bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Apollon Musagète
Authors: Reynolds Nancy
Published: September 2018

Apollon Musagète, premiered by Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes in 1928, and most widely known since the 1950s as Apollo, is the oldest work by choreographer George Balanchine still in active repertoire. For its age alone the ballet is significant, but it also marked a new phase in the development of Balanchine’s artistic philosophy. In 1945 he wrote, "Apollo I look back on as a turning point. In its discipline and restraint … the score was a revelation. It seemed to tell me that I could dare not to use everything, that I too could eliminate. I began to see how I could clarify … by reducing what seemed to be multiple possibilities to the one which is inevitable" (Balanchine qtd in Lederman 1975: 81). Such was Balanchine’s influence that what was a turning point for him was also a turning point for ballet in the twentieth century. The score that so influenced Balanchine was composed, by Igor Stravinsky, for a small string orchestra. Diaghilev described it as "an amazing work, extraordinarily calm, and with greater clarity than anything he has so far done, [with] filigree counterpoint [a]round transparent, clear-cut themes, all in the major key; [it is] somehow music not of this world, but from somewhere above" (Diaghilev qtd in White 1979: 342).
Bunster, Patricio (1924–2006)
Authors: Giersdorf Jens Richard
Published: September 2018

Patricio Bunster’s career was emblematic of a Latin American engagement with European modernism and unique in its exchange with German modern dance (Ausdruckstanz). Trained in Chile by immigrant German members of Kurt Jooss’s company, Bunster merged a local vocabulary with globalized movements—such as modern dance vocabulary derived from Ausdruckstanz and ballet—with the goal of restructuring existing nationally defined movement. This merger was utopian in its rethinking of national culture toward a global artistic expression. Such a utopian understanding of the capacity of movement as a global unifier and transformer recalled early modern dance’s vision for a changed world through corporeal awareness and choreographed emancipation. Influenced by Laban as well as Jooss and Leeder, Bunster observed and deployed movement found in manual labor, leisure, daily rituals, nature, and the structure of architecture. In Bunster’s opinion, all of these sources carried traces of future choreographies that could express a new transnational, (Latin) American, and utopian society. Different utopian models, such as the radical rethinking of political structures through a breakdown of the barrier between art and life or the embracing of technology in relation to design for the bettering of society were at the core of modernist conviction that the world needed to be fundamentally changed.
Castle, Vernon (1887–1918) & Castle, Irene Foote (1893–1969)
Authors: Cook Susan C.
Published: September 2018

During the years 1911–1917, Irene Foote Castle (1893–1969) and her husband Vernon Castle (1887–1918) explicitly marketed ragtime dancing as "modern" to their upper-class and, increasingly, middle-class audiences eager to partake in new kinaesthetic forms of popular culture. Dancers, who previously skipped to the 6/8 marching meter of the two step, began to trot, strut, and glide, taking a step on each beat of syncopated 2/4 meter music long associated with African American culture. Easily learned, these new one-step dances invited improvisation and individual response. Mr. and Mrs. Vernon Castle, as they called themselves, became the most public proponents of new trotting dances and distinguished their style from those previously associated with working-class consumers, through discursive and embodied associations of modernity, whiteness, class prestige, and restraint. Irene Castle presented new modes of modern femininity through her corset-less fashions, short haircut, and active lifestyle. With the assistance of their agent Elisabeth Marbury, the Castles collaborated with noted African American composer and bandleader James Reese Europe, who composed works for them and whose ensemble accompanied their live performances. Thus while drawing on the "primitive" yet energizing power of syncopated music, the Castles and their self-proclaimed "refined" dance style offered a modernity that promised newfound vitality while maintaining racial hierarchies.
Devi, Ragini (1893–1982)
Authors: Mattson Rachel
Published: September 2018

Ragini Devi (née Esther Luella Sherman) was a white American dancer and ethnographer who devoted her life to studying and preserving Indian classical dance. In doing so, she contributed to the effort to revive—or, more accurately, to reimagine—Indian classical dance in the 1930s, 40s, and 50s, and to invent, in the US, the idea of "ethnic" or "world" dance. Born in the Midwest in 1893, Devi was raised in Minneapolis to be a proper, middle-class, white, American lady. But in the early 1920s, she cultivated a richly detailed, thoroughly fictional identity as a "high caste Oriental woman" who had learned to perform so-called "Hindu" dances in the caves of Tibet. Her New York Times obituary (January 26, 1982) noted that Devi’s greatest achievement was that she "was instrumental in introducing dances of India to US." But, looking back, it is clear that in addition to her artistic and ethnographic achievements, Ragini Devi’s life is notable for its demonstration of key elements in the history of Americans’ fascination with the East, and the exotic longings that reside at the heart of American whiteness.
Eguchi Takaya (1900–1977)
Authors: Yukihiko Yoshida
Published: September 2018

