American modernism
Encyclopedia
American modernism like modernism in general is a trend of thought that affirms the power of human beings to create, improve, and reshape their environment, with the aid of scientific knowledge, technology and practical experimentation, and is thus in its essence both progressive
and optimistic
. The idea that individual human beings can define themselves through their own inner resources and create their own vision of existence without help from family, fellow citizens, or tradition is a large trend. The general term covers many political, cultural and artistic movements rooted in the changes in Western society
at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century. American modernism is an artistic and cultural movement in the United States starting at the turn of the 20th century with its core period between World War I and World War II and continuing into the 21st century.
David Harvey
’s definition of modernism, in his book The Condition of Postmodernity, is grounded in and evolves from Baudelaire’s
essay, The Painter of Modern Life, as “the transient, the fleeting, the contingent; it is the one-half of art, the other being the eternal and the immutable,”. He draws attention to the “paradoxical unity” in this definition; the American modernist movement expressed the short-lived and the unchanging aspects of a cultural and political upheaval from the late 19th to the better part of the 20th century. Most modernist works were publicized before 1914, which made it a pre-war movement; however, America along with the countries involved in world wars, modernism "needed the desperate convulsions of the great struggle, the crashing of regimes it precipitated, to give [it] the radical political dimension it had hitherto lacked." Within the context of America's involvement in two world wars, its economic depression, the rise of socialism and the threat of democratic capitalism, “intellectual and aesthetic” modernism presented a philosophy to break free from. In the 1960s, people grew “antagonistic to the oppressive qualities of scientifically grounded technical-bureaucratic rationality....”.
Modernism—in general—evolved from Enlightenment
philosophies, yet rejected all historical reference. “Modernity”, writes Harvey, “can have no respect even for its own past...”, it must embrace a meaning collected and defined “within the maelstrom of change”. Enlightenment thinkers collectively gathered the individual efforts working “freely and creatively for the pursuit of human emancipation and the enrichment of daily life”. Early modernists married to the Enlightenment ideal—the progressiveness, the break with history, the embrace of the “transitory”, the “fleeting”, and the “maelstrom of change”-- yet, with the lacuna of war, these optimistic views were abandoned.
Out of the vestiges of war-times, modernism became wary of the “relation between means and ends” as socialist governments began to take form. With ties to the rejection of history, modernists attached to the idea of “creative destruction”. In order to make something new, the old must be abandoned and/or dissembled. Much of this concept of “creative destruction” is mirrored in the cubist movement. The historical contexts of reality as a basis for idealism (as apparent in Enlightenment thinking), becomes a blurring of the lines and angles of reality, and the rejection of idealism. Modernists embraced machinery, language as a mechanism for communication, as the bastion of political and cultural rationality. From this evolved definition, “it meant that, for the first time in the history of modernism, artistic and cultural, as well as ‘progressive’ political revolt had to be directed at a powerful version of modernism itself”.
Art became as established elite and modernist philosophy seeped into the institutionalized aspects of life that modernists had initially breaking from. Needless to say, modernism “lost its appeal as a revolutionary antidote”. It was in these contexts that the anti-modernist movements of the 1960s began to take shape and pave the way for the emergence of postmodernism in America.
art has a tendency to abstraction, is innovative, aesthetic, futuristic and self-referential. It includes visual art, literature
, music, film, design
, architecture
as well as life style. It reacts against historicism
, artistic conventions and institutionalization of art. Art was not only to be dealt with in academies, theaters or concert halls, but to be included in everyday life and accessible for everybody. Furthermore, cultural institutions concentrated on fine art
and scholars paid little attention to the revolutionary styles of modernism.
Economic and technological progress in the U.S. during the Roaring Twenties
gave rise to widespread utopianism, which influenced some modernist artists, while others were skeptical of the embrace of technology. The victory in World War I confirmed the status of the U.S. as an international player and gave the people self-confidence and a feeling of security. In this context American modernism marked the beginning of American art as distinct and autonomous from European taste by breaking artistic conventions that had been shaped after European traditions until then.
American modernism benefited from the diversity of immigrant cultures. Artists were inspired by African, Caribbean, Asian and European folk cultures and embedded these exotic styles in their works.
The Modernist American movement is a reflection of American life in the 20th century. In this quickly industrializing world and hastened pace of life, it is easy for the individual to be swallowed up by the vastness of things; left wandering, devoid of purpose. Social boundaries in race, class, sex, wealth, and religion are all being challenged. As the social structure is challenged by new incoming views the bounds of traditional standards and social structure dissolve and a loss of identity is all that remains; translating later into isolation, alienation, and an overall feeling of separateness from any kind of “whole”. The unity of a war rallied country was dying, along with it the illusion of the pleasantries it sold to its soldiers and people. The world was left violent, vulgar, and spiritually empty.
The middle class worker falls into a distinctly unnoticeable position, a cog much too small to hope to find recognition in much greater machine. Citizens were overcome with their own futility. Youths dreams shatter with failure and a disillusioning disappointment in recognition of limit and loss. The lives of the disillusioned and outcasts become more focal. Ability to define self through hard work and resourcefulness, to create your own vision of yourself without the help of traditional means becomes prized. Some authors endorse this, while other, such as Fitzgerald, challenge how alluring but destructively false the values of the privileged can be.
Modernist America had to find common ground in a world no longer unified in belief. The unity found lay in the common ground of the shared consciousness within all human experience. The importance of the individual is emphasized; the truly limited nature of the human experience forms a bond across all bridges of race, class, sex, wealth, or religion. Society, in this way, found shared meaning, even in disarray.
Some see modernism in the tradition of 19th century aestheticism
and the "art for art's sake
" movement. Clement Greenberg
argues that modernist art excludes "anything outside itself". Others see modernist art, for example in blues
and jazz
music, as a medium for emotions and moods and many works dealt with contemporary issues, like feminism and city life. Some artists and theoreticians even added a political dimension to American modernism.
American modernist design and architecture enabled people to lead a modern life. Work and family life changed radically and rapidly due to the economic upswing during the 1920s. In the U.S. the car became popular and affordable for many, leisure time and entertainment gained importance and the job market opened up for women. In order to make life more efficient, designers and architects aimed at the simplification of housework.
The Great Depression
at the end of the '20s and during the '30s disillusioned people about the economic stability of the country and eroded utopianist thinking. The outbreak and the terrors of the World War II caused further changes in mentality. The Post-war
period that followed is termed Late Modernism
. The Postmodernist era is generally considered characteristic of the art of the late 20th century beginning in the 1980s.
Early in the 20th century, jazz
evolved from the blues
tradition, but also incorporated many other musical and cultural elements. In New Orleans, often considered to be the birth place of jazz, musicians benefited from the influx of Spanish and French colonial influences. In this city, a unique ethnic cultural mix and looser racial prohibitions allowed African Americans more influence than in other regions of the South. The Spanish American War brought Northern soldiers to the region with their bands. The resulting music adopted sounds from the new brass instruments. During the Great Migration
, jazz spread from New Orleans to New York, Chicago, and other cities, incorporating new sounds along the way. Harlem
, New York City, became the new center for the jazz age
.
music, as a central element of American culture, has its roots in Black slave culture. The music combined elements from African call and response patterns into its instrumentation and riffs. In its early beginnings jazz was looked critically upon by parts of the white population, who considered jazz and ragtime
rhythms to be "savage crash and bang" and denigrated the genre as a product "not of innovators, but of incompetents." Its expressive and pulsating style initially served racial stereotypes in the public mind and was widely encountered with skeptical rejection. Despite this phenomenon of animosity towards a rising Black cultural significance, American writer Lawrence W. Levine interprets the role of jazz as a catalyst of a shifting national consciousness:
After all, it was in the nature of jazz to strive for cultural convergence between blacks and whites; according to saxophonist Sonny Rollins
, "Jazz has always been a music of integration." During the 1920s and 1930s jazz gained considerably in popularity and aroused increasing interest in young whites who were attracted by the artistic, personal as well as cultural freedom of expression this new musical form had to offer. Well-known white musicians such as Benny Goodman
, Gene Krupa
, Milton Mezzrow, Muggsy Spanier
or Joe Sullivan
were inspired by Afro-American icons like Louis Armstrong
. The acceptance of jazz soon spread across the Atlantic and, by the mid-20th century, made it international. Today, jazz music is regarded as an integral and vibrant part of American culture, the unique native music of America, a worldwide representative of Afro-American culture.
in 1923 proclaimed jazz to be "A contribution of America to the arts. It is recognized the world over as part of a musical folk lore of this country: it is as thoroughly and typically American as the Monroe Doctrine
or the Fourth of July, or baseball
."
Jazz's American-ness begins with its roots. Jazz was a product of the African Americans, a cultural group distinct to America. Though the early blues
sang distinctly of the sorrows of a displaced people, jazz was something else. The African American labor class who gave birth to jazz were not subject to the education of other white musicians; black minstrels were able to escape the pressure to "Europeanize" their art. Culture (with a capital C) essentially demanded that Americans prefer, commend, and reiterate all things European. Free from these constraints, jazz progressed in an uncharted manner. In 1925, Irving Berlin
called jazz "American folk music" and cited influences ranging from "old Southern Songs" and the "Negro spirituals", to a "tinge of the Russian and Italian folk songs", but Berlin concluded that it was "typically American above all." Like the nation where it was created, jazz blended separate ethnic and cultural influences into a new and different product, combining elements from Black identity with other immigrant influences. It incorporated the sounds of the South and the modern, and adapted elements from urban skylines. Jazz was distinctly American in that it blended the character of different peoples, but still let the individual have his chance to express himself in an improvisational solo, and therefore asserted the "rugged individualism" that already characterized the nation. Furthermore, jazz began to break down the barrier between performer and audience. It "democratized" culture, making it accessible to the common person.
is one of the earliest and most successful jazz adaptation to the stage, jazz ballets appeared in New York City's Metropolitan Theatre, Langston Hughes
and Sterling Brown drew poetry from the Jazz music they experienced, and jazz music colored the paintings of Aaron Douglas
, Miguel Covarrubias
, and many others.
landscapes, still-lives and portraits appeared; bright colors entered the palettes of painters, and the first non-objective paintings were displayed in the galleries. According to Davidson, the beginning of American modernist painting can be dated to the 1910s. The early part of the period lasted 25 years and ended around 1935, when modern art was referred to as, what Greenberg
called the avant-garde
.
