bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Carlos Raúl Villanueva (1900--1975)
Authors: D’Auria Viviana 
Published: September 2018

Carlos Raúl Villanueva is the most renowned Venezuelan modern architect, designer of several social housing developments as ‘El Silencio’ (1941–1945) and ‘23 de Enero’ (1955–1957) and also of one of the most singular examples of Modern Architecture in Latin América, the Ciudad Universitaria of Caracas, campus of Central University of Venezuela (1944–1970), declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2000. Villanueva was born when his father was part of the Venezuelan diplomatic service. His childhood and youth was spent in Europe, most of it in France, where he studied, first in the Lycée Condorcet and later in l’Ecole des Beaux Arts de Paris, graduating as an architect in 1928. Villanueva developed his professional work in Venezuela between 1930 and 1970. During these forty years he embraced the biggest ideal of the modern architect: to work for the common man, for society as a whole, devoting himself to the service of the Venezuelan State. In 1937 Villanueva returned to France for seven months. The project for the Venezuelan pavilion for the Paris International Expo, designed with Luis Malaussena, gave him the opportunity to again be in the midst of artistic avant-gardes. In Paris Villanueva studied Urbanism at the University of Paris and attendance of the fifth Congrès international d’architecture moderne (CIAM) meeting, both of which helped to consolidate his credo in modern architecture and in the synthesis of arts.
Shaw, George Bernard (1856–1950)
Authors: Switzky Lawrence 
Published: September 2018

George Bernard Shaw was an Irish playwright, music and drama critic, and political theorist who pioneered the play of ideas as a dramatic genre, was instrumental in the formation of the Labour Party in England, and remains the only person to have won both the Nobel Prize for Literature (1925) and an Academy Award (1938, Best Adapted Screenplay, Pygmalion). The intellectual and social seriousness of his ideas, his effusive, literary dialogue, and his invention of new genres such as the discussion play were pivotal contributions to the modernization of drama.
Born into a Protestant family in Dublin, Shaw moved to London in 1876 and began ghost-writing a music column for The Hornet while also pursuing an unpromising career as a novelist and becoming involved with the Fabian Society, a British socialist organization that promoted a gradualist rather than revolutionary approach to social reform. In The Quintessence of Ibsenism, initially delivered to the Fabians as a lecture in 1891, Shaw articulated his nascent dramaturgical principles. He argued that Ibsen’s most important contribution to the development of modern drama was replacing the violent catastrophes of melodrama with discussion scenes in which characters sat down and talked about intractable social problems. Shaw’s views about modern drama were put into practice in his first three plays: Widowers’ Houses (1892), about slum landlordism, The Philanderer (1893), about divorce, and Mrs. Warren’s Profession (1893), about prostitution.
Barnes, Djuna (1892–1982)
Authors: Roos Bonnie 
Published: September 2018

Djuna Barnes (1892–1982) was a significant U.S. American literary figure of Paris of the 1920s and 1930s, but became a recluse of New York’s Patchin Place in the 1940s, ending her life in obscure poverty. She is best known for her experimental novel Nightwood, one of the most influential works of modernist fiction, and for her caustic wit. Barnes worked as a poet, journalist, illustrator, playwright, reviewer, and novelist. Her most recognized writings include The Book of Repulsive Women (produced 1915), Ryder (1928), Ladies Almanack (1928), Nightwood (1936), The Antiphon (1958), and Creatures in an Alphabet (1982).
Barnes’s first novel, Ryder (1928), details 50 years of the fictional Ryder family; the same year, Ladies Almanack, understood as a roman à clef novel parodying participants of Natalie Barney’s salon, was privately published. Many of the qualities of satire, dark humor, and surrealism for which Barnes is known are visible in Ryder and Ladies Almanack. But it is Nightwood, Barnes's third novel, that critics see as her most successful work.
Fascist Modernism
Authors: Maertz Gregory 
Published: September 2018

Fascist modernism is an artistic and literary movement emphasizing extreme nationalism, romantic anti-capitalism, and cultural renewal most closely associated with Fascist Italy, Vichy France, and National Socialist Germany (see Nazi modernism) but also describing the fusion of innovative literary technique and reactionary politics found in the writings of leading American, English, and Irish modernist authors such as T. S. Eliot, D. H. Lawrence, Wyndham Lewis, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, and W. B. Yeats.
Sitwell, Edith (1887–1964)
Authors: Barber Claire 
Published: September 2018

