bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Paik, Nam June (1932–2006)
Authors: Shin Chunghoon
Published: September 2018

Nam June Paik was a Korean-born American artist who achieved international notoriety for his destructive, neo-dada activities and visionary, esthetic experiments with electronic media. Born to a wealthy family in Seoul during Japanese colonial rule, Paik took private music lessons throughout his adolescence. After moving to Japan in 1951, he enrolled in the University of Tokyo, where he studied music, esthetics, and art history, graduating with a thesis on the composer Arnold Schoenberg in 1956. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, he turned away from the university setting to associate himself with a network of progressive artists such as John Cage and the Fluxus group. While studying in Germany in the late 1950s, Paik began exploring electronic media as an art form. Yet, far from being negative or polemical, Paik’s attitude toward the televisual environment was marked by a radical openness. He explored the esthetic potential of television and video in an all-encompassing way. Paik’s exploration encompassed manipulation of television signals or scan lines, videotape production, television transmission, live satellite telecast, video sculpture, and environment. Yet Paik was by no means naïve or conformist in his approach; instead, he hijacked broadcast signals, redressing one-way communication and rechanneling energy into an alternative mode of communication.
Ortiz, William (1947--)
Authors: Quevedo Marysol
Published: September 2018

Born in Salinas, Puerto Rico, William Oritz was raised in New York City. He studied composition at the Conservatory of Music of Puerto Rico under Héctor Campos Parsi and Amaury Veray. He holds a master’s degree from SUNY at Stony Brook (1976), where his professors included Billy Jim Layton and Bülent Arel, and a PhD from SUNY at Buffalo (1983), where Lejaren Hiller and Morton Feldman were his professors. Ortiz served as assistant director of Black Mountain College II, NY, also teaching composition and music theory at the school. He has held the position of chair of the department of humanities and has served as band conductor for the University of Puerto Rico at Bayamón. As a music critic he has contributed to The San Juan Star.

Among his many works Oritz has completed commissions for the Casals Festival, the Guitar Society of Toronto, the Puerto Rico Symphony Orchestra, and the New York State Council of the Arts. His approach to composition is characterized by an eclectic adoption of popular and urban music genres as part of his compositional palette. Early on he incorporated elements from urban street music, found mostly in the Latino and Black neighbourhoods of New York City and in the poorer neighbourhoods of San Juan, as reflected in Street Music (1980), Graffiti Nuyorican (1983), De Barrio Obrero a la Quince (1986), and Bolero and Hip-Hop en Myrtle Avenue (1986).
Petrassi, Goffredo (1904–2003)
Authors: Roderick Peter
Published: September 2018

Goffredo Petrassi (b. 1904, d. 2003) was an Italian musician and composer who spent much of his working life in Rome. Alongside Luigi Dallapiccola and Giorgio Federico Ghedini he inhabited an "intermediate" generation in Italian twentieth-century modernism, spanning the gap between the flamboyant trio of Alfredo Casella, Ildebrando Pizetti, and Gian Francesco Malipiero in the 1920s and ‘30s and the avant-gardists Luigi Nono, Bruno Maderna, and Luciano Berio in the 1960s.

Petrassi grew up surrounded by the polyphonic heritage of the Italian renaissance, being born in the same village as Palestrina and studying as a teenager in Rome at the Scuola Cantorum of San Salvatore in Lauro; Weismann notes that "various manifestations of Catholic baroque art displayed on architecture, interior decoration and music … undoubtedly contributed to the formation of his taste" (Weissmann, 1957, 3). His student days were spent at the Conservatorio di Santa Cecilia, where he studied with Bustini and Casella, and produced a flourish of remarkably mature works which combined extreme contrapuntal complexity with the harmonic language of Stravinsky. In addition, Petrassi’s ability to overcome the Italian aversion to the orchestral "set-piece" (for instance, the Partita of 1932, the Concerto for Orchestra of 1933–34) led to fruitful international connections in Britain and Germany.
Plaza, Juan Bautista (1898–1965)
Authors: Labonville Marie Elizabeth
Published: September 2018

Juan Bautista Plaza (Caracas, 19 July 1898–1 January 1965) was a Venezuelan composer, educator, writer, and musicologist active in Caracas; he was one of the principal figures in the development of the modern Venezuelan musical establishment. Trained in Rome as an organist and composer of sacred music, he served as chapel master of the Caracas cathedral for twenty-five years. At the same time he composed sacred and secular music in all genres except opera and symphony. As one of the first Venezuelan composers of art music to adopt a nationalist esthetic, he incorporated elements of Venezuelan folk music into some of his secular works. A dedicated educator, he taught the first music history course in Venezuela and created a music school for children. He helped organize Venezuela’s first choral society and first stable symphony orchestra. To create knowledgeable audiences, he developed a series of radio programmes on music appreciation. He contributed often to Caracas newspapers and magazines, publishing articles about music and local concert life. In 1936 he took charge of an archive of old music manuscripts, which enabled him to publish a set of scores from Venezuela’s colonial period and write scholarly articles about the music. His accomplishments led to his service as Venezuela’s Director of Culture (1944–46).
Tenney, James (1934–2006)
Authors: Hasegawa Robert
Published: September 2018

American composer James Tenney produced a wide range of innovative works, including computer music, Fluxus-inspired text scores, and chance-based instrumental pieces founded on the overtone series. Tenney’s music is characterized by a fascination with sound and how listeners perceive it. In addition to his creative work, Tenney is the author of important theoretical writings on the psychology and phenomenology of musical experience. Like John Cage, Tenney intentionally avoids rhetorical gestures in his music, following his dictum that "[T]he focus should be on the sound itself and not on the ideas and emotions of the composer" (Tenney, 2005).

