bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Eastern Art Group (Tung fang/ Ton Fan hua hui)
Authors: McIntyre Sophie
Published: September 2018

The eastern art group, or Tung fang/ Ton Fan hua hui, was one of Taiwan’s first modern art groups. It was formed in November 1956 by a group of artists who came to Taiwan from Mainland China during the mid- to late 1940s, and most were graduates from the Taipei Municipal Teachers College. Although their artistic styles were dissimilar, these artists shared a common purpose in modernizing Chinese painting by synthesizing traditional Chinese aesthetic values with Western modern art forms, particularly American abstraction. The Eastern art group evolved under the guidance of artist-educator Li Chung-sheng (Li Zhongsheng, 李仲生), who arrived in Taiwan in 1949 from Mainland China. Li played an instrumental role in the development of modern art in Taiwan, mentoring many artists, including members of the Eastern art group, and he is often referred to in Taiwan as "the father of modern art." Influenced by surrealism and abstract expressionism, he encouraged his students to delve into the subconscious and to embrace free and spontaneous artistic expression.

Artists in this group included Chen Tao-ming (Chen Daoming, 陳道明), Ho Kan (Huo Gang, 霍剛) (original name Huo Xuegang, 霍學剛), Hsiao Chin (Xiao Qin, 萧蕭勤), Hsiao Ming-hsien (Xiao Mingxian, 蕭明賢) (original name Xiao Long, 蕭龍), Hsia Yang (夏陽) (original name, Hsia Zuxiang夏祖湘), Li Yuan-chia (Li Yuanjia, 李元佳), Ouyang Wen-yuan (歐陽文苑), and Wu Hao (吳昊) (original name Wu Shilu, 吳世祿). These eight core members were often referred to as "The Eight Bandits" (Ba da xiang ma, 八大響馬) because of their rejection of artistic convention and of academic training.
Penn, Arthur (1922–2010)
Authors: Bane Charles
Published: September 2018

Arthur Penn was an American stage director, television producer, and filmmaker. During the 1950s, Penn’s successful run as a director of television dramas led to an offer to direct the feature film The Left Handed Gun (1958). Throughout the 1960s, Penn alternated between film and stage work, directing some of Hollywood’s biggest stars.
Bergman, Ernst Ingmar (July 14, 1918–July 30, 2007)
Authors: Humphrey Daniel
Published: September 2018

Perhaps the exemplification of the European art-film director throughout the late 1950s and the 1960s, Ingmar Bergman developed what would become an almost instantly recognizable aesthetic and catalogue of concerns – widely imitated, often satirized – in a theater and cinema career spanning seven decades. Born in Uppsala, Sweden, of parents in a troubled marriage, Bergman spent his childhood largely at the home of a beloved maternal grandmother. This served in part as an escape from his relationship with his cold chaplain father. Innumerable biographical events and familial dynamics dating to his childhood would eventually be found in thinly disguised dramatic form throughout Bergman’s oeuvre, which often involves sympathetically portrayed strong and intelligent women and harshly regarded male authority figures. This is particularly the case in his final theatrical motion picture, Fanny och Alexander (1982) (Fanny and Alexander).

Bergman initially came to the cinema from the Swedish theater, where he, like Orson Welles in the U.S. a decade earlier, managed to establish a formidable reputation by his mid-20s. Perhaps as a result of his work for the stage, which Bergman continued throughout the rest of his life, the acting in the director’s films is always particularly impressive; not surprisingly, his films are often set in the milieu of the performing arts, with performance and creative expression as recurrent themes.
Ruttmann, Walter (1889–1941)
Authors: Juan Suárez A
Published: September 2018

Born in Frankfurt, Ruttmann studied architecture and design, and started his career as a painter and lithographer before turning to film. His earliest films, Lichtspiel: Opus I–IV (1921–1925), were composed of animated shapes made of cardboard, wood, and plasticine. Some of these films were hand-colored. They are quite close in conception and execution to the experiments in "absolute film" – or "optical music" – developed by Hans Richter (the Rhythmus series) and Viking Eggeling (Diagonal Symphony, 1922) in the early 1920s. The success of the Lichtspiel series earned Ruttmann commercial film commissions. He designed some special effects for Lotte Reiniger’s silhouette animation The Adventures of Prince Achmed (1926) and made an animated sequence for Fritz Lang’s Die Nibelungen (1924).

Ruttman’s fame, however, rests on his participation in Berlin: Symphonie of a Great City (Berlin: Simphonie der Grossstadt, 1927), an emblematic city film scripted by Carl Mayer and filmed mostly by Karl Freund, which Ruttmann himself edited. Occasionally criticized for its detached, superficial rendition of urban life, the film was successful with audiences and immensely influential on subsequent filmmakers.
Švankmajer, Jan
Authors: Ivins-Hulley Laura
Published: September 2018

