bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
O’Neill, Eugene (1888–1953)
Authors: King William Davies 
Published: September 2018

Eugene O’Neill is regarded as the quintessential modernist among American playwrights, and many of his works show an affinity with the themes and methods of notable modernists, but he resisted alliance with any artistic movement and ultimately resisted involvement in the theater itself. In his fervent exploration of the means of art, he seemed constantly to be rejecting the methods and even the goals of his contemporaries. Some might call his approach eclectic or experimental, but once his career had ended, it became clear that his experiments were driven by a lifelong project of self-analysis and a frustrated romantic quest for fulfillment.
O’Neill was born in New York in 1888, the third son of James O’Neill, a leading actor on the American stage at the point of its commercial boom. His convent-educated mother, by then disappointed with her husband, who would play the Count of Monte Cristo over 4,000 times in his career, had recognized the cost of commercial success in the theater—the lack of a home. A few years earlier, while they were on tour, her second son had suddenly died, and the birth of Eugene, intended to heal that loss, coincided with her becoming addicted to morphine. O’Neill was educated in Catholic boarding schools and grew up deeply alienated from the values of his upbringing: Christianity, middle-class conventions, and art of the commercial variety.
Pirandello, Luigi (1867–1936)
Authors: Bettaglio Marina 
Published: September 2018

Born in the Sicilian town of Agrigento and educated in Palermo, Rome, and Bonn (Germany), the Nobel Prize winner (1934) Luigi Pirandello is a key literary figure of the 20th century, whose concerns reflect the modernist crisis of consciousness. In his novels, plays, and short stories, the unity of the Cartesian subject is irretrievably shattered into a myriad of masks that carry the baroque interplay of being and appearances to an extreme. In the shift from a stable and unitary interpretation of human identity to a plural and changing one, Pirandello’s works express a skeptical view of human existence while paving the way to Postmodernism. Like identity, truth itself ceases to be a unified concept: acquiring a plurality of meanings, it becomes the expression of individual interpretations.
From his initial novel L’Esclusa [The Outcast] (1901), in which the theme of honor and rejection is resolved in a paradoxical way, Pirandello’s works question the phenomenal world and the concept of "truth," and expose the absurdity of a human condition trapped in the arbitrariness of social conventions. Problematizing the relationship between individual and society, Pirandellian characters struggle in vain to find a way out of their constricting existence and to overcome the limitations of their conditions.
Workers’ Theater Movement
Authors: Filewod Alan 
Published: September 2018

The Workers’ Theatre Movement (WTM) was an international project, largely promoted by the Workers International Relief, to conjoin left militant radical theaters during the period of Stalin’s "Third Period" militant class struggle; it was also briefly the name of a workers’ troupe in London. The historical shape of the WTM follows the ideological progress of the Communist International (Comintern), from the hard left turn in 1929 to the collaborative politics of the Popular Front in 1933–1934. As proposed by its ideological leaders and principal activists, the Workers’ Theatre Movement was evidence of the transnational emergence of a proletarian culture derived from the universal modernity of industrialism. In practice, the movement was an aggregate of practices and theories drawn into the semblance of an organization through the cultural apparatus of the Comintern.
The Workers’ Theatre Movement was both a loose international alliance and a range of local experiences that varied greatly. In metropolitan centers, the workers’ troupes occupied a gradient ranging from militant street theaters, such as Ewan MacColl’s Red Megaphone in Birmingham, UK and the Shock Troupe of the Workers’ Laboratory Theatre in New York, to the radical edges of the professional theater, such as the Group Theatre in New York and Unity Theatre in London. Outside of major theatrical centres, WTM troupes were more often organized by radical unions, or, as in the case of the Toronto Workers’ Experimental Theatre, by Communist Party cultural clubs.
Zangirimono [Cropped-hair Plays]
Authors: Wetmore Kevin 
Published: September 2018

