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,…
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Intellectual Currents
This section focusses on the historical, sociological, philosophical, economic, political, and scientific context of modernism. Entries cover individuals, coteries, movements, and events. The primary criterion…
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,…
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…
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…
Modernism in South Asia
In South Asia, a certain haziness regarding modernism and modernity derives not only from the manner in which they can be elided with each other,…
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…
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…
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…
Sologub, Fyodor (1863–1927)
Fyodor Sologub was a symbolist poet, novelist and playwright, who was known for his decadent style of writing and his elaborate personal mythology centered on…
Carrington, Leonora (1917–2011)
Leonora Carrington was a painter, sculptor, poet and novelist who drew on mythology, fantasy and the occult to create images of a dreamlike world. She…
Lawrence, T. E. (1888–1935)
Thomas Edward Lawrence was an Oxford-trained medieval scholar, guerrilla leader, rebel, ascetic and spy. Lawrence was an inveterate self-fashioner in addition to being compellingly mythologized…
La Création du Monde
A ballet inspired by a creation fable in Blaise Cendrars’s Anthologie nègre (1921), La Création du monde (The Creation of the World) was produced by…
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…
Asturias, Miguel Ángel (1899–1974)
Miguel Ángel Asturias (1899–1974), the recipient of the 1967 Nobel Prize in Literature, is one of the most decorated Guatemalan writers in history. He was…
Sørensen, Villy (1929–2001)
Villy Sørensen was a prominent intellectual figure of 20th-century Denmark. His work spanned social commentary, philosophy, and literature. He was a sophisticated literary critic, author…
Apocalypse Poets
The Apocalypse Poets (or Apocalyptics) were a network of British writers centred around the largely forgotten Apocalypse poetry movement. Apocalypse poetry, inspired by the notion…
Djaya, Agus (1913–1994)
Agus Djaya was an Indonesian artist who rejected academic formalism in favor of a more expressive mode of painting, achieved by the flattening of space…
Delaunay, Robert (1885–1941)
Robert-Victor-Félix Delaunay was one of the precursors of abstract painting in Europe. He played a critical role in establishing abstract painting before World War I…
Lévy-Brühl, Lucien (1857–1939)
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…
Desnos, Robert Pierre (1900-1945)
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…
H.D. (Hilda Doolittle) (1886–1961)
Perhaps best known as one of the founding imagists, H.D. was also a novelist, essayist and actor active throughout the entire modernist period. From her…
Frazer, Sir James George (1854–1941)
James George Frazer was a Scottish classicist, social theorist, anthropologist, and historian of religion. He was a Fellow at Trinity College, Cambridge University. In addition…
Harrison, Jane (1850–1928)
Jane Ellen Harrison was a classicist credited with being the first woman to obtain a post in England as a ‘career academic’. Her scholarship combined…
Robert Graves
Robert Graves was a prolific poet and novelist whose career began with the semi-autobiographical Good-bye to All That (1929) but who became famous after the…