Raymond Fernand Loewy was one of the best known industrial designers of the 20th century. Born in France, he spent most of his professional career in the United States where he influenced countless aspects of North American culture. Among h...

Jean Paul Getty was an American industrialist. He founded the Getty Oil Company, and in 1957 Fortune magazine named him the richest living American, whilst the 1966 Guinness Book of Records named him as the world's richest private citizen,...

Sergei Prokofiev was one of the most prolific and celebrated Russian composers of the 20th century, Sergei Prokofiev is perhaps most famous for music he composed for the children's story Peter and the Wolf. He proved his talent as a pianist...

Howard Phillips Lovecraft — known as H. P. Lovecraft — was an American author of horror, fantasy, poetry and science fiction, especially the subgenre known as weird fiction. Lovecraft's guiding aesthetic and philosophical principle was w...

Vaslav Nijinsky was a Russian ballet dancer and choreographer of Polish descent. He grew to be celebrated for his virtuosity and for the depth and intensity of his characterizations. He could perform en pointe, a rare skill among male danc...

Boris Pasternak was a Soviet Russian poet, novelist, and literary translator. In his native Russian, Pasternak's first book of poems, My Sister, Life (1917), is one of the most influential collections ever published in the Russian language....

Boris Leonidovich Pasternak was a Nobel Prize-winning Russian and Soviet poet of Jewish descent, novelist and translator of Goethe and Shakespeare. In Russia, Pasternak is most celebrated as a poet. My Sister Life, written in 1917, is one...

Man Ray's photography would come to play an important role in the Surrealist movement. Although he had first bought a camera in 1915 to document his paintings, he now wanted to become a professional portrait photographer. Some of his very f...

From the 1920s until the 1970s Agatha Christie was the world's most popular mystery author, reportedly selling more than one billion books worldwide. While other mystery authors like Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett came and went, Chri...

Friedrich Anton Christian Lang was an Austrian-German-American film director, screenwriter and occasional film producer, one of the best known émigrés from Germany's school of Expressionism. His most famous films are the groundbreaking Metr...

The Eiffel Tower is a wrought-iron lattice tower on the Champ de Mars in Paris, France. It is named after the engineer Gustave Eiffel, whose company designed and built the tower. Constructed from 1887 to 1889 as the entrance to the 1889...

Sir Charles Spencer Chaplin, KBE (16 April 1889 – 25 December 1977) was an English comic actor, filmmaker, and composer who rose to fame in the era of silent film. Chaplin became a worldwide icon through his screen persona "the Tramp" and i...

Abel Gance was a French film director and producer, writer and actor. He is best known for three major silent films: J'accuse, La Roue, and the monumental Napoléon. He worked in the cinema from 1909, finally winning acclaim with Mater do...

Oskar Schlemmer was a German painter, sculptor, designer and choreographer associated with the Bauhaus school. In 1923 he was hired as Master of Form at the Bauhaus theatre workshop, after working some time at the workshop of sculpture. His...

Huddie William Ledbetter, was an American folk and blues musician, notable for his clear and forceful singing, his virtuosity on the twelve string guitar, and the rich songbook of folk standards he introduced. He is best known as Leadbel...