Tenney was born in Silver City, New Mexico, but moved to New York in the 1950s to study piano with Eduard Steuermann and composition with Chou-Wen Chung. Later studies at Bennington College and the University of Illinois brought him into contact with Carl Ruggles, Lionel Nowak, Kenneth Gaburo, and Lejaren Hiller. In works from this period, such as Seeds (1956–61), composer Larry Polansky identifies the strong influence of Anton Webern and Edgard Varèse, two of Tenney’s early inspirations.
Adiga, Gopalakrishna (1918–1992)
Authors: Tharakeshwar V. B.
Published: September 2018

Mogeri Gopalakrishna Adiga was the focal point of the modernist movement in Kannada. Hailing from a small village in South Karnataka, he moved to Mysore for his studies and worked in various places, but settled at a later stage of his career in Mysore. He taught English literature in colleges in Mysore and was the principal of a college in Sagar and in Udipi. He seems to have started writing in his twenties, initially imitating old Kannada poetry in his use of prosody. However, he soon shifted to writing in the mode of the Navodaya writers. This is evident in his first two collections of poems—Bhaavataranga (1946) and KattuvevuNaavu (1948). In these volumes, he shared a new enthusiasm for the anti-colonial struggle and dreamt of an ideal India for the future. He felt that with the transfer of power and the formation of the Indian nation-state, the dreams of his generation were belied. This led to a sense of disillusionment, turning him into a bitter critic of the Congress and of Jawaharlal Nehru. The Jansangh and Ram Manohar Lohia’s Party were the main opposition parties at that time. He translated Lohia’s Wheel of History as Itihasa Chakra (1972). In 1967 he unsuccessfully contested election to the Parliament as a candidate of the Hindu right-wing party Jan Sangh, which earned him several enemies in literary circles.
Afrocubanismo
Authors: Drissi Susannah Rodriguez
Published: September 2018

Afrocubanismo constitutes an ideological shift in the valuation of Afro-Cuban forms of cultural expression and their acceptance on a national scale. From about 1927 through to the late 1930s, Afrocubanismo influenced all domains of élitist and popular art. At a time of fundamental changes in artistic expression, Afrocubanismo was partly nourished by international aesthetic trends in Madrid, Paris, and New York. A new interest in the non-commercial expression of Afro-Cubans inspired numerous works, from the ethnographic writing of Lydia Cabrera to the paintings of Eduardo Abela, Jaime Valls, and Wifredo Lam. The literary works of Alejo Carpentier and Nicolás Guillén belong to this Afro-Cuban moment, as do the musical theatre of Ernesto Lecuona and the symphonic compositions of Amadeo Roldán. Afrocubanismo involved, among other things, exchanges between national and transnational figures and forms of expression that included the influence of Cuban music on American jazz, Latin jazz, and rhythm and blues. This exchange culminated in the long relationship between Afro-Cuban poet Nicolás Guillén and North American poet Langston Hughes.
Amichai, Yehuda (1924–2000)
Authors: Baroukh Rina
Published: September 2018

Yehuda Amichai was born in Würzburg, Germany to an Orthodox Jewish family, and was raised speaking both Hebrew and German. His family migrated to Israel in 1936. He participated in World War II as part of the Jewish Brigade, and fought in the Israeli War of Independence in 1948. He studied Hebrew literature and the Bible at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Amichai started writing poetry in 1948, during the War of Independence. His poems were first published in the early 1950s. His first book of poetry, Akhshav u-ba-yamim ha-a’herim [Now and on Other Days], was published in 1955. His poetics was soon recognized for its modernistic trends, unique voice and innovative figurative language, and was considered nothing less than revolutionary. His poems were translated into more than thirty languages and received broad international recognition, with praise from poets such as Ted Hughes, Paul Celan and Octavio Paz. He won almost every literary prize available in Israel as well as many international prizes. He died in 2000, and was buried in Jerusalem.
An-sky, S. (1863–1920)
Authors: Legutko Agnieszka
Published: September 2018

Born Shloyme-Zanvl Rappoport near Vitebsk, Belarus, S. An-sky was a Jewish Russian intellectual, political and social activist, journalist, Yiddish ethnographer, poet, writer, and dramatist, whose life and work championed modernist ideals. He could be best described as "the one who looked for new paths" (Dybbuk, Act III) until his death in 1920 in Warsaw, Poland.

