bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Workers Dance League, The
Authors: Prickett Stacey
Published: September 2018

In the midst of the economic and social upheaval of America’s Great Depression, a group of young modern dancers came together in 1932 to form the Workers Dance League (WDL) in New York City. Advocating for the power of dance to change society, the WDL reached out to workers to recruit both audience members and participants. The WDL functioned as an umbrella organization, sponsoring concerts and lecture-demonstrations, as well as leading debates about the artist’s responsibility to society. Two strands of dance practice developed under the label of revolutionary dance: emerging modern dancer-choreographers (including Anna Sokolow, Jane Dudley, Sophie Maslow, and José Limón), and a more agit-prop style performed by recreational groups attached to the city’s unions and cultural groups, some directed by Edith Segal. Inspired by Marxist ideals, the participants’ focus on raising consciousness of working-class identity shaped the WDL’s mission until its name change to the New Dance League in 1935. A shift occurred with the instigation of Popular Front policies by the Comintern (the Communist International), although the WDL was not officially a Communist Party organization. During its three years of existence, the WDL helped a vibrant left-wing dance movement flourish in the United States by taking dance to workers, bringing workers into the dance world, and reinforcing a proletarian identity.
Machine-Age Exposition (New York, 1927)
Authors: Guglielmo Antoniette M.
Published: September 2018

The Machine-AgeExposition took place from 16–28 May 1927 at 119 West 57th Street in Steinway Hall, a commercial space in Manhattan, New York. It exposed the American public to the machine-age aesthetic: a modernist style based upon a belief in technological progress. The style emphasized the qualities of mass production, streamlined design, functionality, dynamism, and force. Jane Heap (1883–1964) of the Little Review Gallery was the main organizer, bringing together engineers and artists to rally momentum for this strain of modernist art. The installation juxtaposed works of architecture, engineering, industrial arts, high-modernist painting, and sculpture in order to emphasize their "inter-relation and inter-influence," as advertised on the exposition flyer. The Machine-Age Exposition highlighted a commonality among these disciplines in their exaltation of the beauty of machinery and celebration of innovation and progress. The exposition celebrated the machine-age aesthetic, as did other exhibitions, most notably Machine Art (1929) at the Museum of Modern Art.
Mansour, Sliman (b.1947, Palestine)
Authors: Rogers Sarah Ann
Published: September 2018

Born in 1947 in Birzeit, Palestine (north of Ramallah), Sliman Mansour studied fine arts at the Bezalel Art Academy in Jerusalem. Since the 1970s, his works on paper have contributed to the development of a visual iconography of the Palestinian struggle: the orange tree (symbol of the 1948 Nakba), the olive tree (symbol of the 1967 war), traditional Palestinian embroidery, village life, and the Palestinian woman as the maternal figure of Palestine. In 1987, together with artists Vera Tamari, Tayseer Barakat, and Nabil Anani, Mansour founded New Visions, a collective formed in response to the first intifada (1987–1993). Boycotting art supplies imported from Israel, the artists instead worked with natural materials (coffee, henna, and clay), thereby tying the process of art making to the land and its struggle. In doing so, art no longer merely represented the political. Instead, artistic production itself became a political act. Mansour is known for using mud as a medium. By layering and moulding mud into figural compositions on wooden frameworks, Mansour deploys the literal land to artistically depict Palestine, its history, and its people.
Durrell, Lawrence (1912–1990)
Authors: Gifford James
Published: September 2018

Lawrence Durrell was born in Jalandhar, India under British colonial rule. Both his parents were born in India and never saw England before 1923 when they sent him ‘home’ for schooling. This experience shaped his writing career, and themes of expatriation and exile appear in his autobiographical first novel about this period, Pied Piper of Lovers (1935). Durrell was involved in English Surrealism and formed some of his key aesthetic concepts from Henry Miller’s anarchist rebuttal to surrealism’s communism. He left England in 1935 for Greece, and this move and post-surrealist aesthetic is reflected in his first major experimental novel The Black Book (1938). He did not make England his long-term home again, and after 1968 was designated a British non-patrial without the right to enter or settle in Britain without a visa. His writing career included works from 1931 to 1990, bridged late modernist and postmodern writing, and retained a baroque prose style even as realism grew more fashionable after World War II. He is most famous for his four-volume series The Alexandria Quartet (1957–1962).
Modern Negro Art
Authors: Baker Marissa H.
Published: September 2018

Modern Negro Art by James A. Porter (1905–1970) is a ground-breaking historical study of African American art from slavery to the early 20th century. The first major text of its kind following Alain Locke’s The New Negro (1925), it was the main source of information on African American artists until comparable historical surveys were published in the 1970s. The book presents an overview of artists’ biographies with analysis of the style and subject matter of their work. The chapter "The New Negro Movement" lays out Porter’s main argument against Locke’s well-established racialist position. Locke advocated for the development of a "Negro art’ that would counter negative stereotypes and present a more appealing image of the New Negro to American society. Countering Locke, Porter argued that seeking to "exploit the ‘racial concept’" limited the potential expression of African American artists. Instead he advocated for a treatment of African American art as already integral to the history of American art. Rejecting Locke’s emphasis on an African ancestral heritage, Porter demonstrated the historical development of African American art in North America from slavery to the early 20th century. His research and thorough attention to overlooked African American artists remain the book’s most vital contributions to the field of art history, and accounts for the book’s continuing impact.
Modersohn-Becker, Paula (1876–1907)
Authors: Borgmann Verena
Published: September 2018