Jan Švankmajer (1934–) is a Czech surrealist visual artist, primarily known for his film works. He studied puppetry and theatre at university and began his career working in Prague theatre. In 1964, he made his first short film, The Last Trick of Mr. Schwarzewald and Mr. Edgar (Poslední trik pana Schwarcewalldea a pana Edgara), and over the next few decades, he continued to make short films. Many of these are stop motion animations featuring everyday objects like chairs, suits, or raw meat, and were occasionally banned by the socialist authorities for their alleged subversiveness. In 1970, he and his wife Eva Švankmajerová (1940–2005) joined the Czech and Slovak Surrealist Group. He has participated in many of the group’s exhibitions and writes poems and essays for its publication, Analogon. After working exclusively in shorts for almost 25 years, Švankmajer directed his first feature-length film in 1988, Alice (Něco z Alenky), inspired by Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland. He has gone on to direct five additional feature-length films, and as of this writing, is in production for his seventh, an adaptation of Karel and Josef Čapek’s satirical play, Pictures from the Insects’ Life. All of his features include stop motion animation sequences.
Vertov, Dziga (b. January 2, 1896, Bialystok, Poland; d. February 12, 1954, Moscow, Russia)
Authors: Eubanks Ivan
Published: September 2018

Derived from the sound of a working film-reel and the word "vertet´sia" (to spin), Dziga Vertov is the pseudonym of David (aka Denis) Kaufman, a Soviet documentarian and prominent avant-garde director. Like his Futurist and Constructivist associates, Vertov believed machines would liberate people from their physical and cognitive limitations. Viewing cinema as a hybrid human-mechanical mode of perception, he asserted that it could transcend subjectivity and unveil aspects of reality not otherwise accessible, because the camera’s ability to show us "life caught unawares" (Kino-Eye, 41) helped the edited film product to "show and elucidate life as it is" (Kino-Eye, 47).

Vertov’s neo-empiricist methodology originated with his early journalistic experience making a newsreel series called Kino-nedelia (Cinema-Week; 1918–1919). In 1919, he formed a group named "Kino Glaz" (Cinema Eye), along with his editor, Elizaveta Svilova (whom he married in 1923) and his brother Mikhail Kaufman. The members called themselves "kinoki" (cine-eyes). Vertov outlined their principles in "We: Variant of a Manifesto" (1922). Decrying theatrical cinema, he insisted that film’s potential to reveal truth could only be realized when filmmakers overcame their addiction to scripts, actors, costumes, and sets. From his perspective, the production methods of theatrical cinema obligated filmmakers to peddle illusions and thereby perpetuated bourgeois values.
World Film News
Authors: Davis Thomas S.
Published: September 2018

World Film News was a publication that advanced the visibility of the documentary film movement and hosted wide-ranging debates over film, politics, and aesthetics. The magazine was preceded by the Edinburgh based journal Cinema Quarterly (1932–1935) and succeeded by Documentary Newsletter (1940–1947). The first issue was funded by Basil Wright and initially took over the audience for Cinema Quarterly. John Grierson, the brash but passionate leader of the British Documentary Film Movement, exercised editorial control over the magazine, but was careful to include articles by distinguished writers, filmmakers, and intellectuals that might lend a certain gravity to the magazine and his own ambitions. Graham Greene, J. B. Priestley, George Bernard Shaw, Sergei Eisenstein, and Vselovod Pudovkin contributed articles and essays; the magazine also listed W. H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood as correspondents. As other prominent film journals such as Sight and Sound had ceased to cover documentary films, World Film News became an important venue for propagating ideas about documentary, asserting its cultural sophistication (which was conveyed most baldly by listing its most prominent subscribers and contributors in each issue), and debating technical issues relating to amateur actors, sound, editing, and funding models as well as covering the burgeoning global film scene.
Bodenwieser, Gertrud (1890–1959)
Authors: Card Amanda
Published: September 2018

Gertrud Bodenwieser was an Austrian-born dancer, teacher, and choreographer who made major contributions on two continents to the development of what she called New Dance, and what others have called modern dance, or Ausdruckstanz. Since the 1940s she has enjoyed the status of a dance pioneer in Australia. More recently, her legacy has been recognized in her native Austria, allowing her a place amongst Vienna’s interwar modernist avant-garde. In both countries Bodenwieser is remembered as an inspired experimenter who stirred a prodigious loyalty among her students. Her early experimentation solidified into a formal technique, which she imparted through her teaching in Vienna in the 1920s and 1930s and in Sydney in the 1940s and 1950s. Her pedagogic principles supported her choreographic practice, as did her belief in the interconnectedness of all the art forms. In her works of pure abstraction or her dance dramas, music was a constant inspiration and improvisation a key process in the realization of her kinetic and thematic ideas.
New Dance Group, New York City, 1932–2009
Authors: Geduld Victoria Phillips
Published: September 2018

Established in 1932 by six young Jewish women in New York City, New Dance Group (NDG) trained leaders of the American modern dance. Founded with the desire to combine radical left-wing politics with dance, NDG proclaimed in its first anniversary bulletin in March 1933: "Dance is a Weapon of the Class Struggle." The early NDG included concert dance soloists, a men’s group, ensembles that performed in union halls, and a folk dance unit.
Shinmuyong (ca. 1926)
Authors: Son Okju
Published: September 2018

