bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Harrison, Jane (1850–1928)
Authors: Smith Dale M.
Published: September 2018

Jane Ellen Harrison was a classicist credited with being the first woman to obtain a post in England as a ‘career academic’. Her scholarship combined archeological research with mythology to understand the religious rituals and social practices represented in the art and literature of ancient Greece. Born in Yorkshire, Harrison was among the first students to attend Cambridge University’s newly created school for women, Newnham College. She later studied with Charles Newton (1816–1894) in the Department of Antiquities of the British Museum and began a career as a speaker on archeology and classical art before her appointment to Newnham as a lecturer in 1898.
Hellerau
Authors: Odom Selma Landen
Published: September 2018

Founded in 1909 as Germany’s first ‘garden city’, Hellerau is a district of Dresden located in the wooded countryside north of the city. Developers Karl Schmidt (1873–1948) and Wolf Dohrn (1878–1914) followed Ebenezer Howard’s (1850–1928) concepts of community planning to build a modern village around the Deutsche Werkstätten für Handwerkskunst (German Workshops for Crafts). Schmidt and Dohrn surrounded the workshops for producing furniture and architectural details with curving streets of attractive row houses, cottages and villas for residents. A team of architects that included Richard Riemerschmid (1868–1957) and Hermann Muthesius (1861–1927) gave physical form to Hellerau’s principles of quality, harmony and functionality in life and work.
Internationalism
Authors: Chamedes Giuliana
Published: September 2018

The term ‘Internationalism’ (internationalisme; Internationalismus) was coined in the mid-nineteenth century to denote those movements that called for involvement in events beyond national and imperial borders, for negotiated solutions to geopolitical problems, and for the prevention of international disputes. The term also referred to the unprecedented social, economic and technological transformations that had gradually begun shrinking the globe by the late nineteenth century. Simultaneously descriptive and aspirational, ‘Internationalism’ suggested an existing state of affairs while also recommending a process that would bring about a more modern (and, it was presumed, superior) sociopolitical order.
Silpakorn University
Authors: Curtin Brian
Published: September 2018

Silpakorn University was officially inaugurated in Thailand in 1943 as a raising of the status of the School of Fine Arts, which had been founded in 1933. The first director of the university was the Italian sculptor Corrado Feroci (Silpa Bhirasri, 1892–1962), who led the institution until his death. He had been employed in 1924 as official sculptor to the government of Thailand under the reign of King Vajiravudh (1880–1925), or Rama VI, who had initiated a number of programs to preserve Siamese craftsmanship and respond to modern foreign influence, of which Silpakorn University was an outgrowth. Feroci remains a revered figure among Thai artists, and his portrait can be regularly seen in local artists’ studios. He had led the creation of the Democracy Monument on Bangkok’s Ratchadamnoen Road – to commemorate the 1932 coup d’état which established a constitutional democracy – and this convinced the Department of Fine Arts that an art university could be used to produce major national works. Feroci created three strands for Silpakorn University’s education: styles specific to the nation, the fashions of contemporary art, and the influence of international modern art. Training in painting and sculpture was initially provided, and then training in architecture, archeology and decorative arts was added. The principal objective of the university was to reconcile Thai traditions and Western Modernism.
Troy, Excavation of
Authors: Kotte Claudia
Published: September 2018

The existence and geographical location of Troy, the legendary setting of the Trojan War described in Homer’s Iliad, received little attention until the nineteenth century. In the 1860s, British diplomat Frank Calvert (1828–1908) began digging at Hisarlik, a mound on the Anatolian coast in Turkey, and convinced German businessman and amateur archeologist Heinrich Schliemann (1822–1890) to continue excavations in the area. Schliemann took up work in 1871, and in 1873 he uncovered fortifications and the remains of a city of great antiquity.
Art Informel in Korea
Authors: Woo Jung-Ah
Published: September 2018

Informel is an art movement characterized by non-geometrical abstraction and expressive gestures. Emerging in the mid-1950s, Informel is generally considered the first radical artistic experiment in postwar Korea, not only because it abandoned representational art in favor of complete abstraction, but also because it initiated a collective rebellion against the government-sponsored National Art Exhibition (gukjeon) system. As the French term suggests, Informel is closely related to its European counterpart and American Abstract Expressionism, which were popular in the 1940s and 1950s.
École de Tunis
Authors: Gerschultz Jessica
Published: September 2018

The École de Tunis was an elite circle of Tunisian, French, and Italian artists formed in 1948 and credited for pioneering a Tunisian artistic modernism. Both the group’s membership and aesthetic purview evolved over the course of the late nationalist and post-Independence periods. Pierre Boucherle, a French artist born in Tunis, founded the group. With Tunisian independence in 1956 Yahia Turki became its president. Affiliation with the École de Tunis was exclusive to elite artists but fluid.
Peggy Guggenheim (1898–1979)
Authors: Mitrano Mena
Published: September 2018

In any history of the migrations and transformations of modernism, Peggy Guggenheim (1898–1979) deserves a privileged place. She shares with Marcel Duchamp, a close friend and her first guide to modern art, the distinctive merit of introducing surrealism to the New York School artists. Though it formed her taste, surrealism was by no means the only force behind her acquisitions. Her collection comprises masterpieces by a variety of European artists she enthusiastically promoted – from Kandinsky to Klee, from De Chirico to Severini, from Giacometti to Brancusi – and of American artists she supported through thick and thin, most notably Jackson Pollock.
Malevich, Kazimir Severinovich (1879–1935)
Authors: Railing Patricia
Published: September 2018

