaise Cendrars, and Gustave Apollinaire were among those who explored and commented on techniques of simultaneity in their work. Simultaneist technique experimented with the concurrent presentation of elements from different places, multiple points-of-view, radically disconnected segments of time, and separate media. Like Futurism and to some extent Cubism, Simultaneism took up elements from and responded to major developments in modernity: technological innovation, large-scale urbanization, mass telecommunication, and scientific discoveries. Perhaps the most famous and recognizably simultaneist work to exhibit these tendencies is the fold-out book published by Delaunay-Terk and Cendrars in 1913, Prose of the Trans-siberian and of Little Joan of France [La Prose du Transsibérien et de la petite Jehanne de France].
Spiral
Authors: Baker Marissa H.
Published: September 2018

Spiral was a collective of African American artists that briefly formed in New York City between 1963 and 1966. Romare Bearden and Norman Lewis were the main founders and leaders of the group. The first meeting convened in Bearden’s studio, with Charles Alston, Felrath Hines, Lewis, Richard Mayhew, William Prichard, Hale Woodruff, and James Yeargens in attendance. Later, Emma Amos, Calvin Douglass, Perry Ferguson, Reginald Gammon, Alvin Hollingsworth, William Majors, Earle Miller, and Merton Simpson joined the group. Prompted by a sense of momentum and urgency from the Civil Rights movement and the imminent March on Washington, which occurred during the summer of 1963, the group gathered to discuss the role of art in the struggle for equal rights. The artists were also eager to discuss racism and their exclusion from New York’s art world. Older artists such as Woodruff and Alston were influenced by the tenets of the New Negro movement—a movement in the early 20th century that encouraged African American artists to use art to achieve racial progress by refashioning the image of the Negro as self-assertive and urbane. Under their influence the question of a ‘‘black art’’ and ‘‘black aesthetic,’’ which put the artists’ racial identity at the center of the debate, remained central to the Spiral group.
Duncan, Robert (Edward) (1919–1988)
Authors: Gifford James
Published: September 2018

Robert Duncan was an American poet, dramatist, and critic central to the San Francisco Renaissance and Black Mountain College. He was born Edward Howard Duncan Jr., renamed Robert Edward Symmes by his Theosophist adoptive parents. He published as Robert Symmes in his early works and finally combined his names to form Robert Duncan in 1941 after his military discharge. After seven years in North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and New York, Duncan returned to California in 1945 and remained in the Bay Area until his death in 1988 of kidney disease.
Ablinger, Peter (1960--)
Authors: Cassidy Aaron
Published: September 2018

Peter Ablinger has arguably done more to challenge what we mean by "music" than any composer since John Cage. His works include Sehen und Hören (1994–2003), a series of abstract photographs that Ablinger refers to as "Music Without Sounds," Parker Notch (2010) for solo instrument and noise, in which an instrumentalist plays a blisteringly fast transcription of a Charlie Parker solo which is completely obliterated by a thick, dense stream of noise occupying the rest of the audio spectrum, rendering the instrumentalist’s sounds more or less inaudible; and Weiss/Weisslich 36, Kopfhörer (1999), in which the listener dons headphones that have a microphone attached, through which she hears what the microphone picks up in real time (as Ablinger writes, "The same is not the same. There is a difference. At least the difference between just being here and: listening. That difference is the piece." In the various Sitzen Und Hören or Stühle pieces, rows of chairs are set up in various indoor and outdoor locales around the world, in which ‘not the sound, but the listening is the piece.’ The LandschaftsoperUlrichsberg [Landscape Opera] (2009) in seven acts, Act 1 of which consists of planting rows of trees "according to acoustic criterias [sic] as, e.g., colour and intensity of noise, version"; or Quadraturen III (‘Wirklichkeit’), in which various recordings (of speech, street noise, etc.) are transcribed and reproduced with surprising verisimilitude through a computer-controlled player piano.
Jiménez-Fonseca, Hernán (1942--)
Authors: Guzmán-Verri Valeria
Published: September 2018

