Art and society in the
20th century
Aban Raza
M.F.A (Final Year)
Print Making
H.O.D.: K.S. Pawar
INDEX
INTRODUCTION
EUROPE
1914
DEPRESSION
ART DURING MAD-NESS
THE COLD WAR
POST WAR ART
ASIA
INDIA CHINA JAPAN
MIDDLE EAST
AFRICA
AMERICA
LATIN AMERICA
CONCLUSION / BIBLIOGRAPHY
Introduction
As relevant as it was back then, I emphasize on the point by
repeating and developing my understanding of it all.
All Art is conditioned by time & represents humanity, insofar as
it corresponds to the ideas & aspiration, the needs & the hopes
of a particular historical situation, but at the same time, Art
goes beyond the limitation & within this historical moment also
create a moment of humanity promising constant
development.
-an excerpt from The Necessity of Art
Ernst Fischer
The functionality of art, gives art a potential so great that it can
be a weapon, a social weapon, commenting on the society &
things that are evolving, in turn getting evolved itself.
Art reflects all that that is happening in a society. Doesn’t
always have to criticize but definitely the ‘progress’ of art is in
tune with the evolution of society. The artist in his/her proud
subjectivity expresses the ideas of the age he/she resides in.
An artist explores the subjective world of feeling which is
greatly influenced by the external world & the aim is to
endeavour to maintain a balance of sorts; an equilibrium
between the two.
There always will be a traumatic interpretation if the settings in
which it is being created are traumatic.
Art holds a great truth & struggles to preserve it by expressing
what must be expressed and by reflecting the progress or
decay of the society it is created in.
An artist can only experience something which his/her time and
his/her social conditions have to offer. But she/he also gains a
greater understanding by reading the course of history and
studying works created in his/her past.
Even the most subjective artist works on behalf of society.
How an individual expresses & defines society can be seen in
the expressions being formed in different societies & at
different time periods.
Distortion in art makes sense, when upheavals of many kinds
were being experienced when world wars & the civil wars were
taking place. This does reflect the mad-ness & the absolute lack
of sense in futile things like war & tensions.
In the middle of the 20th century the act of expressing because
somewhat violent & one saw the farm disintegrate &
eventually dissolve. This maybe as an expression of the angst.
The potential of Art is seen in the fear that regimes held. Hitler
forbidding & degenerating Art works & exiling artist gives us an
insight in the potentiality of art & the threat it holds against an
established corrupt order.
From the writings of Jose Marti, Castro derived the messianic
notion of Cuba as the liberator of the rest of Latin America from
economic servitude.
Ergo, art shall emancipate all, an artist’s duty is to be socially
conscious in a decaying society art, if it is truthful must also
reflect decay.
Duchamp’s Dadaism considered to be an anti art movement
but within the spectrum of art; where was questioned the very
notion of art.
Art & its expression makes the individual aware of his/her
state, his/her plight. Thus art enables individuals to
comprehend reality, making it bearable but also drives an
individual to make an attempt to make it all better.
Art is itself a social reality and expression a reality checkup. I
believe, Art augments understanding beyond narrow egoism,
and directs one to partake in a celebration of creativity
enhancing all qualities of all lives.
Europe
In, 1900 Europe stood at the height of her power and prestige.
Geographically insignificant, the smallest but one of the seven
continents, the inventive-ness, energy & aggressiveness of her
peoples had given her a primacy which had lasted so long that
most Europeans simply assumed it would continue indefinitely.
Europe dominated the world (Hitherto) economically as well as
politically. Britain, Germany & France between them
commanded 60% of the world marked for manufactured goods,
& between 1900 & 1910 Germany virtually doubled her steel,
Iron and coal producing capacity.
Also
The twenty years afore 1914 (when the first-world war broke
out) were one of the most creative & innovative periods in
European history not only in the arts but also in the sciences;
and the study of man & society which led to the development
of many revolutionary ideas.
When seen as a whole the 20th century saw the decline of
Europe’s political domination, yet Europe continued (and still
continues) to preserve her leaving position in the realm of
ideas.
This Europe of which was claimed to be the centre of the
‘civilized’ world was not at all identifiable with the continent as
it was defined geographically.
Large parts of Europe did not share in the material progress
and prosperity of the leading nations. the three southern
projection of Europe-the Iberian Peninsula; Italy below the
industrialized north, the Balkans & Greece- certainly did not,
nor did the greater part of Eastern Europe, where a peasant
population continued to live in a traditional pre-industrial
society.
Many of those who lived in the cities (all across Europe) too,
would have considered themselves excluded, for Europe was
still a stratified society governed by class distinction with an
undisguised & gross inequality between rich and poor. The
poor who thronged the over-crowded slums of the big towns
and industrial districts were a lower order of humanity and
treated as such valued only as the necessary pool of labour,
always in surplus, on which the social and economic system
depended.
By 1900, some of the workers had learned to organize and to
protest: there were frequent strikes in the 14 years to follow;
some of them violent and social problems began to figure more
frequently on the agenda of politics.
In the greater part of Europe, even where it was disguised by
parliamentary institutions as in Germany, Austria-Hungary, the
imperial prerogative and class rule were still what counted.
True, there was fear of revolution, but up to 1914 no serious
revolt against the existing order had taken place in Russia
where the loss of the Russo-Japanese war was followed by the
confused outbreak of 1905.
Certainly no European government hesitated to go to war for
fear that its subjects would refuse the call to arms or turn down
their weapons against their own rulers- and they were right.
20th century philosophy had divided into two main camps,
corresponding roughly to continental Europe and the English-
speaking world. Metaphysical system building retains its hold
on the former and logical analysis on the latter.
At the beginning of this century the creative artist could feel- if
he/she was open-minded and sensitive enough- a number of
powerful forces thrusting at and thru him/her.
There was a spirit of revolt against the materialist complacency
of the previous decades and the authoritarian mores, both
social and political, on which it reposed. At the same time there
was relatively a new sense, originating with the early French
socialists, of a creative minority forming an avant-garde way
out in front of their society and to some extent cut off from it.
There was a general speeding-up of communications, leading to
an influx of more or less exotic works: Japanese graphics,
Russian and Spanish music, Scandinavian plays, the novels of
Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, the poems of Whitman and Tagore.
There was a new scientific concern with the study of primitive
people, which interacted with the synthetic barbarism
preached by Nietzsche to turn men’s eyes [or ears] to even
remoter sources; to the cultures of India, Africa, South America
and Polynesia, or European and Russian folk art.
There were new techniques of reproduction [eg. Half tone] to
help inform the artist, and new methods of construction [eg.
Steel and concrete] to challenge the architect.
There was a blurring of traditional frontiers between the arts
and a semi-social, semi ethical concern with the handicraft,
which sprang largely from the socialist principles and went with
a drive to extend popular awareness of the arts.
