War Art in Japan
Under Japan’s totalitarian state during World War II, most Japanese artists participated in the war effort. Their activities included producing works commissioned by the state,…
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Japanese Secession
In 1920, a group of Japanese architects interested in Art Nouveu or “Jugenstil” created a society sharing a common approach concerning the future of architecture…
Calligraphy in Japan
Known as sho [書], shodō [書道], shosha [書写] or shūji [習字] in the twenty-first century, calligraphy holds an ambiguous and complicated status as art in…
Japanese-Korean Artistic Exchange (20th Century)
Japan was the most active among the East Asian countries in embracing Western civilization during the late 19th century. At the same time, the 500-year-old…
The Japan Art Institute [Nihon Bijutsuin 日本美術院]
The Japan Art Institute was a Japanese art institute focused on the teaching, research, and exhibition of Nihonga-style art, established by Okakura Tenshin in 1898.…
Nikakai [Society of Progressive Japanese Artists] [二科会] (1914--)
The Nikakai, or Second Section Association, was established in 1914 as a reaction to the Japanese government-sponsored exhibition known as the Bunten. The motivation behind…
Modernism in East Asia
The term ‘modernism’ is commonly used to describe some of the literary and cultural production of the early twentieth century in China, Japan, and Korea,…
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.…
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…
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…
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.…
Cubism
Cubism is an influential modernist art movement that emerged in Paris during the first decade of the twentieth century. The term was established by Parisian…
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…
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,…
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…
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…
Photography
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…
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…
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…
Matsui, Sumako (1886–1919)
Matsui Sumako was the first superstar shingeki actress in Japan’s modernist theater movement.
Kinoshita, Junji (1914–2006)
Kinoshita Junji was one of Japan’s foremost modern playwrights. His work consists of several plays based on Japanese folk tales and history, and often interrogates…
Kawakami, Otojirō (1864–1911)
Kawakami Otojirō was an actor, comedian, and impresario during Japan’s early modern period and was the first to take Japanese performances on tour, albeit in…
Yokoyama, Taikan [横山大観] (1868–1958)
The name Yokoyama Taikan is synonymous with Nihonga (Japanese-style painting) and the Japan Art Institute [Nihon Bijutsuin, 日本美術院]. Taikan was among the first batch of…
Kawakami, Sadayakko (1871–1946)
Sadayakko (also sometimes transliterated Sada Yakko or Sada Yacco) was Japan’s first modern actress, a pioneer of Western drama in Japan and one of the…