Costa Rican architect Hernán Jiménez-Fonseca obtained his degree at the Universidad Autónoma de Mexico (UNAM) in 1970. Like many Costa Rican architects of his generation, he trained abroad since there were no architecture degree courses in the country until 1971. After settling back in Costa Rica he designed the National Bank Agency in Puriscal, which was built in 1973. However, it was in 1976, when he won the competition for the Costa Rican Association of Engineers and Architects building, that there came a turning point in his career. With its monumental concrete structure and distinctive form, the building became a significant reference in Costa Rican architecture. Throughout his career, and alongside his designs for residential, religious, and institutional architecture (Pinares Apartment Block, 1980; Turrialba Catholic Church, 1999; Fire Station in Puriscal, 1982), Jiménez-Fonseca won a number of important competitions, such as the National Assembly in 1991 (unbuilt) and the National Centre for Culture in 1994. He was also a member of the jury for high-profile urban projects such as the Square for Democracy. As a competition-winner and jury-member, Jiménez-Fonseca left a lasting and influential mark on the urban setting of the country’s capital.
Costa, Lúcio (1902–1998)
Authors: Goossens Maarten
Published: September 2018

Brazilian architect Lúcio Marçal Ferreira Ribeiro Lima Costa was a founding father and one the main exponents of Brazilian modern architecture. After passing his childhood in Europe, Costa enrolled in the National School of Beaux-Arts in Rio de Janeiro. Although his first years as a practicing architect were characterized by the influence of the neocolonial movement then in its full vigour, by 1929 Lúcio Costa became, along with Gregori Warchavchik, one of the first advocates of modern architecture in Brazil, influenced by the ideas of Le Corbusier, who had visited Brazil in 1929. Costa was given the opportunity to actively promote modern ideas when he was appointed, in 1930, as head of the National School of Beaux-Arts.

One of Costa’s most significant designs from this period, and a landmark in Brazilian and Latin American Modernism, is the Ministry of Education and Public Health (1936–1945), designed with Affonso Eduardo Reidy, Oscar Niemeyer (one of Costa’s former students), and with the participation of Le Corbusier as a design consultant, among others. During his career Costa was able to combine architectural design, landscape architecture, town planning, public service, heritage protection and writing. His most relevant work is the layout of Brasília, the newly built capital city of Brazil (1956–1960).
Golosov, Il’ia (1883–1945)
Authors: Vronskaya Alla G.
Published: September 2018

Il’ia Aleksandrovich Golosov, one of the leading Soviet modernist architects of the 1920s, was born in Moscow into the family of a priest and was the brother of architect Panteleimon Aleksandrovich Golosov (1882–1945). Alongside his brother, Il’ia Golosov graduated from Moscow Stroganov Art and Industry School in 1907 and from the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture in 1912, having received an architectural degree. His first projects were private villas in various historical styles.

In 1919 Golosov became close to the members of the cubo-futurist group Zhivskul’ptrarkh (an agglutination referring to Painting, Sculpture, Architecture), in particular architect Nikolai Ladovskii, sculptor Boris Korolev, and painter Nikolai Istselenov, who together with Golosov became members of the Sculpture Artel (Co-operative) of the Second Independent State Art Studios (soon to become famous as VKhUTEMAS) under the leadership of Korolev. Golosov’s early connection with Cubo-Futurism and sculpture had predicated his design principles and his formal vision of architecture. This sculptural attitude to architecture was manifested, in particular, in Golosov’s "theory of design of architectural organisms": he interpreted architecture as a "mass" (according to formalist aesthetics, a quintessentially sculptural property), or, in other words, as a large-scale form.
Le Corbusier (1887–1965)
Authors: Sequeira Marta
Published: September 2018

Le Corbusier was a Swiss architect and urbanist who acquired French nationality in 1930, having set up his studio ("the atelier for patient research") in that country. Just as he assumed an unconditional continuity in relation to the past, he also clearly confronted the circumstances of his time. Many of his works became icons of Modernism, like the Villa Savoye (1928), the Marseilles Housing Unit (1945), the Ronchamp Chapel (1950), the Convent of Sainte-Marie de la Tourette (1953) and the Chandigarh Capitol Complex (1950–1955), to mention just a few examples. His architecture reflected the development of a modern industrialized economy, a Western avant-garde culture and a vibrant political and social context. He made a mark not only with his constructed work, but also with designs that were never built (and which were progressive in character), his painting (which reflected his experimentalist nature) and with his theoretical texts, which today bear witness to his modernist doctrine. Le Corbusier was above all one of the most prolific thinkers of Modernism, and one of the greatest cultural figures of the 20th century.
Lima, João Filgueiras "Lelé" (1932–2014)
Authors: Frajndlich Rafael Urano
Published: September 2018

