1920s American Art

2 Key excerpts on "1920s American Art"

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  eBook - ePub

  Avant-Garde Film

  Forms, Themes, and Passions

  • Michael O'Pray(Author)
  • 2003(Publication Date)
  • WallFlower Press

    (Publisher)

  2      THE 1920s: THE EUROPEAN AVANT-GARDES

  The film avant-gardes that emerged in the 1920s remain a potent influence to this day. They form part of probably the most creative period of twentieth-century avant-garde activity across the arts and are the indisputable models of avant-gardism. Indeed, the culture of the entire period was avant-garde.

  The 1920s is a complex decade, one of myriad interrelated art movements, fashions and artists, still being unravelled by historians. Such art movements as Dada, Surrealism, Constructivism, Expressionism, de Stijl and others co-existed at the same time, with some artists like Hans Richter flitting from camp to camp (Rees 1979). The idea of the avant-garde, carried over from its first use in French painting of the early nineteenth century, is thus tossed around, argued over, and both rejected and embraced throughout the 1920s and into the 1930s.

  The 1920s avant-gardes are also characterised by the cross-fertilisation of art forms – ballet, painting, poetry, music, sculpture, fashion, literature. These high-art sources are matched by an avant-garde fascination with and love of the popular ‘low-arts’ of circus, vaudeville, Hollywood silent comedies and puppetry. Thus in many ways, the avant-gardes saw their role as being both in opposition to high art and attempting to displace it, to become a new ‘high art’ so to speak. The precursor of such activity was the pre-World War One Italian Futurist movement which was anti-bourgeois, celebratory of modern urban life and culture, and interestingly included film in its multi-media practices (see Corra 1973; Tisdall & Bozzolla 1977).

  Many of the early 1920s avant-garde films are now canonical – Man Ray’s Return to Reason (1923), Fernand Leger and Dudley Murphy’s Ballet mecanique (1924), René Clair’s Entr’acte (1924), Marcel Duchamp’s Anemic cinema

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  The Dialectics of Art

  • John Molyneux(Author)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Haymarket Books

    (Publisher)

  Clearly there are numerous aesthetic value judgments involved in these assertions, and doubtless many of them could be contested. It must also be borne in mind that the picture for any one historical period is always very complex and contradictory, and that the more one tries to evaluate the situation internationally, rather than nationally, the more difficult it gets. Thus French art may have declined after the 1930s, but what about art in the United States? I would judge the emergence of abstract expressionism, followed by pop art, as an advance on prewar US art. And whatever about Renaissance Europe; what happens when we throw Chinese, Japanese, Indian, Central and South American and African art into the mix?

  Nevertheless, despite all these difficulties, I think it is reasonable to say that the history of art consists of periods of progress and regression, and this raises the important question as to what determines these broad patterns or phases. Of course, in each case a concrete analysis is necessary, as with Perry Anderson’s and John Berger’s aforementioned analyses of the ‘moment of cubism’, but it is possible to advance a few general propositions.

  First, because visual art is costly, a period of flowering is likely to be one of prosperity, in which the dominant classes have a relatively substantial surplus available for investment in cultural projects. This was the case for classical Athens. According to classical historian Josiah Ober, ‘The Greek economy grew steeply and steadily from 1000 to 300 BCE ’, and by the fourth century BCE ‘it was densely populated and remarkably urbanised, yet living standards remained high’.23 Regarding Florence, Frederick Antal writes that its ‘great economic power… grew up chiefly in the twelfth century, and expanded during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries to dimensions unparalleled elsewhere in Italy or indeed in Europe.’24 Likewise the Dutch Republic in the first half of the seventeenth century was, for that short time, the richest region in the world. According to economic historian Angus Maddison, Italy’s per capita GDP of 1100 (1990 international Geary-Kharmis dollars) in 1500 was the highest in the world. By 1600 it had been overtaken by the Netherlands, which had reached 1381.25

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