Milestones Of The Century
Human creativity has never been as diffuse nor as democratic as during the past century. The ever evolving fine-art forms have been joined by a host of new media--from cinema to radio and television and a wealth of computer-driven technologies--that have redefined the boundaries of art. And on the wings of these same technologies, the arts have come both to reach and to reflect more people on the planet than at any time in history.
1900 Dancer Isadora Duncan gives her first European performance, in London
1903 Henry James' The Ambassadors is published
1904 William Butler Yeats and John Millington Synge open Dublin's Abbey Theater
1904 Puccini's opera Madama Butterfly premieres, in Milan
1905 Edward Steichen and Alfred Stieglitz open the Little Galleries of Photography in New York City championing photography as an art form
1906 Picasso begins Les Demoiselles d'Avignon
1907 Florenz Ziegfeld produces the first of his 24 famed Follies
1911 Irving Berlin composes Alexander's Ragtime Band
1911 Frank Lloyd Wright builds Taliesin, his Wisconsin home and workshop
1913 The Armory Show in New York introduces Kandinsky and other post-impressionists and Cubists to the U.S.
1913 Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring premieres in Paris
1915 D.W. Griffith's Birth of a Nation opens
1915 Ruth St. Denis and Ted Shawn open Denishawn, first school of modern dance
1918 Magazines carrying installment of James Joyce's Ulysses are seized by the U.S. Post Office
1920 Eugene O'Neill wins first of four Pulitzers for Beyond the Horizon
1922 Louis Armstrong joins Joe ("King") Oliver's band in Chicago
1922 T.S. Eliot writes The Waste Land
1925 F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby is published
1925 A.A. Milne writes Winnie-the-Pooh
1927 The Jazz Singer, starring Al Jolson, becomes the first "talking" movie
1928 Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill write The Threepenny Opera
1928 Mickey Mouse makes his debut in Walt Disney's Steamboat Willie
1931 The Empire State (right) and Chrysler buildings open in New York City
1934 Germans view Leni Riefenstahl's Nazi-propaganda film Triumph of the Will
1935 Martha Graham choreographs Frontier
1935 Gershwin's Porgy and Bess opens on Broadway
1937 Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, first full-length animated film, appears in movie houses
1939 John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath is published
1940 I'll Never Smile Again, by Frank Sinatra and Tommy Dorsey, ranks No. 1 on Billboard's first hit-singles chart
1940 Constantin Brancusi completes abstract sculpture Bird in Space
1941 Orson Welles directs Citizen Kane
1942 Edward Hopper paints Nighthawks
1943 Rodgers and Hammerstein's Oklahoma! opens on Broadway
1947 The Actors Studio is founded in New York City to teach Stanislavsky's Method acting
1947 Christian Dior introduces the New Look
1950 Kurosawa's Rashomon premieres
1953 Lucy has a baby on I Love Lucy
1955 Allen Ginsberg publishes Howl and Other Poems
1956 Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe's My Fair Lady debuts in New York City
1955 Salvador Dali paints The Lord's Supper
1955 Marilyn Monroe stars in The Seven Year Itch
1957 Elvis breaks loose in Jailhouse Rock
1959 Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless launches cinema's New Wave
1960 Alvin Ailey's Revelations premieres
1962 Claes Oldenburg creates soft sculpture Two Cheeseburgers with Everything
1964 The Beatles perform on The Ed Sullivan Show
1964 Pop art exemplified by Roy Lichtenstein's Vicki!! I-I Thought I Heard Your Voice!, comes into vogue
1967 The musical Hair opens on Broadway
1969 Three-day Woodstock festival draws more than 300,000 people
1969 Portnoy's Complaint by Philip Roth is published
1969 Sesame Street debuts on public television
1970 The Mary Tyler Moore Show premieres
1971 Archie Bunker and All in the Family debut
1976 Mikhail Baryshnikov dances Twyla Tharp's Push Comes to Shove
1977 Alex Haley's mini-series Roots is a worldwide ratings smash
1977 Saturday Night Fever makes John Travolta, the Bee Gees and white suits cool
1979 Feminist artist Judy Chicago presents The Dinner Party
1980 John Lennon is murdered in New York City
1981 Cats opens in London
1981 The world tunes in to Dallas to see who shot J.R.
1982 E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial invades the planet
1984 Michael Jackson sells 37 million copies of Thriller
1987 Vincent Van Gogh's Irises fetches $53.9 million at auction
1988 Toni Morrison wins the Pulitzer Prize for Beloved
1992 Johnny Carson steps down as host of the Tonight Show
1993 Steven Spielberg's Schindler's List is released
1994 Grunge-rock singer Kurt Cobain commits suicide
1996 Rent debuts on Broadway
1997 The Getty Center in Los Angeles is completed
1998 Titanic becomes the top-grossing film of all time
1998 Seinfeld signs off