Piaget, Jean (1896–1980)
Born in Neuchâtel, Switzerland, Jean William Fritz Piaget pioneered the field of cognitive developmental psychology using empirical methods to study children. Like Walter Benjamin, Piaget…
Born in Neuchâtel, Switzerland, Jean William Fritz Piaget pioneered the field of cognitive developmental psychology using empirical methods to study children. Like Walter Benjamin, Piaget…
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…
Born in Kassel, Franz Rosenzweig was a German philosopher of self-conscious Jewish affiliation and a charismatic leader in a circle of existentially minded contemporaries. His…
A foundational figure in sociology and social theory, Georg Simmel developed a methodology for analyzing modernity by tracing Capitalism’s disorienting effects on social relations, aesthetics,…
French philosopher, writer, artist and translator Pierre Klossowski was born in Paris and raised in Switzerland, Germany and France. His education was influenced by Rainer…
French author Louis Aragon was a member of the surrealist movement until he split with André Breton and began to devote more of his energy…
Collage is an artistic technique first used in the 20th century in which paper, photographs, fabric, and other items are glued onto paper or canvas.…
Born in Bácsborsód, Hungary, László Moholy-Nagy was one of the most influential teachers, designers, and theoreticians of twentieth-century Modernism. As a professor at the Bauhaus…
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…
Karl Blossfeldt was a sculptor and a teacher of plant modeling at the Unterrichtsanstalt des Königlichen Kunstgewerbemuseums (Institute of the Royal Arts and Crafts Museum)…
Siegfried Kracauer was a German cultural critic and theorist. He wrote film and cultural criticism for the Frankfurter Zeitung in the 1920s and early 1930s.…
A discussion group of French intellectuals established in Paris in March 1937, the Collège de Sociologie lasted until late 1939.
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…
Criticism is one of the fundamental concepts in Modernism and is defined by “the intensification, almost exacerbation, of [a] self-critical tendency” that began with Kant,…
Marieluise Fleiβer is best known for her critical dramas, though she also wrote short stories and an autobiographical novel. Fleiβer is associated with the genre…
Karl Kraus was a famous literary and cultural critic and a cult figure in Vienna’s intellectual scene around 1900. He was the editor of the…
Paul Klee was one of the most important and inventive figures in the development of Modernism in the visual arts. The Swiss-German artist's unusual oeuvre…
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,…
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…
A primarily francophone Jewish poet and writer of Romanian origin, Fondane became known as a critic, poet and dramaturge in Romania before leaving Bucharest for…
Arnold Zweig was born on November 10, 1887 to a Jewish family in Glogau, Silesia (now Glogów, Poland). As an anti-war and anti-fascist activist as…
The obsession with physical culture apparent throughout the tense and formative modernist movement extended well beyond sport, games, and purposive exercise through gymnastics, body building,…
Along with Arthur Rimbaud and Paul Verlaine, Stéphane Mallarmé is a preeminent poet of the latter part of the nineteenth century, notably as the head…
A critic and theorist, André Levinson continued the nineteenth-century continental tradition of dance and ballet criticism as part of philosophical and aesthetic inquiry: dance as…