bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Carreño, Mario (1913–1999)
Authors: Estevez Lisandra
Published: September 2018

Mario Carreño was one of Cuba’s leading modern artists. Born on 24 May 1913 in Havana, he was part of a generation of young artists working in Cuba in the late 1930s and early 1940s that rejected the conservative style and thinking of the Academia de San Alejandro, the country’s dominant art institution and embraced the new modernist idiom that synthesized Cubism, Surrealism, Mexican Muralism and Classicism. Prolific and versatile, he worked as a painter, illustrator and sculptor. His early designs integrated the pictorial language of Cubism and embraced a socialist view in their heterodox subject matter. In 1936, he travelled to Mexico where the monumental forms and nationalist themes of Mexican Muralism had a powerful impact on his development as a painter. During this time, he was also mentored by the Dominican painter Jaime Colson (1901–1975). A formative trip with Colson to Paris in 1938 introduced Carreño to the Louvre’s encyclopaedic collection of classical art. Carreño created a visual language that framed issues of Cuban national identity. Active in Cuba’s vanguardia (or vanguard movement), he sought to re-define the visual aesthetics of Cuban Modernism. Carreño constantly experimented with both materials and subject matter. His ever-changing and dynamic styles helped to redefine the aesthetics of Cuban art in the 1940s.
Colson, Jaime (1901–1975)
Authors: Estevez Lisandra
Published: September 2018

One of the founders of the modernist movement in twentieth-century Dominican art, Jaime Colson worked in a variety of media that included drawing and painting. While his style of representation underwent dramatic transformations that assimilated Impressionism, Cubism and Surrealism, his emphasis on the human figure was central to his oeuvre. The subject of the nude, relatively rare in Dominican art at that point in history, was one that Colson continuously re-interpreted throughout his prolific career. His eroticized representations of both the male and female body, as seen in his Figuras Metafisicas (Metaphysical Figures, 1930, oil on board, Museo Bellapart, Santo Domingo), fuse monumental forms with sensual colour and brushwork. Colson is best known for his development of ‘neohumanismo’ (or neohumanism) as he called it. Moreover, Colson introduced the criollo, a figure whose diverse origins are rooted in African, European and Amerindian culture, into modern Dominican art. In his celebrated Merengue (1938, oil on board, Museo Bellapart), Colson ‘speaks directly to a Caribbean sensitivity’ according to Sullivan (Sullivan, 1996, 22). The picture’s rhythmic composition is populated with figures drawn with strong contours and painted in a vibrant palette that illustrates the festive nature of this music and dance form that is strongly connected to Dominican identity.
Hopper, Edward (1882–1967)
Authors: Graham Arleen Pancza
Published: September 2018

Edward Hopper was known for his realist paintings of American life in the 1930s through to the early 1960s. Born in Nyack, New York, north of Manhattan and across the Hudson river, his family was successful and solidly middle class. Although his parents supported his study of art after his 1899 high school graduation, their conservative viewpoints informed the trajectory of his efforts; they encouraged him to seek a career in commercial art so that he would have a reliable income. He enrolled in the Correspondence School of Illustration in New York City, supporting himself as an illustrator until 1925, creating over five hundred works. From 1900 until 1906 he studied at the New York School of Art with Robert Henri, whose admiration for European artists inspired Hopper to travel abroad, which he did three times during his early career (1906, 1909, 1910). Hopper also studied with William Merritt Chase, and Kenneth Hayes Miller, and was determined to succeed as a fine rather than commercial artist. It was in these classes that he met friends like Rockwell Kent, Guy Pène du Bois, Reginald Marsh and Stuart Davis, who would become important figures in the art world of the time, as well as his future wife, Josephine Nivison, whom he married in 1924. It was during these early years that Hopper began to exhibit his works at the Whitney Studio Club in New York, the precursor to the Whitney Museum of American Art. In 1920, Hopper had his first one-person exhibition at the Whitney Studio Club, and it foreshadowed his future relationship with that institution.
Toulouse-Lautrec, Henri de (1864–1901)
Authors: Blakley Kara
Published: September 2018

Few names are as synonymous with the freethinking associated with the French avant-garde as Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. Born into an aristocratic family, Toulouse-Lautrec chose to spend much of his working life in bohemian Montmartre, which would influence his modernist artistic tendencies. Toulouse-Lautrec chose to reject the academic-style in which he was trained; favoring scenes of nightclubs and theaters to grand histories and mythology, he helped to expand the purview of painting beyond the limits of what was considered acceptable subject matter. Furthermore, Toulouse-Lautrec employed prominent lines, flattened surfaces and ghoulish colors, which would become the hallmarks of later modernist painters. Toulouse-Lautrec frequently worked in oils, watercolor, charcoal, pastel, ink and colored pencils, but was open to using any technique that allowed him to achieve his artistic goals. This openness allowed him to create not only paintings, but lithographs, posters and commercial prints, thus further expanding the media and methods available to avant-garde artists. Perhaps owing to the fact that he was ostracized from elite society because of his physical disabilities, extravagant self-characterizatio, and underclass acquaintances, Toulouse-Lautrec became masterful at depicting psychological authenticity and revealing innate social hypocrisies in bourgeois social practices. Although his career was cut short due to his untimely death, Toulouse-Lautrec helped provide the blueprints for later modernist painting.
Kupka, František (1871–1957)
Authors: Pech Milan
Published: September 2018

