The Age of Anxiety
McKay Chapter 28: 1920s Europe
Victorian Era/ La Belle Epoch/
Gilded Age Weltanschauung
Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Dance at Le Moulin
de la Galette, 1876
Gustave Caillebotte, (1848–1894),
Paris Street, Rainy Day, 1877
Victorian Era/ La Belle Epoch/
Gilded Age Paradigm
• Golden Age of Bourgeosie
• Peace (Pax Britannica )
• Belief in Progress
• leisure time
• Faith in Technology
• Prosperity
• faith in science/ reason
• Supreme confidence
World War I
Victorian Era/ La Belle Epoch/
Gilded Age Paradigm
The storm has died away and still
we are restless, uneasy, as if the
storm were about to break…among
all these injured things is the mind.
The mind has indeed been cruelly
wounded…it doubts itself
profoundly.
French poet Paul Valery (1922)
Europe in
1919
Europe’s Wounded Soul
•
•
•
•
•
WWI shattered Europe’s intellectual
paradigm
Noted irrational and violence in
humans
–
Paul Valéry’s Crisis of the Mind (p.
922)
• wrote about the crisis of the
cruelly injured mind
• war ("storm") had left a "terrible
uncertainty"
Questioned liberal beliefs that had
guided it since the Enlightenment
Uncertain about progress & reason
No longer sure of a knowable orderly
Newtonian society
Otto Dix:
Noted for his ruthless and harshly
realistic depictions of Weimar
society and of the brutality of war,
Friedrich Nietzsche
•
Friedrich Nietzsche
– believed that Western civilization was in decline
– Ambition, the striving to reach the highest possible position
in life (Struggle) drive human progress
– Power is ultimate virtue
– Mankind weakened by Christianity and Judeo-Christian
virtures
– “Slave Morality” which praised humility, the weak
– W. Civ overstressed rational thinking at the expense of
emotion and passion
– But claims that marriage for love should be left to the rabble
– The best should mate with the best
– “God is dead.”
Western Christians no longer really believed
– The Will to Power
• Stipulated that a few superior supermen had to become
the leaders of the herd of inferior people
• How is a superman created?
– Eugenics, severe/ stoic education
– A superman is beyond good and evil
– He is fearless = he is good
– Very influential among German radicals
The reaction of paltry people : Love provides the feeling of highest power.
It should be understood to what extent, not man in general, but only a
certain kind of man is speaking here. " We are godly in love, we shall be '
the children of God ' ; God loves us and wants nothing from us save love
" ; that is to say : all morality, obedience, and action, do not produce the
same feeling of power and freedom as love does ; a man does nothing
wicked from sheer love, but he does much more than if he were prompted
by obedience and virtue alone. Here is the happiness of the herd, the
communal feeling in big things as in small, the living sentiment of unity
felt as the sum of the feeling of life. Helping, caring for, and being useful,
constantly kindle the feeling of power; visible success... Much can I bear.
Things the most irksome I endure with such patience as comes from a
god. Four things, however, repulse me like venom : Tobacco smoke,
garlic, bugs, and the cross…
The profound contempt with which the Christian was treated by the noble
people of antiquity, is of the same order as the present instinctive
aversion to Jews: it is the hatred which free and self- respecting classes
feel towards those who wish to creep in secretly, and who combine an
awkward bearing with foolish self-sufficiency.
The Will to Power by Friedrich Nietzsche
"...the Jews achieved that miracle of inversion of values
thanks to which life on earth has for a couple millennia
acquired a new and dangerous fascination--their prophets
fused 'rich', 'godless', 'evil', 'violent', 'sensual' into one and
were the first to coin the word 'world' as a term of infamy. It is
this inversion of values (with which is involved the
employment of the word for 'poor' as a synonym for 'holy'
and 'friend') that the significance of the Jewish people
resides: with them there begins the slave revolt in morals.“
On the Genealogy of Morality by Friedrich Nietzsche
•
Modern philosophy
Existentialism
– Søren Kierkegaard =father of
existentialism
– Basic Principles:
•
Life is not fair, (bad things DO
happen to good people) BUT
•
Humans can overcome the
meaninglessness of life by
individual action
•
individuals create the meaning
and essence of their lives, as
opposed to deities or authorities
creating it for them
– Absence of a transcendent force
(such as God) means that the
individual is entirely free, and,
therefore, ultimately responsible (for
his/her choices)
– Up to humans to create an ethos
(values) of personal responsibility
outside any branded belief system
Edvard Munch’s The Scream
(1893 represents the universal
anxiety of modern man
“They (human-beings) turn
up, appear on the scene.”
Man is condemned to be
free.”
Jean-Paul Sartre
The revival of Christianity
•
•
Christianity under attack since Enlightenment
Before WWI theologians tried harmonize religious
belief with scientific
–
•
•
Played down the role of miracles and stressed Christ as
a moral teacher
A revitalization of fundamental Christianity took place
after World War I
Christian Existentialism
–
Soren Kierkegaard (1813-1855) revived
•
Led a back-to-basics movement
•
criticized the worldliness of the church and
stressed commitment to a remote and majestic
God
•
Each individual must choose how to exist in
order to live an authentic life
–
Karl Barth (1886-1968)
•
stressed the imperfect and sinful nature of man
•
Man can not “reason out” God’s ways
–
T.S. Eliot, C.S. Lewis & other literary figures were
caught in in revival
•
Graham Green
– “One began to believe in heaven because
one believed in hell.”
