Reiulf Steen

Reiulf Steen was a Norwegian politician for the Norwegian Labour Party. He was active in the Labour Party from 1958 to 1990, serving as deputy party chairman from 1965 to 1975 and chairman from 1975 to 1981.

Born in Hurum, Steen was elected leader of the regional Labour Party affiliate at age 14. He started out his professional career as a factory worker but soon took a job as a journalist in the newspaper Fremtiden, in Drammen. He rose quickly through the ranks of his party, chairing the Workers' Youth League from 1961 to 1964.

He later served as minister of transportation from 1971 to 1972 and minister of commerce and trade from 1979 to 1981. From 1977 to 1993 he was a member of Parliament, representing the constituencies Oslo and Akershus. He was the vice president of the Socialist International from 1978 to 1983 and chaired its committee on Chile from 1975 to 1990. He maintained a long-standing interest in Latin America and was appointed Norwegian ambassador to Chile in 1992, a tenure that lasted until 1996.

In later years, his memoirs and personal recollections affected public opinion.[citation needed] He related accounts of his own psychiatric problems, difficulties within the Labour Party, and other contemporary issues.[citation needed] He has also written columns for several of the country's leading newspapers, dealing with matters such as the EU, the war in Iraq, and the shift to the right of his party in recent years. He was also active in ATTAC and chaired the Norwegian branch of the European Movement (1999–2001), Norsk Folkehjelp (1999–2003) and the Norwegian branch of the Helsinki Committee for Human Rights (1986–1992).

He died on 5 June 2014 and was survived by his wife, four children from a prior marriage and step-family.

Vittorio Giardino

Vittorio Giardino is an Italian comic artist.

Giardino was born in Bologna, where he graduated in electrical engineering in 1969. At the age of 30, he decided to leave his job and devote himself to comics. Two years later his first short story, "Pax Romana", was published in La Città Futura, a weekly magazine published by the Italian Communist Youth Federation and edited by Luigi Bernardi.

In 1982 Giardino created a new character: Max Fridman, an ex-secret agent involved in the political struggle in 1930s Europe. His first adventure, Hungarian Rhapsody was serialized in the first four issues of magazine Orient Express, bringing Giardino in the limelight of the international comic scene. Max Fridman adventures have been published in 18 countries. Some of the prizes the series won include Lucca Festival's Yellow Kid (de) and Brussels' St. Michel.

Starting in 1984, Giardino produced a number of short stories for the Italian magazine Comic Art, where he introduced Little Ego, a young and sexy girl inspired by Winsor McCay's Little Nemo who stars in one-page dreamy erotic stories.

In 1991 Giardino created a new character, Jonas Fink for the Il Grifo magazine. Jonas is a young Jew in 1950's Prague whose father is arrested by the communist police. He and his mother have to cope with the discrimination and oppression of the Stalinist regime. The book, collected as A Jew in Communist Prague, won the Angoulème Alfred prize for best foreign work in 1995 as well as a Harvey Award at San Diego in 1999.

Giardino detailed art style recalls the French ligne claire, while his writing owes to hard boiled and spy story authors like Dashiell Hammett and John le Carré.

Manuel Felguérez

Manuel Felguérez Barra is a prominent abstract artist of Mexico, part of the Generación de la Ruptura which broke with the muralist movement of Diego Rivera and others in the mid 20th century. Felguérez was born in Zacatecas in 1928, but political instability caused his family to lose their land there and move to Mexico City. In 1947, he had the chance to travel to Europe and impressed with the art there, decided to dedicate himself to the vocation. Unhappy with the education at the Academy of San Carlos in Mexico, he did most of his studies in France, where he specialized in abstract art, something that was not accepted in Mexico at the time. His exhibitions were initially limited to galleries and the production of “sculpted murals” using materials such as scrap metals, stones and sand. As attitudes in Mexico changed towards art, Felguérez found acceptance for his work and remains active at over eighty years of age.