Dame Edith Sitwell was an experimental poet known for her eccentric behavior and aesthetics. A skillfully controlled reading voice, along with dramatic clothes and jewelry, led to her widespread recognition as an exceptional performer. Though she has received little attention within modernist studies, she significantly influenced the development of twentieth-century art with literary productions like Façade (1922) and her patronage of other artists, including Dylan Thomas. Her brothers Osbert and Sacheverell Sitwell were two of her closest companions and collaborators. With them, she endeavored to build an avant-garde artistic society rivaling the Bloomsbury Group.
Born into the British aristocracy, Sitwell had a strained relationship with her parents, Sir George and Lady Ida Sitwell, daughter of the Earl of Londesborough. A tall girl with an aquiline nose and hooded eyes, Sitwell did not conform to their idea of beauty, so her parents forced her to wear metal appliances to correct her spine and nose—an experience described in her autobiography, Taken Care Of (1965). Lady Sitwell’s trial for fraud exacerbated this dysfunctional family dynamic during the same year in which Edith published her first literary work, The Mother and Other Poems (1915). However, she had already moved to London in 1914 with former governess Helen Rootham, where she established a literary salon in austere rooms at Pembridge Mansions.
Neo-Impressionism
Authors: Somers Lynn M. 
Published: September 2018

Neo-Impressionism (1886–1906) comprised a group of avant-garde painters in France who explored a systematic approach to painting that revived Classical ideals while critiquing Impressionism’s prevailing aesthetic of spontaneity and improvisation. Led by the young, Parisian-born Georges Seurat, a rebellious École des Beaux-Arts-trained painter and anarchist, the Neo-Impressionists first gained attention at the eighth and final Impressionist exhibition in Paris in 1886. There, Seurat and his student Paul Signac, accompanied by the older Camille Pissarro, and his son Lucien, staged their bold new work. Its centerpiece was Seurat’s monumental Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte (1884–1886), a visual manifesto to Neo-Impressionist precepts.
In his review, art critic and activist Félix Fénéon coined the label néo-impressionisme to describe compositions that forcefully advanced Impressionism’s vibrant coloristic experiments. He detailed Seurat’s method of juxtaposing small, regularized touches of adjacent and complementary colors as ‘optical painting." Termed "divisionism," unblended pigments would theoretically "recombine on the retina" of the observer, resulting in a brilliant synthesis of hue and light on the painted surface. The methodical application of dots was termed "pointillism."
Eisenstein, Sergei Mikhailovich (1898–1948)
Authors: Eubanks Ivan 
Published: September 2018

Sergei Eisenstein was an early Soviet film director and theorist who produced widely acknowledged masterpieces of both silent and sound cinema, such as Strike (1924), Battleship Potemkin (1925), October (1927), Alexander Nevsky (1938) Ivan the Terrible I (1944), and Ivan the Terrible II (1958). He is widely known for devising influential theories on montage as the basis for cinematic art.
Although acclaimed for his cinematic masterpieces and film theory, Sergei Eisenstein began his career in theater. He joined the Red Army in 1918 after studying civil engineering, and he was assigned to a theatrical troupe where he worked as set designer. After being demobilized in 1920, Eisenstein found employment at the Proletkult Theater in Moscow, where he worked under the tutelage of Vsevolod Meyerhold, who would have a lasting influence on him. After spending approximately five years in theater, Eisenstein wrote "Montage of Attractions" (1923), outlining the theory that he had conceived while directing his first play for stage, Alexander Ostrovsky’s Enough Stupidity in Any Wise Man (1868). Defining "attractions" as calculated emotional shocks delivered by a play, Eisenstein claimed that an accumulative series of affects could guide audience members to adopt a given ideology. Thus, he believed, a good script consisted of a plan for engendering attractions in a compelling sequence. He implicitly de-emphasized character-driven plots and suggested that attractions prove most potent, not when arising from the context of a story, but rather when originating with extra-textual associations triggered by action. By 1924, however, he deemed action less effective at evoking such extra-textual associations than images, the fundamental vessels of meaning in cinema, and he therefore resolved that film provides the more powerful means of generating attractions. He thus adapted his theory to cinema, which became the basis of his work in that medium.
UPA (United Productions of America)
Authors: Leskosky Richard J. 
Published: September 2018

