bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Creative Dance in India
Authors: Katrak Ketu H.
Published: September 2018

Creative Dance in India showcases dynamic movement, innovative uses of lighting and space, and collaborations with visual designers, musicians, and martial artists. This style has come to prominence since the 1980s, influenced by modernizing impacts of globalization, the Internet, and transnational travel. Artistic innovations unfold at the intersection of Indian classical dance styles, most commonly bharatanatyam and kathak, two of eight classical dance styles that figure overtly or subtly in this evolving field. Creative dancers also draw upon modern dance techniques of abstract, non-narrative movement (different from the abstract footwork in Indian classical dance), and use of the floor, along with theatre techniques, and multimedia.
Dafora, Asadata (1890--1965)
Authors: Nur Amin Takiyah
Published: September 2018

Multidisciplinary artist Asadata Dafora (also known as Austin Asadata Dafora Horton) was widely known for his contributions to dance as well as for the propagation of African drumming and cultural aesthetics across the United States. As a composer, librettist, singer, choreographer, and dancer, Dafora built a formidable career during the Great Depression, creating full-length operatic works using African drumming, instrumentation, dance styles, and cultural themes. His groundbreaking work Kykunkor (1934), based on Mende folklore, employed authentic African dance, music, language and a predominantly African-born cast and ran for months to increasingly larger audiences in New York. In 1960 he returned to Sierra Leone to serve as Director of Culture, and after his return to the United States two years later, he turned over the leadership of his company to Esther Rolle. As one of the first artists to introduce authentic African dance and music to American audiences, Dafora became a pioneer of black concert dance.
Davidovsky, Mario (1934-- )
Authors: Novoa Laura
Published: September 2018

Mario Davidovsky is one of the most original and relevant voices on the contemporary music scene and a pioneer in composition by electronic means. In his celebrated series Synchronisms he explored the interaction and combination possibilities between prerecorded electronic sound and conventional instruments played live (ranging from a solo instrument to an orchestra and a choir), becoming an inescapable point of reference for composers working with mixed media.
Butts, Mary (1890–1937)
Authors: Enemark Nina Angela
Published: September 2018

Mary Butts was a well-known and prolific British novelist, essayist, poet, and writer of short stories in her time. First published by Robert McAlmon, Butts was acquainted with and admired by a host of familiar modernist figures, such as Ernest Hemingway, Jean Cocteau, Hilda Doolittle, Ezra Pound, Marianne Moore, and Djuna Barnes, and was married for many years to the important publisher of modernist writing John Rodker. Despite her prominence on the scene of modernist writing, and having been published in leading modernist journals such as The Dial, the Little Review and the Transatlantic Review, she was largely forgotten after her death until her rediscovery in the early 1990s.
Canetti, Elias (1905–1994)
Authors: Bru Sascha
Published: September 2018

Elias Canetti, winner of the 1981 Nobel Prize in Literature, spent the first half of his life traveling, and encountered often violence. He devoted the second half of his life to autobiographical writing that used his travel experiences as material. His debut work, Die Blendung (1935, literally "the glare" but published in an English translation as Auto-da-Fé in 1946), is a widely celebrated, late modernist novel. His book-length essay Masse und Macht [Crowds and Power] (1960) is still often today cited in discussions about crowd psychology.

Born into a family of Sephardic Jews in Ruse, a city located on the river Danube in Bulgaria, Canetti moved to Britain, and, following the death of his father in 1912, to Lausanne and thence to Vienna. When he arrived there at the age of seven, Canetti already spoke four languages: Ladino or Judeo-Spanish (his mother tongue), Bulgarian, English, and some French. After further moving to Zurich and Frankfurt, he returned to Vienna to gain a degree in chemistry (1929), but at that point it had already become obvious that philosophy and literature were his real passions. Witnessing the growing threat of Nazism in Austria, which in 1938 led to the Anschluss of Austria to Germany, he moved back to Britain, where he settled until the 1970s, and then to Zurich, where he eventually died.
Churchill, Sir Winston Leonard Spencer (1874 –1965)
Authors: Cubbon Alexandra Gerena
Published: September 2018

Winston Churchill was British Prime Minister twice during his eventful political career. Churchill initially served the British Empire as a soldier in the Caribbean, India, and Africa during the imperial wars of the 1890s. His political service began in Parliament in May 1904 when he joined the Liberal Party and became undersecretary at the Colonial Office (1905). Prime Minister Herbert Asquith promoted Churchill to the Home Office and, in 1911, appointed him First Lord of the Admiralty. After briefly resigning from politics, Churchill returned in 1917 as an ardent anti-communist, joining the Conservatives in 1924, the year he became Chancellor of the Exchequer. He was again appointed First Lord of the Admiralty following the outbreak of World War II and became Prime Minister for the first time in May 1940. As Prime Minister during the war, Churchill relied on vigorous nationalist rhetoric to rouse his compatriots against Germany. Although defeated in the general election of 1945, he continued to speak and publish, delivering his famous "iron curtain" speech at Fulton College in Missouri on March 5, 1946. A lifelong anti-communist, he used this particular speech to emphasize the ideological gulf between the democratic, liberty-embracing West and the Soviet Union. Churchill again served as Prime Minister from 1951 until 1955.
Clark, Lygia (1920–1988)
Authors: Heeren Alice
Published: September 2018