In Meiji-era Japan, as part of the reforms to kabuki in response to modernization, playwright Kawatake Mokuami (1816–1893) and actor Onoe Kikugorō V (1844–1903) developed a new genre of kabuki that focused on presenting both external Western elements and contemporary dramatic narratives onstage in the kabuki style.
In the late 1870s, seeking contemporary pieces that would meet government-dictated reforms within kabuki, Onoe Kikugorō V (1844–1903) asked Mokuami to write modern kabuki plays for him to perform in. The result was "cropped-hair plays" [zangirimono]. As the reforms of the Meiji period took hold, an obsession with the surface elements of Western culture and modernity took hold over the middle and upper classes. The social elite rejected the traditional garments and hairstyles of the samurai, which were perceived as premodern. Kimonos were discarded in favor of Western suits. Swords were no longer worn. Bowler hats, pocket Watches, rickshaws, newspapers, and canes grew in popularity, and topknots (chonmage, the hairstyle of the samurai) were cut off, resulting in "cropped-hair plays": dramas that featured modern office workers and government officials without topknots in contemporary settings.
Dadaism in Film
Authors: Lantz Andy 
Published: September 2018

Members of the Dada cultural and artistic movement began to experiment with film as a means to disseminate their stylistic partialities and cultural values through a new medium free of cultural respectability and aesthetic pretension. Founded in Zurich, Switzerland, by Tristan Tzara in 1916, this avant-garde movement would soon spread to France, Germany, the United States, and elsewhere. Much like the surrealists who would follow, the dadaists sought to liberate their audience from the cultural allegiances, prejudices, and norms of thinking that, in their view, had been largely responsible for the catastrophes of World War I.
Unlike surrealist film, dadaist film did not seek to lure its viewers into the cinematic illusion. Instead, dadaists employed unconventional methods in order to alienate the audience members and to provide them the distance with which to reflect upon the meta-artistic (and anti-artistic) quality of their productions. Film enabled the dadaists to distort reality, motion, and perspective; it revealed familiar things in radically unfamiliar but persuasive new shapes.
Modernist Film Criticism
Authors: Galindo Gloria 
Published: September 2018

Criticism is one of the fundamental concepts in Modernism and is defined by "the intensification, almost exacerbation, of [a] self-critical tendency" that began with Kant, "the first to criticize the means itself of criticism" (Clement Greenberg). Modernism makes use of a multiplicity of approaches and techniques in order to reflect on the means of representation by focusing on its methods. That is, instead of trying to describe, thoughts, feelings, relationships, or the world in a realist way, the modernist artist and critic focuses on the way representation articulates experience, turning, at the same time, art into a reflection of itself. In this sense, modernist discourse operates as a statement, ‘by the specific practices of art criticism, by the art activities implicated in the critic/author’s formulations and by the institutions which disseminate and disperse the formulations as events’ (Marcus 2007).
Earlier film theory "was unformed and impressionistic," and its major concern was, as Robert Stam points out, to define whether or not cinema was an art that was linked or opposed to the other arts. An early theorist, Riccioto Canudo, in his manifesto "The Birth of the Sixth Art" (1911), understood cinema as the conjunction of "the three spatial arts (architecture, sculpture, and painting), and the three temporal arts (poetry, music and dance), transforming them into a synthetic form called ‘Plastic Art in Motion" (Abel 1988: 58–66 quoted in Stam 2000: 28).
Lavista, Mario (1943–)
Authors: Alonso-Minutti Ana R. 
Published: September 2018

Composer, pianist, intellectual, editor, and teacher Mario Lavista is regarded as a central figure in Mexico’s contemporary music scene. A prolific composer of orchestral, stage, chamber, solo, and electronic pieces, Lavista’s oeuvre is characterized by its intersections with the other arts. His music shows an integration of modernist avant-garde trends from both European and American music, while also adopting compositional techniques from diverse historical periods of Western art traditions. He has maintained an active performance career, especially through collective improvisations using prepared piano.
Lavista’s role as intellectual has been shaped mainly through the series of lecture-recitals he regularly organizes as a member of El Colegio Nacional—a prestigious government-funded institution intended to foster the cultural and intellectual activities of an intellectual elite. Moreover, he is the founder and director of one of the most renowned music journals in Mexico, Pauta: Cuadernos de Teoría y Crítica Musical, which promotes multidisciplinary dialogues, especially among writers, painters and musicians, and has a strong emphasis on contemporary music. Lavista has been teaching at the Conservatorio Nacional since 1970, where his role as educator and mentor has been particularly relevant for ‘‘practically all Mexican composers that are younger than he is’’ (Cortez 14).
Indian National Congress
Authors: Poore Benjamin 
Published: September 2018