Paula Modersohn-Becker was born in Dresden and moved to Bremen with her family in 1888. After finishing her studies at a teacher training college, she enrolled in an academy of drawing and painting for women in Berlin. In 1898 she moved to the artists’ colony Worpswede, a village north of Bremen, to continue her education under the painter Fritz Mackensen. There she met Heinrich Vogeler, Clara Westhoff, Rainer Maria Rilke and Otto Modersohn. She married Modersohn in 1901. She traveled to Paris for the first time in 1900. Three subsequent stays in this cultural metropolis led her to develop a new, distinctive and monumental style of painting. Her work was particularly influenced by Paul Cézanne, Paul Gauguin, and the Nabis. However, Modersohn-Becker was also fascinated by antiquity, especially Egyptian mummy portraits and the works of the Old Masters she saw in the Louvre. Following her last stay in Paris from February 1906 to March 1907, she returned to Worpswede where she gave birth to her only child, Mathilde, in November 1907, and subsequently died of an embolism two weeks later.
Mohidin, Abdul Latiff bin Haji (1938--)
Authors: Abdullah Sarena
Published: September 2018

Born on 20 August 1941 in Seremban, Negeri Sembilan, Abdul Latiff bin Haji Mohidin, better known as Latiff Mohidin, is a Malaysian painter and poet whose works are emotional, expressive, and gestural. As a child prodigy, Latiff Mohidin was called a "Boy Wonder" from the age of eleven for his talent in art. He was sent on a German Academic Student Exchange Scholarship to Germany, where he began his studies at the Hochschule der Künste in Berlin in 1960. In 1969, he took up printmaking at Atelier La Courrière, Paris, and Pratt Graphic Center, New York. His works are identifiable by his use of brushstrokes, swathes of color, texture, and layers of oil paint with lines that are dynamic and possess an energy of immediacy. His works combine visual elements as well as the verbal and gestural, and, in this way, successfully present different levels of perspective and meaning. Latiff Mohidin expresses his personal anguish on a blank canvas, paying little attention to form, style, or subject matter. It can be argued that his paintings, created in a series, are autobiographical acts of self-creation, operating as both expressions of his personality and artistic journeys into nature.
Mokhtar, Mahmoud (1891–1934)
Authors: Seggerman Alex
Published: September 2018

Mokhtar deftly blended Pharaonism with neoclassicism to create modern, nationalist sculpture. Born in 1891 in Tanbara, he enrolled in the first class at the École Égyptienne des Beaux-Arts in 1908. After graduating top of his class in 1912, Mokhtar traveled to Paris on a government scholarship to join the studio of French sculptor, Jules-Felix Coutan at the École des Beaux-Arts. In response to the 1919 Revolution in Egypt, he sculpted Nahdat Misr (Egypt’s Reawakening) for the Salon des Artistes Français in 1920. The work depicts a peasant and a sphinx, representing the magnificent history of ancient Egypt and the agricultural prowess of the Nile Valley. After many years of public fundraising, a monumental version of the sculpture was unveiled in 1928 in Bab el-Hadid Square, facing the Cairo railway station.

Because of Nahdat Misr, Mokhtar rose to national prominence, maintaining studios in Cairo and Paris. In 1930, he exhibited bronze, marble, and stone pieces at the renowned Bernheim-Jeune Gallery in Paris. In these works, he blended Pharaonic imagery with a stylized, classicist aesthetic. The most famous, Khamasin, portrays a peasant woman battling the sand storms, her cloak blown back, revealing her body.

Mokhtar continues to be esteemed as Egypt’s most famous sculptor despite his early death of leukemia in 1934. His works, Nahdat Misr in particular, played an active role in larger history of modern Egypt.
Fitzgerald, Zelda Sayre (1900–1948)
Authors: Templeton Erin
Published: September 2018

On 24 July 1900, Zelda Sayre was born into a prominent Southern family in Montgomery, Alabama, the youngest of six children. Her father had a distinguished career in Alabama politics and jurisprudence, eventually serving on the Supreme Court of Alabama. Much younger than her siblings, Zelda was independent, headstrong, and it was claimed, enjoyed being the centre of attention. She studied ballet during adolescence, but the demands of her social calendar overtook dance lessons in 1916. At the time, Montgomery was home to Camp Sheridan, a training facility preparing American soldiers for the First World War. Among Zelda’s many admirers was Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald. The couple first met at a dance in July 1918. After a tumultuous long-distance courtship and a broken engagement, they married on 3 April 1920, and Zelda moved north to New York City.

