Between the World Wars (c.1918-1945)
Chapter 21:
BETWEEN THE World Wars
OUTLINE
Chapter 21: Between The World Wars
The "Great War" and Its Significance
Literary Modernism
T. S. Eliot and James Joyce
Franz Kafka
Virginia Woolf
The Revolution in Art: Cubism
Freud, the Unconscious, and Surrealism
The Age of Jazz
George Gershwin
Duke Ellington
The Harlem Renaissance
Ballet: Collaboration in Art
Art as Escape: Dada
Art as Protest: Guernica
Art as Propaganda: Film
Photography
Art as Prophecy: From Futurism to Brave New World
Outline Chapter 21
Timeline Chapter 21: Between the World Wars
1907
Picasso, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon
c. 1911 German Expressionism; Kandinsky, Compositions
1915-1916
Dadaism; Duchamp, L.H.O.O.Q.
1919
Yeats, "The Second Coming"
1919
Bauhaus design school started at Weimar
1923
Chagall, Green Violinist
1924
Breton, First Surrealist Manifesto
1925
Eisenstein, Potemkin
1926
Kafka, The Castle
1928
Magritte, Man With a Newspaper
1931
Dali, The Persistence of Memory
1937
Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God
1937
Picasso, Guernica
Timeline Chapter 21
The Terrible Impact of World War I
What made World War I so terrible was the advanced technologies used in the
service of death. The old military charge against an enemy was obsolete with
the invention of the machine gun just as the use of poison gas (not outlawed
until after the war) made a mockery of military exercises of strategy. The result
was an appalling slaughter of youth on a scale unparalleled in human history.
US Armored Cars - WWI
US Tanks WWI
Trench Warfare WWI
The Cultural Responses to World War I
In the period between the wars the memory of that slaughter shook
intellectuals to the core. Their response to it was predictable enough: protest
or pacifism or a total distrust of the powers of rationality to cope with human
evil. The reaction to the Great War ranged, in short, from T. S. Eliot's
combination of pessimism and faith to the playful nonsense of the dada artists
and the inner retreat of the surrealists.
Pablo Picasso
Guernica, 1937
Dali, Salvador
Soft Construction with Boiled Beans: Premonition of Civil War
1936
Technology in the Wake of World War
The technological advances that had made the war so terrible also gave
promise of new forms of communication that would radically advance the arts
into new and different fields. The widespread development of radio networks,
the transition of the movies from the silent screen to the "talkies," the
increased mobility brought about by the automobile, and the advances in
photography would not only produce new art forms but provide their
availability to larger audiences
Commercial
and Amateur
Wireless Radio
Equipment
1910 - 1923
The Economic and Socio-Political Landscape Between the World Wars
Coupled with these advances in technology were some profound shifts in
social status. People were leaving rural areas in great numbers for the
factories of the cities of America and Europe. The old social stratification of
the classes was beginning to break down in Europe. The economic
dislocations brought on by the war caused urban poverty in Europe and, after
a giddy decade of prosperity in the 1920s, the depression years in the United
States.
White Angel Breadline 1933
By Dorthea Lange
During the Great
Depression,
the destitute stood in
breadlines like this one in
San Francisco,
set up by a wealthy woman
known as the "White
Angel."
Dorothea Lange,
"Migrant Mother,"
1936
The New Politics of the Post WWI and pre-WWII World
In response to these social and economic dislocations new political
movements seemed attractive and compelling. Hitler's National Socialist party
rose against the background of Germany's defeat, as did Mussolini's Fascists.
The period between the wars also saw the consolidation of Communist power
in Russia and the rise of the totalitarian state under Stalin.
Scenes from
Leni Riefenstahl's
The Triumph
of the Will
1935
Radical Shifts in Fundamental Thinking
Finally, we should note some other fundamental (and radical) ideas that were
beginning to gain currency. Einsteinian physics were changing the picture of
the world in which we lived while containing the seeds of the atomic era.
Sigmund Freud's ideas were also radically reshaping our notions of the
interior landscape of the human soul.
Albert Einstein, 1931
Sigmund Freud, 1938
…All of these forces - political, technological, scientific, social, and artistic
- gave a shape to a culture that in its richness (and sadness) is called “the
Western world between the two great wars”.
Modernism as Exemplified by 20th Century Literature:
The Second Coming -- W. B. Yeats, 1921
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all convictions, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
William Butler Yeats
1923
Cubism: The Revolution in Art
Cubism or cubism - One of the most influential art movements (1907-1914) of the
twentieth century, Cubism was begun by Pablo Picasso (Spanish, 1882-1973) and
Georges Braque (French, 1882-1963) in 1907. They were greatly inspired by African
sculpture, by painters Paul Cézanne (French, 1839-1906) and Georges Seurat
(French, 1859-1891), and by the Fauves.
In Cubism the subject matter is broken up, analyzed, and reassembled in an
abstracted form. Picasso and Braque initiated the movement when they followed
the advice of Paul Cézanne, who in 1904 said artists should treat nature
"in terms of the cylinder, the sphere and the cone.“
There were three phases in the development of Cubism:
Facet Cubism, Analytic Cubism, and Synthetic Cubism.
Georges Braque,
Bottle, Newspaper, Pipe, and Glass,
1913, charcoal and various papers
pasted on paper
Pablo Picasso.