Lygia Clark was born in 1920 in Belo Horizonte, Brazil. She studied with Roberto Burle Marx before leaving for Europe to learn from Fernand Léger. During the 1950s she was part of the Grupo Frente and like other artists in the group she would soon begin to subvert the rationalist premises of concrete art and experiment with materials, space, and collaborative practices. From the early stages of her abstract art, Clark was concerned with the need for totality in her work, and for creating a living "thing." The Bichos [Critters] (1960–1966) are among Clark’s most influential works and they manifest these concerns; the artist perceived them as having their own will instead of being completely passive to manipulation. Clark argued that the Bichos, more than simple artistic objects, initiate and are active subjects in the viewer’s experience. Clark, like other artists of this generation such as Hélio Oiticica and Lygia Pape, took the teachings of iconic modernists such as Piet Mondrian, Max Bill, and Kasimir Malevich, and elaborated on them to arrive at a practice that walked the line between activism, and participatory and therapeutic practices.
Celtic Revival
Authors: Weihman Lisa
Published: September 2018

The Celtic Revival was a late-nineteenth-century resurgence of interest in Celtic history, languages and myths that crossed through many disciplines, most notably cultural anthropology, art history and literature. The Celtic Revival was most influential in Ireland, where it inspired the formation of the Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA; Cumann Lúthchleas Gael) in 1884, which was dedicated to the recovery of ancient Irish sports. In 1893, Douglas Hyde (1860–1949) helped to establish the Gaelic League (Conradh na Gaeilge) in order to preserve the Irish language and promote Irish culture. The Celtic Revival is also associated with the Irish Literary Revival. The latter, which covers the renaissance of Irish literature and poetry that took place in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, is also referred to as the ‘Celtic Twilight’, a term borrowed from the title of William Butler Yeats’s (1865–1939) 1893 volume. Inspired by the poetry of Thomas Moore (1478–1535), James Clarence Mangan (1803–1849) and Samuel Ferguson (1810–1886), as well as by the folktales published by Standish James O’Grady (1869–1928), Yeats established both the Irish Literary Society in London and the National Literary Society in Dublin in 1892. In 1899, Yeats established the Irish Literary Theatre, which would become the Irish National Theatre Society at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin in 1904.
Chiang Kai-shek (1887–1975)
Authors: Kotte Claudia
Published: September 2018

Chiang Kai-shek (also known as Jiǎng Jièshí 蔣介石 or Jiǎng Zhōngzhèng 蔣中正) was a Chinese soldier and statesman, head of the Nationalist government from 1928 to 1949, and head of the Chinese Nationalist government in exile in Taiwan from 1950 until his death in 1975.
Cohen, Hermann (1842–1918)
Authors: Norris Christopher
Published: September 2018

Hermann Cohen was a respected Jewish-German philosopher, who had a profound influence on various currents within the philosophical discourse of modernity. These currents included the philosophy of mind, epistemology, the philosophy of science, ethics, comparative theology, and the history and philosophy of religion.
Watson, Sheila (1909–1998)
Authors: Millar Usiskin Jana
Published: September 2018

Canadian writer Sheila Watson (1909–1998) is best known for her modernist novel The Double Hook (1959) about the redemptive struggles of a small, rural community as they deal with the murder of one of their members. Born Sheila Martin Doherty in New Westminster, BC, Watson received her BA, (Hons) in English (1931) and MA (1933) from the University of British Columbia. She taught elementary students in a number of rural schools in British Columbia before marrying Wilfred Watson in 1941. She then continued to teach in Toronto, in Vancouver at the University of British Columbia, and in Powell River, BC While living in Calgary during 1951–52, Watson completed The Double Hook, which was published to mixed reviews. After its publication, Watson began her PhD under he guidance of Marshall McLuhan at the University of Toronto and completed her dissertation Wyndham Lewis: Post Expressionist at the University of Alberta in 1961. While working as a professor at the University of Alberta, Watson continued to write and publish. She maintained correspondence with several Canadian scholars and writers, including Michael Ondaatje, George Bowering, and Daphne Marlatt. After her retirement in 1980, Sheila and her husband moved to Nanaimo, BC, where they died in 1998.
Croce, Benedetto (1866–1952)
Authors: Beard David
Published: September 2018

Benedetto Croce was an Italian philosopher of aesthetics and history, who cast a long shadow into the aesthetic and literary criticism of Modernism. Croce’s biography includes traumatic episodes that recall the hallmark crises of Modernism, including the early loss of both parents in an earthquake that he himself barely survived. While his career in philosophy started in 1893 with his reading of Giambattista Vico (1668–1744) and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831), his work articulates his ‘philosophy of spirit’ (a term that reveals its Hegelian roots). His primary output was published in La Critica, a journal of cultural criticism that he founded in 1903, as well as in his books, including What is Living and What is Dead in the Philosophy of Hegel (1907) and Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic (1909). As a politician, his appointment as a liberal member in the Italian Senate overlapped with his 1920–1921 service in the Ministry of Public Instruction. Espousing fascist sympathies until 1924, he left his Senate position as Benito Mussolini’s (1883–1945) fascist government came to power in 1922 and thus became marginalized and threatened when he openly criticized Fascism.
The Dreyfus Affair (1894–1906)
Authors: Black Suzanne
Published: September 2018