Following in the footsteps of Baku Ishii and Takada Seiko, dancer Eguchi Takaya established an abstract dance form based on Neue Tanz from Germany. He also helped to found a dancers’ organization in pre- and postwar Japan. In addition, he contributed to the creation of Japanese lyrical modern dance, and published journals for modern dance. Born in Noheji, Aomori Prefecture in Japan, Eguchi studied with Takada Masao and Takada Seiko. Takada Masao and Takada Seiko were dancers who, alongside Baku Ishii and Michio Itō, studied under Giovanni Rossi at the Imperial Theatre. After Rossi’s move to America, the four students became involved in popular culture and other areas such as performing arts, photography, and film, and were the first generation of dancers to base their work on Western dance. Their methods were influenced by rythmique (eurhythmics). In most of their work, the performers danced to the accompaniment of music that was well known at the time.
Flamenco and Modernism
Authors: Cauthery Bridget
Published: September 2018

Though practitioners perceive Andalusia as the form’s spiritual and artistic home, flamenco is taught and performed in cities around the world. Modern flamenco evolved from the "Café Cantante" period or "Golden Age" of flamenco in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, with its widespread introduction outside of Spain occurring as a result of the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939). Flamenco was absorbed into, and transmitted by, popular culture through its inclusion as an exotic divertissement in Hollywood films of the 1930s and 1940s, and the films of director Carlos Saura in the 1980s. These films and their associated imagery created an impression of flamenco as exotic, virtuosic, and gendered—with overt connections to bull-fighting, toreadors, and Romani culture.
Kirstein, Lincoln Edward (1907–1996)
Authors: Steichen James
Published: September 2018

Lincoln Kirstein was an American impresario, writer, and philanthropist, best known as the patron and champion of choreographer George Balanchine, whom he brought to the United States in 1933. Born in Rochester, New York, Kirstein was raised among the wealthy elite of Boston and graduated from Harvard University. A prolific writer, editor, collector, and fund-raiser, Kirstein was a tireless advocate on behalf of the arts generally, and ballet and dance specifically, in the United States. He was a founding editor of the literary quarterly Hound & Horn and helped to create the organization that became the Museum of Modern Art. With Balanchine, Kirstein founded a series dance companies in the 1930s and 1940s, as well as the School of American Ballet (SAB), culminating in the creation in 1948 of the New York City Ballet (NYCB). He served as Managing Director of the New York City Center, and was a member of the original planning committee for the Lincoln Center. Kirstein was instrumental in securing major philanthropic support from the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations for SAB and NYCB (in addition to other American dance companies), and was a crucial institutional leader of both organizations throughout his life. An astute and wide-ranging collector of art, books, and dance memorabilia, Kirstein’s donations to the MoMA Dance Archives and the New York Public Library’s Jerome Robbins Dance Division constitute some of the most significant archival holdings in America on the history of ballet and dance.
Ginner, Ruby (1886–1978)
Authors: Carter Alexandra
Published: September 2018

Working primarily during the second and third decades of the twentieth century, Ruby Ginner devised a new dance form called Revived Greek Dance (later changed to Classical Greek Dance). Fully cognizant of the impossibility of reconstructing dances from ancient Greece, she was inspired by their spirit, principles of movement, dramatic styles, and contexts of production. Extensive research on the artifacts, theater, literature, and thematic narratives of ancient Greece informed the development of a new movement vocabulary. With the mime artist Irene Mawer, Ginner established her own school, and her work was disseminated in the theater, in education, and through her published writings.
Adam, Hoerijah (1936–1971)
Authors: Minarti Helly
Published: September 2018

Born nine years before Indonesia’s independence, Hoerijah Adam epitomized the transitional figure of the Indonesian postcolonial dancer. Despite her short life, Adam changed the course of modern dance in Indonesia by formulating a new style derived from her origins—the Minangkabau culture of West Sumatra.

In contrast to the Javanese influence seen elsewhere in Indonesia’s modern dance—whose classical dances rooted in the Hindu-Buddhist syncretism developed within its court traditions after the arrival of Islam in the fourteenth century—Minangkabau is distinct for its pencak-silat, a vernacular martial arts form. Scholars describe Minangkabau as a culture of paradox, referring to the fact that although its people are predominantly Muslim, their customs are based on matrilineal principles—an unlikely combination.
Ishii, Baku (1886–1962)
Authors: Yukihiko Yoshida
Published: September 2018

Baku Ishii is widely regarded as the creator of Japanese modern dance. He was born in Mitane-cho, Akita Prefecture in 1886. Despite his difficulty adapting to school life in his early years, he moved to Tokyo at the age of twenty-four to study literature. Eventually, he began studying the violin at the Imperial Theatre. During the course of his violin studies, however, Ishii, moved by his exposure to opera, decided to focus on dance. While he remained at the Imperial Theatre, his new focus led him to study ballet under Giovanni Rossi, a ballet instructor who previously worked in the UK, but who had been invited to teach at the Imperial Theatre by the then managing director Keinosuke Nishino. Ishii also performed in the operas Rossi produced at the Imperial Theatre.