The 1913 Armory Show
in New York City displayed the contemporary work of European artists, as well as Americans. The Impressionist, Fauvist and Cubist paintings startled many American viewers who were accustomed to more conventional art. However, inspired by what they saw, many American artists were influenced by the radical and new ideas.
The early 20th century was marked by the exploration of different techniques and ways of artistic expressiveness. Many American artists like Man Ray
, Patrick Henry Bruce
, Gerald Murphy and others went to Europe, notably Paris, to make art. The formation of various artistic assemblies led to the multiplicity of meaning in the visual arts. The Ashcan School
gathered around realism
(Robert Henri
or George Luks
); the Stieglitz
circle glorified abstract visions of New York City (Max Weber
, Abraham Walkowitz
); color painters evolved in direction of the colorful, abstract "synchromies
" (Stanton Macdonald-Wright and Morgan Russell
), whereas precisionism
visualized the industrialized landscape of America in the form of sharp and dynamic geometrization (Joseph Stella
, Charles Sheeler
, Charles Demuth
). Artists like Charles Burchfield, Marsden Hartley
, Stuart Davis
, Arthur Dove
, Georgia O'Keeffe
, John Marin
, Arthur Beecher Carles
, Alfred Henry Maurer
, Andrew Dasburg
, James Daugherty
, John Covert
, Henrietta Shore
, William Zorach
, Marguerite Thompson
(Zorach), Manierre Dawson
, Arnold Friedman
and Oscar Bluemner ushered in the era of Modernism
to the New York School
.
The shift of focus and multiplicity of subjects in the visual arts is also a hallmark of American modernist art. Thus, for example, the group The Eight
brought the focus on the modern city, and placed emphasis on the diversity of different classes of citizens. Two of the most significant representatives of The Eight, Robert Henri and John Sloan
made paintings about social diversity, often taking as a main subject the slum dwellers of industrialized cities. The late 1920s and the 1930s belonged (among many others) to two movements in American painting, Regionalism
and Social Realism
. The regionalists focused on the colorfulness of the American landscape and the complexities of country life, whereas the social realists went into the subjects of the Great Depression
, poverty, and social injustice. The social realists protested against the government and the establishment that appeared hypocritical, biased, and indifferent to the matters of human inequalities. Abstraction, landscape and music were popular modernist themes during the first half of the 20th century. Artists like Charles Demuth who created his masterpiece I Saw The Figure Five in Gold in 1928, Morton Schamberg (1881–1918) and Charles Sheeler
were closely related to the Precisionist movement
as well. Sheeler typically painted cityscapes and industrial architecture as exemplified by his painting Amoskeag Canal 1948. Jazz
and music were improvisationally represented by Stuart Davis
, as exemplified by Hot Still-Scape for Six Colors - 7th Avenue Style, from 1940.
Modernism bridged the gap between the art and a socially diverse audience in the U.S. A growing number of museums and galleries aimed at bringing modernity to the general public. Despite initial resistance to the celebration of progress, technology, and urban life, the visual arts contributed enormously to the self-consciousness and awareness of the American people. New modernist painting shined a light on the emotional and psychic states of the audience, which was fundamental to the formation of an American identity.
Numerous directions of American "modernism" did not result in one coherent style, but evoked the desire for experiments and challenges. It proved that modern art goes beyond fixed principles.
has been a major figure in American Modernism since the 1920s. She has received widespread recognition, for challenging the boundaries of modern American artistic style. She is chiefly known for paintings of flowers, rocks, shells, animal bones and landscapes in which she synthesized abstraction and representation. Ram's Head White Hollyhock and Little Hills, from 1935 is a well known painting by O'Keeffe.
Arthur Dove
used a wide range of media, sometimes in unconventional combinations to produce his abstractions and his abstract landscapes. Me and the Moon from 1937 is a good example of an Arthur Dove abstract landscape. Dove did a series of experimental collage works in the 1920s. He also experimented with techniques, combining paints like hand mixed oil or tempera over a wax emulsion.
African-American painter Aaron Douglas
(1899–1979) is one of the best-known and most influential African-American modernist painters. His works contributed strongly to the development of an aesthetic movement that is closely related to distinct features of African-American heritage and culture. Douglas influenced African-American visual arts especially during the Harlem Renaissance
.
One of Douglas' most popular paintings is The Crucifixion. It was published in James Weldon Johnson's God's Trombones in 1927. The crucifixion scene that is depicted in the painting shows several elements that constitute Douglas' art: clear-cut delineation, change of shadows and light, stylized human bodies and geometric figures as concentric circles in contrast to linear forms. The painting's theme resembles not only the biblical scene but can also be seen as an allusion to African-American religious tradition: the oversized, dark Jesus is bearing his cross, his eyes directed to heaven from which light is cast down onto his followers. Stylized Roman soldiers are flanking the scene with their pointed spears. As a result the observer is reminded for instance of the African-American gospel tradition but also of a history of suppression. Beauford Delaney
, Charles Alston
, Jacob Lawrence
and Romare Bearden
were also important African-American Modernist painters that inspired generations of artists that followed them.
At the beginning of American modernism, photography was still struggling to be recognized as a form of art. The photographer Alfred Stieglitz
described it as following: "Artists who saw my earlier photographs began to tell me that they envied me; that they felt my photographs were superior to their paintings, but that, unfortunately, photography was not an art. I could not understand why the artists should envy me for my work, yet, in the same breath, decry it because it was machine-made." (Stieglitz:8). In 1902, Stieglitz founded the Photo-Secession
group with members such as Edward Steichen
, Gertrude Käsebier
and Clarence Hudson White
, which had the objective of raising the standard and increasing the awareness of art photography. At that point, their main style was "pictorialist", which was known for modifying photos through soft focus, special filters or exotic printing processes, to imitate the style of paintings and etchings of that time. For means of publication, Stieglitz, as the driving force of the movement, started the magazine "Camera Work
", in which he would publish the works of artists whom he considered representative for the movement. He also ran three galleries one after another, namely "291" (1905–1917), "The Intimate Gallery" (1925–1929) and "An American Place" (1929–1947). Especially 291 served as a meeting point for artists and writers and was the first to exhibit the early modernist art works of European artists, such as Henri Matisse
, Auguste Rodin
, Henri Rousseau
, Paul Cézanne
, and Pablo Picasso
, in the United States. A further link to the European avant-garde was established by Man Ray
. Born in America and inspired by the work he saw in Stieglitz’ galleries, Ray emigrated to Paris in 1921 and together with artists of the European Dada
and Surrealist movements created new photographic techniques such as rayographs, a procedure during which objects are placed directly on photosensitive paper.
In the early 1920s the photographers moved towards what they called "straight photography
". In contrast to the pictorialist style, they now rejected any kind of manipulation in the photographic process (e.g. soft lens, special developing or printing methods) and tried to use the advantages of the camera as a unique medium for capturing reality. Their motifs were supposed to look as "objective" as possible. Turning the focus away from classic portraiture and the pictorialist style, the photographers started using their pictures as means for representing the harsh realities of every day life, but at the same time tried to search for the beauty in the detail or the overall aesthetical structure. Machines and factory work, sky scrapers and technical innovations became prominent motifs.
In 1932 some younger photographers (e.g. Ansel Adams
, Imogen Cunningham
, Willard Van Dyke
, Edward Weston
) started Group f/64
based on the ideals of straight photography, which became the most progressive association of its time.
in 1848, American feminists held state and national conventions until the early 20th century. Some spokeswomen of the feminist movement connected the feminist cause with free love and the sexual revolution, which were the taboo issues of the Victorian Age. Therefore, feminists in both Britain and the United States concentrated on political and legal issues, the vote in particular, and other important women's issues regarding the domestic roles of women and the organization of domestic life in general. Eventually, after a long and hard struggle that included massive, sometimes violent protests, the imprisonment of many women, and even some deaths, the battle for women's suffrage
was won. The suffrage law was passed in the United States in 1920 for women who were householders or wives of householders and in 1928 for all adult women. (African-American women were not included. They only received the right to vote in the Civil Rights Movement
of the 1960s.) The National Organization for Women
(NOW) was founded in 1966 by a group of feminists. The largest women's rights group in the U.S. NOW aimed to end sexual discrimination, especially in the workplace, by means of legislative lobbying, litigation, and public demonstrations. The following years of the late 20th century witnessed a great expansion of women's rights in all areas of the modern society.
Modernist artists had an ambivalent attitude towards feminism: on the one hand they opted for equal treatment of men and women with regard to law, franchise, and professions; on the other hand they still had the perceived female inadequacies in terms of biology, culture, and transcendence in mind. As the radical feminist Emma Goldman
proclaimed, "true liberation begins neither at the polls nor in courts [but rather] in a woman's soul" (qtd. in Lyon 223).
