bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Abe Kōbō (1924–1993)
Authors: Swain John
Published: September 2018

Abe Kōbō (1924–1993) was a pivotal shingeki playwright and director as Japanese contemporary theatre matured after World War II. Known also as a novelist, Abe addressed themes of Japan’s struggle to redefine itself after the social and physical devastations of World War II. He did so without following a specific socialist agenda, and before the rise of 1960s counterculture political activism characterised by angura theatre. His works of fiction and drama have surreal characteristics, and his drama verges on Absurdism.
Fischinger, Oskar (1900–1967)
Authors: Leskosky Richard J.
Published: September 2018

Oskar Fischinger (b. 22 June 1900, Gelnhausen, Germany; d. 31 January, 1967, Los Angeles, US) was one of the most influential German abstract experimental animators and creators of visual music. As a youth he studied draughtsmanship and engineering. In 1922, he invented a machine that photographed sequential slices of wax blocks, producing an abstract film in a relatively short time. In Munich, he continued his experiments in creating visual equivalents to orchestral music while making animated cartoons and multi-projector light shows. In Berlin, he did special effects for Fritz Lang’s Frau im Mond [Woman in the Moon] (1929), helped develop the three colour Gasparcolor process, and made stop-motion commercials. In 1936, Fischinger immigrated to the United States. In 1937 he composed the abstract short An Optical Poem to Liszt’s ‘Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2’ for MGM. He worked nine months on the ‘Toccata and Fugue’ segment of Disney’s Fantasia (1940), but none of his original art appears in the film. He continued making abstract expressionist visual music films until 1947, culminating in his masterwork Motion Painting No. 1. Lack of funding subsequently restricted him to painting; around this time he invented a machine to generate artificial sounds. In 1955 he patented the ‘lumigraph’, which enabled its operator to create silent moving colour compositions. Fischinger influenced a host of avant-garde animators, including Norman McLaren, Jordan Belson, and Len Lye, as well as composer John Cage.
Reiniger, Lotte (1899–1981)
Authors: Leskosky Richard J.
Published: September 2018

Berlin-born Charlotte ‘Lotte’ Reiniger, the first woman animator, was the foremost practitioner of silhouette animation (paper cut-outs lit from beneath and manipulated one frame at a time under the camera). She anticipated Disney’s multi-plane system of separating image levels under the camera to create illusory depth by a dozen years. Chinese shadow plays fascinated her as child, and a lecture by German Expressionist director/actor Paul Wegener on animated film inspired her as a teen. While a student at Max Reinhardt’s acting school, she published a book of silhouettes of his actors. Reiniger made her first silhouette film in 1919. She gravitated to fairy tales, fantasies, and operatic themes, but her films nonetheless usually contained wry social commentary, often on gender issues. She also made theatrical commercials and special silhouette effects scenes for live-action features. In 1926, assisted by husband and live-action director Carl Koch and animators Berthold Bartosch and Walther Ruttmann, she completed her feature-length masterpiece, Die Abenteuer des Prinzen Achmed [The Adventures of Prince Achmed]. The first animated feature made in Europe, it employed tinted film stock to reinforce the emotional impact of each scene. Her second silhouette feature, Doktor Dolittle und seine Tiere [Dr. Dolittle and His Animals] (1928), premiered in Berlin with a score by Kurt Weill and Paul Hindemith. Reiniger’s filigreed images are intrinsically abstract and expressionistic, and her stories partake of the surrealism of dreams. After World War II, she worked mostly in Great Britain.
Zero de Conduite (Zero for Conduct) (1933)
Authors: Pringle Thomas Patrick
Published: September 2018

Directed by Jean Vigo, Zero for Conduct is a short film about young boarding school students rebelling against their teachers’ strictures. The film is an autobiographical take on Vigo’s youth and an homage to the spirit of his infamous anarchist father, Miguel Almereyda. Accordingly, Zero for Conduct was initially banned for its lawless attitude, and was only released in 1945, more than a decade after Vigo’s early death. The film is known for its impish charm and effervescent style; it blends a scathing criticism of the harsh conditions of French boarding schools with an anti-authoritarian anarchist politics, presented through the children’s eyes.
Cabinet of Doctor Caligari (1922)
Authors: Parui Avishek
Published: September 2018

Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari [Cabinet of Doctor Caligari, 1922] is a silent German Expressionist film made by Robert Wiene, and is considered among the most influential films in the history of cinema. The film was originally conceived out of an anti-Fascist screenplay by Hans Janowitz and Carl Mayer, and was directed by Robert Wiene after Fritz Lang turned down the offer. Cabinet of Doctor Caligari is a cinematic political text ranking alongside films such as Eisenstein’s Strike and Battleship Potemkin. A stunning visual narrative of necromancy, horror, and hypnotism, Caligari revisits an old German myth in the Nazi Germany of the 1920s. Wiene’s film was remarkable for its architecture of the uncanny, structured in an Expressionist visual vocabulary that attracted the attention of Modernist writers such as Virginia Woolf. With its oblique chimneys, arrow-shaped windows, treelike arabesques and silhouetted photoplay, Caligari is considered the classic cinematic construct of political as well as mental anarchy. This theme is symbolically extended in the film in the never-ending merry-go-rounds and chaotic fairgrounds where the undead exist with innocent children. Logically emerging as a madman’s fantasy in the end, Cabinet of Doctor Caligari remains a story of ambivalence where the borderlines between political control and terror, medical benevolence and imprisonment, logic and madness are eventually unresolved.
Wright, Basil (1907–1987)
Authors: Davis Thomas S.
Published: September 2018

