(Music) 1889-The “divine” Claudia Muzio, one of the most celebrated dramatic sopranos of the first half of the 20th Century (especially in Chicago, where she reigned supreme from 1922 to 1931), is born in Italy.
(Architecture) 1889-French engineer Gustave-Alexandre Eiffel completes a 985-foot-high tower for the Universal Exposition in Paris; initially protested by many artists, after 1900 the tower becomes a symbol of modernity in the arts.
(Architecture) 1889-Frank Lloyd Wright builds his home in Oak Park, Ill.
(Movies) 1889-Thomas Alva Edison demonstrates the Kinetophonograph, a machine that showed the first movie subjects (on newly invented Eastman film) in a peep show, synchronized with phonograph records.
(Visual art) 1890-Edvard Munch begins in Norway “The Frieze of Life,” which includes his masterpiece of urban anxiety, “The Scream.”
(Visual art) 1890-Photographer Jacob Riis publishes “How the Other Half Lives,” a collection of harrowing images of slum life in New York City.
(Literature) 1891-Harlem Renaissance novelist Nella Larsen, the daughter of a Danish mother and a West Indian father, is born in Chicago.
(Performance) 1891-“The Creole Show,” the first all-black musical to depart from the minstrel tradition, debuts in Boston and, later that year, plays at the Chicago World’s Fair for the entire season.
(Music) 1891-Conductor Theodore Thomas, one of the prime movers in American symphonic music during the late 19th Century, founds the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.
(Visual art) 1891-Painter and sculptor Paul Gauguin leaves France for Tahiti, where he will create works that begin to express a fascination with primitive cultures that persists among artists today.
(Architecture) 1891-With the completion of the Wainwright Building in St. Louis, architect Louis Sullivan fulfills his dictum that “the skyscraper should be a proud and soaring thing.”
(Visual art) 1891-French painter Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec designs his first poster, a commission from the Moulin Rouge dancehall in Paris, a series of which will become masterpieces of color lithography.
(Architecture) 1891-D.H. Burnham and Co.’s Reliance Building in Chicago anticipates the steel and glass high-rises of modernism by more than 50 years.
(Architecture) 1891-Daniel Burnham and John Wellborn Root’s austere Monadnock Building in Chicago recalls Egyptian architecture with its thick, tapering wall of masonry. Two years later, Holabird & Roche’s addition to the Monadnock uses the new technology of a thin curtain wall supported by an internal cage of metal.
(Literature) 1892-Friedrich Nietzsche completes publication of the fourth and final part of “Also Sprach Zarathustra,” an expression of his world view that is as much poetry as philosophy; the entire work will influence countless writers from Hermann Hesse to Jean Paul Sartre.
(Performance) 1892-“The Nutcracker” ballet, destined to become a holiday favorite everywhere for the next 100 years and counting, premieres in St. Petersburg, Russia.
(Architecture) 1893-The Beaux-Arts architecture and urban design of the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago’s Jackson Park draw millions to the city and set the aesthetic standard for scores of municipal centers in cities and towns across America.
(Music) 1893-“Falstaff,” Giuseppe Verdi’s final opera (he was nearly 80 when he wrote it) is premiered in Milan.
(Movies) 1893-W.K.L. Dickson constructs the world’s first movie studio, the “Black Maria” near Edison’s headquarters in Orange, N.J.
(Visual art) 1894-Aubrey Beardsley in London creates scandalous illustrations for Oscar Wilde’s play “Salome” that will influence – of all things – rock-music poster design nearly 80 years later.
(Music) c.1894-Impressionist composers, led by Claude Debussy, challenge the dominant German tradition in music.
(Performance) 1895-Marius Petipa and Lev Ivanov’s “Swan Lake,” revised from an earlier version and set to become the greatest full-length ballet of them all, premieres in St. Petersburg, Russia.
(Visual art) 1895-Artist Paul Cezanne receives a one-man exhibition that makes his ideas about color and structure in painting a leading influence on younger artists.
(Performance) 1895-Oscar Wilde’s “The Importance of Being Earnest” opens in London, his second hit of the season. Later in the year, his world crashes when he’s convicted for gross indecency.
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(Movies) 1895-Louis and Auguste Lumiere use their new camera-projector invention, the Cinematographe, for the first time to project films on a screen to a paying public. It is the birth of world cinema.