The turn of the 20th century cultural life saw a shift to a dichotomy of mass culture versus high culture, with the former being generally gendered as feminine and high culture being considered to be male-oriented. Formerly denounced popular fiction now served the feminist purpose; "it formed the bedrock for defenses of a new phase of free love and the concomitant promotion of birth control" (Lyon 225). The upcoming interest in popular psychology, especially Freudian theories, encouraged this new approach to gender roles and sexuality in the arts. Sexual difference was portrayed by women themselves with the help of the media available to them. This manifested itself for example in Mina Loy
's "sex-talk" which is "stunning both for the focus it places on a woman's sexual disappointment and for the balance it strikes between clinical frankness and poetic indirection" (Lyon 225). It also entailed the breaking up of traditional gender roles. They were no longer exclusively male or female but there was also an acknowledgment of homosexuality, feminine men, and masculine women. Thus the concept of sexuality became multi-layered, as in Djuna Barnes
’ novel Nightwood (1936) in which she obliterates all established ideas of gender and sexuality. This early debate dealing with these issues cleared the way for contemporary approaches to gender, for instance that of Judith Butler
in her book Gender Trouble
(1990).
The medial/public depiction lays the foundation stone for the creation of icons. In this way, a certain image of a biological person or a real object (signifier) is produced and becomes the signified (cf. Volkmann 2006: 94-96). The emanated configuration of signs (cf. ibid. 96) helps turn the signified into an icon, if it captures the atmosphere of a particular period/country and is acknowledged by contemporary societies as well as future generations.
New York City is one of the most iconic cities in the United States and one of the major global cities of the world due to its important business, financial, trading and cultural organizations, such as Wall Street, United Nations, the Metropolitan Museum of Arts and Broadway theaters with their (in that time innovative) electric lighting. It is regarded as the birthplace of many American cultural movements, including the Harlem Renaissance in literature and abstract expressionism
in visual art.
New York City is iconic not only for Americans but also for many Europeans as the city of melting pot where many different ethnic groups live often in ghettos such as Chinatown, Little Italy. "Culture just seems to be in the air, like part of the weather". In American modernism, New York became the first stop for immigrants seeking a better life. The city's population boomed, 5 boroughs were formed, the New York City Subway was opened and became a symbol of progress and innovation. The city saw construction of skyscrapers in the skyline.
"Take New York City skyline, for example – that ragged man-made Sierra at the eastern edge of the continent. Clearly, in the minds of immigrants and returning travelers, in the iconography of the admen who use it as a backdrop for the bourbon and airplane luggage they are selling, the eyes of poets and of military strategies, it is one of the prime symbols" (Kouwenhoven 1998: 124). Iconic is especially the Manhattan skyline and its structural properties. It is regarded as a symbol of American progress and competition in height, creativity of structure, advancement and efficiency. It is considered an icon of "architectural individualism" (cf. ibid. 125). The typical gridiron pattern of the city's streets is an icon of simplicity (cf. ibid 127), while vertical steel construction of many stories is an icon of progress and innovation.
Charlie Chaplin is regarded as a film icon. Born in London, and while not a U.S. citizen, he had a strong sense of belonging to American society. Chaplin became famous after starring in his first film, Making a Living
, (1914). As a 10-year-old boy "he worked as a mime on the British vaudeville circuit". The fact that he was once very poor inspired his Tramp's trademark. He created a distorted version of a formal dinner suit (which was regarded to be a symbol of an adult man personified) combined with the attitude of an innocent child.
He was the first and the last person who was in charge of every aspect of making his films. He started his own film studio United Artists
; was in charge of directing, writing, editing, producing and casting the films in which he played. It is said that he changed the film industry into an art form in the first decades of the 20th century. It was his personality, and his genius with "expressive grace", "endless inventiveness" and creativity that made him an American icon He preferred making silent films, (he made more than 75 silent films) setting the acting and the plot in the center of the action. His best known films are The Great Dictator
(1940), Monsieur Verdoux
(1947), Limelight (1952), The Kid
(1921), The Gold Rush
(1925), The Circus (1928), City Lights
(1931) and Modern Times
(1936)
He was so highly recognizable that a movement of "Chaplinitis" was formed by 1920. There were Chaplin songs, dances, comic books, dolls, and cocktails. Poems were written about him and his pantomime. The Beat Generation
(of writers) made him one of its icons. In the '80s IBM took the Tramp for the logo in the their advertisements of personal computers
"Every few weeks, outside the movie theater in virtually any American town in the late 1910s, stood the life-size cardboard figure of a small tramp — outfitted in tattered, baggy pants, a cutaway coat and vest, impossibly large, worn-out shoes and a battered derby hat — bearing the inscription I AM HERE TODAY". "The endearing figure of his Little Tramp
was instantly recognizable around the globe and brought laughter to millions. Still is. Still does"
During the McCarthy era he was attacked and condemned by some for the increasingly politicized messages of his films; and he was accused of "anti-American activities" and of being a suspected communist supporter. He maintained his British citizenship, and after a trip to England in 1952 and for many years he wasn't allowed to re-enter the U.S. Finally in 1972 he triumphantly returned and was awarded an honorary Oscar. He is perceived today as an American film icon due to the charm and brilliance of his films.
Today, the Model-T Ford continues to represent the idea of process and mobility. Therefore, although modernism aimed at rejecting any form of tradition and history, this icon, interestingly, transmits, up to a certain degree, a sense of tradition.
Widespread use of electricity and mass production of technological house appliances like refrigerator brought about the change of eating habits of American people. Use of frozen food became more common. After the war the U.S. government passed new laws concerning food. So some new foods came right out of the ration kits to the stores. "Foods formerly manufactured solely for army use were put on the civilian market", Frozen and dried food products also became popular after the war. National Research Corporation of Boston introduced frozen orange juice concentrate called "tang." The company became Minute Maid, and, by 1950, a quarter of Florida's orange crop was going into concentrates. The frozen product quickly overtook fresh squeezed orange juice in most American homes. Full frozen meals were not far behind. In the 1950s, a Nebraska company Swanson's brought out their TV Dinners to great success.
These changes in eating habits caused huge changes in appliances, transportation and farming. Since people began buying the new products, new refrigerators were quickly developed with bigger freezer sections Shock resistant refrigerator units for trucks had to be invented and used by the military before frozen products could distributed and marketed around the country and around the world. These developments forced farmers to change what they grew and how they grew their products to meet new consumer demands.
In the following are there a few of the foods that were first produced and sold in the 1940s.
- Mrs. Paul's frozen fish sticks
- Cheerios (first sold as Cheeri Oats, the first ready-to-eat oat cereal) and Kellogg's Raisin Bran
- Minute Rice
- Reddi-Whip whipped cream
- Nestles Quick powdered drink mix
- Packaged cake mixes
- M&Ms Chocolate Candies, Peppermint Patty, Junior Mints, Almond Joy, Whoppers malted milk balls, Jolly Rancher Candies
- Deep Dish Pizza (Pizzeria Uno, Chicago)
With the increasing number of automobiles, American people started to get out of their homes and had dinner outside. However, during the war people drove their cars as little as possible. Gas and tires were limited by the government. Car production ceased as factories had to manufacture tanks, Jeeps and other military vehicles. After the war families piled into cars again, as a consequence, new highways were built. The number of drive-ins increased immediately. Drive-ins became part of the social life in America by the end of 1940.
Modernism showed its effects nearly in all areas. One of the immense developments was to supply the rural areas with the electricity. The REA, Rural Electrification Administration, began in the 1930s, however, it took time to build power lines scores of miles into rural areas. Throughout the 1940s, the REA continued to build the electricity lines.
Electricity changed the lives of farm families, from the moment they got up early in the morning, through meals, chores, and work until they went to bed at night. Electricity brought power for lights to work, read, and sew at night; power for appliances like refrigerators and freezers to preserve food; power for small kitchen devices such as mixers and blenders; and power for other labor saving devices such as electric stoves, irons and clothes washers. Electricity brought changes that just made life safer and better – like colored lights instead of dangerous candles on Christmas trees, refrigerators to keep food fresh and electric fans to bring relief on a hot summer day.
There were some crucial steps taken in the communication and media devices like the invention of radio and television.
Radio was the nation's first mass medium, linking the country and ending the isolation of rural residents. Radio was so important that the 1930 Census asked if the household had a radio. Radio provided free entertainment (after you bought the radio) and connected country people to world events. Walter Winchell and Lowell Thomas were popular news commentators on the radio.
The first practical TV sets were demonstrated and sold to the public at the 1939 World's Fair in New York. The sets were very expensive and New York City had the only broadcast station. When World War II started, all commercial production of television equipment was banned. Production of the cathode ray tubes that produced the pictures was redirected to radar and other high tech war uses. After the war television was something few had heard of. That changed quickly. In 1945, a poll asked Americans, "Do you know what television is?" Most didn't. But four years later, most Americans had heard of television and wanted one! According to one survey in 1950, before they got a TV, people listened to radio an average of nearly five hours a day. Within nine months after they bought a TV they listened to radio, but only for two hours a day. They watched TV for five hours a day. The 1940s TVs didn't look like today's televisions. Most had picture screens between 10 and 15 inches wide diagonally, inside large, heavy cabinets. And, of course, color broadcasts and sets didn't arrive until much later, in 1954.
Referring to fashion, usually one would think of dressing styles or costumes. Of course, dressing style is a very important category of the word "fashion". On the other hand, "fashion" has more meanings and could be explained and found in many other fields, such as architecture, body type, dance and music, and even forms of speech, etc.
1. Costumes
In the early 1920s, the ready-to-wear fashion began to spread America. More women earned their own wages and didn’t want to spend time on fittings. Fashion as the status symbol was no more important as class distinctions were becoming blurred. People especially women called for inexpensive fashion. In the aspect of mass production of contemporary style clothing for women, America went ahead of other countries. Several designers of this fashion including Jane Derby
made a stage pose.
Women: By 1921 the longer skirt, which was usually long and uneven at the bottom was out of date. The short skirt became popular by 1925. No bosom, no waistline, and hair nearly hidden under a cloche hat. The manufacturing of cosmetics also began from this decade. Powder, lipstick, rouge, eyebrow pencil, eye shadow, colored nails, women had them all. Moreover, pearls came in fashion as well.