Miguel Utrillo

Miguel Utrillo i Morlius was an engineer, painter, decorator, critic and Spanish artistic promoter. He was one of the artistic directors of the Universal Exhibition of Barcelona in 1929 , actively participating in the creation of the Spanish Village of Montjuïc . His name has been linked to those of Santiago Rusiñol, Ramón Casas, Suzanne Valadon and Catalan modernism. 

Ramon Casas

Ramon Casas i Carbó was a Catalan Spanish artist. Living through a turbulent time in the history of his native Barcelona, he was known as a portraitist, sketching and painting the intellectual, economic, and political elite of Barcelona, Paris, Madrid, and beyond; he was also known for his paintings of crowd scenes ranging from the audience at a bullfight to the assembly for an execution to rioters in the Barcelona streets. Also a graphic designer, his posters and postcards helped to define the Catalan art movement known as modernisme.

Santiago Rusiñol

Santiago Rusiñol i Prats was a Spanish painter, poet, and playwright. He was one of the leaders of the Catalan modernisme movement.

He influenced Pablo Picasso as a modern artist, and also left a number of modernist buildings in Sitges, a town in Catalonia.

Wilhelm II

Wilhelm II, or William II was the last German Emperor (Kaiser) and King of Prussia, ruling the German Empire and the Kingdom of Prussia from 15 June 1888 to 9 November 1918. He was the eldest grandchild of the British Queen Victoria and related to many monarchs and princes of Europe.

Acceding to the throne in 1888, he dismissed the Chancellor, Otto von Bismarck, in 1890 and launched Germany on a bellicose "New Course" in foreign affairs that culminated in his support for Austria-Hungary in the crisis of July 1914 that led in a matter of days to the First World War. Bombastic and impetuous, he sometimes made tactless pronouncements on sensitive topics without consulting his ministers, culminating in a disastrous Daily Telegraph interview in 1908 that cost him most of his influence. His leading generals, Paul von Hindenburg and Erich Ludendorff, dictated policy during the First World War with little regard for the civilian government. An ineffective war-time leader, he lost the support of the army, abdicated in November 1918, and fled to exile in the Netherlands.

Jean Xceron

Jean Xceron was an American abstract painter of Greek origin. He immigrated to the United States in 1904 and studied at the Corcoran School of Art. He worked at the Guggenheim Museum as a security guard for 28 years from 1939 to his death. He is described as a "pioneer of non-objective painting" by the Smithsonian Archives of American Art. His works are in the collections of the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden

Ruskin Spear

Ruskin Spear was an English painter.

Born in Hammersmith, Spear attended the local art school before going on to the Royal College of Art in 1930. He began his teaching career at Croydon School of Art, going on to teach at the Royal College of Art from 1948 to 1975. Initially influenced by Walter Sickert and the Camden Town Group, and the portraiture of the Euston Road School, his work often has a narrative quality, with elements of humour and gentle satire.

Because he used a wheelchair due to childhood polio, much of his work focused on his immediate surroundings. He rendered the citizens of Hammersmith relaxing in and around the local pubs, theatres and shops. A retrospective of Spear's work was held at the Royal Academy in 1980. His work is represented in the Tate Gallery Collection.

A large number of Spear's paintings are held in important public collections, including the Government Art Collection, Arts Council England, National Portrait Gallery, Imperial War Museum and the Royal Academy of Arts. He was appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in 1979.

Luis Cernuda

Luis Cernuda was a Spanish poet, a member of the Generation of '27. During the Spanish Civil War, in early 1938, he went to the UK to deliver some lectures and this became the start of an exile that lasted till the end of his life. He taught in the universities of Glasgow and Cambridge before moving in 1947 to the US. In the 1950s he moved to Mexico. While he continued to write poetry, he also published wide-ranging books of critical essays, covering French, English and German as well as Spanish literature. His collected poems were published under the title La realidad y el deseo.

