bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Buber, Martin (1878–1965)
Authors: Chestopalova Natalja
Published: September 2018

Existential philosopher, essayist, translator and editor, Martin (Mordechai) Buber (מרטין בובר) was born in Austria and spent his earlier years studying in Vienna and Lemberg (now Lvov, Ukraine), eventually moving to Germany and Israel. Focusing on biblical hermeneutics and ethics, much of Buber’s writing is dedicated to the revival of religious Jewish consciousness through the idea of a transformed Zionist movement. Buber’s translation of the Hasidic tales, Die Geschichten des Rabbi Nachman (1906; The Tales of Rabbi Nachman), Die Legende des Baal Schem (1908; The Legend of the Baal Shem) and his original translation of the Hebrew Bible into German have remained valuable contributions to the study of spirituality, pacifism and human relations. Published in 1923, Buber’s most influential philosophical essay Ich und Du (I and Thou, 1937) is an articulation of the dialogic principle, or the duality of primal relations. In I and Thou Buber offers an ethical perspective by distinguishing between the I-Thou relations that stress the dialogical, mutual, holistic existence, and the monological I-It relations that objectify and dehumanize other beings. Buber allocates this dialogical relation to the very foundation of biblical faith and suggests that an authentic relationship to God is only possible through a dialogical life of existential responsibility.
Freytag-Loringhoven, Baroness Elsa von (1874 –1927)
Authors: Knighton Caroline
Published: September 2018

Born Else Hildegard Plötz in the German Baltic seaport town of Swinmünde in 1874, the Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven was an avant-garde poet, performer, visual artist, model, and autobiographer associated with the retrospectively named New York Dada movement. Arrested in Pittsburg for wearing men’s clothes and publicly smoking in 1910, the Baroness became an increasingly notorious figure in New York city as World War I took hold in Europe. Head shaved and lacquered in high vermilion, her often naked body decorated with the tin cans, ice cream spoons, and gilded vegetables that she collected from the city’s gutters or stole from its department stores, the Baroness both embodied and challenged the limits of established avant-garde gestures through a radical lived-Dada practice performed on and through her body. Well-suited to The Little Review’s tagline "Making no Compromise with the Public Taste," the Baroness was, as editor Jane Heap put it, "the only one living anywhere who dresses Dada, loves Dada, is Dada" (1922: 46).
Haiku
Authors: Veenstra Michelle
Published: September 2018

A brief form of poetry originally developed in Japan around the thirteenth century, haiku are typically composed of three lines with a total of seventeen onji, or syllable-like units. Traditional haiku depicts the natural world, is written in the present tense, and includes minimal subjective commentary from the poet, often reflecting Buddhist principles of interrelatedness and egolessness. Much like other forms of Asian culture, haiku played a significant role in the development of early modernism, notably the poetic movement Imagism developed primarily by Ezra Pound, H.D., and Amy Lowell. Haiku has maintained a strong presence globally and in Western literature throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, seeing a particularly strong resurgence in the 1950s and 1960s, when the poetic form and the related ideas of Zen Buddhism were embraced and disseminated by the Beat poets.
The Harvard Society for Contemporary Art
Authors: Hill Catrina
Published: September 2018

The Harvard Society for Contemporary Art was an art gallery that organized ground-breaking exhibitions of modern painting, sculpture, photography, and architecture. Active from 1929 to 1936, the Society was the first organization in America devoted to an ongoing program of changing avant-garde exhibitions. The Society’s leaders were three Harvard undergraduates: Lincoln Kirstein, Edward M.M. Warburg, and John Walker III. They rented a room in Harvard Square in Cambridge Massachusetts; and held exhibitions that included works borrowed from other collections and works for sale. The Society’s mission was to be contemporary and experimental and to show controversial work not being displayed in established museums. The Society gained immediate recognition for its pioneering exhibitions of European and American art. They exhibited current work by some of the leading modern artists of the day including Constantin Brancusi, Alexander Calder, and Isamu Noguchi. The first Boston exhibitions of Picasso, Matisse, and Ben Shahn were held at the Society. It was also the first venue in the country to exhibit Bauhaus architecture.
Herrera, Carmen (1915--)
Authors: Estevez Lisandra
Published: September 2018

Carmen Herrera is a Cuban painter known for her pure geometric abstraction that emphasizes a stark rational order. In each work, she generally restricts her palette to a few contrasting colors or values to create a powerful sense of emphasis and order. In works such as Two Worlds (2011, private collection) and Yellow and Black (2010, private collection), she uses pure, unmixed pigments to accentuate solid shapes. She often paints variegated fields and crisp stripes of bold, flat color to arrange her compositions methodically. While her art has been understandably compared to that of American abstract artists such as Barnett Newman (who was, in fact, a close friend of Herrera’s) and Ellsworth Kelly, Herrera herself has stated that she owes her vibrant sense of color to the Cuban painter Amelia Peláez, who was known for her ebullient hues. In her own words, Herrera sees her own art as "a continuation of that of … Peláez, especially where colour is concerned" (qtd in Fuentes-Perez, Cruz-Taura, and Pau-Llosa 1987: 104). One cannot discount the impact of Herrera’s early training as an architect on her varied yet precise representation of shapes and structured arrangement of forms. The highly disciplined, almost ascetic nature of her compositions captures a concrete geometric order that emphasizes a rational sense of symmetry, asymmetry, and unity. According to Herrera herself, her optical and minimalist approach to form lies in her "quest … for the simplest of pictorial resolutions."
Interior Monologue
Authors: Herman David
Published: September 2018