There was a new mysticism, operating largely outside the
orthodox religions and often with oriental elements, and at the
same time a pulsating new life of machines and cities which
academic artists conventions seemed too feeble to express
Paris was where undoubtedly the most creative forces fused.
Many countries had their artistic revolution but it was here that
what were considered to be the most artistic minds migrated
to. Many of the key figures, like Picasso came to Paris in 1900
and right upto world war II, it was there that the vital ideas and
grouping were for the most part launched or decisively
acclaimed, and the whole process rooted in the development
of French literature and the visual arts in the second half of the
19th century.
In country after country the modern movement can be dated
from the first awareness of certain pioneering French ideas.
What gave the movement its all-embracing framework was an
architectural revolution more comprehensive than anything
since the renaissance. This not only provided the other arts a
fresh setting but set to transform the entire physical
surroundings of our daily lives, particularly in cities and towns.
For instance, erecting the Eiffel Tower showed how
architectural aesthetics could be developed to enhance the
whole city and be implemented in basic things like bridges.
Eventually the Centre of the modern architectural movement
now shifted to the German speaking countries, where it was to
remain into the 1930’s.
Before World War I there was no common aesthetic linking
architecture and the other visual arts; indeed the incongruity
between modern art and its setting was often striking – as it
sometimes is even to-day. All the same one can see a similar
attempt to understand the two dimensional quality of the
surface that was a concern of also Gauguin and Cezanne.
The fauves, under the leadership of Matisse took forward the
bold representational painting for decorative and expressive
ends.
The cubists, studying the works by Cezanne were encouraged
to turn the canvas into an analytical or[eventually] synthetic
structure, where colour and representational allusions played a
more sub-ordinate role.
In both cases, however, the painters were now setting down
rather than those of their subjects. Picasso once said ‘I paint
objects as I think them, not as I see them’
In the former the shapes were curved, flat and brilliantly
coloured. In the latter they were sharp-cut, three dimensional
and edgy.
By this time there was a lot more exposure and greater
interaction amongst artists belonging to different cities and
nationalities.
During this period and in fact, which carried on they [artists]
shared a common interest in primitive, exotic art.
The African art influence is the strongest in Picasso’s immediate
pre-cubist phase- Les Demoiselles d’avignon.
Henri Rousseau’s works too spoke of a great deal more than
what meets the eye: directness of expression, rooted in
mysterious submerged or un-conscious powers.
Expressionism originated in the restlessness of a few young
men in Dresden and took its savagery largely from resentment
at the rigid and authoritarian elements in imperial German life.
Eventually it covered most of central Europe, it was an allabsorbent force, which sucked up every other new tendency
since fauvism digesting the many other movements, and
turning them into its own form of Dionysian energy. Another
distinctive feature- and one, which was to give it a more
important social role than any other 20th century artistic
movement, was its extension from 1910 onwards to cover all
the arts. Where fauvism was a purely pictorial school, Cubism a
movement of painters and sculptures with the odd writer ally,
expressionism was so predominantly an attitude of mind that
poets, playwrights, designers and even musicians like
Schonberg could all be put in this category. There was a
recognizable common approach, to be seen in their emotive
use of formal fragmentation and distortion.
Futurism, the fourth of the main pre-war movements, likewise
came to embrace all the arts, but it was a more artificially
whipped-up affair in which the kind of nationalistic
showmanship promoted an Italian avant-garde. This
movement’s manifesto appeared in 1909, which was essentially
a noisy and iconoclastic proclamation of the modern spirit
coupled with aggression and patriotism of a militaristic kind.
The literary revolutionaries who transformed the face of
European poetry around this time along with writers took their
dynamism from Nietzsche, whose influence was strong enough
throughout futurism and expressionism.
1914
The imperialist competition between the European powers had
not led to war. But it contributed powerfully to creating a new
aggressive nationalism in Europe, a new aggressive nationalism
in Europe, giving it a racist as well as messianic character,
producing a crude philosophy of social Darwinism ‘survival of
the fittest ’and astonishing enough: popularizing it.
Between 1900nand 1914 every one of the European
government responded to what was the perceived public mood
and to its own distrust of the other powers by spending greatly
increased sums on armaments.
Due to this diversion in money expenditure, there were series
of crises that were seen e.g. Morocco 1905, 1911, bosniahungary, with England trying to maintain a freehand but
reaching understandings with France and Russia which
Germany’s challenge to her naval power prevented her from
ever reaching with the central powers.
The feeling that war was inevitable was steadily growing. The
prospect, however, evoked little of the widespread horror. Few
understood the extent and use of what a modern technological
war would and could mean.
Nobody thought it would last for years and those who cheered
the declaration of war in every European capital did not do so
out of some collective death urge, but out of ignorance.
The subsequent dispute about war guilt confused moral with
political issues. Between 10 and 13 millions humans were
killed, 20 million wounded. In addition to the loss of life on
battlefields, each side in the most barbaric way tried to break
the resistance of their civilian population by cutting off supplies
and starving them into submission; this was the object of the
German’s unrestricted U-boat campaign and of the British
blockade.
In the end, mindlessly, as many more again- including millions
of women and children- died from these causes as were killed
in action.
The material destruction was a lot but not much if compared to
what was to follow later.
But the psychological shock was greater, for men and women
thrust into the experience were totally unprepared for a
prolonged and systematic destruction of human life on an
unprecedented scale which is simply incomprehensible. The
consequences were felt long after the fighting had ended, with
a loss of security in everything. There was a social crises of
confidence reaching into the depths pf men’s/women’s
consciousness and affecting in some degree the entire
population of the continent.
The crack came first in the east of this war-ranging continent
where the tsarist regime, totally discredited by the inefficiency
with which it conducted the war, gave way to a provisional
government, which in turn succumbed to a revolutionary
seizure of power by the Bolsheviks; October 1917
The Russian armies disintegrated and the Germans seized their
opportunity to dictate terms, which deprived Russia of large
areas in Eastern Europe including the Ukraine.
But with the United States entering the war in the spring of
1918, the western front was reinforced with fresh supplies of
men and material; the French and the British had the promise
of victory and German had to face the inevitable defeat.
The end came suddenly.
On the 11th of November, the armistice was signed by a
German civilian and not a soldier declaring Germany’s defeat.
This is important because in situations to follow this fact was
twisted and presented as a ‘stab in the back’ and was used to
instill a feeling of fundamentalist nationalism in a public that
was dejected and very defeated.
Art and War
Subconsciously anticipated in certain works of German
expressionism, the shock of world war I jolted and interrupted
many of these trends, and set yet others going.
Many of the chief innovators were swept off, sometimes for
even four years into the armed forces or internment, often
with traumatic effects.
Irreparable losses were suffered, particularly by expressionists,
people were cut off from places.
