Chapter 14 Lecture - Humanities

Identify major figures in today’s humanities.

The Last 100 Years

All non-cited images were gathered from the free domain and are not under any copyright law restrictions. All images gathered from wikipedia.org.

The early part of the twentieth century was a time of change and instability, leading some to call it an “Age of Uncertainty.”

World War I began in 1914, and it is hard to overstate its impact on the arts.

After the war, which took the lives of more than eight million soldiers, the whole world mourned.

Early 20th Century

Early 20th Century

• One response to the war was the creation of the Dada movement, which rejected tradition and thrived on childlike, sometimes imbecilic behavior.

• Marcel Duchamp claimed Dada was a kind of “anti-art” that opposed all recognized values in art and literature.

Early 20th Century

• Dada’s negative reaction to World War I was in contrast to the De Stijl movement which represented a universal, hopeful response.

• Piet Mondrian was the leading painter of the De Stijl school.

• Both Dada and De Stijl demonstrate the spirit of the avant-garde in the arts which thrived after the war. 

Early 20th Century

Another response was Surrealism, which was dedicated to the realm of dreams.

The most famous of the Surrealist artists was Salvador Dali, who depicted illogically juxtaposed objects and impossibly distorted forms.

Early 20th Century

A number of sculptors began to work with abstract forms, including Constantin Brancusi and Henry Moore.

Alexander Calder’s mobiles were sculptural forms suspended from the ceiling.

Early 20th Century

Alfred Stieglitz was the leading photographer of his day, and his art gallery helped introduce avant-garde art to America.

Early 20th Century

Stieglitz’s wife, Georgia O’ Keefe, was primarily known for her expressive organic abstractions of nature. 

Early 20th CenturyPost-war Paris was the scene of the most adventurous new writing by authors such as James Joyce.

Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot are considered the two most influential American modernist poets.

James Joyce introduced startling technical innovations to modern fiction, including intricate mythic and literary references and a stream of consciousness narrative technique.

Virginia Woolf used her novels to reveal her characters’ inner thoughts and feelings, rather than dwelling on what the character said or did.

Ernest Hemingway, one of the most influential writers of the period, had a style which relied on simple plots and laconic and spare language.

Early 20th Century

Before World War I, Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring created quite a stir in the world of music, as did Viennese composer Arnold Schoenberg’s atonal music.

In the U. S., the stock market crash of 1929 exposed a deep social imbalance between the haves and the have-nots.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt wanted to give the have-nots what he called a “New Deal.”

A program inaugurated by the Farm Security Administration included talented photographers Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans.

After the Depression, many American artists turned to a more naturalistic representation of the world’s experiences through regional scenes.

Early 20th Century

Edward Hopper attempted through his art to show the lives of the middle class.

Early 20th Century

Thomas Hart Benton painted murals across the country, representing American themes and experiences.

Early 20th Century

The inspiration for American regionalist painting was the Southern regional fiction that emerged between the wars.

William Faulkner chose to be a chronicler of the American South, experimenting widely with narrative and even using a stream of consciousness technique.

Flannery O’Connor was a social satirist who set her fiction in the South and often challenged American attitudes towards issues such as race relations. 

Early 20th Century

Aaron Copland was one of the most highly esteemed composers.

His music often imitates American fiddle tunes and hymns.

George Gershwin blended classical and jazz elements in music that was also inspired by African American blues. Scott Joplin made famous ragtime, a type of jazz piano.

Louis Armstrong was a vocalist and premier jazz trumpeter. Duke Ellington was one of the greatest jazz pianists and arrangers.

Early 20th Century

Fascism was first established in Italy under dictator Benito Mussolini.

The movement spread to Germany, where Adolf Hitler took advantage of public despair over the state of Germany’s economy following World War I.

Early 20th Century

In 1934, Hitler became president of Germany, leading to World War II and the Holocaust.

Bundesarchiv, Das. Adolf Hitler-1933. 1952. JPG.

Early 20th Century

Francisco Franco led Spain’s right wing against the new Republican government. He ruled Spain as a Fascist dictator from 1939 until he died in 1975.

Late 20th Century

The modern world came into being after World War II.

At least seventeen million soldiers had died fighting, and the economies of Europe and Asia had been destroyed.

In 1940, German troops invaded France, and the French eventually turned over two-thirds of France to the Germans.

Late 20th Century

Britain fought back under new Prime Minister Winston Churchill.

Late 20th Century

In the Pacific, Japanese Emperor Hirohito joined forces with Adolph Hitler; in December 1941, Japan attacked the American naval base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, bringing America into the war.

Late 20th CenturySlowly the Allies gained the upper hand in both Europe and the Pacific.

In May of 1945, U.S. President Harry Truman declared the war in Europe over.

Three months later, the United States dropped atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, forcing Japan to surrender.

The rebuilding of Europe and Japan required a huge investment. U.S. Secretary of State George Marshall developed a plan to provide economic aid to European countries on the condition that they work together for their mutual benefit.