During his studies with the Russian Impressionist Fedor F. Rerberg in 1906 Moscow, Kazimir Malevich learned color theory and the craft of Impressionist painting. In 1910 Malevich was painting in a bright Fauve style, and by 1912 he had mastered the structures of Parisian Cubism and elements of the Futurist movement, combining these styles in pieces such as Knifegrinder (1912). Malevich referred to the amalgamation of these two styles as Cubo-Futurism. Between 1913 and 1915 Malevich created highly accomplished Cubist paintings, and his early 1915 canvases were increasingly dominated by planes of pure colors floating over the Cubist contrast of objects. By the summer of 1915 Malevich was solely painting planes of colors in light on his canvases, a style he called Suprematism, by which he meant the "domination" of color within light. He explored color in light in his paintings from 1916 to 1918 in several ways, including using spinning discs and projectors to cast rays of light onto a white screen of pure light. This resulted in the discovery that spinning discs produce centrifugal forces, and he thus called his paintings, "Supr[ematist] Construction of Colour" where "construction" refers to "force." In 1918 to 1919 Malevich painted light itself in White on White (1918), while also exploring cosmic space in Suprematism of the Mind (Suprematism of the Spirit) (1919–1920). Out of the range of modern artistic trends during this time, Malevich created paintings of pure color, light, and non-objectivity, which itself became a leading modernist trend.
Rauschenberg, Robert (1925–2008)
Authors: Wallis Jonathan
Published: September 2018

Robert Rauschenberg (Milton Ernest Rauschenberg) was an American artist who pioneered new approaches to art prototypical of the Pop Art movement and postmodernism. Born October 22, 1925 in Port Arthur, Texas, Rauschenberg attended the Kansas City Art Institute and the Académie Julien in Paris. From 1948–1952, while attending sessions at Black Mountain College in North Carolina, Rauschenberg studied under the Bauhaus painter Josef Albers and the musical composer John Cage, both of whom became important influences. The experimental approaches encouraged at Black Mountain College informed Rauschenberg’s artistic philosophy and broadened his practice to include dance-theatre and performance.
Ruiz, Antonio (1897–1964)
Authors: Caplow Deborah
Published: September 2018

Antonio Ruiz, also known as El Corzo or El Corcito after a famous Spanish bullfighter, was primarily an easel painter from the 1920s to the 1950s. His small, jewel-like paintings, finely executed in a naïve style, show influences from Surrealism, Northern Renaissance painting, New Objectivity, and Mexican folk art. For his subjects, Ruiz drew from Mexican history and politics as well as everyday Mexican life, but he often added a magical realist twist to his images. He produced very little, about four paintings per year, and sold only three works during his lifetime. A number of his paintings are now in the Museo de la Secretaría de Hacienda y Crédito Público (Museum of Ministry of Finance and Public Credit). His paintings are often satirical scenes of daily life in Mexico, sometimes with dreamlike elements, absurd juxtapositions and incongruous proportions that ally them with Surrealism. His most well-known work, El sueño de La Malinche (The Dream of La Malinche), of 1939, portrays the indigenous woman who acted as translator for Hernán Cortez and bore him a child; in this image Ruiz makes a clear reference to the Conquest of Mexico and expresses his awareness of the complexity of Mexico’s history.
São Paulo Biennial
Authors: de Fátima Morethy Couto Maria
Published: September 2018

The São Paulo Biennial was a daring enterprise modelled on the Venice Biennial that took place for the first time in 1951 in Brazil due to a series of sociocultural and political factors, including a booming industrial sector looking to assert itself socially within Brazilian society. The São Paulo Biennial, the first of its kind in Latin America, looked at propagating Brazil’s image internationally in both the art scene and in the political and economic contexts. Its first instance in 1951 was led by the industrialist Francisco Matarazzo Sobrinho, better known as Ciccillo Matarazzo (1898–1977), who had also spearheaded the founding of the Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo (MAM-SP) half a decade earlier. The biennials above all promoted the circulation of artists, artworks and cultural agents, which was key in the exchange of information, tendencies, and tastes. At a time when the number of art magazines published in Brazil was reduced and travelling abroad was not easy, the São Paulo Biennials connected Brazilians with international contemporary production through the organization of vast retrospectives of modern pioneers such as Paul Klee, Mondrian, and Picasso in 1953, Léger in 1955, and Pollock in 1957.
Torres-García, Joaquín (1874–1949)
Authors: Cortés Saavedra David Fernando
Published: September 2018

Father of Universalismo Constructivo and founder of the Asociación de Arte Constructivo and the Taller Torres García in Montevideo, Torres-García was the most important modern Uruguayan artist of his time and a direct precursor to concrete art in Latin America. Based on his experiences in Europe with artist Antoni Gaudí, the group De Stijl, and the artists gathered around the magazine Circle et Carré, Torres-García elaborated the premises of his Universalismo Constructivo, which he would concretize upon his return to Montevideo in 1934. Universalismo Constructivo is best defined as Torres García’s constructivist work in which schematic figurative elements are held by a grid pattern regulated by the golden section and a pinwheel structure. It was considered by North American theorist Clement Greenberg as an example of all over painting.
Umar, Madiha (1908–2005)
Authors: Shabout Nada
Published: September 2018