Ishii eventually resigned from the opera as a result of an argument with Rossi. After leaving Rossi, Ishii studied rythmique (eurhythmics) with Émile Jaques-Dalcroze. Later he began to choreograph his own work.
Kumudini Lakhia (1930--)
Authors: Coorlawala Uttara Asha
Published: September 2018

Kumudini Lakhia’s career as a dancer, choreographer, and teacher spans over sixty years. During this time, she brought Kathak, a traditional art dance indigenous to northern India, into the world of Euro-American modernism. The differences between twentieth-century Euro-American cultural aesthetics and Kathak inhibited the acceptance of Kumudini Lakhia’s work in India.
Leeder, Sigurd (1902–1981)
Authors: Lidbury Clare
Published: September 2018

In a career that spanned over sixty years, Sigurd Leeder made important contributions to the dance worlds in Germany, Great Britain, Chile, and Switzerland. His early association with Kurt Jooss was of great importance to them both, with Leeder working not only as a dancer in the Ballets Jooss, but also as a ballet master and teacher at the various schools associated with the company. In 1924 he joined Jooss at the Municipal Theatre Münster as a soloist and as a teacher at the new Westphalian Schule für Musik, Sprache und Bewegung (School for Music, Voice, and Movement), then in 1927 he moved with Jooss to Essen. There he became head of the dance department at the Folkwangschule für Musik, Tanz und Sprechen (Folkwang School for Music, Dance, and Voice) and danced with the municipal dance ensemble that later evolved into the Ballets Jooss. In 1934 Leeder moved to Dartington Hall in Great Britain, along with Jooss, other members of the company, and several students from the school in Essen. When the Ballets Jooss folded in 1947, Leeder established the Sigurd Leeder School of Dance in London. He moved to Chile to become director of the dance department at the University of Santiago in 1959, and then to Switzerland in 1964 to again open his own school. The dance language developed by Leeder and Jooss was a synthesis of ballet and Laban’s theories filtered through their varied dance and theater experiences and distilled in Leeder’s inspirational teaching. He was renowned not only for these teaching skills but also for his exploration, development, and refinement of Kinetographie-Laban (Labanotation).
Raqs-e melli
Authors: Shay Anthony
Published: September 2018

Iranian-Armenians Madame Cornelli, Madame Yelena Avakian, and Sarkis Djanbazian, all of whom had learned ballet in Russia or Europe, came to Iran where they opened private dance studios. They began the process of modernizing Iranian dance for performance on proscenium arch stages. To accomplish this task, in a choreophobic environment like that of Iran of the late 1920s to the 1950s, they engaged in two important activities. First, they created a new dance genre, an invented tradition that the Ministry of Fine Arts designated as raqs-e melli, national dance. This new dance form borrowed from classical ballet, Armenian and Iranian solo improvised dance, Armenian and Iranian folk dances, and other Western sources. Second, in order to appeal to the educated class of Iranian Muslims who were familiar with the West, they adopted themes that were taken from Persian literature and pre-Islamic history, as well as bucolic scenes from village life. Their studios were the first sites of dance recitals and concerts using Western-style stages and techniques. In the 1950s, the Iranian government founded the first professional dance companies—a ballet company and a folk dance company—based on the techniques and work begun by these teachers.
Chaki Sircar, Manjusri (1934–2000) and Sircar, Ranjabati (1963–1999)
Authors: Purkayastha Prarthana
Published: September 2018

In early 1980s, Manjusri Chaki Sircar and her daughter, Ranjabati Sircar, coined the term Navanritya or New Dance for their methodology of dance training and choreography. The Sircars’ New Dance emerged from the Bengal region of India in a period that simultaneously witnessed a nationwide upsurge of women’s rights movements and the rise of right-wing antifeminist politics. Energized by the feminist movement, the Sircars challenged and critiqued patriarchal frameworks governing the production of dance for the modern Indian stage. They questioned, both through their dancing bodies as well as through their published work, existing conventions of dance performance such as the stereotypical representation of women in performance. They presented highly innovative and subversive dance works that provided fresh, startling, and contemporary interpretations of available literary sources and inherited dance-drama traditions.
Sorel, Ruth Elly Abramovitsch (1907–1974)
Authors: Templeton Melissa
Published: September 2018

Upon immigrating to Montreal in 1944, Ruth Abramovitsch (also known as Abramowitz) Sorel was one of the first dancers to regularly teach and perform modern dance in Canada. Informed by her experience performing with Mary Wigman in Dresden, Sorel introduced Montreal dancers and audiences to Ausdruckstanz, the German expressionist dance style. Her company, variously billed as "Ruth Sorel Montreal Ballet" or "Ruth Sorel Modern Dance Group," performed dramatic psychological narratives set to a classically informed movement vocabulary. She received national recognition when her company performed at the Canadian Ballet Festivals in 1949 and 1950. Sorel’s legacy can be seen in the many dance careers she helped launch, including Yoné Kvietys (1924–2011) and Birouté Nagys (1920--), who jointly founded the Montreal Modern Dance Company in 1952. However, Sorel’s influence on the Montreal dance community gradually began to fade in the 1950s. Sorel left Montreal to return to Poland in 1957 where she remained until her death in 1974.
Spencer, Penelope (1901–1993)
Authors: Robinson Anne
Published: September 2018

