Symbolism Overview
Symbolism is a late-nineteenth-century literary movement centred mostly around the work of poets such as Stéphane Mallarmé, Arthur Rimbaud, Paul Verlaine, Philippe Villiers de L’Isle-Adam,…
Symbolism is a late-nineteenth-century literary movement centred mostly around the work of poets such as Stéphane Mallarmé, Arthur Rimbaud, Paul Verlaine, Philippe Villiers de L’Isle-Adam,…
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…
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…
Exploring modernity and its intellectual trends in the Middle East is a very fitting endeavour, as ‘Middle East’ itself is a ‘modern’ term which has…
Ismael Nery (b. 1900, Belém do Pará, Brazil; d. 1934, Rio de Janeiro) was the mystical artist of Brazilian modernism. For him, art was a…
The term ‘theosophy’, derived from the Greek theo (‘divine’) and sophia (‘wisdom’), refers generally to divine wisdom and its mystical interpretation. Arising in the third…
Aleister Crowley was an occultist, writer, and mystic who founded the spiritual philosophy of Thelema. Crowley’s work combines European, South Asian, and Chinese esoteric teachings.…
Writer, professor, musicologist, biographer, essayist, novelist, playwright, great letter writer and diarist, mystic in search of a pacified world and of a heroic heart, Romain…
French writer of the beginning of the twentieth century Charles Péguy was a socialist, a dreyfusard, a republican, a nationalist, a catholic, a mystic, successively…
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,…
Cambridge philosopher, metaphysician, and mystic John McTaggart Ellis McTaggart was a key figure in initiating modernist shifts in philosophy by challenging traditional understandings of Christian…
Marsden Hartley was a modernist painter and writer who worked in a variety of styles, from abstract to still life. After leaving school at fifteen…
Born in Ain Beida, Algeria to a Sufi family, Rachid Koraïchi’s art is often framed within a tradition of Sufi spirituality in which aesthetics and…
Jules Laforgue is one of the French ‘poètes maudits’ of the late nineteenth century. Maintaining a certain distance from literary movements, he developed a unique…
Walter Bendix Schönflies Benjamin was a philosopher, essayist and literary critic associated with the Institut für Sozialforschung (Frankfurt Institute for Social Research). Initially trained in…
Novelist, painter, and public intellectual, Bertram Brooker (1888–1955) was a leading force in the modernizing of Canadian culture in the early twentieth century. Brooker believed…
Lucien Lévy-Brühl was a French philosopher who taught philosophy at the Sorbonne from 1899 to 1927. Investigating the psychology of ‘primitive’ societies, his book Les…
Leading writer, publicist, literary critic, and philosopher in late 19th- and early 20th-century Russia, Rozanov was born in Vetluga, Russia, in 1856, and remained in…
Gershom Scholem was born in Berlin to Arthur and Betty Hirsch Scholem. Though raised in an assimilated Jewish and German nationalist household, Gerhard Scholem grew…
Ahmad Sadali was an iconic figure of the Bandung School and remains a key influence as a pioneer in modern abstract painting in Indonesia. Sadali,…
Born Theodor Ludwig Wiesengrund to an Italian Catholic mother and an assimilated Jewish father, Adorno would take his mother’s vaguely aristocratic last name. Philosopher, aesthetician,…
A proletarian modernist, the poet Lola Ridge is best known for her work published between 1918 and 1922, which coincided with her editorship of Broom…
Aldous Huxley is an English writer who is best known for his dystopian novel Brave New World (1932) and his disquisition on psychedelic substances, The…
Andrei Bely (1880–1934) was a writer of prose, poetry, literary criticism and memoirs, as well as a leading theorist and representative of the ‘second wave’…
Malka Heifetz-Tussman was a twentieth-century American Yiddish poet. She was born in 1896 in the region of Volyn in Ukraine (then part of the Russian…