Madiha Umar was the first Iraqi woman to receive a governmental scholarship to travel to Europe, where she officially studied education but also began art lessons. Subsequently, she pursed art education in Washington, DC, at both Corcoran School of Art and George Washington University. Umar made her debut at the Ibn Sina Exhibition held at the Art Institute in Baghdad in 1952. The exhibition included four other women artists. Umar participated with 48 paintings, which introduced the contextualization of the Arabic letter in Iraqi modern art. Umar has been credited with the initiation of the use of the Arabic letter in art through a number of works she started in 1944, thus considered a precursor to horoufiyah, the style of visual manipulations of the Arabic letter in fine art widely employed during the second half of the twentieth century and a long-lasting trend. A naturalized Iraqi from Syrian parents, she was an Iraqi diplomat’s wife who studied and exhibited in Washington, DC, while her husband was on post there.
Urteaga, Mario Alvarado (1875–1957)
Authors: Berland Rosa
Published: September 2018

The self-taught painter Mario Alvarado Urteaga’s oeuvre includes 197 known drawings and paintings. Urteaga’s works often have a contemplative and dignified format that the Museum of Modern Art curator Lincoln Kirstein called "the poetry of the commonplace." During the 1920s to 1930s, Urteaga had begun to move away from neo-Renaissance religious subject matter and concentrated on the gravitas depiction of the Peruvian indigenous people including scenes of daily rural and village life, as well as religious and funerary processions. The oil painting Burial of an Illustrious Man, 1936 (Entierro de veteran), now in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art from the artist’s classical period (1930–1939), depicts a burial in Cajamarca of a veteran of the Chilean-Peruvian War of 1879. It is one of five known paintings of funerary processions (Entierro en Cajamarca, 1923–1934; Entierro, 1945; Entierro, 1946; and El Entierro de un hermano, date unknown) made by Urteaga. In Burial of an Illustrious Man, the artist takes traditional subject matter (a funeral procession) and reinterprets it in a classically informed style that depicts the native people of Peru with a somber dignity and traces of a social realism. Urteaga’s dignified portrayal of the indigenous people of Peru influenced generations of national painters, and his work has come to symbolize a manifestation of indigenous pride.
Beydoun, Abbas (Bayḏūn, ʿAbbās) (1945--)
Authors: Tramontini Leslie
Published: September 2018

Abbas Beydoun is one of Lebanon’s most famous poets and writers, and one of the most outstanding and important intellectuals in the Arab world. He was born in Tyre, Lebanon, in 1945. He attended secondary school there, before moving to Beirut to study Arabic Literature at the Arab University. Politically active since 1968, he worked for extremist-leftist papers in Beirut and was arrested and put in prison several times for his political activities. During the Lebanese Civil War of 1975-1990, he started working as a school teacher in Tyre and Sidon, and then had to flee the country because of his Communist connections. He migrated to France, where in the 1970s he studied at the Sorbonne and received his diploma (DEA). After his return to Beirut he joined the Lebanese daily As-Safir, then moved on to the other dailies Al-Hayat and Al-Nahar before returning to As-Safir in the year 1997 for good, as editor in chief for the cultural section, a position he still holds. Beydoun is one of Lebanon’s most famous poets and intellectuals, with impact far beyond Lebanon. Apart from journalistic essays, literary criticism, and poetry, have which made him a household name, he has made a late-in-life debut as a novelist.
Céline, Louis-Ferdinand (1894–1964)
Authors: Neushwander Jessica
Published: September 2018

Louis-Ferdinand Céline was one of the most controversial and innovative authors of the twentieth century. Known for his use of insults, slang, and ellipses in hallucinatory narratives, Céline became a central figure of modernism in interwar France. He gained notoriety from his first novels, Voyage au bout de la nuit (Journey to the End of the Night, 1932) and Mort à Crédit (Death on the Instalment Plan, 1936), which examine modern warfare as well as everyday suffering in French society. Following World War II, Céline’s anti-Semitic pamphlets and collaboration with the Nazis caused many to reject his inventive novels and to question his place in the French literary canon. Nevertheless, Céline’s unique style of writing and his innovative storytelling have permanently influenced the modern literary landscape.
Hesse, Hermann (1877–1962)
Authors: Crauwels Geert
Published: September 2018

Hermann Hesse was born in Calw (Germany) in a pietistic missionary family. To his devout parents, ‘the I’, as a subject next to God, had no rights. This conviction not only lead to several personal crises in Hesse’s life but also inspired his central theme: the defense of the individual and its intellectual freedom, independent of any cause.

