New American Cinema
The New American Cinema was a movement to create independent films that expressed the countercultural moods and sensibilities of the late 1950s and early 1960s;…
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American Abstract Artists
The American Abstract Artists is a formally established organization of painters, sculptors, and printmakers that has been devoted to promoting abstraction in the United States…
Modernism and Latin American Classical Music
The idea of musical modernism in the Latin American classical music world was a particular aesthetically-oriented instance of a broader discourse that has been described…
Arab-American Theater
Arab-American Theater is a general term that describes plays and performances by Americans of Arab descent written in Arabic and/or English from the early twentieth…
First American Artists’ Congress (14–16 February 1936)
The First American Artists’ Congress convened over three days in New York City, and marked the formal establishment of the American Artists’ Congress (1936–1942). The…
Modernism in Latin America
In Latin American intellectual history, modernism is a term that can be usefully and accurately applied to at least two distinct intellectual movements: a clearly…
Abstract Expressionism
Abstract Expressionism was a movement initiated by a group of loosely affiliated artists that came together during the early 1940s, primarily in New York City.…
Modernism in Canada and The United States
In Canada and the United States modernism emerges from transnational engagements with global intellectual movements while also grappling with local intellectual, cultural, and political developments…
Impressionism (Painting)
Impressionism is an artistic movement that flourished in France between 1860 and 1890. The term has been widely adopted around the world to describe artistic…
Drama, Theater and Performance Subject Overview
This brief preamble will introduce the kinds of material the reader can expect to find in the entries treating drama, theater, and performance, and suggest…
Literature Subject Overview
Literary modernism is a truly global and plural phenomenon, playing out in multiple cultural paradigms, in various timeframes, and in response to diverse experiences of…
Dance
Historically, modern dance scholarship has followed the contours of the field as defined by John Martin, the revered dance critic for The New York Times,…
Montage
As an aesthetic principle, montage, defined as the assemblage of disparate elements into a composite whole often by way of juxtaposition, is most often associated…
Intellectual Currents
This section focusses on the historical, sociological, philosophical, economic, political, and scientific context of modernism. Entries cover individuals, coteries, movements, and events. The primary criterion…
Film Subject Overview
The Film Section includes entries on a variety of modernist genres, periods, movements, directors, films, and critical modes aligned with modernist aims and intellectual attitudes.…
Cubism [REVISED AND EXPANDED]
Cubism is an art movement that emerged in Paris during the first decade of the 20th century. It was a key movement in the birth…
Dadaism
Dada began in Zurich, Switzerland, in the midst of World War I. Several expatriate artists converged in the city to escape the brutal and seemingly…
Constructivism
Prior to World War II, Constructivism attracted little interest from British artists apart from the few involved with Circle in 1937. Circle consisted of a…
Photography
Surrealism Overview
Soupault’s publication of Manifeste du Surréalism in 1924. Rising in the wake of the First World War, Surrealism revolted against a world that had become…
Modernism in Africa
Though they often escape critical scrutiny, concepts such as modernism, modernity, and modernization are at the heart of the concept of development, and thus omnipresent…
Modernism in Europe
We are living in a very singular moment of history. It is a moment of crisis, in the literal sense of that word. In every…
Futurism
Futurism emerged at the beginning of the twentieth century as a movement that explicitly conceptualized the process of literary and artistic experimentation as part of…
Expressionism
Expressionism was one of the foremost modernist movements to emerge in Europe in the early years of the twentieth-century. It had a profound effect on…
Howe, Irving (1920–1993)
Irving Howe was an American literary and social critic. Howe was a central figure in the circles of American democratic socialism as well as a…