João "Lelé" Filgueiras Lima is a public architect. Since his formative years on the construction sites of Brasília (1960) until today, his most remarkable works have been created for the public sector. This aspect of his career led him to take a very plastic approach that always relied upon economical building strategies, and often required new techniques and industrial materials.

Lelé’s interest in industrial building components led him to design pieces of his own, which were used in some early public works, such as the Taguatinga Hospital (1965) and the Secretariats of Bahia Administration Center (1973). Lelé’s breakthrough came when he designed hospitals for the SARAH Kubitschek Foundation. For Brasília’s Hospital for Diseases of the Locomotor System (1980), he used an integrated approach to fulfill the normative standards for a rehabilitation facility, to keep to a tight budget, and to create shade from the extreme heat of Brasília. A gap between the different levels allows all the recovery rooms to have access to a well-shaded green terrace. Structures and cladding are made from prefabricated reinforced concrete, articulated by one-storey-high Virendell beams.
Meyer, Hannes (1889–1954)
Authors: Xiong Xiangnan
Published: September 2018

Hannes Meyer was a Swiss modernist architect, educator, and the second director of the Bauhaus from 1928 to 1930. He believed that architecture and planning are social issues and that modern architects and planners should serve the needs of the masses rather than those of the privileged class. This conviction directed him throughout his entire career.

Meyer was born on November 18, 1889, into an architectural dynasty in Basel. He was an apprentice mason and studied building at Basel Technical School for four years before going to Berlin in 1909, where he attended courses on town planning, economics, and land reform. Between 1912 and 1913 Meyer traveled to England, visiting and studying the garden cities of Letchworth, Bourneville, and Port Sunlight. By the time World War I broke out, Meyer had already completed his training in architecture and town planning. During the war he served in the Swiss army.

In 1919 Meyer received his first building commission: Freidorf housing estate near Basel, in which he used standardized building elements for the sake of economic efficiency. Meyer was appointed as master of architecture at the Bauhaus in 1927. A year later, he succeeded Walter Gropius as the director of the Dessau Bauhaus. He conducted an extensive reform of the Bauhaus curriculum, stressing practical experience and downplaying personal artistic concerns.
Rother, Leopoldo (1894–1978)
Authors: Devia Marta
Published: September 2018

Although German by birth, Leopoldo Rother was a Colombian architect who exerted a great influence in the development of Colombian modern architecture. Rother is known for his rationality which reflects his technical training, his great discipline, his extensive knowledge of construction techniques, and his passion for the craft.

Rother began his studies in Karlsruhe, Germany, in 1913 and received the title of architect-engineer in 1920 from the Technische Hochschule Berlin. From 1920 to 1935 Rother worked for the German government. The design of several buildings for the Technische Universität Clausthal gave him a solid basis for his subsequent works in Colombia.

In 1935, due to his Jewish descent, Rother had to seek refuge in Colombia where he spent the rest of his life.
Samper, Germán (1924--)
Authors: Rosselli Juan Pablo Aschner
Published: September 2018

Germán Samper Gnecco was born in Bogotá, Colombia, on April 18, 1924. He studied architecture at the National University of Colombia. Shortly after finishing his education in 1947, he joined the workshop of Le Corbusier in Paris, where he worked until 1954 on projects such as Bogotá’s Master Plan, the Court of Justice, the Palace of Ministries, and the urban plan for Chandigarh, India, among others. On his return to Colombia, and deeply influenced by Le Corbusier, he worked as an independent architect until he joined the firm Esguerra Sáenz Urdaneta Suárez in 1958, where he became partner and design director. For forty years he designed and directed the construction of several projects in Bogotá, such as the Luis Ángel Arango Library (1957), the Gold Museum (winner of the National Architecture Prize in 1970), the Avianca building (1968), the Banco de Occidente Building (1984), the Colsubsidio Citadel (1990), and the Cartagena Convention Center (1979).
Sanabria, Tomás José (1922–2008)
Authors: D’Auria Viviana
Published: September 2018

