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The Interwar Years, 1918-1939
Like many eras, the interwar years can make a plausible claim to mark the birth of modernism. However, what also attracted me was the same perverse force that makes us stare at auto accidents. Interwar started at the end of one war and ended at the start of another. And along the way, there was the influenza pandemic of 1919, the stock market crash, the Great Depression, famines in China and the Ukraine, the ascension of Adolf Hitler. -
Gassed
John Singer Sargent, best known as a portraitist of sumptuously dressed women of standing, created this memorable look at the aftermath of a WWI gas attack. It recalls a stanza from Wilfred Owen’s “Dulce et Decorum Est:
Gas! GAS! Quick, boys!—An ecstasy of fumbling
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time,
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And flound'ring like a man in fire or lime.—
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning. -
50 cc of Paris Air
Marcel Duchamp purchased this entirely ordinary empty jar at a Parisian pharmacy; he did nothing to it. That it is considered art—and is proudly displayed at the Philadelphia Museum of Art-- provides us with an insight into Dada, a post WWI movement that challenged the accepted understanding of what art, language, and rationality itself is. -
Ulysses
The Book that Makes All English Majors Fear and Tremble is “Ulysses,” the 1922 novel by James Joyce that birthed stream of consciousness writing and literary modernism generally. Modelled on Homer refracted through Irish experience (set on a single day in 1904 Dublin), the book has frustrated all attempts to be fully comprehended though it is regarded as a masterpiece. -
Der Krieg
Though the image appears to be a moonscape, it is actually a WWI battlefield, one of the 50 etchings in Otto Dix’s “Der Krieg.” Dix was a machine gunner, serving on both Eastern and Western fronts; he was in the war from its start in 1914 to its end in 1918, so he had seen everything. Many of Dix’s images focus not on the battle, but on its grim aftermath. For a look at each etching, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pgdIXoNB-VY -
Rhapsody in Blue
The 1920s bandleader Paul Whiteman commissioned George Gershwin to compose a piece as part of his effort to elevate jazz, to bring it into the space occupied by classical music. The result was “Rhapsody in Blue,” described by Gershwin as "a musical kaleidoscope of America." To know why the piece is among the most famous of Gershwin’s compositions, listen to the first minute at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cH2PH0auTUU -
Pillars of Society
The title of George Grosz’s New Objectivity “Pillars of Society” is a study in irony, its content a study in bitter sarcasm. Here we see the business, political, religious, and military elites of Weimar Germany as corrupt and idiotic. Note the chamber pot on the head of one of the “pillars,” a steaming pile of feces coming out of the head of another. -
Poster for "Battleship Potemkin"
Russian art between the 1917 Revolution and the 1932 rise of Stalin boasted a number of avant-garde tendencies—Rayonism, Russian Futurism, abstract art, though the best known of these is Constructivism. This poster by the Stemberg brothers for Sergei Eisenstein’s 1925 ground-breaking montagist film, “Battle Cruiser Potemkin,” with its exaggerated perspective and dynamic sense of movement is typical of that tendency. -
Bauhaus
The Bauhaus was a school for art and craft with a short life but a very long afterlife. Founded by Walter Gropius in 1919, it moved to the modernist building Gropius designed in 1925. Under pressure from the Nazis, it closed in 1933. Its staff was nearly a who’s who of mid-century artists, designers and architects: Wassily Kandinsky, Lazslo Maholy-Nagy, Josef and Annie Albers, Marcel Breuer, Walter Gropius, Mies van der Rohe. Their diaspora impoverished German art for decades. -
Menin Gate Memorial to the Missing
The Menin Gate, a very large memorial arch, lists the names of 54,395 WW I Commonwealth soldiers killed near Ypres, Belgium whose bodies are missing. (The names of 34,984 more of the missing could not fit.) Every day at 8:00 P.M. a memorial service is held, concluding with a passage from “For the Fallen”:
They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning,
We will remember them. -
The Jazz Singer
“You Ain’t Heard Nothin’ Yet” in “The Jazz Singer” marks the birth of the “talkies.” “The Jazz Singer” was the first feature length film to use both a synchronized music score and synchronized dialogue. The film ushered in a new era of filmmaking, though musicians employed at screenings of silent films and actors with accents or unpleasant voices would soon be joining the unemployment line. Hear “You Ain’t Heard Nothin’ Yet” at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=22NQuPrwbHA -