Men: In this period, the clothing for men was a bit more conservative. Trousers widened to 24 inches at the bottoms. Knickers, increased the width and length, were called "plus fours". During the summer white linen was popular, while in the winter an outstanding American coat---- the raccoon coat was in fashion. The slouch hat, made of felt, could be rolled up and packed into a suitcase. These were very popular with the college men.
2. Furniture
There's no pure American modern style in the designing world. The American modern artists inherited the style characterized by simplicity of form, absence of decorative ornament, and focused on functional concerns from their precedents. At the same time, the American designers blended the wild style of Parisian painting, as well as the features of modern architecture in their works, such as Art Deco. Moreover, the designers also placed much emphasis on the materials, especially those invented in the modern age.
, William Carlos Williams
, F. Scott Fitzgerald
, Ernest Hemingway
and William Faulkner
, and while largely regarded as a romantic poet, Walt Whitman
is sometimes regarded as a pioneer of the modernist era in America.
The loss of self and need for self-definition is a main characteristic of the era. Workers faded into the background of city life, unnoticed cogs within a machine yearning for self definition. American modernists echoed the mid-19th-century focus on the attempt to "buid a self" - a theme well illustrated by the classic modernist work The Great Gatsby
Black writers need to be mentioned when talking about modernism in America, as they seem to have brought a breakthrough in literature and mentality, as far as the self-esteem of Afro-Americans is concerned. The folk-oriented poetry of Sterling Brown and Langston Hughes
, for example, written in a rhythm fit to be either sung or told as a story, melancholically describes the joyful attitude of Afro-Americans towards life, in spite of all the hardships they were confronted with. The protagonists of these poems are shown in such a light which offers insight into their cultural identity and folklore. An insight into culture and folklore is also a topic that prose deals with, such as, for example, Jean Toomer
's Blood-Burning Moon and William Faulkner's That Evening Sun
.
Race relations between blacks and whites, the gap between what was expected of each of the two and what the facts were, or, better said, prejudice in the society of the time are themes dealt with in most of the modernist American literature, whether we speak about prose (Jean Toomer
, Zora Neale Hurston
, William Faulkner
, Ernest Hemingway
), or about drama (Eugene O'Neill
). In other words, such stereotypes as the lack of education, the poor use of the English language and their portrayal in a dangerous light are not dealt away with, on the contrary, they are still present during the modernist period, as far as literature is concerned. However, with Ernest Hemingway's The Battler
, for example, there seems to be a reversal of stereotypes. The Afro-American character in this short story proves out to be a kind, calculated and polite man, whose good manners and carefully chosen vocabulary are easily noticeable from the first moment he appears in the story.
Madness and its manifestations in the human being seems to be another favorite theme of American modernist writers. Eugene O'Neill's The Emperor Jones
, Ernest Hemingway's The Battler and William Faulkner's That Evening Sun, all deal to a certain extent with this topic.
The modernist period also brought changes to the portrayal of gender roles and especially to women's role in society. It is an era under the sign of emancipation and change in society, issues which reflect themselves in the literature of the period, as well. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby
, for example, deals with such topics as gender interaction in a mundane society.
Influenced by the first World War, American modernist writers, such as Ernest Hemingway, offer an insight into the psychological wounds and spiritual scars of the war experience. The economic crisis in America at the beginning of the 1930s also left a mark on the literary creations of the period, such as John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath
. Nevertheless, all these negative aspects led to new hopes and aspirations, and to the search for a new beginning, not only for the contemporary individuals, but also for the fictional characters in American modernist literature.
The New Criticism in America
From the 1930s to the 1960s, New Criticism
became a critical force in the United States. It was the most powerful perspective in American literary criticism. The representatives were John Crowe Ransom
, Allen Tate
, Cleanth Brooks
, Robert Penn Warren
. "The influential critical methods these poet-professors developed emphasized the sharpening of close reading skills. New Criticism privileged the evaluation of poetry as the justification of literary scholarship". Brooks and Warren's Understanding Poetry (1938) became one of the most influential college poetry textbooks of the 1930s and continued to be revised and reprinted well into the 1970s" (Morrisson: 29).
New Criticism showed itself in such works as Eliot
's and Yeats
’ poems. "Poetry that best fit the aesthetic criteria of the New Critics was emphasized in important classroom teaching anthologies" (Morrisson: 29).
T. S. Eliot redefined tradition in his essay "Tradition and the Individual Talent". He formulated such critical concepts as "objective correlative", and rethought the literary canon in his elevation of Jacobean drama and metaphysical poetry. His work had a fundamental influence on New Criticism in America.
Among construction innovations there are such materials as iron, steel and reinforced concrete.
Brooklyn Bridge by John and Washington Roebling (1869–1883) (for more details see John Roebling/Washington Roebling)
Louis Henry Sullivan headed the so-called Chicago school of architecture, which was distinct by its development of functional design along with modern materials. Sullivan's follower Frank Lloyd Wright
absorbed from his 'lieber Master' (dear master) the German romantic tradition of organic architecture. He developed a new and original approach to residential design before World War I, which became known as the "prairie style." It combined open planning principles with horizontal emphasis, asymmetrical facade elevations, and broad, sheltering roofs. Robie House in Chicago (1909) and the Guggenheim Museum in New York City (1946–59) are two of his seminal works.
In his works Wright moved closer and closer to an earth-bound sense of natural form, using rough-hewn stone and timber and aiming always in his houses to achieve an effect of intimate and protective shelter.
Foreign-born architects as Richard Neutra
, Rudolf Schindler
, and William Lescaze
during the 1920s played a great role in development of American architecture performing later a style, which got the name of international style
and was reflected in the design of corporate office buildings after World War II. Such buildings as Skidmore, Owings and Merrill's Lever House (1952) and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe's Seagram Building (1956–58) in New York City are the examples of this new style. When such famous Europeans as Walter Gropius
and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe
immigrated to the United States, many American architectural schools went under the influence of the traditions of the Bauhaus
in Germany.
Social progress
Social progress is the idea that societies can or do improve in terms of their social, political, and economic structures. This may happen as a result of direct human action, as in social enterprise or through social activism, or as a natural part of sociocultural evolution...
and optimistic
Optimism
The Oxford English Dictionary defines optimism as having "hopefulness and confidence about the future or successful outcome of something; a tendency to take a favourable or hopeful view." The word is originally derived from the Latin optimum, meaning "best." Being optimistic, in the typical sense...
. The idea that individual human beings can define themselves through their own inner resources and create their own vision of existence without help from family, fellow citizens, or tradition is a large trend. The general term covers many political, cultural and artistic movements rooted in the changes in Western society
Western culture
Western culture, sometimes equated with Western civilization or European civilization, refers to cultures of European origin and is used very broadly to refer to a heritage of social norms, ethical values, traditional customs, religious beliefs, political systems, and specific artifacts and...
at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century. American modernism is an artistic and cultural movement in the United States starting at the turn of the 20th century with its core period between World War I and World War II and continuing into the 21st century.
David Harvey
David Harvey
David Harvey is the name of:*David Harvey *David Harvey , geographer and social theorist*David Harvey , American luthier...
’s definition of modernism, in his book The Condition of Postmodernity, is grounded in and evolves from Baudelaire’s
Charles Baudelaire
Charles Baudelaire was a French poet who produced notable work as an essayist, art critic, and pioneering translator of Edgar Allan Poe. His most famous work, Les Fleurs du mal expresses the changing nature of beauty in modern, industrializing Paris during the nineteenth century...
essay, The Painter of Modern Life, as “the transient, the fleeting, the contingent; it is the one-half of art, the other being the eternal and the immutable,”. He draws attention to the “paradoxical unity” in this definition; the American modernist movement expressed the short-lived and the unchanging aspects of a cultural and political upheaval from the late 19th to the better part of the 20th century. Most modernist works were publicized before 1914, which made it a pre-war movement; however, America along with the countries involved in world wars, modernism "needed the desperate convulsions of the great struggle, the crashing of regimes it precipitated, to give [it] the radical political dimension it had hitherto lacked." Within the context of America's involvement in two world wars, its economic depression, the rise of socialism and the threat of democratic capitalism, “intellectual and aesthetic” modernism presented a philosophy to break free from. In the 1960s, people grew “antagonistic to the oppressive qualities of scientifically grounded technical-bureaucratic rationality....”.
Modernism—in general—evolved from Enlightenment
Age of Enlightenment
The Age of Enlightenment was an elite cultural movement of intellectuals in 18th century Europe that sought to mobilize the power of reason in order to reform society and advance knowledge. It promoted intellectual interchange and opposed intolerance and abuses in church and state...
philosophies, yet rejected all historical reference. “Modernity”, writes Harvey, “can have no respect even for its own past...”, it must embrace a meaning collected and defined “within the maelstrom of change”. Enlightenment thinkers collectively gathered the individual efforts working “freely and creatively for the pursuit of human emancipation and the enrichment of daily life”. Early modernists married to the Enlightenment ideal—the progressiveness, the break with history, the embrace of the “transitory”, the “fleeting”, and the “maelstrom of change”-- yet, with the lacuna of war, these optimistic views were abandoned.
Out of the vestiges of war-times, modernism became wary of the “relation between means and ends” as socialist governments began to take form. With ties to the rejection of history, modernists attached to the idea of “creative destruction”. In order to make something new, the old must be abandoned and/or dissembled. Much of this concept of “creative destruction” is mirrored in the cubist movement. The historical contexts of reality as a basis for idealism (as apparent in Enlightenment thinking), becomes a blurring of the lines and angles of reality, and the rejection of idealism. Modernists embraced machinery, language as a mechanism for communication, as the bastion of political and cultural rationality. From this evolved definition, “it meant that, for the first time in the history of modernism, artistic and cultural, as well as ‘progressive’ political revolt had to be directed at a powerful version of modernism itself”.