Sanabria is a representative figure of the second generation of 20th-century Venezuelan architects. He studied in the United States of America after World War II and had a rigorous functionalist orientation, paying attention to natural conditions, environmental features, the relationship between architecture and geography, the influence of architecture in civic culture, structural and technological expressiveness, and the links between architecture, art, and the urban scale.

After graduating as an engineer (1941–1945) from the Universidad Central de Venezuela (UCV), he embraced a functionalist approach during his studies (1945–1947) at the Harvard Graduate School of Design in Cambridge, Massachusetts. At Harvard Walter Gropius, Martin Wagner, Ieoh Ming Pei, Hugh Stubbins, and Marcel Breuer were among his professors. He returned to Venezuela in 1947 and worked as professor of Architecture for Engineers at the UCV’s School of Engineering. By 1948 he was director of the Department of Architectural Composition at the School of Architecture in the Faculty of Engineering. In 1954 he became the first director of the School of Architecture in the Faculty of Architecture and Urbanism, founded that year.
Jooss, Kurt (1901–1979)
Authors: Elswit Kate
Published: September 2018

Kurt Jooss is often understood to be a founding figure in dance theater, both for his choreography Der grüne Tisch (The Green Table, 1932), which continues to appear today on international ballet programmes, and as the teacher of Pina Bausch, who was his most famous student. Jooss was particularly vocal toward the end of the Weimar Republic about the need for modern dance to reincorporate into its expressive capacities more classical forms of technique in order to continue to move forward with the project of establishing dance as an independent art of the theater. He became director of the Dance Department at the Folkwang School in Essen first in 1927, a position he left when he and his company fled Nazi Germany in 1933. After the war, he returned primarily to the Folkwang School and there taught a new generation of dancers from 1949 through 1968. Although Jooss is often central to histories of German dance, he is an exemplary case study for its transnational circulation, in terms of his own movements and those of his company members and students, as well as in the survival of his four notated works in international ballet repertoires—Pavane on the Death of an Infanta (1929), Big City (1932), A Ball in Old Vienna (1932), and The Green Table (1932).
Kishida, Kunio (1890–1954)
Authors: Jortner David
Published: September 2018

Kishida Kunio is considered to be one of the founders of Japanese shingeki drama and one of the most important modern Japanese dramatists. Through his use of imagistic language and psychological realism, Kishida established the "literary" school of shingeki theatre.

Kishida was born in 1890 in Tokyo to a military family. He was commissioned as an officer in the Japanese army in 1912 but left two years later, disillusioned by military life. He entered Tokyo Imperial University in 1917 in order to study French literature. In 1919 he traveled to Paris to study with the French playwright Jacques Copeau.

Kishida returned to Japan in 1923 and introduced many of the ideas Copeau had shown him to the shingeki stage. From 1924 to 1929 he wrote numerous one-act plays for both performance and publication; these works included Kami fūsen [Paper Balloon] (1925), Buranko [The Swing] (1925), and Ashita wa Tenki [Tomorrow it Will Be Fine] (1928). These plays examined the emotional lives of their characters as they focused on issues of domesticity.

From 1929 to 1936 Kishida shifted toward writing multi-act plays for the theater. With actor Tomoda Kyōsuke and actress Tamura Akiko he founded the Tsukijiza (Tsukiji Troupe) in 1932. This was the first shingeki company based on Kishida’s literary form of modern drama. He also founded Gekisaku [Playwriting] magazine in the same year, which became a platform for Kishida to articulate and promote his apolitical view of theater as well as a splace in which to promote new Japanese playwrights such as Tanaka Chikao and Uchimura Naoya.
Kawakami, Otojirō (1864–1911)
Authors: Swain John D.
Published: September 2018

Kawakami Otojirō was an actor, comedian, and impresario during Japan’s early modern period and was the first to take Japanese performances on tour, albeit in a rather unconventional exoticized form, to the West in 1899–1901 and again from 1901–2. Otojirō married the actress, and former geisha, Kawakami Sada Yakko in 1896. She became his major creative collaborator, and she was the troupe’s featured performer during their tours.