The Dreyfus Affair was a French political controversy resulting from the unjust conviction and imprisonment of Captain Alfred Dreyfus (1859–1935), a Jewish artillery officer, for alleged espionage. By 1899, the ‘Affair’ had polarized France between ‘Dreyfusards’ and ‘anti-Dreyfusards’, pointing to profound divisions between traditionalist and modernizing forces.
Gandhi, M. K. (1869–1948)
Authors: Black Suzanne
Published: September 2018

Mohandas Karamchand (sometimes called Mahatma, or ‘great soul’) Gandhi was an Indian lawyer, a champion of Indian independence from Great Britain, and an advocate and theorist of non-violent civil disobedience, who became one of the leading political and spiritual figures of the twentieth century. Born on October 2, 1869, in the province of Gujarat in northwestern India, Gandhi trained in England as a lawyer. Offered a position in Pretoria, he became an activist for the Indian community in South Africa, where he lived from 1893 to 1914. After his return to India in 1915, Gandhi took on the British Empire through a series of non-violent resistance actions that played a major role in securing Indian independence in 1947. Gandhi was assassinated by a Hindu militant on January 30, 1948.
Lawrence, T. E. (1888–1935)
Authors: Hemmings Robert
Published: September 2018

Thomas Edward Lawrence was an Oxford-trained medieval scholar, guerrilla leader, rebel, ascetic and spy. Lawrence was an inveterate self-fashioner in addition to being compellingly mythologized by a coterie of literary friends and romanticized in Lowell Thomas’s (1892–1981) 1919 multi-media show ‘With Allenby in Palestine’. His mythical status was renewed with the popularity of David Lean’s (1908–1991) cinematic epic Lawrence of Arabia (1962). Lawrence’s involvement with Arab revolt against the Turks, his postwar support for the Arab movement and disillusionment with Britain’s exploitation of that movement, and his subsequent flight from rank and title provide the material for his agonistic autobiographical writing. After the war, he renounced his fame and position, assuming the names John Hume Ross and T. E. Shaw and becoming a dedicated serviceman, a ‘mechanical monk’ in the newly created Royal Air Force (Meyers 124). He was also a classic ‘Orientalist’ and ‘imperial agent’, according to Edward Said (240); a ‘mysterious farrago’ and a ‘fraud’, according to Richard Aldington (35); and remains ‘a prince of our disorder’, according to Irving Howe (qtd. in Mack xvi).
Manifesto
Authors: Waszczuk Cathy
Published: September 2018

A manifesto is an articulation of a particular (sometimes numerically or hierarchically ordered) set of theses that correspond to a political or aesthetic movement. In early forms, manifestos appeared as religious, then legal, tracts and gained prominence in sociopolitical discourse in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. According to Janet Lyon, the manifesto sets out the particular terms of exclusion or repression of a minority group by a majority oppressor, activating a complex binarity of inclusion (of sympathetic individuals or movements) and rejection (of the dominant order against which the group identified in the manifesto defines itself). The manifesto was the preferred form of aesthetic proclamation for early twentieth-century modernist and avant-garde art movements, including, notably, Futurism, Vorticism, Dada and Surrealism.
Négritude
Authors: Benga Ndiouga
Published: September 2018

The literary and cultural movement known as négritude was started in Paris in 1932 by Black students from French-speaking colonies in West Africa, the Caribbean and South America. The word ‘négritude’, which literally means ‘negro-ness’, expresses the value and depth of Black culture and history, as opposed to European, particularly French, culture. Its aesthetics drew from other Black-centric movements of the period, including the Harlem Renaissance in the United States. The most prominent authors associated with négritude were Léopold Sédar Senghor (1906–2001) from Senegal, Léon Damas (1912–1978) from French Guiana, Aimé Césaire from Martinique (1913–2008) and Birago Diop (1906–1989) from Senegal, who wrote literature and political treatises that influenced their contemporaries as well as many postcolonial writers. Some of the movement’s founding members, including Césaire and Senghor, held political office in their newly independent states in the post-World War II period.
Olympic Movement
Authors: Murray Peter
Published: September 2018

At the close of the nineteenth century, French aristocrat Pierre de Coubertin (1863–1937) sought to revive the Olympics in an attempt to foster cultural diversity and alleviate rising international tensions. In 1894, Coubertin helped found the International Olympic Committee (IOC), and he served as its second president until 1925. The first modern Olympic Games were held symbolically in Athens in 1896.
Ortega y Gasset, José (1883–1955)
Authors: Matthews Stephanie Walsh
Published: September 2018

Spanish philosopher, historian, sociologist and politician José Ortega y Gasset contributed significantly to the intellectual landscape of the first half of the twentieth century. Ortega’s works, such as La rebelión de las masas (1930; The Revolt of the Masses), make up the corpus of one of the most influential writers of his time. For him, modernity and democracy were the instigators of his writings that matured into a complex Existentialism, where reason, above all, is a function of life. Born into a Spanish literary family, Ortega was educated by the Jesuits in Madrid before leaving Spain to continue his studies in Germany.
Wilson, Ethel (1888–1980)
Authors: Pinder Kait
Published: September 2018

