Mass Dance
The early years of the twentieth century saw a proliferation of mass spectacles and events on a grand scale with thousands of participants, which frequently…
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Mass Observation
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…
Massine, Léonide (1896–1979)
Russian-born Léonide Massine’s career flourished in the cities of Western Europe, where he made his name as a lead dancer and choreographer for Serge Diaghilev’s…
Massaguer, Conrado (1889–1965)
Conrado W. Massaguer is remembered as the dominant force in graphic arts and popular periodicals in Cuba from the 1910s through the 1950s. During his…
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…
Montage
As an aesthetic principle, montage, defined as the assemblage of disparate elements into a composite whole often by way of juxtaposition, is most often associated…
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…
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…
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…
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 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…
Dance
Historically, modern dance scholarship has followed the contours of the field as defined by John Martin, the revered dance critic for The New York Times,…
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,…
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…
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…
Photography
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…
Abstract Expressionism
Abstract Expressionism was a movement initiated by a group of loosely affiliated artists that came together during the early 1940s, primarily in New York City.…
Modernism in South Asia
In South Asia, a certain haziness regarding modernism and modernity derives not only from the manner in which they can be elided with each other,…
Modernism in Africa
Though they often escape critical scrutiny, concepts such as modernism, modernity, and modernization are at the heart of the concept of development, and thus omnipresent…
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…
Readymades
In 1916, the French artist Marcel Duchamp coined the term “readymade” to describe a body of his own work in which everyday and often mass-produced…
Pritchard, John Craven (Jack) (1899–1992)
Jack Pritchard was a British furniture manufacturer and design patron who co-founded the Isokon design company in 1931. Under his leadership, Isokon developed mass-produced, standardized…
Madge, Charles (1912–1996)
Charles Madge is best known as a founder of Mass Observation, but he was also an accomplished poet, a journalist, and a social scientist. Madge…
Griffith, David Wark (1875–1948)
American film director D.W. Griffith was a pivotal figure in cinema’s ascendance as a mass medium and modern art form. He is best known for…