Will Eisner

William Erwin "Will" Eisner was an American cartoonist, writer, and entrepreneur. He was one of the earliest cartoonists to work in the American comic book industry, and his series The Spirit (1940–1952) was noted for its experiments in content and form. In 1978, he popularized the term "graphic novel" with the publication of his book A Contract with God. He was an early contributor to formal comics studies with his book Comics and Sequential Art (1985). The Eisner Award was named in his honor, and is given to recognize achievements each year in the comics medium; he was one of the three inaugural inductees to the Will Eisner Comic Book Hall of Fame.

Louis-Joseph Lebret

Louis-Joseph Lebret was a French Dominican social scientist and philosopher and pioneer of development ethics, who sought to "put the economy at the service of man" and advanced the notion of the "human economy."

Louis-Joseph Lebret was born June 26, 1897, in Minihic, Brittany, in a family of sailors, closely connected to the peasant farmers of the area. His father was a marine carpenter. He entered the Brest Naval School (“l’Ecole Navale de Brest”), became a marine officer, fought in World War I with the Lebanese squadron. and was briefly director of the port of Beirut. In 1922 he became an instructor at the Naval Academy. When his religious vocation became clearer, he left the marines in 1923 to become a Dominican priest and was ordained in 1928.

After completing his theological studies, he was assigned to Saint-Malo in 1929 where he observed the destitution of the fishermen and their families. He conducted in-depth surveys among the fishermen, regarding their problems and needs, in an effort to find solutions. For ten years he studied connections between unemployment, low wages, the poorly organized local fishing industry and the attempt on the part of international firms to monopolize the best fishing areas. Lebret determined that the vulnerability of the small scale local fishermen to the broader market had ingrained structural causes. He conducted over 400 studies on fishing conditions from areas as diverse as Britain, the Baltic and the Mediterranean. At the same time he established trade unions, co-ops, and maritime associations to re-configure the way business was done.

During World War II, he was drafted to protect French fishing and oversee merchant marine policy. In 1941 he founded in Marseille, with François Perroux, Henri Desroche and others Économie et Humanisme (Economy and Humanism), in the Lyons region, whose objective was to study economic systems and social change, proposing to “put back the economy at the service of man”. In 1942 the Revue Economie et Humanisme was created.

A lecture tip to Brazil in 1947 led Lebret to focus on development in the Third World. He worked in Brazil (1947-1954), Colombia (Lebret Mission 1955), Senegal (1958-1959), Lebanon (1960-1964), and other countries. Lebret believed that chronic structural evils cannot be corrected by subjective good will but by transformation of those structures, which presupposes a thorough understanding of how they work. He believed in the necessity of combining research and rigorous analysis with action. He was recognized by the United Nations as an expert on the question of living-standard disparities in the world.

In 1958 he founded the International Institute for Research and Training, Education and Development (IRFED), later called the International Center Development and Civilizations - Lebret - IRFED.

Lebret championed concern for development as a concern of the Catholic Church. He was aware of the challenges posed to the Church and the Western by underdevelopment and pushed the argument for an increased solidarity with poor countries. He was called upon by Pope Paul VI to participate as an expert in the Vatican Council and assisted in the drafting of Gaudium et spes. He was also asked to represent the Holy See at the first UNCTAD (United Nations Conference for Trade and Development) which took place in Geneva in 1965. Père Lebret was one of the experts consulted in the drafting of the 1967 encyclical Populorum progressio.

Lebret died on June 20, 1966.

Constant Puyo

Émile Joachim Constant Puyo was a French photographer, active in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. As the leading advocate of the Pictorialist movement in France, he championed the practice of photography as an artistic medium. For most of his career, Puyo was associated with the Photo Club of Paris, serving as its president from 1921 to 1926. His photographs appeared in numerous publications worldwide, and were exhibited at various expositions in the 1900s.

Victor-Lévy Beaulieu

Victor-Lévy Beaulieu is a French Canadian writer, playwright and editor.

Born in Saint-Paul-de-la-Croix, in the area of Bas-Saint-Laurent, Victor-Lévy Beaulieu began primary school at Trois-Pistoles, moving later to Montréal-Nord. He began his public writing career at the Montreal weekly Perspectives, where he served as chronicler for a decade (1966–1976). In 1967, he became a copy writer at La Presse, Petit Journal, Digest Éclair, and finally at Maintenant in 1970.