Ethel Wilson was a modernist prose writer who lived in Vancouver, Canada. Wilson began writing late in life; although she was only six years younger than Virginia Woolf, she published her first book, Hetty Dorval, in 1947, six years after Woolf’s death. Wilson was one of the first Canadian writers to represent both the growing city of Vancouver — including its Chinese-Canadian population and the class divisions in Vancouver society — and the rich landscape of British Columbia’s interior. Her published work includes three novellas, three novels, a collection of short stories, and a collection of essays, stories, and letters published posthumously. An orphan herself, Wilson often wrote about women without families who must negotiate the difficult social world in order to become self-sufficient and self-fulfilled. For this reason, her works are latently, if not radically, feminist. Furthermore, she often presents and meditates on difficult moral questions. Wilson commonly quotes John Donne’s phrase ‘No Man is an Island’ to emphasize her protagonists’ obligation to juggle their own desires and the needs of others. Wilson died on 22 December 1980 at a private hospital in Vancouver.
Pragmatism
Authors: La Shot Derek
Published: September 2018

Pragmatism is a method of inquiry that deems an object or belief adequately ‘true’ if it has utility for an individual or a collective. It is an American philosophical tradition that reflects certain values typically identified as American, such as the principles of individual choice, optimistic progress, and practicality. It promotes scientific Skepticism, beginning with the notion that there is no solid metaphysical foundation, real object, or system of thought independent of observational influence. For pragmatists, judging whether a theory or concept should be valued was usually determined by the answer to William James’s (1842–1910) question, ‘What difference would it make if one believed it?’ In other words, the system of thought was judged according to its consequences, that is, in terms of what it would allow an individual (or humanity) to achieve. In this sense, the pursuit of the absolute truth of a concept would be foolish and interminable. These quests were doomed to failure and should be discarded in favor of the pursuit of what works – or what achieves empirically verifiable ends and goals.
Simmel, Georg (1858–1918)
Authors: Phillips George Micajah
Published: September 2018

A foundational figure in sociology and social theory, Georg Simmel developed a methodology for analyzing modernity by tracing Capitalism’s disorienting effects on social relations, aesthetics, perception and marginal minutiae, influencing Walter Benjamin (1892–1940), Georg Lukács (1885–1971) and others. Born in Berlin, Simmel is best remembered for his important 1903 essay, ‘Die Großstädte und das Geistesleben’ (‘The Metropolis and Mental Life’), which explores the non-committal, ‘blasé’ postures that city-dwellers adopt to cope with their bewildering urban environments.
The Spanish Civil War (1936–1939)
Authors: Jones David
Published: September 2018

The Spanish Civil War was a major military conflict between right-wing Nationalists and left-wing Republicans that erupted after a coup d’état was staged by rebel generals against the democratically elected Republican government. Following the ‘defense of Madrid’, during which Republicans held off a Nationalist siege on the Spanish capital, the conflict settled into a war of attrition, with Spain divided into two radically opposed territories. On the Nationalist side, an authoritarian dictatorship bolstered by the fascistic Carlist and Falange militias under General Francisco Franco (1892–1975) emerged, representing the interests of Spain’s conservative and Catholic élites. On the Republican side, defenders of the government of President Manuel Azaña (1880–1940) organized around radical anarchist and socialist trade unions (CNT, UGT, POUM) and volunteer militias.
Stalin, Joseph (1878–1953)
Authors: Elliott Emily
Published: September 2018

Joseph Stalin (Iusif Vassarionovich Dzhugashvili) was born in Gori, Russian Empire, which is part of present-day Georgia. He adopted the name ‘Stalin’ from the Russian word for ‘steel’. Although he originally attended a Georgian Orthodox seminary, he read the works of Vladimir Lenin (1870–1924) and became a Bolshevik in 1903. In the pre-revolutionary period, Stalin was a leading figure in the Caucasus, raising funds through committing bank robberies. He was sent to Siberia several times as a prisoner, but he frequently managed to escape, the last time being to Petrograd (St. Petersburg) during the revolution.
The Irish War of Independence and The Irish Civil War
Authors: Weihman Lisa
Published: September 2018

The Irish War of Independence (Irish: Cogadh na Saoirse), also known as the Anglo–Irish War, began in January 1919 as a guerrilla war waged by the Irish Republican Army (IRA) against the British Government. Ireland was formally a part of the United Kingdom as a result of the passing of the Acts of Union in 1800. In the late-nineteenth century, the Irish Parliamentary Party, led by Charles Stewart Parnell (1846–1891), advocated home rule for Ireland through cooperation with the Liberal Party in the English Parliament, but it was unsuccessful until the Third Home Rule Bill of 1912. This bill provoked Unionists in the north of Ireland to form the Ulster Volunteers, who feared a predominantly Catholic Irish Parliament in Dublin. In response, Nationalists formed the Irish Volunteers. The Third Home Rule Bill never took effect because of the outbreak of World War I; Irish troops fought with England in the war with the promise that home rule would be granted at the conflict’s end.
Theosophy
Authors: Seagrave Jennifer Large
Published: September 2018

The term ‘theosophy’, derived from the Greek theo (‘divine’) and sophia (‘wisdom’), refers generally to divine wisdom and its mystical interpretation. Arising in the third century, the term acted as a synonym for theology until the sixteenth century, when Jakob Böhme (1575–1624), drawing on Neoplatonism and alchemy, described it as divine knowledge by which man interprets the natural world – an idea of great importance to the Romantics.
Tynianov, Yuri (1894–1943)
Authors: McEwan Andrew
Published: September 2018

