Film Subject Overview
The Film Section includes entries on a variety of modernist genres, periods, movements, directors, films, and critical modes aligned with modernist aims and intellectual attitudes.…
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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,…
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…
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…
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…
Amichai, Yehuda (1924–2000)
Yehuda Amichai was born in Würzburg, Germany to an Orthodox Jewish family, and was raised speaking both Hebrew and German. His family migrated to Israel…
Von Sternberg, Josef (1894–1969)
Born in Vienna as Jonas Sternberg to impoverished Orthodox Jewish parents, Josef von Sternberg (1894–1969) migrated to New York in his teens; there he changed…
New Culture Movement (China)
The New Culture Movement (Xīn Wénhuà Yùndòng 新文化运动) originated at Peking University during the 1910s. The movement’s ideologies were reflected in the phrase Old China…
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…
Hung, Tung (1920–1987)
Hung Tung (Hong Tong) was a self-taught artist from Taiwan who rose to prominence during the 1970s. His naïve, intricate, and vibrant paintings are rich…
Zacharia, Paul (1945--)
Paul Zacharia, a short story writer, novelist, and essayist, introduced the notion of counter-modernity to Malayalam literature in the late 1960s. He rejected the self-definition…
Stalin, Joseph (1878–1953)
Joseph Stalin (Iusif Vassarionovich Dzhugashvili) was born in Gori, Russian Empire, which is part of present-day Georgia. He adopted the name ‘Stalin’ from the Russian…
Esenin, Sergei (1895–1925)
Sergei Alexandrovich Esenin was one of Russia’s major lyrical poets. He described himself as “the last poet of the village.” Raised in a peasant family,…
Bernstein, Eduard (1850–1932)
Eduard Bernstein was a prominent politician in the German Social Democratic Party (SPD), which in the late nineteenth century was the largest workers’ party in…
Il’f, Il’ia Arnol’dovich and Petrov, Evgeny Petrovich
The writing duo collectively known as “Il’f and Petrov” is best known for two early Soviet satirical novels featuring the wisecracking con artist Ostap Bender,…
Besant, Annie (1847–1933)
Born Annie Wood, Annie Besant was an English political activist and spiritualist with Irish heritage. She married British clergyman Frank Besant in 1867; they separated…
Kliuev, Nikolai Alekseevich (КЛЮЕВ, Николай Алексеевич) (1884–1937)
A poet of peasant origins who became a prominent figure in the Russian Silver Age, Kliuev grew up in Olenets province to the northeast of…
Tavener, John Kenneth (1944–2013)
John Tavener was an English composer. He studied at the Royal Academy of Music in London, where his composition teachers were Lennox Berkeley and David…
Rozanov, Vasily (1856–1919)
Leading writer, publicist, literary critic, and philosopher in late 19th- and early 20th-century Russia, Rozanov was born in Vetluga, Russia, in 1856, and remained in…
Parnok, Sofia Yakovlevna [Парнок, София Яковлевна] (1885–1933)
Sofia Parnok was born into a Jewish family, in the southern Russian city of Taganrog. Her father was a pharmacist; her mother, a doctor, died…
Vaihinger, Hans (1852–1933)
Hans Vaihinger is known chiefly for the fictionalist outlook developed in his 1911 Philosophie des als ob (The Philosophy of As-If), a text that has…
Zukofsky, Louis (1904–1978)
Louis Zukofsky was an American avant-garde poet active from the 1920s upto the 1970s. Zukofsky’s masterwork long poem, ‘A’ (in company with his many other…
Silpakorn University
Silpakorn University was officially inaugurated in Thailand in 1943 as a raising of the status of the School of Fine Arts, which had been founded…
Pärt, Arvo (1934–)
Arvo Pärt is an Estonian composer whose music has had phenomenal success worldwide since his radical stylistic change from an overtly modernistic aesthetic to a…
Ball, Hugo (1886–1927)
Born in Pirmasens on February 22, 1886, the German writer Hugo Ball is best known as the co-founder, with Tristan Tzara, of the Cabaret Voltaire…