The troupe went to France from 1907 to 1908 to study every aspect of Western theater. Upon their return to Japan, Kawakami opened the Imperial Actress Training Institute, and the Imperial Theater as a home for the troupe in Osaka.

Otojirō left his home in Fukuoka at the age of fourteen, ending up in Kyoto where he had several occupations and became a liberal political agitator until he apprenticed to a rakugo [comic storytelling] master. His apprenticeship inspired him to establish an amateur theater company with a fellow political activist. The amateur status of the troupe allowed them to fly slightly under the radar of the authorities, but in 1888 Kawakami created a musical sensation, the Oppekepe [trumpet] song. This was a satirical song with a rousing chorus that imitated the sound of a trumpet—"oppekepe!"
Mayama, Seika (1878–1948)
Authors: Zheng Guohe
Published: September 2018

Mayama Seika was a novelist, historian, and one of the most prominent playwrights in Japan’s modernist theater movement.

Born Mayama Akira in Sendai, he studied medicine at high school and worked as a lay doctor in 1902. While in middle school, he became interested in literature. Inspired by Tokutomi Rokka (1868–1927) to become a novelist, he moved to Tokyo in 1903. Mayama’s first story was published when his mentor, Satō Kōroku (1874–1949), submitted it to meet his own deadline signed with Seika, a name subsequently adopted by Mayama as his own. Also under Satō, he helped to adapt Konjiki Yasha [The Golden Demon] by Ozaki Kōyō for the stage. In 1907 he published Minami Koizumi-mura [The South Koizumi Village], thereby winning recognition as a major naturalist novelist. However, in 1910 his career as a novelist ended in disgrace, however, for double-publishing his manuscripts. Ostracized from the bundan, he turned to scholarly research on Edo history, an abiding passion that engaged him for most of his life, and which not only produced authoritative studies on Ihara Saikaku, but later lent his drama depth and historical authenticity.

Following an invitation from actor Kitamura Rokurō, he joined Shōchiku in 1913 as a playwright, gaining life-long patronage from ōtani Takejirō and Noma Seiji, the founders of Shōchiku and the Kōdansha publishing house, respectively. In 1915–1917, he wrote pieces of mostly contemporary social drama for shinpa, including Mihana Adahana [A Flower Is Useless if it Blossoms without Bearing Fruit]. A turning point came in 1918 when he wrote two historical plays which were produced by kabuki, a much more prestigious genre.
Shin Kabuki
Authors: Zheng Guohe
Published: September 2018

Shin Kabuki literally "new kabuki," a modern outgrowth of traditional kabuki and one of the fruits of Japan’s modernist theater movement.

The term was first coined by Kasuyama Masao and later defined by Kagayama Naozō to mean plays written in the kabuki format but with Western ideas incorporated in to them and with literary merit. As used today, it refers to works written since the late Meiji period (1868–1912) by intellectuals who were not part of the kabuki establishment. These works were staged with kabuki’s apparatus but without such traditional kabuki acting and staging conventions as climactic poses (mie), stylized makeup, and quick role-change (hayagawari). Through these plays, kabuki came to be divided into "classical" (koten) and "new" (shin) categories.

Following the Meiji Restoration, government leaders returning from trips to the West sought a potential counterpart to Western drama in Japan, as part of Japanese high culture suitable for entertaining the upper classes and visiting foreign dignitaries. This desire of the Meiji leaders coincided with indigenous modernist efforts to reform this traditional performing art to suit the times. This led to the appearance of zangiri-mono and katsureki-mono. However, following the death in 1893 of Kawakate Mokuami, who had provided most of the scripts for such reformative efforts, there was no playwright of comparable caliber to support the reform of kabuki. This gap, coupled with the growing influence of Western theater and the era’s great social changes, facilitated a transition away from the old practice—scripts were written exclusively by playwrights attached to a company—and the appearance of intellectual playwrights who were unrelated to kabuki.
Shōchiku Company Limited [松竹株式会社]
Authors: Fukushima Yoshiko
Published: September 2018

Shōchiku Company Limited [松竹株式会社] is a Japanese entertainment gaint that owns theaters, film studios, production companies for motion pictures and theater, real estate, and other businesses such as music recording studios and publishing compaines.