The Indian National Congress is one of the largest and oldest democratic political organizations in the world, and one of two major parties in Indian political life. In 1885 the Congress was founded by middle-class intellectuals and professionals, including journalists, civil servants, lawyers, and teachers. The most notable early members of the organization included Lala Lajpat Rai, Allan Octavian Hume, Surendranath Banerjea, Dadabhai Naoroji, Sarojini Naidu, and Annie Besant.
The period of the Congress’ foundation occurred within what is known as the Moderate Phase of emergent Indian nationalism. Secular and liberal in character, this political period was highly critical of racism and discrimination in professional life, and the economic disempowerment of Indians by the imperial project. The national organization of the Congress hinged on not only the national network of railways—especially vital for campaigning in later years—but also contact between the intelligentsia and commercial communities.
Nietzsche, Friedrich (1844–1900)
Authors: Pecora Vincent P. , La Shot Derek 
Published: September 2018

Friedrich Nietzsche, the son of a Lutheran minister, was a German philologist, philosopher, and iconoclast. He is best known for his controversial but powerful reevaluation of traditional Western morality, epistemology, and theology.
His early academic career was devoted to philology, and he secured a professorship at Basel University at the age of twenty-four despite having failed to obtain his doctorate at Leipzig. He obtained most of his philosophical training outside of his speciality. His principle resources were Arthur Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation, followed by Richard Wagner’s revolutionary music. Although he admired Schopenhauer’s stark premise that existence was a chaotic affair guided by a will to life, Nietzsche later replaced Schopenhauer’s embrace of ascetic "will-less-ness" as the only response to suffering with the "will to power": the idea that man "will rather will nothingness than not will" (Genealogy of Morals, III: sec. 1; emphasis in the original). His first book was The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music (1872; title altered in subsequent editions), which explained Greek tragedy by revealing the wrestling of two intellectual energies within it.
Haidar, Kadhim (1932–1985)
Authors: Shabout Nada 
Published: September 2018

Born in Baghdad, Iraq, Kadhim Haidar studied art at the Institute of Fine Arts in Baghdad after receiving a degree in Arabic Studies from the Higher Institute for Teachers in 1953. Later, in 1961 and 1962, he pursed a BA in theatre design and graphics at the Royal School of Art and Graphics in London. After his return from London, he taught at the Institute of Fine Arts in 1962 and the Academy of Fine Arts in Baghdad in 1968. He founded the Design Department at the Academy of Fine Arts in Baghdad in 1974 and chaired the Visual Arts Department there in 1981 and 1982. He was a contributing writer and a poet for various publications including Al-TakhtitwalElwan [Sketching and Colors], which became a standard textbook at the academy.
Haidar’s work explored key political shifts in Iraq during the 1950s and 1960s through a re-imagination of popular religious symbolism, which was seen in opposition to the new secular modern thought favored by his generation of artists, and thus had been absent from the work of modern Iraqi artists. His most noted series of work is Melhamet al-Shahid [The Martyr’s Epic], which is based on a poem he wrote in Baghdad in 1965. Through his negotiation of the martyrdom of the Prophet Mohammed’s grandson, al-Hussayn, at the battle of Karbala, Haidar’s work gained added significance for contemporary Iraqis within the turbulent political years of coups d’état and unsettled affairs.
Enas, Hoessein (1924–1995)
Authors: Abdullah Sarena 
Published: September 2018

Mohd Hoessein Enas was born in Bogor, Indonesia, migrated to Singapore in 1945, and became a citizen of the Federation of Malaya in 1956. Largely self-taught, Enas is best known for using acrylic and oil paint to portray his subjects in the style of European academic portraiture.
In 1956 he spearheaded the Majlis Kesenian Melayu [Malaysian Arts Council] and was the founder and president of Angkatan Pelukis Semenanjung [The Peninsular Artists Force, or APS]. He played a distinct role in Malaysian art by introducing modernity and Western art through his figurative drawings influenced by the European academic style. Under Enas, the APS promoted the idea that local painters should produce artwork that stemmed from their emotional identification with Malaya by depicting Malay ideals of beauty and character.
Enas is widely acclaimed as the father of Malaysian portrait painting, and was appointed Royal Portrait Painter to the Sultan of Selangor in 1990. His later works include portraits of several sultans and members of Malaysian royalty. Enas was a fellow of London’s Royal Society of Arts, and was also the head of Design and Staging Services at Radio and Television Malaysia.
Ensor, James Sydney Edouard (1860–1949)
Authors: Todts Herwig 
Published: September 2018