Basil Wright was a prominent figure in the British documentary film movement. He attended the first screening of John Grierson’s Drifters (1929), which amplified his desire to pursue filmmaking. Grierson admired Wright’s amateur film work and made him one of the first recruits in November 1929 for the Empire Marketing Board’s film unit. Wright wholeheartedly took to Grierson’s definition of documentary as the ‘creative treatment of actuality,’ a sort of tightrope act that balanced aesthetic experimentation with a commitment to capturing the gritty realities of everyday life in various settings and industries. Keenly aware of the tension between aesthetics and public education that underwrote the documentary enterprise, Wright nonetheless believed the successful documentary ‘illumines the fundamental problem of human kind with a realism which rises above reportage or exposition to the pinnacle of aesthetic completeness and creative satisfaction’ (‘Documentary Dilemma’ 325).
Abbott, Edwin Abbott (1838–1926)
Authors: Logemann Andrew
Published: September 2018

Edwin Abbott was born in London and educated at the City of London School and St. John’s College, Cambridge. He was ordained in the Church of England in 1863 and returned to the City of London School to serve as its headmaster from 1865–1889. He distinguished himself as a gifted teacher and scholar, publishing 54 books on topics ranging from theology and biblical studies to literary criticism and classics. Despite this prodigious scholarly output, Abbott is primarily known today for his single work of fiction, Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions (1884). This short novel offers both a strident satire of the gender inequities and class divisions of Victorian society and a deft popularization of the mathematics of four-dimensional space. In Flatland, a two-dimensional being’s discovery of the third dimension serves as an analogy for the three-dimensional audience’s encounter with a potential fourth dimension.
Al-Tahtawi, Rifa’a (1801–1873)
Authors: Ibrahim Mahmoud A. A.
Published: September 2018

Rifa’a Rafi’ al-Tahtawi was an Egyptian reformer and thinker who is widely recognised as the pioneer of the Egyptian ‘Awakening’ (nahda) in the 19th century. He stands at the cultural heart of the intellectual awakening of Egypt’s modernisation movement that sought to import and implement military, scientific, technical, and educational innovations from the West. His thought influenced many later scholars including prominent sheikhs such as Muhammad Abduh and Rashid Rida. Al-Tahtawi was born in Tahta in Upper Egypt into a family of prominent scholars. In 1817 he moved to Cairo to join the renowned al-Azhar University. His professor sheikh Hasan al-`Attar (1766–1834) had the greatest influence on him. In 1824, Rifa`a was appointed as an imam.
Gladstone, William Ewart (1809–1898)
Authors: Cubbon Alexandra Gerena
Published: September 2018

William Gladstone was a British politician who served as prime minister four times during his career, his first premiership lasting from 1868 until 1874. He was educated at Eton College and Christ Church, Oxford, from which he graduated in 1831.

Gladstone began his political career in Parliament in 1832 as a High Tory, but he became a member of the Liberal Party in 1859 after being appointed chancellor of the exchequer under Lord Palmerston. His chancellorship resulted in such legislation as the Exchequer and Audit Act of 1866. During the 1860s and 1870s Gladstone’s domestic policies advocated ‘civic individuality’, while his foreign policy was anti-imperialist and favourable to Irish Home Rule. His views on empire stood in stark contrast to those of his political rival, Conservative Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli, who supported imperial expansion in the Middle East and Central Asia. Gladstone famously denounced the Ottoman Empire’s repression of the Bulgarian April uprising in the 1876 pamphlet Bulgarian Horrors and the Question of the East.
Mannheim, Karl (1893–1947)
Authors: Chappel James
Published: September 2018

Karl Mannheim was one of the most influential sociologists of the early 20th century. He received a doctorate in philosophy from the University of Budapest, but soon immigrated to Germany in response to Hungary’s political turmoil. There he studied with Alfred Weber (brother of Max) and published his most influential work, Ideology and Utopia (1929) – one of the founding texts of the sociology of knowledge. For Mannheim, as for Marx and other early sociologists, our knowledge is historically constructed. Mannheim, though, argues that this construction can take different forms, with different political outcomes.
Popular Front
Authors: Guédon Cécile
Published: September 2018

An alliance of left-wing movements in France, the Popular Front (Front Populaire) won the May 1936 elections, leading to the first French government headed by a socialist prime minister, Léon Blum (1872–1950), from 5 June 1936 to 21 June 1937. After the anti-parliamentarian riots of 6 February 1934, which violently opposed fascist leagues to leftist organisations, the three main left-wing parties, Radical-Socialists, the Section française de l’internationale ouvrière (SFIO, the French Section of the Workers’ International) and the Parti communiste français (PCF, French Communist Party), joined forces, giving way in 1935 to one unified group to counter the rise of fascism in France.
Propaganda
Authors: Beard David
Published: September 2018

