Key Questions

1
Key Questions

• What impact did the First World War have on
  cultural and artistic trends?
• What role did mass culture and leisure have on
  society and government control?
• Themesalienation, disillusionment, irrational,
  subjective, consciousness, escapism, consumerism

2
The Shock of the ModernHigh and Mass Culture

• Disillusionment and Denial,
• 1919-39

3
Roaring Twenties

• Shift in morals
• Jazz and dance halls
• Influence of U.S.
• Josephine Baker
• Consumerism and advertising
• Buying on credit
• New media (radio, movies, etc.)
• New fashion styleschallenge traditional gender
  roles

4
Radio and Film

• New tool for governments, esp. dictatorships
• BBC and Volksempfänger
• Goebbels and Triumph of the Will
• Charlie Chaplin and Fritz Langcritiques of
  technology

5
Mass Leisure

• Organized sportsgymnastics, soccer, World Cup
• 1936 Olympics
• Air travel and tourism
• Automobiles
• Dopolovaro and Kraft durch Freuderegimentation
  of leisure for state purposes

6
Intellectual Life

• Sense of disillusionment and alienation
• Reaction to WWI
• Oswald Spengler, Decline of the West
• Openness about sex and birth control
• Weimar Culture (Berlin)Cabinet of Dr. Caligari
• Nazi reactiondegenerate art
• exiles

7
Expression(ism)

• Emotional attitude toward subject
• Grosz, Dix, Beckmann, DadaHoch, Tzara

8
Expression(ism) II
9
Abstraction I

• Formal structure
• Reduce reality to essential elements of light and
  color
• Picasso, Stella, Miro, Leger, Demuth, Mondrian

10
Abstraction II
11
Fantasy I

• Use of imagination
• Spontaneous and irrational
• Influence of Freud
• Klee, Dali, Chirico

12
Fantasy II
13
Architecture and Sculpture

• Modern styleform follows function
• Essential elementssteel, concrete, glass
• Boxes with windows
• Bauhaus Wright

Henry Moore
14
Literature and Music

• Stream of consciousness styleProust, Joyce,
  Faulkner, Woolf, Hesse, Kafka, T.S. Eliot
• Lost Generation in U.S.Hemingway, Fitzgerald
• All Quiet on the Western Front
• Weill, Threepenny Opera
• Atonal music and serialismStravinsky and
  Schoenberg

15
Psychology

• Influence of Freud
• Ideas seemed confirmedCivilization and Its
  Discontents
• Carl Jung and collective unconscious
• Increased importance of psychoanalysis

16
Heroic Age of Physics

• Influence of quantum theory and Einstein
• Rutherford and atoms
• Heisenberg uncertainty principle
• First atom split in Germany in 1938
• University of Chicago1st chain reaction in 1942
  (Fermi)