Chapter Twenty-One
The World at War
Culture and Values
Cunningham and Reich and Fichner-Rathus,
8th Ed.
World War I begins in 1914
Panama Canal opens
Germans use poison gas and sink the Lusitania
The October Revolution brings communism to Russia in 1917
United States enters World War I in 1917
The war ends in 1918
Women receive the right to vote in Britain in 1918
Prohibition begins in the United States in 1919
1920 ce – 1929ce
Women receive the right to vote in the United States in 1920
Fascists rise to power in Italy
Lindbergh makes the first solo flight from the United States to
Europe in 1927
 Television images are transmitted from Washington, DC, to New
York City in 1927
 Fleming discovers penicillin in 1928
 First sound movie is produced in 1928



































1929 ce – 1939ce
The U.S. Stock market crashes in 1929
The Great Depression begins
The analog computer is invented at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in
1930
Franklin Delano Roosevelt is first elected president in 1932
Roosevelt declares, “We have nothing to fear but fear itself”
Prohibition ends in 1933
Nazis rise to power in Germany in 1933
The Spanish Civil War (1936–1939)
Golden Gate Bridge opens in 1937
Japan invades China in 1937
1939 ce – 1941ce
Hitler invades Poland in 1939
Einstein alerts Roosevelt of the need to develop an atom bomb in 1939
The Netherlands, Belgium, and France are all taken by German blitzkrieg in 1940
Hitler invades Russia in 1941
Japan bombs Pearl Harbor, bringing the United States into the war on Dec. 7, 1941
1941 ce – 1945ceThe United States defeats Japanese fleet at Midway in 1942
The Soviet Union defeats Germany at Stalingrad and Kursk in 1943
The Allies land in Normandy on June 6, 1944
Germany surrenders in 1945
The United States drops atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945
World War II ends
The Great War (World War I)
Drastic loss of life
Sociopolitical consequences
October Revolution
Hitler’s National Socialist movement
Cultural consequences
Transportation, communication
Entertainment
Art Out of the Ashes
Max Beckman (1884-1980)
Humankind’s descent into cruelty and
madness
Night (1918-1919)
Pablo Picasso
Expressed the “brutality and darkness” of
the age
Max Beckmann, 1918-19, The Night (Die Nacht), oil on canvas,
Max Beckman, Departure
1932-33
Oil on canvas
triptych, center panel 84 3/4 X 45 3/8"; side panels each 84 3/4 X 39 1/4"
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
21.3 Pablo Picasso, Guernica, 1937
The Lost Generation
Rupert Brooke (1887-1915)
Isaac Rosenberg (1890-1918)
Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961)
Photography
Dorothea Lange
21.4 Dorothea
Lange, Migrant
Mother,
Nipomo,
California,
1936
Literature
Modernist temper
William Butler Yeats (1865-1939)
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
Stream of consciousness
Literature
Franz Kafka (1883-1924)
“Kafkaesque”
Guilt, loss, oppression, violence
Virginia Woolf (1882-1941)
Writer, critic (Bloomsbury Group)
Social, economic, and intellectual
discrimination against women
Literature
Sinclair Lewis (1885-1951)
Babbitt (1922)
“a chicken in every pot…”
Mindless materialism
Aldous Huxley (1894-1963)
Brave New World (1932)
Technology as tool for totalitarian control
The Visual Arts
Abstract Art
291 Gallery
Georgia O’Keeffe (1887-1986)
The Armory Show
Marcel Duchamp
Charles Demuth (1883-1935)
Destijl or Neoplasticism
Theo van Doesburg (1883-1931)
Constantine Brancusi
21.5 Georgia
O’Keeffe,
White Iris,
1924
21.6 Marcel
Duchamp,
Nude
Descending a
Staircase, (No.
2), 1912
Charles
Demuth,
My Egypt,
1927.