In 1895 one of the founders of Shōchiku, Takejirō ōtani (1877–1969) became a theatrical promoter for Sakaiza. In 1900 ōtani purchased Sakaiza and renamed it Kabukiza and became a theatrical promoter for Tokiwaza. In 1902 ōtani and his twin brother Matsujirō Shirai (1877–1951) established a production company Matsu Take Partnership Corporation (renamed Shōchiku Company in 1937) and opened Meijiza (later Shōchikuza). By 1909 the company had purchased most of the major kabuki theaters in Kyoto and Osaka including Minamiza, Nakaza, and Asahiza. In 1909 the company purchased Bunrakuza and produced the first ningyo joruri [puppet theaters] performance. Following Shōchiku’s purchase and modernization of Shintomiza, the site of the Meiji era’s Theater Reform in 1911, the company began expanding its business in Tokyo. Ōtani was in charge of the company’s affairs in Tokyo while Shirai managed those in Kyoto and Osaka. In 1914 Tokyo’s Kabukiza fell under Shōchiku’s management, and by 1929 all kabuki actors had become affiliated with Shōchiku. Under the influence of Kawakami Otojirō creator of shinpa and Kawakami’s troupe actor Shizuma Kojirō, Shōchiku modernized the production system by establishing multiple ticket prices, abolishing the sale of food and drink in audience seating areas, shortening the length of productions, modernizing/Westernizing the theater building, and improving sanitary conditions in theaters.
Matsui, Sumako (1886–1919)
Authors: Zheng Guohe
Published: September 2018

Matsui Sumako was the first superstar shingeki actress in Japan’s modernist theater movement.

Born Kobayashi Masako in Nagano Prefecture, she went to Tokyo at the age of sixteen. She became interested in theater following encouragement from her second husband. In 1909 she was admitted into Bungei Kyōkai’s newly launched Theater Academy. Hard work and a determination to become an actress enabled her, with only an elementary education, to survive the rigorous two-year co-educational program which used English-language original or translated scripts as textbooks. At the Theater Academy’s graduation presentation in May 1911, she debuted as Ophelia in Japan’s first full-length production of Hamlet in the recently opened Imperial Theater. The overwhelmingly positive reception of her role eliminated once and for all the need in shingeki for onnagata, the male impersonation of female roles. It was around this time that she adopted her professional name. Her role as Nora in A Doll’s House in September of that year at Bungei Kyōkai’s newly completed private theater was so successful that it was produced again two months later at the Imperial Theater, at the latter’s request. The success came from her superb natural and acquired skills to reveal the interior world of the roles she played, and which established her as the leading actress in modern Japanese theater.
Agee, James (1909–1955)
Authors: Neighbors Ryan
Published: September 2018

James Agee was an American film critic, journalist, and novelist, who, like his modernist contemporaries, pushed against the constraints of his genres. Born in Knoxville in 1909, Agee attended Harvard University before working as a journalist for Fortune, TIME, and The Nation. In 1936 he and photographer Walker Evans spent time among Alabama sharecroppers with the intention of writing a journalistic story about their plight during the Depression. The essay and photographs that they produced were rejected by their editors but were later incorporated into their book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941). Although the book sold poorly, it would become a modern classic and a groundbreaking work of literary journalism. During the 1940s Agee served as a film critic, and his intellectual film reviews elevated the medium from marketing device to literature. He lauded the work of Alfred Hitchcock, revived interest in silent film comedians, and hailed cinema as the preeminent art form of the 20th century. Eventually, he worked in film production himself, co-writing scripts for The African Queen (1951) and The Night of the Hunter (1955), before dying of a heart attack at the age of 45 years. Two years later, his semi-autographical novel A Death in the Family was published and then won the Pulitzer Prize, securing his place in the canon of American writing.
Italian Neorealism
Authors: Harvey-Davitt James
Published: September 2018