Many artists were forced to go back to ‘their’ countries. Van de
Velde has to leave Germany for good; the chief cubist dealer
Kalnweiler left France. Kandinsky and Chagall went back to
Russia.
Some artists like Duchamp and Picabia established themselves
in new york in 1915, which had a lasting effect on the city’s
attitude to modern movements.
At the same time there was quite a new and increasingly
commercial traffic in cinema and jazz music, which only began
to enter the world of arts about this time only.
For many people the war was above all the periods of Chaplin’s
unforgettable short comedies, culminating in 1918 in the war
film Shoulder Arms.
Here was surprisingly little direct reflection of people’s
experience or even observation of the fighting. War novels,
which became so common a decade later, were slow to appear.
State sponsored art led to certain advanced painters as ‘war
artists’. This led to the German encouragement of a separate
Flemish culture in occupied Belgium, which gave rise to Flemish
expressionism.
There were also artists who continued there research which
they had started afore the war, specially in neutral countries
like Switzerland and Holland.
Schonberg published nothing for the next eight years but
worked to establish a unifying principle, which would govern
both the structure and harmony of his composition.
In Italy Giorgio de Chirico joined with the ex-futurists Carra and
Morandi to evolve a mysterious treatment of urban spaced and
dummy-like figures, which they termed as metaphysical. In
Paris the core of the cubist movement was disintegrating and
though contrary to what one would expect Picasso’s art
became decorative and sober. Braque returned seriously
wounded in 1915, never to resume the strict sobriety of his
cubist works. In Holland, however Piet Mondrian who was seen
to be moving from cubism to absolute abstraction was during
the war period seen to employ [for the remaining artistic life]
the strict style of rectangular flat surfaces, painted in primary
colours and defined by solid black bars.
With the painter-poet Theo Van Doesburg, an outstanding
avant-garde amateur [some ten years younger] he founded the
review De Stijl [1917] which established a comparably rigorous
aesthetic for sculpture, furniture, typography and architecture.
The other main center of activity was Switzerland, where
Busoni and Stravinsky had settled and the isolated and
dedicated James Joyce arrived in 1915
Also in Zurich in the same year a group of younger men, most
of them fugitives from the war, came together around the
newly formed cabaret Voltaire under Hugo Ball, who had
worked in the Munich theatre and contributed to expressionist
periodicals.
Their movement of total contemptuous protest against the war
and against every other accepted idea or institution including
art itself was a mixture of these several different elements.
Dada, a name which they picked as meaningless [and hence
mystifying], soon spread into Germany, where Raoul
Hausmann, the satirical draughtsman gerge Grosz and the
Herzfelde brothers turned it into a still sharper weapon of
attack against everything to do with war and society that
supported it. There was already a similar but less purposeful
trend in France, where Apollinaire’s late play les Mamelles de
Tiresias and the ballet Parade [1917] recalled the provocative
nihilism of Ubu Roi some twenty years earlier. This linked with
the works of Duchamp in the States who was moving away
from the fine painterly quality found in his ‘nude descending a
staircase’ with its quasi-futurist rendering of movement.
The orgy of destruction that convulsed the western world
between 1914 and 1918 checked the progressive spirit that had
animated the arts in the years before.
Activities weren’t necessarily stifled but the most significant
movements [of the day] took the form of a revolt against the
culture and the corrupt, complacent values that had
encouraged the suicidal massacre of trench warfare.
‘Modern civilization’ was itself to be destroyed, and the
instrument to be used was not art but anti-art or non-art; there
was no thought of development and replacement, even if non
art proved to be just that- a new development in the course of
history. The intense frustration engendered by the war erupted
simultaneously in widely separated centers [and were for a
long time cut off from one another] but after a year or so of the
stalemate, groups of artists were linked by an exchange of visit
and all forms of expressions were conscripted to serve in this
protest- cabaret performances, meeting designed to provoke
controversies.
And so developed the dada movement: the name itself is a
nonsense word, a word common in many languages
Dada’s first manifesto in 1918 offered no programme, no
apologia, no explanation.
In Germany the main centers were Berlin, Cologne and
Hanover. The berlin version triggered by Huelsenbeck, was
satirical and actively political. Its armaments were a couple of
magazines- club dada, der dada.
These periodicals deployed a raucous use of explosive
typography and photomontage.
The cologne version, 1919-1920, was by contrast biased
towards aesthetics even if only in the sense of being antiaesthetics. It included 2 major artists: Max Ernst and Arp. Ernst
along with John Heartfield exploited satirical collage techniques
using popular printed material in free play with the grotesque
and the weirdly erotic, often foreshadowing Paris Surrealism.
Duchamp’s L.H.O.O.Q. violated the most famous of all
masterpieces, contradicted the idea of the sanctity of art and of
the value of the unique art object.
A number of writers who were seriously political were brought
under the category of minority socialists [anti-war] whose
Russian section had been established by Lenin in that country
in September of 1914: no group of intellectuals anywhere was
so keenly against the war as the dominant humanitarian wing
of expressionism; and the result was a great deal of passionate
and rhetorical poetry which was very unlike what came from
the allied side of the trenches.
In Russia the first four five years of the soviet revolution was an
astonishing period in the arts. Anatoly Lunacharsky, whom
Lenin at once made commissioner for education, had learnt to
understand cubist painting in Paris and under him the small
Russian avant-garde was now given official commissions and
jobs. Kandinsky and Rodchenko were put in charge of picture
purchases for the museums; the constructivists Gabo, Pevsner
and Tatlin became professors in Moscow; Chagall, Lissitzky and
Malevitch in Vitebsk. Two of the most important decisions were
taken by Lenin himself: the institution of what he termed as
‘propaganda by monuments’- i.e. the erection of giant public
statues- and the creation of a soviet film industry as the best
way of reaching the masses.
There were decorated propaganda trains, poetry reading et
cetera.
Aesthetically the immediate effect of all of this was to force the
growth of constructivism, a form of abstract art something akin
to that of De stijl, but with an added flavor of machinery and
engineering. In Moscow in 1920 Tatlin made his constructivist
project for the headquarters of the new third international.
The German revolution of 1918 likewise gave an established
footing to the modern movement, particularly in the visual arts
and the theatre.
Artists like Pechstein made posters and pamphlets for the new
republic; Schmidt-Rottluff designed its improved German eagle;
Kokoschka, Barlach and a number of lesser expressionists were
appointed to professorships or made members of the
academics. Theatre directors changed the leadership of the
Weimar Applied Art School and the Fine art school changed and
was inclined to the leftist ideology.
Although the 1918 revolution helped to spread the
expressionist’s ideas right across Germany, giving them a
position apparently stronger than that of any other part of the
international modern movement, it also introduced them to
the sad compromises and betrayals that came with the
conversion of ideals into reality, and nastier still, to certain
special characteristic of the new German right.
