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…
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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…
Spencer, Penelope (1901–1993)
The career of the English “creative” dancer, choreographer, teacher, and dance writer Penelope Spencer spanned the period between the World Wars. Spencer’s versatile training and…
Hoffmann, Josef Franz Maria (1870–1956)
Josef Hoffmann was an Austrian architect and designer who proved instrumental in formulating the aesthetics and theory of modernist design. Among the most progressive architects…
Synaesthesia
Synaesthesia is the confusion or conflation of sensory modalities, where one sense is experienced or described in terms of another as in Charles Baudelaire’s simile…
Ballets Russes
Founded by the Russian impressario Sergei Diaghilev in 1909, the Ballets Russes played a role of fundamental importance in the development of early twentieth-century modernism.…
The Oshogbo Group
Between 1962 and 1966, after Nigeria gained Independence from Britain, a group of artists emerged in the Yoruba town of Oshogbo in southwestern Nigeria. They…
Monte Verità (1900–)
During the first two decades of the 20th century, Monte Verità, a hill on the west side of Ascona in southern Switzerland, was the site…
Osun Osogbo Sacred Grove
The Osun Osogbo Sacred Grove is part of the story of Nigerian Modernism. Situated on the outskirts of the city of Osogbo in Southwest Nigeria,…
Hellerau
Founded in 1909 as Germany’s first ‘garden city’, Hellerau is a district of Dresden located in the wooded countryside north of the city. Developers Karl…
Art Nouveau
From the 1880s until the mid-1910s, Art Nouveau was the dominant style in art, architecture, and design in Europe, with innovative and thoroughly modern production…
Nazi Modernism
Nazi Modernism is not a contradiction in terms, even if Nazi-era rhetoric and propaganda directed against Entartete Kunst powerfully suggested that this was the case.…
Craig, Edward Gordon (1872–1966)
Edward Gordon Craig was one of the leading figures of modernist theater. His books, stage designs, manifestos, and collaborations all contributed to an understanding of…
Ziegfeld Follies (1907–1931)
Named after its founder, Broadway impresario Florenz Ziegfeld (1867–1932), and inspired by the Folies Bergères in Paris, the Ziegfeld Follies (1907–1931) remains one of the…
Russian Modernism (1890–1934)
Russian modernism arose as a rejection of positivism and the realism of the major nineteenth-century Russian novelists such as Lev Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and Ivan…
Schlemmer, Oskar (1888–1943)
Oskar Schlemmer was a painter, sculptor, choreographer, stage designer, and theorist most recognized as a master at the Bauhaus, where he taught from 1921 to…
Klimt, Gustav (1862–1918)
Gustav Klimt had an indelible influence on the artistic and cultural innovations that occurred in Vienna at the turn of the century. He was a…
Cunningham, Merce (1919 – 2009)
One of the twentieth century’s most influential dancers and choreographers, Merce Cunningham re-defined the genre of modern dance. He began his professional career as a…
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…
Fokine, Michel (1880–1942)
Michel Fokine’s seventeen works for Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes (1909–29) revitalized ballet in the early twentieth century. In Fokine’s most successful works, the body became…
Music and Dance
The histories of modernist music and dance are vast and inextricably related, so much so that it is as daunting to consider them in tandem…
Diaghilev, Serge (1872–1929)
Impresario, critic, curator, and founder-director of the Ballets Russes (1909–1929), Serge Diaghilev was a towering figure and pioneer of early 20th-century modernism. Through his various…