Picabia, Francis (1879–1953)
A cavalier individualist, Francis Picabia became an internationally renowned avant-garde artist, spearheading Paris and New York Dada with his friend Marcel Duchamp and also contributing…
A cavalier individualist, Francis Picabia became an internationally renowned avant-garde artist, spearheading Paris and New York Dada with his friend Marcel Duchamp and also contributing…
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…
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…
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…
Both Dada and Surrealist writers and artists experimented with “automatic” creative production. Dadaists including Francis Picabia, Tristan Tzara, Hans Arp, and Kurt Schwitters wrote “automatic”…
Alfred Stieglitz (1864–1946) was an American art collector, dealer and photographer who was one of the earliest supporters of modernist art in the United States.…
Rolf de Maré’s Ballets Suédois was active from 1920 to 1925. It was the chief artistic rival to Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, and de Maré was…
Filmmaker, novelist, and critic René Clair (original name René-Lucien Chomette) was one of the foremost French film directors of the 1920s and 1930s. His first…
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,…
Born Fabian Avernius Lloyd in Lausanne, Switzerland to expatriate English parents, Arthur Cravan was a self-styled ‘poet-pugilist,’ nephew of Oscar Wilde, and husband of British…
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…
Marius de Zayas was a Mexican caricaturist, writer, collector, dealer, and curator who formed part of the New York avant-garde, and did much to promote…
Born Samuel (Samy or Sami) Rosenstock in Moineşti, Romania, Tristan Tzara was an avant-garde poet, performer, critic, and film director. Together with Hugo Ball, Hans…
Brother of the celebrated poet Sofia Parnok, Valentin Parnakh was a Russo-Soviet dancer, jazz musician, actor, poet, and translator, a mover and shaker of the…
Marie Laurencin was a painter, etcher, lithographer, illustrator, and decorative artist of the Parisian avant-garde in the early twentieth century. She is most widely known…
Fascist modernism is an artistic and literary movement emphasizing extreme nationalism, romantic anti-capitalism, and cultural renewal most closely associated with Fascist Italy, Vichy France, and…
Georges Braque was a major French modernist painter of the twentieth century who created and developed the cubist painting technique. Upon meeting Picasso in 1907,…
Rolf de Maré was a Swedish-born impresario, art collector, and philanthropist. Born into one of Sweden’s wealthiest families, he began collecting modern art at an…
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,…
The French-born Ecuadorian painter Manuel Rendón Seminario (also known as Manuel Rendón) is credited for introducing Geometric Abstraction to Ecuador together with compatriot Areceli Gilbert…
A passionate proponent of modernist arts and letters, publisher and author Margaret Caroline Anderson is best known as the intrepid co-editor (with Jane Heap, 1883–1964)…
As principal choreographer and dancer for the 1920s avant-garde troupe Les Ballets Suédois (Swedish Ballet), Jean Börlin contributed greatly to the modernist cauldron that was…
Guillaume Apollinaire (1880–1918) was a poet, literary and art critic, playwright, novelist, editor, and journalist. Born in Rome to a Polish-Russian mother and an unknown…
Born in Malaga, it was in Barcelona that Picasso first identified himself as a subversive Modernist with a critical, contestatory and transgressive praxis exposing the…
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…