The early years of their marriage saw the Fitzgeralds as the embodiment of the riotous ‘Jazz Age.’ With her bobbed hair, fondness for dancing and jazz, and rebellious sense of style, Zelda Fitzgerald was one of the original American flappers. The Fitzgeralds’ only child, a daughter named Frances Scott (Scottie), was born in October 1921.
Nanyang Style
Authors: Low Yvonne
Published: September 2018

Nanyang Style was a popular term associated with the paintings of a group of émigré Chinese artists working in British Malaya (present-day Singapore and Malaysia) around the period of the 1930s to 1950s. It referred particularly to works that embodied an experimental and syncretic approach to pictorial representation; impressionist, post-impressionist, fauvist, and cubist elements with Chinese ink and brush compositional and pictorial techniques; and the depiction of local subject matter such as indigenous peoples and their environments. The key proponents of this style included Chen Chong Swee, Georgette Chen, Liu Kang, Chen Wen Hsi, and Cheong Soo Pieng. These artists, who were also collectively called the "Nanyang artists," were associated with the Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts (NAFA) either as teachers or associates of teachers. The cultural identity of the artists as ethnically Chinese sojourners was frequently used to substantiate the originality of the Nanyang Style. This term generally described an approach to painting that reflected considerations unique to a group of Chinese artists attempting to arrive at types of modern art production that were linked to the place itself.
Nash, Paul (1889–1946)
Authors: Brockington Grace
Published: September 2018

Paul Nash was an artist who responded both to a British tradition of landscape painting, specifically to the art of William Blake, Samuel Palmer, and J.M.W. Turner, and to new developments in European modernism. He worked across several media: painting in watercolor and oils, book illustrations, design, and photography. He was inspired by literature, including the poetry of W.B. Yeats, the prose of Sir Thomas Browne and artist-poets like Blake and Dante Gabriel Rossetti. He was himself a writer of essays, and of letters published posthumously. Born in London, he achieved early success in the London art world, contributing to the crisis of brilliance (Henry Tonks) that shaped modern art in Britain before the Great War. He served as an official war artist in both world wars, and painted some of the most famous images of conflict, including Wire (1918), The Menin Road (1919), Battle of Britain (1941) and Totes Meer (1940–1941). Between the wars, he became a leading figure in British modernism, co-founding Unit One in 1933 and exhibiting at the International Surrealist Exhibitions in London in 1936 (which he helped to organize) and in Paris in 1938.
The Newcomers Group
Authors: Smith Sarah-Neel
Published: September 2018

The Newcomers Group [YenilerGrubu] was formed in 1940 while its members were still students at the Istanbul Academy of Fine Arts under Leopold Levy (1840–1904), and was active through 1952. It is also known as the Harbor Group [LimanGrubu], in reference to the theme of the collective’s first exhibition, which featured scenes of waterfront life in Istanbul. Similar to art collective D Group (1933–1947), the Newcomers aimed to portray what they saw as uniquely Turkish social realities using formal strategies associated with Western modernity, including impressionist, fauvist, and cubist painting techniques. At the same time, the Newcomers claimed with greater urgency than the D Group that local artists were obligated to engage directly with Turkey’s general population. This preoccupation with the relationship of the artist in an elite social position to the larger national body was closely linked to ongoing debates both in state policy (reflected in the development of the Homeland Tours program from 1938–1943, and the Village Institutes from 1940–1954) and in the Turkish literary world. As a result, the Newcomers received ample press coverage and the support of major literary figures such as Hilmi Ziya Ülken (1901–1974) and Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar (1901–1962), who also sought to develop national art forms rooted in Turkish popular experience.
Noguchi, Isamu (1904–1988)
Authors: Kirsch Matt
Published: September 2018

Searching for a redefinition of sculpture, Isamu Noguchi’s work slipped between object-making, industrial design, set design for theater and dance, public sculpture, and land art. Born in Los Angeles, Noguchi was raised in Japan by his American mother and remained estranged from his Japanese father. At age thirteen, he returned to America for schooling. Noguchi was a promising New York sculptor in the academic Western tradition before having what would be a formative experience working as assistant to the sculptor Constantin Brancusi in Paris in 1927. It was from Brancusi that Noguchi gained his first understanding of the nature of abstraction as a means of distilling essences. In New York in the 1940s, Noguchi created a series of delicate sculptures in slate and marble (including Kouros 1944–1945) that stood under the architectural tension of their interlocking elements. Despite growing notoriety, in 1949 Noguchi embarked on a two-year excursion throughout Western Europe, India, and Southeast Asia to observe how societies related to secular and ceremonial spaces like temples, plazas, and marketplaces. His observations formed the basis for his collaborations with architects on public spaces from the 1950s onward, which recast sculpture in experiential terms.
Die Novembergruppe [The November Group] (1918–1934)
Authors: Wünsche Isabel
Published: September 2018

Founded in December 1918 in response to the November Revolution in Germany, The November Group was an association of radical and politically engaged artists, including painters, sculptors, and architects. In contrast to similar organizations prior, the group served neither to unite its members in the pursuit or promotion of a particular aesthetic or artistic style nor to pursue the functions of an exhibition society. Instead, its purpose was to unite the creative, forward-looking forces in the fields of art and architecture in order to increase influence in the shaping of contemporary political and cultural life and reconstruction of the German society after World War I. The November Group was characterized by the mutual collaboration of its members as well as its professed openness to a wide range of artistic ideas and stylistic methods of expression—a programmatic pluralism, sometimes referred to as Cubofuto-expressionism—which provided the group with the means for integration and adaptation throughout its existence. The group’s founding manifesto explicitly called on Expressionists, Cubists, and Futurists, but the group also included Dadaists, Constructivists, and later representatives of New Objectivity. In 1921 sections for literature and music were added, leading the November Group, in the 1920s, to become one of the most important forums for new music and experimental film. The group published six issues of its journal Der Kunsttopf [The Art Pot] in 1920; a planned publication series conceived by Raoul Hausmann and Hans Siebert von Heister resulted in only one edition in 1921. The association only held a small number of its own group exhibitions, one in 1919 and one in 1921, both at the Kunstantiquariat Fraenkel & Co in Berlin.
Oppenheim, Meret Elisabeth (1913–1985)
Authors: Barber Fionna
Published: September 2018