Between 1912–1914, An-sky headed the Baron Horace Guenzburg Jewish Ethnographic Expedition in Volhynia and Podolia, which inspired his most famous work, The Dybbuk (Between Two Worlds, 1914–1918), arguably the greatest masterpiece of Yiddish literature. Boasting a trilingual genesis (Russian, Yiddish, and Hebrew), the play premiered in Yiddish in Warsaw thirty days after An-sky’s death in 1920, and was an instant success. Using the folk motif of dybbuk possession (a soul of the dead possessing a living body) in this play, An-sky addressed the quintessential modernist experience of transgressions. The Dybbuk portrays a passionately tragic love and the crisis of faith juxtaposed with a struggle between the individual and the collective. The background conflict between generations, genders, and classes is accompanied by a difficult transition from tradition to modernity and raises questions of religion, art, and identity. The play has transcended Yiddish literature, becoming a world classic that continues to fascinate artists and audiences around the globe in the twenty-first century.
Bagul, Baburao (1930–2008)
Authors: Jaaware Aniket
Published: September 2018

A major inspiration to a younger generation of Marathi ‘Dalit’ authors, Baburao Bagul’s literary and critical writing is somewhat atypical of what subsequently became famous as ‘Dalit’ literature (literature of the oppressed) after 1972. Bagul was also actively involved in the discussions that would lead to the founding of the Dalit Panthers. Having published stories in magazines earlier, he published his first volume of short stories called JevhaMiJaatChorliHoti (When I Hid My Caste, 1963). He reinforced his reputation with his short story collection MaranSwasta Hot Ahe (Death is Becoming Cheaper, 1969). Most of his stories explore ‘lumpen’ characters and the ethical implications of their actions as they fight to survive the unrelenting misery and poverty of urban modernity. His characters are ones who survive (or not) in limit situations of hunger and criminality, in dwellings without any civic amenities, and often exploit or violate other characters in similar circumstances.
Buddha Bandit Poets
Authors: Bloch Julia
Published: September 2018

In 1978, Asian American poets Garrett Hongo, Lawson Fusao Inada, and Alan Chong Lau published The Buddha Bandits Down Highway 99, a collaborative anthology of poems dedicated to meditations on the highway that runs north–south across California’s Central Valley. The "Buddha Bandits" helped inaugurate a wave of activist Asian American poetry after Modernism. Hongo, Inada, and Lau first collaborated as the Buddha Bandits in 1977 in a performance of music and poetry at California State University, Long Beach. Their 1978 anthology engages with the culturally and geographically heterogeneous landscape of the California state highway, particularly its history of Asian American migration and its significance as a site of Japanese internment during World War II. The Buddha Bandits shared the formal concerns and countercultural attitudes of their fellow avant-garde poets, particularly the Beats, but their collaboration also anticipated a rejection of American Orientalism in that same avant-garde. Activist Asian American poets of the 1970s later rejected the depiction of Asia as a distant source of enlightenment, instead asserting a historically specific identity for the Asian American avant-garde.
Butler, Frederick Guy (1918–2001)
Authors: Voss Tony
Published: September 2018

Guy Butler, poet, playwright, director, historian, autobiographer, essayist, academic and public intellectual, was born and raised in the Eastern Cape in South Africa. He began his education at the Cradock High School and Rhodes University, and served in North Africa and Italy during the Second World War. Study at Oxford and a lectureship at Witwatersrand University led to his position as chair of English at Rhodes in 1952, the year that Stranger to Europe: Poems, 1939–1949 was published. His traditionally oriented poetry seeks human connection across the barriers of history, culture and legally enforced racial segregation. An innovative teacher, he promoted the study of South African English literature and founded departments of speech and drama, linguistics, and journalism at Rhodes University. Throughout his life he strove to reconcile his local loyalties to the Eastern Cape, to his Settler forebears, and to his English heritage — he established the 1820 Monument, the National English Literary Museum, the Grahamstown Festival, and the Institute for the Study of English in Africa — with an inclusive South African national identity. He translated Afrikaans poetry into English, and in plays such as Richard Gush of Salem and Demea celebrated representative historical and imagined figures of interracial and intercultural rapprochement.
Claussen, Sophus (1865–1931)
Authors: R. Fauth Søren
Published: September 2018

Sophus Claussen is considered one of the foremost Danish poets of the period spanning the 19th and 20th centuries. As a regular contributor to the Symbolist journal Taarnet (1893–1894), published by Claussen’s fellow writer and friend Johannes Jørgensen (1866–1956), he became representative of a current which—apart from its Symbolist predicate—might aptly be described in terms of spiritual modernity. Sophus Claussen’s models were Charles Baudelaire, Paul Verlaine and Stéphane Mallarmé. In keeping with the so-called "Modern Breakthrough" spearheaded by Danish critic and scholar Georg Brandes, Claussen confronted the Church and traditional Christianity. It was a conflict that led Claussen not to enlightenment, realism and naturalism, but to a continued quest for a spiritual dimension, in direct opposition to the more profane modernism espoused by Brandes. Like the French Symbolists, Claussen perceived the manifestations of the world as representations of an underlying, all-encompassing divine truth with which the poet in his art was compelled to seek affinity. This neo-Romantic yearning towards a higher form of spiritual reality transcending visible (phenomenal) manifestations is accompanied in Claussen’s work by an apprehensive, sceptical consciousness whose only certain knowledge is that of its own ignorance.
Dropkin, Celia (1887–1956)
Authors: Legutko Agnieszka
Published: September 2018

Celia Dropkin, one of the greatest yet lesser-known Yiddish poets, revolutionized modern Yiddish poetry with her pioneering exploration of gender dynamics. Bold erotic motifs in Dropkin’s poetry shocked her contemporaries, while her poems, written mostly in the 1920s and 1930s, sound au courant in the twenty-first century. In her poetry, Dropkin addressed themes such as sexuality, love, artistic creativity, motherhood, and nature — as well as domination and sexual politics in man-woman relationships.

