- Le Corbusier
Charles-Edouard Jeanneret, who chose to be known as Le Corbusier, was a Swiss and later French, (Swiss-born) architect and writer, who is famous for his contributions to what now is called Modern Architecture. He was a pioneer in theoretical studies of modern design and was dedicated to providing better living conditions for the residents of crowded cities. His career spanned five decades, with his iconic buildings constructed throughout central Europe, … - Ezra Loomis Pound
Ezra Pound was born on October 30, 1885 in the small mining town of Hailey, Idaho . He had an average middle-class childhood in Wyncote, Philadelphia , where his father held the position of assistant assayer for the United States Mint . Pound left high school, and attended the University of Pennsylvania , where he befriended another notable poet of the twentieth century, William Carlos Williams , who was studying medicine at the time. - Wallace Stevens
Wallace Stevens was a major American Modernist poet. He was born in Reading, Pennsylvania - D. H. Lawrence
David Herbert Richards Lawrence (11 September, 1885 - 2 March, 1930) was a very important and controversial English writer of the 20th century, whose prolific and diverse output included novels, short stories, poems, plays, essays, travel books, paintings, translations, literary criticism and personal letters. His collected works represent an extended reflection upon the dehumanizing effects of modernity and industrialisation. - William Carlos Williams
Dr. William Carlos Williams (sometimes known as WCW) (September 17, 1883 - March 4, 1963), was an American poet closely associated with modernism and Imagism. - Joseph Conrad
Joseph Conrad was a Polish-born novelist who spent most of his adult life in Britain. Some of his works have been labelled romantic: Conrad's supposed "romanticism" is heavily imbued with irony and a fine sense of man's capacity for self-deception. Many critics regard Conrad as an important forerunner of Modernist literature. Conrad's narrative style and anti-heroic characters have influenced many writers, including Ernest Hemingway, D.H. Lawrence, Graham Greene, … - Max Weber
Max Weber was an American painter who worked in the style of cubism before migrating to Jewish themes towards the end of his life. Born in Białystok, part of Poland belonging to Russia at that time, he immigrated to America with his parents at the age of 10. He studied art at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn under Arthur Wesley Dow. - Henry Moore
Sir Henry Spencer Moore OM CH FBA, (30 July 1898 - 31 August 1986) was a British artist and sculptor. The son of a mining engineer, born in the Yorkshire town of Castleford, Moore became well known for his larger-scale abstract cast bronze and carved marble sculptures. Substantially supported by the British art establishment, Moore helped to introduce a particular form of modernism into the United Kingdom. - W. H. Auden
Wystan Hugh Auden IPA: ;, who signed his works W. H. Auden, was an Anglo-American poet, regarded by many as one of the greatest writers of the 20th century. His work is noted for its stylistic and technical achievements, its engagement with moral and political issues, and its variety of tone, form, and content. The central themes of his poetry are: personal love, politics and citizenship, religion and morals, … - Marianne Moore
Marianne Moore was a Modernist American poet and writer. - Marcel Breuer
Marcel Lajos Breuer, architect and furniture designer, was an influential Hungarian-born modernist of Jewish descent. One of the fathers of Modernism, Breuer showed a great interest in modular construction and simple forms. Known as Lajkó, Breuer studied and taught at the Bauhaus in the 1920s, stressing the combination of art and technology, and eventually became the head of the school's cabinet-making shop. - Robert Venturi
Robert Charles Venturi (June 25, 1925 -) is an award winning American architect. Based in Philadelphia, he worked under Eero Saarinen and Louis Kahn before forming his own firm with John Rauch. As a faculty member at the University of Pennsylvania, Venturi met his future wife, the architect and planner Denise Scott Brown, who joined the firm in 1967. After Rauch's resignation in 1989, the firm took its current form and was named Venturi, Scott Brown and Associates, Inc.. - Stuart Davis
Stuart Davis (December 7, 1892 - June 24, 1964), American painter, was born in Philadelphia to Edward Wyatt Davies and Helen Stuart Davies. His parents were both worked in the arts. His father was the art editor of the Philadelphia Press while his mother was a sculptor. Davis studied painting, and art under Robert Henri, the leader of the early modern art group the Eight; he was one of the youngest painters to exhibit in the controversial Armory Show of 1913. - Richard Neutra
Richard Joseph Neutra (April 8, 1892 - April 16, 1970) is considered one of modernism's most important architects. Neutra was born in Vienna, Austria in 1892. He studied under Adolf Loos, was influenced by Otto Wagner, and worked for a time in Germany in the studio of Erich Mendelsohn. He moved to the United States by 1923 and became a naturalized citizen in 1929. - Louis Sullivan