Art became as established elite and modernist philosophy seeped into the institutionalized aspects of life that modernists had initially breaking from. Needless to say, modernism “lost its appeal as a revolutionary antidote”. It was in these contexts that the anti-modernist movements of the 1960s began to take shape and pave the way for the emergence of postmodernism in America.
History
Characteristically, modernistModernism
Modernism, in its broadest definition, is modern thought, character, or practice. More specifically, the term describes the modernist movement, its set of cultural tendencies and array of associated cultural movements, originally arising from wide-scale and far-reaching changes to Western society...
art has a tendency to abstraction, is innovative, aesthetic, futuristic and self-referential. It includes visual art, literature
Literature
Literature is the art of written works, and is not bound to published sources...
, music, film, design
Design
Design as a noun informally refers to a plan or convention for the construction of an object or a system while “to design” refers to making this plan...
, architecture
Architecture
Architecture is both the process and product of planning, designing and construction. Architectural works, in the material form of buildings, are often perceived as cultural and political symbols and as works of art...
as well as life style. It reacts against historicism
Historicism (art)
Historicism refers to artistic styles that draw their inspiration from copying historic styles or artisans. After neo-classicism, which could itself be considered a historicist movement, the 19th century saw a new historicist phase marked by a return to a more ancient classicism, in particular in...
, artistic conventions and institutionalization of art. Art was not only to be dealt with in academies, theaters or concert halls, but to be included in everyday life and accessible for everybody. Furthermore, cultural institutions concentrated on fine art
Fine art
Fine art or the fine arts encompass art forms developed primarily for aesthetics and/or concept rather than practical application. Art is often a synonym for fine art, as employed in the term "art gallery"....
and scholars paid little attention to the revolutionary styles of modernism.
Economic and technological progress in the U.S. during the Roaring Twenties
Roaring Twenties
The Roaring Twenties is a phrase used to describe the 1920s, principally in North America, but also in London, Berlin and Paris for a period of sustained economic prosperity. The phrase was meant to emphasize the period's social, artistic, and cultural dynamism...
gave rise to widespread utopianism, which influenced some modernist artists, while others were skeptical of the embrace of technology. The victory in World War I confirmed the status of the U.S. as an international player and gave the people self-confidence and a feeling of security. In this context American modernism marked the beginning of American art as distinct and autonomous from European taste by breaking artistic conventions that had been shaped after European traditions until then.
American modernism benefited from the diversity of immigrant cultures. Artists were inspired by African, Caribbean, Asian and European folk cultures and embedded these exotic styles in their works.
The Modernist American movement is a reflection of American life in the 20th century. In this quickly industrializing world and hastened pace of life, it is easy for the individual to be swallowed up by the vastness of things; left wandering, devoid of purpose. Social boundaries in race, class, sex, wealth, and religion are all being challenged. As the social structure is challenged by new incoming views the bounds of traditional standards and social structure dissolve and a loss of identity is all that remains; translating later into isolation, alienation, and an overall feeling of separateness from any kind of “whole”. The unity of a war rallied country was dying, along with it the illusion of the pleasantries it sold to its soldiers and people. The world was left violent, vulgar, and spiritually empty.
The middle class worker falls into a distinctly unnoticeable position, a cog much too small to hope to find recognition in much greater machine. Citizens were overcome with their own futility. Youths dreams shatter with failure and a disillusioning disappointment in recognition of limit and loss. The lives of the disillusioned and outcasts become more focal. Ability to define self through hard work and resourcefulness, to create your own vision of yourself without the help of traditional means becomes prized. Some authors endorse this, while other, such as Fitzgerald, challenge how alluring but destructively false the values of the privileged can be.
Modernist America had to find common ground in a world no longer unified in belief. The unity found lay in the common ground of the shared consciousness within all human experience. The importance of the individual is emphasized; the truly limited nature of the human experience forms a bond across all bridges of race, class, sex, wealth, or religion. Society, in this way, found shared meaning, even in disarray.
Some see modernism in the tradition of 19th century aestheticism
Aestheticism
Aestheticism was a 19th century European art movement that emphasized aesthetic values more than socio-political themes for literature, fine art, the decorative arts, and interior design...
and the "art for art's sake
Art for art's sake
"Art for art's sake" is the usual English rendering of a French slogan, from the early 19th century, l'art pour l'art, and expresses a philosophy that the intrinsic value of art, and the only "true" art, is divorced from any didactic, moral or utilitarian function...
" movement. Clement Greenberg
Clement Greenberg
Clement Greenberg was an American essayist known mainly as an influential visual art critic closely associated with American Modern art of the mid-20th century...
argues that modernist art excludes "anything outside itself". Others see modernist art, for example in blues
Blues
Blues is the name given to both a musical form and a music genre that originated in African-American communities of primarily the "Deep South" of the United States at the end of the 19th century from spirituals, work songs, field hollers, shouts and chants, and rhymed simple narrative ballads...
and jazz
Jazz
Jazz is a musical style that originated at the beginning of the 20th century in African American communities in the Southern United States. It was born out of a mix of African and European music traditions. From its early development until the present, jazz has incorporated music from 19th and 20th...
music, as a medium for emotions and moods and many works dealt with contemporary issues, like feminism and city life. Some artists and theoreticians even added a political dimension to American modernism.
American modernist design and architecture enabled people to lead a modern life. Work and family life changed radically and rapidly due to the economic upswing during the 1920s. In the U.S. the car became popular and affordable for many, leisure time and entertainment gained importance and the job market opened up for women. In order to make life more efficient, designers and architects aimed at the simplification of housework.
The Great Depression
Great Depression
The Great Depression was a severe worldwide economic depression in the decade preceding World War II. The timing of the Great Depression varied across nations, but in most countries it started in about 1929 and lasted until the late 1930s or early 1940s...
at the end of the '20s and during the '30s disillusioned people about the economic stability of the country and eroded utopianist thinking. The outbreak and the terrors of the World War II caused further changes in mentality. The Post-war
Post-war
A post-war period or postwar period is the interval immediately following the ending of a war and enduring as long as war does not resume. A post-war period can become an interwar period or interbellum when a war between the same parties resumes at a later date...
period that followed is termed Late Modernism
Late Modernism
Late modernism encompasses the overall production of most recent art made between the aftermath of World War II and the early years of the 21st century. The terminology often points to similarities between late modernism and post-modernism although there are differences. The predominant term for...
. The Postmodernist era is generally considered characteristic of the art of the late 20th century beginning in the 1980s.
Jazz
- For a wider, more formal account, please see JazzJazzJazz is a musical style that originated at the beginning of the 20th century in African American communities in the Southern United States. It was born out of a mix of African and European music traditions. From its early development until the present, jazz has incorporated music from 19th and 20th...
and Jazz AgeJazz AgeThe Jazz Age was a movement that took place during the 1920s or the Roaring Twenties from which jazz music and dance emerged. The movement came about with the introduction of mainstream radio and the end of the war. This era ended in the 1930s with the beginning of The Great Depression but has...
.
Early in the 20th century, jazz
Jazz
Jazz is a musical style that originated at the beginning of the 20th century in African American communities in the Southern United States. It was born out of a mix of African and European music traditions. From its early development until the present, jazz has incorporated music from 19th and 20th...
evolved from the blues
Blues
Blues is the name given to both a musical form and a music genre that originated in African-American communities of primarily the "Deep South" of the United States at the end of the 19th century from spirituals, work songs, field hollers, shouts and chants, and rhymed simple narrative ballads...
tradition, but also incorporated many other musical and cultural elements. In New Orleans, often considered to be the birth place of jazz, musicians benefited from the influx of Spanish and French colonial influences. In this city, a unique ethnic cultural mix and looser racial prohibitions allowed African Americans more influence than in other regions of the South. The Spanish American War brought Northern soldiers to the region with their bands. The resulting music adopted sounds from the new brass instruments. During the Great Migration
Great Migration (African American)
The Great Migration was the movement of 6 million blacks out of the Southern United States to the Northeast, Midwest, and West from 1910 to 1970. Some historians differentiate between a Great Migration , numbering about 1.6 million migrants, and a Second Great Migration , in which 5 million or more...
, jazz spread from New Orleans to New York, Chicago, and other cities, incorporating new sounds along the way. Harlem
Harlem
Harlem is a neighborhood in the New York City borough of Manhattan, which since the 1920s has been a major African-American residential, cultural and business center. Originally a Dutch village, formally organized in 1658, it is named after the city of Haarlem in the Netherlands...
, New York City, became the new center for the jazz age
Jazz Age
The Jazz Age was a movement that took place during the 1920s or the Roaring Twenties from which jazz music and dance emerged. The movement came about with the introduction of mainstream radio and the end of the war. This era ended in the 1930s with the beginning of The Great Depression but has...
.
Jazz – music of integration
JazzJazz
Jazz is a musical style that originated at the beginning of the 20th century in African American communities in the Southern United States. It was born out of a mix of African and European music traditions. From its early development until the present, jazz has incorporated music from 19th and 20th...
music, as a central element of American culture, has its roots in Black slave culture. The music combined elements from African call and response patterns into its instrumentation and riffs. In its early beginnings jazz was looked critically upon by parts of the white population, who considered jazz and ragtime
Ragtime
Ragtime is an original musical genre which enjoyed its peak popularity between 1897 and 1918. Its main characteristic trait is its syncopated, or "ragged," rhythm. It began as dance music in the red-light districts of American cities such as St. Louis and New Orleans years before being published...
rhythms to be "savage crash and bang" and denigrated the genre as a product "not of innovators, but of incompetents." Its expressive and pulsating style initially served racial stereotypes in the public mind and was widely encountered with skeptical rejection. Despite this phenomenon of animosity towards a rising Black cultural significance, American writer Lawrence W. Levine interprets the role of jazz as a catalyst of a shifting national consciousness:
Culturally, we remained to a much larger extent than we have yet recognized, a colonized people attempting to define itself in the shadow of the former imperial power. Jazz was an expression of that other side of ourselves that strove to recognize the positive aspects of our newness and our heterogeneity; that learned to be comfortable with the fact that a significant part of our heritage derived from Africa and other non-European sources; and that recognized in the various syncretized cultures that became so characteristic of the United States an embarrassing weakness but a dynamic source of strength.
