Albert Camus

Albert Camus (November 7, 1913 – January 4, 1960) was a French-Algerian author, philosopher, and journalist who won the Nobel prize in 1957. He is often associated with existentialism, but Camus refused this label. On the other hand, as he wrote in his essay The Rebel, his whole life was devoted to opposing the philosophy of nihilism. On the subject of his belief or not in God, he writes in the third volume of his notebooks: "I do not believe in God and I am not anatheist."

Albert Camus founded in 1949 the Group for International Liaisons in the Revolutionary Union Movement, according to the book Albert Camus, une vie of Olivier Todd, a group opposed to the atheist and communistic tendencies of the surrealistic movement of André Breton. Camus was the second-youngest recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature (after Rudyard Kipling) when he became the first African-born writer to receive the award, in 1957. He is also the shortest-lived of any literature laureate to date, having died in an automobile accident only three years after receiving the award.

Camus preferred to be known as a man and a thinker, rather than as a member of a school or ideology. He preferred persons over ideas. In an interview in 1945, Camus rejected any ideological associations: “No, I am not an existentialist.Sartre and I are always surprised to see our names linked…”

Jean Paul Sartre

Jean-Paul Charles Aymard Sartre (June 21, 1905 – April 15, 1980), normally known simply as Jean-Paul Sartre(pronounced [ʒɑ̃ pol saʁtʁ^ə]), was a French existentialist philosopher and pioneer, dramatist and screenwriter, novelist andcritic. He was a leading figure in 20th century French philosophy.

Samuel Beckett

Samuel Barclay Beckett (13 April 1906 – 22 December 1989) was an Irish writer, dramatist and poet.

Beckett's work is stark and fundamentally minimalist. As a follower of James Joyce, Beckett is considered by many one of the last modernists; as an inspiration to many later writers, he is considered one of the first postmodernists. He is also considered one of the key writers in what Martin Esslin called "Theatre of the Absurd".

He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1969 "for his writing, which—in new forms for the novel and drama—in the destitution of modern man acquires its elevation". Beckett was elected Saoi of Aosdána in 1984.

Clement Greenberg

Clement Greenberg (January 16, 1909 - May 7, 1994) was an influential American art critic closely associated withModern art in the United States. In particular, he promoted the Abstract Expressionist movement and was among the first critics to praise the work of painter Jackson Pollock.

Peggy Guggenheim

Peggy Guggenheim (August 26, 1898 – December 23, 1979) was an American art collector. Born Marguerite Guggenheim to a wealthy New York City family, she was the daughter of Benjamin Guggenheim, who went down with the Titanic in 1912 and the niece of Solomon R. Guggenheim, who would establish the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation.

Alfred H. Barr

Alfred Hamilton Barr, Jr. (January 2, 1902 – August 15, 1981), known as Alfred H. Barr, Jr., was an art historian and the first director of the Museum of Modern Artin New York City. From that position, he was one of the most influential forces in the development of popular attitudes toward modern art; for example, by arranging the blockbuster Van Gogh exhibition of 1935, in the words of author Bernice Kert "a precursor to the hold Van Gogh has to this day on the contemporary imagination."

Harold Rosenberg

Harold Rosenberg (February 2, 1906, New York City - July 11, 1978, New York City) was an American writer, educator, philosopher and art critic. He coined the term Action Painting in 1952 for what was later to be known as abstract expressionism. The term was first employed in Rosenberg's essay "American Action Painters" published in the December 1952 issue of ARTnews. The essay was reprinted in Rosenberg's book The Tradition of the New in 1959. The title is itself ambiguous as it both refers to American Action Painters and American Action Painters and reveals Rosenberg's political agenda which consisted in crediting US as the center of international culture and action painting as the most advanced of its cultural forms. This theme was already developed in a previous article "The Fall of Paris" published in Partisan Review in 1940.

Rosenberg was born in Brooklyn, educated at City College of New York and received a law degree from St. Lawrence College in 1927. Later, he often said he was "educated on the steps of the New York Public Library." From 1938 to 1942 he was art editor for the American Guide Series produced by the Works Progress Administration. Later he was deputy chief of domestic radio in the Office of War Information and a consult for the Treasury Department and the Advertising Council of America. Later, he was professor of social thought in the art department of the University of Chicago. 

Rosenberg is best known for his art criticism. Beginning in the early 1960s he became art Critic for the New Yorker magazine. His books on art theory include The Tradition of the New, (1959) The Anxious Object, (1964) Art Work and Packages, Art and the Actor and The De-Definition of Art. He also wrote monographs onWillem de Kooning, Saul Steinberg, and Arshile Gorky.

Rosenberg was also the subject of a painting by Elaine de Kooning. Along with Clement Greenberg and Leo Steinberg, he was identified in Tom Wolfe's 1975 bookThe Painted Word as one of the three "kings of Cultureburg", so named for the enormous degree of influence their criticism exerted over the world of modern art.

Saul Bellow wrote a fictional portrait of Rosenberg in his short story "What Kind of Day Did You Have?".

Miles Davis

Miles Dewey Davis III (May 26, 1926 – September 28, 1991) was an American jazz trumpeter, bandleader, andcomposer.

Widely considered one of the most influential musicians of the 20th century, Davis was at the forefront of almost every major development in jazz from World War II to the 1990s. He played on various early bebop records and recorded one of the first cool jazz records. He was partially responsible for the development of modal jazz, and jazz fusion arose from his work with other musicians in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

Davis belongs to the great tradition of jazz trumpeters that started with Buddy Bolden and ran through Joe "King" Oliver, Louis Armstrong, Roy Eldridge and Dizzy Gillespie, although unlike those musicians he was never considered to have the highest level of technical ability. His greatest achievement as a musician, however, was to move beyond being regarded as a distinctive and influential stylist on his own instrument and to shape whole styles and ways of making music through the work of his bands, in which many of the most important jazz musicians of the second half of the Twentieth Century made their names.

Davis was posthumously inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame on March 13, 2006. He has also been inducted into the St. Louis Walk of Fame, Big Band and Jazz Hall of Fame, and Down Beat's Jazz Hall of Fame.

Dizzy Gillespie

John Birks "Dizzy" Gillespie (October 21, 1917 – January 6, 1993) was an American jazz trumpeter, bandleader,singer, and composer. He was born in Cheraw, South Carolina, the youngest of nine children. Dizzie's father was a local bandleader, so instruments were made available to Dizzy. He started to play the piano at the age of 4. Together with Charlie Parker, he was a major figure in the development of bebop and modern jazz.

In addition to featuring in these epochal moments in bebop, he was instrumental in founding Afro-Cuban jazz, the modern jazz version of what early-jazz pioneer Jelly Roll Morton referred to as the "Spanish Tinge". Gillespie was a trumpet virtuoso and gifted improviser, building on the virtuoso style of Roy Eldridge but adding layers of harmoniccomplexity previously unknown in jazz. In addition to his instrumental skills, Dizzy's beret and horn-rimmed spectacles, his scat singing, his bent horn, pouched cheeks and his light-hearted personality were essential in popularizing bebop, which was originally regarded as threatening and frightening music by many listeners raised on older styles of jazz. He had an enormous impact on virtually every subsequent trumpeter, both by the example of his playing and as a mentor to younger musicians.