Italian Neorealism is a filmmaking movement associated with a select group of Italian filmmakers in the latter years of, and the years immediately following, World War II, the most popularly regarded being directors Roberto Rossellini, Luchino Visconti, Vittorio de Sica, and Sica’s regular collaborator, the writer Cesare Zavattini. The films they made during this period share an interest in the state of Italian society in the wake of war, and a concern with what shape the reconstruction of that society should take. Benchmark titles of this kind include Ossessione [Obsession] (Luchino Visconti, 1943), Rossellini’s Rome, Open City [Roma, cittàaperta] (1945) and Paisan (1946), and de Sica’s Bicycle Theives [Ladri di biciclette] (1948). While its proponents often refuted its status as a generic or aesthetic style, the films of Neorealism were pioneering in their use of nonprofessional actors in key roles, their preference for contingency and neglect of classical narrative structure, and for shooting scenes on location in the city streets and country landscapes of war-torn Italy. Besides making some of most significant Italian neorealist films, Zavattini and Rossellini were also two of its most articulate commentators. Both regularly reiterated a desire to contemplate humanity in order to rediscover morality, a reaction to Fascism’s recent manipulation of both. While the great aims of these filmmakers were not matched by their audience reception (as illustrated by their box office returns), their poetic and aesthetic innovations made a lasting impression on the subsequent history of cinema.
Man with a Movie Camera (1929)
Authors: Jacobs Steven
Published: September 2018

Together with Berlin: Die Sinfonie der Großstadt (Berlin: Symphony of a City, Ruttmann, 1927), Chelovek s kinoapparatom (Man with a Movie Camera) is one of the best-known examples of a city symphony—a film genre that is also described as "city film" or "city poem," combining elements of documentary, narrative, and experimental film. Made by Dziga Vertov, the film was shot in Moscow, Kiev, and Odessa and depicts modern urban life on a single day. Focusing on the icons of urban modernity (industry, motorized traffic, anonymous masses, shop windows, mass entertainment), the film evokes the rhythms of metropolitan life by means of experimental techniques such as fast editing, split screens, fast motion, jump cuts, freeze frames, multiple exposures, and stop-motion animation. Moreover, Vertov introduces an element of avant-garde self-reflection, since the film also includes images of its own making: we look at the omnipresent man with the camera shooting the film, the woman editing it, the film operator screening it, and spectators watching it. Taking the pulse of the city and quite literally translating it into the rhythm of cinema, Vertov’s meta-film makes explicit the connection between film spectatorship and the stimulus-response mechanisms said to be produced by metropolitan modernity, with its dizzying kaleidoscopic atmosphere and sensory overload.
Video Art
Authors: Spampinato Francesco
Published: September 2018

The term "video art" is used to describe art made using video technology. Not to be confused with experimental cinema or art film, video art is based on a specific type of electronic image consisting of a two-dimensional composition of pixels. The main feature of video, both in technical and conceptual terms, is its instant playback capability, which is not possible with film, but which allows the creation of an instantaneous mirror-like replica of reality that is available to be manipulated, either live or in post-production. Video art was born in the mid-1960s and has developed in tandem with the evolution of video technology and its increasing availability.

Video has become a major tool for artists over the past fifty years, and a quintessential postmodernist medium, which has allowed critical and meta-linguistic responses to be made to what Guy Debord (1931–1994), French writer and leader of Situationism, has called "the society of the spectacle," referring to mainstream forms of media entertainment such as television, cinema, and advertising. Video is employed to document scripted performances and improvised actions, to appropriate preexisting moving images or to create new narratives. Artists’ videos display live or prerecorded images in single- or multichannel settings or as part of multimedia installations shown in exhibition spaces or in the public sphere, broadcast by television or distributed as videotapes, CDs, DVDs and recently as digital media files.
Vulgar Modernism
Authors: Park-Primiano Sueyoung
Published: September 2018