One of the hallmarks of modernist style, interior monologue affords a prime opportunity for studying how writers ranging from James Joyce and Dorothy Richardson to Italo Svevo and Alfred Döblin innovated on conventions for speech and thought presentation to create effects of psychological immediacy. Gerald Prince, building on Dorrit Cohn’s foundational account of techniques for presenting fictional minds, defines interior monologue as "the nonmediated presentation of a character’s thoughts and impressions or perceptions" (2003: 45). In this usage, interior monologue is a cover term that applies to more or less extended passages of free direct discourse—in other words, discourse that, though stripped of quotation marks and tag phrases such as she reflected or he wondered, can be assumed to correspond to or quote the unvocalized thoughts of a character. The "Penelope" episode of James Joyce’s Ulysses is often taken to be a prototypical instance of the form, though Joyce deploys interior monologue in less extended stretches throughout his novel, nowhere more movingly than at the end of the "Lestrygonians" episode. Here the text cross-cuts between reports of Leopold Bloom’s outward conduct as he attempts to avoid Blazes Boylan and passages that can be taken as offering an unfiltered presentation of Bloom’s perceptions and thoughts when he encounters his wife’s lover (italics mark instances of interior monologue):

His heart quopped softly. To the right. Museum. Goddesses. He swerved to the right.

Is it? Almost certain. Won’t look. Wine in my face. Why did I? Too heady. Yes, it is. The walk. Not see. Get on. (Joyce 1986: 150)
Cambodian Modernism
Authors: Nelson Roger
Published: September 2018

Cambodian modernity was chiefly shaped by the forces of colonization, decolonization, and the Cold War. These influences had singular consequences for art and culture in Cambodia, in turn shaping a distinct Cambodian modernism. From the establishment of a national art school in 1918 until the 1940s, Cambodian artists were forbidden to use forms that were perceived to be European. This was the result of a strict cultural policy designed to preserve and protect what were thought of as authentically traditional Cambodian arts and crafts. In the 1950s and 1960s, during King Norodom Sihanouk’s independent Cambodian SangkumReastrNiyum [People’s Socialist Community], the arts flourished as a key site for articulating a new nationalist identity. However, the promise of this period—popularly remembered as a cultural golden age—was shattered by violent political upheavals, beginning with the outbreak of civil war in 1970. During Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge regime of 1975–1979, approximately 1.7 million Cambodians perished, including an estimated ninety per cent of all artists and intellectuals. Under the regime, most familiar forms of art and culture were forbidden. In 1979, invading Vietnamese forces ousted the Khmer Rouge and in the following decade artistic production focused on rebuilding after the devastation. Finally, the 1992–1993 United Nations occupation of Cambodia heralded a new era of transnational cultural exchanges, often based in discourses of aid and development.
Johnson, Georgia Douglas (1877?–1966)
Authors: Stephens-Lorenz Judith
Published: September 2018

Georgia Douglas Johnson was a multitalented artist of the New Negro/Harlem Renaissance era who wrote poetry, plays, short stories, music, and newspaper columns from her home in Washington, D.C. She was born in Atlanta, Georgia and was a member of Atlanta University’s Normal School class of 1893. She studied music at Oberlin College and wrote songs from 1908 until 1959.
Fengmian, Lin [林風眠] (1900–1991)
Authors: Yao Wu
Published: September 2018

Lin Fengmian was a twentieth-century Chinese artist who introduced Western modernism into the Chinese art scene through both his painting practice and teaching activities. In 1919, Lin joined a Chinese work-study program and spent the next six years studying art in Europe, where he was influenced by modernist styles including fauvism, cubism, and expressionism. During this formative phase, his belief in Western and Eastern artistic synergy started to form. His monumental canvases from this period echoed the large expressionistic paintings from his German days, in which a profound sense of humankind’s malaise and struggle can be observed. His more formalist oils, with their spatial fragmentation and angular shapes, paid homage to cubism, while his ink and watercolor paintings employed devices of foreshortening and shading. His mature work is characterized by a hybrid of painting media, a rich palette, layering of heavily hued areas, and simplified line and form that induce lyrical and naive qualities. As an art instructor, Lin promoted Western-style art and pedagogy. He taught a number of Chinese modern artists, including Li Keran 李可染 (1907–89), Wu Guanzhong 吳冠中 (1919–2010), and Zao Wou-ki 趙無極 (1921–2013).
Marqués, René (1919–1979)
Authors: Stevens Camilla
Published: September 2018

During his lifetime, René Marqués was Puerto Rico’s most renowned literary figure. His oeuvre, which includes plays, short stories, essays, film scripts, poetry, and a novel, shows deep concern with the destiny of Puerto Rico and its colonial relationship with the United States. Marqués’s cultural conservatism—reflected in his nostalgia for a paternalist and agrarian past—has been rejected by subsequent generations of intellectuals. However, from the 1950s to the 1970s, his role as a provocateur in politics and the arts solidified the status of the writer as a social critic and professional in Puerto Rico. At the same time, his constant experimentation with literary techniques established him as the exemplary modernist writer of his generation.
Modernism without an Avant Garde in India
Authors: Mukherji Parul
Published: September 2018

Any critical history of modern Indian Art must take into account the key difference between Indian and Euro-American modernism: the distinct absence of an avant-garde in Indian modernism. No Hegelian dialectics or Kantian autonomy impelled Indian modernism along the same historical lines plotted in Western art historiography, nor was there a distinct classical tradition to be disregarded and to start anew from.

