1. McKay Chapter 28: 1920s Europe
The Age of Anxiety
McKay Chapter 28: 1920s Europe

2. Victorian Era/ La Belle Epoch/ Gilded Age Weltanschauung
Gustave Caillebotte, (1848–1894), Paris Street, Rainy Day, 1877
Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Dance at Le Moulin de la Galette, 1876

3. Victorian Era/ La Belle Epoch/ Gilded Age Paradigm
Golden Age of Bourgeosie
Peace (Pax Britannica )
Belief in Progress
leisure time
Faith in Technology
Prosperity
faith in science/ reason
Supreme confidence

4. World War I

5. Victorian Era/ La Belle Epoch/ Gilded Age Paradigm
World War I

6. The storm has died away and still we are restless, uneasy, as if the storm were about to break…among all these injured things is the mind. The mind has indeed been cruelly wounded…it doubts itself profoundly. French poet Paul Valery (1922)

7. Europe in 1919

8. Europe’s Wounded Soul WWI shattered Europe’s intellectual paradigm
Noted irrational and violence in humans
Paul Valéry’s Crisis of the Mind (p. 922)
wrote about the crisis of the cruelly injured mind
war ("storm") had left a "terrible uncertainty"
Questioned liberal beliefs that had guided it since the Enlightenment
Uncertain about progress & reason
No longer sure of a knowable orderly Newtonian society
Otto Dix:
Noted for his ruthless and harshly realistic depictions of Weimar society and of the brutality of war,

9. Friedrich Nietzsche Friedrich Nietzsche
believed that Western civilization was in decline
Ambition, the striving to reach the highest possible position in life (Struggle) drive human progress
Power is ultimate virtue
Mankind weakened by Christianity and Judeo-Christian virtures
“Slave Morality” which praised humility, the weak
W. Civ overstressed rational thinking at the expense of emotion and passion
But claims that marriage for love should be left to the rabble
The best should mate with the best
“God is dead.” Western Christians no longer really believed
The Will to Power
Stipulated that a few superior supermen had to become the leaders of the herd of inferior people
How is a superman created?
Eugenics, severe/ stoic education
A superman is beyond good and evil
He is fearless = he is good
Very influential among German radicals

10. The reaction of paltry people : Love provides the feeling of highest power. It should be understood to what extent, not man in general, but only a certain kind of man is speaking here. " We are godly in love, we shall be ' the children of God ' ; God loves us and wants nothing from us save love " ; that is to say : all morality, obedience, and action, do not produce the same feeling of power and freedom as love does ; a man does nothing wicked from sheer love, but he does much more than if he were prompted by obedience and virtue alone. Here is the happiness of the herd, the communal feeling in big things as in small, the living sentiment of unity felt as the sum of the feeling of life. Helping, caring for, and being useful, constantly kindle the feeling of power; visible success... Much can I bear. Things the most irksome I endure with such patience as comes from a god. Four things, however, repulse me like venom : Tobacco smoke, garlic, bugs, and the cross… The profound contempt with which the Christian was treated by the noble people of antiquity, is of the same order as the present instinctive aversion to Jews: it is the hatred which free and self- respecting classes feel towards those who wish to creep in secretly, and who combine an awkward bearing with foolish self-sufficiency. The Will to Power by Friedrich Nietzsche

11. "...the Jews achieved that miracle of inversion of values thanks to which life on earth has for a couple millennia acquired a new and dangerous fascination--their prophets fused 'rich', 'godless', 'evil', 'violent', 'sensual' into one and were the first to coin the word 'world' as a term of infamy. It is this inversion of values (with which is involved the employment of the word for 'poor' as a synonym for 'holy' and 'friend') that the significance of the Jewish people resides: with them there begins the slave revolt in morals.“ On the Genealogy of Morality by Friedrich Nietzsche

12. Modern philosophy Existentialism
Søren Kierkegaard =father of existentialism
Basic Principles:
Life is not fair, (bad things DO happen to good people) BUT
Humans can overcome the meaninglessness of life by individual action
individuals create the meaning and essence of their lives, as opposed to deities or authorities creating it for them
Absence of a transcendent force (such as God) means that the individual is entirely free, and, therefore, ultimately responsible (for his/her choices)
Up to humans to create an ethos (values) of personal responsibility outside any branded belief system
Edvard Munch’s The Scream (1893 represents the universal anxiety of modern man
“They (human-beings) turn up, appear on the scene.”
Man is condemned to be free.”
Jean-Paul Sartre

13. The revival of Christianity
Christianity under attack since Enlightenment
Before WWI theologians tried harmonize religious belief with scientific
Played down the role of miracles and stressed Christ as a moral teacher
A revitalization of fundamental Christianity took place after World War I
Christian Existentialism
Soren Kierkegaard ( ) revived
Led a back-to-basics movement
criticized the worldliness of the church and stressed commitment to a remote and majestic God
Each individual must choose how to exist in order to live an authentic life
Karl Barth ( )
stressed the imperfect and sinful nature of man
Man can not “reason out” God’s ways
T.S. Eliot, C.S. Lewis & other literary figures were caught in in revival
Graham Green
“One began to believe in heaven because one believed in hell.”