Born in Bobruisk, Belarus as Tsilye Levin, she wrote her first poems in Russian at the age of 10. After her immigration to the USA in 1912, she began writing in Yiddish, making her literary debut in 1918. She was affiliated with modernist groups formed by Yiddish poets in America, such as Di Inzikhistin [Introspectivists] and Di Yunge [The Young]. During her lifetime, she published only one volume of poetry, In heysn vint. Her children reissued the volume after her death, updating it to include her short stories and reproductions of paintings that she created later in life. Dropkin’s modernist poetry shattered cultural stereotypes about the social and gender roles imposed on men and women, making her a path-breaking poet who ‘filled the stillness of Yiddish poetry with a passionate breath’ (Yakov Glatshtayn).
Højholt, Per (1928–2004)
Authors: Fauth Søren R.
Published: September 2018

Per Højholt was one of the most productive and influential Danish writers of the 20th century. He made his debut in 1948 at the age of twenty, when the modernist journal Heretica published his cycle of poems De nøgne. Højholt proceeded to elaborate his own form of radical modernism rooted in the work of, for example, Stéphane Mallarmé, with his first collection of poetry, Poetens hoved (1963). Whereas in the work of Mallarmé the suggestiveness of the language reaches towards a more elevated (truer) form of reality, Højholt’s poetry is postmodern play with language. The oeuvre spans widely, ranging from collections of poems, short prose and essays, to the novel Auricula (2001) and the posthumous fragment Hans Henrik Mattesen—En monografi (2007). Højholt by no means confined himself to the writing desk and the written page. A large part of his work comprised performance and artistic expression in other media: radio readings of poetry, radio montage, radio plays, as well as a variety of public happenings. Højholt was born on 22 July 1928 and died on 15 October 2004. A trained librarian, he worked in that capacity until 1966, subsequently devoting himself to his artistic endeavor until the time of his death. He was awarded the Danish Academy’s Grand Prize in 1982.
Leffler (Edgren), Anne Charlotte (1849–1892)
Authors: Hron Irina
Published: September 2018

Anne Charlotte Leffler was one of the most acclaimed Swedish women writers of the modern breakthrough in late 19th-century Scandinavia. Joining the circle known as Young Sweden, a leading literary movement of the 1880s, she was part of the Ibsen-inspired debate about women’s rights, sexual morality, and the normative bourgeois family structure. During her lifetime, Leffler’s plays were performed more frequently than Strindberg’s, and she was known as a notable salon hostess. After her divorce from Gustaf Edgren in 1889, she married the Italian mathematician Pasquale del Pezzo, duke of Cajanello, and settled in Italy. In 1892 she died of appendicitis at the age of forty-three. In her provocative works, sometimes close to popular fiction, Leffler depicts not only dysfunctional middle-class marriages but also 19th-century notions of love, in particular eroticism. Her major works are translated into several languages, including English, German, Russian, Italian, Croatian and Dutch.
Arlen, Michael (1895–1956)
Authors: Girling Anna
Published: September 2018

Michael Arlen, although now largely forgotten, was one of the most successful novelists of the 1920s. Born Dikran Kouyoumdjian in Ruse, Bulgaria, to Armenian parents, Arlen’s family came to Britain in the early 1900s, and he attended Malvern College. He briefly studied at the University of Edinburgh before moving to London in the mid 1910s to embark on a career as a writer, initially working for A. R. Orage’s magazine, The New Age. His first publication was a collection of his pieces from the magazine, published as The London Venture in 1920. It was at this point that he began writing as Michael Arlen.

Arlen produced a steady stream of short stories and novels throughout the early 1920s, all offering a similar whimsical, romantic glimpse of young London socialites, culminating in 1924 with the publication of The Green Hat. It was an immediate success (selling 150,000 copies that year alone), and went on to become one of the bestselling novels of the 1920s, enabling Arlen to fund Noel Coward’s play, The Vortex. Arlen and his novel quickly became short hand for a popular conception of the 1920s; both are referred to in a slew of novels from the time (Michaelis, for instance, in D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, is thought to be based on him). Arlen moved to the USA in 1941 and continued to write until his death, experimenting with a range of genres, including science fiction, but he never again wrote anything as successful as The Green Hat.
Millin, Sarah Gertrude (1888–1968)
Authors: Turner Ellen
Published: September 2018

Born of Lithuanian Jewish parentage, author Sarah Gertrude Millin grew up amongst the diamond diggings in the Northern Cape province of South Africa. Beginning with The Dark River (1919), Millin published seventeen novels in a career spanning five decades. The publication of God’s Step-Children (1924) cemented her international reputation. The South Africa of Millin’s novels is represented with a stark and pessimistic realism. Her fiction depicts both urban and rural South Africa, and her work embodies many of the opinions of her English-speaking, white, middle-class, South African contemporaries. While Millin was a prolific and popular writer during her lifetime, posthumously her reputation has suffered because of the recurrent themes of racial purity and abhorrence of miscegenation in her writings. J. M. Coetzee’s 1980 article on the author has had a particularly significant role in the establishment of (still scant) scholarly criticism on Millin. Millin’s oeuvre also includes two autobiographies, a six-volume diary, and copious non-fictional works on South African concerns. Of these, her biography of diamond magnate Cecil Rhodes (1933) was particularly acclaimed. As a successful author in her own era, acquainted with many of the modernist writers of the time, Millin is both a significant figure in South African women’s literary history and a representative of racist colonial ideologies.
Goleizovsky (Goleizovskii), Kas’ian Yaroslavich (1892–1970)
Authors: Misler Nicoletta
Published: September 2018