František Kupka, a Czech-born painter and graphic artist active in France, was a pioneer of abstract painting. His Amorpha: Fugue in Two Colours, shown at the Salon d’Autumne in 1912, was the first manifestation of abstract art in Paris. Vertical Schemes I (1912), exhibited at the Salon des Indépendants in 1913, was later celebrated by Alfred H. Barr, founding director of The Museum of Modern Art in New York, as the first pure geometrical abstraction. While Guillaume Apollinaire appreciated Kupka’s work and included him in Orphism, Kupka was not fully accepted into avant-garde circles, and despite his contact with the Puteaux Cubists, he refused to be identified with them.

Kupka views motion and light as the only forces that can penetrate and melt matter. From his viewpoint, spiritual reality or cosmic order can be found in nature and is present in all natural forms. While in the 1890s Kupka incorporated elements of symbolism, naturalism, and decorative stylization into his works, in 1910 he gradually began to liberate color as a result of his belief in the deep spiritual and cosmological meaning of art. This conceptual approach led him to develop a scientific and theoretical basis for his work: he studied optics and the color theories of various scientists, including Isaac Newton and Michel-Eugène Chevreul, who were also engaged in biology, physiology, anthropology, and other fields, and applied these interests to his own artistic concerns.
Secessionist Movement
Authors: Johnson Michael
Published: September 2018

The Secessionist Movement is the name applied to a range of artistic splinter groups that began to emerge in the 1890s. Objecting to what they saw as the inherent conservatism of established academies, these groups ‘seceded’ or broke away from their parent institutions and launched their own, avant-garde approach. The first secessionist group appeared in Munich in 1892 under the leadership of Franz von Stuck and Wilhelm Trübner.

Among the most influential secessionist groups was that founded in Vienna by a coalition of artists, architects and designers who resigned from the Association of Austrian Artists in 1897. United by the urge to elevate the applied arts to the status of fine art, members of the Vienna Secession produced exquisite work across a spectrum of creative disciplines. The aesthetic initially resembled the curvilinear Art Nouveau style, but it increasingly moved towards abstraction and geometric simplicity. The founding of the Vienna Secession thus marked the beginning of a new artistic era in Austria and heralded the birth of the Modern Movement.
Storer, Edward (Augustine) (1880–1944)
Authors: Petrocchi Valeria
Published: September 2018

Edward (Augustine) Storer (1880–1944), British poet, critic, dramatist, journalist and translator. Founder and theorist of the first Imagism along with Thomas E. Hulme and Frank S. Flint. The first English translator of Luigi Pirandello’s dramas. Founder and editor of the little magazine dedicated to literary and art Atys in Rome (Italy), where he frequented the Italian avant-garde circles.
Pollock, Jackson (1912–1956)
Authors: Child Danielle
Published: September 2018

Jackson Pollock was one of the leading figures of Abstract Expressionism in mid-twentieth century America. He began his career working for the Federal Art Project, but is predominantly known for pioneering the ‘‘drip’’ technique in which, using sticks and brushes, the artist dripped paint onto the horizontal canvas. Hans Namuth famously filmed and photographed Pollock painting in 1951. Pollock was the focus of a number of American art critics in the 1950s, particularly Harold Rosenberg and Clement Greenberg. Although unnamed, Pollock’s method of working was the implicit content of Rosenberg’s ‘‘The American Action Painters’’ (1952), in which the act of painting becomes the central focus of the work. It is Pollock’s canvases that take center stage in Greenberg’s historicization of ‘‘modernist painting’’ which followed a formalist trajectory of French painting through to contemporary American painting in the 1950s (this was later expanded in the 1960s to include the ‘‘high modernist’’ painters who developed from Pollock). The attention given to Pollock’s method of painting further fostered the scrutiny of Pollock himself. His subsequent characterization in popular culture as a manic-depressive who struggled with alcoholism clouded an understanding of his contribution to modernist painting in later years.
Kollwitz, Käthe (1867–1945)
Authors: Price Dorothy
Published: September 2018

Käthe Kollwitz (née Schmidt) was born in Königsberg, East Prussia in 1867, the fifth child of Karl and Katharina Schmidt. In 1884 she entered the drawing and painting school of the Association of Women Artists in Berlin and then the Women’s School of Art in Munich. In Berlin she trained under Karl Stauffer-Bern who introduced her to the work of Max Klinger. Klinger’s 1891 treatise, Malerei und Zeichnung, was crucial to Kollwitz’s early decision to abandon painting in favor of the graphic arts. Kollwitz married social democrat doctor Karl Kollwitz in 1891 and moved with him to his surgery in Berlin’s east-end tenement district, the inhabitants of which became a major source for Kollwitz’s art. The couple bore two sons, Peter and Hans. In 1914 Peter died in action at the Front, further politicizing Kollwitz’s practice against suffering humanity during the Weimar era. Stylistically, Kollwitz remained indebted to naturalism with preferred subject matter of the poorest and most vulnerable members of society, especially mothers and children, rendered with an expressionist sensitivity and symbolic resonance. With the rise of Hitler in 1933 Kollwitz was dismissed from her professorship at the Prussian Academy of Arts, labelled a ‘‘degenerate artist,’’ and her studio closed. She died in 1945, survived by her youngest son Hans.
Mexican Muralism (c. 1920–1940)
Authors: Stigberg Sara
Published: September 2018

