Chapter TwentyOne Between the World Wars

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Chapter Twenty-OneBetween the World Wars
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• Map
• Europe After World War I

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The Great War and Its Significance

• Drastic loss of life
• Sociopolitical consequences
• October Revolution
• Hitlers National Socialist movement
• Cultural consequences
• Transportation, communication
• Entertainment

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Literary Modernism

• Franz Kafka (1883-1924)
• Kafkaesque
• Guilt, loss, oppression, violence

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Revolution in Art Cubism

• Analytical Cubism
• Geometric qualities, flat planes, 2-d linearity
• Picassos Les Demoiselles dAvignon (1907)
• Braques Violin and Palette (1909-1910)
• Synthetic Cubism
• Post-war color, vitality, expressiveness
• Picassos Three Musicians (1921)

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• Image 21.1
• Pablo Picasso, Les Demoiselles dAvignon

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• Image 21.2
• Georges Braque, Violin and Palette

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• Image 21.4
• Pablo Picasso, Three Musicians

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Freud, the Unconscious and Surrealism

• Interpretation of Dreams (1900)
• Id, ego, superego
• Dreams and the unconscious mind
• Psychoanalysis as philosophy
• Human and cultural behaviors
• Surrealism
• Dalís The Persistence of Memory (1931)
• Kahlos Self-Portrait (1937)

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• Image 21.9
• Salvador Dalí, The Persistence of Memory

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• Image 21.10
• Frida Kahlo, Self-Portrait Dedicated to Leon
  Trotsky

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The Age of Jazz

• African-American experience, heritage
• Intonations, rhythms
• Spirituals
• Blue note / the Blues
• Ragtime
• From New Orleans to Chicago to NYC

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The Age of Jazz

• George Gershwin (1898-1937)
• Jazz in symphonic, operatic works
• Rhapsody in Blue (1924)
• Porgy and Bess (1935)

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Art as Protest Guernica

• Picassos protest against inhumanity
• Hope in the face of horror
• Inspired by destruction of war
• Social, pivotal document
• Expressionistic, Cubist
• Technical experimentation

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• Image 21.17
• Pablo Picasso, Guernica

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Art as Propaganda Film

• Propaganda as high art
• Radio, film
• Educate, persuade, shape public opinion
• Sergei Eisenstein (1898-1948)
• Potemkin and the October Revolution (1925)

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Art as Propaganda 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

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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
  Freuds 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 twentieth century?
  Explain.
• Consider the ways in which film was used in the
  early twentieth 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 twenty-first
  century? Explain.
• To what extent do you agree or disagree with
  Huxleys 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.