A Russo-Soviet choreographer, dancer, and artist, Kas’ian Goleizovsky was exposed to various art forms from early childhood: dance at the Bolshoi ballet school; fine and applied arts at Moscow’s Stroganov Institute; and music lessons with the celebrated violinist David Krein. This broad education enabled him to perceive dance in terms of line and color, to integrate costume and choreography, and to infuse visual rhythm, emotional expression, bodily movement, and musicality into his artistic explorations. His collaborations with avant-garde visual artists such as Petr Galadzhev, Anatolii Petritsky, and Boris Erdman, and with composers such as Boris Ber, Matvei Blanter, and Sergei Prokofiev were always distinguished by strong mutual understanding. A pre-postmodern choreographer, Goleizovsky moved among very different systems and types of dances, including classic, eccentric, variety, ballroom, and music hall.
Modern Breakthrough
Authors: D’Amico Giuliano
Published: September 2018

The Modern Breakthrough is a category of literary history first used in 1883 by the Danish critic Georg Brandes. Brandes used it to group together a series of Scandinavian authors of the preceding decade. More generally, the Modern Breakthrough came to identify the literary currents embedded in social realism and naturalism that grew in Scandinavia during the 1870s and the 1880s. Although closely related to European literary currents of the age, the Modern Breakthrough developed as a distinctly Scandinavian phenomenon. It also influenced other literatures through the works of key personalities such as Henrik Ibsen, August Strindberg, and Jens Peter Jacobsen. Authors of the Modern Breakthrough shared an interest in social problems such as the tension between the working classes and the capitalist bourgeoisie, the role of women in society, and the struggle between science and religion. In the second half of the 1880s, the Modern Breakthrough increasingly became influenced by symbolism and impressionism and gradually extinguished during the 1890s, threatened by decadent and avant-garde literature.
Nada, Hamid (1924–1990)
Authors: Radwan Nadia
Published: September 2018

Born in the popular neighbourhood of Khalifa in Cairo, Egypt, Hamid Nada is one of the leading figures of Egyptian modern art. He was one of the first Egyptian painters to introduce symbolism in his work, which was characterized by the expression of human inner feelings, and inspired by popular traditions, in his work. He joined the Egyptian ‘Group of Contemporary Art’, founded in 1946 by the painter and pedagogue Hussein Youssef Amin (1904–1984), who rejected the traditional approaches to art education and promoted freedom of expression. In 1948, Nada pursued his studies at the School of Fine Arts in Cairo, where he graduated in 1951. He studied in Luxor in 1956, and the following year, he was appointed to the Faculty of Fine Arts in Alexandria. In 1961, he was named professor at the School of Fine Arts in Cairo and became the head of its Painting Department in 1977.
Przybyszewski, Stanislaw (1868–1927)
Authors: Fialek Marek
Published: September 2018

Stanislaw Przybyszewski (1868–1927), highly controversial author of German tongue and Polish provenance, catalyst of German-Scandinavian modernity, and satanist, was widely read in Europe at the turn of the twentieth century. He began his writing career with Zur Psychologie des Individuums, a treatise with the subtitle Chopin und Nietzsche. By means of a highly selective presentation of Nitzschean doctrine, he tried to determine his own aesthetic-philosophical position. He propagated a new type of art that is, essentially, created in an outburst of emotion, placing sexuality and the opposition of the sexes at the very beginning of any artistic creativity. Art is, in Przybyszewski’s interpretation, the constant struggle between the sex and the brain, or the sublimation of erotic desire. Diegesis is often replaced by memories, dreams, visions, images from the subconscious of the narrator, and situations of pure madness and ecstatic excruciation. His language use was novel in being filled with medical terminology, colourful imagery, and scientific analogies, combining terms adapted from the exact sciences to the field of intuitive psychology with a vigorous ambition to coin new terms. Przybyszewski’s psychic naturalism and his understanding of the soul as a ‘perpetually introversive view’ embodied an animadversion on the limits of language itself, which is why, to him, Munch’s Fieber und Vision represents a felicitous depiction of the most difficult-to-grasp operations of the human soul.
Rabikovitch, Dalia (1936–2005)
Authors: Codish Moria
Published: September 2018

Born in Ramat Gan, Israel, Dalia Rabikovitch was six years old when her father died in a car accident. Her family moved to kibbutz Geva, a transition that Rabikovitch later recalled as traumatic. At the age of thirteen she moved to the city of Haifa, where she was transferred from one foster family to another. Orphanhood and alienation are the fundamental experiences in her poetry, which is characterized by a lyrical, elegiac tone.

Rabikovitch is a highly regarded poet in Israel. Her work combines biblical-archaic language with simple, day-to-day semantics, and ranges from abstract to concrete. She was among those who generated the poetic shifts in Hebrew literature of the 1950s and 1960s, and her voice is one of the most influential and unique in modernist Hebrew poetry.
Wallach, Yonna (1944–1985)
Authors: Weisman Anat
Published: September 2018

Yonna Wallach, born in Mandatory Palestine, is known as one of the most prominent and influential poets in Israeli poetry. She lived most of her life in her mother’s home in the town of Kiryat Ono. The residence was located on a street named after her late father, who was killed in the Israeli Independent War in 1948 when Wallach was four years old.