In 1967 he won the Larousse-Hachette Prize thanks to an eighteen-page essay devoted to Victor Hugo. In 1968, he spent a year in Paris, and on his return became a scriptwriter at the Montreal radio station CKLM while resuming his position of chronicler. Also in 1968, he published his first novel Mémoires d'outre-tonneau'. This would be the first of a long run: Race de monde (1969) — La nuite de Malcomm Hudd (1969) — Jos Connaissant (1970) — Les Grands Pères (1971) — Un rêve québécois (1972) — Oh Miami Miami Miami (1973) — Don Quichotte de la démanche (1974).

Beaulieu served as a teacher of literature at the National Theatre School of Canada from 1972 to 1978, and also wrote for the Radio-Canada broadcasts "Documents", "Petit théâtre", "Roman", "La Feuillaison". His recent book, James Joyce, l'Irlande et le Québec, has been praised by critics.

In 2008 he threatened to burn copies of his entire body of work as a protest against the growth of bilingualism in Quebec and various statements by PQ leader Pauline Marois in support of English classes for francophone schoolchildren. The writer created a stir after describing Canadian Governor-General Michaëlle Jean as a "negro queen" in L'Aut'Journal magazine. Beaulieu said Ms. Jean was appointed to the post because she was "black, young, pretty, ambitious, and because of her husband, certainly a nationalist as well." In an interview with La Presse, the author defended his text, saying he had not intended to be racist. However, his eight references to the "reine negre" caught the attention of Bloc Québécois Leader Gilles Duceppe and Bloc MP Vivian Barbot. Ms. Barbot told La Presse she found the text insulting and discriminatory, as well as a personal attack on Ms. Jean's character.

Mr. Beaulieu wrote of the "small, black queen of Radio-Canada" and her visit to France, where she spoke about Canadian federalism, but also saluted France for its abolition of slavery in 1847. Mr. Beaulieu noted Ms. Jean, a native of Haiti, came from a country that long suffered the effects of slavery.

He also attacked writer Mordecai Richler for the unsympathetic portrayal of French Canadians in his novels.

Seán Ó Faoláin

Seán Proinsias Ó Faoláin was an Irish short story writer. He was elected Saoi of Aosdána in 1986.

Ó Faoláin was born as John Francis Whelan in Cork City, County Cork, Ireland. He was educated at the Presentation Brothers Secondary School in Cork. He came under the influence of Daniel Corkery, joining the Cork Dramatic Society, and increasing his knowledge of the Irish language, which he had begun in school. Shortly after entering University College, Cork, he joined the Irish Volunteers. He fought in the War of Independence. During the Irish Civil War he served as Censor for the Cork Examiner and as publicity director for the IRA. After the Republican loss, he received M.A. degrees from the National University of Ireland and from Harvard University where he studied for 3 years. He was a Commonwealth Fellow from 1926 to 1928; and was a Harvard Fellow from 1928 to 1929.

He wrote his first stories in the 1920s, eventually completing 90 stories over a period of 60 years. From 1929 to 1933 he lectured at the Catholic college, St Mary's College, at Strawberry Hill in Middlesex, England, during which period he wrote his first two books. His first book, "Midsummer Night Madness," was published in 1932: it was a collection of stories partly based on his Civil War experiences. He afterwards returned to his native Ireland. He published novels; short stories; biographies; travel books; translations; literary criticism—including one of the rare full-length studies of the short story: The Short Story (1948). He also wrote a cultural history, The Irish, in 1947.

He served as director of the Arts Council of Ireland from 1956 to 1959, and from 1940 to 1990 was a founder member and editor of the Irish literary periodical The Bell. The list of contributors to The Bell included many of Ireland's foremost writers, among them Patrick Kavanagh, Patrick Swift, Flann O'Brien, Frank O'Connor and Brendan Behan. His Collected Stories were published in 1983.