Louis Henri Sullivan (September 3, 1856 - April 14, 1924) was an American architect, called the "father of modernism". He is considered by many as the creator of the modern skyscraper, was an influential architect and critic of the Chicago School, and was a mentor to Frank Lloyd Wright. - Pierre Boulez
Pierre Boulez (b. March 26 1925) is a French composer and conductor of contemporary classical music. - Philip Guston
Philip Guston (July 27, 1913 - June 7, 1980) was a notable painter and printmaker in the New York School, which included many of the Abstract Expressionists, such as Jackson Pollock and Willem De Kooning. In the sixties Guston helped to lead the transition from Modernism to Post-Modernism in painting, abandoning the so-called "pure abstraction" of abstract expressionism in favor of more cartoonish renderings of various personal symbols and objects. - Karen Armstrong
Karen Armstrong (b. November 14 1944 in Wildmoor, Worcestershire, England) is an author who writes on Judaism, Christianity, Islam and Buddhism. Armstrong is a former nun, now a "freelance monotheist". She has advanced the theory that fundamentalist religion is a response to and product of modern culture. She was born into a family with Irish roots who after her birth moved to Bromsgrove and later to Birmingham. - Aaron Copland
Aaron Copland was an American composer of concert and film music, as well as an accomplished pianist. Instrumental in forging a distinctly American style of composition, he was widely known as “the dean of American composers.” Copland's music achieved a difficult balance between modern music and American folk styles, and the open, slowly changing harmonies of many of his works are said to evoke the vast American landscape. - Charles Jencks
Charles Jencks (b. 1939) is an American architect, landscape architect and architectural theorist. His books on the history and criticism of Modernism and Postmodernism were widely read in architectural circles and beyond. Born in Baltimore, he first studied English Literature at Harvard University, later gaining an MA in architecture from the Graduate School of Design in 1965. He also has a PhD in Architectural History from University College, London. - Benjamin Britten
Edward Benjamin Britten, Baron Britten of Aldeburgh, OM CH (22 November 1913 – 4 December 1976) was a British composer, conductor, and pianist. - Claude Debussy
Achille-Claude Debussy (August 22, 1862 - March 25, 1918) was a French composer. Along with Maurice Ravel he is considered the most prominent figure working within the style commonly referred to as Impressionist music, though he himself intensely disliked the term when applied to his compositions. Debussy was not only among the most important of all French composers but also a central figure in all European music at the turn of the twentieth century. - Russel Wright
Russel Wright was one of the most influential Industrial designers of the 20th century. Born of Quaker parents in Lebanon, Ohio, he spent the entirety of his professional career in New York. Through his immensely popular and widely distributed housewares and furnishings, he revolutionized the way Americans lived and organized their homes in the mid 20th century. His simple, practical style was influential in persuading ordinary Americans to embrace Modernism in the 1930s, … - George Gershwin
George Gershwin (September 26, 1898 - July 11, 1937) was an American composer. He wrote most of his vocal and theatrical works in collaboration with his elder brother, lyricist Ira Gershwin. George Gershwin composed both for Broadway and for the classical concert hall. He also wrote popular songs with success. Many of his compositions have been used on television and in numerous films, and many became jazz standards. - Djuna Barnes
Djuna Barnes (June 12, 1892 - June 18, 1982) was an American writer who played an important part in the development of 20th century English language modernist writing by women and was one of the key figures in 1920s and 30s bohemian Paris after filling a similar role in the Greenwich Village of the teens. Her novel "Nightwood" became a cult work of modern fiction, helped by an introduction by T.S. Eliot. - Michael Fried
Michael Fried (born 1939, New York City) is an influential Modernist art critic and art historian. He studied at Princeton University and Harvard University and was a Rhodes Scholar at Merton College, Oxford University. He is currently the J.R. Herbert Boone Professor of Humanities and Art History at Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland, United States. - Jean Rhys
Jean Rhys, originally Ella Gwendolen Rees Williams, was a Caribbean novelist who wrote in the mid 20th century. Her first four novels were published during the 1920s and 1930s, but it was not until the publication of "Wide Sargasso Sea" in 1966 that she emerged as a significant literary figure. A "prequel" to Charlotte Brontë's "Jane Eyre", "Wide Sargasso Sea" won a prestigious WH Smith Literary Award in 1967. - Elliott Carter
Elliott Cook Carter, Jr. (born December 11, 1908) is an American composer of classical music. Elliott Carter was born in New York, New York. He was encouraged as a young musician by Charles Ives and studied English and music at Harvard University and Longy School of Music, where his professors included Walter Piston and where he sang with the Harvard Glee Club. He then went to Paris to study with Nadia Boulanger, … - Walter Benn Michaels
