bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Bourke-White, Magaret (1904–1971)
Authors: Slipp Naomi
Published: September 2018

Margaret Bourke-White was an influential American photojournalist associated with Life Magazine. Bourke-White briefly studied at Columbia University under Photo-Secessionist Clarence White (1871–1925) before graduating from Cornell University in 1927. Opening a photography studio in Cleveland, Ohio, she specialized in industrial and commercial images that appealed to emerging modernist tastes. Widely published and highly lauded, Bourke-White achieved many firsts, including being the first woman to photograph combat zones. Her career transformed the male-dominated field of photojournalism.

In 1927 Bourke-White photographed the dark interior of the Cleveland-based Otis Steel Company utilizing magnesium flares to capture the industrial processes. The following year, Bourke-White documented the construction of the Chrysler Building in Manhattan. Both sets of photographs emphasize American industry and combine formal drama with tonal variation, aligning Bourke-White with the "machine aesthetic" of modernist art. From 1929–1935, Bourke-White photographed for Henry Luce’s Fortune magazine. For her first assignment, she took compelling images of the Swift hog processing plant. This was followed by three trips abroad to document culture and industry in Stalin’s Soviet Union. Her 1931 photo-essay in Fortune was the first on life in the USSR in a Western publication.
Casablanca School
Authors: Powers Jean Holiday
Published: September 2018

The École des Beaux-Arts of Casablanca was founded in 1950 by the French, during the protectorate era in Morocco (1912–1956). It has stayed open constantly since its opening, and is a municipal school, unlike the art school in Tétouan, Morocco. The first Moroccan director of the school was Maurice Arama (1960–1962), who was succeeded by Farid Belkahia (1962–1974). Under Belkahia, the school was a significant landmark in the history of Moroccan modernism. As well as a new modernist style in their personal work, members of the faculty were known for advancing a pedagogy that focused on rooting modernism in local visual culture. The school turned away from the inherited French model of easel paintings and still-lifes, instead highlighting Moroccan visual culture and architecture. Faculty taught students in multiple media, including painting, sculpture, and ceramics, as well as in graphic design. Each year, for a final project, the students would work together on an urban space that would stay open for three months for public visits. For example, in the final year project for 1968, rather than a typical art school showcase, as the faculty described it, the students were asked to treat the architecture of the gallery in such a way as to highlight the broader materials, plasticity, and space of the gallery itself, trying to integrate and synthetize arts of multiple disciplines and techniques.
Cephas, Kassian (1845–1912)
Authors: Cox Matt
Published: September 2018

Cephas was the first indigenous Indonesian photographer who, after training with a European mentor around 1870, was appointed as official photographer to the royal house of Hamengkubuwana in Jogjakarta where he made official portraits and documented festivities. When Cephas first advertized his studio’s services in 1877, he announced himself as an independent businessman and a member of the emerging petit bourgeois who employed his technical skills to establish himself as a modern man. As souvenirs for European tourists and Dutch expatriates returning home, Cephas’s photographs were prone to the commoditization of local scenery and life: subjects were arranged into simulations of daily life, producing a contrived reality of types such as batik makers, card players, woodworkers and Javanese beauties. While his self-portraits established him as a modern photographer, it was Cephas’s photographs of young Javanese women that may have served as models for 20th-century modern artists in their quest to find suitable allegories for an emerging independent nation. Cephas used photography to express a modern identity, forged in negotiation with the feudal past and the colonial project, thereby tracing an arc of modern Indonesian art from the central courts of Java in the 1880s to the pages of bilingual 1920s photographic manuals. Thus, Cephas’s photography may provide the missing link in Indonesian art history between Raden Saleh and Sudjojono.
Chen Li Ying Georgette (1906–1993)
Authors: Low Yvonne
Published: September 2018

Georgette Chen was a Chinese émigré artist who settled in Singapore in 1953 and taught at the Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts (NAFA) until 1981. Described as the most influential, pioneering female artist in Singapore, Chen brought modernist ideas to the nascent Malayan art world and was instrumental in fostering modernism in local art practice. Her oil paintings, her strongest and most proficient artform, were initially influenced by the Realist and Barbizon Schools. Later her paintings became informed by French Post-Impressionism—especially Fauvism—most notably in their approach toward color. Her mastery of modernism culminated in a synthesis of Western and Eastern philosophies, which was best represented by her portraits, tropical still lives, and plein air paintings of everyday scenes in the Malayan landscape—all of which conveyed a distinct local flavor. Chen was known as the first generation of "Nanyang artists," most of whom were affiliated to NAFA as teachers, and who were responsible for bringing to Malaya a sophistication and cosmopolitanism that was deemed missing from the local art scene.
Chitt Chongmankhong (1922–2009)
Authors: Veal Clare
Published: September 2018