Destined to become a Protestant theologian, Hesse became a seminarist at the Protestant convent school Maulbronn in 1891, from which he fled shortly after. A suicide attempt followed in 1892. Some years later, Hesse was trained as a bookseller in Tübingen (1895–1898). Although Hesse had started his career as a lyricist in the neo-romantic tradition by then (Romantische Lieder, 1898) and considered poetry to be his central literary medium, his novels and stories were the foundation of his success. His novels can be characterized as biographies of the soul, reflecting the protagonist’s subjectivist development and self-discovery. Hesse’s breakthrough came with Peter Camenzind (1904), which already dealt with his main topics: the uncompromising personality development, criticism of modern civilization and the education system, the mystic experience of nature and a return to the simple, authentic life – echoing Nietzsche’s philosophy of life.
Lewis, Sinclair (Harry) (1885–1951)
Authors: Welch Bronwen
Published: September 2018

Sinclair Lewis was an American novelist, short-story writer, and playwright. Born in the small town of Sauk Centre, in Minnesota, Lewis was the youngest of three boys; the eldest, Fred, was born in 1875, followed by Claude in 1878. Lewis was a sensitive and bookish boy, un-athletic and vulnerable. His, father Edwin J. Lewis, a doctor and a strict, domineering father, had a hard time understanding his youngest son, and sadly Lewis's mother, Emma Kermott Lewis, died when he was six years old; her death had a lasting impact of Lewis’ life and writing. In 1892, Edwin J. Lewis remarried Isabel Warner, a kind and deeply maternal woman who became a friend and confidant to the lonely Lewis.

Lewis’ works are known for their satirical representation of the pettiness of American life and values, revolving around such icons of Americanism as religion, patriotism, small-town life, and commercial capitalism. The narrowness of this lens, however, must be located within the broader realm of turmoil against a world order which Lewis felt was all about commerce: a buying and selling that produced only greed and dissatisfaction.
The Long Poem
Authors: Jaussen Paul
Published: September 2018

In its most basic sense, the ‘long poem’ refers to any extended poetic work, from the long lyric to the epic. Within the context of modernism, the long poem emerged as a significant genre, channeling the authority and scope of the epic yet rejecting many traditional epic devices. Most notably, many modernist long poems abandoned narrative, replacing it with other organizational principles, ranging from symbolism to collage. The practice became particularly significant within the context of Anglo-American modernism, largely due to the influence of T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, although the long poem can also be considered a transnational genre, with examples in French, such as Saint-John Perse’s Anabase (1924), and Spanish, like Federico García Lorca’s sequence Poeta en Nueva York (1940).

One of the most famous and influential examples of the genre is Eliot’s The Waste Land, published in 1922. Adapting mythological themes, literary allusions, and a symbolic framework, Eliot’s work combined the traditional historical rhetoric of earlier long poetics, from Chaucer to the Arthurian legends, with the language and concerns of World War I England.
Smith, (James Marshall) Arthur (1902-1980)
Authors: Barclay Adèle
Published: September 2018

A.J.M. Smith was a poet, scholar, and anthologist of Canadian literature. As an editor of little magazines and anthologies, Smith was an important figure in the founding of Canadian modernism.

Born on November 8, 1902 to English parents, Smith grew up in Westmont, Quebec. He studied at McGill University (1921-1926), obtaining a BSc (Arts) and an MA. His Masters thesis was on the poetry of W.B. Yeats. Smith associated with F.R. Scott, A.M. Kein, Leo Kennedy, and Leon Edel, the circle of Montreal poets who, influenced by T.S. Eliot and Anglo-American modernism, sought to establish the practice of modernist poetry in Canada in order to counter the Victorian-style Confederation Poets of the early twentieth century.

As an undergraduate student, Smith founded and edited the Literary Supplement of the McGill Daily. He continued his editorial efforts as a graduate student, creating, with Scott in 1925, the McGill Fortnightly Review—the first journal of modernist writing in Canada. The journal helped initiate the tradition of Little Magazines in Canada, publishing the surge of Canadian modernist poetry in the 1920s and 1930s. After marrying Jeanne Dougall Robins in 1927, he began his PhD at the University of Edinburgh and completed his dissertation, ‘Studies in the Metaphysical Poets of the Anglican Church in the 17th Century’, in 1931. Smith worked as a professor at Michigan State University (1936-1972).
Elytis, Odysseus (1911–1996)
Authors: Georganta Konstantina
Published: September 2018

"For me the Aegean is not merely a part of nature, but rather a kind of signature," Odysseus Elytis suggested in a 1972 interview with Ivar and Astrid Ivask. "I and my generation—and here I include Seferis—have attempted to find the true face of Greece. This was necessary because until then the true face of Greece was presented as Europeans saw Greece. In order to achieve this task we had to destroy the tradition of rationalism which lay heavily on the Western world."
Feuchtwanger, Lion (1884–1958)
Authors: Wallace Ian
Published: September 2018

Born into a Jewish family in Munich, Lion Feuchtwanger lived in Berlin from 1925 to 1933 when Hitler’s accession to power forced him into exile, first in France and then, following the fall of France in 1940, in California where he died in 1958. He achieved international fame with a series of sixteen best-selling, widely translated novels published between 1923 and 1957. He received widespread criticism for his positive account of his visit to Stalin’s USSR in Moskau 1937 [Moscow 1937]. Unholdes Frankreich [The Devil in France] describes his internment in France as an enemy alien prior to his flight to the USA.
Fischer, József (1901–1995)
Authors: Csepely-Knorr Luca
Published: September 2018

József Fischer was a prolific designer of mid-war Hungarian modernist architecture, and in tandem with Farkas Molnár he was also a highly active and important member of the Hungarian section of the Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne (CIAM). He began to study architecture at college and enrolled at the Hungarian Academy of Crafts, but was forced to leave for financial reasons. He started his own practice in 1930 with his wife Eszter Pécsi who was the first Hungarian female engineer, and also an internationally renowned structural engineer.
American Abstract Artists
Authors: Hartel, Jr. Herbert R.
Published: September 2018