After all, it was in the nature of jazz to strive for cultural convergence between blacks and whites; according to saxophonist Sonny Rollins
Sonny Rollins
Theodore Walter "Sonny" Rollins is a Grammy-winning American jazz tenor saxophonist. Rollins is widely recognized as one of the most important and influential jazz musicians. A number of his compositions, including "St...
, "Jazz has always been a music of integration." During the 1920s and 1930s jazz gained considerably in popularity and aroused increasing interest in young whites who were attracted by the artistic, personal as well as cultural freedom of expression this new musical form had to offer. Well-known white musicians such as Benny Goodman
Benny Goodman
Benjamin David “Benny” Goodman was an American jazz and swing musician, clarinetist and bandleader; widely known as the "King of Swing".In the mid-1930s, Benny Goodman led one of the most popular musical groups in America...
, Gene Krupa
Gene Krupa
Gene Krupa was an American jazz and big band drummer and composer, known for his highly energetic and flamboyant style.-Biography:...
, Milton Mezzrow, Muggsy Spanier
Muggsy Spanier
Francis Joseph Julian "Muggsy" Spanier was a prominent cornet player based in Chicago. He was renowned as the best trumpet/cornet in Chicago until Bix Beiderbecke entered the scene....
or Joe Sullivan
Joe Sullivan
Michael Joseph "Joe" O'Sullivan was an American jazz pianist.Sullivan was the ninth child of Irish immigrant parents. He studied classical piano for 12 years and at age 17, he began to play popular music in a club where he was exposed to jazz...
were inspired by Afro-American icons like Louis Armstrong
Louis Armstrong
Louis Armstrong , nicknamed Satchmo or Pops, was an American jazz trumpeter and singer from New Orleans, Louisiana....
. The acceptance of jazz soon spread across the Atlantic and, by the mid-20th century, made it international. Today, jazz music is regarded as an integral and vibrant part of American culture, the unique native music of America, a worldwide representative of Afro-American culture.
Jazz as American
A compilation article appearing in The New York TimesThe New York Times
The New York Times is an American daily newspaper founded and continuously published in New York City since 1851. The New York Times has won 106 Pulitzer Prizes, the most of any news organization...
in 1923 proclaimed jazz to be "A contribution of America to the arts. It is recognized the world over as part of a musical folk lore of this country: it is as thoroughly and typically American as the Monroe Doctrine
Monroe Doctrine
The Monroe Doctrine is a policy of the United States introduced on December 2, 1823. It stated that further efforts by European nations to colonize land or interfere with states in North or South America would be viewed as acts of aggression requiring U.S. intervention...
or the Fourth of July, or baseball
Baseball
Baseball is a bat-and-ball sport played between two teams of nine players each. The aim is to score runs by hitting a thrown ball with a bat and touching a series of four bases arranged at the corners of a ninety-foot diamond...
."
Jazz's American-ness begins with its roots. Jazz was a product of the African Americans, a cultural group distinct to America. Though the early blues
Blues
Blues is the name given to both a musical form and a music genre that originated in African-American communities of primarily the "Deep South" of the United States at the end of the 19th century from spirituals, work songs, field hollers, shouts and chants, and rhymed simple narrative ballads...
sang distinctly of the sorrows of a displaced people, jazz was something else. The African American labor class who gave birth to jazz were not subject to the education of other white musicians; black minstrels were able to escape the pressure to "Europeanize" their art. Culture (with a capital C) essentially demanded that Americans prefer, commend, and reiterate all things European. Free from these constraints, jazz progressed in an uncharted manner. In 1925, Irving Berlin
Irving Berlin
Irving Berlin was an American composer and lyricist of Jewish heritage, widely considered one of the greatest songwriters in American history.His first hit song, "Alexander's Ragtime Band", became world famous...
called jazz "American folk music" and cited influences ranging from "old Southern Songs" and the "Negro spirituals", to a "tinge of the Russian and Italian folk songs", but Berlin concluded that it was "typically American above all." Like the nation where it was created, jazz blended separate ethnic and cultural influences into a new and different product, combining elements from Black identity with other immigrant influences. It incorporated the sounds of the South and the modern, and adapted elements from urban skylines. Jazz was distinctly American in that it blended the character of different peoples, but still let the individual have his chance to express himself in an improvisational solo, and therefore asserted the "rugged individualism" that already characterized the nation. Furthermore, jazz began to break down the barrier between performer and audience. It "democratized" culture, making it accessible to the common person.
Jazz as modern
Jazz is distinctly modern in sound and manner. According to Lawrence Levine, "Jazz was, or seemed to be the product of a new age…raucous, discordant…accessible, spontaneous…openly an interactive, participatory music." Daniel Gregory Mason charged that jazz "is so perfectly adapted to robots that the one could be deduced from the other. Jazz is thus the exact musical reflection of modernist industrial capitalism", and jazz has also been likened to the sound of riveting. Irving Berlin called jazz the "music of the machine age." Players drew influences from everyday street talk in Harlem, as well as from French Impressionist paintings. The improvised nature begs the player to dismantle and examine pre-existing structure within the music. As tribute to the modernity of jazz, one only needs to examine the various media that drew influences from the music. The musical Shuffle AlongShuffle Along
Shuffle Along is the first major successful African American musical. Written by Flournoy Miller and Aubrey Lyles, with music and lyrics by Noble Sissle and Eubie Blake, the musical premiered on Broadway in 1921.-Plot:...
is one of the earliest and most successful jazz adaptation to the stage, jazz ballets appeared in New York City's Metropolitan Theatre, Langston Hughes
Langston Hughes
James Mercer Langston Hughes was an American poet, social activist, novelist, playwright, and columnist. He was one of the earliest innovators of the then-new literary art form jazz poetry. Hughes is best known for his work during the Harlem Renaissance...
and Sterling Brown drew poetry from the Jazz music they experienced, and jazz music colored the paintings of Aaron Douglas
Aaron Douglas
Aaron Douglas was an African American painter and a major figure in the Harlem Renaissance.-Early life:...
, Miguel Covarrubias
Miguel Covarrubias
José Miguel Covarrubias Duclaud was a Mexican painter and caricaturist, ethnologist and art historian among other interests. In 1924 at the age of 19 he moved to New York City armed with a grant from the Mexican government, tremendous talent, but very little English speaking skill. Luckily,...
, and many others.
American modernist painting
There is no single date for the beginning of the modern era in America, as dozens of painters were active at the beginning of the 20th century. It was the time when the first cubistCubism
Cubism was a 20th century avant-garde art movement, pioneered by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, that revolutionized European painting and sculpture, and inspired related movements in music, literature and architecture...
landscapes, still-lives and portraits appeared; bright colors entered the palettes of painters, and the first non-objective paintings were displayed in the galleries. According to Davidson, the beginning of American modernist painting can be dated to the 1910s. The early part of the period lasted 25 years and ended around 1935, when modern art was referred to as, what Greenberg
Clement Greenberg
Clement Greenberg was an American essayist known mainly as an influential visual art critic closely associated with American Modern art of the mid-20th century...
called the avant-garde
Avant-garde
Avant-garde means "advance guard" or "vanguard". The adjective form is used in English to refer to people or works that are experimental or innovative, particularly with respect to art, culture, and politics....
.
The 1913 Armory Show
Armory Show
Many exhibitions have been held in the vast spaces of U.S. National Guard armories, but the Armory Show refers to the 1913 International Exhibition of Modern Art that was organized by the Association of American Painters and Sculptors...
in New York City displayed the contemporary work of European artists, as well as Americans. The Impressionist, Fauvist and Cubist paintings startled many American viewers who were accustomed to more conventional art. However, inspired by what they saw, many American artists were influenced by the radical and new ideas.
The early 20th century was marked by the exploration of different techniques and ways of artistic expressiveness. Many American artists like Man Ray
Man Ray
Man Ray , born Emmanuel Radnitzky, was an American artist who spent most of his career in Paris, France. Perhaps best described simply as a modernist, he was a significant contributor to both the Dada and Surrealist movements, although his ties to each were informal...
, Patrick Henry Bruce
Patrick Henry Bruce
Patrick Henry Bruce was an American cubist painter.-Biography:A descendant of Patrick Henry, Bruce was born in Campbell County, Virginia, the second of four children. His family had once owned a huge plantation, Berry Hill, worked by over 3,000 slaves...
, Gerald Murphy and others went to Europe, notably Paris, to make art. The formation of various artistic assemblies led to the multiplicity of meaning in the visual arts. The Ashcan School
Ashcan School
The Ashcan School, also called the Ash Can School, is defined as a realist artistic movement that came into prominence in the United States during the early twentieth century, best known for works portraying scenes of daily life in New York's poorer neighborhoods. The movement grew out of a group...
gathered around realism
Realism (visual arts)
Realism in the visual arts is a style that depicts the actuality of what the eyes can see. The term is used in different senses in art history; it may mean the same as illusionism, the representation of subjects with visual mimesis or verisimilitude, or may mean an emphasis on the actuality of...
(Robert Henri
Robert Henri
Robert Henri was an American painter and teacher. He was a leading figure of the Ashcan School in art.- Early life :...
or George Luks
George Luks
George Benjamin Luks, was an American realist artist and illustrator. His vigorously painted genre paintings of urban subjects are examples of the Ashcan school in American art.-Early life:...