Chitt Chongmankhong was one of Thailand’s foremost artistic photographers, and is today referred to as "the father of Thai photography" (Chongmankhong 1998: 23). He is recognized for his innovative use of darkroom techniques, and would often say that thirty percent of photographic accomplishment is in taking the photograph, and seventy percent is a result of having expertise in the darkroom. In addition to owning his own commercial photographic store, from 1958 Chitt was also a member of the Royal Thai Photographic Society (RTPS) and served as the organization’s president from 1987–1988. He frequently traveled outside Bangkok to take photographs of the Thai landscape and portraits of ordinary people, sometimes with other members of the RTPS. His photographic compositions were generally carefully planned, sometimes adopting a pictorialist style in their atmospheric rendering of light and shadow and in their representation of different weather conditions and landscapes. However, Chitt’s constant fascination with darkroom techniques meant that his work also sometimes took the form of surrealistic collages or interrogations into the photographic medium itself. While in his early career his style was unpopular within Thailand’s photographic community, his receipt of many international awards eventually legitimized his work locally. Chitt became a National Artist of Thailand in 1995.
Cossington Smith, Grace (1892–1984)
Authors: Moore Catriona
Published: September 2018

Grace Cossington Smith was one of Australia’s foremost female modernist artists. Having developed an enthusiasm for modern theories of color and design at the Dattilo Rubbo art school in Sydney, in 1915 she exhibited The Sock Knitter, a seated portrait of her sister Madge knitting socks for the war effort. The portrait’s tight composition and flat blocks of decorative colour, influenced by the modern British style, have led to claims that it may be Australia’s first Post-Impressionist painting.

Cossington Smith went further than most in exploring the technical challenges and pictorial effects of colour and rhythmic compositional structure. She lived an unmarried, childless and economically comfortable life devoted to art. Living in relative suburban seclusion, Cossington Smith nonetheless held regular and successful solo exhibitions and was loosely involved with Ethel Anderson’s Turramurra Wall Painters. Her broad subject matter includes city scenes as well as portraits of friends and family, religious scenes, landscapes, still lifes and flower paintings. The artist later focused loving attention on the formal and spiritual dimensions of light, as expressed in the mirrored interior spaces of her beloved home, Cossington.
Del Prete, Juan (1897–1987)
Authors: Berland Rosa
Published: September 2018

While the legacy of Juan Del Prete (b. 1897, Vasto, Chieti, Italy; d. 1987, Buenos Aires) begins with the introduction of visual abstraction to Argentina through two exhibitions of his work in 1933 and 1934 (both at the Asociación Amigos del Arte in Buenos Aires), his oeuvre, which spans over forty years, is largely characterized by experimentation in a variety of modernist styles. Born in Italy, Del Prete immigrated to Argentina in 1909 and studied briefly at the Academia Perugino and Mutualidad de Estudiantes de Bellas Artes in Buenos Aires, participating in the El Bermellón Group. Much of his early work was representational, and included landscapes like Nota campestre (1925). In 1926, Del Prete exhibited with the progressive organization Asociación Amigos del Arte, which awarded him a scholarship to study abroad in France (1929–1933). Del Prete was one of many Latin American artists living and working in Paris, and took part in a rich artistic exchange with Hans Arp, Massimo Campigli, Rachel Forner, Joaquín Torres García, Jean Hélion, and Georges Vantongerloo. Del Prete joined the Abstraction-Création group in 1932. In Paris, Del Prete exhibited with the Salon des Surindépendants (1930–1933), Salon des Réalités Nouvelles, Huit artistes du Rio de la Plata, Galerie Castelucho-Dianan and the Première Exposition du Groupe Latino-Americain de Paris (1930). Moreover, Gallery Zak held an exhibition of Del Prete’s work in 1930, as did Galerie Vavin in 1931. His work from this period includes colorful geometric compositions including Abstracción (1932).
Desta, Gebre Kristos (1932–1981)
Authors: Cantone Helena
Published: September 2018

Gebre Kristos Desta was one of the most influential artists to emerge from the Addis Ababa Fine Arts School in Ethiopia in the 1960s. Best known for his pioneering abstract impressionist style paintings, his socially and politically charged content, and Pan-African perspectives, Desta was attacked by critics who accused him of being too Westernized and removed from his Ethiopian heritage and culture. While he exhibited abroad in the United States, USSR, India, and Czechoslovakia, Desta was mainly known in Ethiopia and West Germany during his short life, and only received international recognition after his death.

Desta studied art at the Werkschule für Bildende Künste und Gestaltung in Cologne from 1957 to 1961. Following his graduation, Desta held a solo exhibition at the Gallery Kuppers, an event that launched his career as an artist. In Ethiopia, Desta flourished under the patronage of Haile Selassie I, receiving the honorary National Prize for Fine Arts in 1965, and awards for his teaching services at Addis Ababa Fine Arts School between 1962 and 1975. Desta was responsible for introducing new artistic concepts to his students, including non-figurative abstract art and experimentation with social–political themes.
Dr. Atl (1875–1964)
Authors: Black June I.K.
Published: September 2018

Dr. Atl was a Mexican artist, author, political activist, and amateur vulcanologist. Born Gerardo Murillo in 1875 and raised in Guadalajara in the state of Jalisco, Dr. Atl was trained in drawing and the use of color by the Brazilian-born artist Félix Bernardelli, from whom he also learned of the European artistic vanguard. When Murillo received a scholarship from the Mexican Ministry of Public Education and Fine Arts in 1897, he traveled first to France, where he encountered the work of the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists. He then traveled to Italy, where he learned of the Divisionists, a group whose technical innovations in painting motivated his own later reimagining of the medium’s possibilities. From 1911–1914, the artist lived and worked in Paris. Throughout the early 1900s, Dr. Atl stayed connected to the arts scene in Europe, although he rejected what he referred to as the barbarity of Futurism and Cubism. Upon returning to his home country in 1914, Dr. Atl revolutionized the Mexican approach to depicting landscapes. Building on Mexico’s already strong tradition of landscape painting—most notably the work of Luis Coto (1830–1891), Daniel Thomas Egerton (1797–1842), Eugenio Landesio (1810–1879), and José María Velasco (1840–1912)—he introduced Mexican society to the techniques he had learned in Europe and brought a new expressiveness to the genre.
Brink, André (1935--2015)
Authors: Burger Willie
Published: September 2018