Prior to the outbreak of World War I, James Ensor (b. 1860 Ostend, Belgium–d. 1949 Ostend, Belgium) worked during the summer months in a souvenir shop owned by his family in the Belgian seaside resort of Ostend. His artistic career took place in the political, financial and cultural capital of Brussels, which was a train ride away from his home. From 1877 to 1880 he attended the Academy of Fine Arts in Brussels, where he participated in Les XX group, La LibreEsthétique artistic society, and the Galérie Georges Giroux. He took part in the cultural life and nightlife of Brussels, where he met literary friends, art lovers, and his mistress Augusta Boogaerts.
Ensor believed that the capital sin of producing aesthetic banality could be successfully combated by constantly exploring new subject matter, genres, techniques, materials, styles, and artistic disciplines (he wrote articles and composed music as well). Ensor explored the possibilities of any specific artistic project usually by radicalizing an existing model. His desire to experiment with Realism, Symbolism, Impressionism, Rembrandt’s light, the grotesque repertoire of Hiëronymus Bosch and Francisco Goya, or the farces of Pieter Brueghel resulted in iconographic and stylistic incoherent drawings and paintings with a surreal character. Occasionally Ensor used line, form, brush strokes, and color in an almost autonomous manner. He often employed one of his favored images, the mask, as an ambiguous and psychologically affecting motif (usually as an instrument of unmasking).
Since the 1960s, scholars have investigated the subversive function of Ensor’s combination of social and political satire, religious subject matter and a highly private iconography.
Gharbaoui, Jilali (1930–1971)
Authors: Powers Jean Holiday 
Published: September 2018

Jilali Gharbaoui was a sculptor and painter born in Jorf El Melh, Sidi Kacem region in Morocco. Along with Ahmed Cherkaoui, Jilali Gharbaoui is considered one of the founders of modernism in Morocco. He played a major role in furthering the debates around Moroccan modernism, and his work focuses on the gesture of painting itself.
Although Gharbaoui worked with both sculpture and painting, he is best known for the striking colors and violent brush strokes of his gestural abstractions on canvas, paper, and wood. Very early works by Gharbaoui are relatively representational or focus on geometric abstraction, but later works are identified by a consistent style of loose abstract work that emphasizes the movement of the brush itself. The paintings deliberately highlight the hand of the artist and often build up texture through thick layers of paint, showcasing both the interplay of colors and lines as well as the materiality of the paint itself.
He was introduced as part of the groupe des informels at the Salon Comparaison in Paris in 1959 by art critic Pierre Restany. Gharbaoui suffered from severe mental illness, and was hosted on multiple occasions by Father Denis Martin at the monastery of Toumliline in the Middle Atlas mountains. He committed suicide and his body was found on a public bench in the Champ de Mars. His body was repatriated to Morocco by André Malraux, and he is buried in Fes.
Halaby, Sophie (1906–1998)
Authors: Sherwell Tina 
Published: September 2018

Sophie Halaby was born in 1906 in Jerusalem to a Palestinian father and Russian mother. She pursued her higher education in France and Italy between 1928 and 1933 before returning to the city of her birth, later fleeing from West Jerusalem to East Jerusalem during the 1948 Palestine War. In the 1950s she opened a small shop on Zahra Street where she sold handcrafted goods and her watercolor paintings. She also participated in several exhibitions in the 1980s. Halaby often portrayed the landscape surrounding Jerusalem, one of her primary inspirations, in watercolor and oil. Often painted from the perspective of a window or balcony view, many of her works are absent of human presence and have a melancholic and foreboding atmosphere. Unlike European painters of the Holy Land, Halaby did not focus on religious sites and grand panoramas in orientalist traditions, expressing instead a more intimate relationship to the land and its details in her landscape watercolors, which moved increasingly towards abstraction over the course of her life.
Her domestic sketches are some of the few images of Palestinian women working in the home during the period, and they reveal a facet of upper-class life during her time rarely seen or documented, recalling sketches of Impressionist artists. Halaby passed away in 1998 at the age of 92. Several Palestinian collectors, including Mazen Qupty, purchased her work. The significance of Halaby’s work was discovered in the late 1990s, and she is now considered one of Jerusalem’s pioneering female artists.
Hsiao Chin (Xiao Qin) [蕭勤] (1935--)
Authors: Seiz Natalie 
Published: September 2018