India’s distinct origins of modernity stem from the fact that it was under colonial modernity that modernism first made its appearance in India. If the beginnings of modernism in India are traced to the late nineteenth century, Raja Ravi Varma can be considered as India’s first Salon artist, who acquired a mastery over the medium of oil painting and the genre of portraiture. Any neat dichotomy between the colonizer and the colonized becomes blurred when considering the close nexus between the two. It was the Western Orientalists and their investment in disciplines such as Indology, for instance, whose arduous discovery of the past fed the Indian nationalist imagination and its desire to return to the precolonial past.
Nabokov, Vladimir [ВЛАДИМИР НАБОКОВ
] (1899–1977)
Authors: Alladaye Rene
Published: September 2018

Vladimir Nabokov was one of the leading novelists of the twentieth century. He was born in St Petersburg, Russia in 1899, but spent most of his life abroad after his family was forced to emigrate in the wake of the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. He first composed novels in Russian while living in Berlin and Paris, but switched to English when he moved to the United States in 1940. His novel entitled Lolita (1955) was immensely successful. Although he had been an American citizen since 1945, he came back to Europe in 1961, and lived in Montreux, Switzerland, where he died in 1977.
Neue Sachlichkeit in Visual Arts [New Objectivity in Visual Arts]
Authors: Mackenzie Michael
Published: September 2018

Neue Sachlichkeit, which can be translated as "New Objectivity," was the name given to a tendency in painting which, from about 1921 on, returned to something like traditional compositional and representational codes, eschewed vehemence of any kind, "Primitivism," and even painterliness, while emphasizing unbroken contour lines and unbroken local color. Painters depicted conventional subject matter such as still life, landscapes, and portraits with the pictorial means of sculptural volume, perspectival space, natural proportions, and unbroken, evenly modulated tonal values which had dominated painting since the Renaissance but which had been systematically dismantled by Modernism.

The tendency received its name with an exhibition at the Mannheim Kunsthalle in 1925, organized by Gustav Friedrich Hartlaub, although art critics had sought to name and define it since 1920, and explicitly in opposition to an Expressionism widely perceived as moribund. Hartlaub described what he saw as a split in the overall tendency, with an inclination toward traditionalism and classicism on the "right" wing, and toward aggressively critical social commentary and a propensity to exaggeration and caricature on the "left" (although Hartlaub denied that there was any political significance to his terminology of "left" and "right," the artists assigned to the "left" wing were either active in or openly sympathetic to the left wing of German politics).
Satchidanandan, K. (1946--)
Authors: Ramakrishnan E. V.
Published: September 2018

K. Satchidanandan is among the foremost modernist poets in Malayalam, as well as a prominent literary critic and translator. Born and educated in Kerala, Satchidanandan was a Professor of English at Christ College, Irinjalakkuda from 1970 to 1992, when he moved to New Delhi as the editor of Indian Literature published by the Sahitya Akademi (National Academy of Letters). Subsequently, he worked as the Secretary of the Akademi from 1996 to 2006. Satchidanandan is the author of twenty-one volumes of poetry, sixteen volumes of poetry translations, and nineteen volumes of essays in Malayalam. A recipient of numerous prestigious awards and honors at both national and international levels, including the Sahitya Akademi Award (2012) and the Knighthood of the Order of Merit from the Government of Italy (2006), his poetry has been translated into major world languages including English, French, German, Italian, and Arabic.
Stevens, Wallace (1879–1955)
Authors: MacPhail Kelly
Published: September 2018

Wallace Stevens is recognized as one of America’s greatest modernist poets, yet he was not widely celebrated for his poetry until the last years of his life in the early 1950s. Stevens was a private man who was in many ways quite different from his poetic contemporaries and the other great American modernist writers. His unusual trajectory as a poet was circumscribed by the relatively late age at which he began to publish, by his lack of foreign travel, by an at times unhappy marriage, and by his consuming work as an insurance lawyer and vice-president at the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company. Nonetheless, Stevens’s poetic world was immense, and his verse exhibits his preoccupations with the nature of poetry itself and with the complex relationship of the mind, the imagination, and reality. Stevens published his Collected Poems in 1954 at the age of seventy-five to great acclaim and died the following year of stomach cancer.
Yongping, Li [李永平] (1947--)
Authors: Groppe Alison
Published: September 2018

Li Yongping is a Taiwan author who rose to literary fame for a collection of interrelated short stories called Retribution: The Jiling Chronicles (吉陵春秋, 1986), considered among the works exemplifying the best of Taiwan modernism. Now a citizen of the Republic of China (Taiwan), Li was born in Kuching, a city in the East Malaysian state of Sarawak, in northwest Borneo. Sarawak became a British crown colony in 1946, and then joined the independent Federation of Malaysia in 1963. Li left Kuching in 1967 to pursue university education in Taiwan, following a route that was and has remained popular with many Chinese Malaysians who, like Li himself, had received some Chinese-language education in Malaysia. Li graduated from National Taiwan University in 1971 and later received postgraduate degrees in the United States. Li relinquished his Malaysian citizenship in 1987. Over the course of his career, Li has published several long novels and collections of short stories and essays; he has also worked as an editor, translator, and professor.
Chinese Art of the Cultural Revolution
Authors: Ma William H.
Published: September 2018