André Philippus Brink is one of South Africa’s most esteemed writers. Initially writing only in Afrikaans, he was one of the leading figures of the so-called Sestigers [Writers of the Sixties] who radically renewed Afrikaans literature, breaking away from the Realist tradition in Afrikaans fiction. Influenced by the French nouveau roman and the existentialism of Camus, Brink’s work of the 1960’s introduced Modernism to Afrikaans fiction. Breaking many taboos, writing openly about sex, and questioning the narrow Calvinist religious doctrine and political views prevailing at the time in the Afrikaner community led to clashes with the conservative Afrikaner establishment.
The Egyptian School of Fine Arts
Authors: Davies Clare
Published: September 2018

The Egyptian School of Fine Arts [Madrassat al-Funun al-Jamila al-Misriyya] opened its doors on 13 May 1908, a date cited by many art historians as marking the starting point of modern art in Egypt. The ESFA aimed to cultivate "Egyptian artists" while modeling its curriculum on that of the French academy system, with rigorous training in drawing at its core. At the same time, the school claimed to produce graduates capable of turning their skills to professional advantage. A privately funded institution, it was highly influential in molding so-called first- and second-generation artists. The model of arts education adopted by the school and its relevance to the goal of realizing an Egyptian artistic renaissance were themes addressed in early debates following the schoool’s establishment. An inaugural exhibition of student work took place between 13–20 January 1910 at the Royal Automobile Club in downtown Cairo. Many early graduates would go on to constitute Egypt’s celebrated Pioneer Generation [Jil al-Ruwwad] in the arts. The re-invention of the school as a state-run institution in the late 1920s played an important role in contemporary struggles between competing factions for control of the arts.
Film und Fotografie
Authors: Long Jonathan
Published: September 2018

FiFo, or Film und Fotografie, is shorthand for the Internationale Ausstellung des deutschen Werkbundes [International Exhibition of the German Werkbund], which opened in Stuttgart in May 1929. It presented an overview of contemporary photography, and is widely acknowledged as one of the most important photographic exhibitions of all time. The Werkbund was an open association—mainly consisting of architects but also involving craftsmen, industrialists, businessmen, publishers, and teachers—that supported training in the applied arts. FiFo was initiated by Gustav Stotz, director of the Württemberg section of the Werkbund, and its selection committee consisted of art historian Hans Hildebrandt, architect Bernhard Pankok, and typographer Jan Tschichold. Prominent photographers and critics were responsible for different sections of the exhibition: László Moholy-Nagy for Germany, Siegfried Giedion for Switzerland, El Lissitzky for the Soviet Union, Edward Steichen and Edward Weston for the United States, and Piet Zwart for the Netherlands. Hans Richter curated the accompanying film program. After the Stuttgart show, the exhibition toured to Berlin and Wrocƚaw (formerly Breslau) and—under the title Das Lichtbild [The Photograph]—to Munich, Essen, and Dessau. In 1930, it was shown, in various guises, in Zurich, Vienna, Gdansk (formerly Danzig), Zagreb, Tokyo and Osaka.
First American Artists’ Congress (14–16 February 1936)
Authors: Marie Annika
Published: September 2018

The First American Artists’ Congress convened over three days in New York City, and marked the formal establishment of the American Artists’ Congress (1936–1942). The members of the organization were brought together to act on behalf of artists, art, and artistic freedom. The Congress met its broad mandate by organizing exhibitions, hosting symposia, publishing, fund-raising, protesting censorship and lobbying for artists’ rights. Although not overtly aligned with a political party, the Congress’s politics were in keeping with the Popular Front (1935–1939), the Communist Party’s strategy to forge connections with the non-revolutionary intelligentsia and liberal middle class by emphasizing their shared cultural values and stressing the necessity of a mutual alliance against fascism.
Gill, Eric (1882–1940)
Authors: Bergstrom Tracy , Cribb Ruth
Published: September 2018

Eric Gill was a sculptor, typeface designer, printmaker and craftsman associated with the Arts and Crafts movement whose greatest influence was on the development of modern British sculpture in the early 20th century. As an advocate of hand-making in small workshops, he is considered one of the main proponents of the method of direct carving. Through his close working relationship with Jacob Epstein between 1910 and 1912, and receiving support from Roger Fry, Gill’s sculptures were received as representing modernity through direct carving, the simplification and flattening of line and form, and the use of British stones. Gill’s work as a typographer, letter cutter, wood engraver, and essayist also placed him at the heart of many modern movements in Britain during his lifetime, including the Society of Wood Engravers. As a writer and prolific sculptor for public architecture in the 1930s, he became prominent in the popular press. As a Catholic convert, his views and the religious subject matter of his art have complicated his status in the art historical canon. Since his death, his influence and importance have been predominately attributed to his letter cutting and typography.
Grosvenor School of Art, London (1925–1940)
Authors: Peers Juliette
Published: September 2018