Hsiao Chin is an abstract painter who was born in Shanghai, China, to an affluent Christian family. His father Hsiao Yu-mei [蕭友梅] founded the Shanghai Conservatory of Music in 1927. His parents died when he was young, and he moved to Taiwan where, in 1951, he entered the Department of Art Education at the Provincial Taipei Normal School. There he met his mentor Li Chung-sheng [李仲生] (1912–1984). In 1956 Hsiao became a founding member of the Ton Fan Art Group [東方畫會] (also known as the Dongfang huahui or Eastern Painting Group). Hsiao Chin had moved to Spain in 1955, by which time his painting was rich in calligraphic marks made in oil. He moved to Italy in 1958 and lived there for forty years, establishing the Punto movement in 1961 with painters Antonio Calderara (1903–1978), Azuma Kenjiro (1926--), and Li Yuan-chia [李元佳] (1929–1994).
Throughout his life, Hsiao investigated Taoism and metaphysics, Zen, the energy of the sun, Tibetan tantrism, and Indian mandalas, and represented this in his non-figurative works through pure bold colors. While in New York from 1967–1971, he was further influenced by the work of Mark Rothko. Hsiao also wrote for Taiwanese newspapers from abroad, communicating art news and trends directly to a Taiwanese audience.
The National Gallery of Zimbabwe
Authors: Hellman Amanda H. 
Published: September 2018

The National Gallery of Zimbabwe is an art museum in Harare dedicated to collecting, preserving, and promoting Zimbabwean visual culture. Though the collection focuses on contemporary artists from Zimbabwe, its holdings are diverse, containing traditional and contemporary African along with European Old Master paintings—a reflection of the acquisition interests of the first director.
Sir James Gordon McDonald (1867–1942), a friend and biographer of Cecil Rhodes, gifted £30,000 to found an art gallery in 1943. Ten years later in 1953 a board was established to raise funds, build the museum, and select a director. In 1956, Scotsman Frank McEwen (1907–1994) was appointed to the post of director. The Rhodes National Gallery was opened on 16 July 1957 in Salisbury, Southern Rhodesia (renamed Harare, Zimbabwe in 1980). The institution changed its name to the National Gallery of Rhodesia in 1972, one year prior to McEwen’s resignation. One of McEwan’s projects was the Rhodes National Gallery Workshop School. Artists who participated in this early workshop, such as Thomas Mukarobgwa and John and Bernard Takawira, helped define Zimbabwean modern art. After Zimbabwe gained independence in 1980 the National Gallery developed the BAT Workshop, which became the National Gallery School of Visual Art and Design in 2012.
Ithipol Thangchalok (1946--)
Authors: Galloway Charlotte 
Published: September 2018

Ithipol Thangchalok has established an international reputation as both a leading contemporary Thai artist, and a respected art educator. While studying at Silpakorn University he was exposed to abstract art and print techniques through Chalood Nimsamer, who had recently returned from the Pratt Graphic Center in New York. Thangchalok excelled at Silpakorn and subsequently received a scholarship to study fine art at the University of Washington, completing his Master’s degree in 1975. Subsequently, he received another scholarship to travel to Australia in 1983.
In his work, Thangchalok favors abstraction and demonstrates great confidence in managing line and texture. He has explored a number of diverse themes as a conceptual artist, including contemporary concerns related to the old and new in urban environments. He exhibits his work regularly, often representing Thailand internationally; moreover, he continues to maintain a strong local following. In addition to being a significant figure in the Thai art scene, Thangchalok is an assistant professor in painting at Silpakorn University, and is actively involved in arts organizations in Thailand including the National Gallery, Bangkok. While he has worked with a variety of media, he is considered an expert printmaker. Thangchalok experiments with various printmaking techniques and through his teaching has helped popularize the medium among a new generation of Thai artists.