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Age of Anxiety. Modern Thought, Art, Literature. Effects of World War One (the opening act). Competing empires nations blundered into the war over nationalism, secret alliances , land, colonies and resources
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Age of Anxiety Modern Thought, Art, Literature
Effects of World War One (the opening act) • Competing empires nations blundered into the war over nationalism, secret alliances, land, colonies and resources • Technology created a horrible new type of war: machine guns, poison gas & trench warfare • The world economy was shattered for years • Human casualties were worse: 10 million dead; 20 million wounded • The governments tried to claim that they were fighting for democracy, but many did not believe it • The horror and disillusionment from World War One created a cynical, hedonistic (pleasure seeking) “Lost Generation” of survivors that had been psychologically traumatized by the war
Paul Valéry --post war unease • Spoke/wrote about a “crisis of the mind.” • The future did not look bright -- not optimistic outlook like the belief in progress and reason that prevailed before the war
The Crises of Meaning: Nietzsche • He was the first Western Philosopher since Socrates to deny that the universe was rational (it was irrational disorder) • Man was fooling himself by thinking he was rational; he was hurting himself by denying his “creative animal passions” • He called Christianity “a slave morality” and claimed that God was “dead”
Revolt Against Established Philosophical Beliefs • Logical Empiricism • Popular in Britain and America • Philosophy is the study of language according to Ludwig Wittgenstein • Major issues of philosophy (God, freedom, morality, etc.) can’t be tested by science or mathematics, so these issues are senseless
Revolt Against Established Beliefs (2) • Existentialism • Most existentialists were atheists; looked to Nietzsche’s “God is dead.” • Sartre: humans simply exist, and then try to define themselves • Honest humans deal with the meaninglessness of life by acting. • Humans must act courageously and choose actions consistently; they are responsible for their own behavior. • By acting humans can overcome life’s absurdities.
Revival of Christianity • Uncertainties of postwar world caused people to have renewed interest in Christianity • Theologians no longer interested in interpreting the Bible to take science and evolution into account. Focused on faith and mysteries of God’s forgiveness
The Crises of Meaning: Freud • Freud didn’t cheer for man’s irrational nature but he argued that we couldn’t ignore it • He argued that humans were torn between the rational and the irrational impulses of our brains • In his book Civilization and Its Discontents, he argued that human progress was a trade off where man’s primitive desires were repressed in order the security of living under the rule of law • The more advanced the society, the greater the repression and frustrations. • The horrors of World War One made perfect sense to Freud Id, Ego and Superego, Freud said are the key to understanding the mind.
Twentieth-century Literature • No more all-knowing narrators with realistic descriptions. 20th century writers often used first-person point of view to show limited view of one person • Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past
Stream of consciousness technique: Virginia Woolf’s Jacob’s Room [internal monologues]; William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury; James Joyce’s Ulysses [ordinary day for ordinary man--parallel to Homer’s hero] • T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land • Kafka’s The Trial and The Castle • Later, Orwell’s 1984, published in 1949; after WWII and Stalinism
Woolf Joyce Orwell Faulkner
Expressionism (growing from post-impressionism) • Edvard Munch (Moonk) • Expressions of modern anguish in post World War I years • Expressed extreme emotions -- anger, jealousy, loneliness
Matisse • “You speak the language of color” Renoir to Matisse • Revolt against realism with Picasso (Picasso = shape; Matisse = color) • “Feel good paintings” response to trying decades of 1st half of 20th century
Matisse: Les Betes de la Mer • One of Matisse’s last works, created when he was very ill with cancer. Since he couldn’t paint Matisse turned to paper collages. • Les Betes de la Mer is an example of abstract art
George Grosz • In 1914 Grosz volunteered for military service; like many other artists, he believed the Great War might be "the war to end all wars", but he was quickly disillusioned and was given a discharge after hospitalization in 1915. • After the war Grosz was known especially for his savagely caricatural drawings of Berlin life in the 1920s.
Otto Dix • On the outbreak of the First World War in 1914 Dix volunteered for the German Army. He fought at the Battle of the Somme, later served on the Eastern Front against the Russians, and finally ended up back up on the Western Front. He was wounded several times and won the Iron Cross. • After the war Dix developed leftist views and was was angry about the way that the wounded and crippled ex-soldiers were treated in Germany.
Dix’s anger was reflected in paintings such as War Cripples (1920), Butcher's Shop (1920) and War Wounded (1922). • In 1923 Dix's painting, The Trench depiction of decomposed corpses in a German trench created such a public outcry that the museum's director, where the picture was exhibited, was forced to resign. • In 1924 Dix joined with other artists who had fought in the First World War to put on a travelling exhibition of paintings called No More War!
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner Berliner Strassenszene (Berlin Street Scene)
Picasso • Leader of artistic innovation -- considered by many to be greatest artist of 20th century • Cubism -- inspired by Cezanne’s geometric patterns --> Picasso “broke reality into shards.”
Art & the Crisis of Meaning: Dadaism-nonsense & absurdity… Surrealism-create a new reality Memory • Salvador Dali • Cut with the Kitchen Knife Through the last Weimar Beer-Belly Cultural Epoch • Hannah Hoch • L.H.O.O.Q. • Marcel Duchamp
Weimar Identity: Brecht & the Dadaists • Brecht portrayed his “generation's deep disappointment in the civilization that had come crashing down at the end of World War I.” • The Dadaist group, (was) aimed at destroying what they condemned as the false standards of bourgeois art through derision and iconoclastic satire.
Dada Art Movement • The activity of Dada was a permanent revolt of the individual against art, against morality, against society. The means were manifestos, poems, writings of various kinds, paintings, exhibitions, and a few public demonstrations of a clearly subversive character."-Georges Ribemont-History of Dada (1931)
Jean Arp • One of the best of the Dadaists, Arp combined random images to create collages. • Arp later moved onto freeform wooden compositions and sculpture using black or white marble
Seeds of Dada’s destruction • Dadaism contained within itself the seeds of its own destruction, since Dadaism was an anti-art, anti-establishment, anti-almost-everything-else movement. Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain
Surrealism • Offspring of Dadaism -- began as literary movement • Response to horrors of war • Create without control to tap unconscious imagery. Dreams and symbols Chagall -- “I and the Village”
The Bauhaus Movement Art and Architecture
Walter Gropius’s Bauhaus School Gropius felt that applied arts were to be taught in a workshop-based design school that would bring together the craft and implementation of design with industrial production techniques