The Grosvenor School of Art, also known as the Grosvenor School of Modern Art, was founded in 1925 by Scottish artist and printmaker Iain McNab. In 1940, it merged with the more traditional Heatherley’s Art School, which is still operating in London. The Grosvenor was famous across Britain and the British Empire in the interwar period for promoting modernist art and design. Its contribution to introducing and acclimatizing continental modernism to an extended anglophile audience was substantial. Pupils came from Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, as well as other countries, and through them the experience of modernism was brought back to their homelands. Across the British Empire, the Grosvenor School made modernism acceptable and praiseworthy, representing the authority of what Australian artist Arthur Streeton called "the Centre of Empire," combined with the glamorous social cachet that London symbolized for the social elites in the colonies.
Groupe Bogolan Kasobané
Authors: Goldner Janet
Published: September 2018

The Groupe Bogolan Kasobané is an association of six artists from Mali, West Africa: Kandioura Coulibaly, Klètigui Dembélé, Boubacar Doumbia, Souleymane Goro, Baba Fallo Keita, and Néné Thiam. The five men and one woman began working together in 1978. The Groupe is largely responsible for having elevated bogolan, a Malian textile technique traditionally used to decorate garments, to an important symbol of national and even pan-African identity. The members of the Groupe met as students at the Institut National des Arts (L’INA) in Bamako. At that time, bogolan was rarely seen in urban areas and was fabricated only by rural women. The study of bogolan was also strictly forbidden at the art academy. The Groupe’s use of local materials and elevation of materials associated with craft is a strategy employed by many contemporary artists throughout the world. Their first objective, to promote and preserve bogolan and to have it accepted and valued as artistic expression has been achieved. The Groupe moved the technique from craftsmanship to art. Today the Groupe is known because of their numerous exhibitions in Mali and around the world. Working collaboratively and developing new approaches to this centuries-old technique, they have continued to feature it in their art and award-winning costume and set designs for film and stage as well as fabrics for fashion and home furnishings.
Hikmet, Mohammed Ghani (1929–2011)
Authors: Floyd Tiffany Renee
Published: September 2018

Mohammed Ghani Hikmet is considered one of Iraq’s most prolific artists and influential modern sculptors. Hikmet is best known for his monumental sculptures that dot the cityscape of Baghdad. Many of his works, like The Fountain of Kahramana and Scheherazade and Shahrayar (1917), have become emblematic of Iraq itself.

After graduating from the Institute of Fine Arts in Baghdad in 1953, Hikmet traveled to Rome to attend the Accademia di Belle Arti. While in Italy, he also studied bronze casting at the Instituto di Zaka in Florence. After returning to Baghdad, Hikmet taught at the Institute of Fine Arts and the College of Architectural Engineering at the University of Baghdad. He also became involved in several Baghdadi art groups, most notably the Baghdad Group of Modern Art. Hikmet also assisted in the creation of two major public works taken on under other prominent Iraqi sculptors. He oversaw the casting of Jewad Selim’s massive figures for the Monument to Freedom. Following Selim’s premature death in 1961, Hikmat supervised its completion. Similarly, upon the death of the sculptor Khalid al-Rahal in 1987, Hikmet had to finish the work on the contested Arch of Victory.
Hopps, Walter (1932–2005)
Authors: Allan Ken D.
Published: September 2018

Walter Hopps was an American art dealer and curator of modern and contemporary art. Best known for organizing the first museum retrospective of Marcel Duchamp in 1963 at the Pasadena Art Museum (now the Norton Simon), Hopps was a pioneering example of the independent, creative curator, a model that emerged in the 1960s in the United States From his start as an organizer of unconventional shows of California painters on the cultural fringe of conservative Cold War-era Los Angeles, Hopps became one of the most respected, if unorthodox, curators of his generation, holding a dual appointment at the end of his life as 20th-century curator at Houston’s Menil Collection and adjunct senior curator at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York. Some of his noted exhibitions include: in Pasadena, a 1962 group show that helped to define pop art, The New Paintings of Common Objects; the first U retrospectives of Kurt Schwitters (1962) and Joseph Cornell (1967); Robert Rauschenberg retrospectives in 1976 and 1997 at the National Museum of American Art and Menil Collection, respectively; a 1996 survey of Edward Kienholz for The Whitney Museum of American Art; and a James Rosenquist retrospective in 2002 at the Guggenheim.
Hussein, Ibrahim (1936–2009)
Authors: Abdullah Sarena
Published: September 2018

Ibrahim Hussein is one of Malaysia’s most internationally recognized artists. His early works are known for their realistic figuration, the most prominent of which are Pak Utih (1970) and My Father & The Astronaut (1970). His works are influenced by Abstract Expressionsm, as apparent in his aerial views of semi-abstract figures, entangled and rolling in fluid. Noteworthy examples of this technique include Tumult (1969) and Lovers (1964). His later series Dance of Life (1982) and Red, Orange & Core (1984) feature heavy line work by graphic pens. These present an innate monumentality of interweaving fluid lines, engaging the viewer in a continuous journey of visual rhythm.