Walter Benn Michaels is a literary theorist, known as the author of "Our America: Nativism, Modernism and Pluralism" (1995) and "The Shape of the Signifier: 1967 to the End of History" (2004). Michaels’s work has generated a powerful set of arguments and questions around a host of issues that are central to literary studies: problems of culture and race, identities national and personal, the difference between memory and history, disagreement and difference, … - Mina Loy
Mina Loy (December 27, 1882 - September 25, 1966) was an artist, poet, playwright, novelist, Futurist, actor, Christian Scientist, designer of lamps and bohemian extraordinaire. She was one of the last of the first generation modernists to achieve posthumous recognition. Her poetry was admired by T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, Basil Bunting, Gertrude Stein, and Yvor Winters, among others. - Kurt Weill
Kurt Julian Weill (March 2, 1900 - April 3, 1950), was a German, and in his later years German-American, composer active from the 1920s until his death. He was a leading composer for the stage, as well as writing a number of concert works. Over fifty years after his death, his music continues to be performed both in popular and classical contexts. In Weill's lifetime, his work was most associated with the voice of his wife, Lotte Lenya, … - Iannis Xenakis
Iannis Xenakis was one of the most important Greek composers of the 20th century, a major contributor to musical modernism, and an architect - Maurice Ravel
Joseph-Maurice Ravel (March 7, 1875 - December 28, 1937) was a French composer and pianist of the impressionistic period, known especially for the subtlety, richness and poignancy of his music. His piano, chamber music and orchestral works have become staples of the concert repertoire. Ravel's piano compositions, such as "Jeux d'eau", "Miroirs" and "Gaspard de la Nuit", demand considerable virtuosity from the performer, and his orchestral music, … - Anthony Caro
Sir Anthony Caro, OM, CBE, (born 8 March 1924 in New Malden, Surrey) is an English, abstract sculptor whose work is characterised by assemblies of metal using 'found' industrial objects. Caro was educated at Charterhouse public school and Christ's College, Cambridge, earning a degree in engineering. In 1946, after time in the British Navy, he started at the Regent Street Polytechnic (now the University of Westminster) to study sculpture for a year. - Bruno Taut
Bruno Julius Florian Taut, was a prolific German architect, urban planner and author active in the Weimar period. Taut is best known in the English-speaking world for his theoretical work, speculative writings and a handful of exhibition buildings. Taut's best-known single building is the prismatic dome of the Glass Pavilion at the Cologne Werkbund Exhibition (1914). His sketches for "Alpine Architecture" (1917) are the work of an unabashed Utopian visionary, … - Albert Frey
Albert Frey (b. October_18 1903, Zurich - d. November 14 1998, Palm Springs, California) was a prolific architect who established a style of modern architecture centered around Palm Springs, California that came to be known as 'desert modernism.' Born in Zurich, Switzerland, Frey received his architecture diploma in 1924 from the Institute of Technology in Winterthur, Switzerland. - Peter Ackroyd
Peter Ackroyd (born October 5 1949, London) is an English author. Ackroyd's mother worked in the personnel department of an engineering firm and his father had left home when Ackroyd was a baby. He was reading newspapers at the age of 5 and wrote a play about Guy Fawkes when he was 9. He also first realised he was gay at the age of 7. Ackroyd was educated at St. Benedict's, Ealing and at Clare College, Cambridge, … - Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk
Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk is an American architect and urban planner. She was born in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania on December 10, 1950. A member of the first class of women to graduate from Princeton University, she received her undergraduate degree in architecture and urban planning from Princeton and her master's degree in architecture from the Yale School of Architecture. In 1977, Plater-Zyberk was co-founder of the Miami firm Arquitectonica, with her husband Andrés Duany, … - Luciano Berio
Luciano Berio (October 24, 1925 - May 27, 2003) was an Italian composer. He is noted for his experimental work (in particular his 1968 composition "Sinfonia" for voices and orchestra) and also for his pioneering work in electronic music. - Barrett Watten
Barrett Watten (born September 18, 1948) is an American poet, editor, and educator often associated with the Language poets. Since 1994, Watten has taught modernism and cultural studies at Wayne State University in Detroit. Other areas of research include postmodern culture and American literature; poetics; literary and cultural theory; visual studies; the avant-garde and digital literature. He is married to the poet Carla Harryman.
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