Meret Oppenheim was a Swiss artist primarily known as a maker of Surrealist objects. Born in Berlin-Charlottenburg to a German father and Swiss mother, Oppenheim spent most of her youth in Switzerland until, at the age of eighteen, she traveled to Paris to become an artist. Although enrolled at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière, Oppenheim preferred to work independently and, in 1933, her friendship with fellow Swiss artists Hans Arp and Alberto Giacometti led to an invitation to participate in the Surrealist Salon des Surindépendents. She subsequently became a part of the group focused around André Breton at the Café de la Place Blanche, continuing to exhibit with the Surrealists until returning to the family home in Basle in 1937, where she attended the School of Arts and Crafts for two years. A long period of depression and artistic crisis ensued during which Oppenheim destroyed much of her work. During the postwar period she became increasingly estranged from the remains of the Surrealist group, perceiving it as entrenched in the past. Her own solo career was belatedly developing and, with the advent of feminism, she was increasingly recognized as a role model for independent women artists. In 1975 Meret Oppenheim was the beneficiary of the Art Award of the City of Basle, and in 1982, the same year that she took part in Documenta 7 in Kassel, she was awarded the Art Prize of the City of Berlin.
The Oshogbo Group
Authors: Weise Constanze
Published: September 2018

Between 1962 and 1966, after Nigeria gained Independence from Britain, a group of artists emerged in the Yoruba town of Oshogbo in southwestern Nigeria. They participated in art workshops conducted by expatriates, particularly Susanne Wenger, Ulli Beier and Georgina Beier. The artists combined traditional subject matter and stories with Western artistic media and techniques. Many had been involved in dance, theater and music as members of Duro Ladipo’s theatre company and remained creatively linked. Their works were characterized as trans-genre and retained the performative momentum of Gesamtkunstwerk (total artwork). The artists, among them Jacob Afolabi, Rufus Ogundele, Jimoh Buraimoh, Adebisi Fabunmi, Taiwo Olanyi (Twins Seven-Seven), Muraina Oyelami, Adebisi Akanji, Buraimoh Gbadamosi and Nike Okundaye, gained international fame and patronage, continuing with their work even after the Beiers left Nigeria. The Beiers continued to support Oshogbo artists in Sydney, Australia and Bayreuth, Germany while Susanne Wenger involved them in the artistic recreation of the Osun grove in Oshogbo itself.

In the early 1960s, three expatriate artists, the art critic Ulli Beier (1922–2011), and visual artists Georgina Betts (later Beier, b. 1936 ) and Susanne Wenger (Beier’s first wife, 1915–2009) settled around Oshogbo, setting an art movement in motion. At the same time playwright Duro Ladipo (1931–1978) arrived with his theatre group. In March 1962, Ladipo opened up his home as a cultural center housing the Oshogbo chapter of Mbari Mbayo (an outgrowth of an arts organization originating at the University of Ibadan) in his "Popular Bar."
PERSAGI (Persatuan Ahli-Ahli Gambar Indonesia)
Authors: Sambrani Chaitanya
Published: September 2018

PERSAGI is the acronym for Persatuan Ahli-Ahli Gambar Indonesia (Union of Indonesian Painters, or to be more precise, Union of Indonesian Drawers). Founded by S. Sudjojono (1913–1986) and Agus Djaja (1913–1994) in October 1938, PERSAGI is widely understood to have played a major role in the development of modernism in Indonesian art. While there was no binding style linking the individual artists, they were all in search of a new art that was both distinctively national and intensely individual. Sudjojono’s influence as critic and artist was profound, and served to define a modernist—as well as nationalist—tenor in the Indonesian art of the 1940s and beyond. In terms of its importance to Indonesian modernism, it is significant that PERSAGI was formed a decade after Bahasa Indonesia was declared the national language. It was in 1928 that young nationalists in the then-Dutch East Indies led by Sukarno issued the Youth Declaration, proclaiming a unified nation with one motherland, one people, and one language. The artists of PERSAGI saw themselves as cultural workers within this nascent nation-state, making them part of a broad socialist-nationalist front aimed at the creation of a new national consciousness out of the inheritance of a colonial past. They also sought divergence from the deeper histories that divided this archipelagic country with its vast geography and a variety of ethnic, religious, and linguistic differences.
The Photo League (1936–1951)
Authors: Mickevicius Emilia
Published: September 2018