Propaganda is the term for a variety of communication phenomena developed in the 20th century. As such, its meaning has changed over time from a largely neutral description of public relations and political communication towards an account of systematically distorted communication. The earliest major American proponent of the term, Edward Bernays (1891–1995), claimed that the ‘conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society’ (Bernays, 1928: 1). Bernays believed that ‘propaganda’, for him, a political variation on public relations work, was a tool used by political organizations and eventually businesses to organize and manipulate the desires, actions and will of the masses.
Sapir, Edward (1884–1939)
Authors: Norris Christopher
Published: September 2018

Linguist and anthropologist Edward Sapir is one of those thinkers whose fame has been increased but his full achievement somewhat underrated through association with just one idea. This is the ‘Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis’, jointly credited to Sapir and his student Benjamin Lee Whorf (1897–1941), according to which – on the received interpretation – the syntactic and semantic structures of language determine the conceptual and referential structures of thought. In this case, it would follow that speakers of different languages have different ontologies and inhabit different worlds, to the point where – if those differences are radical enough – there is simply no possibility of translation or mutual comprehension.
Schmitt, Carl (1888–1985)
Authors: Siemers Ryan
Published: September 2018

A conservative German jurist, political theorist, and Roman Catholic, Schmitt became the most significant legal mind of Weimar and then Nazi Germany. His first major work, Dictatorship (1921), distinguished between commissarial dictatorship, which is limited and directed toward restoring normalcy, and sovereign dictatorship, which is unlimited and establishes a new order. His most influential work, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty (1922), argues that ‘all significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts’ for both historical and structural reasons. The modern state inherits earlier divine and monarchical ideas of sovereignty.
Sombart, Werner (1863–1941)
Authors: Van Wyck Brian
Published: September 2018

Werner Sombart, German economist and sociologist, was born into an upper-class family in Ermsleben. After studying economics and law, Sombart received his doctoral degree from the University of Berlin in 1888. In the early years of his career, he was an avowed Marxist and his most influential work, Modern Capitalism, first published in 1902, defined the development of capitalism in three stages – early, high and late – each governed by a guiding spirit. For Sombart, this spirit, rather than the mode of production, was the most basic layer of social organisation. Despite this historicist disagreement with Marx, Sombart’s communist leanings and sympathy for organised labour saw him struggle to find acceptance in the German academic establishment.
Troeltsch, Ernst (1865–1923)
Authors: Steinmetz-Jenkins Daniel
Published: September 2018

Ernst Troeltsch was a liberal German Protestant theologian and philosopher of religion whose work spans the last decades of the German Empire and the early Weimar Republic. He studied theology at the Universities of Erlangen, Berlin, and Göttingen before becoming a professor of theology at Heidelberg (1894), followed by an appointment in the Philosophy Department at the University of Berlin (1915–23). His most famous work is Die Soziallehren der christlichen Kirchen und Gruppen (1912; The Social Teachings of the Christian Churches), which outlines a methodological approach to understanding the basic social and ethical teachings of European Christianity from the first to the eighteenth century.
Weston, Jessie (1850–1928)
Authors: Hawkes Joel
Published: September 2018

Jessie Laidlay Weston was a British independent scholar and folklorist best known for her influential study From Ritual to Romance (1920), which sought to trace the Christian grail legend, specifically the story of the Fisher King, back to pre-Christian origins. Her analysis draws from Sir James Frazer’s comparative study of religion, The Golden Bough (1890), and its claim that modern religion evolved from older fertility cults and their rites of the dying god/king. The ‘Cambridge Ritualists’, who also took much inspiration from Frazer, likewise influenced Weston—particularly the work of Jane Ellen Harrison—with their theories of ritual practice and their shared belief that ritual preceded myth, with storytelling always an explanation of older rites.
Adivasi Writing
Authors: Vashist Urvashi
Published: September 2018

Adivasi writing is something of a contradiction in terms: the literary traditions of adivasis (an umbrella term that designates original inhabitants, indigenous peoples, and tribal communities in the Indian subcontinent) have largely been oral. Furthermore, the displacement and destitution-driven disappearance of adivasi communities whose lifestyle and survival were contingent upon their environment, and their increasing assimilation into mainstream agrarian or urban communities, have meant that these oral traditions have often fallen into disuse.
Can Xue 殘雪 (pen name of Deng Xiaohua 鄧小華) (1953–)
Authors: Green Frederik
Published: September 2018

Can Xue (pen name of Deng Xiaohua) is a Chinese writer and literary critic whose work has gained a following for its avant-garde themes and style. Resisting compartmentalization as a feminist writer, or interpretations of her often nightmarish tales as straightforward literary responses to the violence and political excesses of the Mao period, Can Xue imperatively denied that her work is rooted in China’s socio-historic condition. ‘There is no political cause in my work’, she said in an interview in 2002, maintaining instead that hers is a ‘literature of the soul’ and that its main interest lies in the metaphysical aspect of individual existence.
Kolatkar, Arun (1932–2004)
Authors: Patke Rajeev S.
Published: September 2018

Kolatkar was a bilingual poet who wrote in English and Marathi, and also worked as a graphic artist. He was one among several writers from mid-twentieth-century India to succeed in adapting a modernist outlook to his times and circumstances. Born in Kolhapur into a middle-class Hindu family, he studied art in Mumbai and worked most of his professional life in advertising. Intensely private in nature and Bohemian by temperament, he shunned publicity, read eclectically, published sporadically, and developed the attitude of a flâneur browsing the street life of Mumbai. For many years he frequented its humble cafes, and from such vantage points wrote poems that provide a sardonic collection of marginalia on the cultural transformations undergone by his corner of contemporary Asia, refracted through a temperament impatient of cant, indifferent to bourgeois attitudes, and sceptical of much that passes for tradition in India.
Livingstone, Douglas James (1932–1996)
Authors: Wylie Dan
Published: September 2018

