Functionalism
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…
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Architecture Subject Overview
Modernist architecture and design represented a utopian vision of how the built environment could be adapted to the needs to modern industrial society. Industrialization had…
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…
Bauhaus
In 1919 a young architect named Walter Gropius initiated one of the most modern art schools of the twentieth century in the city of Weimar…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
Photography
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…
Parsons, Talcott (1902–1979)
Talcott Edgar Frederick Parsons was an American sociologist who, as the principal exponent of what is known as structural functionalism, exerted a major influence over…
Angkatan Pelukis Se-Malaysia
Angkatan Pelukis Se-Malaysia [APS—All Malaysian Painters’ Front] is recognized as one of the first Malay art collectives in Malaysia. It functions as both a social…
Hawks, Howard (1896–1977)
Born Howard Winchester Hawks in Goshen, Indiana, to a wealthy industrialist family, he is considered one of the major directors of the classical Hollywood studio…
Romañach, J. Mario (1917–1984)
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…
Sanabria, Tomás José (1922–2008)
Sanabria is a representative figure of the second generation of 20th-century Venezuelan architects. He studied in the United States of America after World War II…
Berlewi, Henryk (1894–1967)
The Polish painter, graphic designer and art critic Henryk Berlewi was one of the outstanding figures of Polish Constructivism and the Yiddish Avant-Garde. As a…
Prague Linguistic Circle, The
The Prague Linguistic Circle was a group of linguists, philologists, literary theorists, and cultural analysts who began meeting on a regular basis in 1926 and…
Ortega y Gasset, José (1883–1955)
Spanish philosopher, historian, sociologist and politician José Ortega y Gasset contributed significantly to the intellectual landscape of the first half of the twentieth century. Ortega’s…
Mumford, Lewis (1895–1990)
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…
Lewis, (Percy) Wyndham 1882–1957
Wyndham Lewis is best known as the leader of Vorticism, due largely to his First World War paintings and the portraits he produced during the…
Die Aktion
Die Aktion was a review of radical politics and culture published by Franz Pfemfert (1879–1954) in Berlin from 1911 to 1932. During the period of…
Saarinen, Gottlieb Eliel (1873–1950)
Gottlieb Eliel Saarinen, better known as Eliel Saarinen, was an architect who practiced in his native Finland for twenty-five years before beginning a new phase…
Structuralism
Structuralism, generally described, is a twentieth-century intellectual movement associated with linguistic studies in Europe, despite its vast applicability and many adherents. An initial aim of…