The Photo League was a cooperative of photographers in New York united by shared social and creative motivations. The group’s members included Morris Engel, Sid Grossman, Helen Levitt, Walter Rosenblum, Aaron Siskind, Paul Strand, and Weegee. Other figures who supported the group but were not members included Berenice Abbott, Ansel Adams, Margaret Bourke-White, Dorothea Lange, Lisette Model, and Beaumont Newhall. The League was active from 1936 to 1951, and held regular meetings throughout its duration, as well as events, lectures, and symposia to promote education in photography skills and techniques. The group maintained darkroom facilities and an exhibition space in New York, initially on 21st Street and later on 10th Street. Combining social and political efficacy with a dedication to aesthetic standards in an environment that stressed creative collaboration, members of the Photo League produced imagery that contributed to the development of documentary practice within the greater creative and cultural ferment of the 1930s. On December 4, 1942, the Photo League was included on the list of "subversive" organizations submitted by U.S. Attorney General Tom C. Clark to President Harry S. Truman. The League denied the charges in a press release, and further challenged their blacklisting in a telegram sent directly to Attorney General Clark. Under this pressure, they ceased activity in 1951.
Preston, Margaret (1875–1963)
Authors: Moore Catriona
Published: September 2018

Margaret Preston was a pioneering modernist who worked across a range of media, including ceramics, china painting, and basketry, as well as painting and printmaking. Preston was attuned to modernism, like many other women artists of her generation. Her reductive portrait, titled Flapper (1928), profiles a forceful New Woman or "flapper": a smart, working girl with her own money to spend, the type of girl who entered the factories and commercial and service sectors to fill new jobs in retail and office work after the War. In both subject matter and pictorial style, Preston aligned herself with the signs of modernity, including urban life and leisure, consumerism, and the new production processes. Preston described her kitchen table as a modernist laboratory, and she embraced new technologies, machine-like forms, materials, and processes of domestic modernity as fitting subjects for art. We see this in her domestic still life Implement Blue (1927), where Preston’s cubist approach to the motif also shows the influence of art deco, cinema, and glamour photography. Preston trained initially in Adelaide and at the National Gallery School in Melbourne before heading to Europe in 1904 for the first of many overseas trips. She married at the close of the War and remained childless, enjoying financial security and opportunities for international travel that fueled an ongoing fascination with the art of other cultures.
Samb, Mamadou Pape (1951–2014)
Authors: Roberts Allen F.
Published: September 2018

Mamadou Pape Samb, better known as Papisto Boy, was a Senegalese street artist celebrated locally and internationally. He moved to Dakar as an orphan of ten years old, and would spend the next forty years living in an informal fishing village squeezed between factories in Dakar’s portside industrial park of Bel-Air. Papisto’s greatest artistic accomplishment was a two-hundred-meter-long mural covering the exterior walls of a fish-processing plant. His portraits and narrative vignettes celebrated global heroes of human rights, and Papisto greatly enjoyed recounting compelling stories about those depicted to local children or passers-by. The remarkable qualities of Papisto’s work were recognized in the late 1970s and he was brought to West Germany to exhibit his paintings in 1980. Later, he participated in Dakar’s Set/Setal youth-empowering artistic revolution of the late 1980s. His works figured prominently in the exhibition A Saint in the City: Sufi Arts of Urban Senegal, which traveled to six U.S. museums from 2003 through 2008, and in Urban Islam in Amsterdam (2004) and Basel (2006). Papisto’s last major work was a mural in 2006 commissioned for the outer wall of the French Cultural Center of Dakar.
Schapiro, Meyer (1904–1996)
Authors: Persinger Cynthia
Published: September 2018

Art historian Meyer Schapiro was born in Šiauliai [Shavley], Lithuania, on September 23, 1904, but soon immigrated to the United States with his family in 1907. Schapiro grew up in the working-class, left wing, Jewish immigrant neighborhood of Brownsville, Brooklyn. He graduated from Columbia University with a Ph.D. in fine arts and archaeology in 1935 (having completed his dissertation in 1929). He spent his career at Columbia, though he also taught regularly at the New School for Social Research from 1936 until 1952. While trained as a medievalist, Schapiro was an early proponent of modern art, and over the course of his career he taught courses, lectured, and published on both fields. Through his lectures and publications, Schapiro’s ideas shaped several generations of artists and art historians. Though he published several books including those on Post-Impressionist artists Paul Cézanne (1950) and Vincent van Gogh (1952), his most respected ideas on both medieval and modern topics were published in articles. Schapiro is known for his innovative and interdisciplinary approaches to art history; he explored new art historical methodologies through the use of Marxism, psychoanalysis, and semiotics. He is also known for his essay "Style" (1953), a systematic consideration of past and current theories of style.
Shaikhly, Ismail al- (1924–2002)
Authors: Floyd Tiffany Renee
Published: September 2018

Born in Baghdad, Iraq, Ismail al-Shaikhly was among the Baghdadi Institute of Fine Art’s first graduating class in 1945. At the institute, he studied under Faiq Hassan and is considered his most gifted student. After graduating from the Institute, al-Shaikhly traveled to Paris to attend the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts. Upon his return to Baghdad, al-Shaikhly became an active participant in several art groups that were gaining prominence in the 1950s and 1960s. He was a member of the Pioneers and became the group’s leader in 1962. He was also a founding member of the Society of Iraqi Plastic Artists and participated in the Iraqi Artists Society. Al-Shaikhly exhibited extensively with these groups. He was also a prodigious exhibitor internationally. In 1955 and 1958, a collection of his works toured countries like China, Russia, Bulgaria, Poland, and India. Early in al-Shaikhly’s career, his work borrowed much from his mentor Faiq Hassan. However, he soon developed his own interpretation of subject matter favored by many of his contemporaries, the environs, and people of Iraq. He is best known for his feminine masses composed of color and ovular shapes. These female figures, recognizable by the abaya, cluster together with emotional energy. The power of al-Shaikhly’s representations is intertwined with this rhythmic energy. It suggests not only the colors and forms of everyday Iraqi life, but also the essence of its experience.
Signac, Paul (1863–1935)
Authors: Bezverkhny Eva
Published: September 2018