14. The new physics
Pre 1920 physics was based on a Newtonian weltanschauung
World machine
People were comforted be science’s certainty in a time when “God is dead.”
Planck and Einstein undermined belief in constant natural laws
Plank
work with subatomic energy showed that atoms were not the basic building blocks of nature (protons & neutrons)
Einstein
E=MC2
postulated that time and space are relative
They can be altered (curved) with energy
the universe is infinite
matter and energy are interchangeable
Rutherford
Atom was not smallest, solid matter
Identified subatomic particles (neutron)
new physics
instead of Newton's rational laws, there are only tendencies
The world was not a perfect predictable harmonious machine!!!!

15. Freudian psychology
Prior to Freud, it was assumed that the conscious mind processed experiences in a rational and logical way
According to Freud, human behavior is basically irrational
key to understanding the mind is the irrational unconscious (the id), which is driven by sexual, aggressive, and pleasure seeking desires
Behavior is a compromise between the needs of the id and the rationalizing conscious (the ego), which mediates what a person can do, and ingrained moral values (the superego), which tell what a person should do
Instinctual drives can easily overwhelm the control mechanisms; yet rational thinking and traditional moral values can cripple people with guilt and neuroses.
Many interpreted Freudian thought as an encouragement of an uninhibited sex life

16. Twentieth century literature
The postwar moods of pessimism, relativism, and alienation influenced novelists
Literature focused on the complexity and irrationality of the human mind
Writers such as Proust embraced psychological relativity--the attempt to understand oneself by looking at one's past
Novelists such as Woolf, Faulkner, and Joyce adopted the stream-of-consciousness technique, in which ideas and emotions from different time periods bubble up randomly
Some literature, such as that of Spengler, Kafka, and Orwell, was anti-utopia--it predicted a future of doom
The Waste Land
A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
And the dry stone no sound of water…
Hooded hordes swarming…
Falling towers
Jerusalem Athens Alexandria
Vienna London
Unreal
T.S. Eliot (1922

17. Modern painting
French impressionism replaced with to nonrepresentational expressionism
sought to portray the worlds of emotion and imagination
Van Gogh, Gauguin, Cézanne, and Matisse
Vincent van Gogh
Starry Night 1889
Paul Gauguin
Tahitian Women [On the Beach]) 1891

18. Themes in Early Modern Art
Uncertainty/insecurity.
Disillusionment.
The subconscious.
Overt sexuality.
Violence & savagery.

19. There’s no such thing as Santa?!?!?!?
Edvard Munch: The Scream (1893)
There’s no such thing as Santa?!?!?!?
Expressionism
Using bright colors to express a particular emotion
Reflects a zeitgeist of anxiety, uncertainty

20. Franz Marc: Animal Destinies (1913)

21. Gustav Klimt: Judith I (1901)
Secessionists
Disrupt the conservative values of Viennese society.
Obsessed with the self.
Man is a sexual being, leaning toward despair

22. Gustav Klimt: The Kiss (1907-8)

23. Georges Braque: Violin & Candlestick (1910)
CUBISM
The subject matter is broken down, analyzed, and reassembled in abstract form.
Cezanne  The artist should treat nature in terms of the cylinder, the sphere, and the cone.

24. Georges Braque:
Woman with a Guitar (1913)

25. Pablo Picasso: Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907)

26. Picasso: Studio with Plaster Head (1925)

27. Pablo Picasso:
Guernica (1937)

28. Nude Descending a Staircase (1912)
Marcel Duchamp:
Nude Descending a Staircase (1912)

29. George Grosz Grey Day (1921) DaDaism
Ridiculed contemporary culture & traditional art forms.
The collapse during WW I of social and moral values.
Nihilistic

30. The Pillars of Society (1926)
George Grosz
The Pillars of Society (1926)

31. Raoul Hausmann: ABCD (1924-25)

32. Marcel Duchamp: Fountain (1917)

33. Salvador Dali: Soft Construction with Boiled Beans (Premonition of Civil War), 1936
Surrealism
Late 1920s-1940s.
Came from the nihilistic genre of DaDa.
Influenced by Feud’s theories on psychoanalysis and the subconscious
Confusing & startling images like those in dreams

34. Salvador Dali: The Persistence of Memory (1931)

35. Salvador Dali: The Apparition of the Face and Fruit Dish on a Beach (1938)

36. Salvador Dali: Geopoliticus Child Watching the Birth of a New Man (1943)