After the First world
Europe was aggressively divided and was very disordered
where the habit of violence got accentuated and the
experience that humans went through turned many towards
extremism. Tussia under Lenin counted on the revolution,
spreading to the rest of Europe and for that it needed
Germany.
The German communist made several attempts to capture
power but all failed. The Republican leaders pushed into power
when the Kaiser abdicated. When a choice had to be made the
majority of the German workers turned down revolution in
favor of reform by constitutional methods. The same pattern
repeated itself throughout the European working class
movement, which resulted in every European socialist part
split; the majority voting in favor of reform and against
revolution. After the tumultuous years of 1919 and 1920, the
revolution tide steadily receded: the tragedy was the quarrel
between the communists and social-democratic left and the
socialist and working class movement permanently divided to
the ultimate profit of those who were enemies of both.
Mussolini took advantage of this divide and staged his “March
to Rome” in October 1922, and went on to establish one of
Europe’s first fascist regimes. While the post war tide of
disorder was still at its height, the peace conference met in
early in January 1919, but excluded Russia and the defeated
states (Germany etc.).
The Treaty of Versailles can be justly criticized. It was too harsh,
and failed to carry out what it planned to. It was too
humiliating if it was meant to bring a democratic Germany into
the European community. This was used to revive German
nationalism.
America withdrew from what was termed as an international
organization ‘league of nations’. Russia was absent and keeping
in mind its purpose and its universal association – it became a
bit irrelevant. The peace of Paris brought the war to an end.
But fighting continued in Eastern Europe. There were profound
tensions between nations and many treaties were signed and
not respected.
1923 French troops marched into the RUHR to secure pledges
for the payment of reparation. A bitter struggle ensued in
which the German stage as well as its economy nigh to
dissolution. The newly appointed finance minister Schacht
succeeded in stabilizing the German currency but not afore the
savings and securities of German (including the rising middle
class) had been wiped out. This was a social revolution, which
bit far more deeply than the political changes of 1918 and
powerfully assisted that “radicalization” of German society of
which Nazis were to be the beneficiaries.
The years 1924-29, were the nearest Europe came to stability
between the wars. German industries recovered exponentially
and by 1928 they were second only to the United States.
France and Britain also recovered tremendously, and this lead
to an almost overall economic recovery. Europe however
couldn’t restore its erstwhile position in the world.
Europe was heavily indebt to the United States. The British and
the French had redistributed, the German and Turkish empires,
but the revolt against imperialism had already begun; Against
French rule in Morocco, against British rule in India.
Europe’s old self-confidence had gone and with it the capacity
for new ideas. The German economic recovery was real
enough, but it was precarious, dependent on American short
term loans and thus vulnerable to any recession in the United
States.
Recovery was in any case limited to the western half of Europe
the fragmentation of the Hapsburg empire and the nationalism
of the successor state left the eastern half predominantly
chronically impoverished.
Southern Europe was the same, burdened with an immemorial
poverty. In such circumstances, democracy meant no more
than corruption and frustration; in one country after another it
was abandoned either openly or under concealment of a royal
dictatorship: Yugoslavia et cetera.
Paradoxically, the 1920s, which proved to be so checkered in
Europe’s political and economic history, were as brilliant a
decade in the arts, literature and science as in her history
The originality, that had marked the years 1900 to 1914 now
found full expression and an audience as well, in the freer more
open post war of Europe.
Paris had never attracted more writers, painters and berlin in
the days of Weimar republic rapidly became a legend. The
paradox however is only superficial.
The culture of the 1920s, which gave the decade so much of its
character in retrospect, was that of a minority even in the
handful of cities where it flourished.
And underneath the brilliance of the performance there was
evidently a deep anxiety about the future of a Europe, which
could not forget nightmares of World War I.
It was only after the war, that the modern movement became
intellectually and socially acceptable and actually penetrated
into ordinary people’s homes, clothes, and ideas and leisure
entertainment.
The artists in Europe in the capitalist age found himself/herself
in a highly peculiar situation where capitalism turned
everything into a commodity and destroying much of the
directness of human relationships and led to man’s increasing
alienation from social reality and himself/herself.
Surrealism as a pseudo doctrine was romantic and pseudo
Freudian exploring the interior imagery and subconscious
association was most applicable to the literary aspect of art.
Gradually however, surrealism in painting became more
definite by a kind of case –law of minor experiments made by
Ernst, Miro Magritte etc.
1929 Ernst’s collages of old engravings, Miro’s biomorphic
forms, Dali’s precisely painted distortions and de-composition
of symbols against an endless horizon; in fact any kind of
startling juxtaposition and allusion or return to childhood came
to be seen as surrealist.
In Russia, the less revolutionary minded artists and writers
started reemerging on returning from abroad during the 1920s.
In 1922, Mussolini seized power in Italy, turning futurism of the
1920s into a semi official movement. In 1923, the German
currency stabilization cut short the boom on which
expressionistic creators; publishing and the art market had
depended.
Dada at an end and neo-classicism flourishing in France, it was
a sif the whole experimental period was now over. In 1921,
there was split in the constructivist movement in Russia
resulting in the departure of Kandinsky and Chagall back to
Western Europe.
In Germany, post expressionist painters, notably Beckmann,
Grosz, Dix combined realism with social commentary.
The true individuality of the 1920s is to be found in the changes
effected in the relations between art and society around them.
Hence the outstanding development was the use of more or
less functionalist architecture for mass housing in Germany.
The audience at the same time was growing, thanks partly to
the conscious social and educational policies pursued in
revolutionary states like Russia, where museums now actively
promoted modern art and partly to the spread of mechanical
reproductions: the records, radio, etc.
Photography was at last beginning to be used creatively in the
hands of artists like Lissitzky, Madray etc. With the new
reproductive techniques to be developed was jazz music, which
originated in New Orleans and Chicago, a phenomenal
generation of semi literate instrumentalists, both black and
white, went to the recording studios to give performances of
the greatest expressiveness and originality, often burning
themselves out in the process.
In these and other ways, there was in the 1920s the beginning
of a new breaking down of established class barriers in the arts.
These went further than a mere fascination ‘primitive culture’
and art but pointed the way to a new attitude of equality, if as
yet only in the cultural field.
Depression
The Depression started with the collapse of the New York stock
market in October 1925 was the most severe in the history of
modern capitalism (until now). Since European countries were
heavily dependent on the American loans, these countries were
heavily affected. In Germany, unemployment mounted until it
passed six million, and this figure does not take account of
those on part time work or dependents. IN Britain, with a
smaller population the official figures at their peak were over
three million. The Depression hit farming as much as industry;
European agriculture had been suffering from world over
production, falling prices and dumping of surpluses since 1926.
Particularly hard hit were those countries like Hungary, Poland,
etc. which depended on agricultural exports to finance their
imports.
