How and in what ways did European
painting or literature reflect the
disillusionment in society between
1919 and 1939?
• Support your answer with specific
artistic or literary examples.
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Disillusionment: to free or be freed from illusion.
The general environment of pessimism, relativism, and alienation
was articulated in literature.
Novelists developed new techniques to express new realities.
Focused attention on the complexity and irrationality of the human
mind, where feelings, memories, and desires are mixed up.
Serious Novelists used stream-of-consciousness technique to
explore psyche.
Jacob’s Room (1922), Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) created a novel
made up of a series of monologues, in which ideas and emotions
bubble up randomly from different periods of time.
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As creative writers turned their attention from society to the individual
and from realism to psychological relativity, the idea of progress was
rejected.
The Decline of the West (1918), Oswald Spengler explains every culture
experiences a life cycle of growth and decline. Western civilization in his
opinion was in its old age, and death was approaching by conquest.
The Waste Land (1922), T.S. Eliot (1888-1965) depicts a world of growing
despair.
The Trial (1925), The Castle (1925), Franz Kafka (1883-1924) portrayed
helpless individuals crushed by hostile forces.
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Modern painting grew out of a revolt against French
impressionism. (conveying experience by impressions of reality)
French painters such as Pierre August Renoir, Claude Monet, and
Camille Pissaro sought to capture the momentary overall feeling
or impression, of light falling on a real-life scene before their eyes.
Artists known as postimpressionists were united to desire and
depict worlds other than what is reality.
Like modern novelists, they wanted to express a complicated
psychological view of reality as well as an overwhelming
emotional intensity.
Paul Gauguin (1848-1903) believed form and design of a picture
were important in themselves and the painter should try not to
represent them as the eye saw them.
Fascination with form, was characteristic of postimpressionism and
expressionism(forms derived from nature are being distorted).
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Dutch expressionist Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890) : The Starry Night (1889). Van
Gogh went beyond the portrayal of external reality, painting an inner world of
intense emotion and wild imagination he greatly contributed to the rise of
expressionism.
Paul Cezanne (1839-1906) committed to form and ordered design.
Still Life with a Curtain (1895) illustrates Cézanne's increasing trend towards terse
compression of forms and dynamic tension between geometric figures.
The expressionism of Henri Matisse (1869-1954) was so extreme that his group of
painters shocked critics and wanted to be called “the wild beasts”
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In Spain, Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) founded cubism, which
concentrated on a complex geometry of zigzagging lines and
overlapping planes.
Three Musicians (1921) - The three jagged figures from traditional
Italian comedy seem to convey the atmosphere of theater and the
rhythm of modern music.
Guernica (1937)- Inspired by the Spanish civil war and the deadly
terror bombing of Guernica.
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In the 1920s and 1930s , artistic movements of the prewar years
were extended and consolidated.
Dadaism attacked all accepted standards of art and behavior,
delighting in outrageous conduct.
Example of Dadaism: Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa where the
mysterious and famous woman has a mustache and is ridiculed.
After 1924 many Dadaists were attracted to surrealism.
Surrealism painted a world of wild dreams and complex symbols.
Surrealist painters made powerful statements about the age of
anxiety.
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Literature focused on the
complexity and irrationality of
the human mind.
Novelists such as Woolf, Faulkner,
and Joyce adopted the stream-ofconsciousness technique, in
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which ideas and emotions from
different time periods bubble up
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randomly.
Some literature, such as that of
Spengler, Kafka, and Orwell, was 
anti-utopian--it predicted a future
of doom.
French impressionism yielded to
nonrepresentational expressionism,
which sought to portray the worlds of
emotion and imagination, as in the
works of van Gogh, Gauguin,
Cézanne, and Matisse.
Nonrepresentational art turned away
from nature completely; it focused on
mood, not objects.
Dadaism delighted in outrageous
conduct.
Surrealists, inspired by Freud,
painted wild dreams and complex
symbols.