Man Ray (1890-1976)
Born Emmanuel Radnitzky, Man Ray was one of the key innovators in modernist photography, film, and object making. He began his artistic career as a…
Born Emmanuel Radnitzky, Man Ray was one of the key innovators in modernist photography, film, and object making. He began his artistic career as a…
Berenice Abbott was a photographer, theorist, teacher, and inventor who first learned photography as Man Ray’s studio assistant in Paris. In 1926, she established an…
Emak Bakia (Basque for “Leave me alone”) is a 16-minute long black-and-white silent film directed by Man Ray. Subtitled a “cine-poem,” it features no obvious…
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…
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…
Jean Painlevé was a French scientist who was particularly well known for his documentary films about science and the natural world. He was the only…
Members of the Dada cultural and artistic movement began to experiment with film as a means to disseminate their stylistic partialities and cultural values through…
Tarō Okamoto [岡本太郎] (1911–1996) was one of Japan’s most visible artists during the post-World War II period. Born in Kawasaki, Kanagawa, his father was a…
Australian photographer Max Dupain distinguished himself as a professional and artistic presence from the 1930s well into the 1970s. His earliest works were in the…
New York-based art collector and gallerist, Julien Levy, was an important advocate for photography as a modern art medium in the 1930s and 1940s, and…
The Société Anonyme, Inc., Museum of Modern Art, was an international avant-garde exhibiting society that ran from 1920 to 1950. Founded in New York by…
A primarily francophone Jewish poet and writer of Romanian origin, Fondane became known as a critic, poet and dramaturge in Romania before leaving Bucharest for…
Assemblage is an artistic form that involves the transformation of non-art objects into two-dimensional or three-dimensional artistic compositions. Together with abstraction, it has been considered…
Erik Satie’s compositions, writings, and humor played an important role in many modernist movements of the twentieth century. Experimenting with simple forms, neoclassicism, mysticism, satire,…
Alexander Berkman (21 November 1870–28 June 1936), while largely remote from literary concerns, was closely connected to a number of key modernist figures, helping to…
Eugène Atget employed one of the defining instruments of modernity—the camera—to produce a comprehensive photographic record of what modern city planning was about to destroy:…
Considered one of the important experimental films of the prewar European avant-garde, Anemic Cinema (1926) is a short experimental film by Marcel Duchamp, who authored…
Jean Cocteau (Jean Maurice Eugène Clément Cocteau) was an influential, prolific, multi-talented French artist, writer, critic and filmmaker. He wrote poetry, plays, libretti for ballets,…
New Zealand native Len Lye was an experimental innovator in painting, sculpture, documentary film, and animation. After studying indigenous art in Samoa, he emigrated to…
A poet, journalist, publisher, radical intellectual, and political activist, Nancy Cunard operated at or near the centre of multiple modernist discourses. Her early poetry, especially…
Yves Tanguy was a French painter and one of the principal members of the Surrealist group. His main artistic output consisted of oil paintings, which…
The Machine-AgeExposition took place from 16–28 May 1927 at 119 West 57th Street in Steinway Hall, a commercial space in Manhattan, New York. It exposed…
Robert Pierre Desnos (1900-1945) was a surrealist French poet whose diverse work included scripts for film and stage; journalism; essays; advertisements; cantatas; children's fables; and…
George Johann Carl Antheil was an American composer, pianist, author, and inventor. He is best-known for his 1924 composition, Ballet Mechanique, originally scored for sixteen…