The political effects were quick to follow. In Britain the
economic crisis brought the Labour government down. The
Depression hit France later than other European countries:
1932. In 1934, right-winged and patriotic organizations
attempted to storm the Chamber of Deputies and were only
stopped by gunfire. The most promising departure o the
decade, the Rally of the Left, which produced a popular left
front government supported by socialist radicals and
Communists, under Blum’s leadership ended in disillusionment,
a year later.
The one part of Europe where democracy mastered the
problem created by the depression was Scandinavia, where the
nearest approach to a successful social democracy anywhere in
the world was strengthened rather than weakened by this
experience. In the rest of Europe the trend set more strongly
towards authoritarian government and was given a powerful
impetus by the Nazis’ capture of power in Germany. Since
March 1930, when the coalition government has split on he
measure to be taken in the face of the depression, Germany
had been governed by a conservative administration.
Unemployment grew steadily worse through 1931 and 1932,
and the government became more and more isolated from the
mood of the country. The cumulative experience of defeat, civil
disorders, inflation and even worse plunge into economic
disaster, had produced in a great number of Germans a pent up
force of despair, anger and insecurity, which was there for the
taking by an extremist party. What the situation called for and
what Hitler provided was a radicalism of the right,
revolutionary, non-conservative in character but drumming up
nationalist frenzy and offering a universal scapegoat in the
Jews. On this platform the Nazis leapt from nowhere to
become the second party in their Reichsteig in September 1930
and went on winning more votes for another two years. Yet,
Hitler became Chancellor on 30th January 1933 as part of a
backstage deal with Papan, another conservative politician who
congratulated themselves that in return for the mass support
which Hitler would bring them, they had offered him no more
than three seats in a coalition cabinet, in which they would
control the real power. It was the miscalculation of the century.
Once in office, Hitler launched a revolution takeover, which left
the rest of the cabinet helpless.
After that the success of the Nazi programme of public works
and relieving unemployment, plus the restoration of German
national pride by a series of successes in foreign policy
unmatched since the unification, won for Hitler a greater
measure of genuine support than any other government in
Europe.
For a minority whose judgment had not been corrupted by the
propaganda of success, it was an oppressive and corrupt
regime, but the majority of the German people were content to
be swept along in the powerful tide of national feeling that
Hitler had harnessed.
Many who hated Nazism turned to communism and Russia,
which was remote during the 1920s moved back into the center
of the European picture in the 1930s.
Four years after Lenin’s death, Stalin resumed the initiative of
collectivization of agriculture and when the independent
peasants objected, he broke their resistance, which led to
millions being massacred. Collectivization was not a success
and agriculture continued to be weak in the soviet economy.
Stalin applies the same method to the forced industrialization
of Russia, which wasn’t implemented well leading to an
imbalance in the economy. And the standard of living of
Russian workers was desperately low.
Though Russia emerged at the end of the 1930s as a major
industrial power.
Outside the USSR, the example of communism in action
attracted many with left-wing sympathies in Western Europe.
Disillusioned with the inabilities of democratic institution to
provide effective answers to problems of a capitalist society,
they saw in USSR a country which had broken with its past and
was being remade in a new and more equal pattern.
There was the rallying of all the forces of the left in a popular
anti-fascist font.
Soviet Russia was seen as the one reliable opponent of Nazi
and fascist aggression.
The thirties was the decade of the dictators- Hitler and
Mussolini.
Spain once the greatest of the European powers, emerged from
her isolation and opened the chapter in the European civil war
between the anti-fascists, popular front of the left, the working
classes led by the intellectuals, and the reactionary forces of
the right.
The French, whose own social and ideological divisions were
sharpened by divided sympathies over the Spanish war
increasingly left the initiative to fight the fascist forces to the
British led by Chamberlain, who was profoundly distrustful of
the left and Russia, and he preferred to look for a settlement
with Hitler and Mussolini which would then avoid war.
Hitler well understood the divided sate of Europe, and by the
end of 1937, with Germany’s economic strength restored and
her re-armament underway; he was ready to take advantage of
it.
Arts before the Second World War
In 1929, the Nazi ideologist Alfred Rosenberg founded a
militarist league for German culture to combat secular and
equality related values.
There were demonstrations against modern art; a nigh riot at
the premiere of Brecht and Weill’s opera, whitewashing of
Schlemmer’s murals in the old Bauhaus building at Weimar by
the new head of the school.
Under Stalin, the freedom of creative expression was curbed.
In both countries the reaction against the modern movement
was to continue right thru the 1930s, with drastic and
demoralizing effects on the arts throughout the world.
A sense of confidence that had permeated artists was now
destroyed, as the art’s new social setting in central and Eastern
Europe quickly crumbled, leaving the artist to organize
himself\herself politically or not at all.
Part of this was undoubtedly due to the German emigration
after 1933, followed by a lesser exodus of European artists and
intellectual around 1939.
Artists and intellectuals like Stravinsky, Bretch, Ernst, Dali
Mondrian and Beckmann et plus.
In Germany the reaction was first and foremost against any art
with non-Aryan, communist, or anti-militarist associations, then
against he cultural apparatus set up by the Weimar republic.
Anything that was heroic. Optimistic, consciously German was
embraced and schools and academies, students were
encouraged to conduct ceremonial book burning, silenced
those who remained and many were driven to exile. Artists
were forbidden from exhibiting or publishing.
Censorship could be exercised on the initiative of party,
ministry, the Reich youth leader and Rosenberg’s largely lunatic
office.
Then came a new drive starting in 1936 and culminating in a
grand purge of the museums the next year, together with a
denigrate art exhibition in Munich which coincided with Hitler’s
opening of a new party-style house of German art there.
Roughly 17000 pictures of all kinds, including masterpieces by
Gauguin and Van Gogh were removed from the public
collections in this way, 2/3rd of them being in due course sold
or stolen and the remaining 5000 burnt.
Under Stalin in 1932, the party abolished the existing cultural
organizations. Only the surrealists seen openly to have
admitted the dilemma, publishing a statement against Stalinism
in 1935 and subsequently becoming associated with the
Trotskyite opposition; although their actual works were
apolitical. It was more towards commercial design and
advertisements.
Apart from them, the main effort of the French intelligentsia in
the 1930s was canalized thru the communist run Association
d’Ecrivians et Artistes Revolutionaries founded in 1932,
together with its journal Commune and the related
international meetings to defend culture against fascism, in
which older humanists like Gide, Heinrich, Mann and E. M.
Forster appeared alongside the communists.
Whether or not this whole left wing of the popular front
campaign was politically effective [it was felt to be so, from its
convictions and its commitment to higher truth and a better
world came the decade’s outstanding works of art [special
mention to the art produced during the Spanish civil war:
novels of Andre Malraux, Brecht’s plays written in exile and the
strongly expressive paintings of Picasso , the climax being
Guernica painted in 1937.