Born in Vitebsk, present-day Belarus, Yuri Nikolaevich Tynianov (Юрий Николаевич Тынянов) was a leading Russian and Soviet literary theorist, historian and novelist as well as a member of the Russian formalists. Alongside Roman Jakobson (1896–1982), Vladimir Propp (1895–1970) and Viktor Shklovsky (1893–1984), Tynianov worked toward a description of literature by reference only to the formal characteristics and language of the work itself, without relying on historical or biographical descriptions to generate meaningful readings.
Vitalism
Authors: Bradd Christopher
Published: September 2018

Vitalism is a philosophy of life that ascribes a vital principle or animating life-force to the processes of living organisms. Against the assertions of mechanistic thought, which held that the processes of living organisms could be explained by the chemical or mechanical interaction of their associative parts, vitalist discourse, in the seventeenth century, reasserted the ancient and irreducible distinction between living and non-living beings. In the nineteenth century, the doctrine was given metaphysical expression in the work of Herbert Spencer (1820–1903) and later by Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900), who proclaimed that art was ‘the great stimulant of life’ (452).
Weber, Max (1864–1920)
Authors: Moore Paul S.
Published: September 2018

Maximilian ‘Max’ Karl Emil Weber was born on April 21, 1864 in Erfurt, Prussia (present-day Germany), and is a prominent figure in the emergence of sociology as an academic discipline. He is best known for the concept of the ‘iron cage’ (or ‘steel-hard casing’: stahlhartes Gehäuse) of modernity, which he introduced in his essay ‘Die protestantische Ethik und der Geist des Kapitalismus’ (‘The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism’), which was first published in two parts in 1904 and 1905 and then published again with some revisions at the end of his life in 1920. Weber’s studies range in topic from world religions, to Urbanism, to law and politics, to epistemologies of the social sciences, but they coalesce around the problem of the rational status of knowledge and authority in modern industrial economies; he notably observed charismatic authority alongside bureaucracy as equally constitutive of modern democracies. His comparative-historical sociology stands against the historical materialist critique of Marx and Marxism, but is equally distinct from the Positivism of earlier sociologists Auguste Comte (1798–1857) and Herbert Spencer (1820–1903). The interplay and oppositions among these interpretive, materialist and positivist approaches in method and epistemology came to shape the contours of modern social and political thought.
World Expositions of Paris (1889 and 1900) and Chicago (1893 and 1933)
Authors: Frangos Mike
Published: September 2018

The world expositions were monumental, public spectacles originating in the industrial fairs of early-nineteenth-century France and culminating in the Expositions Universelles of Paris (1889 and 1900) and the World’s Columbian Exposition (1893) and Century of Progress International Exposition (1933) of Chicago. The Great Exhibition of 1851 in London was among the first of the nineteenth-century industrial exhibitions featuring monumental exposition architecture with its cast-iron and glass Crystal Palace designed by Joseph Paxton (1803–1865). For cultural observers of the time as well as later critics, the Crystal Palace and later expositions – particularly the fin de siècle expositions held in Paris (1889 and 1900) and Chicago (1893) – exemplified the culture of mass consumption that had its origins in the bourgeois society of the nineteenth century. In The Arcades Project, Walter Benjamin (1892–1940) described the world expositions as ‘places of pilgrimage to the commodity fetish’ (7) in which workers were transformed into consumers through the mediation of iron and glass architecture. The American expositions of the 1930s intensified the massive displays of utopian expectation and technological progress on offer at the fairs with their exhibits of ‘dream cars’ and ‘houses of tomorrow’, monuments to Consumerism as well as science fiction visions of the future.
André Kertész (1894–1985)
Authors: Long Jonathan
Published: September 2018

Born Kertész Andor, André Kertész was one of the major innovators in 20th-century photography. He was self-taught, and largely produced scenes of everyday life in his native Hungary. After moving to Paris in 1925, he embarked on a career as a professional photographer, and began to publish his images in many major illustrated periodicals in Europe. He was invited to the United States by Keystone Studios in 1936 and settled there permanently, taking US citizenship in 1944. Kertész continued to undertake photo-reportage assignments for Look, Harper’s Bazaar, and Vogue, while also exhibiting extensively and publishing his work in book form.
Beier, Ulli (1922–2011)
Authors: Greven Katharina
Published: September 2018

Ulli Beier (b. 1922, Glowitz, Poland – d. 2011, Sydney, Australia) was a Polish-born publisher, writer, translator, lecturer, curator, theatre producer, and particularly a promoter and collector of arts. Throughout his career, Beier’s interests shifted between Aboriginal Art in Australia, outsider art in India and Papua New Guinea, but the focus of his life’s work was centered in Nigeria, where he would come to shape the arts as one of the first outsiders to recognize and support the emerging modern art movement in this country. By promoting and collecting traditional and modern art he shaped a very specific image of Africa. Beier’s initiatives such as the Black Orpheus magazine, the Mbari-Club in Ibadan, and the Mbari-Mbayo-Club in Osogbo helped new forms of African art to develop a voice and aesthetic. From 1981–1996, Beier was the director of the Center of African Culture at the University in Bayreuth, the Iwalewa-Haus, where he continued to promote art from all over the world, in exhibitions, festivals and publications, until he retired with his wife Georgina Beier to Sydney, Australia, where he died in 2011.
Brâncuși, Constantin (1876–1957)
Authors: Jecu Marta
Published: September 2018

