Architecture Subject Overview
Modernist architecture and design represented a utopian vision of how the built environment could be adapted to the needs to modern industrial society. Industrialization had…
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Visual Arts Subject Overview
Modernism in the visual arts is a complex term and currently the subject of much academic debate. However, this project demanded that we set boundaries…
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…
Expressionism
Expressionism was one of the foremost modernist movements to emerge in Europe in the early years of the twentieth-century. It had a profound effect on…
Dadaism
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…
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,…
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…
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…
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…
Carnap, Rudolf (1891–1970)
Rudolf Carnap was a German-American philosopher, and was widely regarded as one of most important of the 20th century. Politically engaged and inclined toward utopianism,…
Bunster, Patricio (1924–2006)
Patricio Bunster’s career was emblematic of a Latin American engagement with European modernism and unique in its exchange with German modern dance (Ausdruckstanz). Trained in…
Mayakovsky, Vladimir (1893–1930)
Vladimir Mayakovsky (МАЯКОВСКИЙ, ВЛАДИМИР) was a leading Russian poet of the twentieth century and representative of Russian Futurism, a modernist trend that emerged as an…
Grassic Gibbon, Lewis (1901–1935)
Lewis Grassic Gibbon, a pseudonym for James Leslie Mitchell, was a key writer of the early 20th-century Scottish Renaissance, most famous for his trilogy A…
Niemeyer, Oscar (1907–2012)
Oscar Ribeiro de Almeida Niemeyer Soares Filho, better known as Oscar Niemeyer, was a prolific Brazilian architect and one of the leading Latin American exponents of…
Walden, Herwarth (1878–1941)
Herwarth Walden was the force behind Der Sturm, an avant-garde journal, gallery, performance venue, bookstore and theater school in Berlin (1910–1932). Walden’s first wife, the…
Adorno, Theodor Wiesengrund (1903–69)
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,…
Windrush
‘Windrush’ is a term used to describe the post-World War II generation of writers from the English-speaking Caribbean who were published (and most often lived)…
Tezuka, Osamu (1928–1989)
Tezuka Osamu was a manga (comic) artist, animator, and film director often called the “God of Manga” for his enormous lasting impact upon the manga…
World Expositions of Paris (1889 and 1900) and Chicago (1893 and 1933)
The world expositions were monumental, public spectacles originating in the industrial fairs of early-nineteenth-century France and culminating in the Expositions Universelles of Paris (1889 and…
Frankfurt School
The Frankfurt School (Institute für Sozialforschung) was founded in 1923 by Felix Weil and fellow students Max Horkheimer and Friedrich Pollack, and was originally endowed…
Mannheim, Karl (1893–1947)
Karl Mannheim was one of the most influential sociologists of the early 20th century. He received a doctorate in philosophy from the University of Budapest,…
Sorel, Georges (1847–1922)
Georges Sorel was a French social thinker and political theorist. An engineer of modest bourgeois extraction, he was a state employee for twenty-five years. He…
Chernikhov, Iakov (1889–1951)
Iakov Georgievich Chernikhov was born in Pavlograd, Yekaterinenskav Gubernia, in the Russian Empire (now Dnepropetrovskaya oblast, Ukraine) into an impoverished petit bourgeois Jewish family. Having…
Brenner, Yosef Hayim (1881–1921)
Yosef Hayim Brenner was born in 1881 in Novi Mlini, in the Russian Empire (now Ukraine). Like many Hebrew and Yiddish writers of his generation,…
Luhan, Mabel Dodge (1879–1962)
Mabel Evans Dodge Sterne Luhan was a writer and patron of the arts who hosted circles of visual and literary artists at her homes in…