In England too, there was a coherent anti-fascist movement,
which grew, and new institutions like the Artist’s International
Association, the group theatre et cetera came about. The
prevailing mode was realist. The Spanish civil war became
central to the movement that was led by men between the
ages of 25 to 35. E.g. Auden, Day Lewis.
In America also there were groupings on the left: communist
inspired New York Congress of American Writers of 1935.
The same year for crises was ‘golden years’ for Hollywood,
which was booming ever since the arrival f sound in 1928.
Hitler knowing hoe divided Europe was, made is first move by
annexing Austria in 1938. Neither Britain nor France made a
move that only boosted Hitler’s confidence; then his eyes were
on Czechoslovak. Hitler was sure that the west would not risk
war for the sake of Poland.
But on September one when he launched his troops, the British
government was forced tp recognize the threat to Europe’s
peace and its interest.
And declared war on Germany.
Before Britain and France were ready to make a move, Hitler
attacked France and defeated it.
June 22 1941, the day on which the German army invaded
Russia, has a good claim to be regarded as the most fateful day
in the modern history of Europe.
Well, its all about speculation but what if the German army had
succeeded in overthrowing the one communist state in the
world and managed to bring the resources of Russia under their
control, the whole pattern of the rest of the century would be
very different. In that sense, it was fortunate that Pearl
Harbor’s brought America as well as Russia into the war.
Eastern Europe felt the full brunt of Nazi racist policy.
People oppressed by the Nazi were not treated as humans and
underwent the most horrendous types of crimes and
treatments.
Early in 1942 Hitler secretly ordered the ‘final solution’ of the
Jewish solution and in the next three years SS detachments
under the command of men like Eichmann carried out the
systematic extermination of some 5 million Jews, a crime
without parallel in European history.
In these circumstances, the resistance attracted increasing
number.
Whilst the Russians steadily fought the Germans back, British
and America had cleared North Africa, invaded Italy and in the
summer of 1944 made their long awaited landing in the west.
The forces now in the field against him left Hitler with no
rational hope of avoiding defeat.
By the time the Russians forced their way into the ruins of
berlin, Hitler committed suicide: 30th april1945.
The Second World War was the most destructive of all wars,
although it was far more of a world war than the first. The
heaviest burden fell on Europe and the scale of losses makes
the statistics meaningless: between 25 and 30 million dead;
double the number uprooted from their homes, hundreds of
towns in ruins, thousands of square miles lost to cultivation.
For several years after the fighting stopped many parts of
Europe lived on the verge of starvation, with inflation and the
black market rampant.
Art during this madness
Except in countries where an underground resistance to Nazism
and fascism developed, the war against Germany took away
the art’s political function and broke their international links.
It was not in itself an occasion of major original works and no
one could comprehend its immediate impact. Partly because its
outbreak came as a shock, partly because what happened was
beyond anyone’s ability to grasp and digest it. The ensuing view
that such events made nonsense of literature was borne out by
the fact that the books that were outstanding to issue from the
war were actually accounts of first hand experience which no
novelist can match. E.g. Inge Scholl’s the White Rose.
What the war did was radically to rearrange the setting, within
which the arts operated. In Europe a new appetite for the arts
developed. In France whose four year exposure to German
ideas surely had some bearing on the importance subsequently
attached to Heidegger, Kafka et cetera, the prime concern was
to reestablish Paris as the worlds cultural capital.
The united states, after the war decided that Russia was
exploiting the revolutionary situation which hey found in postwar Europe and in American eyes it was an attempt to subvert
all war and post-war agreements and to foist communism on
nations that the allies had fought to liberate.
The crunch came initially in the form of a failure to agree on
occupation policies. Soon it extended to the whole Russian
treatment of her east-European satellites. A restoration of
Europe’s shattered economies was recognized as an absolute
priority. It basically was a defense against communism. The
establishment of NATO was an American guarantee to a
Europe, which had already taken the basic decision in favour of
collective resistance.
And thus, developed the cold war.
With this commitment to the long-haul strategy of the cold war
went an unprecedented expansion and reinforcement, of the
military establishment.
In 1947 the National Security Act overhauled the machinery of
government to provide thru National Security Council, a body
hitherto unknown in Washington in the form of the Central
Intelligence Agency [CIA], an organization that combined the
collection of intelligence with the conduct of undercover paramilitary operations.
In the huge funds at its disposal and free from public scrutiny
the CIA constituted a new, doubtfully healthy and certainly
undemocratic element in American government. This marked a
new phase in the American evolution.
Finally the development of new military technology most
exemplified in nuclear weapons. In Europe in the 1940s
American strength and diplomacy, in company with Britain and
some parts of the continent succeeded in holding the line.in
the Far East things went differently.
In 1948,the hitherto legal element of segregation in
government service and in the armed forces of AfricanAmerican was eliminated.
The public was becoming increasingly anti left. The sustained
harrying of communist party officials under the wartime Smith
act, prohibiting conspiracies to overthrow the government by
force, was upheld by the supreme court, whilst the McCarran
Internal Security Act, virtually excluded party members and
fellow travelers to the united states.
The campaign of vilification of ‘guilt by association’ conducted
by senator joseph McCarthy, with the acquiescence of a supine
legislature, ran its course almost unhampered by legal or
political resistance until 1954.
It permanently damaged sections of the administration,
especially the state department, debased the language of
public debate, silenced free expressionism in large areas of
American life and damaged the nation’s reputation for liberty
and fair dealing, around the globe.
Eisenhower was elected and tension with the USSR persisted.
The most notable reform came about by legal action when the
Supreme Court in 1954 reversed a fifty-eight year old rule,
which permitted segregation of blacks and whites in state
schools.
This ushered in a new social revolution.
In the 50s and the 60s this long-delayed self-assertion by a
minority twenty million strong became a dominating feature of
the American scene.
To explain the meaning and history of the term Negro is quite
complicated but going by Martin Luther King’s usage of the
word it wasn’t meant to mean anything derogatory but being
sensitive to its history, it is an unhealthy stereotype.
The civil right movement, which was so very powerful, was
soon replaced by black power as the dominating influence. In
1968, the assignation of Martin Luther king provoked riots in
125 cities.
Linked of course to the African-American protest were the vast
socio-economic changes of post war America.
A middle class grew but the cities deteriorated. Poverty, in
acute forms, persisted to a degree that most Americans failed
to realize.
The assassination of Kennedy in Dallas in 1963, in a larger sense
was expressive of the disruptive forces, which seemed at times
to be tearing America apart – these forces were captured in the
American paintings of this period; the abstractionism of Pollock
or the pop art which satirized the affluent society.
