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…
Modernism in Latin America
In Latin American intellectual history, modernism is a term that can be usefully and accurately applied to at least two distinct intellectual movements: a clearly…
Modernism in East Asia
The term ‘modernism’ is commonly used to describe some of the literary and cultural production of the early twentieth century in China, Japan, and Korea,…
Modernism in Canada and The United States
In Canada and the United States modernism emerges from transnational engagements with global intellectual movements while also grappling with local intellectual, cultural, and political developments…
Cubism
Cubism is an influential modernist art movement that emerged in Paris during the first decade of the twentieth century. The term was established by Parisian…
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…
Photography
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…
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…
Troeltsch, Ernst (1865–1923)
Ernst Troeltsch was a liberal German Protestant theologian and philosopher of religion whose work spans the last decades of the German Empire and the early…
Maritain, Jacques (1882–1973)
Jacques Maritain was a leader among those who attempted to update and transform Catholic teaching for the modern world. Born to a Protestant republican, he…
Scheler, Max (1874–1928)
Scheler was a philosopher in the phenomenological school. His mother was Jewish; his father was Protestant. In high school he became a Catholic but abandoned…
Angura
Angura has been called the most effective fusion of art and politics from Japan’s turbulent years of social protest in the 1960s and 1970s. Angura…
Modern Chinese Woodblock Prints
The history of Chinese Modern prints is intimately tied to social and political developments in 20th-century China. On May 4, 1919, a protest against the…
Van Wyk, Christopher (1957–2014)
Born in Baragwanath, Soweto, Chris van Wyk proved an influential figure on the South African literary scene. Associated with the Black Consciousness movement, his volume…
Dudley, Jane (1912–2001)
Jane Dudley, a key figure in the radical dance movement of the 1930s, was a choreographer who developed her own distinctive voice within the modern…
Baird, Irene (1901–1981)
Canadian novelist and civil servant Irene Baird is best known for her second novel, Waste Heritage (1939), which was based on firsthand research into the…
Stephenson, Sam (1933–2006)
Sam Stephenson was a controversial Irish architect whose work throughout the 1970s and 1980s sparked debates about brutalist architecture and planning regulations. His best-known works…
Niebuhr, Reinhold (1892–1971)
Karl Paul Reinhold Niebuhr was an influential pastor and theologian in America. His thought initially centered on liberal pacifism, but it later turned to the…
Parnell, Charles Stewart (1846–1891)
Charles Stewart Parnell was the first president of the Irish Land League (1879) and the leader of the Irish Parliamentary Party (1879–1891). Born to a…
Kirchner, Ernst Ludwig (1880–1938)
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner was one of the major visual artists of the avant-garde in Germany in the first half of the twentieth century and is…
O’Casey, Sean (1880–1964)
Born into Dublin tenement life in 1880, Sean O’Casey (originally John O’Casey) went on to become one of Ireland’s most important playwrights, best known for…
First American Artists’ Congress (14–16 February 1936)
The First American Artists’ Congress convened over three days in New York City, and marked the formal establishment of the American Artists’ Congress (1936–1942). The…
African Hip-Hop
There are several features that distinguish African Hip-Hop music from the genre’s American origins. Principal targets of its social critique such as disenfranchisement and social…