); the Stieglitz
Alfred Stieglitz
Alfred Stieglitz was an American photographer and modern art promoter who was instrumental over his fifty-year career in making photography an accepted art form...
circle glorified abstract visions of New York City (Max Weber
Max Weber (artist)
For the social theorist and philosopher, see Max WeberMax Weber was a Jewish-American painter who worked in the style of cubism before migrating to Jewish themes towards the end of his life.-Biography:...
, Abraham Walkowitz
Abraham Walkowitz
Abraham Walkowitz was an American painter grouped in with early American Modernists working in the Modernist style.-Birth and education:...
); color painters evolved in direction of the colorful, abstract "synchromies
Synchromism
Synchromism was an art movement founded in 1912 by American artists Stanton MacDonald-Wright and Morgan Russell. Their abstract "synchromies", based on a theory of color that analogized it to music, were among the first abstract paintings in American art...
" (Stanton Macdonald-Wright and Morgan Russell
Morgan Russell
Morgan Russell was a U.S. abstract painter. He was born and raised in New York City in 1886. He was, along with artist Stanton Macdonald-Wright, the founder of Synchromism an important modernist movement in early 20th century art.-Biography:Initially he studied architecture and after 1903 he...
), whereas precisionism
Precisionism
Precisionism, also known as Cubist Realism, was an artistic movement that emerged in the United States after World War I and was at its height during the inter-War period...
visualized the industrialized landscape of America in the form of sharp and dynamic geometrization (Joseph Stella
Joseph Stella
Joseph Stella was an Italian-born, American Futurist painter best known for his depictions of industrial America. He is associated with the American Precisionism movement of the 1910s-1940s....
, Charles Sheeler
Charles Sheeler
Charles Rettew Sheeler, Jr. was an American artist. He is recognized as one of the founders of American modernism and one of the master photographers of the 20th century.-Early life and career:...
, Charles Demuth
Charles Demuth
Charles Demuth was an American watercolorist who turned to oils late in his career, developing a style of painting known as Precisionism....
). Artists like Charles Burchfield, Marsden Hartley
Marsden Hartley
Marsden Hartley was an American Modernist painter, poet, and essayist.-Early life and education:Hartley was born in Lewiston, Maine, where his English parents had settled. He was the youngest of nine children. His mother died when he was eight, and his father remarried four years later to Martha...
, Stuart Davis
Stuart Davis (painter)
Stuart Davis , was an early American modernist painter. He was well known for his jazz influenced, proto pop art paintings of the 1940s and 1950s, bold, brash, and colorful as well as his ashcan pictures in the early years of the 20th century.-Biography:He was born in Philadelphia to Edward Wyatt...
, Arthur Dove
Arthur Dove
Arthur Garfield Dove was an American artist. An early American modernist, he is often considered the first American abstract painter.-Youth and education:...
, Georgia O'Keeffe
Georgia O'Keeffe
Georgia Totto O'Keeffe was an American artist.Born near Sun Prairie, Wisconsin, O'Keeffe first came to the attention of the New York art community in 1916, several decades before women had gained access to art training in America’s colleges and universities, and before any of its women artists...
, John Marin
John Marin
John Marin was an early American modernist artist. He is known for his abstract landscapes and watercolors.-Biography:...
, Arthur Beecher Carles
Arthur Beecher Carles
Arthur Beecher Carles was an American Modernist painter.-Biography:He was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts between 1900 and 1907. He studied with Thomas Pollock Anshutz, Hugh Breckenridge, Henry McCarter, Cecilia Beaux, and William...
, Alfred Henry Maurer
Alfred Henry Maurer
Alfred Henry Maurer was an American modernist painter. He exhibited his work in avant-garde circles internationally and in New York City during the early 20th century.-Biography:...
, Andrew Dasburg
Andrew Dasburg
Andrew Michael Dasburg was an American modernist painter and "one of America's leading early exponents of cubism".-Biography:...
, James Daugherty
James Daugherty
James Henry Daugherty was an American modernist painter, muralist, children's book author, and illustrator. -Life:...
, John Covert
John Covert
John Covert was an American painter born in Pittsburgh, USA. He was one of the founders of the Society of Independent Artists and was at the forefront of American Modernism. He died in New York.-External links:*...
, Henrietta Shore
Henrietta Shore
Henrietta Shore was a post-impressionist Canadian painter who exhibited contemporaneously with Georgia O'Keeffe and influenced the photographer Edward Weston. Her media were oils, murals, watercolors, and lithographs....
, William Zorach
William Zorach
William Zorach was a Lithuanian-born American sculptor, painter, printmaker, and writer. He won the Logan Medal of the arts.-Life and career:...
, Marguerite Thompson
Marguerite Zorach
Marguerite Zorach was an American fauvist painter, textile artist, and graphic designer and was an early exponent of modernism in America. She won the 1920 Logan Medal of the Arts.-Life:...
(Zorach), Manierre Dawson
Manierre Dawson
Manierre Dawson was a painter and sculptor born and raised in Chicago, Illinois, but lived most of his life in Michigan...
, Arnold Friedman
Arnold Friedman
Arnold Friedman was an American Modernist painter.He was born in Corona, Queens, worked for the Federal Art Project and studied at the Art Students League of New York under the tutelage of Robert Henri and Kenneth Hayes Miller. In 1909, he took a six-month leave of absence from his job to study...
and Oscar Bluemner ushered in the era of Modernism
Modernism
Modernism, in its broadest definition, is modern thought, character, or practice. More specifically, the term describes the modernist movement, its set of cultural tendencies and array of associated cultural movements, originally arising from wide-scale and far-reaching changes to Western society...
to the New York School
New York School
The New York School was an informal group of American poets, painters, dancers, and musicians active in the 1950s, 1960s in New York City...
.
Ashcan School
The Ashcan School, also called the Ash Can School, is defined as a realist artistic movement that came into prominence in the United States during the early twentieth century, best known for works portraying scenes of daily life in New York's poorer neighborhoods. The movement grew out of a group...
brought the focus on the modern city, and placed emphasis on the diversity of different classes of citizens. Two of the most significant representatives of The Eight, Robert Henri and John Sloan
John French Sloan
John French Sloan was an American artist. As a member of The Eight, he became a leading figure in the Ashcan School of realist artists. He was known for his urban genre painting and ability to capture the essence of neighborhood life in New York City, often through his window...
made paintings about social diversity, often taking as a main subject the slum dwellers of industrialized cities. The late 1920s and the 1930s belonged (among many others) to two movements in American painting, Regionalism
Regionalism (art)
Regionalism is an American realist modern art movement that was popular during the 1930s. The artistic focus was from artists who shunned city life, and rapidly developing technological advances, to create scenes of rural life...
and Social Realism
Social realism
Social Realism, also known as Socio-Realism, is an artistic movement, expressed in the visual and other realist arts, which depicts social and racial injustice, economic hardship, through unvarnished pictures of life's struggles; often depicting working class activities as heroic...
. The regionalists focused on the colorfulness of the American landscape and the complexities of country life, whereas the social realists went into the subjects of the Great Depression
Great Depression
The Great Depression was a severe worldwide economic depression in the decade preceding World War II. The timing of the Great Depression varied across nations, but in most countries it started in about 1929 and lasted until the late 1930s or early 1940s...
, poverty, and social injustice. The social realists protested against the government and the establishment that appeared hypocritical, biased, and indifferent to the matters of human inequalities. Abstraction, landscape and music were popular modernist themes during the first half of the 20th century. Artists like Charles Demuth who created his masterpiece I Saw The Figure Five in Gold in 1928, Morton Schamberg (1881–1918) and Charles Sheeler
Charles Sheeler
Charles Rettew Sheeler, Jr. was an American artist. He is recognized as one of the founders of American modernism and one of the master photographers of the 20th century.-Early life and career:...
were closely related to the Precisionist movement
Precisionism
Precisionism, also known as Cubist Realism, was an artistic movement that emerged in the United States after World War I and was at its height during the inter-War period...
as well. Sheeler typically painted cityscapes and industrial architecture as exemplified by his painting Amoskeag Canal 1948. Jazz
Jazz
Jazz is a musical style that originated at the beginning of the 20th century in African American communities in the Southern United States. It was born out of a mix of African and European music traditions. From its early development until the present, jazz has incorporated music from 19th and 20th...
and music were improvisationally represented by Stuart Davis
Stuart Davis (painter)
Stuart Davis , was an early American modernist painter. He was well known for his jazz influenced, proto pop art paintings of the 1940s and 1950s, bold, brash, and colorful as well as his ashcan pictures in the early years of the 20th century.-Biography:He was born in Philadelphia to Edward Wyatt...
, as exemplified by Hot Still-Scape for Six Colors - 7th Avenue Style, from 1940.
Modernism bridged the gap between the art and a socially diverse audience in the U.S. A growing number of museums and galleries aimed at bringing modernity to the general public. Despite initial resistance to the celebration of progress, technology, and urban life, the visual arts contributed enormously to the self-consciousness and awareness of the American people. New modernist painting shined a light on the emotional and psychic states of the audience, which was fundamental to the formation of an American identity.
Numerous directions of American "modernism" did not result in one coherent style, but evoked the desire for experiments and challenges. It proved that modern art goes beyond fixed principles.
Main schools and movements of American modernism
- the StieglitzAlfred StieglitzAlfred Stieglitz was an American photographer and modern art promoter who was instrumental over his fifty-year career in making photography an accepted art form...
group - the Arensberg circle
- color painters
- PrecisionismPrecisionismPrecisionism, also known as Cubist Realism, was an artistic movement that emerged in the United States after World War I and was at its height during the inter-War period...