The career of the English "creative" dancer, choreographer, teacher, and dance writer Penelope Spencer spanned the period between the World Wars. Spencer’s versatile training and career encompassed diverse British theater genres, including ballet, drama, mime, modern dance, musical comedy, opera, pantomime, and revue. She practiced consecutively as a freelance artist and under the auspices of enlightened cultural institutions, including the Arts Theatre Club, British Broadcasting Corporation, British National Opera Company, Camargo Society, Glastonbury Festival, Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, and Royal College of Music. Her published articles explored the relationship between dance and music, the importance of dance to actors and musicians, and dance as a collaborative art form, promoting the Wagnerian concept of Gesamtkunstwerk. During the interwar period, Spencer made significant and pioneering contributions to British theater dance and wider cultural heritage, while incorporating progressive philosophies into her choreography and teaching.
Barrett, Cynthia (1921–2006)
Authors: Donaldson Samantha Mehra
Published: September 2018

Choreographer, teacher, and dance artist Cynthia Barrett was a modern dance artist who established her own company in Toronto. For a short while she directed the Neo Dance Theatre (later to become the New Dance Theatre under Nancy Lima Dent), for which she choreographed Song of David, which was performed at the Second Canadian Ballet Festival in 1949. While a self-professed ballet dancer, she looked toward modern themes, music, and aesthetics for inspiration. In 1944 she explored the plight of the Jewish peoples during and since World War II in Child Refugee: I Don’t See No Butterflies (1944), and considered local social histories in Canadiana (1946) and Eskimo Dances (1946). During the mid-1960s, she began using a group of dancers including Peter Randazzo, David Earle, and Patricia Beatty, who would eventually become the founders of Toronto Dance Theatre.
Alvarez Bravo, Lola (1903–1993)
Authors: Black June I.K.
Published: September 2018

Born to a wealthy family in Jalisco, Mexico, Dolores Martínez de Anda (always known as Lola) was brought up in luxury during her infancy and childhood; nonetheless, she witnessed the incredible upheaval of the Mexican Revolution as a young woman. In 1925, she married Manuel Alvarez Bravo, who had been a student of photography under Hugo Brehme. The Alvarez Bravos moved to Oaxaca early in their marriage, where Lola began to learn about photography from Manuel. They shared a camera and a dark room during their time in Oaxaca and worked in a similar style. Although Lola received less recognition than Manuel during her lifetime, she is now recognized as an influential Mexican photographer and is often cited as the first Mexican-born woman to dedicate herself to the medium. Her photographic aesthetic was strongly influenced by her husband in the early years of her career, but also by Tina Modotti and Edward Weston (who worked in Mexico in the mid-1920s) and Henri Cartier-Bresson and Paul Strand (who worked there in the mid-1930s). Her later photomontages alternatively engaged with both Constructivism and Surrealism. She was also a curator, educator, photojournalist, and general advocate of the arts in Mexico.
Arensberg, Walter (1878–1954)
Authors: Archino Sarah
Published: September 2018

Walter Arensberg (April 4, 1878 to January 29, 1954) and his wife, Louise Stevens Arensberg (1879–1953), were influential patrons of the avant-garde, building a collection that included modernist art, early American Shaker furniture, and non-Western objects, primarily of African and pre-Columbian origin. They collected modern art by American and European artists, with a special concentration in work by Marcel Duchamp (who also served as their art advisor) and Constantin Brancusi. Their New York apartment, at 33 West 67th Street, hosted a frequent salon of artists, writers, and intellectuals from 1915–1921. These gatherings were a focal point for the activities and antics of New York Dada. Among Arensberg’s many friendships with artists and writers, his long association with Marcel Duchamp was perhaps most influential. When Duchamp arrived in New York in 1915, Walter Pach met him at the pier and brought him directly to the Arensberg’s apartment, where Duchamp lived during the summer of 1915. Later, Arensberg paid the rent for Duchamp’s studio, located in the same building. The Arensberg Collection would amass nearly forty works by Duchamp, including The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass) (1921). When Arensberg was unable to purchase the artist’s infamous Nude Descending a Staircase No. 2 (1912), he commissioned a duplicate and eventually acquired the original as well.
Assemblage
Authors: Pantazis Steven
Published: September 2018

Assemblage is an artistic form that involves the transformation of non-art objects into two-dimensional or three-dimensional artistic compositions. Together with abstraction, it has been considered one of the two most significant innovations of modern art. The term assemblage was first used in 1953 by critic, philosopher and poet Max Loreau in describing French artist Jean Dubuffet’s series of imprint collages of butterflies’ wings. The term was popularized by the Museum of Modern Art’s 1961 exhibition The Art of Assemblage, which showcased the work of early 20th-century European artists, such as Marcel Duchamp, Pablo Picasso, George Braque and Kurt Schwitters, and Americans such as Joseph Cornell, Man Ray and Robert Rauschenberg.
al-Attar, Suad (1942--)
Authors: Floyd Tiffany Renee
Published: September 2018