Shinmuyong means literally "New Dance" in Korean, but today it is categorized as creative Korean dance. In the early 20th century, Ausdruckstanz (Expressionist Dance) from Germany had a decisive influence on Japanese modern dancers. This kind of dance was introduced to Korea in 1926 when Japanese dance innovator Ishii Baku (1886–1962) presented his work for the first time in Korea under the title of Shinmuyong, which was a translation of the German phrase Neuer Tanz. However, the meaning of the Shinmuyong changed radically in the 1930s and 1940s. After Ishii’s performance in Korea, several young Korean intellectuals decided to learn Western modern dance from Ishii in Japan. Although they learned modern dance especially based on German Ausdruckstanz, they choreographed their own dances with elements of traditional Korean dance in the 1930s. Furthermore, after a world tour in the late 1930s, the Shinmuyong dancers actively turned to creating a hybrid Asian dance form in the 1940s, so that Shinmuyong became a composite form. Choi Seung-hee (1911–1969) and Cho Taek-won (1907–1976), amongst others, are considered important representatives of Shinmuyong.
Selvon, Samuel (1923–1994)
Authors: Davis Thomas S.
Published: September 2018

Samuel Selvon was a Trinidadian writer whose vivid portraits of daily life in both the Caribbean and post-Second World War England garnered international acclaim. Selvon’s episodic storytelling, vernacular narration, and stylistic inventiveness have led critics past and present to classify his writing alongside both his modernist predecessors, and his postcolonial contemporaries. Selvon was born in Trinidad in 1923 to an East Indian father and an Anglo-Scottish mother. In his own words, he grew up as a ‘Creolized West Indian’. He worked as a wireless operator for the Royal Naval Reserve during the Second World. After the war ended in 1945, Selvon relocated to Port of Spain and began his early forays into journalism, contributing to The Trinidad Guardian and serving as the fiction editor for The Guardian Weekly. Selvon’s early stories and sketches, now collected in Foreday Morning, demonstrate his early preoccupation with the details of everyday life, a preoccupation that cuts across his writings. In 1950, somewhat disenchanted with what he called the ‘very complacent and easy going’ Trinidadian life, Selvon migrated to England on a boat that also carried the Barbadian novelist George Lamming.
Winfield, Hemsley (1907–1934)
Authors: Paris Carl
Published: September 2018

An early initiator of Black modern dance, Hemsley Winfield first gained recognition as an actor and director of the New Negro Art Theater in New York City. Galvanized by his success, Winfield founded the New Negro Art Theater Dance Group in 1931. Like other emerging African-American exponents of the new dance, including Edna Guy, Alison Burroughs, Ollie Burgoyne, and Charles Williams, Winfield consciously drew on the philosophy of the New Negro movement, which promoted the use of art to advance racial consciousness and heritage during the Harlem Renaissance. Despite his premature death at age 26, Winfield set a significant starting point for Black modern dance at the crossroads of the Harlem Renaissance, American modernist primitivism, and the emergent modern dance movement. In so doing, Winfield modeled new possibilities for male dance artists, along with his contemporaries Harald Kreutzberg and Ted Shawn.
Ferdinand de Saussure (26 November 1857 – 22 February 1913)
Authors: Siemers Ryan
Published: September 2018

The Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure received his doctorate from the University of Leipzig in 1880, taught at the École Pratique des Haute Études in Paris (1881–1891) and the Université de Genève (1991–1913). Saussure’s posthumously published Cours de Linguistique Générale (1915) was reconstructed by scholars from students’ notes taken at Saussure’s lectures between 1906 and 1911. Unlike previous linguists, Saussure focussed here on the synchronic (systematic) structure of language rather than the diachronic (historical) development of language, though he taught the latter as well. Saussure argued that signs were the arbitrary pairing of signifiers (sound images, or words) and signifieds (concepts), constituting a system in which tout se tient (everything connects with everything). (His approach to the sign was anticipated only by C. S. Pierce, founder of semiology.) Saussure’s linguistic signs are not "natural," but arbitrarily gain value (the capacity to act as a signifier) by means of their systematic and habitual differences from one another. The rules of the system as a whole, langue, function autonomously, allowing individual performances, or parole, within a given language (langage). The literary critic Roman Jakobson and the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss extended Saussure’s work into a theory of structuralism for the human sciences.
Duvivier, Julien (1896–1967)
Authors: Heitzman Kendall
Published: September 2018

Julien Duvivier was a Golden Age French film director active from the 1919 to the 1960s. He made a name for himself in the 1930s as the director of a series of films treating people on the down and out with a light touch. In Poil de carotte (1932), based on the novel by Jules Renard, a redheaded boy shunned by his parents makes his way in the world. Le paquebot Tenacity (S.S. Tenacity, 1934) shows two adventurers stuck in port trying to make their way to Canada (where there is less competition than in the United States), but falling in love in the meantime. In Un carnet de bal (Dance Program, 1937), a melodramatic mixture of pathos and comedy, a woman tracks down the men from her first dance card twenty years earlier.
Hawkins, Erick (1909–94)
Authors: Morris Gay
Published: September 2018

Erick Hawkins was a major twentieth-century American choreographer who created a poetic form of modern dance based on free-flowing movement. He also was an early proponent of objectivist or plotless dances that did not attempt to express an emotion or intellectual concept, but existed for their own sake. Hawkins had three distinct phases to his career: the first in ballet as a dancer and fledgling choreographer with Lincoln Kirstein’s interwar American Ballet and Ballet Caravan, then between 1939 and 1950 as a dancer and choreographer with the Martha Graham Company, and finally, from the 1950s onward, as a dancer, choreographer, and director of his own company and school. It was in this final and longest phase of his career that Hawkins created a personal movement vocabulary and a sensuous dance whose goal was direct, unmediated experience.
Leavis, F. R. (1895–1978)
Authors: Atkinson Kate
Published: September 2018