Douglas Livingstone is regularly cited as South Africa’s pre-eminent poet of the twentieth century. Born in Malaysia, but settling in South Africa at the age of ten, he made Durban, Natal, his home, microbiology his career, and poetry his central passion. He published eight collections of poems, excluding the Selected Poems (1984) and the Collected Poems (2004), as well as hundreds of uncollected pieces, essays, and scientific articles. His work displays an increasing concern with the ecological health of his home region and of the planet as a whole.
Lu, Xun (1881–1936)
Authors: Shao Flora Xiaofang
Published: September 2018

Lu Xun, a pre-eminent man of letters in twentieth-century China, is widely regarded as the father of modern Chinese literature. Writing during China’s tumultuous transition from a dynastic empire into modern nation-state, Lu Xun was one of the leading practitioners of the nationalist ‘New Literature’ as well as a driving force behind the iconoclastic New Culture Movement and other intellectual reforms. His works have been celebrated for their trenchant critique of the cultural malaise of Chinese society. His inimitable style of acute self-reflexivity, combined with dark sarcasm, set an example for later writers who were similarly engaged in literature as a form of social critique.
Luhan, Mabel Dodge (1879–1962)
Authors: Kuykendall Lara
Published: September 2018

Mabel Evans Dodge Sterne Luhan was a writer and patron of the arts who hosted circles of visual and literary artists at her homes in Florence, Italy; Greenwich Village, New York City; and Taos, New Mexico. She befriended and supported noted modernists including Gertrude Stein, Georgia O’Keeffe, Carl Van Vechten, Ansel Adams, Marsden Hartley, and Willa Cather. Luhan and her creative cohort promoted stylistic innovation in their works, including visual abstraction and non-linear narratives. Political activists such as sex educator Margaret Sanger and anarchist Emma Goldman also contributed to the revolutionary spirit of Luhan’s intellectual salons, where important relationships formed and conversations took place about the nature of creativity in the modern, industrial world. Luhan wrote essays and books about the cultural milieu she helped to cultivate throughout the 1930s and 1940s. Lorenzo in Taos (1932) was inspired by her friendship with D.H. Lawrence. Intimate Memories (four volumes, 1933–7) is notable for its forthright discussions of her bisexuality. Taos and Its Artists (1947) is an early introduction to the art scene that she was instrumental in building in the southwest. Luhan died in 1962.
Manto, Saadat Hasan ‏
وسعادت حسن منٹ ‪(1912–1955)
Authors: Asaduddin M.
Published: September 2018

Saadat Hasan Manto is one of the foremost writers of the Indian subcontinent in Urdu, and, by common consent, the most accomplished practitioner of the short story form in South Asia. He wrote short stories, sketches, portraits, essays, screen plays, seven collections of radio plays, and a novel.

Born into a typical middle-class Muslim family of Samrala, Punjab, to a conservative, domineering father and a gentle mother, he showed no interest in studies at school. Luckily he chanced upon a mentor, Abdul Bari Alig, a dilettante writer and journalist, who introduced him to English, Russian, and French writers—Oscar Wilde, Chekhov, Pushkin, Maupassant, Victor Hugo, and others.
Navya (Kannada)
Authors: Nikhila H.
Published: September 2018

Literally meaning ‘of the new’, Navya refers to the modernist phase in Kannada literature which began in the 1950s and ran its course by 1980. Vinayaka Krishna Gokak’s poetry collection entitled Navya kavitegalu (New Poems) published in 1950 was the Kannada response to the English modernist poets’ injunction to ‘make it new’. While Gokak is recognized as bringing in newness in form, Gopalkrishna Adiga is credited with bringing novelty in theme and content. As against the Romanticism of the Navodaya writers, Navya writing is characterized by disillusionment (the failed promise of Nehru), biting sarcasm against encrusted tradition, and the restless quest for meaning and values in the present.
Campbell, Roy (1901–1957)
Authors: Voss Tony
Published: September 2018

Schooled in South Africa, in 1919 Campbell went to Oxford, but never entered the university. After marriage to Mary Garman in 1922, and the success of his first major work, he returned briefly to Natal, to edit the literary magazine Voorslag, but thereafter lived most of his life in France, Spain, and Portugal, apart from army service in Africa and residence in England during the Second World War.