The Mexican Muralist movement was a nationalistic movement that aimed at producing an official modern art form distinct from European traditions, thus embracing and clearly expressing a unique Mexican cultural and social identity. Shortly after the Mexican Revolution (1910–1920), expatriate Mexican artists were summoned to return to the country. They were charged with creating public murals on government buildings, which would visually communicate unifying ideals to a largely illiterate population. Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco, and David Alfaro Siqueiros, known collectively as Los Tres Grandes or The Great Three, were key figures in the movement. The architectural aspect of the large murals created during this period underscores the government’s and artists’ belief in art as a social and ideological tool, and reflects a desire to establish permanent expressions of a national identity. The works embraced and elevated mural painting in Mexico from a popular form to a form of high art. Further, the movement embodied social ideals manifested in the muralists’ work alongside carpenters, plasterers, and other laborers. The 1930s saw the solidification of a leftist national discourse, but by the 1940s, the major political developments in Mexico and Europe resulted in significant redefinition of this ideology, and Mexican Muralism became out-dated.
Mondrian, Piet (1872–1944)
Authors: Jones Peter
Published: September 2018

The Dutch artist Piet Mondrian was one of the pioneers of abstract art, producing some of the most radical painting of the 20th century. The early influence of Cubism led him to adopt a semi-abstract linear style, as in the paintings of trees and buildings he made in Paris and Holland over 1912–1914. During the inter-war years, Mondrian developed an esoteric theory of art and an austere style of geometric abstraction he called Neo-Plasticism. In this work, for which he is best known, Mondrian abandoned all reference to nature and aimed to express a higher reality beyond the world of appearances. He reduced his painting to basic elements and their interplay: black horizontal and vertical lines, planes of primary colors, grey and white as exemplified in Composition C (III) with Red, Yellow and Blue from 1935. His final paintings, made in America in the early 1940s, are characterized by vibrant grids animated by small colored squares reflecting an interest in the syncopated rhythms of popular music and urban life. Mondrian was also a consummate draughtsman, prolific writer and member of the influential De Stijl [The Style] group, which sought to reform the arts and society.
Morel, Yoryi (Jorge Octavio Morel Tavárez) (1906–1979)
Authors: Tornatore-Loong Maria C.
Published: September 2018

Santiago-born painter, musician, and teacher, Jorge Octavio Morel Tavárez (also known as Yoryi Morel) is considered an early progenitor of the Dominican modernist school of painting, along with contemporaries Jaime Colsón, Darío Suro, and Celeste Woss y Gil. As one of the leading costumbrista painters in the Caribbean, Morel’s distinct vernacular style eulogized the Dominican landscape, people, architecture, and culture while under the oppressive dictatorship of Rafael Leónidas Trujillo (1930–1961). The artist’s early oeuvre integrated realist and post-Impressionist techniques with indigenous subject matter depicting street scenes of his native city, Santiago, and the abundant villages and rustic landscapes of the fertile Cibao region, while his mature practice was characterized by a figurative expressionist mode. A gifted portraitist, Morel depicted local character-types, signifying the interdependent relationship between art and society. Another important feature of Morel’s practice was his preoccupation with popular customs like festivals, religious rituals, ceremonies, and gaming activities that accentuated the significance of merengue music and dances in Dominican society. These indigenist works not only contributed to the development of Dominican modernism, but also defined the spirit of dominicanidad [‘‘Dominican-ness’’]. As the founder of the ‘‘Yoryi’’ Academy and educator/director at the Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes, Morel was an inspirational master for a generation of artists.
The Organic School
Authors: Wünsche Isabel
Published: September 2018

The Organic School of the Russian avant-garde was a group of artists primarily based in St Petersburg. Less concerned with the urban, ideological, and utilitarian aspects of modernist art, they instead focused on holistic approaches to art and life. The group included Elena Guro, Nikolai Kulbin, Mikhail Matiushin and his students, Pavel Filonov and his followers, as well as Pavel Mansurov, Petr Miturich, and Vladimir Tatlin. The artists of the Organic School saw nature as a never-ending source for artistic creation. They viewed artistic activity not as passive imitation of nature, but as an active expression of the relationship between the artist and the natural environment, and called for a new, absolute art that did not copy nature, but was instead based on its universal laws and organic principles. Taking as their model the developmental processes, natural forces, and organic forms found in nature, their aesthetics were informed by pantheist, neo-vitalist, and monist ideas combined with evolutionary thought and scientific knowledge from the fields of physics, biology, physiology, and psychology. Discussing the materials and processes involved in the creation of art and analyzing the elementary building blocks of painting, these artists not only explored the properties of color and form and their psychophysiological effects upon the viewer, but also focused on faktura [texture], which they considered to be a fundamental principle of the creative process. Emphasizing human creativity and the psychological dimension of art, the artists of the Organic School of the Russian avant-garde viewed art as a means toward individual self-realization, thus leading to the unification of art and life, body and soul, humanity and nature.
Segal, Arthur (1875–1944)
Authors: Kessler Erwin
Published: September 2018