Frank Raymond Leavis was an influential, though controversial, literary critic and teacher who was raised and educated in Cambridge, England, where he eventually held a permanent academic position. In 1929, he married a student, Q. D. (Queenie Dorothy, née Roth [1906–81]), with whom he engaged in a lifelong intellectual partnership. Known for his uncompromising intellectual stances, Leavis built on the tradition of journalism-based criticism by articulating the role of the academic critic in English. After taking eight years to produce his first book, New Bearings in English Poetry (1932), Leavis published prolifically, covering topics in poetry, the novel, and English education, always seeking to address questions of the worth and objectives of reading. Leavis dedicated a large part of his career to interpretations of the work of modernist writers D. H. Lawrence and T. S. Eliot, of whom he claimed, ‘our time, in literature, may fairly be called the age of D. H. Lawrence and T. S. Eliot’; indeed, Eliot’s own critical writings from the 1930s were an important early influence on Leavis (Storer 54). Leavis had publicly antagonistic relationships with some scholars, including C. P. Snow; despite his intellectual combativeness, he is respected as one of the founders of the modern study of English literature.
Pani Darqui, Mario (1911–1993)
Authors: Santoyo-Orozco Ivonne
Published: September 2018

Mexican architect Mario Pani spent his formative years between Belgium, Italy, and France due to his father’s diplomatic posts. After graduating from the Écoles des Beaux-Arts (1934), he returned to Mexico just prior a period of massive urban transformation in Mexico City. During his first decades in Mexico, Pani worked intensively to establish his career, quickly winning his first commissions, perhaps the most important of which was the Hotel Reforma (1936), which Pani controversially took over from Carlos Obregón Santalicia. Indeed, his early career in Mexico saw him actively participating in many competitions against the most renowned architects of his time. In 1938 he founded the magazine Arquitectura/México (1938–1979) not only to disseminate contemporary architecture in Mexico but also to republish material from international magazines.

Over the course of his career, Pani designed a huge variety of projects. These included educational buildings, such as the National Conservatory of Music (1946), the National School of Teachers (1947), and his famous Rectory Building in Mexico City (1952); touristic complexes such as the Acapulco Yacht Club (1955); administrative centres like CondominioAcero in Monterrey (1959); and urban plans such as the Medical CenterMasterplan (with Jose Villagran Garcia, 1942), the University Campus of the National Autonomous University (with Enrique del Moral, 1952), among many others. However, Mario Pani is more commonly remembered for his housing projects.
Masābnī, Badī’ah
Authors: Shay Anthony
Published: September 2018

Badī’ah Masābnī was a professional actress, singer, and dancer from the Levant. She settled in Egypt in the 1920s and eventually opened a highly successful nightclub, Casino Badī’ah. The highlight of the variety shows, which featured both Egyptian and European dances, acts, and skits, were performances in which she often starred, especially as a comedienne. She is associated with the modernizing of belly dance from a static nineteenth-century dance to a new dance genre that became known as cabaret belly dance, with hundreds of thousands of devotees and practitioners around the world. The new dance genre, often called raqs sharqī (Oriental dance), which was included in her nightclub revue and later in Egyptian films, often featured a soloist accompanied by a chorus line, incorporated movements from ballet as well as elements from Hollywood films, and involved a new use of space. Masābnī also revolutionized the costume that is familiar to filmgoers and viewers of belly dance performances by dancing in an elaborately decorated brassiere with a long skirt slit up the sides, and a coin girdle. Her tumultuous life was profiled by the media throughout the Arab world, but in spite of her contributions to belly dance, she remains little known in the West.
Modernism and Latin American Classical Music
Authors: Herrera Eduardo
Published: September 2018

The idea of musical modernism in the Latin American classical music world was a particular aesthetically-oriented instance of a broader discourse that has been described as ‘modernist capitalist-cosmopolitan’. The general modernist discourse was centered on the binary opposition modern/traditional that naturalizes a particular notion of temporal condition with a value judgment—that which is ‘modern’ is new, recent, and more efficient, against that which is ‘traditional’ which is old, has been passed on, and is less efficient. By 1918, at the end of the Great War, the prevalent ideology of ’progress’ that was naturalized throughout industrialization in the 19th century had suffered its first major drawback. If society was progressing, how was it that Europe ended in such a wide and costly war? What was the place for artists in such conditions? Composers as diverse as Stravinsky, Schoenberg, Skryabin, and Busoni became associated with the notion of modernism. Self-proclaimed futurist artists in Italy during the 1910s like Luigi Russolo and Francesco Balilla Pratella, advocated for a music that incorporated the sounds of the industries and the ‘modem’ city. By localizing artistic production in the urban setting against the rural soundscapes, the concept of the ‘modern’ captured also space, making the rural to be associated with the idea of ‘traditional’. A final key aspect of this discursive construction of the ‘modern’ was the way in which it represented a paradigmatic shift from 19th century discourses that divided the world into ‘civilized’ and ‘primitive’ practices.
Nuevo Cine Cubano
Authors: Lanz Andy
Published: September 2018

