CULTURE OF THE
INTERWAR YEARS
Major Trends
 Artistic & intellectual innovations of
pre-WWI yrs became more
widespread and accepted
 Why?
 Political insecurities
 Economic insecurities
 Social insecurities
Art
“Modernism in art and
music meant
constant
experimentation and
a search for new
kinds of expression.”
McKay, A History of Western Society
Artistic
Response to the
Contemporary
World
What shapes and colors do you
see?
What words or phrases describe
the tone of this piece?
How is this a response to the
time period in which the artist
lived?
KANDINSKY’S
IMPROVISATIO
N NO. 30
(ON A WARLIKE THEME),
1913
Carra’s
Manifesto for
Intervention,
1914
Leger’s Remorqueur, 1920
Magritte’s
On the Threshold
of Liberty,
1929
Picasso’s Guernica, 1937
Ernst’s Europe After the Rain II,
1940-1942
Leger’s Le Petite Dejeuner
Fauvism
 1898-1908
 color & simplified lines
 “How do you see these trees? They are
yellow. So, put in yellow; this shadow,
rather blue, paint it with pure ultramarine;
these red leaves? Put in vermillion.”
-Paul Gaugin, 1888
Woman with Hat
Henri Matisse, 1905
Harmony in Red, 1908, Matisse
Cubism
 1909-1914
 multiple viewpoints simultaneously
 fragmented, geometric forms
 “The cubist is not interested in usual
representational standards.”

-Perry, Western Civilization
Georges
Braque
(1882-1963)
Woman With a Guitar, 1913
Violin and Candlestick, 1910
Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, 1907
Portrait of Dora Maar Seated, 1937
Pablo
Picasso
(1881-1973)
Expressionism
 Indebted to Freud
 Art tries to penetrate the façade
of bourgeois superficiality and
probe the psyche—that which
lurks beneath an individual’s calm
and artificial posture
Expressionism
 Subliminal anxiety
 Dissonance in color and
perspective
 Pictorial violence—manifest* and
latent**
 *Manifest (adj) readily perceived by the eye or the
understanding; evident; obvious; plain
 **Latent (adj) present or potential but not visible,
apparent, or realized
Edvard Munch
The Scream
1893
Ernst Ludwig
Kirchner
Street Scene with
a Cocotte in Red
1914
Oskar Kokoschka, The Tempest, 1914
Max
Beckmann
The Night
1918-1919
The Age of Uncertainty
 “Age of Anxiety”
 “The Great Break”
 What did doubt and
searching mean for western
thought, art and culture?
The Age of Uncertainty
 The postwar period was
one of loss and
uncertainty but also one
of invention, and new
ideas.
Dada Movement
 Cultural movement (art,




literature, theater)
Peak 1916-1920 – France,
Switzerland, Germany
(international in scope)
Reaction to WWI, struggle with
modern world
Rejection of laws of beauty &
social organization
“anti-art”, absurd
Artist George Grosz
described Dada as "the
organized use of
insanity to express
contempt for a
bankrupt world."
-S. Stamberg
Marcel Duchamp
Fountain by
Marcel Duchamp,
1917, photograph
by Alfred
Stieglitz.
Hannah Höch
Cut with the
Kitchen Knife
George Grosz
(ca. 1919)
Extra editions fly high! Peace
In the grenades rain down
And hacked-up soldiers
Much champagne is drunk in the Mascotte Pavillion
Little Lisa dances secretly at the Art Club—
INTENSIFIED TURBULENCE OF THE WORLD
talk and countertalk
!! COURAGE: to AFFIRM the absurdity of existence!
!! The GIGANTIC nonsense of the universe!!
Accomplished by the rear- end of the world!
Surrealism
 Movement in visual art




and literature
Grew out of Dada
movement
Founded in 1924 in Paris Interwar period
Influenced by Freud
Unconscious as source of
inspiration
Indefinite Divisibility
Yves Tanguy, 1942
Surrealism
 Explores the dream world, a world without




logic, reason, or meaning
Fascination with mystery, the strange
encounters between objects, and incongruity
Subjects are often indecipherable in their
strangeness
The beautiful is the quality of chance
association
Illogical and fantastical
Dali’s Persistence of Memory, 1931
Dalí in the 1960s wearing the mustache
style he popularized.
The Philadelphia Museum of Art for the 2005
Salvador Dalí exhibition
Dali’s Invention of Monsters, 1937
The Elephant
Celebes (1921) by
Max Ernst.
Giorgio de
Chirico
The
Vexations of
the Thinker
Salvador Dali, The Persistence of Memory
Max Ernst
Two Children
are Menaced
by a
Nightingale
Joan Miró, Dog Barking at the Moon
Marc
Chagall
Self-portrait
with Seven
Fingers
1913
Architecture
 Functionalism—Buildings should be
“functional” or useful, fulfilling the purpose
for which they constructed
 Art & engineering were to be unified
 All unnecessary ornamentation was to be
stripped away.
 Believed that art had a social function
Architecture
 Chicago School
 Louis Sullivan
 Frank Lloyd Wright
 Bauhaus School
 Walter Gropius
 Tried to blend fine arts (painting & sculpture) with
applied arts (printing, weaving, & furniture
making)
 Wanted to unify arts and crafts to create buildings
and objects of the future
Music
 Igor Stravinsky
 Sought a new understanding of irrational forces in
his music
 Inaugurated a modern musical movement
 The Firebird (1910), Petrushka (1911), and The Rite
of Spring (1913)
 Arnold Schönberg
 Experimented with atonal music (tonality is
abandoned)
Literature
 Interest in the Unconscious
 Stream-of-Consiousness: author relates the
innermost thoughts of each character
 James Joyce—Ulysses (1922)
 Virginia Woolf—Mrs. Dalloway
 Hermann Hesse—Steppenwolf
 Focused on spiritual lonliness & psychological
confusion of modern people in a mechanized and
urban society
Psychology
 Carl Jung
 Challenged Freud’s ideas
▪ Said his theories were too narrow
 2-Part Unconscious
▪ Personal Unconscious
▪ Collective Unconscious
▪ Place where memories of all human beings reside and
includes mental forms, archetypes, & images from dreams
▪ Archetypes are common to all people and help create myths,
religions, etc.
▪ Archetypes would bring the collective mind of all of
humanity to the fore in individual human minds
Physics
 7 subatomic particles had been distinguished
by 1940s
 Laid the groundwork for the atomic bomb
 Werner Heisenberg
 Uncertainty principle—humans can’t predict
phenomena because the very act of observing an
electron with light, for instance, affected its
location
 Signified a new worldview—uncertainty, not
predictability, lay at the heart of all physical laws
Mass Culture
 Revolution in mass communication
 Radio
 2.2 million radios in Britain in 1926, 9 million in 1930s
 Movies
 Increased size of audiences and their ability to give audiences a shared
experience
 Growth of mass leisure
 Sports
 World Cup begun in 1930
 1920s and 30s era of stadium-building
 Tourism
 Air travel, trains, buses, and cars made excursions more popular
and affordable