Chapter Twenty-One
Between the World Wars
Culture and Values, 6th Ed.
Cunningham and Reich
The Great War and Its Significance
Drastic loss of life
Sociopolitical consequences
October Revolution
Hitler’s National Socialist movement
Cultural consequences
Transportation, communication
Entertainment
Literary Modernism
Modernist temper
T.S. Eliot (1888-1965)
Necessity of cultural continuity
The Wasteland  Four Quartets
James Joyce (1882-1941)
Cultural stability found through art
Epiphany, autobiography
Alienated artist
Literary Modernism
Franz Kafka (1883-1924)
“Kafkaesque”
Guilt, loss, oppression, violence
Virginia Woolf (1882-1941)
Writer, critic (Bloomsbury Group)
Social, economic, and intellectual
discrimination against women
Revolution in Art: Cubism
Analytical Cubism
Geometric qualities, flat planes, 2-d linearity
Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907)
Braque’s Violin and Palette (1909-1910)
Synthetic Cubism
Post-war color, vitality, expressiveness
Picasso’s Three Musicians (1921)
Revolution in Art: Cubism
Piet Mondrian (1872-1944)
Marc Chagall (1889-1985)
Rufino Tamayo (1899-1991)
Women of Tehuantepec (1939)
Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944)
Expressionist, non-objective art
Freud, the Unconscious, and Surrealism
Interpretation of Dreams (1900)
Id, ego, superego
Dreams and the unconscious mind
Psychoanalysis as philosophy
Human and cultural behaviors
Surrealism
Breton’s Manifesto of Surrealism (1924)
Freud, the Unconscious, and Surrealism
Dalí’s The Persistence of Memory (1931)
Kahlo’s Self-Portrait (1937)
René Magritte (1898-1967)
Influence of film
Dalí and Buñuel, Jean Cocteau
Paul Klee (1879-1940)
Cubist, Expressionist, Surrealist
The Age of Jazz
African-American experience, heritage
Intonations, rhythms
Spirituals
“Blue note” / the Blues
Ragtime
From New Orleans to Chicago
Black Jazz in Anglo culture
Symphonies, operas, swing
The Age of Jazz
George Gershwin (1898-1937)
Jazz in symphonic, operatic works
Rhapsody in Blue (1924)
Porgy and Bess (1935)
Duke Ellington (1899-1974)
Orchestra virtuoso, prolific composer
Extended jazz idiom to larger arena
The Harlem Renaissance
African American writers, artists,
intellectuals, musicians
Themes of African American experience
Roots, racism, culture, religion
W.E.B. Dubois (1868-1963)
African American self-identity, cultural
identity, racial identity
Ballet: Collaboration in Art
Artistic integration:
setting, movement, music, narrative
Serge Diaghilev’s Ballet Russe (1909)
Vast musical commissions
Parade (1917):
Diaghilev, Cocteau, Satie, Picasso
Art as Escape: Dada
Protest against war
Nonsense language, dissonant music,
anarchic irreverence
Tristan Tzara’s Dada manifesto (1918)
Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968)
Mobiles, ready-mades
L.H.O.O.Q. (1919)
Art as Protest: Guernica
Picasso’s protest against inhumanity
Hope in the face of horror
Inspired by destruction of war
Social, pivotal document
Expressionistic, Cubist
Technical experimentation
Art as Propaganda: Film
Propaganda as high art
Radio, film
Educate, persuade, shape public opinion
Sergei Eisenstein (1898-1948)
Strike! (1924), Ivan the Terrible (1944, 1946)
Class struggle, the working class, socialism
Alexander Nevsky with Prokofiev (1938)
Potemkin and the October Revolution (1925)
Art as Propaganda: Film
Leni Riefenstahl (1902-2003)
Triumph of the Will (1936)
Documentary of 1934 Nazi congress
Glorification of Nazi virtues
Olympia (1938)
Documentary of the 1936 Berlin Olympics
Homage to Hitler vs. beauty of sport
Photography
Increased mobility, immediacy of image
Man Ray (1890-1976)
László Moholy-Nagy (1895-1946)
The “f/64 Group”
Direct, nonmanipulative pictures
Images from the Great Depression
Commissioned by FSA and USDA
Art as Prophecy:
From Futurism to Brave New World
Futurists
Valued industrialization, urbanization
Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (1876-1944)
Lewis’s Babbitt (1922)
“a chicken in every pot…”
Mindless materialism
Huxley’s Brave New World (1932)
Technology as tool for totalitarian control
Chapter Twenty-One: Discussion Questions
 What aspects of the “modernist temper” can be found in the works of
the Harlem Renaissance writers and African American Jazz musicians?
What are the personal and cultural expressions found behind these
artistic forms? Explain, citing specific examples.
 In light of the “modernist temper,” why were Freud’s theories so
popular? In what sense does psychoanalytical theory abandon the
explanation of human motivation that has been long held by Western
Europeans? What does this shift in understanding signal about the
twentieth century? Explain.
 Consider the ways in which film was used in the early twentieth century
as propaganda. In what ways does the cinematic medium continue to
serve in this way? What types of cultural, social, and political values are
asserted through popular film and other visual media of the twenty-first
century? Explain.
 To what extent do you agree or disagree with Huxley’s assertion that
technology makes individuals dependent on totalitarian forces? Do you
feel that our dependency on technology puts us at risk as a culture?
…as a free people? Explain.