Modernism

1
Modernism

• 1914-1945

2
Main Ideas and Events

• WWI
• WWII
• The Depression
• The rise of totalitarianism
• The rise of the masses
• Mass culture

3
World War I

• Took an estimated ten million lives
• Central Powers Germany, Austria-Hungary,
  Turkey, and Bulgaria
• Allied Powers France, Russia, Great Britain,
  Italy, and the U.S.
• U.S. entered the war in 1917
• Treaty of Versailles ended the war in 1919
• Woodrow Wilson was President during and after the
  war
• Established the League of Nations

4
The Roaring Twenties

• A time of great prosperity in the United States
• Henry Ford invented Model T Flappers
• Prohibition
• Expatriates Fitzgerald, Hemingway
• First Transatlantic flight Charles Lindbergh
• Al Capone and gangs
• Women vote for the first time in the U.S.
• Flappers
• Ku Klux Klan
• Immigration to the U.S.

5
The Depression

• Crash of the New York stock market in October
  1929
• The Depression wiped out prosperity and brought
  mass unemployment, demonstrations, and near
  starvation to many people
• President Franklin Delano Roosevelt was President
  during the 1920s
• New Deal program to revitalize the economy
• Germany suffered most during the Depression
• Japan prospered under Emperor Hirohito

6
The Rise of Totalitarianism

• By 1939, Germany, Austria, Hungary, Italy, Spain,
  Bulgaria and Rumania had become totalitarian.
• Totalitarian governments control every aspect of
  the lives and thoughts of their citizens
• Two forms of totalitarianism between the wars
  communism and fascism.

7
Russian Communism

• Based on the writings of Karl Marx whose theory
  was reinterpreted by Lenin.
• Belief that reform could only occur when a small
  elite group seized power in the name of the
  people
• Bolsheviks, led by Lenin, seized control of the
  government in 1917.
• After Lenins death, Stalin emerged as ruler of
  the Soviet Socialist Republic.

8
Fascism

• Based on the idea that the masses should fuse
  into one spirit.
• The individual was insignificant and the
  nation-state was the supreme embodiment of the
  destiny of its people.
• First appeared in Italy in the 1920s, and then
  in Germany and Spain in the 1930s.
• Led by Mussolini in Italy.
• Led by Hitler in Germany
• Led by Franco in Spain

9
World War II

• Causes of WWII Treaty of Versailles, the Great
  Depression, and nationalism
• WWII began on September 1, 1939, when Germany
  invaded Poland France and Britain responded with
  declarations of war.
• Within nine months, the Nazis occupied most of
  western Europe.
• Unable to defeat England by air, Hitler invaded
  the Soviet Union in 1941. The Soviet Union and
  Great Britain became allies against Nazi Germany.
• On December 7, 1941, Japan attacked Pearl Harbor.
  
• A few days later Germany and Italy followed Japan
  in declaring war on the United States.

10
World War II

• The war lasted until May 1945, when the Allied
  Powers Britain, the Soviet Union, and the
  United States forced Germany to surrender.
• The war against Japan was brought to an end in
  August 1945 when the U.S. bombed Hiroshima and
  Nagasaki. More than 200,000 Japanese were killed
  in these two raids.

11
The Holocaust

• Gradually it became known that the Nazis had
  rounded up the Jews in Germany and eastern Europe
  and transported them to extermination camps,
  where they were killed in g as chambers.
• Six million Jews were murdered out of a
  population of nine million.

12
Images of World War II
13
Images of WWII
14
Modernism

• 1914-1945 mark zenith of Modernism
• Gap between artist and audience
• Isolation of artist
• Mass culture was a response to this dilemma and a
  direct outgrowth of industrialized society.

15
Experimentation in Literature

• The Novel
• Stream of consciousness technique
• James Joyce
• Virginia Woolf
• William Faulkner
• Ernest Hemingway and influence of his style
• D.H. Lawrence and novels of sexual liberation

16
Experimentation in Poetry

• William Butler Yeats mysticism and Irish
  patriotism
• T.S. Eliot The Wasteland
• Langston Hughes and the Harlem Literary
  Renaissance

17
Drama

• Bertolt Brecht and epic theater- attempt to make
  the audience uncomfortable
• Eugene ONeil tense family drama

18
Existentialism

• Major philosophy of the Modern Period
• Heidegger
• Sartre
• Concern for human freedom, personal
  responsibility and individual choices
• Because human beings are condemned to be free,
  they must take responsibility for their actions.

19
Painting

• Painting dominated the visual arts in the
  interwar period.
• Four major artistic styles abstraction,
  primitivism, fantasy, and Expressionism
• Picasso and Matisse were major painters
• Cubism remained leading art movement in the
  period with Picasso as leader

20
Images of Abstract Art
21
Abstract Art
22
Cubism and Abstract Art
23
Georgia OKeefe

• Distinctly American kind of abstraction
• American subjects drawn from nature

24
Georgia OKeefe
25
Modern Music

• Schoenberg introduced serial music- composing
  with a twelve-tone scale
• Stravinsky leading figures of Neoclassicism in
  music
• American composers Charles Ives, Aaron Copland,
  George Antheil,
• African American composer William Grant Still
• Duke Ellington
• Louis Armstrong
• Ella Fitzgerald