Search Results 1 - 25 of 202


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Mass Observation

Mass Observation was founded in 1937 by filmmaker Humphrey Jennings, poet Charles Madge, and ethnologist and explorer Tom Harrisson. It was originally conceived as a…

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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…

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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…

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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…

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Modernism in Africa

Though they often escape critical scrutiny, concepts such as modernism, modernity, and modernization are at the heart of the concept of development, and thus omnipresent…

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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…

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Cubism [REVISED AND EXPANDED]

Cubism is an art movement that emerged in Paris during the first decade of the 20th century. It was a key movement in the birth…

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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…

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Big Bang Theory

The Big Bang theory is a scientific model of the universe that posits a state of dense, centralized matter before the current, observable expansion of…

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Madge, Charles (1912–1996)

Charles Madge is best known as a founder of Mass Observation, but he was also an accomplished poet, a journalist, and a social scientist. Madge…

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Vijayan, O.V. (1930–2005)

O.V. Vijayan was a writer, thinker, political observer, and cartoonist, born in Palakkad, Kerala and rose to prominence with his first novel, Khasakkinte Itihasam (The…

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Contemporary African Christian Art

During the twentieth century, though little noticed by most observers, the Christian demographic in Africa exploded from 9.5 million in 1900, to over 400 million…

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Cotton, Olive (1911–2003)

Olive Cotton was one of Australia’s leading 20th-century photographers. She became a skilled observer of nature, incorporating both the principles of Pictorialism and modernism into…

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Anderson, Sherwood

Sherwood Anderson was an American short-story writer, novelist, and memoirist. He was a businessman turned author whose writing often rendered the lives of ordinary people…

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Primus, Pearl (1919–1994)

Dancer and choreographer Pearl Primus made significant strides toward securing a vital role for dance artists of color in American modern dance. Sparked by the…

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Dobell, William (1899–1970)

William Dobell was an icon of Australian art during his lifetime, renowned for portraiture but also for the controversy surrounding his being awarded the Archibald…

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Malinowski, Bronisław Kasper (1884–1942)

Born Bronisław Kasper Malinowski to a family in the Polish nobility (the szlachta), Malinowski made contributions to anthropology through his text Argonauts of the Western…

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Adams, Henry (1838–1918)

Although he was known as a historian during his lifetime, the work of Henry Adams—like that of Henry James—is often seen as an American precursor…

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Proust, Marcel (1871–1922)

Proust was a French novelist and essayist known for his masterpiece À la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time), published in seven…

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Nortje, Arthur Kenneth (1942–1970)

From the University of the Western Cape, Arthur Nortje left for Jesus College, Oxford, to which he returned after teaching for two years in Canada.…

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Tonalism

Tonalism is an often under-appreciated aspect of Australian painting, which developed from the mid-1910s to the 1950s. A technique pioneered by Max Meldrum (1875–1955) it…

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New Verse

New Verse was a British literary magazine founded by Hugh Ross Williamson (1901–1978) and Geoffrey Grigson (1905–1985). Essentially Grigson’s hobbyhorse, this little magazine would become…

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Marker, Chris (1921–2012)

Chris Marker was a French filmmaker, photographer, writer, and multi-media artist who is widely considered to be the foremost pioneer of the essay film. More…

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Popper, Karl (1902–1994)

Karl Raimund Popper was one of the twentieth-century’s most influential philosophers of science. Qualified to teach elementary school and to teach physics and mathematics at…

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Page, P. K. (1916–2010)

Patricia Kathleen Page described herself as a traveller, and invoked this status through both her poetry (under P. K. Page), and her visual art (under…