Arthur Segal was a Romanian artist born as Aron Sigalu to Jewish parents. He shifted his attention away from post-impressionist modernism around 1900 to focus on the radical avant-garde in the early 1920s, and then back to classicizing modernism in the 1940s. His work moved from traditional art-craft (painting, engraving) to modern and avant-garde practices (political engagement, teaching, curatorship, manifestos, theoretical writings, art-therapy). From 1892 to 1900 he studied in Berlin, Paris, and Munich. Segal was a student of Adolf Hölzel (founder of the art colony Neues Dachau), and much of his work was shaped by Hölzel’s color theory, where landscapes were formally structured as decorative grids rather than as phenomenal transcripts of ocular perception. In 1902–1903 he visited Italy and France, where he was influenced by the work of Vincent Van Gogh and Giovanni Segantini, whose naturalism and light-seeking divisionism he sought to appropriate in his own work. He exhibited with the Berliner Secession from 1909 onward, and co-founded the Neue Secession in 1910. Segal remained connected to the Romanian art scene, exhibiting with the TinerimeaArtistica group in 1910–1913. His 1910 Bucharest exhibition was heralded as ‘‘the first exhibition of modern art’’ in Romania (Segal 1974: 133). In 1914 Segal moved to Ascona, Switzerland, where he met Hans Arp, Hugo Ball, and Alexei Jawlensky, who were linked with the Monte Verita community. In 1916 Segal exhibited at Cabaret Voltaire alongside fellow Romanian Dadaists Tristan Tzara and Marcel Janco. In 1919 he joined the Novembergruppe, becoming one of its leaders.
Stieglitz, Alfred (1864–1946)
Authors: Hartel Jr. Herbert R.
Published: September 2018

Alfred Stieglitz (1864–1946) was an American art collector, dealer and photographer who was one of the earliest supporters of modernist art in the United States. Stieglitz was born in 1865 in Hoboken, New Jersey, to an affluent German-Jewish family. He studied at City College in New York for two years and then at the Technische Hochschule in Berlin for three years, before returning to New York. Although trained in engineering, Stieglitz became interested in photography while in Germany. He promoted photography as a legitimate form of art and expression, which was a radical idea at the time. This led him to establish, in 1902, the Photo-Secession, a group of photographers who believed that photography needed to be considered a fine art and not a technical, manual craft. In 1903 Steiglitz started Camera Work, his own publication on modern art, which he published until 1917. Camera Work published photographs, reproductions of modernist artworks, and essays, treatises, statements and criticism about modernist art and theory. In 1904, Stieglitz opened his first gallery, the ‘‘Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession’’ (later known as ‘‘291’’ for its address on Fifth Avenue), where he introduced the European avant-garde to the USA. He donated works for the Armory Show in New York in 1913 and also purchased works from the exhibition.
The Group of Seven
Authors: Nay Eric
Published: September 2018

The Group of Seven was a group of Canadian landscape painters working in the early 1900s that developed a distinct style of painting tied to the evolution of Canada’s national identity. The group’s work focused on capturing the natural beauty of Canada’s vast wilderness through a self-proclaimed ‘‘Canadian’’ style that evolved following group expeditions into Canadian wildernesses. The original members of the group were Franklin Carmichael (1890–1945), Lawren Harris (1885–1970), A.Y. Jackson (1882–1972), Frank Johnston (1888–1949), Arthur Lismer (1885–1969), J.H. MacDonald (1873–1932), and Frederick Varley (1881–1969). The group’s members were based in Toronto, Ontario, and included fine artists, commercial artists and graphic designers who would meet at the Toronto Arts and Letters Club. Tom Thomson (1877–1917) was the group’s spiritual founder, even though he died three years prior to its official formation. Membership would expand in later years to include A.J. Casson (1898–1992), Edwin Holgate (1892–1977), and LeMoine Fitzgerald (1890–1956). Emily Carr (1871–1945) was also associated with the Group of Seven, but was never an official member. The Group of Seven disbanded in the 1930s.
VKhUTEMAS
Authors: Vronskaya Alla G.
Published: September 2018

VKhUTEMAS was a school of arts and architecture in Moscow between 1920 and 1927. Similar ‘‘art and technical studios’’ existed in other Soviet cities. VKhUTEMAS was supervised by Narkompros (the ministry of culture), particularly by the commissar (minister) of culture, Anatolii Lunacharskii, and became the center of developing and propagating modernism in Soviet Russia. VKhUTEMAS emerged as a result of a post-Revolutionary reconstruction of the pre-existing system of art education: it replaced Moscow Svomas (Svobodnye gosudarstvennye khudozhestvennye masterskie [Independent State Art Studios]) which, in turn, was formed in 1918 on the base of the pre-Revolutionary Stroganov Art School (First Free Art Studio) and the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture (Second Free Art Studio). It continued to be restructured and renamed a multitude of times. VKhUTEMAS, and its next reincarnation VKhUTEIN, were headed by painter and sculptor Efim Ravdel’’ (1920–1923), graphic artist Vladimir Favorskii (1923–1926), and critic Pavel Novitskii (1926–1930).
Warhol, Andy (1926–1987)
Authors: Ahern Mal
Published: September 2018