Nuevo Cine Cubano refers to the postrevolutionary Cuban cinema that emerged in the years immediately following Fidel Castro’s rise to power. In March of 1959, various filmmakers and politicians (Alfredo Guevara, Julio García Espinosa, and Santiago Álvarez, among others) helped found the Cuban Institute of Cinematographic Art and Industry (ICAIC), the cinematic production and distribution arm of the Revolutionary government whose main purpose was to utilize film as a means of mass communication and mobilization. While Cuban films produced before the Revolution were of little aesthetic or critical import, ICAIC immediately began turning out works with significant social, political, and artistic value. 1960s Cuba witnessed a unique convergence of artistic and ideological avant-gardism, and while other areas of cultural expression suffered under strict vigilance from the regime’s hardliners, filmmakers enjoyed a relative degree of autonomy thanks to the efforts of, among others, Alfredo Guevara (then the president of ICAIC). The cinema became a space of open critical engagement with Revolutionary policies while it acted as a means of celebrating and capitalizing on the newly acquired cultural literacy of the Cuban people.
Cavalcanti, Alberto de Almeida (1897--1982)
Authors: Torres Hortelano Lorenzo J.
Published: September 2018

Alberto Cavalcanti was a Brazilian-born film director and producer who made significant contributions to documentary and post-war cinema. In 1926 he made his first film, Rien Que les Heures [Nothing but Time], in Paris, which was a predecessor of Walter Ruttmann’s Berlin: Die Sinfonie der Großstadt [Berlin: Symphony of a Big City] (1927) to which he also contributed. Together with Rien he created the prototype of the modernist city symphony, with no narrative story but having an internal structure that dramatized the documentary form. He was close to the surrealist movement which helped him to delve into the dark sides of reality, as in En rade [Sea Fever] (1928). In the 1930s he joined John Grierson’s GPO Film Unit (General Post Office) and became its most modernist director through his use of formalist editing techniques. Here he directed experimental short documentaries such as Coal Face (1935), based on a poem by W. H. Auden. In the 1940s he joined Ealing Studios where he made many films and mentored other directors. Of note during this period was a collective film, Dead of Night (1945), a classic of the fantasy genre. After leaving Ealing he made two films noir with strong social connotations: They Made Me a Fugitive (1947) and For Them that Trespass (1949). In Brazil, he was offered a position to teach cinema at the Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo and made one of his most powerful movies, O canto do mar [Song of the Sea] (1952), which tells the story of the exodus by a sertão family, fleeing from drought and misery.
Cummings, E. E. (1894–1962)
Authors: Hutchison Hazel
Published: September 2018

Edward Estlin Cummings was a prolific and iconoclastic figure in American poetry of the mid-twentieth century. He experimented with unconventional verse forms, often playfully disrupting syntax, punctuation, and typography, and creating a more flexible, visually active kind of poetry, which yet retained surprising lyric power. He was also a painter and dramatist.
Carnap, Rudolf (1891–1970)
Authors: Elder Bruce
Published: September 2018

Rudolf Carnap was a German-American philosopher, and was widely regarded as one of most important of the 20th century. Politically engaged and inclined toward utopianism, Carnap was a leading member of the Vienna Circle and a staunch advocate of the unity of science thesis, which held that the various physical sciences—physics, astronomy, chemistry, and biology—could be unified into a single overarching theory. He worked across numerous fields, including the foundations of probability, modal theory, inductive logic, and semantics. His principal philosophical method was logical analysis, the final goal of which, he explained, is to analyze all assertions of science and everyday life alike, to identify the method of verification for each proposition. This method is grounded in the anti-metaphysical verificationist principle, according to which a statement is meaningful only if a method of verifying it is available. Carnap himself was well aware that his philosophy shared in the same spirit as modernist art. In his preface to Die Logische Aufbau der Welt (1928) Carnap claims that there is "an inner kinship" between the attitude on which his philosophical work is founded, "and the intellectual attitude which presently manifests itself in entirely different walks of life; we feel this orientation in artistic movements."
Carpentier, Alejo (1904–1980)
Authors: Pardee Sheila
Published: September 2018

Alejo Carpentier, Cuban novelist and musicologist, formed important connections between the European and Latin American modern literature of the 20th century. He was a founder of the avant-garde Afro-Cuban movement, incorporating African heritage into Cuban art, theater, and music. Exiled in France from 1929–1939 for political dissent, he associated with surrealists and was for a time heavily influenced by their work. In France, he finished the novel he had started in a Cuban prison: ¡Ecue-Yamba-O! [Praise be to God!] (1933). Following his return to Cuba, a trip to Haiti inspired his novel, El reino de este mundo [The Kingdom of this World] (1948), an imaginative recreation of the Haitian revolution and its aftermath. In his prologue to this novel, he introduced the term lo real maravilloso Americano, or magical realism, as it was later known.
Chernikhov, Iakov (1889–1951)
Authors: Vronskaya Alla G.
Published: September 2018

Iakov Georgievich Chernikhov was born in Pavlograd, Yekaterinenskav Gubernia, in the Russian Empire (now Dnepropetrovskaya oblast, Ukraine) into an impoverished petit bourgeois Jewish family. Having shown a talent for art during childhood, as a teenager Chernikhov worked as an apprentice in a photographer’s workshop (having run away from home, where his desire to become an artist found little support) before beginning his studies at Odessa Art School (Odesskoe Khudozhestvennoe Uchilishche) in 1906–1914. After graduating from the School, Chernikhov entered the Academy of Arts in St. Petersburg, from which he received a diploma in architecture in 1925. Chernikhov’s training as both an artist and an architect determined his idiosyncratic approach to architectural form and his particular interest in the aspects of its representation.
The Black Arts Movement
Authors: Doss Crystal Gorham
Published: September 2018