•
The new physics
Pre 1920 physics was based on a Newtonian weltanschauung
–
World machine
–
People were comforted be science’s certainty in a time
when “God is dead.”
–
Planck and Einstein undermined belief in constant natural
laws
•
Plank
– work with subatomic energy showed that atoms
were not the basic building blocks of nature
(protons & neutrons)
•
Einstein
– E=MC2
– postulated that time and space are relative
» They can be altered (curved) with energy
» the universe is infinite
– matter and energy are interchangeable
–
Rutherford
•
Atom was not smallest, solid matter
•
Identified subatomic particles (neutron)
–
new physics
•
instead of Newton's rational laws, there are only
tendencies
•
The world was not a perfect predictable harmonious
machine!!!!
Freudian psychology
•
•
Prior to Freud, it was assumed that the
conscious mind processed experiences in
a rational and logical way
According to Freud, human behavior is
basically irrational
–
key to understanding the mind is the
irrational unconscious (the id), which is
driven by sexual, aggressive, and
pleasure seeking desires
–
Behavior is a compromise between the
needs of the id and the rationalizing
conscious (the ego), which mediates
what a person can do, and ingrained
moral values (the superego), which tell
what a person should do
• Instinctual drives can easily
overwhelm the control mechanisms;
yet rational thinking and traditional
moral values can cripple people with
guilt and neuroses.
• Many interpreted Freudian thought
as an encouragement of an
uninhibited sex life
Twentieth century literature
• The postwar moods of pessimism,
relativism, and alienation
influenced novelists
• Literature focused on the
complexity and irrationality of the
human mind
• Writers such as Proust embraced
psychological relativity--the
attempt to understand oneself by
looking at one's past
• Novelists such as Woolf, Faulkner,
and Joyce adopted the stream-ofconsciousness technique, in which
ideas and emotions from different
time periods bubble up randomly
• Some literature, such as that of
Spengler, Kafka, and Orwell, was
anti-utopia--it predicted a future of
doom
The Waste Land
A heap of broken images,
where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no
shelter, the cricket no
relief,
And the dry stone no
sound of water…
Hooded hordes
swarming…
Falling towers
Jerusalem Athens
Alexandria
Vienna London
Unreal
T.S. Eliot (1922
Modern painting
•
French
impressionism
replaced with to
nonrepresentation
al expressionism
– sought to
portray the
worlds of
emotion and
imagination
– Van Gogh,
Gauguin,
Cézanne, and
Matisse
Vincent
van
Gogh
Starry
Night
1889
Paul
Gauguin
Tahitian
Women [On
the Beach])
1891
Themes in Early Modern Art
1. Uncertainty/insecurity.
2. Disillusionment.
3. The subconscious.
4. Overt sexuality.
5. Violence & savagery.
Edvard Munch: The Scream (1893)
There’s no such thing
as Santa?!?!?!?
Expressionism
 Using bright colors
to express a
particular emotion
 Reflects a
zeitgeist of
anxiety,
uncertainty
Franz Marc: Animal Destinies (1913)
Gustav Klimt:
Judith I (1901)
Secessionists
 Disrupt the
conservative values of
Viennese society.
 Obsessed with the self.
 Man is a sexual being,
leaning toward despair
Gustav Klimt: The Kiss (1907-8)
Georges Braque: Violin & Candlestick (1910)
CUBISM
 The subject matter is
broken down, analyzed,
and reassembled in
abstract form.
 Cezanne  The artist
should treat nature in
terms of the cylinder,
the sphere, and the
cone.
Georges Braque:
Woman with a Guitar
(1913)
Pablo Picasso: Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907)
Picasso: Studio with Plaster Head (1925)
Pablo Picasso:
Guernica (1937)
Marcel Duchamp:
Nude Descending a
Staircase
(1912)
George Grosz
Grey Day
(1921)
DaDaism
 Ridiculed contemporary
culture & traditional
art forms.
 The collapse during
WW I of social and
moral values.
 Nihilistic
George Grosz
The Pillars
of Society
(1926)
Raoul Hausmann: ABCD (1924-25)
Marcel Duchamp: Fountain (1917)
Salvador Dali: Soft Construction with Boiled Beans (Premonition
of Civil War), 1936
Surrealism
 Late 1920s-1940s.
 Came from the nihilistic
genre of DaDa.
 Influenced by Feud’s
theories on
psychoanalysis and the
subconscious
 Confusing & startling
images like those in
dreams
Salvador Dali:
The Persistence of Memory (1931)
Salvador Dali: The Apparition of the Face and Fruit Dish on a
Beach (1938)
Salvador Dali: Geopoliticus Child Watching the Birth of a
New Man (1943)