Ibrahim Hussein also invented a technique called "Printage" which combines printing techniques and collage. This technique is exemplified in his pieces Are You Alone Up There? (1969), Pak Utih (1970), My Father (1972), and HariIni Kita Dewasa (1975). Hussein has a body of work that spans more than half a century. He has left an extraordinary legacy of paintings that revolve around his perceptions of life, humanity, his country, and his reflection of personal experiences throughout the years.
Juelanshe [决澜社]
Authors: Piggott Belinda
Published: September 2018

Juelanshe (The Storm Society), founded in 1931 by Pang Xunqin (庞薰琹, 1906–1985) and Ni Yide (倪贻德, 1901–1970), was a short-lived movement in China informed by Post-Impressionism. The group, based in Shanghai, emerged following drastic changes to the education system implemented by the Qing Dynasty. From 1875, an increasing number of students went abroad for their education, primarily to Japan and Europe. After 1911, this had a significant impact on art practice as Euro-American art became associated with progress and modernity. European modernist movements became influential from the mid-1920s, supported by the rapid expansion of book, newspaper, and journal publishing. Shanghai, as a treaty port, offered an environment of comparative freedom for artists and intellectuals. Pang had studied for four years in Paris and sought to establish a modernist Parisian studio in the French Concession. Influenced by a number of artists, notably Picasso, Matisse, and Leger, he explored various styles, shifting from representational to almost abstract geometric, montage-like compositions. Ni graduated from the Shanghai Art School and studied Western art in Tokyo from 1927–1928. The style of his oil paintings was more consistent, displaying a neo-realistic, post-fauvist style influenced by Cezanne, Derain, and Vlaminck. He was a well-known art theorist and critic who actively engaged in public debate.
Kiowa 5
Authors: Peck James
Published: September 2018

The Kiowa 5 were a group of Kiowa artists born in Indian Territory (in what is now known as Oklahoma) during the first decade of the 20th century. Stephen Mopope (1898–1974), Jack Hokeah (c. 1900/2–1969), Monroe Tsatoke (1904–1937), James Auchiah (1906–1974), and Spencer Asah (1905/10–1954) were encouraged to paint by relatives, schoolteachers, and Indian Services personnel. In 1926, Oscar Jacobson, head of the University of Oklahoma art department, created a special program for Kiowa artists. Through Jacobson’s influence, from 1928 to 1932, the Kiowa 5 exhibited their paintings at the First International Art Exposition in Prague, Czechoslovakia, and at the 1932 Venice Biennal. These exhibitions, along with a portfolio of the artists’ work titled Kiowa Indian Art, brought the group critical acclaim in America and Europe. Stylistically, their watercolor paintings featured outlined fields of flat colour, with little or no indication of perspective or the third dimension. This flat, linear, decorative style was derived in part from Plains ledger drawings and hide paintings. Their subjects were auto-ethnographic representations of everyday, historically traditional Kiowa life. Their art provided a bridge between Plains ledger art of the late 19th century and the flat Studio Style taught to Indian students by Dorothy Dunn in Santa Fe in the 1930s.
Ko Hŭi-dong (고희동, 高羲東) (1886–1965)
Authors: Lee Jungsil Jenny
Published: September 2018

Ko Hŭi-dong is regarded as Korea’s first Western-style painter. Born into a progressive diplomatic family, Ko studied at a French language school in Seoul where he was introduced to Western culture and art by his French teachers and artists such as Léopold Remion. Ko became a government official, but throughout his career grew concerned with what he saw as the decline of his country. In response, he turned to traditional ink painting, studying under the country’s last court painters, An Chung-sik (안중식, 安中植, 1853–1920) and Cho Sŏk-chin (1816–1919). Ko eventually came to see traditional ink painting as little more than a copy of Chinese painting, so in 1909, the year before the Japanese colonization of Korea, Ko went to Tokyo. There, he studied Western-style painting at the Tokyo School of Fine Arts under Kuroda Seiki (조석진, 趙錫晉, 1866–1924). However, as is obvious in the large number of his remaining landscapes, Eastern-style ink painting eventually became Ko’s focus, where he applied his expertise in Western painting techniques to the traditional Asian medium. The unconventional content and new perspectives in landscapes that resulted formed the basis of Ko’s reputation as a founder of the modern ink painting style. Ko was also an art educator and administrator, and one of the most influential leaders in Korean modern art history.
Lattier, Christian (1925–1978)
Authors: Vincent Cédric
Published: September 2018

Christian Lattier, nicknamed the "bare-handed sculptor" by art historian Yacouba Konaté, was among the pioneers of modern art in Côte d’Ivoire. His success was formally recognized in 1966 when he won the grand prize at the First World Negro Art Festival in Dakar. Despite this recognition, he died at age 53, in virtual obscurity in his home country. Lattier enrolled at the École des Beaux-Arts in Saint-Etienne (France) in 1947. One year later, he went on to study sculpture and architecture at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris. Paris is also where Lattier achieved his first artistic success; not long after his arrival, his original sculptures designed with wood, stone, wire, and a strong hemp fiber attracted considerable attention. Among his most famous works is Panthère, the larger-than-life crouching rope panther for which he was awarded the Chenavard prize in 1954—a prize awarded to the best students of art and architecture at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. In 1959 he was a part of the first Paris Biennal. Today, artists such Dominique Zinkpè recognize his influence on their work, and Lattier’s sculptures are deposited at the Musée National de Côte d’Ivoire in Abidjan.
Legaspi, Cesar Torrente (1917–1994)
Authors: Ramirez Eileen Legaspi
Published: September 2018