Hollywood cartoon studio UPA (United Productions of America) was founded in 1943 by former Disney animators Steven Bosustow, Zachary Schwartz, and David Hilberman. It profoundly influenced animation art and practice around the world with its modern design and adult themes. UPA created highly praised theatrical cartoon shorts, distributed by Columbia Pictures, from 1948 until 1959. During this time it also produced television commercials, the ground-breaking animated television series The Boing-Boing Show (1956–1957), and the feature-length cartoon, 1001 Arabian Nights (1959). Although UPA continued as a business entity into the 21st century, its aesthetic significance and influence effectively ended with its theatrical shorts.
UPA animators, most of them graduates of college art programs, had become frustrated with the stratified studio production system pioneered by Walt Disney and with Disney’s relatively realistic character animation, both of which had been widely imitated. Language of Vision (1944) by Gyorgy Kepes, head of the Light and Color curriculum at Chicago’s New Bauhaus, significantly influenced UPA animators with its notions of the educational function of visual art and its analysis of design components.
Rolland, Romain (1866–1944)
Authors: Coustille-Cossou Charles 
Published: September 2018

Writer, professor, musicologist, biographer, essayist, novelist, playwright, great letter writer and diarist, mystic in search of a pacified world and of a heroic heart, Romain Rolland profoundly marked the first half of the twentieth century. While he initially wrote for the theatre, his first success would come from the ten-volume novel Jean-Christophe, published between 1904 and 1912. Through the life of a young and enthusiastic German musician with a French first name, he depicted, in great detail, two rival societies under the threat of war. He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1915.
A talented piano player in his youth, Romain Rolland entered the École Normale Supérieure in 1886, defended a dissertation on the Origins of Modern Lyrical Drama [Les origines du théâtrelyrique moderne], and went on to teach art history and musicology at the Sorbonne. In Rome, he met Malwida von Meyensburg (a former friend of Nietzsche and Wagner) who accelerated his debut in literature. While he initially wrote for the theatre, his first success would come from the ten-volume novel Jean-Christophe, published between 1904 and 1912. Through the life of a young and enthusiastic German musician with a French first name, he depicted, in great detail, two rival societies under the threat of war.
Smart, Elizabeth (1913–1986)
Authors: Virani Zaqir Husein 
Published: September 2018

Elizabeth Smart was a Canadian poet and novelist, best known for By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept– a novella-length work of prose poetry that weaves surrealist, personalist, feminist, and anarchist ideals with Canadian, American, and European political sentiments.
Smart was born to prominent Canadian lawyer Russel Smart and his wife Emma Louise Parr–two of Ottawa’s more storied socialites. The Smart family frequently hosted Ottawa’s noted political and dramatic figures, affording their children the opportunity to grow up in the company of poet Duncan Campbell Scott, Canadian broadcasting pioneer Graham Spry, and William Lyon Mackenzie King, the tenth Prime Minister of Canada.
Martinez, Juan (1901–1971)
Authors: Forster Alejandra Celedon 
Published: September 2018

Juan Martinez Gutierrez arrived to Chile with his family from Spain in 1909. He studied Architecture (1918) at the University of Chile, and trained in parallel in the Faculty of Arts. His professional life was always tied to this institution, first as Professor, then as Director of the School, and eventually as Dean of the Faculty of Architecture. There, he ran and participated in two reforms to the teaching of the discipline, in 1933 and 1946 respectively. In a three-year visit to Europe (1928–31) he absorbed the work of renowned architects of the time, such as van der Rohe, Behrens, Le Corbusier and Gropius, which influenced his own architectural production and, by means of it, the Chilean architectural scene.
The core of his design work developed between the thirties and the fifties, consisting in a large number of public buildings, which stand for the construction of the identity of the emergent modern republic. Many of his buildings are related to education and culture, especially by way of liberal institutions such as the University of Chile. Although slightly neoclassical in appearance, his architecture represents a transition between traditional values and the embracement of modern ones: the blunt aesthetic in the use of concrete, the functional values and the image of monumentality has proved to be enduring.
West, Nathanael (1903–1940)
Authors: Meehan Adam 
Published: September 2018