Born in Baghdad, Iraq, Suad al-Attar moved to London in 1976. She holds a prominent position within the narrative of Iraqi modern and contemporary art as one of the nation’s leading female artists. In 1965, al-Attar became the first woman to hold a solo exhibition in Baghdad. This exhibition was the beginning of a prolific career that spans several decades and geographic regions. Al-Attar began her formal education at the Academy of Fine Arts in Baghdad and at California State University. She then pursued graduate training in London at the Wimbledon School of Art, where she studied printmaking, and the Central School of Art and Design. After the completion of her studies, al-Attar taught at the University of Baghdad before moving to London. Working within a graphic aesthetic, al-Attar’s work is flat, linear, and oftentimes monochromatic. Her canvases are filled with mythical creatures set in phantasmagoric spaces. The artist’s work is characterized as a manifestation of memory, at both a personal and collective level. Her characters emerge from Iraq’s literary past, but al-Attar also creates a personalized set of symbols based on memories of her homeland. Many of her works also offer introspective laments on the destruction of Baghdad during the turbulent years of the 1990s and 2000s.
Bacon, Francis (1909–1992)
Authors: Barber Fionna
Published: September 2018

British painter Francis Bacon was one of the most important figures of international post-war modernism. During the 1940s and 1950s, he developed a characteristic painting format used throughout his career, generally featuring an isolated figure within an armature or stage-like setting. Bacon’s work is renowned for its raw emotional appeal, and also its ability to convey an existential sense of the human condition. Bacon’s painting developed sporadically until Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion (1944) attracted considerable critical attention. During the 1950s, a series of variations on Diego Velazquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X (c. 1650) supported the development of Bacon’s international reputation, consolidated by a major retrospective at the Tate in 1962. In 1970, however, on the eve of his major retrospective exhibition at Grand Palais, Paris, his former lover George Dyer died of an overdose, a tragedy Bacon later commemorated in a group of triptychs. After this event he withdrew considerably from Soho Bohemia, in which he had played such a leading role during the previous two decades.
Bandung School
Authors: Rath Amanda Katherine
Published: September 2018

The Bandung School refers to one of the streams of modern art in post-revolutionary Indonesia. It is associated primarily with the art school in what is known now as the Institute of Technology Bandung (ITB), and encompasses the works of the first generations of its students, many of whom became its first Indonesian instructors. Forerunners of the school include Mochtar Apin (1923–1994), But Mochtar (1930–1986), Ahmad Sadali (1924–1987), Sudjoko Danoesoebroto (1928–2006), Syafe’i Soemardja, Srihadi Sudarsono (1931--), Popo Iskandar (1927–2000), and A.D. Pirous (1933--), all of whom attended the school during the 1950s. As lecturers, professors and exhibiting artists, they came to define a modernist and universalist approach to art practice and style. This ultimately clashed with nationalist critics during the 1950s, who contended that their work lacked an Indonesian soul and did not reflect Indonesian experience. During the early 1960s, the Bandung School was increasingly under pressure and marginalized by its ideological opponents, most notably from the Communist Party. However, with the sweeping political changes of 1965–1967, the Bandung School artists and their aesthetic philosophy came to prominence in the emerging New Order.
The Bay Area Figurative Movement
Authors: Nay Eric
Published: September 2018

The Bay Area Figurative Movement, also commonly referred to as the Bay Area Figurative School, was an art movement in the 1950s and 1960s. It was made up of a group of artists working in the San Francisco Bay Area who, in a move away from the New York School mode of abstraction, abandoned painting in the established style of Abstract Expressionism. These West Coast artists focused predominantly on the human body as their subject matter and eschewed Abstract Expressionism’s rejection of representation. The artists’ concentration on figurative work ultimately lent the group its name, although its subject matter included landscapes, cityscapes and still lifes as well. The Bay Area artists shared mutual interests and evolved a shared stylistic vocabulary. They received significant critical recognition, and helped redefine figurative art following Abstract Expressionism through a uniquely regional interpretation of modernist painting. The evolution of the Bay Area Figurative Movement was also culturally associated with the rise of beat culture in San Francisco, West Coast jazz, and reactions to World War II. It remains highly contested whether the Bay Area Figurative Movement was a deliberate and rebellious break with Abstract Expressionism or simply a cyclical return to the human figure as subject matter.
Beckett, Clarice Marjoribanks (1887–1935)
Authors: Peers Juliette
Published: September 2018

Clarice Beckett was a major Australian artist, and remains an important figure in feminist history. Beckett’s abstracted impressionism, subtle color harmonies, and ordered placement of compositional elements is considered quintessential to Australian modernism. In the early 1970s her proto-minimalist approach was likened to that of Mark Rothko. Her refined blurring of hues and para-futurist vision of industrialized cities broke with the predominately agrarian themes of 1920s Australian painting. Having never left Victoria, her artistic vision was highly autonomous and self-reliant; locally available books and art instruction, for instance, provided her with theoretical and technical cross-references. While her own creativity was bounded by domestic routine, her works poetically transformed and transcended her local surroundings.

During the women’s liberation movement and second wave feminism of the 1970s, discussions framing Beckett as a self-driven cultural maverick trapped within a restrictive middle-class family offered guidance and self-identification for many artists associated with each movement. While the narrative of Beckett’s artistic career stimulated substantial curatorial and scholarly interest in her work, the posthumous focus on her social standing and personal life risk undermining the artistic breadth and credibility she achieved during her lifetime.
Beckmann, Max (1884–1950)
Authors: Grimm Dagmar
Published: September 2018

A painter, printmaker, sculptor, and writer, Max Beckmann achieved success at an early age. After studying art in Weimar and spending some months in Paris, Beckmann moved to Berlin in late 1904. Participating in an art competition there, he was awarded an opportunity to study in Florence. His prize-winning painting Young Men by the Sea, was bought by the Weimar Museum in 1905, an unprecedented occurrence for a twenty-year-old painter. Beckmann was admitted to the Berlin Secession in 1906 and took part in their annual exhibitions to favorable response. He worked in an academic style, painting melodramatic renditions of disasters such as the Messina earthquake in 1910, and the sinking of the Titanic in 1912, as well as mythological or biblical scenes.