Cesar Legaspi was a Filipino painter known as one of the 13 Moderns, a group of emergent artists whose work, according to artist-art educator Victorio Edades, was an alternative to the classicism and nostalgia-laced realism popular during the pre-World War II juncture of American colonialism in the Philippines. Along with peers Hernando Ocampo and Vicente Manansala, Legaspi was part of a generation of artists whose early image making engaged with questions of distortion, and the liberties artists could take in construing reality. In the early 1950s, these painters were regarded as the neo-realist triumvirate. While they produced works dealing with the same everyday subject matter as conservative artists of the period, they unselfconsciously took from other stylistic traditions that they encountered through research and peer exchanges. In doing so, they worked towards more individuated ways of rendering subjects, finding affinities with Cubism, Surrealism, and Expressionism. In the post-World War II period, the Neo-Realists manifested a cynicism toward the urbane, which they resolved visually in different ways. A well-known work of Legaspi’s from this period, Gadgets II (1949), depicts the mutant fusing of man and machine in an age where the industrial was both feared and mythologized. This work, alongside pieces imaging the working class (including stevedores, grave diggers, beggars, seasonal farm workers, and internal migrants) is associated with his early proletarian or proto-social realist phase.
Maria Martins (1894–1973)
Authors: Stigberg Sara
Published: September 2018

Maria Martins was a Brazilian sculptor and writer, a founding member of the Fundação do Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro, and a co-founder and exhibitor for the BienalInternacional de São Paulo. She was born in Campanha, Minas Gerais, Brazil in 1894. She made a name for herself in the international art world of the 1940s as "the sculptor of the tropics" and "the great sculptor of Surrealism," though she was largely overlooked between the 1950s and early 2000s. The wife of a diplomat, in the art world she preferred simply to be known as "Maria." She was influenced by Jacques Lipchitz, who encouraged exploration of her Brazilian identity in her work, and by Surrealism. A member of the expatriate artists’ community in New York, she was championed on the international stage by André Breton and held a long affair with Marcel Duchamp. Maria’s sculpture, based on natural forms and reflecting deep introspection, became increasingly abstract over the course of her career. On returning to Brazil from the United States in 1949, Brazilian critics rejected her work for its non-traditional and eroticized manner and themes. Nonetheless Martin used her international connections in the art world to promote modern art in Brazil until her death.
Meadmore, Clement (1929–1995)
Authors: Peers Juliette
Published: September 2018

Clement Meadmore was a major 20th-century sculptor with many works in situ across North America, Australia, and Japan. They were often commissioned as design features within substantial architectural installations and urban design projects in the International Style. Their heroic and rhetorical positioning on the forecourts of large corporate towers, on university campuses, and other public institutions could almost be classified as a cliché of mid- to late-20th-century visual experience, except that his works captured attention on their own merits.
Mingei [民芸]
Authors: Ajioka Chiaki
Published: September 2018

Developed in Japan in the mid-1920s, "Mingei" denotes a concept that encompasses objects, aesthetics, and philosophy. Developed by three individuals—religious philosopher and aesthete Yanagi Muneyoshi (Sōetsu 柳宗悦, 1889–1961), and potters Hamada Shōji (浜田庄司, 1894–1978) and Kawai Kanjirō (河井寛次郎, 1890–1966)—Mingei recognizes the beauty in humble folk crafted objects sold at markets. The three founding members conceived the term minshū-tekikōgei (craft with characteristics of people), eventually shortening it to Mingei. Typical Mingei objects were handcrafted wares from pre-modern eras produced in large quantities for everyday use. Yanagi claimed that their beauty—the simplicity, robustness, and honesty of the material—was "born, not made." As such, one could recognize the beauty of said objects through "direct perception" or "seeing before knowing." A wide range of Japanese and non-Japanese ideas informed Mingei theory, including those of John Ruskin, William Morris, William Blake, Walt Whitman, Émile Mâle, and the works of British potter Bernard Leach (1887–1979). While Mingei began as a sense of appreciation, it developed into an artistic movement through research and propagation in the magazine Kōgei (Craft [1931–1951]).
Modotti, Tina (1895–1942)
Authors: Caplow Deborah
Published: September 2018

Tina Modotti, an Italian-born photographer who lived much of her life in the United States, was an actress in silent movies in Hollywood, and in Los Angeles joined a Bohemian circle that included photographer Edward Weston, who would become her lover. Together they moved to Mexico, where she worked as a photographer from 1923 to 1930; her career there, though brief, was highly influential. She and Weston acquainted themselves with the artists and writers of Mexico City, presented exhibitions, made portraits and photographed the works of the muralists. Her early photographs, such as Roses (1924), were influenced by Weston, but she combined his formalism with her leftist inclinations, creating images such as Worker Reading El Machete (1925), or Campesinos Reading El Machete (1929), which used contrasts of light and shadow and geometric design to deliver political messages. In 1929 Modotti’s companion at the time, Julio Antonio Mella, was murdered and she was accused of complicity in the crime. Although exonerated, she was charged with the attempted assassination of President-Elect Pascual Ortiz Rubio and deported in 1930. She lived in Moscow from 1930 to 1936, and worked as a nurse in Spain during the Spanish Civil War. After the war, she returned to Mexico and lived quietly until her death in 1942.
Naghi, Mohamed Musa (1888–1956)
Authors: Davies Clare
Published: September 2018