Constantin Brâncuși is one of the great masters of modern and contemporary art. The influence of his work can be felt across both the avant-garde and neo-avant-garde movements. Although he can be considered the early master of minimalism and abstractionism, Constantin Brâncuși admitted to be in the search of realism in sculpture. The extensive work of the Romanian born artist was dedicated, as he claimed, to "sculpture's own life." Born in the Romanian village of Hobița in 1876, Brâncuși was profoundly influenced by vernacular philosophy as well as by traditional carving techniques, reflecting a rising European sensibility for the ancestral treatment of the form.
Cornell, Joseph (1903–1972)
Authors: Pantazis Steven
Published: September 2018

Joseph Cornell was an American artist known for his poetic use of collage and assemblage. His art, including his films, contains images that derive from art history, music, literature, ballet, theatre, film, and natural science.
Delaunay, Robert (1885–1941)
Authors: Schroder Andressa
Published: September 2018

Robert-Victor-Félix Delaunay was one of the precursors of abstract painting in Europe. He played a critical role in establishing abstract painting before World War I and had a strong influence on the later development of abstract art. Delaunay became a representative of Orphism, a term coined by Guillaume Apollinaire in reference to Orpheus, the legendary musician and poet in Greek mythology. Delaunay wrote many letters to other artists such as August Macke, Franz Mark, and Wassily Kandinsky, which reveal that his main concerns were related to the luminous essence and to the movement of colors in nature.

Robert Delaunay was the son of George Delaunay and the countess Berthe Félicie de Rose. During his childhood his parents got divorced and he was raised by his mother’s sister, Marie, and her husband Charles Damour in La Rouchère. In 1902 he started studying in the Rosin’s atelier for decorative arts in Belleville. The following year he left Rosin’s to focus only on painting and in 1904 he exhibited some of his works in the Salon des Indépendants. These first works were strongly influenced by Impressionism. Between 1905 and 1907 Delaunay began studying the color theory of Michel Eugène Chevreul. His works of this period were strongly influenced by Neo-Impressionism, particularly the works of Paul Cézanne. In 1907 he served as regimental librarian for the Military Forces in Laon.
Dobell, William (1899–1970)
Authors: Philp Angela
Published: September 2018

William Dobell was an icon of Australian art during his lifetime, renowned for portraiture but also for the controversy surrounding his being awarded the Archibald Prize (1943). From 1929 he developed his signature expressionist style of exaggerated features and distortion with a sense of satire, accompanied by a mastery of classical painting techniques and underpinned by sound observational drawing.
Yiddish Literature 1864–1939
Authors: Mahalel Adi
Published: September 2018

The most important writer of old Yiddish literature was Elijah Levita (a.k.a. Elye Bokher, 1469–1549), who adapted the Italian version of the chivalric romance Bevis of Hampton into a Yiddish version known as the Bovo-bukh (1541). The Hasidic movement produced Yiddish literature that is significant for religious and secular readers alike. The most prominent Hasidic Yiddish literature, Sefersipureymayses [The Book of Tales, 1815], was by the Hasidic leader Nahman of Bratslav (1772–1811). From the late 18th century onward the Haskalah or Jewish Enlightenment movement pushed for Jewish acculturation in Europe, pursued the promise of emancipation and equal rights, and promoted reform in Jewish education as well as the progress of Jews through the adoption of modern ‘useful’ professions. Modern Yiddish literature can be said to have been invented during the late 1880s by Sholem Aleichem.
Natalia Sergeevna Goncharova (1881–1962)
Authors: Parton Anthony
Published: September 2018

One of the most talented and prolific of 20th-century Russian artists, Natalia Goncharova was not only a leading member of the Russian avant-garde in the years before World War I but also achieved widespread recognition afterwards for her work as a stage designer for Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. As a painter she was a leading exponent of neo-primitivism but subsequently engaged in abstraction and Rayonism, becoming one of the first non-objective artists in Russia.
Gorky, Arshile (ca. 1902–1948)
Authors: Wallis Jonathan
Published: September 2018

Arshile Gorky was an Armenian American artist whose work and knowledge of European avant-garde art contributed to the development of Abstract Expressionism. Born Vosdanig Adoian in Khorkom, Armenia, Gorky immigrated to the United States in 1920, changed his name and established himself as a self-taught painter in New York City.
Hasegawa, Saburô (長谷川三郎) (1906–1957)
Authors: Szostak John
Published: September 2018

