Jacob, Max (1876–1944)
The poet and painter Max Jacob was a major figure in the Parisian artistic movements of the early twentieth century. With his friends Guillaume Apollinaire…
The poet and painter Max Jacob was a major figure in the Parisian artistic movements of the early twentieth century. With his friends Guillaume Apollinaire…
Katherine Mansfield Beauchamp was born in Wellington, New Zealand on October 14, 1888. Yet this bare factual statement in no way indicates Mansfield’s importance to…
Vita Sackville-West was a poet, prose writer, and gardener. Much of her work was significantly informed by her close identification with the English landscape, in…
Lewis Mumford was a prolific author, social philosopher and prominent American critic of architecture and Urbanism. A native of New York City, he penned a…
Jacinto Benavente y Martínez was a Spanish dramatist of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Author of more than 170 plays, he was awarded…
Born in Biebrich, Rhineland (now Hesse, Germany), the German philosopher and psychologist Wilhelm Christian Ludwig Dilthey founded the German school of philosophy called Lebensphilosophie (philosophy…
Vicente Emilio Sojo was born in Guatire, Miranda State, on December 8, 1887, the son of Francisco Reverón and Luisa Sojo. Self-taught composer, conductor, choirmaster…
Lewis Jacobs (1906–97) was an American film critic, historian, and filmmaker. Jacobs initially studied painting and design, and his first foray into cinema was through…
Functionalism, a central idea in modernist design, rejects ornamentation unrelated to an item’s function, resulting in design that emphasizes a utilitarian purpose. The style was…
Jules Laforgue is one of the French ‘poètes maudits’ of the late nineteenth century. Maintaining a certain distance from literary movements, he developed a unique…
The Spanish artist Juan Gris (born José Victoriano Carmelo Carlos González Pérez) is widely recognized, alongside Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, as one of the…
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…
Teatro del Pueblo (The People’s Theater) was the first ‘independent’ theater in Argentina and launched the teatro independiente movement in Buenos Aires. Founded on November…
John Howard Lawson was born in New York City on September 25, 1894. His first major play, Roger Bloomer (1923), advanced expressionism in the United…
The 400 Blows (Les 400 Coups), a black-and-white French feature film directed by François Truffaut, is one of the most influential works of the French…
Alexander Boghossian, better known as Skunder, was one of the most prominent figures of African modernism. Born in Addis Ababa in Ethiopia in 1937 to…
Mass Observation was founded in 1937 by filmmaker Humphrey Jennings, poet Charles Madge, and ethnologist and explorer Tom Harrisson. It was originally conceived as a…
Vladimir Yakovlevich Propp (Владимир Яковлевич Пропп) was a Russian philologist and folklorist who ranks among the most penetrating, original and influential of modern narrative theoreticians.…
Fyodor Sologub was a symbolist poet, novelist and playwright, who was known for his decadent style of writing and his elaborate personal mythology centered on…
The musician, painter, and theoretician Mikhail Matiushin is best known for his music for the Cubo-Futurist opera Pobeda nad Solntsem (Victory over the Sun), which…
Edward Estlin Cummings was a prolific and iconoclastic figure in American poetry of the mid-twentieth century. He experimented with unconventional verse forms, often playfully disrupting…
Elsa Barraine’s precocious musical talents were recognized at an early age, and she entered the Paris Conservatoire at the age of twelve. She studied composition…
Orientalism is the sociological, historical, cultural, and anthropological study of the Orient, with “the Orient” constituting countries East of “the Occident” (Western Europe), and including…
Dora Marsden significantly influenced the aesthetics of Anglo-American Modernism largely through her creation of a series of journals.
The film director John Ford (February 1, 1895–August 31, 1973) has been celebrated both for his mythification of the American experience and for his signature…