The Flaming Terrapin (1924), an epic manifesto, established the essentials of Campbell’s poetic style: exuberant imagery, traditional versification, idiosyncratic intensity, and self-projection (‘The man clear-cut, against the last horizon’). The persona is usually a romantic figure from an imagined pre-industrial world. Successive disappointments (the short life of Voorslag and his marriage threatened by adultery) released hilarious satire: The Wayzgoose (1930) is a lampoon of the pretensions of settler culture; The Georgiad (1931) suggests that, like Thomas Pringle (1789–1834) in his clash with the Cape Governor Somerset, Campbell suffered and baulked at the hauteur and moral indifference of the English aristocracy.
Bouabré, Frédéric Bruly (1923–2014)
Authors: Vincent Cédric
Published: September 2018

Frédéric Bruly Bouabré is one of the best-known contemporary African artists. His drawings first gained international exposure in 1989 when exhibited in the groundbreaking show Magiciens de la Terre (Beaubourg-La Villette, Paris). Since then he has participated in a number of major international exhibitions: Africa Now (1991), Trade Routes-2nd Johannesburg Biennale (1997), Global Conceptualism (1999), Documenta 11 (2002), Africa Remix (2004–7), Biennale de Venise (2013). His artwork succeeds in challenging the gap between supporters of outsider art and those of conceptual art.

Born in the early 1920s into an Ivory Coast farming culture, Frédéric Bruly Bouabré served in the French Navy, worked for the police department in Dakar, Senegal, and held various clerical positions in the colonial administration. In 1948 he had a mystical vision that inspired him to start his own religion, the Order of the Persecuted. He was mainly known by ethnologists as a prophet before his prolific writing and drawing caught the attention of French curator André Magnin.
Fifth Moon Art Group (Wu yue hua hui)
Authors: McIntyre Sophie
Published: September 2018

Wu yue hua hui, also referred to in English as the Fifth Moon art group, was formed in May 1957 by a group of painters who were graduates from the Art Department at the National Taiwan Normal University. Its core members included Liu Kuo-sung (Liu Guosong, 劉國松), Chuang Tse (Zhuang Zhi, 莊喆), Feng Chung-jui (Feng Zhongrui, 馮 鍾 睿), Kuo Tung-jung (Guo Dongrong, 郭東榮), Li Fang-chih (Li Fangzhi, 李芳枝), Kuo Yu-lun (Guo Yulun, 郭豫倫), Chen Jing-rong (陳景容), and Ku Fu-Sheng (Gu Fusheng, 顧福生), and they were subsequently joined by other artists including Chen Ting-shi (陳庭詩) and Han Hsiang-ning (Han Xiangning, 韓湘寧).
Lange, Dorothea (1895–1965)
Authors: Kuykendall Lara
Published: September 2018

Dorothea Lange is best known as a documentary photographer for the United States Department of Agriculture’s Resettlement Administration (later the Farm Security Administration) during the 1930s. Her photographs are often characterized by an empathetic focus on individuals as representatives of larger social conditions. During the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl, her work increased awareness of economic and environmental disasters in order to garner public and governmental support for Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal relief agencies. Lange’s most famous photograph, Migrant Mother (1936), depicts a woman and three of her children at a pea picker’s camp in Nipomo, California. Although the family is clearly destitute, dirty, and hungry, the mother’s gaze makes her appear resolute and hopeful, as if she is envisioning her own survival. Lange also documented the Japanese internment camps of the Second World War, created photo essays for Life magazine, and was the first woman photographer to win a Guggenheim Fellowship. She died of oesophageal cancer in 1965.
Minimalism
Authors: de Baca Miguel
Published: September 2018

Minimalism is an artistic style understood as a transition between high modernist abstraction and the turn into what would become known as postmodernism in art. Rather than a cohesive school, Minimalism is comprised of heterogeneous artistic tendencies embodied by individual practitioners. Some of its identifiable characteristics include the preference for industrial fabrication instead of handmade construction, hard-edged geometric shapes and patterns sometimes arranged as serial units, and the elimination of reference and expression. These tactics suggest that Minimal artists were less concerned with authorial intention (i.e., the meanings an artist communicates through a given artwork) and more greatly concerned with the perceptive experience of the viewer.
Nsukka School
Authors: Rice Erin M.
Published: September 2018

The Nsukka School, which is named after the University of Nigeria at Nsukka, was a group of artists and faculty members associated with the use of uli—a form of body and mural decorative painting indigenous to the Igbo culture of Nigeria—in their work and are considered disciples of Uche Okeke’s teachings and artistic influence. The Uli experiment sought to address Okeke’s call for ‘natural synthesis’ in the visual arts of Nigeria and the formation of an art appropriate for the post-Independence age. Other members of the group who experimented with uli forms through painting and drawing were Chike Aniakor and Obiora Udechukwu, followed by their students Tayo Adenaike and Olu Oguibe.
Posada, José Guadalupe (1852–1913)
Authors: DiTilio Jessi
Published: September 2018

A seminal printmaker of Mexico City at the turn of the twentieth century, José Guadalupe Posada is most recognizable for his calaveras, images of skulls and skeletons that satirized politicians, aristocrats, and corruption in Mexican society. Though he received little acclaim or monetary success during his lifetime, Posada’s work was rediscovered by the Mexican avant-garde in the early 1920s, including Jean Charlot, Dr. Atl, Diego Rivera, and José Clemente Orozco. For these artists, Posada represented an artistic precedent outside of the European tradition, and a link between the images of Pre-Columbian art and their own. The most famous of the calaveras is a character Posada called La Catrina, whose image is ubiquitous in pop-cultural imagery produced for the Day of the Dead.
Tonalism
Authors: Philp Angela
Published: September 2018