The Black Arts movement (BAM) spanned the period from the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s and is considered an artistic extension of the Black Power movement. BAM writers aimed to produce explicitly political art and saw the artist as a political activist. Though it began in New York, the BAM was a national movement. It was also an intellectual and academic movement that changed how African American literature was valued and studied. BAM writers focused on telling the stories of the past, recovering the work of formerly unknown artists, and exploring the diversity of the contemporary Black experience. BAM artists frequently used African American Vernacular English. The BAM included authors of drama, poetry and prose. Key figures in this movement included Amiri Baraka (1934–2014), Sonia Sanchez (1934–), Nikki Giovanni (1943–), Maya Angelou (1928–2014), Gwendolyn Brooks (1917–2000) and Larry Neal (1937–1981). The BAM is unique among modernist artistic movements because of its political and social engagement. It influenced writers like Toni Morrison (1931–) and Alice Walker (1944–), and it inspired minority writers from other historically oppressed groups.
Kracauer, Siegfried (1889–1966)
Authors: Heitzman Kendall
Published: September 2018

Siegfried Kracauer was a German cultural critic and theorist. He wrote film and cultural criticism for the Frankfurter Zeitung in the 1920s and early 1930s. From 1933 to 1941 he was in exile in France before moving to the United States. He wrote criticism for various New York publications in the 1940s and 1950s. His major works include From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film (1947), Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality (1960) and the posthumously published History: The Last Things before the Last (1969). Kracauer is perhaps most famous for his essay ‘The Mass Ornament’ (1927), which was an exploration of the relationship of the geometrical patterns produced by the Tiller Girls, precision dance troupes popular across Europe and the United States at the time, to contemporary economic and political realities.
New Culture Movement (China)
Authors: Wang Jason
Published: September 2018

The New Culture Movement (Xīn Wénhuà Yùndòng 新文化运动) originated at Peking University during the 1910s. The movement’s ideologies were reflected in the phrase Old China (Jiu Zhong Guo旧中国), referring to the rejection of traditional Chinese culture, especially orthodox Confucianism and conventional gender inequality, and the promoting of Western cultural modernity (particularly democracy and science).
Takarazuka
Authors: Swain John D.
Published: September 2018

The Takarazuka Revue (Takarazuka kagekidan) is an all-female troupe founded by Kobayashi Ichizō (1873–1957) in 1913 as a device to generate business on the railway and hot springs resort owned and operated by himself and the Hankyū Railway. The troupe takes its name from the city of Takarazuka located just northwest of Osaka. The commercial promotion was such a success that the city is now better known for the Takarazuka Revue than for its hot springs. Today, the company has two large theaters, one in Takarazuka and one in Tokyo, and five troupes, Flower, Moon, Snow, Star and Cosmos, that take turns performing in Takarazuka, in Tokyo, and on national tours.
Webb, Beatrice (1858–1943) and Sidney (1859–1947)
Authors: Atkinson Kate
Published: September 2018

Beatrice and Sidney Webb were leading intellectual advocates of socialist reform in England. Beatrice Webb (née Potter) was born into a wealthy family, but her early experience as a researcher studying poverty in London with Charles Booth (1840–1916) confirmed her commitment to sociology and socialist values. Sidney Webb was from a lower middle-class family and entered civil service as a progressive member of the London County Council just before the two married in 1892.
Woolf, (Adeline) Virginia (1882–1941)
Authors: Randall Bryony
Published: September 2018

Virginia Woolf was one of the foremost literary innovators of the early twentieth century. A novelist, essayist, short-story writer and literary critic, she was also instrumental in disseminating the work of other key modernist writers, through the Hogarth Press which she ran with her husband Leonard Woolf. Author of such major works as Mrs Dalloway¸ To the Lighthouse and A Room of One’s Own, she was a key figure in the Bloomsbury Group of writers, artists and intellectuals active in the early twentieth century. Although her bouts of mental illness (culminating in her suicide by drowning in March 1941) for many years overshadowed appreciations of her literary output, she is now recognized as one of the most important figures in the literature and culture of the period, whether in terms of the feminist politics of her work, or her ground-breaking experiments with narrative form and technique.
Yoga
Authors: Thomas Priya A.
Published: September 2018

The term ‘yoga’ refers to a heterogeneous matrix of philosophies and practices that originated in India and developed into a school of thought sometime between 150 and 500 C. E. Reinterpreted and redacted in multiple religious traditions over the course of its two-thousand-year history, yoga’s dynamic and discontinuous textual and performance traditions are far from monolithic. Modern yoga – a predominantly corporeal practice of postures and breathing techniques – developed in India in the 1920s and is not considered to be a direct successor of yoga’s classical or medieval traditions. Rather, modern yoga’s physical reinventions are emblematic of the accretions and innovations that attended India’s colonial and postcolonial relationship to transnational modernities. A reconfiguration of existing indigenous traditions vis-à-vis transnational influences, modern yoga is the embodiment of hybrid discourses including, but not limited to, the international physical culture movement; the growth of scientific and medicalized discourses of the body; Secularism; the doctrine of progress; Esotericism both in the East and the West; and transnational mobility and migrations of diaspora. In this way, modern yoga’s encounter with multiple modernities reshaped its theoretical and corporeal dispositions, forging a performance practice based on the individual accumulation of physical techniques for psychosomatic health, fitness, and personal development.
Delaunay, Sonia (1885–1979)
Authors: Schroder Andressa
Published: September 2018