Nathanael West was an author and screenwriter whose work spanned the decade of the 1930s. He was born Nathan Weinstein on 17 October 1903 in New York City; his decision to change his name at the age of twenty-two reflects a life-long ambivalence toward his Jewish ancestry. He is best known as a novelist whose work teems with characters suffering from psychological traumas stemming from the bleak atmosphere of Depression-era America. He died tragically and in relative obscurity with his wife Eileen in an automobile accident outside of El Centro, California in 1940.
Miss Lonelyhearts (1933), his second novel, is widely considered his best work. Unlike his first novel, The Dream Life of Balso Snell (1931) — which was influenced by French surrealism and was highly experimental in style — Miss Lonelyhearts is rooted in the everyday challenges of the Great Depression. The title character, whose actual name is never given, works as an advice columnist for a newspaper in New York City. Although he and others see the job as trivial, the desperate letters from readers begin to take a heavy emotional toll, leading him on an ill-fated search for meaning. Although the book’s plot is tragic, it also features elements of black comedy, a pervasive element of West’s work.
Russian Revolution (1917)
Authors: Elliott Emily 
Published: September 2018

The Russian Revolution occurred in two stages toward the close of World War I. It led to the overthrow of the Romanov dynasty and the establishment of the world’s first communist regime. Although the Revolution in 1917 was the first to overthrow the Romanovs, imperial Russia had a long history of rebellions against the autocratic rule of the tsars. During the seventeenth century, Ivan Bolotnikov (1565–1608) and Stenka Razin (1630–1671) led two separate peasant rebellions nearly fifty years apart. In the following century, Kondraty Bulavin (1660–1708) and Yemelyan Pugachev (1742–1775) led uprisings of their own. In the nineteenth century, Russia faced the Decembrist Revolt in 1825 following the death of Alexander I. In 1863, parts of Poland and Lithuania rebelled to gain more cultural freedom.
The reign of Nicholas II (1894–1917) worsened the relationship between the tsar and the Russian public. On the day of his coronation, a mass was held at Khodynka Field near Moscow. When some attendees heard that not everyone would receive the promised free food and drink, they trampled others, leaving an estimated thirteen hundred dead and thirteen hundred injured. Nicholas and Alexandra still held their celebration banquet, however, and this earned him the sobriquet ‘Bloody Nicholas’.
Schwitters, Kurt (1887–1948)
Authors: Gaggi Silvio 
Published: September 2018

Kurt Schwitters is most commonly associated with Dada, but his relationship to that movement’s aesthetic, political, and philosophical rebellion was ambivalent. Although he was friends with the Berlin Dadaists and participated in shows with them, he never formally became a member of their group. Schwitters was also involved with the Expressionist gallery and magazine, Der Sturm, and Dada purists disdained Expressionism, with its focus on the personal rather than the political, the dominant concern of other German Dadaists such as George Gros and Richard Huelsenbeck. The formalist aspect of much of Schwitters’s work also separated his work from Dada "anti-art."
Nevertheless, Schwitters is generally regarded as the greatest collage artist of the 20th century. He named his particular style of collage, which often incorporated three dimensional as well as two-dimensional elements, Merz. Merz became a tag prefix for all his works, which included poetry, music, and architecture, as well as visual art.
After Schwitters’s art was included in the Nazi’s Degenerate Art exhibition, he escaped, first to Norway and then to England, where he continued to be artistically active until his death in 1948. Schwitters’s Merz aesthetics has been a major influence on avant-garde art throughout the 20th and early 21st centuries.
Zamyatin, Evgeny
Authors: Stauffer Rachel 
Published: September 2018