Self Portrait in a Green Bugatti
Bugatti automobiles, both for their speed and design, symbolized the Jazz Age. Tamara Lempica, for her beauty and audacious sexuality both in her work and in her life, symbolized that era as well. In this self-portrait, the two icons of Art Deco are joined. -
Composition ii in Red, Blue and Yellow
Piet Mondrian’s career took him far from his beginning as a representational artist to one completely given over to abstraction. Simplification of shapes to rectangles and squares, of lines to verticals and horizontals, and of color to pure hues mark his work done in the school of Dutch painting known as de stijl (the style). He said of his work, "I wish to approach truth as closely as is possible, and therefore I abstract everything until I arrive at the fundamental quality of objects." -
Flying Over the Coliseum
If any country can be defined by its past, Italy has a strong claim to be that country. Italian Futurists fervently wished to escape that past and flee into a fast-moving, machine-dominated future. Using bizarre, even cinematic perspective, Tato (Guglielmo Sansoni) unites two symbols of Italy—its ancient past and its bright and dynamic future. -
Persistence of Memory
Engagement with dreams, fantasies and the distressed mind were a hallmark of several early 20c art movements—symbolism, expressionism and, most famously surrealism. Dali is its one of its foremost practitioners, “Persistence of Memory,” one of his best known—and most mysterious—works. -
Spirit of Detroit
The 1920s marked the emergence of Mexico as an important center of modern art, though large murals dated to pre-Conquest Mexico. The “big three” muralists, focusing on Mexican history and national identity from a left viewpoint, were Jose Clemente Orozco, David Alfaros Siquieros, and Diego Rivera. Rivera’s major surviving work in the US is the “Spirit of Detroit” at the D.I.A. (Rivera also painted murals at New York’s Rockefeller Center, but John D. Rockefeller had them destroyed.) -
Migrant Mother
In 1936, Dorothea Lange was employed as a photographer for the Farm Security Administration. Though most of the photographs taken by FSA photographers (Walker Evans among them) were of Southerners, “Migrant Mother” is of a pea picker in California. The worry on the face of the subject, Frances Owens Thompson, may reflect that the peas she had come to pick had frozen in the field, leaving her without work. -
Elephant
Alexander Calder was a third generation sculptor, though his works were nothing like those of his father or grandfather. In fact, they were nothing like the works of any previous sculptor. They moved, and were christened “mobiles.” Next time you see carefully balanced forms suspended on wires being moved by currents of air above a crib, you’re seeing an echo of what Alexander Calder invented. -
The Worker and The Kolkhoz Woman
Stalin’s 1932 rise to power resulted in a sharp decline in the creativity of Russian arts. The heady, experimental days of the avant-garde ‘20s were replaced by the imposed conformity of Socialist Realism. “The Worker and the Kolkhoz {collective farm} Woman” represent an idealized, monumental vision of the Russian people, smiling and marching onward toward a bright utopian future. Not surprisingly, it won the 1941 Stalin Prize. -
Guernica
In 1937, at the request of Spanish fascists, German and Italian aircraft bombed the Basque town of Guernica. Though in a few years the intentional targeting of civilians in London and later in Berlin, Dresden, and Tokyo would be accepted as an unfortunate, if routine act of war, in 1937, it was seen as an outrage that, for Picasso, required an outcry. “Guernica” is at once Picasso’s most political and most iconic work. -
Cradling the Wheat
American Regionalism is an American version of volkische art, celebrating the lives of working people both rural and urban. It is well represented in numerous 1930s Post Office and school Federal Arts Project-funded murals. Here in Thomas Hart Benson, we see his stylized, somewhat unconventional version of American Regionalism. -
Benny Goodman Carnegie Hall Concert
If Gershwin’s 1925 “Rhapsody in Blue” was the first step in the effort to elevate jazz to the concert hall stage, Benny Goodman's 1938 Carnegie Hall concert was the final step. “Jazz’s coming out party” is how one critic labelled it. The irony is that there was thought to be no surviving recording of it when, in 1950, Goodman’s sister in law found tapes of the concert in her closet. The rest, as they say, is history. Get in the swing at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0NigiwMtWE0