Andy Warhol was a painter, filmmaker, producer, and multi-media artist. He was born in Pittsburgh, Pennyslvania and worked in New York City from the 1940s onward. He started his career as a commercial artist before moving into fine-art painting in the 1950s. Between 1962 and 1968, he made hundreds of films, ranging from a series of short ‘‘Screen Tests,’’ to the notorious, eight-hour film Empire (1965), which comprised a series of stable, slow motion shots of the Empire State Building. Warhol’s films were notorious for their spare aesthetic and banal subject matter: he created films of people eating, sleeping, getting haircuts, and simply staring at the camera. His sound films, like Poor Little Rich Girl (1965, starring Edie Sedgwick) and Screen Test #2 (1965, starring Mario Montez) show their stars sparring with an off-screen voice.

Warhol’s work was also notable for the fact that it depicted the lives and personalities of Warhol’s friends and acquaintances, most of whom were a part of New York City’s queer ‘‘underground.’’ His two-screen, three-plus hour epic Chelsea Girls became a minor hit because of its frank depiction of queer sex, cross-dressing, and drug use. After Warhol was shot in 1968, he retreated from filmmaking, but continued to create paintings and other artworks.
Connell, Amyas Douglas (1901–1980)
Authors: Rendel Sally
Published: September 2018

The New Zealand-born architect Amyas Connell was responsible for a number of strikingly modern buildings, mainly houses, in 1930s England. The first of these was the gleaming white High and Over at Amersham, Buckinghamshire, for Sir Bernard Ashmole (1894–1988), which is recognized as the first major modern movement house in England. In practice with Basil Ward (1902–1976), and joined later by Colin Lucas (1906–1984), he worked mainly on private house projects, experimenting with concrete construction to create clean-lined buildings with generous glazing. During the post-war period he completed a number of fine modern buildings in Africa, including the Aga Khan Memorial Hospital in Nairobi (1962).

Amyas Connell was born on June 23, 1901, in Eltham, New Zealand. He was the second of six children of Nigel Douglas Connell (1873–1951), who was of Scottish extraction, and his wife, Gertrude, née Weber, (1873–50), who was born in Germany. He was educated at Stafford High School until 1916. In 1919 he was articled to Young & Fearn, an architectural practice in Wellington. Lessons through practice were supplemented by the New Zealand Institute of Architects (NZIA) professional course.
Atonality
Authors: Whittall Arnold
Published: September 2018

Atonality refers to the complete absence of tonality in a musical composition. In music, it is often claimed that modernism stands in opposition to classicism or romanticism, even though music from late Beethoven (1820s) to early Schoenberg (1900s) sees elements of modernist disjunction emerging from, interacting, and conflicting with, elements of classicism and romanticism. By the same token, atonality stands in opposition to tonality, even if atonal music involves the increasing enrichment of diatonic tonality with chromatic elements that, particularly from Liszt and Wagner onwards, tend to undermine or reinforce the structural stability of diatonic fundamentals.

Music theorists since Schoenberg have been divided over the validity of atonality as a meaningful concept. Schoenberg himself rejected the term on the grounds of its negative connotations, and his own music demonstrates how difficult it is in practice to make hard and fast distinctions between compositions in which no suggestion of tonal formations of any kind can be distinguished and those which demonstrate the kind of passing allusions that Schoenberg identified as ‘‘suspended tonality’’ and ‘‘pantonality.’’
Fitzgerald, Desmond (1911–1987)
Authors: O’Brien Sorcha
Published: September 2018

Desmond Fitzgerald was an architect descended from a well-known Irish political family. He worked for Patrick Abercrombie on Mendesohn and Chermayeff’s 1936 De La Warr Pavilion. After his return to Ireland he led a team of young Irish architects to design the "International Style" Dublin Airport for the Office of Public Works from 1937 to 1940. Influenced by Dutch models, the airport was designed to follow the circulation patterns of passengers, with a curved plan funnelling them out onto the airfield (see Figure 1). A good example of the glamorous associations of inter-war air travel, the concrete and steel terminal referenced ocean liners with curved ends and stepped balconies, and the airport was awarded the RIAI Gold Medal for 1938–40. After World War II, Fitzgerald taught architecture at University College Dublin and designed several other public buildings, as well as large office buildings in a monumental style.
Grupo Austral (1939–1950)
Authors: León Ana María
Published: September 2018

Grupo Austral was an association of architects that operated chiefly in Buenos Aires, Argentina, from 1939 until approximately 1950. The catalan architect Antonio Bonet met Argentinians Juan Kurchan and Jorge Ferrari Hardoy in 1936 while working in Le Corbusier’s office in Paris. Argentina’s promising economic prospects and the impending conflict in Europe prompted the group to move to Buenos Aires in 1938, where they founded Austral together with a core group of young local architects. Argentina had been going through a process of transformation and growth, and Austral sought to reframe this process with the planning ideas of Le Corbusier and the the Cangrès internationaux d’architecture moderne (CIAM). The members of Austral teamed up in different configurations and worked at various levels, designing furniture, buildings, and urban plan proposals. However, although the Argentinian state was eager to embrace the technical and functional traits of modernity, it was also skeptical about foreign influences; in addition, it was mired in political conflicts. These conflicts ultimately prevented the realization of the urban plans the group instigated. Although short-lived, Austral productively collapsed different temporalities and geographies: between their formation in Le Corbusier’s office amid the European avant-garde discourse, and their encounter with a rapidly modernizing Argentina.
Kurokawa, Kishō [黒川紀章] (1934–2007)
Authors: Clarke Neilton
Published: September 2018