Sonia Delaunay, lately often referred to as Delaunay-Terk, was a painter and textile designer who, together with her husband Robert Delaunay, was the precursor of a movement described as Orphism by the poet and critic Guillaume Apollinaire. Sonia Delaunay was born as Sarah Stern in Gradizhsk in the Russian Empire, which is now part of the Ukraine. She was the youngest child of a poor Jewish couple. At the age of five, she was adopted by her mother’s brother Henri Terk, who worked as a lawyer in Saint Petersburg, and renamed Sonia Terk. She then had the opportunity to grow up in an environment surrounded by music and art and to learn several languages.
Der Sturm
Authors: Anger Jenny
Published: September 2018

Der Sturm (Storm) was the fulcrum of the international avant-garde in Berlin from 1910 to 1932. Herwarth Walden (born Georg Levin, 1878–1941) founded the journal Der Sturm, in 1910. His first wife, the poet Else Lasker-Schüler, likely suggested both his nom-de-guerre and the newspaper’s title. Walden, a pianist who had studied with Conrad Ansorge, a former prodigy of Franz Liszt, had ambitions that exceeded the concert hall. Suggesting both the multiplicity of arts that Der Sturm would embrace, and the intention to reach a wide audience, the pianist-impresario-editor Walden traveled with the poet-playwright-artist Lasker-Schüler and the painter-printmaker-dramatist Oskar Kokoschka across Germany to distribute the first edition to the people. The group and their paper met with incomprehension, however, so they returned to cultivate a more select audience in the metropolis.
Dove, Arthur (1880–1946)
Authors: Hartel, Jr. Herbert R.
Published: September 2018

Arthur Dove (1880–1946) was a pioneer of abstraction and probably the first American to create purely non-representational paintings. His interest in natural forces, processes and forms inspired most of his work. His use of nature epitomizes a broad trend in early American modernist painting that includes many artists in the Alfred Stieglitz circle. Dove came from the Finger Lakes region of New York.
Johns, Jasper (1930– )
Authors: Pantazis Steven
Published: September 2018

One of the most influential American artists of the late 20th century, Jasper Johns was born in Augusta, Georgia, in 1930 and grew up in South Carolina. He studied at the University of South Carolina and attended art school in New York City for a short period. In 1958 Johns had his first solo show at Leo Castelli Gallery where he exhibited his encaustic paintings of simple objects and symbols such as Flag (1954–1955); it was at this show that the Museum of Modern Art acquired three of his works. Strengthened by his close friendship with Robert Rauschenberg, the composer and artist John Cage, and dancer and choreographer Merce Cunningham, Johns became a key forerunner of Pop, Minimal and Conceptual art of the 1960s. In the 1970s Johns created virtually abstract paintings, focusing on painterly technique and leaving behind the depiction of everyday objects. During the 1980s his painterly and sculptural pieces made references to the work of other artists such as Edvard Munch. He has returned to the depiction of simple objects and symbols in his most recent works.
Yu Dafu
Authors: Chan Cheow-Thia
Published: September 2018

Best regarded as a member of the vanguard of the ‘New Literature’ movement closely related to the nationalist ‘May Fourth Incident’ in 1919, Yu Dafu was a distinguished figure in the Chinese literary scene of the 1920s and the 1930s, known especially for his explicit depictions of eroticism and sexuality. In 1921, towards the end of his sojourn in Japan, Yu published his first book through the Creation Society [創造社] (1921–1930), a literary organization he co-founded with like-minded friends who subscribed to similar romantic notions about literature. He went on to become a prolific writer of fiction, essays, and classical poetry, an occasional translator, as well as an editor of several literary journals. Contending that ‘all literary works are autobiographies of their authors,’ his prose writings familiarized readers with his creative drive, as well as his peripatetic experiences in China and Japan–countries which provided the settings for most of his fictional works. He spent the last eight years of his life in south-east Asia (1938–1945). From a newspaper editor to becoming a wanted fugitive during the Second World War, his career and life ended with his enigmatic disappearance in Sumatra, Indonesia, soon after Japan had officially surrendered. It is believed that he was killed by the Japanese before their retreat. Yu’s body was never recovered.
Sabbagh, Georges (1887–1951)
Authors: Radwan Nadia
Published: September 2018

Born into a family of Syro-Lebanese origin in Alexandria, Egypt, Georges Sabbagh is an Egyptian painter of the École de Paris. He started painting at the Académie Ranson in Paris in 1910, where he was introduced to Félix Vallotton and Maurice Denis, who had a significant influence on his work.
Siqueiros, David Alfaro (1896 –1974)
Authors: Heeren Alice
Published: September 2018