The art of the Cultural Revolution in China, created during the ten-year period from 1967 to 1977, includes a large variety of visual materials in different media. Generally characterized by unambiguous and heroic images that appealed to the masses, these artworks became powerful tools of political propaganda. Most scholars attribute the beginning of the Cultural Revolution to the 1965 play HaiRui Dismissed from Office. Written by Wu Han, a local Communist official, the play was a thinly veiled critique of Mao Zedong. Though semi-retired in the early 1960s, Mao was determined to hold on to power by launching a new revolution to reawaken young Chinese people and root out the counterrevolutionary and anti-proletarian elements in society. Under Mao’s directive, people, places, and things representing the Four Olds (Old Customs, Old Culture, Old Habits, and Old Ideas) were targeted and violently attacked by young people wearing red armbands and carrying the Little Red Book, a collection of quotes by Mao. Party officials, teachers, professors, authors, and artists had their homes raided and were publically dragged out by the Red Guards for public humiliation. In addition, historical and cultural sites were desecrated and vandalized. While the real violence only lasted the first few years, it set the tone of militarism and revolutionary fervor for the next decade, which permeated through all the arts.
Malfatti, Anita (1889–1964)
Authors: Siqueira Vera Beatriz
Published: September 2018

Anita Malfatti began her artistic training with her mother Bety, an American amateur artist. In 1910 she went to Berlin to study with Fritz Bürger, Lovis Corinth, and Ernst Bischoff-Culm. In late 1914 she traveled to New York to attend the Independent School of Art under the direction of Homer Boss. Following her return in 1916 to Brazil, Malfatti held a controversial solo exhibition in 1917, which was criticized harshly by the writer Monteiro Lobato but which received passionate appreciation from modernist intellectuals such as Oswald de Andrade and Marío de Andrade. In 1922 she participated in the Week of Modern Art as the chief representative of Brazilian modern painting. The following year she received a fellowship to study in Paris, where she stayed for five years. Influenced by the classical ideals of the École de Paris, during this time Malfatti transformed her vibrant and colorful technique into a more serene and intellectual style of painting that was not received with much enthusiasm upon her return to Brazil in 1928. She lost the leading role in Brazilian Modernism and decided to dedicate herself to depicting local figures and rural landscapes in a more traditional style. Anita Malfatti is considered a pioneer of Brazilian Modernism.
Oz, Amos (1939– )
Authors: Grunberg Karen
Published: September 2018

The Hebrew author Amos Oz (born Amos Klausner)—an essayist, professor of literature at Ben Gurion University of the Negev, and active contributor to Israeli and international media on literary and political matters—is best known for his internationally regarded prose fiction. He was born in Jerusalem during the British Mandate period and at the age of 15 left for Kibbutz Hulda, where he lived for three decades before moving in 1986 to the southern Israeli city of Arad. His first collection of short stories, Artsot ha-tan [Where the Jackals Howl] was published in 1965. His novels and stories have been translated into over thirty languages and have garnered worldwide acclaim and prestigious literary prizes, including the French Légion d'Honneur (1997), the German Heinrich Heine Prize (2008), the Italian Primo Levi Prize (2008), the National Jewish Book Award (2006) and every major Israeli literary prize, among them the Bialik Prize (1986), the Israel Prize (1998), and the Jerusalem-Agnon Prize (2006). An advocate of peace with the Palestinians through a two-state solution and a mainstay of the Zionist Left in Israel, Oz was a founder of the peace organization Shalom Achshav (Peace Now) and has been its chief spokesperson.
Cholamandal Artists’ Village
Authors: Bhagat Ashrafi S.
Published: September 2018

The Cholamandal Artists’ Village is the residential-cum-cultural center situated in Injambakkam at Chennai, Tamilnadu, South India. Established by the artist K.C.S. Paniker [1911–1975] along with a group of his fellow artists in April 1966, it resides on 8.4 acres of land. The main aim in establishing this center was to offer artists the opportunity to practice professionally after graduation. This major concern led Paniker to think about establishing studio facilities or a commune where artists would have workspace and opportunities for interaction and creative experimentation, while simultaneously generating a parallel income by creating artistic crafts that would be sold through the Artists’ Handicrafts Association, which he founded in 1963. Among the first group of artists who moved into the village in May 1966 were K. Jayapal Panniker, V. Viswanathan, K.R. Harie, K.M. Adimoolam, C. Dakshinamoorthy, K. Ramanujam and A.C. Mamman. They lived and worked in trying and hazardous conditions. Others who settled there later included S.G. Vasudev, Paramasivam, P.S. Nandhan, K.V. Haridasan, and C. Douglas. Cholamandal also saw two women artists purchasing land with an avowed idea of marking their presence within a male dominated community. They were Anila Jacob and Arnawaz Driver. Today a museum has been established on the site, named after its founder. The K.C.S. Paniker Museum of Madras Movement contains many works of those seminal artists who contributed to the Madras Art Movement. Commercial galleries, Indigo and Labernum, offer space for exhibitions.
S. Fischer Verlag
Authors: Barndt Kirsten
Published: September 2018

Founded in Berlin in 1886 by Samuel Fischer, S. Fischer Verlag quickly became one of the most important publishing houses of German and European modernism. Émile Zola and Henrik Ibsen headlined the publisher’s first list of authors. The company went on to bring European and world literature to the German reading public, including works by Joseph Conrad, John Dos Passos, and Virginia Woolf. Yet the main focus of S. Fischer Verlag was to launch important new German-language writers who would soon come to shape the canon of modernism, including Gerhart Hauptmann, Thomas Mann, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Hermann Hesse, Arthur Schnitzler, Franz Werfel, Robert Musil, and Alfred Döblin.