Kishō Kurokawa [黒川紀章] was born in 1934 in Kanie, Aichi prefecture, Japan, and studied architecture at Kyoto University, obtaining his bachelor’s degree in architecture in 1957. Further studies at the University of Tokyo under Kenzō Tange, graduating with a master’s degree from its Graduate School of Architecture in 1959, were followed by doctoral studies at the same institution until 1964. Kurokawa was a key proponent of Metabolism, the Japanese architectural movement that utilized biology as a metaphoric vehicle to reconfigure both the cityscape and architectural practice itself, and which came to attention at the World Design Conference 1960 in Tokyo.

Founding his own practice, namely Kishō Kurokawa Architect & Associates (KKAA) in Tokyo in 1962, Kurokawa’s projects during the 1960s and 1970s were mainly located in Japan. They included the Resort Center Yamagata Hawaii Dreamland (1967) and the Nakagin Capsule Tower in Tokyo (1972), the latter being a key example of Metabolism. The late 1970s saw Kurokawa pursuing engagements overseas, and from the 1980s onwards he consolidated his activity abroad, including projects such as the Japanese-German Center of Berlin (1988), Melbourne Central (1991), the new exhibition wing at the Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam (1998), and Astana International Airport, Kazakhstan (2005).

Kurokawa received numerous awards, including the Académie d’Architecture Gold Medal, France (1986), Richard Neutra Award, USA (1988), AIA Pacific Rim Award, USA (1997), Dedalo-Minosse International Prize, Malaysia (2003–2004), Walpole Medal of Excellence, UK (2005), and an International Architecture Award, USA (2006). Honorary doctorates were bestowed on Kurokawa by Sofia University, Bulgaria (1988), Newport Asia Pacific University (now Anaheim University), USA (1990), Albert Einstein International Academy Foundation, USA (1990), and the Universiti Putri Malaysia (2002). Kurokawa died of heart failure in 2007.
Maekawa, Kunio (1905–1986)
Authors: Robinson Joel
Published: September 2018

The Japanese architect Kerio Maekawa was pivotal in the consolidation of a Japanese architectural Modernism. He was born into a noble family in Niigata prefecture and studied at Tokyo Imperial University (1925–1928). Having served his apprenticeship under Le Corbusier (1887–1965) in Paris for nearly two years, he went on to develop his teacher’s L’Artdécoratifd’aujourd’hui (1925) in 1930. On his return to Japan, he worked under Antonin Raymond for five years before establishing his own firm. He was a champion of international Modernism and Auguste Perret’s innovations with concrete, but also developed an individual aesthetic that was more attentive to tradition and context, using his signature cast-in-place ceramic tiling.
Maki, Fumihiko [槇文彦] (1928--)
Authors: Clarke Neilton
Published: September 2018

Fumihiko Maki was born in Tokyo in 1928. After studying at the University of Tokyo and graduating with a bachelor’s in architecture (BS Arch) in 1952, he undertook further studies in the USA, at the Cranbrook Academy of Art, Michigan, and at the Graduate School of Design (GSD), Harvard University, obtaining a Master of Architecture from each in 1953 and 1954, respectively. Afterwards, Maki worked for Skidmore, Owings & Merrill in New York, and for Sert, Jackson & Associates in Cambridge, Massachusetts. In 1956 he became an assistant professor of architecture at Washington University, St. Louis. Steinberg Hall, the university’s on-campus arts center, was Maki’s first design commission. Maki served as associate professor at Harvard’s GSD from 1962 to 1965, returning to Japan afterwards to establish his own firm, namely Maki and Associates. He held a professorship at the University of Tokyo from 1979 to 1989.

Maki’s architectural oeuvre straddles Asia, North and South America, Europe, and the Middle East, encompassing a breadth of projects including art museums and performing arts venues, educational, research, and administrative institutions, conference, media, sports, and community centers, and residential projects, among others. His practice has earned him innumerable awards including the Wolf Prize (1988), the Thomas Jefferson Medal in Architecture (1990), the UIA Gold Medal (1993), the Pritzker Architecture Prize (1993), Japan Arts Association Praemium Imperiale (1999), and the American Institute of Architects (AIA) Gold Medal (2011).
Moses, Robert (1888–1981)
Authors: Evans Adam
Published: September 2018

Robert Moses was an influential urban planner in New York State in the mid-20th century. Born in New Haven, Connecticut, in 1888, he relocated with his family to New York City in 1897. He studied at Yale University and subsequently at Wadham College, Oxford, achieving his PhD in Political Science from Columbia University in 1914. His deep interest in politics was something that would shape his career, and in the following decades also influence the State and City of New York.
Romañach, J. Mario (1917–1984)
Authors: López Alberto José-Antonio
Published: September 2018