He died on April 20, 1991 in Dublin at the age of 91.

Louis Leprince-Ringuet

Louis Leprince-Ringuet was a French physicist, telecommunications engineer, essayist and historian of science.

Louis Marie Edmond Leprince-Ringuet was the son of Félix Leprince - Ringuet, director of the École des Mines , and Marie Stourm, grandson of René Stourm, of the Institute, and great-grandson of the sculptor Victor Paillard, was a pupil at École Polytechnique. He continued his studies at Supélec from 1920 to 1923, then at Télécom Paris, before becoming an engineer in the submarine cable department.

From 1929, he worked with Maurice de Broglie at the X-ray physics laboratory. He taught physics at the École Polytechnique from 1936 to 1969 and at the Collège de France from 1959 to 1972.  In 1949 he became a member of the Académie des Sciences. In 1958, he obtained the appointment of a third professor of physics at Polytechnic: Bernard Gregory. He was commissioner for Atomic Energy from 1951 to 1971.

He obtained numerous recognition titles from his peers, such as several prizes from the Académie des Sciences and the Société Française de Physique. He defines himself as an experimental physicist and attaches great importance to experimentation. A practicing Catholic, he thought a lot about the relationship between science and religion. He was president of the Catholic Union of French scientists. In 1961, he became a member of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences.

Author of several books (on political and social subjects) and laureate of the Ève Delacroix literary prize in 1958, he was elected member of the Académie française in 1966. He animated on television (single channel) a Quarter of an hour from 1967 to 1969. He was president of Jeunesses Musicales de France from 1971 to 1983. His commitment to Europe led him to be President of the French Organization of the European Movement from 1974 to 1990.

He died on December 23, 2000 in Paris at the age of 99.

André-François Marescotti

André-François Marescotti was a Swiss composer

Marescotti was born to an Italian father and a Savoyard mother.  After studying music in Geneva and Paris where he was a pupil of Roger-Ducasse, he became organist at Compesières in 1921, then professor at the Conservatoire in 1931. As a composer, he was awarded the Geneva Composition Prize in 1963.

Gunnar Berg

Gunnar Berg was a Swiss-born Danish composer. A leading exponent of serialism in Denmark, he is considered to have written the first Danish serial piece, his Cosmogonie for two pianos, in 1952.

Berg was born to Danish and Swedish parents in Switzerland. He studied with Herman David Koppel from 1938 to 1943, and moved to Paris in 1948, where he became associated with Honegger and Messiaen. In 1952 he married the pianist Béatrice Duffour, who would later record much of his piano music. In the same year he became the first Dane to attend the summer courses at Darmstadt.

Arriving in Paris in 1948 he became part of the international modernist movement in post-War Europe by joining the circle around Olivier Messiaen. Here, Berg had inspiring encounters with key figures such as John Cage, Pierre Boulez and Karlheinz Stockhausen. Serial organization began to make its mark already in the newcomer’s Pièce for trumpet, violin and piano from 1949, and henceforth Berg uncompromisingly yet in his very own fashion would remain faithful to the complex expressive mode of musical modernism, from now on always composing within the theoretical and aesthetic framework of serialism.

Gunnar Berg died in Bern August 25, 1989.

Frédéric Lefèvre

Frédéric Lefèvre was a French novelist, essayist and literary critic.

He started in 1917 with a study on French Young Poetry. He became the editor of the Nouvelles Littéraires and would remain so until his death, from 1924 he specialized in interviews with well-known writers and celebrities of the day under the title: " An hour with ... "These interviews, published in the Nouvelles Littéraires, were published in 6 volumes (1924-1933).

Parallel to his journalistic activity, Frédéric Lefèvre led a literary activity, whose main testimonies are works of strong earthly flavor such as the Matinées of the red beech (929), Sol (1931), Samson, son of Samson (1900), the Love to live (1932), and philosophical and literary essays: Maurice Blondel's itinerary (1928), the Adhesion (1946), Biblical Images and My friends and my books (1950), which are of one humanist at a time objective and passionate.