(Performance) 1896-Alfred Jarry’s “Ubu Roi” opens in Paris, ushering in futurism, radical theater and, eventually, performance art.
(Performance) 1897-Nonconformist American dancer-choreographer Isadora Duncan, whose style abandoned balletic convention for Grecian-inspired naturalism, gives her first recitals in London.
(Movies) 1897-Ex-Paris stage magician and entertainer and budding filmmaker Georges Melies constructs Europe’s first movie studio at Montreuil.
(Music) 1897-John Philip Sousa publishes “Stars and Stripes Forever.”
(Visual art) 1897-Charles Rennie Mackintosh revolutionizes design with his decorations and furniture for the Cranston Tea Rooms in Glasgow.
(Performance) 1898-The opening of the Moscow Art Theatre, which will present the first productions of plays by Anton Chekhov, Maxim Gorky and Mikhail Bulgakov, and whose founding director Konstantin Stanislavsky will influence generations of European and American actors through his acting “method.”
(Music) 1898-George Gershwin, the brilliant American composer and pianist who made jazz respectable in the concert hall (“Rhapsody in Blue”) and the opera house (“Porgy and Bess”), is born.
(Music) 1899-Edward Kennedy “Duke” Ellington is born. In the next 75 years, he will give jazz more compositions, hit songs, stage works, film scores, recorded masterpieces and sacred music than any other figure.
(Music) 1899-Scott Joplin publishes “Maple Leaf Rag,” the most popular of all ragtime compositions and a curtain-raiser for a prolific career as author of such indelible rags as “Easy Winners,” “Elite Syncopations” and “The Entertainer.”
(Architecture) 1899-Louis Sullivan’s Schlesinger & Mayer Store (now Carson Pirie Scott) on State Street exquisitely expresses its underlying steel frame and prophesizes the steel-and-glass architecture of the 20th Century.
20TH CENTURY
(Music) 1900-Aaron Copland, who went beyond establishing an indigenous style of American composition to take his place as one of the nation’s greatest, most influential and readily identifiable creative voices, is born.
(Literature) 1900-Theodore Dreiser writes “Sister Carrie,” his important naturalistic novel, not available until 1912 and expurgated then.
(Literature) 1900-Beatrix Potter completes the first of her children’s books, “The Tales of Peter Rabbit.”
(Literature) 1900-Joseph Conrad, the Polish-born author who distinguished himself as a novelist writing in English, publishes “Lord Jim.”
(Music) 1901-Jascha Heifetz, the Russian-born American violinist whose name became synonymous with technical and musical perfection in performance, is born.
(Visual art) 1901-Jacques-Henri Lartigue at age 5 becomes the first prodigy of photography, taking extraordinarily lively pictures of family and friends in France during the Belle Epoque.
(Movies) 1901-Walt Disney is born in Chicago.
(Literature) 1902-“The Wings of the Dove,” the first of Henry James’ great trio of master novels (with “The Ambassadors” and “The Golden Bowl”), comes out.
(Music) 1902-Son House is born in Riverton, Miss., eventually establishing himself as the greatest blues singer who ever lived.
(Music) 1902-Premiere of “Pelleas et Melisande” in Paris. Claude Debussy’s opera, a perfect realization of the composer’s Impressionist art, would attain a permanent place in the repertoire as one of the supreme achievements of 20th Century music.
(Literature) 1902-Poet Langston Hughes is born in Joplin, Mo.
(Architecture) 1902-Frank Lloyd Wright’s Ward Willitts House in Highland Park, Ill., the first great Prairie School design, is completed.
(Visual art) 1903-Walker Evans, an American dandy who created poetic, formally perfect photographs from the vernacular of American life, is born in St. Louis.
(Literature) 1903-W.E.B. DuBois, African-American poet/activist/scholar and co-founder of the NAACP, publishes “The Souls of Black Folks,” which quickly became a classic on race relations.
(Literature) 1903-Zora Neale Hurston, African-American novelist, folklorist and anthropologist and author of “Their Eyes Were Watching God,” is born.
(Visual art) 1903-Baron Adolph de Meyer becomes the first artist in fashion photography.