The American Abstract Artists is a formally established organization of painters, sculptors, and printmakers that has been devoted to promoting abstraction in the United States since the late-1930s. The organization was established in New York City in 1936, at a time when American art was dominated by figurative, realistic styles, such as regionalism and social realism, which favored depicting everyday life and people and national historical subjects. It held several exhibitions over the subsequent years, including a large annual exhibition each winter from 1937 to 1941. It was most influential in the late-1930s through the mid-1940s. The membership grew to more than fifty artists at this time, and its most influential, its famous members have included Burgoyne Diller, Ilya Bolotowsky, George L. K. Morris, Balcomb Greene, Albert E. Gallatin, Alexander Calder, Suzy Frelinghuysen, Fernand Léger, Piet Mondrian, Josef Albers, Jean Hélion, Carl Holty, Ad Rinehardt, Gertrude Greene, Stuart Davis, Charles Shaw, Vaclav Vytlacil, Jean Xceron, and David Smith. The American Abstract Artists group is often thought to have advocated a rather homogenous abstract style that was geometric, linear, and planar, but this is a broad oversimplification of the diversity of its membership.
Greene, Graham (1904–1991)
Authors: Elmore Jonathan
Published: September 2018

Henry Graham Greene, born in Hertfordshire and educated at Oxford, was a prolific novelist whose life and career spanned most of the 20th century. In 1927 he married Vivien Dayrell-Browning, and although their marriage lasted a lifetime, Greene had numerous extramarital affairs and several prolonged relationships with other women. An avid traveller, Greene drew material from his excursions that formed the background of his novels. He died of leukaemia in 1991 while living in Switzerland. His journalistic background is apparent throughout his writing, as illustrated by his realistic style, characters, and settings.
The Antipodeans Group
Authors: Moore Catriona
Published: September 2018

The Antipodeans was the title of a group exhibition of figurative painters at the Victorian Artists’ Society in August 1959. Signatories to the exhibition catalogue (the notorious Antipodean Manifesto) were the Melbourne artists Charles Blackman (b. 1928), Arthur Boyd (1920–1999), David Boyd (1924–2011), John Brack (1920–1999), Bob Dickerson (b.1924, a Sydney artist), John Perceval (1923–2000), and Clifton Pugh (1924–1990). The influential art historian and critic Bernard Smith (1916–2011) was the Manifesto’s author and co-signatory. Many had been active members of the radical Melbourne Branch of the Contemporary Art Society through the war years, and were associated with other figurative artists, such as Sidney Nolan (1917–1992), Albert Tucker (1914–1999), and Russell Drysdale (1912–1981). The Antipodeans was a tactical intervention into post-war cultural debate, railing against the perceived uncritical following of European and United States models of abstraction and the superficial gestures of neo-Dadaist play. In contrast, the Manifesto held that the artist should create significant images and narratives for a "young country yet to make its own myths." In this, the group was firmly committed to the modern figurative image: "[T]he image, the recognisable shape, the meaningful symbol, is the basic unit of [the artist’s] language... It is born of past experience and refers back to past experience — and it communicates. It communicates because it has the capacity to refer to experiences that the artist shares with his audience."
Dung, Kai-Cheung (1967–)
Authors: Rojas Carlos
Published: September 2018

One of Hong Kong’s most celebrated authors, Dung Kai-Cheung is known for his intricately metatextual works. Inspired by European modernist writers such as Marcel Proust and Italo Calvino, Dung’s stories and novels frequently reflect provocatively on their own fictionality, while at the same time exploring issues of history and temporality, writing and representation, gender and desire. His works reveal a fascination with textual traces, material objects, family history, and the socio-symbolic space of Hong Kong. Dung publishes the first editions of his novels in either Hong Kong or Taiwan, and has won major literary prizes in both regions. In addition to his fictional writings, Dung also has regular columns in Hong Kong newspapers, and has published his essays in several collected volumes.
Khlebnikov, Velimir (1885–1922)
Authors: Ioffe Dennis
Published: September 2018

One of the founders of Russian Futurism, Khlebnikov can be counted as one of the movement’s most prominent and seminal representatives. Widely acclaimed for his innovative experiments with language, Khlebnikov is generally regarded as the most radical poet of the Russian avant-garde. He left a noticeable imprint on all the major venues of experimental art in Russia during the years when Futurism was influential, particularly through his exploration of "trans-reason" language [zaum’]. His extravagant vagabond lifestyle fortified the modernist life-creation legacy in post-symbolist Russia. Khlebnikov’s poems and prose appeared in the leading avant-garde periodicals of the era. After nearly two decades of intensive writing, traveling, participating in avant-garde performances in Russia and abroad (most remarkably in Iran) Khlebnikov died as a result of a combination of various deadly diseases and malnutrition in the village of Santalovo in the Novgorod region.
Locke, Alain LeRoy (1885–1954)
Authors: Chalk Bridget , Williams Cocoa , Fedirka Sarah
Published: September 2018