Hasegawa Saburô was a Japanese writer, art historian, and abstract painter. Born in Yamaguchi prefecture, as a youth he trained under the oil painter Koide Narashige (1887–1931). He studied Japanese art history at Tokyo Imperial University while continuing to paint. After graduating in 1929, he moved to Paris for three years, where he studied the work of abstract painters, particularly Mondrian, whose style he found inspirational. Upon his return to Japan he contributed to exhibitions organized by the Nikakai (Society of Progressive Japanese Artists). In 1936 he published Abstract Art (Abusutorakuto âto), one of the first authoritative Japanese-language texts on the subject. The next year he joined with several other artists to create the Free Artist Society (Jiyû Bijutsuka Kyôkai), an influential pre-war avant-garde collective. Paintings such as Locus of a Butterfly (Chô no kiseki, 1937) — which was contributed to the Free Artist Society’s first exhibition — demonstrate Hasegawa’s interest in combining Western-style abstraction with East Asian calligraphy. During a visit to New York in 1951, he gave lectures on Zen and East Asian aesthetics that were attended by Franz Kline, Willem de Kooning, and other New York School painters. From 1955 he worked as a lecturer in art history, painting, printmaking, and calligraphy at the California College of Art and Crafts.
Henri, Robert (1865–1929)
Authors: Stenz Margaret
Published: September 2018

Robert Henri (born Robert Henry Cozad in Ohio) is best known as the leader of the Ashcan School, a group of Realist painters who portrayed New York City life in the first decades of the 20th century. His works ranged from tonalist landscapes, to full-length portraits of socialites and performers, to an extensive series of ordinary people from different cultures, many of them children. At the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 1886, Henri adopted a Realist style, which he honed in Paris at the Academie Julian. Back in Philadelphia, he taught at local art schools and in 1892 formed the Charcoal Club. This informal weekly discussion and sketching session included John Sloan and other local newspaper illustrators, who Henri encouraged to become painters of contemporary life. Henri studied the works of Diego Velázquez, Rembrandt, and Frans Hals on several more European trips. In 1900 he settled in New York with his wife Linda Craige (ca. 1875–1905). Henri’s early works included small landscapes influenced by Whistlerian tonalism, such as La Neige (1899). He established his career, however, as a painter of large-scale figure paintings. He was invited to join the Society of American Artists and the National Academy of Design in 1903 and 1905, respectively.
Yoknapatawpha County
Authors: Gradisek Amanda
Published: September 2018

A fictional county created by American author William Faulkner, Yoknapatawpha County serves as the setting of many of Faulkner’s works. Based on Lafayette County in Mississippi, Yoknapatawpha is located in north-western Mississippi. In Faulknerian lore, this area was dominated before the Civil War by the Sartoris, Compson, and Sutpen plantations and by slave labour. Many of Faulkner’s novels—including Sanctuary, Absalom, Absalom!, and The Sound and the Fury — as well as some of his short stories take place here. Because of this common setting, characters, plots, and locations transcend traditional boundaries, building a web of textual interconnectivity.

The name ‘Yoknapatawpha’ derives from two words of the local Native American Chickasaw language (meaning ‘split land’). The name could reference either the physical nature of the land, divided as it is by the Tallahatchie River into plantation and pine-topped hill lands, or the division of Black and White created by the slave system. The map of this fictitious county, included in Absalom, Absalom!, allows readers a point of entry for the interconnected and vibrant setting that characterizes Faulkner’s modernist aesthetic.
Magritte, René François Ghislain (1898–1967)
Authors: Marson Jann
Published: September 2018

René Magritte was a Belgian artist who gained notoriety during the interwar period as a painter and for his involvement with Surrealism. His epigrammatic approach to painting, using collage-like juxtapositions and absurd transformations, developed from his preference for figurative representation and interest in the relation of images to poetic language. Although Magritte presented himself as contentedly bourgeois, his paintings were often intended to shock viewers by showing them what he called "the mystery of the world." Magritte was born in the town of Lessines, but grew up in Châtelet where his father had become successful in the edible oil industry. Here he experienced a great childhood loss upon his mother’s suicide. Magritte first discovered painting as a boy, having encountered a painter working outdoors at an abandoned cemetery. In 1915, Magritte relocated to Brussels and soon undertook a brief period of study at the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts until 1918. Magritte’s paintings during the early 1920s exhibited Futurist and Cubist influences. Collaborating closely during this period, Magritte and the abstract painter Victor Servranckx published an essay in 1922 entitled "Pure Art: A Defence of the Aesthetic." Uneasy, however, with abstract painting’s reception as art for art’s sake, Magritte was deeply affected, in 1923, by what he called the "triumphant poetry" of certain Giorgio de Chirico paintings emphasizing the stillness and isolation of figures and objects. Magritte thereafter developed a similar approach to composition, as seen in The Lost Jockey (1926).
Modigliani, Amedeo Clemente (1884–1920)
Authors: Protz Uta
Published: September 2018

Defying categorization, the Italian draughtsman, painter, and sculptor Amedeo Modigliani is a key representative of the School of Paris. Active in France from 1906 until his premature death in 1920, he placed the human body at the center of his work. With few exceptions his approximately 30 sculptures comprise of crouching figures and elongated heads and his approximately 420 paintings are portraits and female nudes. Less experimental and radical than some of his contemporaries, Modigliani never questioned the human form. Rather, drawing on his early training in Italy, he continued the great tradition of the female nude in modern, provocative reinterpretation. His only solo exhibition during his lifetime, shown at Galerie Berthe Weill in Paris in 1917, caused a scandal: featuring his great series of reclining female nudes, the exhibition was closed by the police on the grounds of obscenity, but subsequently reopened. Modigliani’s private life was no less dramatic; despite or because of his poor health, he indulged in alcohol, drugs, and women. His last love was the art student Jeanne Hébuterne, 14 years his junior. She was nearly nine months pregnant with their second child when Modigliani died age 35 of tubercular meningitis in 1920. Desperate and inconsolable, Hébuterne committed suicide the day after, killing herself and the unborn child.
Painting and Sculpture Museum
Authors: Shaw Wendy
Published: September 2018

