THE AGE OF
CONFUSION
Scott Masters
Crestwood College
• Ongoing industrialization and WWI
quickened the crumbling of the
“Old Order” – it had staggered
imaginations and left traditional
values open to question
• New intellectual and artistic (and
scientific, political…) trends
sought to fill the void; since the
“rules” had been smashed,
experimentation became the
norm…
• This created an atmosphere of
relativism…many sought refuge in
extremism…
• This process began before the
war…
• The theme of relativism extended into all parts of
society, and Existentialism continued to be the
driving force…
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Life has no absolute meaning…
Individuals are accountable to themselves…
There is no god…
There is no absolute morality…
All that awaits us the void (le neant)…
There are no rules  total freedom and experimentation…
Jean –Paul Sartre – Huis Clos
Samuel Beckett – Waiting for Godot
• Theatre of the Absurd…
Eugene Ionesco – The Chairs
Freud…
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Psychoanalysis
Id, Ego, Super Ego
Oedipus Complex
The Interpretation
of Dreams
• Freudian slips…
• More confusion…
I was thinking of so many things he didnt know of Mulvey and Mr Stanhope and
Hester and father and old captain Groves and the sailors playing all birds fly
and I say stoop and washing up dishes they called it on the pier and the
sentry in front of the governors house with the thing round his white helmet
poor devil half roasted and the Spanish girls laughing in their shawls and
their tall combs and the auctions in the morning the Greeks and the jews and
the Arabs and the devil knows who else from all the ends of Europe and
Duke street and the fowl market all clucking outside Larby Sharons and the
poor donkeys slipping half asleep and the vague fellows in the cloaks asleep
in the shade on the steps and the big wheels of the carts of the bulls and the
old castle thousands of years old yes and those handsome Moors all in
white and turbans like kings asking you to sit down in their little bit of a shop
and Ronda with the old windows of the posadas 2 glancing eyes a lattice hid
for her lover to kiss the iron and the wineshops half open at night and the
castanets and the night we missed the boat at Algeciras the watchman going
about serene with his lamp and O that awful deepdown torrent O and the sea
the sea crimson sometimes like fire and the glorious sunsets and the
figtrees in the Alameda gardens yes and all the queer little streets and the
pink and blue and yellow houses and the rosegardens and the jessamine
and geraniums and cactuses and Gibraltar as a girl where I was a Flower of
the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls
used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall
and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes
to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain
flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so
he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad
and yes I said yes I will Yes.
Surrealism
• James Joyce - Ulysses
• “Stream of
Consciousness”
Salvador Dali: Soft Construction with Boiled Beans (Premonition
of Civil War), 1936
 Late 1920s-1940s.
 Influenced by Feud’s
theories on
psychoanalysis and the
subconscious.
 Confusing & startling
images like those in
dreams.
Themes in Early Modern Art
1. Uncertainty/insecurity.
2. Disillusionment.
3. The subconscious.
4. Overt sexuality.
5. Violence & savagery.
Edvard Munch: The Scream (1893)
Expressionism
 Using bright colors
to express a
particular emotion.
Wassily Kandinsky: On White II (1923)
Gustav Klim t:
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)
Henri Matisse:
Open Window
(1905)
 The use of intense
colors in a violent,
and uncontrolled
way
 “Wild Beast” =
Fauvism
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)
Pablo Picasso:
Woman with a
Flower
(1932)
George Grosz
Grey Day
(1921)
DaDa
 Ridiculed contemporary
culture & traditional
art forms.
 The collapse during
WW I of social and
moral values.
 Nihilistic.
Marcel Duchamp: Fountain (1917)
Walter Gropius: Bauhaus Building (1928)
Bauhaus
 A utopian quality.
 Based on the ideals
of simplified forms
and unadorned
functionalism.
 The belief that the machine economy could deliver
elegantly designed items for the masses.
 Used techniques & materials employed especially in
industrial fabrication & manufacture  steel, concrete,
chrome, glass.
LeCorbusier
Frank Lloyd Wright
MUSIC…
FILM…