During the first decade of its existence, S. Fischer Verlag was instrumental in shaping naturalist drama in Germany, with Gerhart Hauptmann as its leading literary voice. This success was due to an engagement on various fronts: the founding of a private theatre association, the Freie Bühne (Free Stage), where new plays could premiere despite censorship; the promotion of naturalism in the publisher’s own literary journal; and the publishing concept of ‘Collected Works’. These multi-volume editions of complete works by living writers successfully accelerated the canonization of many of Fischer’s authors, adding economic and cultural value in the process.
Skrypnyk, Leonid (1893–1929)
Authors: Ilnytzkyj Oleh S.
Published: September 2018

Leonid Skrypnyk was a major Ukrainian futurist prose writer, literary and cultural theoretician, photographer, a close collaborator of Mykhail' Semenko and the Futurist journal Nova generatsiia (New Generation, 1927–1930). He died prematurely from tuberculosis. Skrypnyk came to literature and art with an engineering and aviation background, having also worked in the Ukrainian film industry, bringing a rational, analytical and anti-sentimental attitude to his writings. He published on photography, film, and cultural theory, contributing to the theory of Panfuturism. Skrypnyk's prose legacy is small but important, consisting of a novel, a short story and two fragments from an incomplete novel. His major work—The Intellectual. A Screened Novel in Six parts with a Prologue and Epilogue—was a hybrid, so-called, ‘destructive’ genre combining a screenplay and novel, complemented by ‘authorial’ comments, and printed with visual typographic effects. The Intellectual is a cerebral dissection of ‘bourgeois’ mores as they re-emerged in the post-revolutionary period. In his cultural theory, Skrypnyk took the radical futurist position that most traditional arts were antiquated and should be destroyed or changed through experimentation. Some of his works appeared under the pseudonyms ‘M. Lans'kyi’ and ‘Levon Lain’.
Tucholsky, Dr Kurt (1890–1935)
Authors: Fröhlich Sören
Published: September 2018

Kurt Tucholsky was an important and widely-read author, poet, satirist, and editor of small literary forms during the Weimar Republic. He was a prolific writer of satires, cabaret songs, and poems that bespoke the specific scenes of Berlin and Germany between the World Wars. Today he is widely known for two playful, erotic romances, Rheinsberg and Schloß Gripsholm, both of which he wrote after romantic weekend escapes with lovers. Tucholsky called for a radical renewal of German culture and society in his articles for the Weltbühne and the Vossische Zeitung, always adjusting his tone and argument with an eye to his audiences. After his military service in the First World War, Tucholsky became a powerful voice for bourgeois, left-wing humanism, and an active, antimilitarist, anti-fascist, anti-dogmatist, and enemy of demagogues. His use of transparent pseudonyms offered no protection against political and legal persecution, and his constant travels led him to live in Berlin, Paris, Denmark, and Sweden, where he settled and died of a narcotic overdose in a hospital in 1935.
Ultraísmo
Authors: Vanderbosch Dagmar
Published: September 2018

Ultraísmo is an early twentieth-century art movement which developed in Spain around 1920 and was introduced to Argentina by Jorge Luis Borges in 1921. It was strongly influenced by European avant-garde movements, particularly Cubism and Dadaism, and by the Chilean poet Vicente Huidobro’s Creationism. The poets of Ultraísmo rejected the fin de siècle aesthetics of Spanish and Spanish-American modernism and experimented with the graphic and acoustic dimensions of poetry, emphasising rhythm over rhyme.

The origins of Ultraísmo go back to late 1918, when Vicente Huidobro visited Madrid for a short period, and Rafael Cansinos Assens, host of a literary circle in the Café Colonial, wrote the first Ultraist Manifesto, published in the magazine Grecia in January 1919 (Videla 1963: p. 27). Other founding texts of the movement are El movimiento ultraísta español and Manifiesto Vertical, both written by Guillermo de Torre in 1920. The movement of Ultraísmo was oriented both toward Europe and Spanish America. Ultraísmo adopted ideas from different European avant-garde movements in an effort to reduce the cultural distance between Spain and the rest of Europe, rather than develop an original programme. Their poetry gives importance to images and metaphors, experiments with typography and calligrams, rejects punctuation and often rhyme, and focuses on poetic rhythm. Ultraísmo developed in Spanish America when Jorge Luis Borges, who had spent several years in Spain and had published poems in Ultraist magazines, introduced the movement in the literary circles of Buenos Aires upon his return to Argentina in 1921.
Ch’oe Sŭng-hŭi (1911–1969)
Authors: Van Zile Judy
Published: September 2018