David Alfaro Siqueiros was one of the founders of the mural movement in Mexico. Together with Diego Rivera and Jose Orozco, Siqueiros joined the struggles of the Mexican revolution by fighting in the front lines, participating in political groups, and depicting the ideals of the movement in his murals. His art reflects his engagement with both Marxism and modern technology. Being influenced both by Futurism and the compositional and thematic concern of artists such as Michelangelo and Francisco Goya, Siqueiros’s murals are a unique mixture of traditional and modern. Murals such as the Proletarian Victim (1933) express the impact of oppression upon the lower classes, while Echo of a Scream (1937), on the other hand, shows the suffering at the level of the body and the mind, and highlights the suffocating and overwhelming character of modern technology. The latter work’s evocation of trauma, and the effect of trauma through generations, was an important theme in Post-Revolution Mexico. The impact of modern life and its technological changes is also central in Siqueiros’s work. More than just depicting modernity, Siqueiros’s use of modern materials and pictorial techniques such as synthetic paints and spray guns was revolutionary. Through his teaching in Latin America and the USA, Siqueiros introduced these new materials and techniques to a myriad of artists, and having an extensive impact upon art in North America. More than propagandistic, Siqueiros’s works are important aesthetic statements with their forced perspectives and multiple viewpoints, as well as their affective color arrangements.
Zoshchenko, Mikhail Michailovich (1894–1958)
Authors: Discacciati Ornella
Published: September 2018

Mikhail Zoshchenko was a Soviet writer of short stories and tales (sometimes autobiographical), as well as a feuilletonist, memoirist, and dramatist. He was a member of the Serapion Brothers writers’ collective. Zoshchenko was best known for his hilarious lampooning of Soviet bureaucracy and the rampant scam artists of the 1920s. In the 1930s, his works were increasingly subjected to censorship and criticism. Evacuated from Leningrad during World War Two, he spent part of the war in Alma Ata (Kazakhstan). In 1946 his career was dramatically curtailed by Communist Party statesman Andrei Zhdanov, who led a public campaign of criticism against Zoshchenko and the poet Anna Akhmatova. Deprived of his membership in the Soviet Writers’ Union, and hence his right to earn a living as an author, Zoshchenko died in 1958.
van Doesburg, Theo (1883–1931)
Authors: Johnson Michael
Published: September 2018

Theo van Doesburg was a Dutch painter, designer, and art theorist. As the founder and major polemicist of the avant-garde movement known as De Stijl (The Style), he was instrumental in developing an abstract style based on primary colors and geometry. Tirelessly promoting De Stijl across Europe, van Doesburg played a crucial role in the development of Modernist art, architecture and design in the first half of the twentieth century. Born Christian Emil Marie Küpper in Utrecht, van Doesburg was the son of the photographer Wilhelm Küpper. His pseudonym was developed from the name of his stepfather, Theodorus Doesburg, whom he regarded as his natural father. Van Doesburg became a painter around 1900. His early work was influenced by Post-impressionism and Fauvism, but in 1915 he discovered the work of Piet Mondrian and underwent a profound transition. Mondrian had developed an austere visual style based on primary colors and orthogonal grids. This convinced van Doesburg to pursue spiritual harmony based on mathematical order.
Washington Color Painters
Authors: de Baca Miguel
Published: September 2018

Washington Color Painters were a group of non-objective, post-painterly abstractionists working in Washington, DC, in the late 1960s, who believed that the formal property of color was fundamental to modern art. In June 1965, the Washington Gallery of Modern Art mounted Washington Color Painters, a travelling exhibition showcasing the artwork of Morris Louis, Kenneth Noland, Gene Davis, Thomas Downing, Howard Mehring, and Paul Reed. Subsequently the term "Washington Color School" or simply "Washington school" has come to characterize this style of highly chromatic, large-scale painting made by soak-staining or striping pigment onto un-primed canvas. Noland has noted that such a school never existed for the earliest Washingtonian abstractionists such as Louis and himself; rather, the term refers to students of these artists, who coined it in the later 1960s. Other notable artists associated with the movement include Sam Gilliam, Mary Pinchot Meyer, and Hilda Thorpe.

In 1953, Louis and Noland visited Helen Frankenthaler’s studio in New York City and saw her iconic Mountains and Sea (1952), a monumental painting, made by saturating areas of unprepared canvas with oil paint heavily diluted with turpentine. Upon returning to Washington, Louis and Noland experimented with Frankenthaler’s so-called "soak-staining" technique, working with viscous, fast-drying acrylic paints instead of oils.
Zukofsky, Louis (1904–1978)
Authors: Jennison Ruth
Published: September 2018

Louis Zukofsky was an American avant-garde poet active from the 1920s upto the 1970s. Zukofsky’s masterwork long poem, ‘A’ (in company with his many other shorter works of poetry and prose), had a profound effect on the shape and development of American poetics. His work can be counted as a major influence on the Black Mountain, Beat, and Language poets, and on other contemporary poets working in conversation with the historical avant-garde. Major themes in Zukofsky’s work include the materiality of language, formalism, the place of the poem in history and politics, the musical structure of poesis and vice versa, and translation.

Zukofsky was born to working-class, Orthodox Jewish, Yiddish-speaking parents in the Lower East Side of New York City. His poetic career began following his graduation from Columbia University with an MA in English. A parody of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, entitled ‘Poem Beginning ‘The’’, received the admiration of Ezra Pound. The poem features one of Zukofsky’s signature formal techniques: the strategic parataxis (juxtaposition) of high and low cultures, placed in the service of an anti-reactionary, and sometimes Marxist and revolutionary, avant-garde poetics. Zukofsky’s epistolary relationship with Pound was extensive, and the older poet would be a lifelong object of admiration — and negation — for Zukofsky.