Alain Locke was an American philosopher, editor, and critic whose influence helped to inscribe modernist aesthetics within the history of black artistry, which he defined in philosophical and political as well as artistic terms. His guest editorship of the March 1925 Survey Graphic magazine’s special edition on race, which he titled "Harlem: Mecca of the New Negro" and which he edited and extended to create his anthology The New Negro: An Interpretation of Negro Life, is generally considered a seminal moment in the founding of the Harlem Renaissance. Published in 1925, The New Negro includes contributions from what Locke called the rising generation of "Negro Youth" writers, including Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, Jessie Fauset, Jean Toomer, and Countee Cullen. Locke's introduction to the volume announced a new age in African American aesthetics, one which abandoned the direct political objectives of racial uplift and dedicated itself to merging folk art with artistic experimentation. Locke was born in Philadelphia, received undergraduate and graduate degrees from Harvard, and was the first African American Rhodes Scholar. His philosophical theories focused on race relations, cultural relativism, and pluralism, interests he extended to his promotion of writers and artists now associated with the Harlem Renaissance.
MacDiarmid, Hugh (1892–1978)
Authors: Gibson Corey
Published: September 2018

Hugh MacDiarmid was the pseudonym of Christopher Murray Grieve, the pre-eminent Scottish modernist poet, and leading proponent of the interwar "Scottish Literary Renaissance." His best-known work is A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle (1926), an extended stream-of-consciousness monologue in Scots verse. MacDiarmid was also an editor, critic, essayist, and polemicist. Rejecting what he saw as the stagnancy of the Scottish imagination under the ascendency of the canon of English literature, he promoted a revived Scots poetry that would reconnect with contemporary movements in Europe. The slogan for the Scottish Chapbook, MacDiarmid’s monthly periodical, was "Not traditions—precedents!"
MacNeice, Louis (1907–1963)
Authors: Whittington Ian
Published: September 2018

Poet, critic, and broadcaster Louis MacNeice was an influential member of the generation of British poets who came to artistic maturity in the 1930s. Born the son of a Protestant minister (later a bishop) in Belfast, and raised in nearby Carrickfergus, MacNeice would live most of his adult life in England, where he balanced the literary fame he enjoyed from the 1930s onwards with a career at the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) that lasted from 1941 until his death in 1963. Though professionally and personally connected to other major poets of the 1930s, MacNeice wrote verse that tended to eschew the fervent commitments of that decade in favor of an attention to sense perception and a wry, sophisticated skepticism directed equally at political, national, and religious affiliations.
Odoevtseva, Irina Vladimirovna (1895–1990)
Authors: Harwell Xenia Srebrianski
Published: September 2018

Poet, memoirist, and novelist with roots in the Acmeist literary movement, Odoevtseva is best known for her two volumes of memoirs, which portray many of the leading figures of the Russian Silver Age. Born in Rīga, she died in Leningrad (modern-day St. Petersburg). She moved to Petrograd in 1918, where she studied poetry under Nikolai Gumilev, joined the second Guild of Poets, and published a book of verse. In 1922 she emigrated to France with her husband, the poet Georgy Ivanov (1894–1958), spending most of her life in Paris at the center of Russian émigré literary society, and visiting the USA only once. As an émigré, Odoevtseva initially turned to writing prose, with female protagonists as the focus of her interwar novels. During the post-Second World War period, she published several volumes of poetry, continued to place her work in various literary journals, and worked on the staff of Russkaia mysl’ [Russian Thought]. Georgy Ivanov died in 1958, and in 1978 she married writer Iakov Nikolaevich Gorbov (1896–1982). In 1987 Odoevtseva returned to live permanently in Leningrad at the invitation of the Writers’ Union. She was warmly welcomed, and attained her lifelong dream of reconnecting with Russian audiences through public appearances and the publication of some of her works.
Valéry, Paul (1871–1945)
Authors: Joseph Rima
Published: September 2018

Paul Valéry is the author of an oeuvre that comprises several genres and shows him to have been a polyvalent thinker. Celebrated for his poetry, he is an innovator in imagery and the lyrical subject as in his adaptations of classical form. Introduced into the milieu of symbolist authors at the age of twenty, he left eye-witness accounts of the development of Symbolism and insightful analyses of its significance in language arts. His essays and lectures show him to be a critic of historical and philosophical discourses and a forerunner in modern literary theory as he moves its object from a local evaluation to a theory of literary production. An interlocutor of many preeminent scientists of his time, he collaborated alongside them on cultural commissions. Although he always objected to being labeled a philosopher, aesthetic invention, the phenomenology of thought and the functions of language are among his subjects of predilection in his poems, essays, dialogues, drama, and notebooks.
Barua, Navakanta (1926–2002)
Authors: Misra Tilottoma
Published: September 2018

Navakanta Barua was one of the best known Assamese modernist writers of the twentieth century who worked through multiple genres. A graduate from the Visva Bharati University and with an MA from the Aligarh Muslim University, he joined Cotton College, Guwahati as a Lecturer in English in 1954, where he worked till his retirement from service. During his lifetime, Navakanta published more than a dozen volumes of poetry and songs, five novels, eight volumes of non-fictional prose and literary criticism, besides a substantial body of children’s literature. He edited two children’s magazines (Jonbai and Pohar) and a journal of art and culture (Seerolu). He translated into Asamiya the verses of Kabir and some of the major works of Euripides, Goethe, Pushkin, Rabindranath Tagore, Nazrul Islam, Sumitranandan Pant, Subramanyam Bharati, Walt Whitman and T. S. Eliot. Some of his best translations render the texture and nuances of the original in a brilliantly creative manner.
Bateson, Gregory (1904–1980)
Authors: Merrill Trevor
Published: September 2018

