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…
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Bauhaus
In 1919 a young architect named Walter Gropius initiated one of the most modern art schools of the twentieth century in the city of Weimar…
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…
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,…
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…
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…
Carrington, Leonora (1917–2011)
Leonora Carrington was a painter, sculptor, poet and novelist who drew on mythology, fantasy and the occult to create images of a dreamlike world. She…
Méliès, Georges (1861–1938)
Georges Méliès (born Marie-Georges-Jean Méliès) was a French showman, illusionist, and filmmaker best known for his early silent fantasy and science fiction films, such as…
Warner, Sylvia Townsend (1893–1978)
Sylvia Townsend Warner was the author of novels, short stories, poetry, journalistic non-fiction, and literary criticism. Her works often inhabit settings at opposite ends of…
Lovecraft, H. P. (1890–1937)
H. P. Lovecraft was an American pulp author in the 1920s and 1930s. His work, primarily published in the magazine Weird Tales, helped create the…
Persona
Ingmar Bergman’s Persona (Sweden, 1966) is often described as an intense drama about the relationship between a famous actress and the inexperienced nurse assigned to…
Arrivi, Francisco (1915–2007)
Francisco Arriví was instrumental in developing a modern theater in Puerto Rico during the 1940s–1960s. A playwright, poet, essayist, and tireless promoter of Puerto Rican…
Bulgakov, Mikhail Afanas’evich (Булгаков, Михаил) (1891–1940)
Mikhail Bulgakov was a Russian prose writer and playwright. In the last 25 years of the Soviet Union’s existence Bulgakov was one of its most…
Lasker-Schüler, Else (1868–1945)
Else Lasker-Schüler can be regarded as the most important German female modernist and is one of the few women affiliated with the Expressionist movement. Her…
Fantômas
The first and most famous of many films based on the eponymous villain created by writers Marcel Allain and Pierre Souvestre, the silent crime serial…
Kahlo, Frida (1907–1954)
One of the most recognizable Mexican painters of the twentieth century, Frida Kahlo produced around 200 paintings, dozens of drawings and an illustrated journal. She…
Cabinet of Doctor Caligari (1922)
Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari [Cabinet of Doctor Caligari, 1922] is a silent German Expressionist film made by Robert Wiene, and is considered among the…
Black Girl (1966)
Black Girl is the first feature-length sub-Saharan African production directed by Ousmane Sembène, also known as the father of African cinema. The film traces the…
Fischinger, Oskar (1900–1967)
Oskar Fischinger (b. 22 June 1900, Gelnhausen, Germany; d. 31 January, 1967, Los Angeles, US) was one of the most influential German abstract experimental animators and creators…
Cavalcanti, Alberto de Almeida (1897--1982)
Alberto Cavalcanti was a Brazilian-born film director and producer who made significant contributions to documentary and post-war cinema. In 1926 he made his first film,…
Clair, René (1898–1981)
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…
Sjöström, Victor David (1879–1960)
Victor Sjöström (also known as victor Seastrom) was a Swedish film director, screenwriter, and actor. He is, with Mauritz Stiller, the joint founding father of…
Reiniger, Lotte (1899–1981)
Berlin-born Charlotte ‘Lotte’ Reiniger, the first woman animator, was the foremost practitioner of silhouette animation (paper cut-outs lit from beneath and manipulated one frame at…
Comics
The early twentieth century saw the rise of the modern comic strip, the comic book and the artist’s book as distinctive forms of graphic narrative…
Busoni, Ferruccio (1866--1924)
Ferruccio Busoni was an Italian composer, pianist, transcriber, editor, and writer on music who spent most of his career in Germany. A child prodigy who…