J. Hoberman (James Lewis Hoberman) first introduced his concept of "vulgar modernism" in 1981 to describe a particular sensibility found on the "looney" fringes of American popular culture—that is, the "vulgar equivalent of modernism itself". This self-conscious and self-reflexive sensibility was developed between 1940 and 1960 in such ironic and subversive works as Warner Bros. cartoons by Tex Avery and Chuck Jones, Jerry Lewis and Dean Martin comedies directed by Frank Tashlin, Mad Magazine's graphic parodies of Disney characters, and the television programs by comedian Ernie Kovacs. These lowbrow works are heavily embedded with intertextuality, forgo restraint and naturalism, flout conventions and sentimentality, and crack the veneer of acceptable materialism and frenzied consumption in mid-century American society. As such, these examples of so-called para-art may be appreciated alongside experimental or avant-garde works commonly associated with high art, including Lettrist poetry and the films of Jean-Luc Godard.
Anarchism
Authors: Cunningham Anne
Published: September 2018

Anarchism is a term derived from the Greek anarkhia, meaning "contrary to authority" or "without a ruler." Anarchism narrowly refers to a theory of society without state rule, and generally to a social and political ideology advocating a society that does not use coercive forms of authority. Many advocates trace its roots to the Greek Stoics. William Godwin’s An Inquiry Concerning Political Justice and its Influence on General Virtue and Happiness (1793) is widely recognized as the first work to present a full articulation of the idea of anarchism.

The term was considered derisory until the French social philosopher Pierre-Joseph Proudhon used it in 1840 to describe his political program. Proudhon is credited as the first to call himself an anarchist. The Russian revolutionary Michael Bakunin (1814–1876), a key figure in anarchism, sought the violent overthrow of the state in order to replace it with a federation built on the basis of voluntary associations. Bakunin was a proponent of what would become anarcho-syndicalism, a term not coined until the early 20th century by Sam Mainwaring in Britain and Georges Sorel in France. Anarcho-syndicalism focused on trade unions as the transformative agent of social change, because they championed workers and could serve as a foundation for a new social organization after the successful overthrow of the existing state.
Bell, (Arthur) Clive Heward (1881–1964)
Authors: Overton Tom
Published: September 2018

Clive Bell was an English art and cultural critic associated with the Bloomsbury Group. He is best known for the concept of "significant form," which he outlined in his book Art (1914). Art made a version of the case for appreciating artistic form independently of content, which is known as Formalism. At the expense of representative, narrative, or iconographical meaning, the book encouraged a contemplation of "relations and combinations of lines and colours" in art from the ancient to the modern. "To appreciate a work of art," Bell argued, "we need bring with us nothing from life, no knowledge of its ideas and affairs, no familiarity with its emotions." Though this approach eventually fell out of critical fashion, Art remains enduringly significant as a manifesto for the post-impressionist movement, for which Bell helped Roger Fry to arrange important London exhibitions in 1910 and 1912. Bell is also remembered as a member of the Bloomsbury Group, an influential collection of artists and writers gathered in London which included Virginia Woolf.
Carpenter, Edward (1844–1929)
Authors: Davis Michael T.
Published: September 2018

Edward Carpenter was a British poet, essayist, philosopher, social activist, and early advocate for the social acceptance of same-sex relationships. Born in Brighton, East Sussex, the son of Charles Carpenter and Sophia Wilson, he was educated at Brighton College and studied mathematics at Cambridge. In 1868 Carpenter earned a fellowship at Cambridge and reluctantly took Anglican orders. When Leslie Stephen, later the father of Virginia Woolf, resigned his appointment at Cambridge due to religious doubt, he suggested Carpenter as his replacement. The reformist movement promoted at Cambridge by F. D. Maurice, Professor of Moral Philosophy and disciple of Henry Sidgwick, influenced Carpenter’s outlook. But Carpenter could not reconcile his clerical duties with his religious doubt and in 1873 resigned his fellowship.

By this time Carpenter had become aware of his homosexuality. He acquired a copy of William Michael Rossetti’s bowdlerized edition of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, and in 1874 wrote to the older poet initiating a relationship that lasted until Whitman’s death in 1892. Following Whitman’s lead, Carpenter wrote his poem Towards Democracy (1883). Like Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, the poem would grow in volume over the next two decades.