The Republic of Turkey houses its public collection of arts in the Western modality at three museums of painting and sculpture: the Istanbul Museum of Painting and Sculpture (1937); the Izmir Museum of Painting and Sculpture (1952; remodeled in 1973); and the Ankara Museum of Painting and Sculpture (1981).
Rayism
Authors: Parton Anthony
Published: September 2018

An abstract and non-objective style of painting, Rayism ("Luchizm") was pioneered by the Russian artist Mikhail Larionov in early 1912. The style represented the first theoretically coherent and practically consistent response on the part of the Russian avant-garde to the challenges of French Cubism and Italian Futurism. In divorcing art from figuration and in its emphasis on the purely formal qualities of painting, Rayism prepared the way for the development of both Suprematism and Constructivism. Larionov’s innovative style was practiced chiefly by those artists in his immediate orbit: painters such as Natalia Goncharova, Alexander Shevchenko, and Mikhail Le-Dantiyu, who belonged to the Donkey’s Tail and Target group. While Rayism had a limited life-span in Russia, being overtaken by Suprematism in 1915, Larionov and Goncharova continued to practice the style throughout their careers, executing Rayist paintings right up to the 1950s.

In its earliest phase, known as "Realistic Rayism" ("Realistichesky luchizm"), the style proceeded from Larionov’s interest in optics and Impressionist color theory and specifically from the idea that the color, contour, and form of our world is defined by rays of light reflected from all material objects. According to Larionov’s booklet Rayism (Luchizm) of 1912, his initial aim was to explore the nature of visual perception as it exists before the brain converts what we see into a comprehensible form.
Sadali, Ahmad (1924–1987)
Authors: Rath Amanda Katherine
Published: September 2018

Ahmad Sadali was an iconic figure of the Bandung School and remains a key influence as a pioneer in modern abstract painting in Indonesia. Sadali, along with But Mochtar, Mochtar Apin, and Srihadi Soedarsono, was among the first generation of Indonesian students in the Bandung School. His early work of the 1950s demonstrates the direct influence of his teacher, Dutch painter Ries Mulder (1909–1973), whose own work was influenced by the Cubist work of Jacques Villon (1875–1963). Immediately upon graduation in 1953, Sadali became one of the first Indonesian lecturers of the Academy. Sadali was a key figure in the development of a modern Islamic art and its discourse in Indonesia, for which the principles of abstraction in modern painting were well suited. A devout Muslim and the son of a founder of the Garut chapter of Muhammadiyah, Sadali perceived painting as a spiritual act, as a way of seeking God’s blessing, and as imbued with tasawuf (inner mystical quality). He referred to his paintings as visual meditations, and the act of painting as a form of zikir (repetitive acts leading to a mindfulness of God).
Scheyer, Galka E. (1889–1945)
Authors: Wünsche Isabel
Published: September 2018

Galka E. Scheyer was a German-American painter, art dealer, art collector, and art teacher. Born into a middle-class Jewish family in Braunschweig, Germany, Scheyer studied painting, sculpture, music, and languages in Munich, London, Paris, and Brussels. In 1916, she became acquainted with Alexei Jawlensky’s work at an exhibition in Switzerland. Inspired by Jawlensky (who gave her the nickname "Galka," meaning blackbird), Scheyer abandoned her own artistic career to promote his art and between 1919 and 1924 organized a series of travel exhibitions, which she accompanied with lectures, press coverage, an artist’s monograph, and sales of art works. In 1924, at Scheyer’s initiative, the artists’ group The Blue Four (Lyonel Feininger, Alexei Jawlensky, Wassily Kandinsky, and Paul Klee) was founded. It was Scheyer’s plan to arrange exhibitions and offer their work for sale while on an extended stay in the United States. Following her arrival in New York in May 1924, Scheyer devoted herself to promoting the art of the Blue Four through exhibitions and lectures in New York and later on the West Coast. Between 1925 and 1929, she lived in San Francisco and was part of the modernist art scenes in the Bay Area.
Scottish Modernism
Authors: McCulloch Margery Palmer
Published: September 2018

Scotland participated in the European visual art modernism of the early 20th century, when painters such as J. D. Fergusson and the Scottish Colourists set up studios in France, and the Glasgow architect Charles Rennie Mackintosh and designers and painters including Margaret and Frances Macdonald exhibited in Vienna, Turin, and other European cities. It was not until the post-1918 period, however, that Scottish literature saw a comparable transformation when C. M. Grieve, better known as the poet Hugh Macdiarmid, initiated the revival popularly known in its own day as the Scottish Renaissance, but now regarded as a Scottish contribution to literary modernism. Macdiarmid’s new movement was launched by the publication of his little magazine The Scottish Chapbook in 1922, the year also of James Joyce’s Ulysses and T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. The Chapbook’s aim was both artistic and political: to encourage a new and modern literature in all three of Scotland’s indigenous languages: Scots, Gaelic, and Scottish English; and to take Scottish literature (and in the longer term the Scottish nation) out of its current provincial North British status and return it to the mainstream of European culture where it had been before the Union with England.