MODERNISM AND ANTI-MODERNISM IN THE “GOLDEN TWENTIES”

1. MODERNISM AND ANTI-MODERNISMIN THE “GOLDEN TWENTIES” • The cosmopolitan artistic avant-garde flourished in the Weimar Republic, but conservative nationalists denounced the following trends as “cultural Bolshevism:” • The relaxation of laws against pornography & obscenity • The skewed perspective and color schemes of “Expressionist” art and the new access to government patronage enjoyed by avant-garde artists • The “international style” in architecture • The arrival of jazz music • The freedom and independence thought to be enjoyed by the “New Woman”

2. Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (1880-1938), “Naked People Playing under a Tree” (1910) Expressionism emerged around 1905 in Dresden. Expressionists sought to recover the most powerful and elemental human emotions.

3. Kirchner, “River Bank at the Red Church” (Berlin, 1912):His colors became subdued when Die Brücke moved to Berlin

4. Kirchner, “Street Scene: Friedrichstrasse Berlin” (1914)

5. A children’s fairy tale inspired “The Blue Rider,” founded in Munich in 1911 by Franc Marc (standing at left) and the Russian immigrant Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944)

6. Vassily Kandinsky, “Mountain” (Munich, 1909)

7. Kandinsky, “Painting with White Form #166” (1913)

8. A modern dance routine at Herwarth Walden’s art gallery in Berlin, “Der Sturm,” 1923.Modern art became a big business in the 1920s….

9. Lyonel Feininger, “Cathedral”(title page for the Bauhaus Proclamation by Walter Gropius, 1919):“The artist is an exalted craftsman. Let us then form a new guild of craftsmen, without the presumptuousness of class distinctions! Let us together create the new building of the future, which will be everything in a single form: architecture and sculpture and painting, which will one day rise toward heaven as the symbol of a new, emerging faith.”

10. The Bauhaus, i.e., Thuringian State School of the Arts, Dessau, 1925:The avant-garde becomes the cultural establishment(including Kandinsky as Professor of Painting)

11. Bauhaus lamp and Breuer chair from 1924

12. Walter Gropius fled Germany in 1934 and later became a major force among American architects, e.g.,with the “Pan Am Building” (1963)

13. The metropolis: Berlin’s Unter den Linden in the 1920s

14. The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920): Germany’s first great horror film employed expressionist set designers

15. The UFA lot at Neubabelsberg, outside Berlin, Europe’s largest film studio between the wars, late 1920s Fritz Lang, Metropolis (1927)

16. Marlene Dietrich in The Blue Angel and Morocco

17. Jazz comes to Berlin in 1925:Duke Ellington’s “Chocolate Kiddies” starred Josephine Baker

18. Otto Dix, “Metropolis” triptych (1927/28)

19. Poster advertising “The Moulin Rouge”in Berlin, 1924.Germany did not have women bartenders before the War; her cropped hair and self-confidence mark her as a “New Woman”

20. In these postcards from the German General Electric Co., famous actresses use the newest household appliances

21. The “New Woman,” according to a glossy magazine,The Young Bachelor

22. Richard Ziegler,“The Young Widow”(1922).Some familiarity with Freudian psychoanalysis was spreading fast in Germany due to the influence of Karl Abraham

23. Richard Ziegler, “The Judgment of Paris” (1928):A modern job interview for secretaries

24. “National Comrades, Vote Social Democratic”(campaign poster from 1928, featuring the “New Woman” with Bubi-Kopf)

25. “Provide for our future– Vote for the Center Party” (campaign poster from 1928):Almost every other surviving campaign poster shows women in traditional hairstyles and roles.

26. “We hold firmly to the Word of God! Vote German Nationalist” (1930)