Tonalism is an often under-appreciated aspect of Australian painting, which developed from the mid-1910s to the 1950s. A technique pioneered by Max Meldrum (1875–1955) it is different to the use of tone developed by artists such as Leonard da Vinci (1452–1519) and Johannes Vermeer (1632–75). Traditionally, European artists worked from dark to light, building up the painted surface to model form and create realistic effects as part of the will to produce illusionistic forms and space on a two-dimensional painted surface. This process is based on closely observed preliminary sketches. In Australia, the technique developed by Meldrum involved the blocking in of tonal impressions with no under-drawing or outlines.
Tshelantende
Authors: Langenohl Kathrin
Published: September 2018

Tshelantende was an artist, tailor, and hunter born before the turn of the twentieth century in Luluaburg, today’s Kananga, and lived until 1950s in Ibanshe in the Kasai region of the Belgian Congo colony. As an artist, Tshelantende was known for his mural paintings depicting scenes of day-to-day colonial life which later on served as references for his oeuvre of watercolour paintings. As an amateur and autodidact in the field of art, Tshelantende was free to choose his subjects and to develop his individual style of visual representation, combining local traditions with appropriations of European imagery in a realistic manner. Visualization served as means to objectify and hence distance oneself from the ongoing process of transformation and at the same time bring attention to certain topics.
Wong, Wucius (王無邪) (1936–)
Authors: Ma Karen
Published: September 2018

Wucius Wong (b.1936) is a Hong Kong artist famous for his integration of grids into Chinese landscape painting. Born in China, Wong moved to Hong Kong at the age of five, and was exposed to Western culture while learning English. He is a member of the second generation of twentieth-century Chinese modernist artists, and was a prominent member of the Hong Kong New Ink Painting Artists in the 1960s. Wong was influenced by the monumental landscape paintings of the Northern Song dynasty of China (960–1127), and the systematic application of geometric forms found in Bauhaus design. He uses the textured stroke of Chinese ink paintings to draw landscapes, and presents them in fragments within a grid structure. The grid is presented either as the frame structure of the painting, the outlines of rocks, or the gaps between mountain ranges. Most recently, Wong has put great effort into exploring new techniques through the use of brush and ink. His artistic career spans five decades. He is also a design and fine art educator, having written many books on related topics.
Atget, Jean Eugène Auguste (1857–1927)
Authors: Protz Uta
Published: September 2018

Eugène Atget employed one of the defining instruments of modernity—the camera—to produce a comprehensive photographic record of what modern city planning was about to destroy: Old Paris. Between 1897 and 1927 he made approximately 10,000 glass negatives from which he printed an estimated 25,000 albumen prints showing Paris and its environs in its many architectural and social appearances. Next to palaces and parks he captured the capital’s back alleys and shanty towns. He also took a keen interest in the city’s people and portrayed its salesmen and traders as well as its rag-and-bone men and prostitutes.
Filla, Emil (1882–1953)
Authors: Moseman Eleanor
Published: September 2018

Emil Filla (b. 4 April 1882 in Chropyně in Moravia; d. 6 October 1953 in Prague) is regarded as one of the main leaders of Czech Cubism in early twentieth-century Prague. Best known for paintings that interpret Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque in a Czech context, Filla also produced accomplished sculptures, drawings, and prints. His early career was inaugurated by exhibiting with the group Osma (The Eight) (active 1907–8), of which he was a founding member. In 1909 he joined the Mánes Society and became co-editor of its journal Volné Směry (Free Directions) (ed. 1909–11). Filla was a founding member and leading figure of Skupina výtvarných umělců (the Group of Fine Artists) (active 1911–14) and assumed editorship of the group’s journal Umělecký Měsíčník (published 1911–14). From 1914 to 1920 Filla resided in the Netherlands, where he was active in anti-war politics. In 1920 Filla returned to Prague and resumed work with the Mánes Society. He collaborated with Piet Mondrian and Theo Van Doesburg on the first issue of De Stijl in 1917. After 1920 he left behind the analytic and synthetic cubist aesthetic for which he is best known and turned to figural themes. He was briefly influenced by Surrealism in the 1930s as a result of his friendship with Czech Surrealist and Devětsil member Jindřich Štyrský.
Geometry of Fear
Authors: Paraskos Michael
Published: September 2018

The phrase ‘geometry of fear’ is used to describe the work of a group of British sculptors who came to prominence in the 1950s. Their work often resembles insect or bat-like forms combined with the human figure. Typically they have rough surfaces resembling hammered and wrought ironwork. There has been controversy over the term ‘geometry of fear’ as it was not a name chosen by the artists themselves. It first appeared in an essay written by Herbert Read to accompany a display of sculptures at the Venice Biennale in 1952. Although Read did not intend to label the artists as a coherent group, the ‘geometry of fear’ quickly became a shorthand description for most of those involved in the Venice show. The characteristics Read identified in the work of these sculptors relate to his wider theory of art. He used the term ‘geometry of fear’ to evoke the angular and spindly sculptural forms that he equated to the fears in society at that time. This was in the context of the recent end of the Second World War, the discovery of the Nazi death camps, and the growing fear of nuclear war between the USA and the Soviet Union. However, Read did not claim the sculptors were consciously illustrating these fears through reference to insects, bats, or other forms that might be read as frightening. Instead, the images emerged from the artists’ unconscious minds without prompting.
Sabogal, José (1888–1956)
Authors: Berland Rosa
Published: September 2018