But in some ways the most remarkable manifestation of
domestic dissent occurred on college campuses notably Berkley
and Columbia where youthful alienation from the America
which was at the peak of its power and prosperity showed itself
in every form, from the ‘beat’ writings of Jack Kerouac, to sitins, riots and the burning of draft cards.
The ‘60s saw the revival of folk music. Many folk artists like
Joan Baez, Phil Ochs, Bob Dylan etc. sang heavily against war
and the system.
Art was well fused with the happenings in society and by means
of art a lot of pressure was put on governments to stop
injustice and to make them take action against all that that was
wrong. In 1967, anti war protests and demonstrations swept
the country and in 1969, the year, which saw America put a
man on the moon, she began her withdrawals from South
Vietnam.
American realism became the new direction for American
visual artists at the turn of the twentieth century. The
photographer led the photo secession, which created pathways
for photography as an emerging art form. Georgia O’Keffe,
Arthur Dove, Gerald Murphy were some important early
American modernist painters.
After World War I, many artists rejected the modern trends and
many adopted styles of realism in depicting American urban
and rural scenes. The Harlem renaissance was another
significant development in American art. In the 1920s and 30s,
a new generation of educated and politically astute African
American men and women emerged who sponsored literary
societies and art and industrial exhibitions to combat racist
stereotypes. Notable artists– Aaron Douglas, James van der
Zee.
When the great depression hit, President Roosevelt’s New Deal
created several public art programs. The purpose of these
programs was to give work to artists and decorate public
buildings usually with a national theme. This was most
influenced by Mexican mural.
In the years after World War II, a group of New York artists
formed the first American movement exert major influence
internationally: Abstract expressionism. The term has always
been criticized as too large and paradoxical, yet the common
definition implies the use of abstract art to express feelings,
emotions, what is within an artist.
The first generation of abstract expressionists included Jackson
Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko, Robert Motherwell
etc. They were influenced by cubist works like Picasso’s, Miro’s
etc.
Most of them abandoned formal composition and
representation of real objects. It was more of an intuitive and
instinctual arrangement of space, line, shape, color. Two types
developed – Color field painting: Mark Rothko, NewmanAction painting: Pollock.
During the 1950’s, abstract painting in America evolved into
movements such as neo-dada, op art, minimal art.
Pop art, photo-realism and neo realism extended the
boundaries of contemporary art in the mid 1960s through the
1970s. Artist like Robert Rauschenberg, Andy Warhol
reproduced with satiric care everyday objects and images of
American popular culture – Coca Cola, soup cans. Realism has
always been popular in America; Edward Hopper’s works.
At the beginning of the twenty first century, contemporary art
in the United States as it stands as a super power (since the
collapse of the Soviet Union) is characterized by the idea of
pluralism.
Latin America
A widely shared culture, a common colonial legacy, similar
religious experience and language gives to Latin America a
deceptive impression of homogeneity which can obscure the
wide differences between countries and population and racial
compositions, in illiteracy rates, in educational standards etc.
At the opening of the 20th century the majority of the
population lived in the countryside, in small towns. These were
self-sufficient landed estates owned by absentee landowners,
managed by bailiffs and worked by debt peonage labor. In the
early years of the twentieth century, due to the opening of the
Panama Canal and the Great War stimulated demand to which
the towns responded by expanding at the expense of
neighboring Indian lands. Throughout Andean America and in
Mexico, innumerable revolts were evidence of increasing rural
distress and in countries peasant grievances passed from the
stage of rural revolt to full scale revolution – in Mexico after
1910, Bolivia after 1952 and Cuba after 1959.
From the centers of finances less railways were built to the
interior of these countries. These lines were constructed with
the profits and utilities of the foreign companies, not the needs
of the country. In Chile alone (where railways were internally
financed) railways play a constructive role in nation building. In
the 1920s, shipping and air transport was owned by Germans
and Americans. Immigration was another important factor in
the economic expansion accompanying political stability.
Cities are the visible mark of Latin America’s progress. By 1910,
Buenos Aires was the largest city south of the equator; quite
cosmopolitan. But in all these cities are immigrants and there is
a lot of poverty. The efforts by rural immigrants are
concentrated on earning a precarious living and trying to slot
themselves into existing society rather than attempting to
overthrow the existing order. Retarded industrialization,
financial and technical control by foreign firms has given a
break on the emergence of an independent middle class. The
popularity of family businesses as against corporations reflects
a dislike of Imperialism, which happens to be one of the
distinctive traits of Latin American culture.
European ideas, fashions and experts were extolled whilst
indigenous art and culture were deprecated. The Mexican
revolution was the dominant event of the first half of the
century, although the repercussions have not been so
widespread internationally as those of the Cuban revolution.
The revolution erupted as a consequence of tensions within a
developing economy in which the Mexican middle class had not
been given a big enough share of either political or economic
power, and in which many traditional hacienda (small town)
were unable to compete with the new commercially oriented
estates of the elite and those foreign landowners who owned a
fifth of Mexico’s land in 1910.
In 1913, when the revolution’s first leader Francisco Madero
was assassinated, what followed was 4 years of campaigning.
Finally in 1917, a constitution was framed in which are
expressed the principles of the revolution: agrarianism,
socialism, nationalism, Indianism. An unusual feature in Mexico
is the way in which the social myth of the revolution found
pictorial rather than literary expression. Seeking inspiration in
the neglected Indian past and drawing on an extraordinarily
rich tradition of popular art, a school of Muralist, the most
famous of whom are Rivera, Orozco, Siqueiros produced a
revolutionary art without parallel anywhere. Painters, rather
than writers constituted the revolutionary vanguard.
After the First World War, many intellectuals felt that Europe
had forfeited its right to be leader of world civilization. They
were still responsive to the latest avant-garde expressions of
poetry and art but now there was a conscious search for other
sources of inspiration. This was expressed in 3 forms of cultural
nationalism.
Firstly, the Mexican revolution stimulated indigenous thought,
especially Andean countries with their large Indian population
could provide a new cultural identity and an escape from
spiritual subjugation to Europe. In Peru, Haya de la Torre and,
more profoundly, Carlos Mariategni and in Bolivia Franz
Tamayo regarded the Indians as the foundation of nationality.
In Mexico, Jose Vasconcelos argued that Latin America could
make unique and great contribution to world culture. Similarly,
Brazil’s Gilberto Freyre and in Cuba the work of Fernando Ortiz
explored the African elements in Cuba’s culture.
Secondly, there was a re-evaluation of the Spanish legacy and
recognition of the cultural unity of the Hispanic world,
stimulated by the great renaissance of poetry, literature and
philosophy in Spain.
Thirdly, the Bolivarian ideal of continental unity was revived as
the need to find a means of combining against cultural and
economic imperialism became more urgent with the United
States intervention in the Caribbean and Central America.