The painter Mohamed Naghi is remembered today alongside Mahmoud Mukhtar (1891–1934) and Mahmoud Said (1897–1964) as one of the core members of the so-called first generation of Egyptian artists. His early nationalist paintings executed after the Uprising of 1919 won him recognition. Paintings produced in 1931–1932 while Naghi was in Ethiopia brought him further acclaim. After the system of foreign privileges was abolished in 1937, a number of Egyptian artists, including Naghi, were assigned high-ranking positions in state art institutions. A "Pioneer" artist, Mohamed Naghi sought to develop a school of modern Egyptian art that was true to what he perceived as art’s universal foundations (and especially an equilibrium both formal and moral in nature) and the roots of an Egyptian identity grounded in a metaphysics of the collective. Like many of his contemporaries, his work drew on motifs referencing the art and intellectual history of Pharaonic Egypt, Egypt’s Islamic Golden Age, and a shared culture of the Mediterranean basin, as well as important contemporary literary and artistic figures. However, it was his interest in Egyptian folk art (al-fann al-sha‘abi) that would prove most influential for subsequent generations. Despite early setbacks in his dealings with the art establishment, he eventually became a powerful figure in Egypt’s new state arts sector and argued for the need for state intervention in cultivating an Egyptian artistic renaissance.
Namatjira, Albert (Elea) (1902–1959)
Authors: McLean Ian
Published: September 2018

Albert Namatjira was the leading artist of the modern Aboriginal watercolor art movement at the Hermannsburg (Ntaria) Lutheran mission in Central Australia. He was the first Aborigine to be recognized as a professional artist, to make a good living from his art, and gain national acclaim. The turning point in his life occurred in 1934, when two visiting landscape artists, Rex Battarbee and John Gardiner, exhibited paintings of the local scenery at the mission. Already a talented craftsman with a reputation at the mission for his artefacts and poker-worked designs, Namatjira was inspired by the exhibition to learn to paint his totemic landscape of the MacDonnell Ranges of Central Australia in the same modern landscape style. Namatjira’s paintings had a huge impact on the Western Arrernte, as well as on other Aboriginal artists and the wider Australian public. In depicting local ancestral sites in the pictorial language of Biblical illustrations, Namatjira’s paintings are a visual parallel to the Arrernte Bible, effectively translating their ancestral histories into a modern idiom. To this day, the Western Arrernte consider Namatjira’s style as their own, as if it embodies their collective identity and history of the place. His success is considered a milestone in Australian art and the beginning of the modern Aboriginal art movement.
Nery, Ismael (1900–1934)
Authors: Flores Maria Bernardete Ramos
Published: September 2018

Ismael Nery (b. 1900, Belém do Pará, Brazil; d. 1934, Rio de Janeiro) was the mystical artist of Brazilian modernism. For him, art was a means to express his spiritual and philosophical restlessness. His project of the disintegration of the pictorial body arose from the desire to find the essence of the form through the abstraction of time and space. The androgyny that appears in his art represents the notion of divine androgyny: the idea that in the beginning males and females were one, and that perfection arises from such totality of being.
Nguyen Gia Tri (1908–1993)
Authors: Scott Phoebe
Published: September 2018

Born in Ha Dong, Vietnam, Nguyen Gia Tri was a modern painter, best known for his virtuosity in the medium of lacquer painting. Modern lacquer painting was invented at the École des Beaux Arts de l’Indochine, and was an experimental practice, drawing from traditional Vietnamese lacquer techniques to create a two-dimensional painted surface, akin to an oil painting. While a student at this school in the 1930s, Nguyen Gia Tri developed an expressive style in lacquer, marrying post-impressionist influences with an exploration of the medium’s visual characteristics, such as translucency and sheen. His most common subjects were aestheticized female figures, blending into amorphous backgrounds. Due to his work in the 1930s and 1940s, Nguyen Gia Tri was credited with transforming lacquer from a decorative art to a "fine art" medium. The idea of lacquer as a uniquely Vietnamese form of "fine art" had a special significance in the context of the burgeoning nationalism of colonial-period Vietnam. Following the Vietnamese Revolution of 1945, and the outbreak of the First Indochina War (1946–1954), Nguyen Gia Tri left Hanoi, eventually settling in Saigon, South Vietnam. While he continued to work in his characteristic style, he also experimented widely with the medium, including by exploring its innate facility for abstraction.
Flaubert, Gustave (1821–1880)
Authors: McKee Adam R.
Published: September 2018

A primary innovator of the modern novel, French writer Gustave Flaubert was one of the most influential literary artists of the nineteenth century. Primarily associated with Realism, Flaubert is best remembered for his magnum opusMadame Bovary (1857). A close friend of many of his contemporaries including Ivan Turgenev, Henry James, and Guy de Maupassant, Flaubert was one of the moving forces in the early stages of modern literature. He is widely acknowledged as one of the originators of the modern novel’s form, and his work has influenced such literary figures as Émile Zola, Franz Kafka and Jean-Paul Sartre. Perhaps his legacy is best understood through Marcel Proust, who referred to Flaubert as a ‘génie grammatical’ (grammatical genius).