(Architecture) 1903-Frank Lloyd Wright’s austere Larkin Company Administration Building in Buffalo, N.Y., redefines the modern workplace with its central atrium and becomes a seminal monument of modern architecture.
(Performance) 1904-The Abbey Theatre, a home for the Irish dramas of William Butler Yeats, Lady Gregory, John Millington Synge and Sean O’Casey, opens in Dublin.
(Music) 1904-Chicago’s Orchestra Hall, designed by architect Daniel Burnham to the specifications of music director Theodore Thomas, is inaugurated as the new home of his Chicago Symphony Orchestra.
(Music) 1904-Vladimir Horowitz, the American piano virtuoso of Ukrainian origin who rose to become one of the most extraordinary, if not the most extraordinary, keyboard artist of this century, is born.
(Performance) 1904-George Balanchine, the visionary Russian choreographer who revolutionized ballet in the 20th Century, is born.
(Visual art) 1905-French painter Andre Derain becomes one of the first young artists in Paris to collect African art and channel its influence into his own work; he later will introduce it to Pablo Picasso.
(Visual art) 1905-Alfred Stieglitz opens the Photosecession Gallery at 291 Fifth Avenue in New York; as “291,” it will become the first showplace for modern art in America.
(Performance) 1905-“Salome,” the Richard Strauss opera (after Oscar Wilde’s play) that further challenged traditional tonality – with “amoral” subject matter to boot – premieres to scandal.
(Visual art) 1905-An exhibition in Paris of the works of Henri Matisse, Maurice Vlaminck and others gains for the artists the name “Fauves” (“Wild Beasts”) because of their expression of strong feeling through color.
(Music) 1906-Dmitri Shostakovich, the greatest and most internationally successful Russian composer of the 20th Century despite his having lived under the shadow of Stalinist political oppression for most of his career, is born.
(Performance) 1906-Innovative American choreographer Ruth St. Denis presents her first series of works in New York.
(Visual art) 1906-The Art Institute of Chicago becomes one of the earliest American museums to acquire a painting by African-American expatriate Henry Ossawa Tanner; it is “The Two Disciples at the Tomb,” from 1906.
(Literature) 1906-Upton Sinclair publishes his landmark muckraking novel “The Jungle,” set in the Chicago stockyards.
(Architecture) 1906-Frank Lloyd Wright’s Unity Temple pioneers the use of poured concrete and creates a remarkably serene, skylit interior space.
(Visual art) 1907-Pablo Picasso leaves unfinished “Les Desmoiselles d’Avignon,” which will become one of the key paintings of the century for its assimilation of African art and spatial treatment that leads directly to Cubism.
(Visual art) 1907-Alfred Stieglitz takes “The Steerage,” the photograph he will prize above all his others.
(Performance) 1907-Anna Pavlova introduces “The Dying Swan,” her signature solo choreographed by Michel Fokine.
(Music) 1908-Austrian conductor Herbert von Karajan, whose influence as “music director of Europe” during the postwar period, combined with his prolific recording career, made him an all-powerful figure in the musical life of the Continent, is born.
(Visual art) 1908-Robert Henri leads a group of American social realist painters called the “Eight”; they will later be known as the “Ashcan School.”
(Visual art) 1908-Balthasar Klossowski de Rola, the Polish-born French painter who under the name Balthus carried the standard for figure painting throughout the century, is born in Paris.
(Visual art) 1908-Henri Cartier-Bresson, the Fred Astaire of the hand-held camera, is born in Chanteloup, France.
(Music) 1909-American composer Elliott Carter, an enormously influential figure in postwar modernist music whose energy of invention is unrivalled in contemporary composition, is born.
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(Literature) 1909-Experimental, influential writer Gertrude Stein publishes her first work, “Three Lives.”
(Literature) 1909-Filippo Marinetti’s Futurist manifesto is published in Le Figaro, Paris, setting the stage for a series of convulsive art movements in the visual, theatrical and literary worlds.
(Visual art) 1909-Henri Matisse paints one of his lyrical masterpieces, “The Dance.”
(Performance) 1909-Impresario Serge Diaghilev presents his first program of ballets in Paris, a forerunner of his monumentally influential Ballets Russes, through which he commissioned scores by the likes of Maurice Ravel, Claude Debussy and Erik Satie and fostered, despite critical drubbing, the innovative choreography of famed dancer Vaslav Nijinsky.