Based on the quality of design in his projects both built and unbuilt, the significant output of work during his relatively short career in Cuba (over seventy built during his eight years in the partnership Bosch y Romañach (1948–1955) with architect Silverio Bosch and five years as an independent practitioner), and a consensus among critics both contemporary and current, Mario Romañach is generally regarded as Cuba’s most talented modern architect. A creative individual passionately dedicated to rational architectonic experimentation as well as a designer with a sensible interest in traditional spatial systems and formal composition, both local as well as foreign, he generated a body of work that reflected a careful balance between an international modernity and Cuba’s colonial past.
Rationalism
Authors: Vronskaya Alla G.
Published: September 2018

Rationalism [Ratsionalizm] was a modernist movement in Soviet architecture that was current in the 1920s and early 1930s. It was led by the architect and prominent architectural pedagogue Nikolai Aleksandrovich Ladovskii (1881–1941). Constructivism and Rationalism were the two major rival approaches to architectural Modernism in the USSR. Whereas Ladovskii referred to his method as "rationalist architecture" or "ratio-architecture" [ratsionalisticheskaiaarkhitektura; ratsio-arkhitektura], the constructivists derogatively called Ladovskii’s school "Formalism." The ethnically natural term "Rationalism" was introduced by the historian Selim Khan-Magomedov in the 1960s.
Reich, Lilly (1885–1947)
Authors: Cesare Carla
Published: September 2018

Lilly Reich was a German-born designer who created interiors, displays, and exhibitions in the early to mid-20th century. She was active in the Deutscher Werkbund and in the Bauhaus, and was the first female architect to be given a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1996. Reich’s career as a female designer has been said by critic Beatriz Colomina to be an example of the collaborative nature of architecture in which women have often played an unspoken role.

Reich was one of the few female designers to have played a leading role in the early 20th century, yet she has gained little academic renown. As is common for female designers of the time they are often known in relation to their work with more prominent male architects or designers; for Reich, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe was both a personal and professional partner. Reich, who came from a wealthy manufacturing family, studied in 1908 at the Wiener Werkstätte and then in 1910 at the Höhere Fachschule für Dekorationskunst in Berlin. Like many women of the period she focused on textiles, needlework, and fashion as well as set design and display.
Reidy, Affonso Eduardo (1909–1964)
Authors: Corato Aline Coelho Sanches
Published: September 2018

The Brazilian architect and town planner Affonso Eduardo Reidy was born in Paris and studied architecture at the National School of Fine Arts of Rio de Janeiro (1926–1930). The school’s newly appointed director, Lúcio Costa, sought progressive teachers to join the faculty in an attempt to reform the school in a modernist direction. At Costa’s invitation, Reidy became an assistant lecturer upon his graduation in 1931. Reidy was also a trainee and assistant (1929–1931) of Alfred Agache, the French town planner who at the time was responsible for the master plan of Rio de Janeiro. Reidy became an architect of the city council in 1932 (Rio was Brazil’s capital at that time), and then began his thirty-year career in architectural design and planning that helped to define Brazilian modern architecture.

Alongside the architect Gerson Pompeu Pinheiro, Reidy was responsible for one of Rio’s first modernist buildings, the Albergue da Boa Vontade (1931–1932). He participated in the design of the Ministry of Education and Health (1936), which became a key work of Brazilian modern architecture. To have worked on this project under the direction of Le Corbusier was a pivotal experience for the young architect.
Boulez, Pierre (1925-2016)
Authors: Goldman Jonathan
Published: September 2018

French composer Pierre Boulez was one of the most influential composers of the second half of the twentieth century. His personal development mirrored the history of Western concert music. An essential figure in the history of artistic modernism, he was perceived as a leader of the musical avant-garde since 1945. In addition, through his international career as a conductor, he sought to change the listening habits of the concert-going public by initiating them, through concerts and recordings, into the classics of modernism from the first half of the twentieth century (Stravinsky, Schoenberg, Webern, Bartók, Berg, etc.).

From serialism, open forms, the interface between instrument and machine, the concern with perceptibility, Boulez’s catalog forms a rich and varied corpus. Although Boulez dispensed with total serialism after a brief but decisive period, his concern with the formal unity of a work of art remained a central concern throughout his career.
Shinohara, Kazuo (1925–2006)
Authors: Soeiro Diana
Published: September 2018

Kazuo Shinohara was born in Shizuoka Prefecture, Japan. He graduated from the Department of Architecture, Tokyo Institute of Technology, in 1953. That same year, he commenced his successfull career as an academic and practicing architect. To Shinohara, theory and practice were closely linked and whatever he conceived in theory, he took the chance to experiment with in real-life structures. Academically, he published several hundred articles and books between 1955 and 1990; as an architect, he concluded his first project, House in Kugayama in 1954 and his last work Kumamoto-kita Police Station, was completed in 1990. Shinohara considered himself an individual housing architect, having built around forty residences.