Born in the northern French city of Rouen in 1821, Flaubert was the second of three children. Flaubert’s father was a surgeon in Rouen. After attending secondary school at Collège Royal de Rouen, Flaubert enrolled in law school in Paris in 1842. He would spend almost two years living in Paris before suffering the first epileptic seizure of his life in January 1844. As a result, Flaubert’s career as a writer would begin as he moved to a family property in Croisset, outside Rouen. Here Flaubert would write his masterpieces.
Okeke, Uche (1933--)
Authors: Rice Erin M.
Published: September 2018

Born as Christopher Uchefuna Okeke in Anambra State, Nigeria in 1933, Uche Okeke is a founding father of Nigerian Modern Art. As one of the original members of the Zaria Art Society and the author of the group’s manifesto, which laid out the principles of Natural Synthesis, Okeke was influential in the formation of a national aesthetic as an artist, a writer (poet and playwright), and as a teacher. Okeke sought to bring together forms and subjects indigenous to his Igbo ethnicity with modern, foreign influences and techniques. He practiced primarily in pen and ink and oil painting, exploring Igbo folklore and a body and wall painting tradition called uli. After graduating from the University of Nigeria in Zaria, Okeke actively promoted cultural activities throughout the country, running the Mbari Centre Workshops in Enugu and founding the Asele Institute, which provided studio space, educational programming and a gallery for artists. Okeke was also influential for subsequent generations of Nigerian artists through his teaching at the University of Nsukka during the 1970s. Additionally, he served as an ambassador for the art and culture of Nigeria for UNESCO, helping to promote Nigerian arts throughout the world. Although the work done by members of the Zaria Art Society varied greatly, all members were engaged with the same effort to discover a true, modern Nigerian art, a quest fuelled by the euphoric drive towards independence in the late 1950s.
Panicker, K.C.S. (1911–1977)
Authors: Clark John
Published: September 2018

Kovalezhi Cheerampathoor Sankaran Paniker was of Malayali background but spent most of his active life as a painter, teacher, and organizer in Madras, now Chennai, in Tamil Nadu. His work is important for three reasons: it shows his own stylistic trajectory out of the modernist dilemmas faced by an artist before and after Indian Independence; it indicates the way Indian visual material from Malayalam script to magical diagrams could be mobilized to produce a kind of abstract pictorial discourse; it manifests how a regionally based artist could link up with and generate significant modernist work at a national and international level. Modernism is a reflexive discourse where the subject is how an art form manifests the modern, the position which relativizes the past, to make new selections of pre-modern exemplars where the modern becomes a pair with an invented tradition, and distances practice from a naturalized, unconscious customary. Modernism’s subject is the modality of the modern. Paniker’s work clearly shows this shift from a humanist identification with the Indian poor or politically oppressed using the practices of Post-Impressionism to the early-1950s. He moves to an identification with the Indian folk as a repository of visual experience but also a public visuality with considerable pre-colonial history.
Pechstein, Max (1881–1955)
Authors: Soika Aya
Published: September 2018

The Saxon painter Max Pechstein was hailed as one of the leading representatives of modern painting in Germany throughout the 1910s and 1920s, but played a comparatively minor role in the canonization of German Expressionism after 1945.

Pechstein first gained notoriety through his affiliation with the artist’s group Die Brücke from 1906 until 1912. He only came to the attention of a wider art public by way of his involvement in the controversial exhibition society Neue Secession in Berlin in May 1910 for which he served as president, designing its legendary first poster and catalog cover (see figure). Pechstein featured prominently in Paul Fechter’s 1914 book Der Expressionismus which presented him as the figurehead of Die Brücke in Dresden and Berlin (much to Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’s annoyance). Pechstein continued to paint and to exhibit throughout the 1920s and 1930s. Despite being included in the notorious 1937 Degenerate Art exhibition, and expelled from the Prussian Academy of Arts, he remained a member of the Reich Chamber of Arts throughout the Nazi dictatorship, and was the first of the so-called "degenerate artists" to receive permission to exhibit again in private galleries in 1939. The first retrospective of his work after his death (in Berlin in 1959) signaled the art historical focus on the early period of his career during the Brücke years at the expense of his later oeuvre.
Pettoruti, Emilio (1892–1971)
Authors: Doyen Roxanne
Published: September 2018

Emilio Pettoruti was born in the city of La Plata, Argentina, the modern, geometric layout of which would make appearances in his art later in his life. In 1913, Pettoruti received a scholarship from the government of Argentina and traveled to Italy. He studied Italian art of the 14th century and also got to know a number of avant-garde artists involved with Futurism. Pettoruti decided to extend his time in Europe by working in different countries. In Paris, he became acquainted with artists such as Pablo Picasso, Kees van Dongen, and Juan Gris, who had a major influence on his artwork. He participated in an exhibition in Herberth Walden’s famous Der Sturm Gallery in Berlin in 1923 and became a well-known modern artist. The avant-garde magazine Martín Fierro defined Pettoruti’s artwork (as they did the art of Pettoruti’s friend, Xul Solar) as Criollismo, a term from literature, which entails the use of a realist style to portray scenes and customs of one’s native country. Pettoruti’s style is a modern concept of harmony, order, geometric forms, and a combination of science and the spiritual. Technique, light, color, and movement are the most important characteristics of his art.