Japan’s new constitution prohibited it from developing an army or air force, freeing up money for other purposes.

The struggle for world power between the United States and the Soviet Union was called the “Cold War.”

The period after World War II witnessed a steady movement from destruction to affluence.

Late 20th Century

Existentialist philosopher Søren Kierkegaard emphasized the essentially ethical nature of human life, with each individual responsible for making choices and commitments.

French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre thought that human beings are defined by the choices they make, and that it is not the situations people find themselves in that fix their identities, but the choices they make in response to those situations.

Simone de Beauvoir emphasized the need for women to make their own decisions and claim their independent existence.

Late 20th Century

The arts also began to emphasize the value of individual expression, focusing on a style of highly personal and subjective abstract painting called “abstract expressionism.”

Several Abstract Expressionist artists, supported by the WPA in the 1930s, went on to lead America to prominence in the international art scene in the 1940s.

One such artist was Jackson Pollock, whose body of work is referred to as the “drip” paintings.

Like Pollock, Willem de Kooning was interested more in the act of creating the painting than in the finished product.

Mark Rothko, who worked in a style known as “color field painting,” produced a series of works consisting of soft-edged rectangles in various colors.

Pollock, J. War. 1947. JPG.

Late 20th Century

A second generation Abstract Expressionist, Helen Frankenthaler worked on huge, raw canvases laid out on the floor, pouring paint onto the canvas.

Most of the great post war architects developed a single international style, based primarily on the nature of modern materials and structure, using slender steel posts and beams, and concrete reinforced by steel.

Walter Gropius was one of the leading architects in Germany, and director of the Bauhaus art school there.

The main principle of the Bauhaus was to closely connect art, science, and technology.

Ludwig Mies van der Rohe was a colleague of Gropius’s at the Bauhaus; he moved from Germany to the United States, where he created the modern skyscraper.

Late 20th CenturyAnother leader of the International Style was Le Corbusier. He called the functional homes he designed machines à habiter—“machines to live in.”

The most influential architect of the age was American Frank Lloyd Wright, who believed that the character of a building must be related to its site and blend with the terrain.

Modern drama begins in the nineteenth century with the plays of Henrik Ibsen.

The existentialist sense of the absurd dominated post-war theater. Absurdist dramatists rejected the idea that plot should be structured.

One of the most important of absurdist dramatists was Irish-born playwright Samuel Beckett, whose best-known work is Waiting for Godot.

Beckett mixed humor with pathos to portray a bleakly pessimistic view of life.

Late 20th Century

The 1950s and 1960s saw an explosion of the consumer culture in America.

It was during this time that shopping malls, fast food restaurants, and television all arrived on the scene.

Many artists and intellectuals realized that art might be made out of almost anything.

Composer John Cage demonstrated this with his piece 4’33”, which consisted of nothing but four minutes and thirty-three seconds of silence.

One of Cage’s students, Robert Rauschenberg, began taking junk and trash and combining them to create “art.”

Late 20th CenturyLouise Nevelson used small compositional units made of pieces of wood furniture to create wall-size assemblages, which she unified by painting a single color.

Andy Warhol’s work embodied the world of mass production and image creation.

His style, including his famous portrayals of Campbell’s soup cans and Marilyn Monroe, was labeled “Pop Art.”

One of Warhol’s contemporaries, Roy Lichtenstein, painted large-scale comics, often depicting the lives of young women.

Claes Oldenburg’s giant versions of the most banal things, such as clothespins, transform the everyday into the monumental.

Cage’s minimalist tendencies were attractive to a number of sculptors as well, including Donald Judd, who created a series of what he called “Specific Objects” which were uniform, modular boxes made of iron.

Late 20th CenturySol LeWitt also worked in modular units, creating frameworks of white, baked enamel arranged as an open cube and repeated according to various mathematical formulas.

Christo and Jeanne-Claude create site-specific sculpture which is usually outdoors, public, large-scale and temporary.

The artists’ “environmental art,” which has included wrapping large structures such as the Reichstag in Berlin, is intentionally transitory.

No architect’s work epitomizes pop culture’s collision of styles more than that of Frank Gehry.

His Santa Monica house represents the consciously assembled style of past and present elements present in “postmodern” architecture.

Late 20th Century

The “Beat” generation of writers saw American prosperity as a negative.

Perhaps the leading voice of the generation was Jack Kerouac, who wrote in what he called “spontaneous prose.”

This is essentially the same style used by poet Alien Ginsberg.

One of the era’s most highly regarded musical talents was composer, conductor, and pianist Leonard Bernstein, who is perhaps best known for West Side Story, a contemporary version of Romeo and Juliet.

References

All non-cited images were gathered from the free domain and are not under any copyright law restrictions. All images gathered from wikipedia.org.

Pollock, J. War. 1947. JPG.

Bundesarchiv, Das. Adolf Hitler-1933. 1952. JPG.