Gregory Bateson was an English anthropologist, social scientist, communications theorist, and cyberneticist. His most famous work, Steps to an Ecology of Mind (1972), is a compilation of essays in which he set forth important ideas on psychology, cybernetics, anthropology, and epistemology.
Beardsley, Aubrey Vincent (1872–1898)
Authors: Johnson Michael
Published: September 2018

Aubrey Beardsley was an English illustrator of the late Victorian period. His fluid, sinuous illustrations were influenced by Japanese prints and by the curvilinear Art Nouveau style. Beardsley was a prominent member of the Aesthetic Movement, a progressive group of artists and writers who pursued the cause of art for art’s sake and rejected the repressive constraints of Victorian society.
Bely, Andrei (БЕЛЫЙ, АНДРЕЙ) (1880–1934)
Authors: White Frederick H.
Published: September 2018

Andrei Bely (1880–1934) was a writer of prose, poetry, literary criticism and memoirs, as well as a leading theorist and representative of the ‘second wave’ of Russian Symbolism. Music and philosophy first interested Bely as is evident in his four prose Symphonies (1902–1908) and a collection of poetry, Gold in Azure (1904). Following the failed 1905 Revolution, Bely’s poetry became more pessimistic. The mystical enthusiasm of his early poetry was replaced by images of disillusionment in two later collections: Ashes and The Urn (both 1909). In 1910, Bely published his first novel, The Silver Dove, yet it was his second, Petersburg (1916), which is considered to be among the finest novels of the twentieth century. Bely’s remaining prose works were much less successful. At the end of his life, Bely was under increasing pressure by Soviet officials to re-remember elements of the modernist movement. As a result, Bely’s memoirs are highly unreliable, but fascinating as examples of cultural coercion in the Soviet Union. Today, Bely is remembered as one of the principal voices of Russian Symbolism at its inception—and then one of its main apologists, after the movement fell out of fashion in the Soviet Union.
Arp, Hans/Jean (1886–1966)
Authors: Obler Bibiana
Published: September 2018

Hans/Jean Arp is an Alsatian poet and artist, who was a founding member of Dada and an active participant in Constructivism and Surrealism. Arp grew up in Strasbourg speaking German, French, and Alsatian. He studied fine arts in Strasbourg, Weimar, and Paris, and even early in his career was active in international artistic and literary circles. In 1910, he co-founded the Moderne Bund and contributed to Der Blaue Reiter Almanach [The Blue Rider Almanac]. A German citizen, Arp successfully dodged the draft during World War I, finding refuge first in Paris and then in Zurich. At an exhibition that featured his embroideries, tapestries, and works on paper at the Tanner Gallery, he met Sophie Taeuber, who soon became a friend and collaborator and, in October 1922, his wife. Early in their friendship, her exploration of strict geometries led to a series of collaborative vertical-horizontal compositions in collage and embroidery that are among the earliest purely abstract works produced by European avant-gardes. In 1916, Arp joined Hugo Ball, Tristan Tzara, and others in launching Dada. Informed by mysticism and Eastern philosophies, Arp sought to transcend the boundedness of individual production by working with chance, thus deliberately relinquishing some control over the process of making.
Bendre, Dattatreya Ramachandra (D. R.) (1896–1981)
Authors: Boratti Vijayakumar M.
Published: September 2018

Datttreya Ramachandra Bendre is a prominent poet of the Kannada modernist school, Navodaya. He is one of the eight recipients from Karnataka of the Bharatiya Jnanpith, the highest civilian award given to a littérateur in India. He was born in Dharwad, a region in north Karnataka. During his long period of unemployment, he participated in the Indian struggle for freedom. In 1944, he joined D. A. V. College at Solapur as a Kannada professor and retired in 1956. After his retirement, he became an advisor in All India Radio from 1956 to 1959. He died at the age of 85.
Berdyczewski, Micha Yosef (1865–1921)
Authors: Weininger Melissa
Published: September 2018

Micha Yosef Berdyczewski was a Ukrainian-born writer, journalist and Hebrew scholar who is best known for his modernist writings on the Jewish faith. The son of a rabbi, Berdyczewski was raised in a traditional Hasidic household, but turned to secular literature in his youth. Strongly influenced by the haskalah, the Jewish Enlightenment, he began publishing widely in the Hebrew press; in the years 1899–1900, Berdyczewski published two novellas that became highly influential in the world of Hebrew modernism and deeply affected the next generation of Hebrew writers, Makhanayim (Two Camps) and Urvah parakh (Nonsense).
Bergson, Henri (1859–1941)
Authors: Shortall Sarah
Published: September 2018

Henri Bergson was a leading philosopher of France’s Third Republic. A graduate of the prestigious École Normale Supérieure, he was appointed Chair of Modern Philosophy at the Collège de France in 1904. Bergson is best remembered for his critique of the ‘spatialized’ model of time underwriting scientific and Kantian understandings of causality. Bergson argued that the data of consciousness in fact confront us as pure duration (la durée), which is heterogeneous but also continuous and indivisible. It therefore cannot be broken down into a series of juxtaposed events, as the notion of causality requires. Creative Evolution (L’Évolution créatrice, 1907) deepened these insights in an effort to rescue human freedom from the determinism of mechanistic and finalist models of change. It explained the phenomenon of evolution by positing the existence of an original creative force (élan vital) that accounts for both the continuity of all beings and their differentiation into species, without limiting the scope for genuine novelty and human creativity. Bergson’s work had an important impact on William James, Gilles Deleuze, Catholic Modernism, Cubism, and literature.
Berlin Conference (1884–1885)
Authors: Srebrnik Henry
Published: September 2018