(Architecture) 1909-Frank Lloyd Wright’s Robie House in Chicago’s Hyde Park culminates the development of the Prairie School.
(Architecture) 1909-Daniel Burnham and Edward Bennett’s Plan of Chicago, which shapes everything from Chicago’s lakefront to Navy Pier to North Michigan Avenue, is published.
(Music) 1910-A double bill of Mascagni’s “Cavalleria Rusticana” and Leoncavallo’s “I Pagliacci” is the first radio broadcast from the Metropolitan Opera in New York.
(Performance) 1910-Mikhail Fokine’s version of “Firebird,” set to Igor Stravinsky’s music and first in a series of flashy renditions in the 20th Century, premieres in Paris.
(Visual art) 1910-Francis Bacon, the greatest British painter since Joseph Mallord William Turner, is born in Dublin, Ireland.
(Visual art) 1910-1911-Within a few months, Wassily Kandinsky in Germany, Mikalojus Ciurlionis in Lithuania, Frantisek Kupka in Czechoslovakia, Manierre Dawson and Arthur Dove in the United States create the first examples of abstract art, each independent of the other.
(Visual art) 1911-Italian painter Giorgio de Chirico creates his first mysterious cityscape paintings, which will grow into “metaphysical pictures” that influence Surrealism.
(Literature) 1911-Edith Wharton publishes what would endure as her most famous novel, “Ethan Frome.”
(Visual art) 1912-Braque and Picasso start to use collage, adding bits of everyday reality -newspapers, advertising labels – to their paintings and drawings.
(Music) 1912-Al Jolson embarks on a recording career that includes several million-sellers and makes him the first major American pop singer.
(Literature) 1912-Thomas Mann’s novella “Death in Venice” is published.
(Literature) 1912-James Weldon Johnson publishes “The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man.”
(Performance) 1912-Nijinsky’s haunting, disturbing, controversial and enduring “The Afternoon of the Faun,” to music by Claude Debussy, premieres in Paris.
(Music) 1912-Hungarian conductor Georg Solti, one of the major podium figures of the 20th Century, who made perhaps his greatest impact internationally as music director of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, is born.
(Visual art) 1912-Wassily Kandinsky publishes his “On the Spiritual in Art,” one of the central documents of early non-objective painting.
(Literature) 1912-Harriet Monroe founds Poetry magazine in Chicago, a literary magazine still publishing some of our finest poets. Over the years, Poetry has published work by authors including Carl Sandburg, Ezra Pound and Marianne Moore. In 1915, T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” appeared in the pages of Poetry.
(Architecture) 1913-Impresario Gabriel Astruc opens the Theatre de Champs-Elysees in Paris, designed by Auguste Perret and decorated by Aristide Maillol. Maurice Denis, Edouard Vuillard and Ker-Xavier Roussel; it will become a veritable temple of modernism.
(Performance) 1913-Igor Stravinsky’s “Les Sacre du Printemps” (“The Rite of Spring”), with choreography by Nijinsky, has its premiere in Paris at the Theatre de Champs-Elysses. A key manifesto of modernism, its violent rhythms and jarring dissonances occasion one of the most famous riots in music history.
(Architecture) 1913-Architect Cass Gilbert’s Woolworth Building, is completed in lower Manhattan and is dubbed “The Cathedral of Commerce.”
(Literature) 1914-French novelist and critic Marcel Proust publishes at his own expense “Swann’s Way,” the first of the seven volumes that will comprise his vast intellectual and spiritual adventure, “Remembrance of Things Past.”
(Visual art) 1914-American-born British artist Jacob Epstein sculpts “Rock Drill,” a robot crossed with a jackhammer, under the influence of Vorticism, a short-lived offshoot of Futurism.
(Visual art) 1914-The Armory Show, the largest exhibition in North America to present modern art, opens in New York; the sensation is Marcel Duchamp’s futurist painting “Nude Descending a Staircase.”
(Music) 1914-Benjamin Britten, the most important British composer of the 20th Century, is born.
(Music) 1914-Luigi Russolo publishes “Art of Noises,” which challenges the way music is made and encourages that everyday objects be used as instruments.