Long associated with the Peruvian ‘indigenista’ movement, Sabogal was lauded by the Marxist José Carlos Mariátegui as a truly ‘Peruvian painter’. The definition of the modern and historic concept of the meaning of Peruvian identity was constantly in flux in the early to the mid-twentieth century, and as such, the artist would fall in and out of favour with the various factions. However, Sabogal’s representation of the Indigenous people of Peru and his commitment to Peruvian history, including the inheritance of Incan culture, served as the beginning of a cultural preservation of this heritage, and engendered the reimagination of the ‘Indian’ by generations of Peruvian artists.
Massaguer, Conrado (1889–1965)
Authors: Fraunhar Alison
Published: September 2018

Conrado W. Massaguer is remembered as the dominant force in graphic arts and popular periodicals in Cuba from the 1910s through the 1950s. During his long career, Massaguer created and published a number of magazines, including the highly influential Social and the widely popular Carteles. Citing Charles Dana Gibson and James Montgomery Flagg as influences, Massaguer developed a distinctive visual style in illustration and caricature, creating an instantly identifiable modernist look in his magazine covers and ads whose impact spread across Latin America. His sense of style extended to layout and content, modernizing and updating the Belle Epoque aesthetic previously dominant in Cuba. He was a founding member of the influential association of artists, writers, and theorists, the Grupo Minorista, whose Saturday lunches drew leading national and international artists and intellectuals. In addition to his activities in Cuba, Massaguer was famous internationally as an illustrator and caricaturist, publishing caricatures and illustration in Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, and other American publications along with French and German magazines. He was active against the repressive Machadato, the regime of the dictator Gerardo Machado.
Ragtime Dancing
Authors: Templeton Melissa
Published: September 2018

Ragtime dancing is a social dance practice, performed to ragtime music, that began in the 1890s and gained widespread popularity in US dance halls until the end of World War I. With roots in both African and European dance traditions, ragtime dancing began in jook houses of the South and dance halls of the North, and developed largely in the African American community before making its way to white participants through migration, integrated dance halls, and the vaudeville stage. Popular interest in ragtime dancing eventually led to its performance in ballrooms and on Broadway (though the dances changed with each new iteration). During the peak of its popularity, ragtime dancing, with its intimate embrace and free improvisatory form, was seen as liberatory and represented the changes that came with modernity and the new century. In addition, ragtime dancing’s energetic movements inspired changes in women’s fashion that became iconic of modernism’s "New Woman." In its prime, ragtime dancing was often itself referred to as "modern dancing."
Academic Realism, Korean
Authors: Heangga Kwon
Published: September 2018

Academic Realism refers to the mainstream style of Western painting from the Japanese colonial era (1910–45), as exemplified by works shown at the Joseon Art Exhibition (1922–44), the representative government exhibition in Korea. In the West, Academism is characterized by classical features, but Korean Academism was marked by a somewhat compromised blend of Realism and Impressionism. The style is "compromised" because the Korean artists making Western paintings at the time had mostly received Academism through their art education in Japan. Two of the movement’s representative artists are Lee Ma-dong (1906–81) and Kim In-seung (1911–2001), both of whom graduated from the Tokyo School of Fine Arts and became the major artists of the Joseon Art Exhibition. After Korean independence in 1945, Modernism and various experimental art forms emerged, and Academic Realism was heavily criticized for its conservative nature. However, it continued to exert its influence as the preferred style of the National Art Exhibition of Korea (Gukjeon) (1949–81), and as a necessary skill for students hoping to enter art school.
Akerman, Chantal (1950–2015)
Authors: Ionita Maria
Published: September 2018

Chantal Akerman was a Belgian filmmaker, artist, and film professor known for her austere, minimalistic style, her feminist themes, and her depictions of alienation, dislocation, and repression, all masterfully expressed in her best-known film, Jeanne Dielman 23, quai du Commerce 1080 Bruxelles (1975).
Boghossian, Alexander (Skunder) (1937–2003)
Authors: Cantone Helena
Published: September 2018

Alexander Boghossian, better known as Skunder, was one of the most prominent figures of African modernism. Born in Addis Ababa in Ethiopia in 1937 to Ethiopian-Armenian parents, Boghossian won a government scholarship to study in Europe aged seventeen. He studied in London at St. Martin’s School, the Slade, and the Central School between 1955 and 1957 and then moved to Paris in 1957 to 1966 where he continued his training at L’École National Supérieure des Beaux Arts and L’Académie de la Grande Chumière. Boghossian became part of the artistic and intellectual fabric of Paris during the late 1950s and 1960s, meeting influential figures in the Pan African and Négritude movements, including philosopher Sheikh Anta Diop, Léopold Senghor, and the Congolese poet Tchikaya U’Tamsi. In particular Aimé Césaire’s poetry greatly influenced and inspired Boghossian’s vision. Artistically, Boghossian was associated with the Surrealist movement and artists including Wilfredo Lam, Paul Klee, André Breton, Max Ernst, Gerard Sokoto, and Georges Braque.
Apocalypse Now (1979)
Authors: Sapra Rahul
Published: September 2018

