1920s

Paul Nash, We are Making a New World, 1918

“Repelled by the slaughterhouses of the world war, we turned to art. We searched for an elementary art that would, we thought, save mankind from the furious madness of these times … we wanted an anonymous and collective art.” (Hans Arp)

Art Manifestos

Hannah Höch, Cut with the Kitchen Knife through the Last Weimar Beer-Belly Cultural Epoch in Germany, 1919

“The magic of a word - DADA - which for journalists has opened the door to an unforeseen world, has for us not the slightest importance. “ (Tristan Tzara, 1926)

The Dada Manifesto was first released in 1916, written by Hugo Ball, and then in 1926 by Tristan Tzara (the entire manifesto can be found here: http://www.ralphmag.org/AR/dada.html

Dadaism appeared as an art movement against the conventions of art and expressed a rejection of the bourgeois, of preoccupations with war and of imperialist / colonial aspirations. Dada – a randomly chosen word from the French dictionary (meaning hobby-horse) – celebrated ‘non-sense’, the unconscious, the random and aimed to subvert the mainstream, accepted principles of art and conventions of thought.

W. B. Yeats, The Second Coming, 1919

Turning and turning in the widening gyreThe falcon cannot hear the falconer;Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhereThe ceremony of innocence is drowned;The best lack all conviction, while the worstAre full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;Surely the Second Coming is at hand.The Second Coming! Hardly are those words outWhen a vast image out of Spiritus MundiTroubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desertA shape with lion body and the head of a man,A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,Is moving its slow thighs, while all about itReel shadows of the indignant desert birds.The darkness drops again; but now I knowThat twenty centuries of stony sleepWere vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

• World War One

• Easter Rising 1916 (Ireland)

• Russian Revolution 1917

Terms of the Versailles Treaty (Some main points)

• Alsace & Lorraine returned to France• Demilitarised zone set up, France occupation of

the Rhineland for 15 years• Germany to be disarmed• Germany had to accept full responsibility for the

war• Reparations to be paid (announced in 1921 as

£6,600 million)• A further series of peace treaties.

The Bauhaus (1919-33), artists and designers favoured strict adherence to form they considered ornate styles inappropriate for the functional rigour of the modern world. The Bauhaus was an establish school of art and design in inter-war Germany

Le Corbusier, Villa Savoye (1928-1931) Poissy, France

Modernists had a utopian desire to create a better world. They believed in technology as the key means to achieve improvement and in the machine as a symbol of that aspiration. All of these principles were frequently combined with social and political beliefs (largely left-leaning) which held that design and art could, and should, transform society.http://www.vam.ac.uk/vastatic/microsites

Directors House at the Bauhaus 1923. Furniture Marcel Breuer Bauhaus Chairs

Bauhaus Chairs (1928) (1923)

1920

• League of Nations• Prohibition• Women get vote in US

League of Nations

1921

• Irish Free State declared

• German reparations set at 132 Billion German Marks inflation begins

1922• Tutankhamun's tomb discovered

• Mussolini march on Rome; fascists convince government to let Mussolini be PM

• TS Eliot’s The Wasteland published

• James Joyce’s Ulysses published

1923

• Charleston

• Hitler’s Munich beer hall putsch. Sentenced to 5 years in prison where he wrote Mein Kampf. The failed coup also highlighted to Hitler the necessity to achieve initial power through democratic means rather than violence.

1924

• Lenin dies, Stalin takes control (was in charge from Lenin’s stroke year before)

• Manifesto of Surrealism

Max Ernst, Attirement of the Bride, 1940

The Dada group was eventually disbanded in the mid 1920s, and several of its members joined the new Surrealist movement (Man Ray, Max Ernst, etc). The Surrealist Manifesto was first drafted in 1924 by André Breton, and another was released in 1929/30 (the full manifesto can be found here: http://www.tcf.ua.edu/Classes/Jbutler/T340/F98/SurrealistManifesto.htm

The Surrealists were interested in ideas of psychoanalysis (Freud, Jung), Marxism, dreams, symbols, the unconscious, eroticism, the irrational, automatism (automatic writing), and spiritualism. Like the Dadaists, they too sought to subvert accepted conventions, ‘truths’, and traditions.

Man Ray http://www.ubu.com/film/ray.html

The Genius of Photography

1925• Flappers

• John T. Scopes convicted and fined for teaching evolution in a public school in Tennessee “Monkey Trial”

• Franz Kafka’s The Trial published

• F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby published

Louise Brooks (l) Clara Bow (r)

1927

• Fritz Lang’s Metropolis released

• BBC

• Charles Lindberg flies NY-Paris

• Al Jolson’s The Jazz Singer

1928• Penicillin discovered

• Kellogg-Briand Pact (General Treaty for the Renunciation of War)

• Stalin’s 5 year plan

• Mickey Mouse introduced

• UK Universal Suffrage

1929

• St Valentine’s Day Massacre

• Wall St Crash