Paul Signac was a prolific French Neo-Impressionist painter during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. His friendship with Georges Seurat defined the early part of his career in which he explored Pointillist and Divisionist painting methods. Interested by the laws and theories of physiological optics, Signac experimented with the effects of light and purposeful juxtaposition of color on canvas to produce effects in the eye of the viewer. Through the application of small, deliberate brushstrokes, Signac furthered the development of Neo-Impressionist painting techniques. Signac and Seurat practiced their theories of contrasting color through "Pointillism," the application of small dabs or dots of paint in calculated compositions. Following the death of Seurat in 1891 Signac turned from oil painting to watercolor and began to incorporate broader brushstrokes. He defined his new method as Divisionist rather than Pointillist. Signac focused his attention primarily on the promotion and dissemination of Divisionism and Neo-Impressionism.
Sudjojono, Sindudarsono (1913–1986)
Authors: Cox Matt
Published: September 2018

Sindudarsono Sudjojono was seminal in developing a discourse of modernity in early 20th-century Indonesia. Though a painter, he was most influential as a critic and activist. Through his critical writings, the formation of numerous painters’ associations, his political activism, and his ties to President Sukarno, Sudjojono married his political aspirations for social equality with his career as a modernist painter. His commitment to social issues and to revealing the "visible soul" in painting fueled his instruction of what many have described as an honest approach to painting. Sudjojono’s paintings exhibit a modern self-reflexivity and an emotive quality made explicit through a somber palette and expressive brushwork. His paintings evoking the gritty reality of daily life demonstrate little regard for the illusionistic or academic qualities of earlier Indonesian painters and distinguish him as a pioneer of social realism in Indonesian art. His early life, and his career tied to Indonesian independence, has been valorized within post-colonial narratives and continues to be a great source of interest for art historians. After his resignation from the Indonesian Communist Party and the Lembaga Kebudayan Rakyat [Peoples’ Cultural League] in 1958, his work largely focused on landscape, still lifes, and family portraits. This period of introspection and contemplation has not attracted the same kind of attention as his earlier life and work.
Syed, Ahmad Jamal (1929–2011)
Authors: Abdullah Sarena
Published: September 2018

Syed Ahmad Jamal was a painter who promoted Abstract Expressionism as an artistic approach in Malaysia. As an art student, he was already drawn to the theoretical writings of Wassily Kandinsky and Paul Klee, and his early interest in art drew him to the works of Emil Nolde, Ernst Kirchner and Max Beckmann. In one of his written pieces, Syed hailed Abstract Expressionism as an important artistic approach in Malaysia, suggesting that the idiom reflected Malaysian independence. His early works include Pohon Nipah (1957), Mandi Laut (1957), The Bait (1959), Chairil Anwar (1958) and Perhubungan (1963). However, Syed’s significance to Malaysian artistic modernism was not only in the production and promotion of Abstract Expressionism but also in his curation of the Rupa dan Jiwa exhibition held at the ASEAN Museum of Art at the University of Malaya in 1979. This exhibition inspired many artists to explore the possibility of using Malay and/or Islamic aesthetics in their art practice. Subsequently, Syed produced his Gunung Ledang series, which depicted the Gunung Ledang legend using images and symbols from Malay culture and nature. Syed consistently used the tumpal or triangle shape in many of his works as a symbol of stability and harmony.
Tekle, Afewerk (1932–2012)
Authors: Cantone Helena
Published: September 2018

Afewerk Tekle was Ethiopia’s leading modern artist, famously known for introducing Western techniques of painting and sculpture to Ethiopia, and for his government commissions under Haile Selassie I and the infamous Derg regime of Mengistu. A prolific artist, Afewerk Tekle worked on Pan-African and Christian themes in particular, using diverse media from drawings, paintings, murals, mosaics, stained-glass windows, and sculpture, as well as designs for stamps, playing cards, posters, flags and national ceremonial dresses. His work was strongly influenced by Pan-African ideals and the optimism of the 1950s at the height of liberation movements sweeping across Africa. Afewerk Tekle first went to England to study engineering in 1947, and was later helped by British Suffragette Rita Pankhurst (1882–1960) with his artistic career and training at the Central School of Arts and Crafts and the Slade in London. Tekle returned to Addis Ababa in 1954, where he held his first solo show at the Municipality Hall, the first significant modern art exhibition in Ethiopia, which brought international attention to a new generation of modern Ethiopian artists.
Whitney, Gertrude Vanderbilt (1875–1942)
Authors: Graham Arleen Pancza
Published: September 2018

Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, an American sculptor, art collector, philanthropist, and patron, is usually remembered as the founder of The Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. A Manhattan native, she was the great-granddaughter of the wealthy transportation industrialist, Cornelius Vanderbilt (1794–1877). In 1896, she married the affluent Harry Payne Whitney (1872–1930), an heir to an oil, tobacco, and banking fortune and descendent of Eli Whitney, who invented the cotton gin. She participated in many philanthropic activities in her lifetime, including sponsoring the American Ambulance Field Hospital in France during World War I. Though she participated in society events, she preferred the company of the bohemian artists who frequented the Greenwich Village area of lower Manhattan. In 1907, she established her own studio on MacDougal Alley in the Village. In 1914, she bought a townhouse at 8 West 8th Street, to which she added adjoining townhouses that became known as the Whitney Studio Club. It was a gathering place where artists could socialize, study, sketch, and exhibit their work. It was during this period that she first employed Juliana Rieser Force (1876–1948) as her secretary. An able administrator, Force later became the founding director of the Whitney Museum at that location.
Cunningham, Merce (1919 – 2009)
Authors: Copeland Roger F.
Published: September 2018

One of the twentieth century’s most influential dancers and choreographers, Merce Cunningham re-defined the genre of modern dance. He began his professional career as a member of the Martha Graham Company in 1939. However, by 1953, when he founded his own company, he had repudiated many of the prevailing beliefs and practices of previous modern dance pioneers. Prior to Cunningham, most modern dance choreographers (including Graham) vehemently rejected the fundamentals of classical ballet. Cunningham, by contrast, re-incorporated ballet’s emphasis on classical shape, line, elevation and intricate footwork. He offset these balletic elements with eccentric tilts and twists of the torso, back and arms. In the early 1950s, in collaboration with the composer John Cage, Cunningham also pioneered the use of ‘chance methodologies’ as a choreographic tool. Together, Cunningham and Cage fundamentally re-conceived the relationship between movement and music which had characterised virtually all earlier genres of choreography. In Cunningham’s dances, movement, sound and décor all remained independent of one another. Yet the underlying concept of collaboration remained fundamental to Cunningham’s dances, with celebrated composers and visual artists creating sound scores and designs for the company. Over the course of a career that spanned more than 60 years, Cunningham choreographed over 200 dances including Root of an Unfocus (1944), Sixteen Dances For Soloist and Company of Three (1951) Septet (1953), Suite for Five in Space and Time (1956), Summerspace (1958), Rune (1959), Winterbranch (1964), Variations V (1965) Walkaround Time (1968), Rainforest (1968), Sounddance (1975), Torse (1976), Quartet (1982), Fabrications (1987), CRWDSPCR (l993) and BIPED (1999).
Faulkner, William (1897–1962)
Authors: Gradisek Amanda
Published: September 2018

William Faulkner was one of the best-known American authors of the twentieth century. Experimenting with form, chronology, and language, Faulkner developed a strikingly personal style while exploring the complexities of life in the American South. He was especially interested in crafting stories that explored the effects of the Civil War’s destruction and the ways in which it revealed the breakdown of plantation-based aristocracy, the effects of the exaggerated chivalric code of the Old South, and the complex racism of a society once based on slavery. He is most famous for novels such as Absalom, Absalom!, Light in August, The Sound and the Fury, Sanctuary, and As I Lay Dying. Many of his novels are set in fictional Yoknapatahpha County, a county of his own design that resembled his own birthplace, Lafayette County. A native of Oxford, Mississippi, Faulkner lived most of his life there; he also joined the Canadian Air Force during World War I and spent time in Hollywood later in his career writing screenplays. He struggled with alcoholism throughout his life, but eventually died from a heart attack following a fall from his horse.
Hermeticism
Authors: Mitrano Mena
Published: September 2018

Though it originates in the work of H. D., hermeticism achieves its most lasting impact and enduring legacy in the work of mid-century Italian poets. Within modernism, hermeticism names an alternative sensibility which remains in the shadow of the dominant modernist motifs of rupture and novelty and is drawn, instead, to the paradox of a productive retreat, of strength in weakness. It insists upon the intimate relationship of reading, its community-making power, and the capacity of language to respond to the most brutal challenges of history. One of the symbols of this strain of modernism is the self-enclosed completeness of the pearl and the shell in H. D.’s earlier imagistic poems. Later, in the poems of Trilogy, the non-referential intimacy of the shell suggests the more extreme withdrawal of the closed-in ‘egg in egg-shell’ (Gubar), emblem of the power of natural objects to withstand apocalypse and the deluge of history.
Kahlo, Frida (1907–1954)
Authors: Carbayo-Abengozar Mercedes
Published: September 2018

One of the most recognizable Mexican painters of the twentieth century, Frida Kahlo produced around 200 paintings, dozens of drawings and an illustrated journal. She related her works to her experiences in life: in particular, to her physical and emotional pain and her relationship with her husband, the acclaimed Mexican painter Diego Rivera. Her paintings are visual narratives in which she fuses elements of fantasy and reality, Surrealism and Mexican folklore. She is perhaps best known for her self-portraits. The life cycle is a constant concern in her art: birth, childhood, family, pain, and death; her pictorial language is characterized by a great irony and sense of humor. Her importance lies in her ability to explore taboo aspects of female experiences long before the women’s movement. She was known for her alliance to the Mexican Communist Party, and her political position influenced her paintings from her earliest years as a painter in many different ways. Her work is emblematic of Mexican national and indigenous tradition, and as a depiction of female experience. Today Frida Kahlo has become an international icon and her paintings fetch more money than those of any other female artist.
Klee, Paul (1879-1940)
Authors: Bourneuf Annie
Published: September 2018

Paul Klee was one of the most important and inventive figures in the development of Modernism in the visual arts. The Swiss-German artist's unusual oeuvre drew on the work of other modernist painters while also challenging foundational tenets of Modernism in painting.

