Pragmatism
Pragmatism is a method of inquiry that deems an object or belief adequately ‘true’ if it has utility for an individual or a collective. It…
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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…
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…
Dewey, John (1859–1952)
John Dewey was an American philosopher, educational theorist, and one of the three major pragmatists, along with William James and Charles Saunders Peirce. After obtaining…
Santayana, George (1863–1952)
George Santayana—philosopher, poet, novelist, memoirist, and critic—was born in Madrid, the son and grandson of diplomats, and was brought to America by his mother in…
Rivers, W. H. R. (1864–1922)
A pre-eminent British neurologist, psychologist, ethnologist and anthropologist, William Halse Rivers Rivers worked as a psychiatrist in British military hospitals, most famously Craiglockhart War Hospital…
James, William (1842–1910)
William James was an American psychologist and philosopher who worked across those fields to investigate the nature of consciousness, experience and free will. A founding…
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…
Locke, Alain LeRoy (1885–1954)
Alain Locke was an American philosopher, editor, and critic whose influence helped to inscribe modernist aesthetics within the history of black artistry, which he defined…
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…
Marsden, Dora (1882–1960)
Dora Marsden significantly influenced the aesthetics of Anglo-American Modernism largely through her creation of a series of journals.
Yoga
The term ‘yoga’ refers to a heterogeneous matrix of philosophies and practices that originated in India and developed into a school of thought sometime between…
New Verse
New Verse was a British literary magazine founded by Hugh Ross Williamson (1901–1978) and Geoffrey Grigson (1905–1985). Essentially Grigson’s hobbyhorse, this little magazine would become…
Selim, Jewad (1921–1961)
Born in Ankara, Turkey, Jewad Selim descended from an Iraqi family of artists. His father is Hajj Mohammad Selim, his sister Naziha Selim and brothers…
Cassavetes, John (1929--1989)
John Nicholas Cassavetes (1929--1989) was born to Greek parents in New York. He originally trained in the theater. His acting in commercial Hollywood films such…
Motherwell, Robert (1915–1991)
Robert Motherwell was one of the central founding members of the Abstract Expressionist movement in the United States during the 1940s and 1950s and served…
Claudel, Paul (1868–1955)
Both the power of Paul Claudel’s writing and the controversial character of his politics were so well known in their time that Auden, in the…
Communism, Socialism, Marxism, Bolshevism
Communism is first and foremost the reality of long-dismantled or nearly defunct regimes in China, the (former) Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, Cuba and North Korea:…
St. Denis, Ruth (1878–1968)
Ruth St. Denis is considered one of the founders of modern dance, even though the genre had not been named as such during her most…
Martínez Delgado, Santiago (1906–1954)
Alongside Sergio Trujillo, Santiago Martínez Delgado is considered to be one of the most representative Colombian Art Deco artists. The blooming period of Martínez’s work…
BLAST (1914–1915)
BLAST was an early modernist ‘little magazine’ edited by Wyndham Lewis in London. Not to be confused with Alexander Berkman’s San Francisco-based anarchist newspaper The…
Neue Sachlichkeit in Visual Arts [New Objectivity in Visual Arts]
Neue Sachlichkeit, which can be translated as “New Objectivity,” was the name given to a tendency in painting which, from about 1921 on, returned to…
Bodenwieser, Gertrud (1890–1959)
Gertrud Bodenwieser was an Austrian-born dancer, teacher, and choreographer who made major contributions on two continents to the development of what she called New Dance,…
Late Modernism
Late Modernism is a critics’ term rather than one that artists used themselves. Introducing it in the late 1970s, architectural critic Charles Jencks was probably…