Until 1913, Beckmann’s work was not considered avant-garde. A controversy between him and Franz Marc in 1912 regarding the merits of contemporary art played out in the periodical Pan, placing Beckmann on the side of the conservative artistic establishment. Beckmann never wanted to be classified with the Expressionists, or to be a part of any group or trend. Yet his later work, in which he developed his personal, subjective, symbolic world, must be considered with the Expressionist movement.
Berni, Antonio (1905–1981)
Authors: Westphalen Von Hartenthal Mariana
Published: September 2018

Antonio Berni is a central figure in 20th-century Argentinean art who employed a number of diverse mediums in his work, experimenting with a wide variety of techniques, from oil painting to collages to large sculptures. Berni frequently incorporated trash and other industrialized, humble materials, into his pieces. The artist’s complex prints, which combined traditional printmaking techniques and collage with found materials, secured him the Grand Prize for Drawing and Printmaking at the 1962 Venice Biennal. Berni’s works usually addressed the inequality and injustices he witnessed in Argentina as a result of the rapid growth in industrialization and consumerism. His works, predominantly figurative, have a cluttered, grimy aspect.

At the beginning of his career in the 1920s and early 1930s, Berni was influenced by the Surrealists, with whom he became familiar on a study trip to Europe. During the 1930s, the artist created monumental paintings; he also delineated the movement "Nuevo Realismo" ("New Realism"), an attempt to bring art to a broader audience. In 1933, Berni worked with David Alfaro Siqueiros, Lino Spilimbergo, Juan Castagnino, and Enrique Lázaro on the mural Ejercícioplástico [Plastic Exercise]. He later criticized this experience on the grounds that mural painting could only exist in Argentina with the collaboration of the bourgeoisie.
Modern Dance and Education in the United States
Authors: Green Jill
Published: September 2018

The history of dance instruction in educational settings in the United States dates back to the early twentieth century. A number of female physical education teachers, including Gertrude Colby and Bird Larson, became interested in dance and experimented with rhythmic and ‘‘natural’’ movements as they developed technique classes in physical education curricula. John Dewey’s ideas about art in education and the rise of the progressive education movement in the earlier part of the century were particularly present in the work of Margaret H’Doubler at the University of Wisconsin, as well as in elementary school programmes focussing on creative movement as a holistic means to help students develop their individual talents and abilities. In the 1930s, artistic goals came to the fore at educational institutions such as the Bennington School of Dance, which hosted a summer programme from 1934 until 1942, with a break during the 1939 term when the school was held at Mills College. This summer school led to the development of the ‘‘Gymnasium Circuit’’—a series of universities and colleges that provided a touring network for modern dancers. Although modernism still exists in higher education dance in the United States, the close of the twentieth century reoriented dance scholarship toward dance history, criticism, and global and postcolonial thinking favoring a pluralistic world view, and challenging the presumed ‘‘high art’’ elitism and Eurocentrism of modern dance.
Biomorphism
Authors: Botar Oliver
Published: September 2018

Biomorphism is a 20th-century style of painting, sculpture, photography and design with roots in the late 19th century. It is characterized by what are often termed "organic" forms: curvilinear rather than angular lines and surfaces, presumably more typical of biomorphs (life forms) than orthogonal arrangements.

The term "biomorph" was coined by English anthropologist Alfred Cort Haddon in 1895 to refer to designs derived from animate sources. It was applied to modernist art by English critic Geoffrey Grigson in 1934, and was soon adopted by Alfred Barr in Cubism and Abstract Art, his 1936 account of modernist movements. While Barr used it to designate one of two styles of abstraction (geometric abstraction was the other), the term has been used for both abstracted but recognizable depictions (usually plants, animals or geological formations) and non-mimetic or difficult-to-decipher curvilinear forms.
Boyd, Arthur (1920–1999)
Authors: McKenzie Janet
Published: September 2018

Arthur Boyd is widely recognized as one of Australia’s greatest artists. He was born in Melbourne to Merric and Doris (née Gough) Boyd, into a family that was unusually creative and unconventionally religious. Their home at Murrumbeena became a meeting place for artists and intellectuals during the war years. Arthur Boyd began his artistic career with a considerable knowledge of art, buoyed by the previous generation’s enthusiasm for European cultural life and ideas. Although associated with artists surrounding Angry Penguins magazine, Boyd did not take part in contemporary debate over the role of art in society. Arthur Boyd’s work is beautiful yet haunting; grotesque yet disturbing; historical and contemporary. He maintained dialogue with great masters of European art, and yet remained a visionary of the future.
Brandt, Marianne (1893–1983)
Authors: Otto Elizabeth
Published: September 2018

Best remembered for her metal designs, Marianne Brandt created the small tea extract pot that set a record in 2007 for the highest sum ever paid for a Bauhaus object. While her work in metal has become iconic, other aspects of Brandt’s diverse œuvre and her influence on the Bauhaus still remain little studied.