Since opening communications with Western countries in the mid-1850s, Japan had been struggling to maintain its own identity. At first, architects started imitating Western styles from different historical periods, experimenting with brick and other materials unknown hitherto in Japan. Some, however, continued to favor traditional Japanese architecture with its predominant use of wood. After 1920 and the Japanese secession, architects started to proclaim their own individual artistic creativity, considering architecture to be not only a science, but also an art.
Stephenson, Sam (1933–2006)
Authors: O’Brien Sorcha
Published: September 2018

Sam Stephenson was a controversial Irish architect whose work throughout the 1970s and 1980s sparked debates about brutalist architecture and planning regulations. His best-known works included large-scale developments for banks and civic and commercial offices in Dublin. The erection of these structures was often accompanied by protests about the destruction of existing architecture and archaeology. His headquarters for the Electricity Supply Board is a horizontal Miesian design, but is more notorious for causing the leveling of the central section of Dublin’s Georgian Mile. Only two of Stephenson’s four monumental towers for Dublin Corporation Civic Offices were built, due to the discovery of extensive Viking remains on the site and subsequent popular protests. The Central Bank of Ireland tower was unashamed in its use of unadorned structure, with concrete slabs suspended from twin central cores. The tower sparked controversy about planning height regulations in Dublin’s historical center.
Velarde, Héctor Bergman (1898–1989)
Authors: Vila Katerine Tapia
Published: September 2018

The architect Héctor Velarde was born in Lima, Peru, on May 14, 1898. His father was a diplomat and Velarde passed his childhood and adolescence in Brazil, Switzerland, and Paris. Velarde studied in France at the École Spéciale des Travaux Publics, du bâtiment et de l’industrie graduating as an architect-engineer in 1919. In 1920 he entered the École des Beaux-Arts where he studied at the atelier of Victor Laloux, an upcoming neoclassical French architect. In 1924 Velarde returned to Lima, and from then until 1927 dedicated himself to the diplomatic service, to literature and to journalism. In 1928 he resigned from the diplomatic corps and devoted himself full-time to architecture and construction, as well as to teaching at various institutions of higher education, becoming Vice Chancellor of the University of Lima. During his career as an architect he built several projects that can still be seen in the city today. A prolific writer, he produced a variety of academic texts and humorous stories. Velarde died on December 22, 1989.
Vivas, Fruto (1928--)
Authors: d’Auria Viviana
Published: September 2018

A successful architect born in the Venezuelan Andes, Fruto Vivas received his training in Caracas during a period of booming modernization mid-20th-century. His approach to popular culture lay at the heart of his proposals for a national architecture based on Venezuelan Hispanic typologies, traditional techniques, and regional materials. As a result of such references critics have labelled his architecture "populist."

From the 1960s onwards, Vivas applied these proposals to an architecture inspired by nature’s functional logic, from which two main theses arise: "structural types" or "boundary structures" and the idea of "living trees." While the former analyzes the minimum dimensions and weights for structural elements consistent with self-construction for an "architecture of the masses," the latter illustrates how houses can do without many devices for their conditioning and they can even be self-generative so as to guarantee the survival of their users.
Carter, Elliott (Cook Jr.) (1908–2012)
Authors: Ravenscroft Brenda
Published: September 2018

Born in 1908 into a wealthy New York City family, Elliott Carter enjoyed a cosmopolitan childhood, spending time in Europe and learning French at an early age. The composer Charles Ives mentored the young Carter, taking him to concerts in New York and encouraging his developing interest in music. Carter’s childhood, characterized by immersion in a culturally enriched environment and exposure to the modern world, provided the elements from which his artistic aesthetic and musical language would later be forged. When Carter entered Harvard College, he focused his studies on English literature, Greek, and philosophy, although musical activities continued in the form of lessons with Walter Piston and Gustav Holst, as well as singing with the Harvard Glee Club. Carter completed a master’s degree in music at Harvard in 1932, after which he moved to Paris to study composition with Nadia Boulanger for three years. He received a doctorate in music from the École Normale de Musique in Paris in 1935.
Yoshizaka, Takamasa (1917–1980)
Authors: Robinson Joel
Published: September 2018

Yoshizaka was among the last in a series of Japanese architects to pass through Le Corbusier’s Paris atelier. The son of a diplomat, he was born in Tokyo and educated at Waseda University (1938–1941), teaching there until he was drafted in 1943. In 1950, having been awarded a grant to further his studies in France, he began to assist on two of the most groundbreaking post-war projects, the Unite d’habitation and the Chandigarh capitol. During this time he also embarked on the task of translating Le Corbusier’s Oeuvres Completes, and publicizing writings on the Modulor system in Japanese. His return to Japan witnessed a growing interest in urban planning, collective housing, and artificial land. He joined the last meeting of the International Congress of Modern Architecture (Congrès internationaux d’architecture moderne—CIAM) at Otterlo in 1959, becoming a professor at Waseda University in the same year. He espoused the somewhat mystical theory of "discontinuous unity," which sought to address the chaos or diversity of urban life less dismissively. From the mid-1950s he began to attract commissions, including those for the Japanese Pavilion at the Venice Biennale (1956) and a number of educational facilities. In these works, he increasingly rejected the pristine internationalism of his contemporaries, pursing more rugged and vernacular approaches, and inspiring the architect and historian Terunobu Fujimori to identify him as the founder of the "Reds" (as opposed to the "White School"), some of whom trained at his Atelier U from 1964.