Known as the Dancing Princess of the Peninsula, based on the title of a Japanese-made film in which she appeared (Hanto no Maihimei), Ch’oe Sŭng-hŭi’s life and career spanned the volatile years of the Japanese occupation of Korea (1910–45), two world wars, the Korean War, and the division of the Korean peninsula into the Republic of Korea (South Korea) and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (North Korea). Despite these complex circumstances, her favored status with different governments at different times allowed her to travel in Asia, Europe, and North and Latin America, and provided extensive support for her dance activities during at least part of her time in North Korea. Her early training, together with opportunities to see contemporaneous developments in the performing arts during her travels, contributed to her evolving dance aesthetic, which, as it progressed, traversed stages exemplifying modernism’s diverse manifestations in the rejection and revision of tradition, attraction to images of an "other," and embracing of experimentation. Ultimately, Ch’oe made important contributions to what constitutes distinctively Korean dance icons in the twenty-first century.
De Stijl (1917–1932)
Authors: Johnson Michael
Published: September 2018

De Stijl (The Style) was an avant-garde artistic group founded in the Netherlands in 1917. The name was also applied to a journal used to propagate the group’s theories and published between 1917 and 1932. Led by the painters Theo Van Doesburg and Piet Mondrian, the group developed an abstract, elemental style based upon primary colors, geometric planes and right angles. Pursuing spiritual harmony based upon mathematical order, De Stijl formulated a universal language of pure form and color. This became paradigmatic of modernist visual art and design.

In 1915 the painter and theorist Theo van Doesburg encountered the work of Piet Mondrian, who had developed a visual style consisting of primary colors and asymmetrical, orthogonal grids. Mondrian was inspired by the mystical ideas of the Theosophists, particularly the eccentric mathematician M.H.J. Schoenmaekers, who devised a Neo-Platonic philosophy based upon pure geometric form. Influenced by Schoenmaekers’ publications The New Image of the World (1915) and Principles of Plastic Mathematics (1916), Mondrian developed an artistic philosophy known as Neo-Plasticism (Nieuwe Beelding):

This new plastic idea will ignore the particulars of appearance, that is to say, natural form and colour. On the contrary, it should find its expression in the abstraction of form and colour, that is to say, in the straight line and the clearly defined primary colour … [This art allows] only primary colors and non-colours, only squares and rectangles, only straight and horizontal or vertical line.
Glasser, Sylvia (1940–)
Authors: Davies Cordova Sarah
Published: September 2018

Over the course of a career that stretches across from the regime of apartheid through the transition and into the establishment of a democratic republic, Sylvia Glasser has contributed significantly to dance and education in South Africa. As "Magogo" or "Mother" to the dancers in her company and training programs, Glasser contested the separatist premises of apartheid and made manifest, without militancy, with bodies in movement, cultures that were banished by apartheid. Glasser received the 1996 FNB Vita Special Achievement Award for her development of a unique, dynamic South African contemporary choreographic practice and dance style and for her company’s ongoing dance education and outreach programs in the communities. She was honored as South African "National Living Human Treasure and Foremost Pioneer" in 2000; garnered the Tunkie Arts and Culture Trust Lifetime Achievement Award in 2005; and earned the National Tribute to Women in the Arts and Culture Sector in 2010 for her contributions to South African modern dance and to society’s fabric. At the forefront of South African modern dance from the late 1970s onwards, Glasser’s explorations of South African rituals, music and dance together with her training in Western modern dance led her to develop a distinct style she calls Afrofusion, which reflects her philosophy of integrity and respectful cultural sensitivity and that blends elements from South African culture with various choreographic structures underpinning Western modern dance.
Guangdong Modern Dance Company 广东现代舞团
Authors: Wilcox Emily E.
Published: September 2018

The Guangdong Modern Dance Company (GMDC) is China’s first professional modern dance performance group. GMDC was founded in 1992 as the "Guangdong Experimental Modern Dance Company" under the leadership of founding director Yang Meiqi (杨美琦) and artistic director Willy Tsao (曹诚渊), and with approval from the provincial government of Guangdong, China. GMDC received early support from American Dance Festival chairman Charles Reinhart and the Asian Cultural Council. Exchange programs facilitated by these groups in the United States were instrumental to the institution of modern dance in China after the 1980s. GMDC’s past artistic directors include Willy Tsao (1992–8 and 2004–7), Yang Meiqi (1998–2000), Gao Chengming (高成明, 2000–4), and Pun Siu-fai (潘少辉, 2007–12). Together with the modern dance program established by Yang Meiqi at the Guangdong Dance School (joint with the Beijing Dance Academy), GMDC has cultivated the core artistic base for modern dance in China and has helped establish Chinese modern dance on the international stage. Beijing Dance Academy, Beijing Dance LDTX, Hong Kong City Contemporary Dance Company, Jin Xing Dance Theatre of Shanghai, and TAO Body Theatre all draw leading modern dance artists from the early Guangdong school. Each summer, GMDC hosts China’s most important modern dance festival and summer camp, attracting students and teachers from around China and the world.
Modern Folk Dance
Authors: Walkowitz Daniel J.
Published: September 2018