Born Marianne Liebe to an upper-middle-class family in the industrial city of Chemnitz, she received her diploma as a painter in 1918 from Weimar’s Grand Ducal Saxon College of Fine Art [Grossherzogliche-Sächsische Hochschule für Bildende Kunst]. She married the Norwegian artist Erik Brandt, and they spent the next two years in Norway and France. Brandt had begun a new course of study in sculpture at the College of Fine Arts in Weimar in 1923 when she saw the State Bauhaus Exhibition [Staatliches Bauhaus Ausstellung] and was inspired to begin her studies anew at the Bauhaus. Brandt completed the Preliminary Course [Vorkurs] under the direction of Josef Albers and László Moholy-Nagy. At the latter’s suggestion she apprenticed at the Metal Workshop, one of the most male-dominated divisions of the school. Brandt experienced some hazing but also had immediate success with the sleek designs and pure forms of her metal tea services and other household items.
Burmese Modernism
Authors: Ranard Andrew
Published: September 2018

Modernistic painting in Burma first assertively appeared in the 1940s and with greater force in the 1950s, emerging as a full-fledged movement in the 1960s. An element of Burmese painting is its lateralism, whereby realist or modernist styles have persistently drawn from a surviving wellspring of traditional arts. In the 1940s–1960s, artists sought an indigenous development that did not mimic foreign aesthetics. They began to look backwards into the ancient mural painting in Pagan 800 years earlier, which in many ways anticipated Surrealism and abstraction. However, by the late 1970s, modernism began to wane. When Burma began to open to the outside world in 1987, an older mastery in Realist and Impressionist painting—introduced by Ba Nyan (1897–1945), who studied in London in the 1920s—dominated the country’s painting style. From the late 1990s onwards, modernism in Burma experienced a vigorous resurgence.
CoBrA (1948–1951)
Authors: Spampinato Francesco
Published: September 2018

CoBrA was a European avant-garde movement active from 1948 to 1951, primarily known for a painterly style of coloristic disfiguration. The name is an acronym of Copenhagen (Co), Brussels (Br) and Amsterdam (A), the home cities of most of the group’s members. CoBrA was founded on 8 November 1948 at the Café de l’Hôtel Notre-Dame, Paris, with the manifesto La Cause Était Entendue ("The Case Was Heard"), signed by the Danish painter Asger Jorn, the Belgian poets Christian Dotremont and Joseph Noiret, and the Dutch painters Karel Appel, Corneille and Constant Nieuwenhuys. Another representative member was the Belgian painter Pierre Alechinsky. In its three-year existence, the group attracted over thirty members, with membership spreading across Europe. Most of the members were painters. Their style was characterized by abstract and improvizational brushstrokes and the use of primary colours, with which they gave rise to anthropomorphic figures that were intended to recall so-called "primitive" art, and the art of the mentally ill and children. Their influences become clear in the pages of the ten issues of the magazine Cobra and the four issues of Le Petit Cobra; they contain articles about folklore, tattooing, comic strips, and magic, among images of their works.
Cotton, Olive (1911–2003)
Authors: Philp Angela
Published: September 2018

Olive Cotton was one of Australia’s leading 20th-century photographers. She became a skilled observer of nature, incorporating both the principles of Pictorialism and modernism into her work. Developing an early interest in photography after receiving Box Brownie for her eleventh birthday, Cotton took pictures and experimented throughout her years of formal education. She joined the Sydney Camera Club and the Photographic Society of NSW in 1929 where she met photographers including Harold Cazneaux. Graduating with a BA from the University of Sydney in 1934, she joined Max Dupain’s photographic studio that same year as an assistant and managed the studio from 1942–1945 during his absence on war service. By the late 1930s she had developed her own style, using nature and still life in carefully composed studies of light and form. With a keen interest in the natural world, she found beauty in the landscape, particularly the smaller details of plants and flowers. She combined this with her interest in the scientific structure underlying nature, an interest sparked by her father, a geologist. She took a long time to wait for, or experiment with, the right light for a composition, enabling her to create intimate studies of the patterns, seasons, and fragility of nature.
Cubo-Futurism
Authors: Parton Anthony
Published: September 2018

Cubo-Futurism (Kubo-Futurizm) was a term used by the early 20th-century Russian avant-garde to describe literary and artistic works that represented a fusion of Cubist and Futurist styles and principles. The term surfaced in 1912, at a point when the Russian avant-garde were exposed simultaneously to Analytical Cubism and Italian Futurism. At this stage in their development, young Russian poets and painters were beginning to move away from forms of Expressionism and to explore more innovative approaches. Cubism and Futurism offered the ideological and practical means to engage with abstraction and, ultimately, non-objectivity, in a serious and distinctive manner. By 1915, however, Cubism and Futurism had exhausted their usefulness for these poets and painters, who had now passed into completely new territory in the form of Velimir Khlebnikov’s and Aleksei Krucheynykh’s zaum (transrational) poetry, Kazimir Malevich’s Suprematism and, subsequently, Vladimir Tatlin’s and Aleksandr Rodchenko’s Constructivism. A distinctive movement of the pre-war period, Cubo-Futurism possessed an episodic character and manifested as a transitional phase in the history of Russian avant-garde art and literature in the early 20th century. It was a bridge by which the Russians approached their radical non-objective conclusions of the 1920s.
David Roland Smith (1906–1965)
Authors: Thyssen Esther T.
Published: September 2018