The son of a music teacher, Klee was a talented violinist. As an adolescent growing up in Berne, Switzerland, Klee was interested not only in the visual arts but also in poetry and music. After graduating from the Berne Gymnasium in 1898, Klee moved to Munich to study art at the academy.

In 1906, Klee married the pianist Lily Stumpf; their only child was born the next year. Relatively isolated from avant-garde art, Klee undertook a prolonged artistic self-education, attempting to break down pictorial art into its elements—line, tone, color—and master them one by one.

In 1911 and 1912, Klee became friendly with the artists of Der Blaue Reiter, including Vassily Kandinsky, Franz Marc, and August Macke, who accompanied Klee on a trip to Tunisia in 1914. Through these new connections, Klee became familiar with a broad spectrum of modernist art. In 1916, Klee, a German citizen, was drafted; he served as a clerk in Bavaria, far from the front. During the war, the Berlin dealer Herwarth Walden energetically promoted Klee's work. By 1920, many in the German avant-garde acknowledged Klee as a major artist, and Walter Gropius invited him to join the faculty of the newly established Bauhaus.
Parker, Charles ‘Charlie’ Jr. (1920-1955)
Authors: Bevilacqua Thomas
Published: September 2018

Charlie Parker, known as ‘Yardbird’ or ‘Bird,’ was a famous American jazz saxophonist. Parker is best known for developing the style of jazz known as ‘bebop’ or ‘bop,’ which featured frenetic tempos, asymmetrical musical construction, improvisation, and virtuosic performance, representing a break from the more established and traditional forms of jazz that were popular in the 1940s and 1950s.
Pound, Ezra (1885–1972)
Authors: Templeton Erin
Published: September 2018

Ezra Weston Loomis Pound (1885– 1972) was an American poet, essayist, and literary critic. In addition to his own literary accomplishments, he famously promoted the work of other artists, writers, and musicians such as George Antheil, T. S. Eliot, and Henri Gaudier-Brzeska. He helped to establish both the Imagist and Vorticist movements. His best known poems include "Sestina Alta Forte" (1909), "In a Station of the Metro" (1913), Hugh Selwyn Mauberly (1920), and The Cantos, a 120-poem epic published in 11 book-length instalments between 1917 and 1969. The Library of Congress awarded him the prestigious Bollingen prize for The Pisan Cantos in 1949.
The Great Depression
Authors: Bradd Christopher
Published: September 2018

Beginning on New York’s Wall Street on October 29, 1929, which would come to be known as ‘Black Tuesday’, the Great Depression was the most intense and protracted global economic crisis of the twentieth century, ending with the outbreak of World War II in 1939. In the United States, ‘Black Tuesday’ saw the sale of 16 million shares, as catastrophic losses shook confidence in the laissez-faire capitalist system. In 1930 the effects of the American market crash spread worldwide; by 1932 there were 30 million unemployed in the industrial world, plunging millions into abject poverty.
Wilde, Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wills (1854-1900)
Authors: Riddell Fraser
Published: September 2018

Oscar Wilde was an Irish playwright, essayist, author and poet, and one of Victorian England’s chief proponents of Aestheticism. His works are often characterised by the use of humorous paradox, which questions Victorian certainties of truth, value and morality. Wilde is best known today for his play The Importance of Being Earnest (1894), his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890, revised 1891) and his imprisonment in 1895 on grounds of ‘gross indecency’ after a series of scandalous trials. Individualism is central to Wilde’s philosophy, and many of his works challenge or ironise social conventions that seek to limit autonomy of personal expression. Wilde prefigures the concerns of much twentieth-century Modernist literature in his critique of Realism, his scepticism regarding authentic selfhood and his often absurd dramatic mode.

Oscar Wilde was born in Dublin on 16 October 1854, the son of upper-middle class Anglo-Irish intellectuals. His earliest education was at the staunchly Protestant Portora Royal School in Enniskillen, before he progressed to Trinity College, Dublin in 1871. Wilde excelled as a student of Greek, and in 1874 was awarded a scholarship to read Classics at Magdalen College, Oxford. Here he was influenced by aesthetic theorists Walter Pater and John Ruskin. Having graduated with a double first, Wilde settled in London in 1879, where he soon set about cultivating an image as an aesthete and dandy.
Baird, Irene (1901–1981)
Authors: Dean Misao
Published: September 2018

Canadian novelist and civil servant Irene Baird is best known for her second novel, Waste Heritage (1939), which was based on firsthand research into the Vancouver "sit down strike" of the unemployed in 1938. Waste Heritage was remarkable in its time for its use of colloquial idioms, its realist representation of the lives of the unemployed, and its naturalist approach to sexuality and violence. Often cited as the best Canadian novel of the Depression era, Waste Heritage was nonetheless a financial failure for Baird, and she sought a more reliable source of income writing promotional material and lecturing for the National Film Board during World War II, spending the balance of her career as a civil servant based in Ottawa.