Wallach was known as an eccentric figure whose lifestyle was exceptionally extroverted, even among the bohemian circles in which she was involved. Her stormy and intense relationships with both men and women, free and open sex life, experiences with drugs, and frequent hospitalizations in psychiatric institutions are described in detail in Yigal Serna’s 1993 biography.

Her first poems appeared in 1964 and her first collection of poetry, Devarim (Words, or Things), was published in 1966. Scholars and critics were fascinated by the richness of the poems, and stressed their original and enigmatic imagism as well as their erotic, existential, metaphysical, feminist and social concerns.
Yokomitsu, Riichi (1898–1947)
Authors: Yoshikuni Hiroki
Published: September 2018

Riichi Yokomitsu was a Japanese novelist who, as one of the founders of Shinkankaku-ha [New Sensation School], helped introduce European avant-garde literature into Japan during the interwar period and opened the door to Japanese modernist style. His stylistic innovation, opposition to the proletarian literature favored by Korehito Kurahara, and theory of the novel opened up Japanese fiction to possibilities other than realism and the I-novel.

Yokomitsu was born Toshikazu Yokomitsu in Fukushima prefecture in 1898. After attending—and later being expelled from—Waseda University, Yokomitsu started a magazine, BungeiJidai [Literary Age] in 1924 with Yasunari Kawabata, Teppei Kataoka, Yoichi Nakagawa, Toko Kon, and others. BungeiJidai, which became the major vehicle for the New Sensation School, marked the beginning of the Showa period in literature, along with the proletarian writers’ BungeiSensen [Literary Frontier], which was launched in the same year.
Zabolotsky, Nikolai Alexeevich (1903–1958)
Authors: Syvarth Kristina
Published: September 2018

Nikolai Alexeevich Zabolotsky was a Russian poet and translator, and a member of the avant-garde absurdist group Oberiu (a modified acronym for Obedinenie Realnogo Iskusstva [Association for Real Art]). He was born in Kizicheskaya Sloboda on 7 May 1903, and died in Moscow on 14 October 1958. Zabolotsky is best known for his work with the late avant-garde, alongside Daniil Kharms and Alexander Vvedensky in their absurdist group, Oberiu. In 1920 Zabolotsky moved away from his family in Urzhum to Moscow to study medicine and philology at Moscow University. Only a year later he moved to Petrograd (now St Petersburg) and enrolled in the Pedagogical Institute of St Petersburg State University. After graduating in 1925, Zabolotsky met Kharms and Vvedensky at a poetry reading and in 1928 they formed Oberiu, a group that gained notoriety for their nonsensical verse and absurdist theatrical productions. By 1931 Oberiu’s activity began to decline under the pressure of the Stalinist purges and the officially sanctioned Socialist Realism. In 1938 Zabolotsky was arrested in one of Stalin’s purges for his anti-Leninist philosophic views and sent to Siberia. He spent much of his time in Siberia working on his translation of the Kievian Rus’ epic, The Lay of Igor’s Host. Twelve years later he was released, and he moved to Moscow where he spent the remainder of his life writing translations and poetry.
Börlin, Jean (1893–1930)
Authors: Batson Charles R.
Published: September 2018

As principal choreographer and dancer for the 1920s avant-garde troupe Les Ballets Suédois (Swedish Ballet), Jean Börlin contributed greatly to the modernist cauldron that was interwar Paris. Founded by the wealthy Swedish arts patron Rolf de Maré in 1920, the Ballets Suédois expanded upon the model of avant-garde collaborative dance theater established by Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes a decade earlier. In the five years until their disbanding in 1925, the Swedes rivaled the better-known Russian company for artistic creativity with such signal works as the 1921 Les Mariés de la Tour Eiffel (The Newlyweds of the Eiffel Tower), the 1923 La Création du monde (The Creation of the World), and the 1924 Relâche (Theatre Closed). With twenty-three original choreographies, some 900 performances, and international tours throughout Europe and the United States, Börlin and his company played a significant role in the development and propagation of innovative modernist work, which grew from the interplay among the visual and performing arts. In collaboration with such artists as Jean Cocteau, Darius Milhaud, and Fernand Léger, Börlin helped change the face and forms of dance theater.
Gerrard, Saida (1913–2005)
Authors: Boye Seika
Published: September 2018

Toronto-born Saida Gerrard was one of the first artists to import modern dance to Canada following study in the United States. Her early training included character dancing and Dalcroze eurhythmics in Toronto, and in 1931 she moved to New York City to train at the newly opened Mary Wigman School, where she studied with Hanya Holm and Fe Alf. She later continued her training at the Martha Graham School and danced with Charles Weidman through the Federal Theater Project. Gerrard eventually settled in California where she continued to teach, choreograph, and perform. From 1932 to 1936 Gerrard returned to Toronto for personal reasons and opened The Studio of Modern Dance, teaching adaptations of exercises in absolute dance (Ausdruckstanz) learned at the Wigman School. Her influence is seen through to the professionalization of modern dance in Toronto in the 1960s. Gerrard’s professional career blossomed during her return to Toronto. She performed her own work before crowds as large as 8,000 with the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, exposing many to modern dance for the first time. Her article/manifesto "The Dance" explains the artistic and philosophical impetus behind the developing art form. She eventually returned to New York where there was an infrastructure to support a professional dance career, which was not available in Canada at the time.
Zeybek, The
Authors: Shay Anthony
Published: September 2018

The zeybek is a genre of Turkish folk dance that is closely associated with the Aegean region on the west coast of Anatolian Turkey, although it is found in other regions as well. It can be seen as an early twentieth-century attempt to "modernize" folk dance in Turkey. There are many versions of this dance: Usually, the zeybek is performed by a solo male dancer, though it can also be performed by two or more males. Although less common, there are a few female zeybek dances. There is also a Greek form of the dance, as well as an urban form—the zeibekikos—brought to Greece by Greeks from Izmir (Smyrna).