David Smith was the pre-eminent sculptor of the New York School. Best known for his iron and steel constructions, Smith created cohesive sets of sculptures, each organized around a particular system of forms, metaphors, and methods. He studied painting in New York with Czech modernist Jan Matulka (1890–1972), and later worked for the Works Progress Administration (WPA) sculpture division (1939). He learned most about the European avant-garde from the émigré intellectual John Graham (1886–1961), originally a friend of Smith’s wife Dorothy Dehner (American sculptor 1901–1994). Through Graham’s introductions, the couple met avant-garde artists in Europe during their travels there in 1935–1936. Smith considered the constructions of Julio Gonzalez and Pablo Picasso the forebears of his oeuvre. Smith sculpted found metal with the oxyacetylene torch and welded the cut shapes together. Planar parts are joined at angles to entrap space, or layered thinly to slice through space rather than to displace it. From the mid-1950s until his death in a car accident in 1965, Smith’s output was prolific and monumental, his process driven by his wartime experience as a machinist and metals fabricator. Smith defined a new status for American sculpture with origins in European modernism and American industry and production, and by the critical validation his oeuvre attained.
Davis, Stuart (1892–1964)
Authors: Marie Annika
Published: September 2018

Stuart Davis was a painter, printmaker, muralist, and arts activist who played a prominent role in the development of American modernism in the first half of the 20th century. Visually, he brought the formal and technical experimentation of the European avant-garde to depictions of the modernity of the American metropolis. As a prolific writer and powerful spokesman, Davis was a committed cultural advocate, working to explain and defend modern abstract art, promoting artists’ rights, and arguing for the democratization of culture and art’s formative impact on society. Davis’s early style relates to the Ashcan School, an early 20th-century brand of realism that combines a direct, spontaneous, journalistic naturalism with everyday scenes of urban street life. The turning point for the young Davis was the New York Armory Show of 1913. Through the exhibit Davis was exposed to Fauvism, Expressionism, Cubism, and Dada. However, Davis’s embrace of the formal rigor of European abstraction did not lead him to purely non-objective painting. Maintaining that form and content were equally important, he argued that European modernism’s visual fragmentation, instability, and simultaneity provided the visual means by which to express contemporary American urban life.
de Zayas, Marius (1880–1961)
Authors: Martinez-Rodriguez Fabiola
Published: September 2018

Marius de Zayas was a Mexican caricaturist, writer, collector, dealer, and curator who formed part of the New York avant-garde, and did much to promote European modernism in the United States. Through his writings, curatorial, and creative work, de Zayas helped to lay the foundations of American modernism, and to assert the centrality of primitive art to the modernist aesthetic. Exhibited for the first time in 1913, de Zayas’ abstract portraits are some of the earliest examples of avant-garde production the United States. These drawings reflect his engagement with the aesthetic explorations of the European avant-gardes, and the challenges posed by photography to the tradition of Naturalism in Western art. Marius de Zayas’ work was instrumental in promoting a transnational exchange of art and ideas between Europe and the Americas. In his conception of modernism, primitive art was the source of formal experimentation, but also of spirituality and transcendence. His contribution to the history of modern art in the United States remains to be appropriately acknowledged, but it is there for anyone who cares to read his How, When and Why Modern Art Came to New York written for Alfred Barr towards the end of his life.
Di Cavalcanti, Emiliano (1897–1976)
Authors: Kühl Paulo
Published: September 2018

The works of Emiliano Di Cavalcanti are at the center of modernism and national art in Brazil. Practically a self-taught artist, he attended the workshop of Gaspar Puga Garcia (18??–1914) in Rio de Janeiro, and later, in São Paulo, when he started Law School, the workshop of Georg Fisher Elpons (1865–1939), a German artist who had moved to Brazil. In the first years of his career as an artist, Di Cavalcanti engaged in several activities as an illustrator and cartoonist and his drawings are among the most interesting parts of his artistic production. During his two longer stays in Europe (1923–1925 and 1937–1940), he moved closer to avant-garde artists and their works, especially Picasso, which allowed him to become aligned with various artistic transformations of the first half of the 20th century. His interests in certain subjects, such as Brazilian women—especially the mulatas—and also carnival, some aspects of urban life in Rio de Janeiro, seascapes, and still-lives helped to form him as a national modernist painter. Mário de Andrade (1893–1945), already in 1932 saluted Di Cavalcanti as one of the greatest modernist heroes in the country: one who brought novelties from Europe, without getting lost in them, and who dedicated himself to national topics. Di Cavalcanti participated actively as one of the organizers of the Semana de Arte Moderna (Modern Art Week) in São Paulo (1922), milestone of modernism in Brazil.