The mass destruction brought on by World War I precipitated
a general disillusionment with Western civilization
on the part of artists and writers throughout Europe.
Avant-garde art, which had sought to discover alternative
techniques to portray reality, now gained broader acceptance
as Europeans began to abandon classical traditions
in an attempt to come to grips with the anxieties of
the new age.
Although there were many different schools of artistic
expression during the postwar era, a common denominator
for all modernist art was its unrelenting crusade for absolute
freedom of expression. Some artists opted for open
revolt against the past, while others wished to liberate the
darker impulses of the spirit from rational constraints
to reveal the whole individual underneath. Others still,
renouncing the apparent chaos of Western civilization,
sought refuge in a new world of abstract painting. Some
abandoned painting and sculpture altogether, preferring
to focus on ameliorating social conditions through utopian
architecture and interior designs for everyday living.
A number of the artistic styles that gained popularity
during the 1920s originated during the war in neutral
Switzerland, where alienated intellectuals congregated at
cafés to decry the insanity of the age and to exchange
ideas on how to create a new and better world. One such
group was the Dadaists, who sought to destroy the past
with a vengeance, proclaiming their right to complete
freedom of expression in art (see the box on p. 83).
While Dadaism flourished in Germany during the
Weimar era, a school of Surrealism was established in
Paris to liberate the total human experience from the restraints
of the rational world. By using the subconscious,
Surrealists hoped to resurrect the whole personality and
reveal a submerged and illusive reality. Normally unrelated
objects and people were juxtaposed in dreamlike and
frequently violent paintings that were intended to shock
the viewer into approaching reality from a totally fresh
perspective. Most famous of the Surrealists was the Spaniard
Salvadore Dalí (1904 –1989), who subverted the
sense of reality in his painting by using near photographic
detail in presenting a fantastic and irrational world.
Yet another modernist movement born on the eve of
World War I was Abstract, or Nonobjective, painting. As
one of its founders, Swiss artist Paul Klee (1879–1940),
observed, “the more fearful this world becomes, . . . the
more art becomes abstract.” 4 Two of the movement’s
principal founders, Wassily Kandinsky (1866 –1944) and
Piet Mondrian (1872–1944), were followers of Theosophy,
a religion that promised the triumph of the spirit in
a new millennium. Since they viewed matter as an obstacle
to salvation, the art of the new age would totally
abandon all reference to the material world. Only abstraction,
in the form of colorful forms and geometric
shapes floating in space, could express the bliss and spiritual
beauty of this terrestrial paradise.
Just as artists began to experiment with revolutionary
ways to represent reality in painting, musicians searched
for new revolutionary sounds. Austrian composer Arnold
Schoenberg (1874 –1951) rejected the traditional tonal
system based on the harmonic triad that had dominated
Western music since the Renaissance. To free the Western
ear from traditional harmonic progression, Schoenberg
substituted a radically new “atonal” system in which
each piece established its own individual set of relationships
and structure. In 1923, he devised a twelve-tone system
in which he placed the twelve pitches of the chromatic
scale found on the piano in a set sequence for a
musical composition. The ordering of these twelve tones
was to be repeated throughout the piece, for all instrumental
parts, constituting its melody and harmony. Even
today, such atonal music seems inaccessible and incomprehensible
to the uninitiated. Yet Schoenberg, perhaps
more than any other modern composer, influenced the
development of twentieth-century music.
Other fields of artistic creativity, including sculpture,
ballet, and architecture, also reflected these new directions.
In Germany, a group of imaginative architects
called the Bauhaus School created what is widely known
as the international school, which soon became the dominant
school of modern architecture. Led by the famous
German architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (1881–
1969), the internationalists promoted a new functional
and unadorned style (Mies was widely known for observing
that “less is more”) characterized by high-rise towers
of steel and glass that were reproduced endlessly throughout
the second half of the century all around the world.
For many postwar architects, the past was the enemy of
the future. In 1925, the famous French architect Le Corbusier
(1877–1965) advocated razing much of the old
city of Paris, to be replaced by modern towers of glass. In
his plan, which called for neat apartment complexes separated
by immaculate areas of grass, there was no room for
people, pets, or nature. Fortunately, it was rejected by
municipal authorities.
During the postwar era, writers followed artists and
architects in rejecting traditional forms in order to explore
the subconscious. In his novel Ulysses, published in
1922, Irish author James Joyce (1882–1941) invented the
“stream of consciousness” technique to portray the lives
of ordinary people through the use of inner monologue.
Joyce’s technique exerted a powerful influence on literature
for the remainder of the century. Other writers, such
as Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961), Theodore Dreiser
(1871–1945), and Sinclair Lewis (1885–1951), reflected
the rising influence of mass journalism in a new style designed
to “tell it like it is.” Such writers sought to report
the “whole truth” in an effort to attain the authenticity of
modern photography.
For much of the Western world, however, the best way
to find (or escape) reality was in the field of mass entertainment.
The 1930s represented the heyday of the
Hollywood studio system, which in the single year of
1937 turned out nearly six hundred feature films. Supplementing
the movies were cheap paperbacks and radio,
which brought sports, soap operas, and popular music to
the mass of the population. The radio was a great social
leveler, speaking to all classes with the same voice. Such
new technological wonders offered diversion even to the
poor while helping to define the twentieth century as the
era of the common people.
World History