The Ottoman government sent Selim Sırrı Tarcan, one of the earliest researchers of Turkish folk dances, to Sweden in 1909 to study physical education, and there he was struck by the ways in which Swedish instructors choreographed folk dances in a "refined" way. In 1916, he choreographed the zeybek—which he called Tarcan zeybeği—to appeal to a sophisticated urban Turkish audience. However, the modernization of the zeybek dance was never fully embraced in Turkey because of the nationalistic and ethnic appeal that staged traditional folk dances had for Turkish audiences.
Itō, Michio (1893–1961)
Authors: Rodman Tara
Published: September 2018

Michio Itō was a modern dancer and choreographer who worked in Europe, the United States, and Japan. After training at the Dalcroze Institute in Hellerau, Itō collaborated with Ezra Pound and W.B. Yeats on the 1916 dance drama, At the Hawk’s Well. In New York City, Itō performed at the Neighborhood Playhouse and the Greenwich Village Theatre, and taught and worked with U.S. modern dancers, including Martha Graham, Charles Weidman, Pauline Koner, Ruth St. Denis, and Lester Horton. Itō moved to Los Angeles in 1929, where he worked in film and choreographed dance symphonies for the Hollywood and Pasadena Rose Bowls. Following the events at Pearl Harbor Itō was interned, and repatriated to Tokyo in 1943. When the war ended he became head choreographer of the Ernie Pyle Theatre in Tokyo, creating productions for the occupying troops. Itō developed his own modern dance technique, the Itō Method, which adapted Dalcroze movement exercises into a style that he described as a fusion of ‘‘East’’ and ‘‘West.’’ Itō’s intercultural approach and ability to move between elite and commercial projects allowed him to cross different streams of modernism—German eurhythmics, British poetic drama, U.S. modern dance, and the Americanization of postwar culture in Japan.
Alberti, Rafael (1902–1999)
Authors: Colás Cardona Silvia
Published: September 2018

Born in Cadiz, Andalusia, and a member of what is known as the Generation of ’27, Rafael Alberti started his career as an avant-garde painter. He began to paint when his family moved to Madrid in 1917, and later in his life, he admitted to thinking of himself as a painter before a poet. He started writing poetry in 1920, publishing some of his early works in the ultraista literary review Horizontes. His first book of poems, Marinero en tierra [Sailor in Land], won the prestigious Premio Nacional de Literatura [National Prize for Literature] in 1925. Soon would follow La amante [The mistress] in 1926 and El alba del alhelí [Dawn of the Wallflower], published in 1927. All three of these works were inspired by neo-popularismo, one of the various literary trends that influenced the Generation of ’27.

The arrival of Alberti at the Residencia de Estudiantes [Student Residence] in 1924 marks a crucial moment in his life; it was at the Residencia that he met most of the members that would later form the Generation of ’27: Federico García Lorca, Salvador Dalí, Luis Buñuel, Jorge Guillén, Gerardo Diego, Pedro Salinas, Vicente Aleixandre and Dámaso Alonso, among others.
Antubam, Kofi (1922–1964)
Authors: Woets Rhoda
Published: September 2018

Kofi Antubam was an influential and pioneering modern artist in Ghana. His realistic, narrative scenes of idealized African life, depicted in wall paintings and mosaics, influenced many artists after him. In 1957 Antubam was appointed as an official state artist following Ghana’s independence; an unsurprising development given Antubam’s firm belief that artists should contribute to national pride and development, representing Ghana in their art work as a modern nation with a unique past and culture.

Antubam received his art education at Achimota School, in Accra, and Goldsmiths College, in London. He exhibited his work both in Ghana and internationally in cities such as London, Paris, Rome, Düsseldorf, and New York. Antubam challenged contemporary African artists to use the skills honed from their European based art training as tools in painting cultural portraits of traditional African culture. A representational art style, he argued, was only a vehicle to express what lay within. Assimilation was the key concept for Antubam in the development of a national and African identity that, he argued, would remain distinct from East and West despite the assimilation of foreign elements.
Ashcan School
Authors: Kuykendall Lara
Published: September 2018