Modern folk dance is a turn of the twentieth-century revivalist practice based upon a participatory dance form originating within village-based ethnic communities of northern Europe. It arose as part of the effort to define the modern European nation-state in the last half of the nineteenth century and gained most of its adherents in the United States and northern Europe. In the face of rapid industrialization, revivalists celebrated traditional dances with roots in the premodern medieval and Renaissance eras that they associated with a pristine, rural idyll in order to revitalize subalterns who they imagined as a "foreign race" and adapt it to modern life.
Agitprop Theatre
Authors: Filewod Alan
Published: September 2018

Now widely used as a catchall term to describe politically combative or oppositional art, "agitprop" originated from the early Soviet conjunction of propaganda (raising awareness of an issue) and agitation (exciting an emotional response to the issue), as theorized by Lenin in What Is To Be Done (1902) and institutionalized in the many departments and commissions of Agitation and Propaganda in the USSR and the Comintern after the Russian Revolution. The portmanteau term conveys the terse telegraphic efficiencies of Bolshevik bureaucratic rhetoric. Considered both as a mode of artistic production and a set of formal characteristics, agitprop had an immense impact on modernist cultural practice, particularly in graphic design, visual art, and theater.

In the theater, agitprop developed in Russia and Germany as a mobile form of exhortative revolutionary theater designed for quick outdoor performance. It was adaptive to location, audience, and cast, and suited the sightlines and acoustics of outdoor performance in found spaces. Short phrases, heavy cadence, and repetition allowed performance to project through noisy and unruly audiences. The form achieved widespread popularity in the brief period between the mid-1920s and the coalescence of the Popular Front in 1934, when artistic and political radicalisms aligned in a vision of an artistic practice mobilized by international proletarian modernity; in this, agitprop was theorized as the theatricalization of modernity.
Truffaut, François (1932–1984)
Authors: Ionita Maria
Published: September 2018

François Truffaut was a French film director, actor, and film critic, best known for being one of the founders of the French New Wave—a movement he helped usher in with his film Les Quatre cents coups (The 400 Blows, 1959)—a realistic, compassionate tale of youthful alienation and rebellion.
Barnet, Boris (1902–1965)
Authors: Adriaensens Vito
Published: September 2018

Boris Barnet (b. June 18, 1902, Moscow, Russia; d. January 8, 1965, Riga, Latvia) was a Russian actor, director, and professional boxer. He made his debut as an actor in Lev Kuleshov’s comedy Neobychainye priklyucheniya mistera Vesta v strane bolshevikov (The Extraordinary Adventures of Mr West in the Land of the Bolsheviks) (1924) along with Vsevolod Pudovkin, after they both famously attended Kuleshov’s three-year workshop on film principles that spawned the film. Barnet inherited Kuleshov’s montage principles, consisting of the combination of American-style fast cutting, combined with avant-garde techniques from French Impressionism and German Expressionism, thus setting it apart from its "dull" predecessors. For Kuleshov, the film came together in the editing room, where he insisted on the importance of the relationship between shots and scenes. Barnet debuted with the contemporary spy serial Miss Mend (1926), and became well known for his swiftly paced comedies; he was therefore somewhat of an anomaly in the propaganda-driven Soviet montage cinema. In his two most celebrated comedies, Devushka s korobkoi (The Girl with the Hatbox) (1927) and Dom na Trubnoi (The House on Trubnaya Square) (1928), Barnet took on the speed of modern city life and translated it into an elating style by combining the visual characteristics of Dziga Vertov with the rhythm and acting of someone like Buster Keaton. In the sound era, Barnet continued to impress internationally with lyrical masterpieces such as the understated Great War ensemble piece Okraina (Outskirts) (1933) and the impressionistic fisherman’s drama U samogo sinego morya (By the Bluest of Seas) (1936).
Delluc, Louis (1890–1924)
Authors: Fairfax Daniel
Published: September 2018

A prolific film reviewer and director of eight films in the early 1920s, Louis Delluc is renowned for being France’s first film critic—a justifiable status to the extent that he was the first figure to develop and apply specifically cinematic criteria in his reception of films. Delluc began as a theater critic and playwright before turning to film reviewing in 1917, after exposure to the nascent Hollywood cinema of Griffith, DeMille, and Chaplin. In the seven years up to his premature death, he wrote for publications including Le Film, Paris-Midi, Le Journal du Ciné-Club, and Cinéa, and developed a literary, often ironic writing style privileging a radically subjective approach to the cinematic viewing experience over the establishment of objective artistic norms.
Ivory, James (1928–)
Authors: Winter Caroline
Published: September 2018

James Frances Ivory is an American film director and co-owner of Merchant Ivory Productions. He and his partner, Ismail Merchant, a film producer, formed Merchant Ivory in 1961, and they collaborated closely with Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, a novelist and screenwriter. Although Ivory directed a few films set in modern India and New York, he is best known for his adaptations of novels and short stories by writers including Henry James, E.M. Forster, Jean Rhys, John Cheever, and Jhabvala. He and Merchant Ivory are so strongly identified with the genre of period drama that these are sometimes referred to as "Merchant-Ivory films."