Les Demoiselles d'Avignon. 1907
Marcel Duchamp
Nude Descending a Staircase
1911-12
Georges Braque
Georges Braque
Fishing Boats
1909
Georges Braque
Girl With a Cross 1911
Pablo Picasso
Pablo Picasso (Spanish, 1881–1973)
Girl Reading at a Table, 1934
The Old Guitarist,
1903/04
Oil on panel
The Poet (Le Poète),
August 1911
Dada: Art as a Critique of Civilization
Dada or Dadaism [French, from dada, child's word for a horse] Nihilistic movement
in the arts that flourished chiefly in France, Switzerland, and Germany from about
1916 to about 1920 and later and that was based on the principles of deliberate
irrationality, anarchy, and cynicism and the rejection of laws of beauty and
social organization. This was an intellectual reaction to the horrors of WWI, which
revealed contemporary“civilized” man to be capable of brutality, savagery, and
destructiveness on a scale unthinkable to previous generations.
Coupled with the breakneck speed of technological “progress” and the radical
paradigm shifts implied by Relativity and Freudianism, the artists of the immediate
post-war period sought to encourage a revolution
in consciousness by consciously subverting the underpinnings of civilized views of
the world, such as language, rationality, and order in thought and
social/political organization. After 1922, however, Dada faded and many
Dadaists grew interested in surrealism.
Dada Art
Overturned Blue Shoe
with Two Heels
Under a Black Vault
Very Rare Picture
on the Earth
1915.
Oil and metallic paint
on board,
and silver and gold leaf
on wood
Marcel Duchamp
Fountain, 1917/1964
15 in. x 19 1/4 in. x 24 5/8 in.
glazed ceramic with black paint
Marcel Duchamp. Bicycle Wheel.
1951
Assemblage: metal wheel
mounted on painted wood stool
Marcel Duchamp
The Work of Marcel Duchamp encompassed many of the trends of
20th-century art international movements from pre-cubism to conceptual art.
In a way similar to the work of Pablo Picasso, Duchamp’s art can not be easily
fit into a single category or “ism”. It illuminates the entire 20th-century landscape.
L.H.O.O.Q., 1919
Nude, Sad Young Man on a Train,
1911–12. Oil on cardboard
The Bride Stripped Bare
by Her Bachelors, Even
(The Large Glass)
1915-23
Oil, varnish, lead foil,
lead wire, and dust
on two glass panels,
Philadelphia Museum of Art
Surrealism: Freud and the Unconscious
Surrealism is a style in which fantastic visual imagery from the subconscious mind
is used with no intention of making the artwork logically comprehensible.
Founded by Andre Breton in 1924, it was a primarily European movement which attracted
many members of the chaotic Dada movement. It was similar in some respects to the
late 19th-century Symbolist movement, but deeply influenced by the psychoanalytic
work of Freud and Jung.
The Surrealist circle was made up of many of the great artists of the 20th century,
including Jean Arp, Max Ernst, Giorgio de Chirico, Man Ray, Joan Miro, and Rene Magritte.
Salvador Dali, probably the single best-known Surrealist artist, was somewhat of an
outsider due to his right-wing politics – during this period leftism was fashionable
among Surrealists, in fact in almost all intellectual circles.
Marc Chagall
Paris Through the Window
1913
Oil on canvas
Jean Arp
Plastron et fourchette - Shirtfront and fork
c.1922, painted wood
Man Ray
Rayograph
c. 1925
Rayograph
1922
Salvador Dali
The Persistence of Memory. 1931
Birth of Liquid Desires
1931–32.
Oil and collage on canvas
The Accommodations of Desire,
1929
Oil and cut-and-pasted
printed paper on cardboard
Rene Magritte
The Reckless Sleeper 1928
Le Dormeur téméraire
Oil on canvas
A figure sleeps in a wooden alcove or box above
a dark cloudy sky. The way into this space is
barred by a tablet embedded with everyday
objects, which are displayed as in a book
for children.
As Magritte knew, some or all of them could also
be read as Freudian symbols. This combination of
different possible interpretations adds to the
painting’s suggestion of dream-like unease
and disorientation.
“The Betrayal of Images"
(1928-9)
Max Ernst
Attirement of the Bride
(La Toilette de la mariée),
1940. Oil on canvas
The Antipope,
December 1941–March 1942
Oil on canvas
Giorgio de Chirico
The Red Tower
1913. Oil on canvas
The Melancholy
of Departure
1914
The Enigma of a Day
1914
Yves Tanguy
Indefinite Divisibility
1942
Paul Delvaux
Sleeping Venus 1944
Joan Miró
Landscape (The Hare)
autumn 1927
Oil on canvas
Paul Klee
Red Balloon, 1922. Oil
on chalk-primed gauze, mounted on board, 12 1/2 x 12 1/4 inches.
The Jazz Age and The Harlem Renaissance
In the decade following World War I, an artistic explosion occurred predominantly
within the African American community that produced a wealth of music,
literature poetry, dance, social discourse and visual art.
Quickly, this music and culture broadened its base to include practitioners and
audiences of all races, ages, and socio-economic groups and entered mainstream
American culture, where it became truly, a mass-media, cross-cultural, and
global phenomenon.
Tales of the Jazz Age (1922)
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Dust Jacket Illustration by John Held, Jr.
The William P. Gottlieb Collection, comprising over
sixteen hundred photographs of celebrated jazz artists,
documents the jazz scene from 1938 to 1948
Art as Propoganda: Film
Sergei Eisenstein. Potemkin
1925
35mm film, black and white and hand-colored, silent, about 75 minutes
Early- to Mid-20th Century Photography
Brassai
Backstage at the Folies-Bergere
1933
Man Ray
The Gift
Date: 1921
ANSEL ADAMS
Monolith, Face of Half Dome, 1927
Futurism to “Brave New World” : Art as Prophecy
Sea=Dancer
1914
Oil on canvas
Aldous Huxley
Brave New World (1931)
Toward the Dawn of the New Age
The mushroom cloud of the atomic bombing of
Nagasaki, Japan, in 1945