The Ashcan School was a group of American artists that began exhibiting together in the early 20th century and advocated for total freedom in style and subject matter. Also known as Urban Realists because of their focus on urban, public spaces including trains, streets and parks, restaurants and bars, and other spaces of popular entertainment, Ashcan members included Robert Henri, John Sloan, George Luks, William Glackens, Everett Shinn, and George Bellows. "Ashcan" was initially a pejorative term applied to the group because they employed dark colors and painterly, unblended brushstrokes, which were thought to make their works appear dirty or unfinished. The Ashcan School was initially associated with a secessionist art group called The Eight, which also included postimpressionists Arthur B. Davies, Maurice Prendergast, and Ernest Lawson. The Eight rebelled against the National Academy of Design, the principal art school and host of prestigious juried exhibitions in New York, because they sought greater stylistic freedom and more control over their exhibition opportunities. Implicitly, the Ashcan painters also rebelled against The Ten, a group of American Impressionists, because they thought their predecessors’ works were too delicate in style and genteel in subject matter.
Brecheret, Victor (1894–1955)
Authors: Canejo Cynthia
Published: September 2018

Victor Brecheret was a modernist sculptor whose unique style incorporated the graceful design of Art Nouveau and Art Deco and the purity of the School of Paris. Working in São Paulo, one of the centers of the avant-garde during the earliest manifestations of modernism in Brazil, Brecheret participated in the Semana de Arte Moderna de 1922 [Week of Modern Art]—an arts festival organized by a group of modernists for the centennial celebration of Brazilian independence—which took place in the Teatro Municipal de São Paulo between 3 and 17 February, 1922. Brecheret became an important part of this intellectual group, which included the painters Anita Malfatti and Emiliano Di Cavalcanti; the poet, Menotti del Picchia; and the writers, Mario de Andrade and Oswald de Andrade. Brecheret was inspired to simplify his sculptural forms while visiting the Parisian ateliers of two noted sculptors: the Romanian, Constantin Brancusi, and the Frenchman, Aristide Maillol. As a modernist working on public monuments—such as the MonumentoàsBandeiras [Monument to the Pioneers], in Ibirapuera Park, São Paulo, 1936–1956—Brecheret was able to unite his national tendencies with his international inclinations. In working with ideas from both Brazil and Europe, Brecheret assimilates national subjects with international styles to create works that are decidedly his own. Furthermore, in choosing unusual poses or unconventional designs, he gives traditional themes a unique character.
Nijinska, Bronislava (1891–1972)
Authors: Garafola Lynn
Published: September 2018

The premiere female ballet choreographer of the first half of the twentieth century, Bronislava Nijinska experienced the transformative power of the Russian Revolution and discovered untapped creative powers in the chaotic moments that followed it. Rejecting the ‘‘acrobaticism,’’ and what she perceived as the stale conventions of nineteenth-century Russian ballet, she was an architect of twentieth-century neo-classicism and an early exponent of the plotless ballet. Although ballet technique remained the foundation of her work, she augmented it with movements originating in other forms, energized it with rhythms of modernity, minimized narrative, and insisted that movement alone constituted the primary material of dance. She brought a woman’s sensibility to her choreography, evident in Les Noces (The Wedding) (1923), her greatest work, and Les Biches (also known in English as The House Party, 1924), both produced for Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, and many of her works rested on gender ambiguity, the probing of gender boundaries, and a mistrust of conventional gender roles. A key figure of Russia Abroad, she contributed to the many diasporic or émigré companies, including her own short-lived ensembles, which dotted the ballet landscape of the interwar years, and through her career as a freelance choreographer played a crucial role in the international dissemination of modernism. She choreographed the original versions of several modernist scores, introducing them to the ballet repertoire. In her multiple roles as teacher, choreographer, and ballet mistress she influenced the careers of numerous dancers and choreographers, including Frederick Ashton and Ninette de Valois. Finally, she was an articulate writer and the author of an acclaimed volume of memoirs, in addition to a major treatise on movement.
Chissano, Alberto (1935–1994)
Authors: McGuire Harriet
Published: September 2018

Alberto Mabungulane Chissano first tried his hand at wood sculpture in 1964, and in the first decade of his career had his work displayed in multiple local and international group exhibitions. By 1972 Chissano had held his first solo exhibition abroad. Before Mozambique’s independence from Portugal in 1975, the Chissano Museum Gallery in Matola, a suburb of the capital Maputo (formerly Lourenço Marques), was established in his home. There he had the first of several generations of Mozambican sculptors learn the secrets of working in mafora and sandalwood at his side. Among the well-known Mozambican sculptors who trained at Chissano’s studio are Naftal Langa (1932–2014), Muando (1960--), and Ndlozy (1970--).
Circle
Authors: Fowler Alan
Published: September 2018

Circle is a book-length survey of international constructive art, first published in London in 1937. The joint editors and organizers of the parallel Exhibition of Constructive Art were the émigré Russian sculptor Naum Gabo (1890–1977), the British abstract artist Ben Nicholson, and the modernist British architect Leslie Martin. Gabo was one of several European artists and architects who came to England in the late 1930s to escape Nazi and Soviet oppression. In London, he became a friend of Ben Nicholson, with whom he discussed starting an annual publication that would promote the constructivist concept of a synthesis of modernist architecture with constructivist painting and sculpture. Circle was the outcome of these discussions, and the book and exhibition constituted the first comprehensive exposition of constructive art in Britain. Circle featured fifty-one participants, including ten from Britain. While the contributors from overseas included major international figures such as Piet Mondrian, Fernand Léger, Walter Gropius and Le Corbusier, the British artists—with the exception of Nicholson, Barbara Hepworth and Henry Moore—were far less well-known and the constructivist credentials of several were very weak. The intention to publish Circle annually was frustrated by the outbreak of World War II and the departure of Gabo and others to the USA.