Evgeny Zamyatin is a Russian author most famous for his dystopian novel We [My], which is said to have influenced George Orwell’s 1984. Criminalized in the pre-Revolutionary period by the tsarist regime for his revolutionary tendencies, and denounced post-Revolution as a traitor to the ideals of Russian Communism, Zamyatin was highly influential as an author, journal editor, leader of literary organizations, and as an instructor and researcher in naval engineering. In 1931, with Stalin’s permission, Zamyatin moved to France, where he died of a heart attack in 1937. His contributions to Russian and Soviet literature were newly acknowledged in the 1980s when his reputation as a traitor was renounced.
Evgeny Zamyatin was born in the Russian countryside to a middle-class family and attended St Petersburg Polytechnic Institute as a student of naval engineering. Travel for this work, combined with the revolutionary climate of St Petersburg, significantly influenced Zamyatin’s writing. Frequent participation in St Petersburg’s revolutionary activity leading to the 1905 revolution resulted in Zamyatin’s arrest and exile, which also served as themes in his literary works. Although, officially, Zamyatin had been expelled from St Petersburg, he remained there as a resident from 1906 until 1911 teaching in the naval engineering programme of St Petersburg Polytechnic Institute.
The Cantos
Authors: Templeton Erin 
Published: September 2018

The Cantos is a series of 120 long poems by the American poet, essayist, and cultural critic Ezra Pound. Pound began work on them as early as 1904, publishing the first three in Poetry magazine in 1917. The poems were originally published in eleven separate book-length installments, with each individual canto numbered sequentially in Roman numerals. They are highly allusive, polyphonic, and notoriously difficult.
Pound had been interested in epic poetry from his collegiate days, and his ideas about its form were influenced by many of his poetic predecessors: Homer, Vergil, Dante, Spenser, and Milton. But in addition to western poetic traditions, Pound studied classical Chinese and Japanese art and philosophy. These interests led him to translate works by Confucius and Li Po, but they also led to his theory of phanopoeia, the importance of the visual elements of a poem. He was particularly interested in ideograms and the way that such characters combined multiple layers of representation, both semantic and visual. Over time, Pound’s poetic project became an ambitious attempt at a complex and dynamic structure of meaning that was an aesthetic object in itself and a representation of the process of interpretation, which engages Odysseus, Elizabeth I, Thomas Jefferson, and a large cast of other characters.
Cope, (Robert Knox) Jack (1913–1991)
Authors: Hall Molly 
Published: September 2018

‘Jack’ Cope was a South African novelist, poet, editor, and short story writer. Born June 3, 1913 in Mooi River, Natal, South Africa, he spent his early career as a local journalist in Durban before moving to London, England as a foreign political correspondent. As a pacifist, he met with hostility there during the years of World War II and returned demoralized to South Africa to work as a cultural critic and editor for an anti-apartheid newspaper, The Guardian, in Cape Town until 1955. After leaving the newspaper, he separated from his wife of sixteen years and began his infamous affair with South African poet Ingrid Jonker in the early 1960s. During this time he also became the editor of Contrast, a bilingual literary magazine in English and Afrikaans, continuing as editor there for twenty years until 1980.
During that time, he was also the editor of several volumes of South African poetry, and his book The Dawn Comes Twice (1969) was banned by the government. Best known for his novels and short stories, he wrote about the racial history of South Africa, focusing on events such as the Bambata Rebellion in 1906 in The Fair House (1955).
Desnos, Robert Pierre (1900-1945)
Authors: Amaral Genevieve 
Published: September 2018

Robert Pierre Desnos (1900-1945) was a surrealist French poet whose diverse work included scripts for film and stage; journalism; essays; advertisements; cantatas; children's fables; and political tracts. His principal works are of experimental poetry and prose, though after breaking with the Surrealists he often employed more classical forms and produced commercial works for radio and newspapers. His preferred themes included dreams, mythology, voyages, eroticism and love. Desnos died in an internment camp in 1945.
From 1922-1927 Desnos contributed regularly to La Révolution Surreáliste and co-signed collective Surrealist tracts. He showed a gift for hypnogogic sleep and automatic writing, leading André Breton to call him the poet ‘closest to surrealist truth’. His longer surrealist works Deuil pour deuil (Mourning for Mourning, 1924) and La Liberté ou l'amour! (Liberty or Love!, 1927) combine narrative prose and lyric poetry, and involve extensive linguistic play, such as puns and homonyms. He often illustrated his own works, or collaborated with artists like André Masson, Joan Miró, and Pablo Picasso.