Oil on
composition
board,
35 ¾″ × 30″
Whitney
Museum of
American Art,
New York,
New York.
I Saw the
Figure 5
in Gold
, 1928
Charles
Demuth
(American,
1883–1935)
Oil on
cardboard;
35 1/2 x 30
in.
Theo von Doesburg, The Cow (composition), 1917
Gouache, oil, and charcoal on paper
Theo van
Doesburg,
Composition,
1929.
Oil on canvas,
11 ⅞″ × 11
⅞″
Philadelphia
Museum of
Art,
Constantin
Brancusi,
Bird in Space,
1924.
Polished bronze,
56 ½″ high,
including base .
Dada
Protest against war
Nonsense language, dissonant music,
anarchic irreverence
Marcel Duchamp
Mobiles, ready-mades
L.H.O.O.Q. (1919)
21.10 Marcel
Duchamp,
L.H.O.O.Q., 1919
Surrealism
Surrealism
Breton’s Manifesto of Surrealism (1924)
Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams
(1899)
Id, ego, superego
Dreams and the unconscious mind
Psychoanalysis as philosophy
Human and cultural behaviors
Surrealism
Salvadore Dali
The Persistence of Memory (1931)
Frida Kahlo
Diego in my Thoughts (1949)
Joan Miro (1893-1983)
21.14 Salvador Dalí, The Persistence of Memory, 1931
21.15 Joan Miro, Painting, 1933
21.16 Frida Kahlo,
Diego in My
Thoughts (Diego y
yo), 1949
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
Aaron Douglas (1899-1979)
Jacob Lawrence (1917-2000)
21.17 Aaron
Douglas,
Noah’s Ark,
ca. 1927
21.18 Jacob Lawrence, The Life of Harriet Tubman, No. 4, 19391940
Figurative Art in the United
States
Grant Wood (1891-1942)
Midwestern regionalism
American Gothic, (1930)
Edward Hopper (1882-1967)
Nighthawks (1942)
Unmistakable American city
Grant Wood,
American Gothic,
1930. Oil on
beaverboard, 30
¾″ × 25 ¾″
Edward Hopper, Nighthawks, 1942.
Oil on canvas. 33 ⅛″ × 60″
Film
Busby Berkeley
Salvadore Dali and Luis Brunel
Unchien Analou
The Wizard of Oz
Gone With the Wind
Propaganda as high art
Radio, film
Educate, persuade, shape public opinion
Film
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)
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
Music in the Jazz Age
African-American experience, heritage
Intonations, rhyhms
“Blue note” / the Blues
Ragtime (Scott Joplin)
From New Orleans to Chicago
12-bar blues
Call-and-Response, Scatting
Music in the Jazz Age
Swing
Duke Ellington (1899-1974)
Orchestra virtuoso, prolific composer
Extended jazz idiom to larger arena
George Gershwin (1898-1937)
Jazz in symphonic, operatic works
Rhapsody in Blue (1924)
Porgy and Bess (1935)
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
Architecture
Walter Gropius (1883-1969)
The Bauhaus
Bauhaus style synonymous with “modern”
Frank Lloyd Wright
Naturalistic style
Walter Gropius, technical wing, Bauhaus
School, 1925–1927. Dessau, Germany.
Frank Lloyd
Wright,
Kaufmann
House
Fallingwater
1936. Bear
Run,
Pennsylvania.
World War II
German blitzkrieg
Invasion of the Soviet Union
Holocaust
Pearl Harbor
Margaret Bourke-White, The Living Dead at Buchenwald, April 1945,
1945. Photograph.
http://life.time.com/history/buchenwald-photos-from-the-liberation-ofthe-camp-april-1945/#19
http://www.ushmm.org/confront-genocide/defining-genocide
Alfred Eisenstaedt, The Kiss,
August 14, 1945.
Photograph.
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 20th
century? Explain.
 Consider the ways in which film was used in the early 20th 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 21st
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.