The continental ideal was most forcibly expressed by the
university reform movement, which began in the Argentinian
university of Cordoba in 1918. In Cuba, Venezuela and Peru
students spearheaded attacks on the dictatorships of the
1920s. The explicit anti imperialism of the reform movement
attracted the attention of the communists, and communism
made its deepest impact in Cuba.
In 1929, prosperity evaporated as markets collapsed and the
flow of foreign money dried up. Within a year, Latin America’s
exports had declined by 40%. There was massive
unemployment. Self-sufficiency seemed like the only option.
Hence, in the larger countries- Mexico, Brazil, Argentina,
Columbia, Chile- the 1930’s saw a policy of enforced
industrialization, in which the state took the initiative.
Although the political and social framework within which these
economic developments took place varied from country to
country, economic insecurity and political instability in the early
1930s provided opportunities for the military to intervene
everywhere except Mexico.
In contrast to Argentina where the response to economic crisis
was to restore the land owning oligarchy to power, in Brazil a
military coup in 1930 ushered in the 15 years populist
dictatorship of Getulio Vargas.
In the smaller, more backward countries, such as those of
Central America, economic crisis strengthened the hold of the
traditional landowners. Elsewhere, there was a growing middle
class and a nascent working class; traditional ruling groups
were forced to accept alliances with them. Mexico alone in the
1930s is an exception, as Cardenas revitalized the revolution by
redistributing more land to peasants than all his predecessors
combined.
Mexico’s diversified economy had helped to save the country
from the worst consequences of the depression, and the
existence of a broadly based official party, representing
workers, peasants and the middle classes enabled Cardenas to
revive the revolution by implementing the agrarian clauses of
the constitution and by nationalizing the oil industry in 1938the one outstanding successful nationalist act of the 1930s.
By 1940, Mexico was uniquely placed to take advantage of the
economic opportunities offered by the outbreak of the Second
World War.
The economic boost experienced by Latin American countries
under the impetus of the war threw up social groups, which
could no longer be contained within restrictive political
systems. The first stirring of a new independent spirit came
from Argentina where, in 10 years of ultra nationalistic
dictatorship between 1945-55, Peron made an unsuccessful;
bid to seize the leadership of Latin America and to establish it
as an independent force in world affairs.
Peron left a legacy of a run down economy, a demoralized
middle class and hostility between army and unions, which is
still the major force in Argentinian politics.
The Bolivian revolution has been unusual in Lain America in fact
it has been the only successful social revolution to have
occurred in one of the poorer under developed countries.
Elsewhere, revolution ‘failed’ or were made to fail as in
Guatemala in 1954 when the 10-year revolutionary regime was
overthrown with CIA aid. Where revolution had succeeded –
Venezuela and Cuba; it was relatively developed.
The Cuban Revolution
In Cuba, the revolt against Batista was not a mass revolt
(initially) but one led by a small group of middle class
revolutionaries working to a moderate reformist program.
Experience of living with and being dependent on peasants on
the sierra maestro converted Castro to the need for a more
fundamental social transformation than he originally planned.
The widening of his program, especially by agrarian reform and
the nationalization of major industries alienated much of the
middle class support but was supported by the masses: rural
and urban and later by the Cuban communist party.
The momentum of the revolution has been sustained over a
long period by the enthusiasm of the younger generation, by
Castro’s own personal rule and by his refusal to institutionalize
the revolution. Cuba has a revolutionary tradition going back to
the middle of the nineteenth century; a struggle against the
Spanish. It has a strong concept of nationhood.
This is embodied by the life and writings of Jose Marti and it is
from that Castro has derived this notion of Cuba as the
liberator of the rest of Latin America from economic servitude.
The second factor is the ‘visibility’ of Cuba’s sugar culture.
Cuba’s dependence on sugar is so complete and the rhythm of
economic and social life so bound up with the sugar harvest
that it is possible to achieve a very high degree of mass
mobilization in activities such cane cutting with which national
survival can be equated.
During the Cold War, Cuba was dependent on Russian
economic and technical support. Since its collapse and even
afore it Cuba has been developing its technical and scientific
elite which goes hand in had with social reformation cum
revolution. The Cuban revolution gave an impetus to reform
mongering and to revolutionary thought throughout the rest of
the continent. America and some countries of Latin America
derived a conclusion that development of the middle class was
the best insurance against revolution and that, once sufficient
capital had been pumped into the system economic progress,
impelled by the middle classes, would acquire a self-generating
momentum. But the middle classes did not respond to the
external stimuli as anticipated.
Che Guevara’s death in Bolivia in 1967 had the left into
disarray.
In 1964, a junta came to power in Brazil and Bolivia, I 1966 in
Argentina and in 1968 in Peru.
There is also tension between the believers [Catholics] and the
non-believers.
From the early 1960s in Latin America, other forms of cooperation have developed in the fields of economics,
education, military affairs, in the creation of common markets,
free trade associations; aimed at rationalizing economic
development.
The outside world may still be hostile to the achievements and
functions of the latin American governments and nations but
gradually, as outsiders become aware of the sophistication and
vitality of this culture as shown in its contributions to the
modern world in fields as varied as football, race relations, art ,
architecture, music, the dance, and literature, has made its
culture and its existence confident. There is definitely a lot to
learn from the experience and evolution of this continent.
Conclusion
Exhausted as it can be reading about the world’s condition in
the twentieth century leaves one with mixed feelings.
On one hand one realizes the wretchedness of the world that
we have so proudly inherited and on the other, there seems to
be some kind of progress, which perhaps can make an
optimistic fellow a bit hopeful; that one-day utopia of a kind
will be reached.
The political madness of the 20th century finds an external
existence in the works of that period when the world saw two
greatest and horrendous wars, where each and every
movement and moment was tense, till the break-up of what
seemed ideal USSR.
The distortion [in art] and the forms getting absolutely
dissolved reflect the fragmented society engendering a feeling
of hopelessness.
The force and angst is evident in the texture and treatment of
work of the artists who experienced the 20th century.
The helplessness and disappointment of an individual [of an
artist] is reflected in his/her works of nineteenth and twentieth
century; where senseless wars and killings were the order of
the day.
This helplessness is still present.
As we are heading towards high capitalism, everything has
become a commodity. Art has and will become an occupation
that is half-romantic and half-commercial.
How harsh it can be, when one feels helpless and one realizes
the strength of the individual but is also aware of the collective
whole, without which no concrete change can be realized.
When in confusion, one must try to articulate one’s thoughts in
one form or the other, thus emerging with clarity and possibly
drawing attention to a solution, which is communicable and
visual or expressive in any way.
Thank you.
Bibliography
- The Twentieth Century
Edited by Alan Bullock
- The History of Art
The Random House Library of Painting and Sculpture;
1981
- The Necessity of Art
Ernst Fischer
- Woman, Art and Society
Whitney Chadwick
1990 Thames and Hudson
- Misc.