The Berlin Conference of 1884–1885 ushered in what became known as the ‘New Imperialism’. While the first waves of European expansion had focused on the Americas and Asia, the third one concentrated on Africa, largely ignored since the conclusion of the Atlantic slave trade. In 1876 King Leopold II (1835–1909) of Belgium hired Henry Morton Stanley (1841–1904) to explore and colonize the Congo River basin of equatorial Africa. Belgian claims to the Congo led to a ‘scramble for Africa’ amongst France, Germany, Great Britain and Portugal, represented at the Conference. They sought to regulate colonial competition by defining ‘effective occupation’ as the criterion for recognition of territorial claims—colonies were recognized if actually possessed. The Berlin Conference remapped Africa without considering cultural or linguistic borders, dividing the continent into some 50 different colonies. Only Ethiopia and Liberia remained independent. The New Imperialism gave rise to new social views of colonialism, including the idea of ‘civilizing’ Africans, as described in Rudyard Kipling’s poem ‘The White Man’s Burden’ (1899), while critiqued by others such as Joseph Conrad in Heart of Darkness (1899). European powers tried to associate colonial rule with the goals of justice and morality, resulting in the rule over tropical lands gaining widespread acceptance.
Besant, Annie (1847–1933)
Authors: Haffey Hailey
Published: September 2018

Born Annie Wood, Annie Besant was an English political activist and spiritualist with Irish heritage. She married British clergyman Frank Besant in 1867; they separated in 1873 largely because of religious differences. Besant became increasingly critical of orthodox Christianity, evident in her pamphlet, ‘On the Deity of Jesus of Nazareth’. Besant met Charles Bradlaugh in 1884 after his lecture comparing Krishna and Christ. She then joined Bradlaugh’s National Secular Society and wrote for the group. In 1877, the two were prosecuted for publishing Charles Knowlton’s book on contraception. She founded the Malthusian League to promote contraception and became active in the Irish Home Rule cause. A feminist and socialist, Besant joined the Fabian Society in 1885, was involved in the 1887 ‘Bloody Sunday’ labour protests in London, and helped lead the 1888 London Match Girls’ Strike. She gained global prominence after meeting Helena Blavatsky in 1889. Besant quickly ascended the ranks of the Theosophical Society and became the society’s President in 1907. After travelling to India in 1893, Besant immigrated, co-founded the Indian Home Rule League, and joined the Indian National Congress, out of which emerged Mohandas K. Gandhi’s successful struggle against the Raj.
Bialik, Hayim Nahman (H. N.) (1873–1934)
Authors: Segal Miryam
Published: September 2018

Hayim Nahman Bialik was one of the most influential and widely-read Hebrew poets of the twentieth century. He revitalized modern Hebrew poetry with his romantic tropes, intense introspection, allusive irony and modernist treatment of language. Together with Shaul Tchernichovsky, his peer in the literary revival of the turn of the century, Bialik re-invented the sound of Hebrew poetry by introducing accentual-syllabic meter to Hebrew.

Bialik was born into a religious and very poor family, and engaged with the Jewish textual tradition even after leaving behind, first, his Hasidic upbringing, and then the more rationalist and intellectual but ultimately unsatisfying world of the famous Volozhin yeshiva.

Bialik spent the better part of three very productive decades in Odessa, the capital of the literary revival in which he was received as a young literary talent, then as national poet and one of the foremost Hebrew writers. He wrote lyric poetry, long poems, poems in the form of folk-song lyrics, children’s poetry and essay, and was an important figure in Hebrew publishing, with a particular interest in preserving the ‘Jewish Bookcase’ of classic works for secular Hebrew culture.
Big Bang Theory
Authors: Heimburger Matthew Y.
Published: September 2018

The Big Bang theory is a scientific model of the universe that posits a state of dense, centralized matter before the current, observable expansion of the universe in one giant explosion. While ‘the Big Bang’ was a phrase first used somewhat facetiously by British astronomer Fred Hoyle in 1949, it rested on earlier theories and observations by George Lamaitre, Albert Einstein, and Edwin Hubble. The implications of Big Bang theory have been far-reaching. For some, the Big Bang’s suggestion of a ‘beginning of time’ lent itself to familiar religious teleology. For others, it provided a rigid, mechanistic model of the physical world, which in turn affected ideas in the social sciences and humanities. This is not to say that Big Bang theory was a ‘grand unifying theory’—even in the 1920s, the rather precise predictions of Einstein’s theories of relativity conflicted with the conclusions of Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle and quantum mechanics. Still, the idea that the physical world exists due to the violent expansion (and subsequent contraction) of matter suggests a rather small place for humanity in the larger scheme of things. There is little room or need for free will in such a system—at least when it comes to matters of large-scale significance. Today, the Big Bang often stands as a euphemism for debates over God and human determinism in the universe, and lends itself to philosophic traditions such as nihilism and existentialism.