Ivory has won numerous accolades, both for Merchant Ivory films and for his own work. For each of his films A Room with a View (1985), Howards End (1992), and The Remains of the Day (1993), he received Academy Award nominations for Best Director; Golden Globe nominations for Best Director, Motion Picture; and Directors Guild of America awards for Outstanding Directorial Achievement in Motion Pictures. He won lifetime achievement awards from the Directors Guild of America in 1995, from the Savannah Film and Video Festival in 2000, and from Camerimage in 2003.
Tati, Jacques (1907–1982)
Authors: Ionita Maria
Published: September 2018

Jacques Tati (born Jacques Tatischeff) was a French director and actor. Despite a very small output—only six feature films and three shorts—he is considered one of the most influential comedy directors of the twentieth century. He is best known for creating the character of Monsieur Hulot—a slightly anachronistic, bumbling gentleman—whom he played in four films: Les Vacances de M. Hulot (M. Hulot’s Holiday, 1953), Mon Oncle (My Uncle, 1958), Play Time (1967), and Trafic (Traffic, 1971). Tati had a complex Russian, Dutch, French, and Italian ancestry (his paternal grandfather was a general in the Russian Imperial Army and came from nobility) and grew up under relatively affluent circumstances.
The Bicycle Thief (1948)
Authors: Catrickes Maria Alexandra
Published: September 2018

Ladri di biciclette (The Bicycle Thief, 1948) is a neorealist film by Vittorio De Sica, considered modern and revolutionary because it radically broke with pre-World War II Hollywood cinematic codes by using real people instead of actors and telling the story of an ordinary man.
Zheng Zhengqiu (郑正秋) (1889–1935)
Authors: Wang Jason
Published: September 2018

Zheng Zhengqiu (Chinese: 郑正秋, born as Zheng Fangze, 郑芳泽) (December 4, 1889 to July 16, 1935) was a Chinese filmmaker and screenwriter, and one of the founding members of Chinese modern cinema. In 1913, Zheng (co-director, screenwriter), with Zhang Shichuan (co-director, producer), produced the first Chinese drama film, Die for marriage (or, The Difficult Couple, Chinese: 难夫难妻, or 洞房花烛), which laid the foundation for the forms of early Chinese motion pictures and enabled Chinese cinematic innovation to take its modern shape.
Nativism
Authors: Pokhrel Arun Kumar , Pillai Sharon
Published: September 2018

Nativism in modernist literature asserts the primacy of personal and collective identity mediated through language, culture, geography, religion and race. In the defense of local identity and cultural particularity, Nativism stresses the values of the native rooted to a particular place and the distinctive social, cultural and geographical qualities of being native. This essentialist Euro-American view of Nativist identity promotes the superiority of any one group, culture and race over other groups, cultures and races, while overlooking similar movements in other parts of the world. So Nativism remains a highly problematic term within the larger field of global modernist studies.
Nazi Modernism
Authors: Maertz Gregory
Published: September 2018

Nazi Modernism is not a contradiction in terms, even if Nazi-era rhetoric and propaganda directed against Entartete Kunst powerfully suggested that this was the case. Indeed, in addition to inaugurating a new style of political leadership (borrowed from Fascist Modernism) based on myths of national regeneration and the exploitation of culture to achieve political ends, National Socialism left its indelible aesthetic imprint everywhere and became synonymous with all things new, technologically advanced, and ‘modern’, including the invention of the first operational jet fighter and ballistic missile, the ‘People’s Car’, the first national highway system, the Autobahn, and fashion and footwear innovations spearheaded by Hugo Boss and the Dassler brothers, Adolf and Rudolf.
Structuralism
Authors: Lundell Michael , Pecora Vincent P.
Published: September 2018

Structuralism, generally described, is a twentieth-century intellectual movement associated with linguistic studies in Europe, despite its vast applicability and many adherents. An initial aim of structural linguistics was to investigate – in greater detail than previously – the way language functions as a network of signification. Structuralism’s goal also typically derives from the question of whether universal truth can be revealed in this network in ways that define the constitution of thought. Structuralism focused on the whole of language, the ‘structure’ of the totality, over its individual parts or their historical development. The principles of Structuralism and its later transformations found widespread application outside of linguistics, particularly in anthropology, sociology, literary studies, semiotics, film, musicology, psychology, and philosophy.
Gutai
Authors: Clarke Neilton
Published: September 2018

Gutai Art Association [Gutai Bijutsu Kyōkai] [具体美術協会] was an influential post-World War II Japanese avant-garde collective with an outward-looking mindset. Founded in 1954 in Ashiya, near Osaka, by Japanese artist Jirō Yoshihara (1905–1972), it had fifty-nine members over the course of its eighteen-year lifespan. Gutai—meaning ‘‘embodiment’’ and ‘‘concreteness’’—saw its artists engage a plethora of media and presentation contexts, often beyond gallery walls and frequently with more emphasis upon process than on finished product. A unifying factor among its multifarious tendencies was a spirit of adventure, exemplified by Yoshihara’s oft-cited call to ‘‘do what no one has done before.’’ Embracing performance, theatricality, and outdoor manifestations, with a characteristic impromptu modus operandi, Gutai’s experimental tendencies and liberal ideals breathed new life into art and into a society remaking itself following the cataclysm and repressions of World War II. As Japan entered the 1960s, consolidating its economy and engagement with the rest of the world, the decidedly offbeat stance of Gutai’s earlier years assumed a cooler demeanor, due in part to nation-wide technological advancement, growing internationalism, and an evolving audience base and receptivity. The Gutai group disbanded following Yoshihara’s passing in 1972.