Apocalypse Now, produced and directed by Francis Ford Coppola, is an adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s novella Heart of Darkness (1899) that deals with European colonialism in the Congo Basin in late nineteenth century. However, the scriptwriters Coppola and John Milius adapted Conrad’s text to convey the brutalities of the Vietnam War. The film charts the journey of the American Captain Willard (Martin Sheen) in Vietnam to find and terminate the rebellious and reportedly insane Colonel Walter E. Kurtz (Marlon Brando). Both the style and the content of the film are influenced by the modernism of Conrad and T.S. Eliot. Images of mutilation and dismemberment dominate Coppola’s film, since Kurtz is represented as a figure of mutilation, which is echoed by Eliot’s poetry. Coppola’s Kurtz reads the first passage of Eliot's "The Hollow Men" verbatim, and the photojournalist (Dennis Hopper) quotes from Eliot’s "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock." Margot Norris notes the film’s use of surrealism to express the irrationality, absurdity, futility, fragmentation, and incomprehensibility of the Vietnam War. The film won the Palme d’Or (1979) at Cannes, but it received mixed reviews, and is regarded by some as a flawed masterpiece.
Coates, Wells Wintemute (1895–1958)
Authors: Johnson Michael
Published: September 2018

Wells Coates was a Canadian-born architect and industrial designer who became a pioneer of Modernism in Britain. As a founder of the Isokon design company, he was instrumental in introducing the radical aesthetics of European Modernism to a sceptical British public. His work as an industrial designer yielded a range of modern consumer products that helped to transform the British domestic interior. Among his major achievements was the design of Lawn Road Flats in London, one of the first mass-housing blocks in Britain and an icon of modernist architecture.
Googie Architecture
Authors: Bryant-Mole Bart
Published: September 2018

Googie architecture was a vernacular style of architecture that emerged in post-Second World War America, primarily in Southern California. Replacing Streamline Moderne as the style of choice for commercial roadside buildings, Googie architecture was characterized by innovative, exuberant designs and attention-grabbing, futuristic forms. Emerging at the peak of America's post-war economic boom, the extravagance of the style symbolized this time of plenty. Though not a cohesive group, certain architects did become associated with Googie architecture. These included Armét and Davis, Douglas Honnold, Martin Stern Jr., and John Lautner.
Saarinen, Eero (1910--1961)
Authors: Johnson Michael
Published: September 2018

Eero Saarinen was the son of influential Finnish architect Eliel Saarinen and followed his father into the architectural profession. In his own right, he pioneered a fluid approach to modern architecture and furniture design in the post-war period. Saarinen extended the modernist vocabulary with flowing curves, interpenetrating spaces, and biomorphic forms, earning a reputation as a ‘structural expressionist’. His architectural works display variety and structural experimentation, with parabolic curves in steel or concrete, while his furniture design exploits the properties of plastic to create organic shapes and saturated colours.
Carlos Raúl Villanueva (1900--1975)
Authors: D’Auria Viviana
Published: September 2018

Carlos Raúl Villanueva is the most renowned Venezuelan modern architect, designer of several social housing developments as ‘El Silencio’ (1941–1945) and ‘23 de Enero’ (1955–1957) and also of one of the most singular examples of Modern Architecture in Latin América, the Ciudad Universitaria of Caracas, campus of Central University of Venezuela (1944–1970), declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2000. Villanueva was born when his father was part of the Venezuelan diplomatic service. His childhood and youth was spent in Europe, most of it in France, where he studied, first in the Lycée Condorcet and later in l’Ecole des Beaux Arts de Paris, graduating as an architect in 1928. Villanueva developed his professional work in Venezuela between 1930 and 1970. During these forty years he embraced the biggest ideal of the modern architect: to work for the common man, for society as a whole, devoting himself to the service of the Venezuelan State. In 1937 Villanueva returned to France for seven months. The project for the Venezuelan pavilion for the Paris International Expo, designed with Luis Malaussena, gave him the opportunity to again be in the midst of artistic avant-gardes. In Paris Villanueva studied Urbanism at the University of Paris and attendance of the fifth Congrès international d’architecture moderne (CIAM) meeting, both of which helped to consolidate his credo in modern architecture and in the synthesis of arts.
Arrivi, Francisco (1915–2007)
Authors: Stevens Camilla
Published: September 2018

Francisco Arriví was instrumental in developing a modern theater in Puerto Rico during the 1940s–1960s. A playwright, poet, essayist, and tireless promoter of Puerto Rican culture, Arriví authored dramatic scripts for the stage, radio, and television, founded theater groups, and supervised the theater wing of the Puerto Rican Culture Institute. Arriví wrote several major essays on Puerto Rican theater as well as plays ranging from poetic realism to absurdist fantasy and farce. His dramas employ anti-mimetic techniques to treat social themes from a psychological perspective. Vejigantes (Carnival Masks) (1958), his major play, is part of a trilogy that addresses Puerto Rican racial prejudice.
Benavente, Jacinto (1866–1954)
Authors: Sprinceana Iulia
Published: September 2018

Jacinto Benavente y Martínez was a Spanish dramatist of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Author of more than 170 plays, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1922. His selection was controversial as many argued that the Generación del 98 and modernist writers such as Miguel de Unamuno, Ramón del Valle-Inclán, and Rubén Darío had greater merits. Nevertheless, Benavente had a significant and revitalizing influence on Spanish drama, ushering in a shift from melodramatic verse to prose comedy and favoring subtle dialogue over the impulsive action typical of the dramas of José de Echegaray.