- the Independents
- the Philadelphia school
- New York independents
- Chicago and westward
Modernist painting
Georgia O'KeeffeGeorgia O'Keeffe
Georgia Totto O'Keeffe was an American artist.Born near Sun Prairie, Wisconsin, O'Keeffe first came to the attention of the New York art community in 1916, several decades before women had gained access to art training in America’s colleges and universities, and before any of its women artists...
has been a major figure in American Modernism since the 1920s. She has received widespread recognition, for challenging the boundaries of modern American artistic style. She is chiefly known for paintings of flowers, rocks, shells, animal bones and landscapes in which she synthesized abstraction and representation. Ram's Head White Hollyhock and Little Hills, from 1935 is a well known painting by O'Keeffe.
Arthur Dove
Arthur Garfield Dove was an American artist. An early American modernist, he is often considered the first American abstract painter.-Youth and education:...
used a wide range of media, sometimes in unconventional combinations to produce his abstractions and his abstract landscapes. Me and the Moon from 1937 is a good example of an Arthur Dove abstract landscape. Dove did a series of experimental collage works in the 1920s. He also experimented with techniques, combining paints like hand mixed oil or tempera over a wax emulsion.
African-American painter Aaron Douglas
Aaron Douglas
Aaron Douglas was an African American painter and a major figure in the Harlem Renaissance.-Early life:...
(1899–1979) is one of the best-known and most influential African-American modernist painters. His works contributed strongly to the development of an aesthetic movement that is closely related to distinct features of African-American heritage and culture. Douglas influenced African-American visual arts especially during the Harlem Renaissance
Harlem Renaissance
The Harlem Renaissance was a cultural movement that spanned the 1920s and 1930s. At the time, it was known as the "New Negro Movement", named after the 1925 anthology by Alain Locke...
.
One of Douglas' most popular paintings is The Crucifixion. It was published in James Weldon Johnson's God's Trombones in 1927. The crucifixion scene that is depicted in the painting shows several elements that constitute Douglas' art: clear-cut delineation, change of shadows and light, stylized human bodies and geometric figures as concentric circles in contrast to linear forms. The painting's theme resembles not only the biblical scene but can also be seen as an allusion to African-American religious tradition: the oversized, dark Jesus is bearing his cross, his eyes directed to heaven from which light is cast down onto his followers. Stylized Roman soldiers are flanking the scene with their pointed spears. As a result the observer is reminded for instance of the African-American gospel tradition but also of a history of suppression. Beauford Delaney
Beauford Delaney
Beauford Delaney was an American modernist painter.-Early life:Beauford Delaney was born in Knoxville, Tennessee, USA, in 1901. Delaney’s parents were prominent and respected members of Knoxville's black community. His father Samuel was both a barber and a Methodist minister...
, Charles Alston
Charles Alston
Charles Henry Alston was an African-American painter, sculptor, illustrator, muralist and teacher who lived and worked in the New York City neighborhood of Harlem. Alston was active in the Harlem Renaissance; Alston was the first African American supervisor for the Works Progress Administration's...
, Jacob Lawrence
Jacob Lawrence
Jacob Lawrence was an American painter; he was married to fellow artist Gwendolyn Knight. Lawrence referred to his style as "dynamic cubism", though by his own account the primary influence was not so much French art as the shapes and colors of Harlem.Lawrence is among the best-known twentieth...
and Romare Bearden
Romare Bearden
Romare Bearden was an African American artist and writer. He worked in several media including cartoons, oils, and collage.-Education:...
were also important African-American Modernist painters that inspired generations of artists that followed them.
Modernist photography
At the beginning of American modernism, photography was still struggling to be recognized as a form of art. The photographer Alfred Stieglitz
Alfred Stieglitz
Alfred Stieglitz was an American photographer and modern art promoter who was instrumental over his fifty-year career in making photography an accepted art form...
described it as following: "Artists who saw my earlier photographs began to tell me that they envied me; that they felt my photographs were superior to their paintings, but that, unfortunately, photography was not an art. I could not understand why the artists should envy me for my work, yet, in the same breath, decry it because it was machine-made." (Stieglitz:8). In 1902, Stieglitz founded the Photo-Secession
Photo-Secession
The Photo-Secession was an early 20th century movement that promoted photography as a fine art in general and photographic pictorialism in particular. A group of photographers, led by Alfred Stieglitz and F...
group with members such as Edward Steichen
Edward Steichen
Edward J. Steichen was an American photographer, painter, and art gallery and museum curator. He was the most frequently featured photographer in Alfred Stieglitz' groundbreaking magazine Camera Work during its run from 1903 to 1917. Steichen also contributed the logo design and a custom typeface...
, Gertrude Käsebier
Gertrude Käsebier
Gertrude Käsebier was one of the most influential American photographers of the early 20th century. She was known for her evocative images of motherhood, her powerful portraits of Native Americans and her promotion of photography as a career for women.-Early life :Käsebier was born Gertrude...
and Clarence Hudson White
Clarence Hudson White
Clarence Hudson White was an American photographer, teacher and a founding member of the Photo-Secession movement. He grew up in small towns in Ohio, where his primary influences were his family and the social life of rural America. After visiting the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago in...
, which had the objective of raising the standard and increasing the awareness of art photography. At that point, their main style was "pictorialist", which was known for modifying photos through soft focus, special filters or exotic printing processes, to imitate the style of paintings and etchings of that time. For means of publication, Stieglitz, as the driving force of the movement, started the magazine "Camera Work
Camera Work
Camera Work was a quarterly photographic journal published by Alfred Stieglitz from 1903 to 1917. It is known for its many high-quality photogravures by some of the most important photographers in the world and its editorial purpose to establish photography as a fine art...
", in which he would publish the works of artists whom he considered representative for the movement. He also ran three galleries one after another, namely "291" (1905–1917), "The Intimate Gallery" (1925–1929) and "An American Place" (1929–1947). Especially 291 served as a meeting point for artists and writers and was the first to exhibit the early modernist art works of European artists, such as Henri Matisse
Henri Matisse
Henri Matisse was a French artist, known for his use of colour and his fluid and original draughtsmanship. He was a draughtsman, printmaker, and sculptor, but is known primarily as a painter...
, Auguste Rodin
Auguste Rodin
François-Auguste-René Rodin , known as Auguste Rodin , was a French sculptor. Although Rodin is generally considered the progenitor of modern sculpture, he did not set out to rebel against the past...
, Henri Rousseau
Henri Rousseau
Henri Julien Félix Rousseau was a French Post-Impressionist painter in the Naïve or Primitive manner. He was also known as Le Douanier , a humorous description of his occupation as a toll collector...
, Paul Cézanne
Paul Cézanne
Paul Cézanne was a French artist and Post-Impressionist painter whose work laid the foundations of the transition from the 19th century conception of artistic endeavour to a new and radically different world of art in the 20th century. Cézanne can be said to form the bridge between late 19th...
, and Pablo Picasso
Pablo Picasso
Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Ruiz y Picasso known as Pablo Ruiz Picasso was a Spanish expatriate painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist, and stage designer, one of the greatest and most influential artists of the...
, in the United States. A further link to the European avant-garde was established by Man Ray
Man Ray
Man Ray , born Emmanuel Radnitzky, was an American artist who spent most of his career in Paris, France. Perhaps best described simply as a modernist, he was a significant contributor to both the Dada and Surrealist movements, although his ties to each were informal...
. Born in America and inspired by the work he saw in Stieglitz’ galleries, Ray emigrated to Paris in 1921 and together with artists of the European Dada
Dada
Dada or Dadaism is a cultural movement that began in Zurich, Switzerland, during World War I and peaked from 1916 to 1922. The movement primarily involved visual arts, literature—poetry, art manifestoes, art theory—theatre, and graphic design, and concentrated its anti-war politics through a...
and Surrealist movements created new photographic techniques such as rayographs, a procedure during which objects are placed directly on photosensitive paper.
In the early 1920s the photographers moved towards what they called "straight photography
Straight photography
Pure photography or straight photography refers to photography that attempts to depict a scene as realistically and objectively as permitted by the medium, renouncing the use of manipulation....
". In contrast to the pictorialist style, they now rejected any kind of manipulation in the photographic process (e.g. soft lens, special developing or printing methods) and tried to use the advantages of the camera as a unique medium for capturing reality. Their motifs were supposed to look as "objective" as possible. Turning the focus away from classic portraiture and the pictorialist style, the photographers started using their pictures as means for representing the harsh realities of every day life, but at the same time tried to search for the beauty in the detail or the overall aesthetical structure. Machines and factory work, sky scrapers and technical innovations became prominent motifs.
In 1932 some younger photographers (e.g. Ansel Adams
Ansel Adams
Ansel Easton Adams was an American photographer and environmentalist, best known for his black-and-white photographs of the American West, especially in Yosemite National Park....
, Imogen Cunningham
Imogen Cunningham
Imogen Cunningham was an American photographer known for her photography of botanicals, nudes and industry.-Life and career:...
, Willard Van Dyke
Willard Van Dyke
Willard Van Dyke was an American filmmaker and photographer who believed that photography could have a major influence on the world....
, Edward Weston
Edward Weston
Edward Henry Weston was a 20th century American photographer. He has been called "one of the most innovative and influential American photographers…" and "one of the masters of 20th century photography." Over the course of his forty-year career Weston photographed an increasingly expansive set of...
) started Group f/64
Group f/64
Group f/64 was a group of seven 20th century San Francisco photographers who shared a common photographic style characterized by sharp-focused and carefully framed images seen through a particularly Western viewpoint...
based on the ideals of straight photography, which became the most progressive association of its time.
Development of feminism
Starting from the early 19th century, some women used the doctrines of the ideal femaleness to avoid the isolation of the domestic sphere. By the 1830s, women were openly challenging the women's sphere and demanding greater political, economic and social rights. They formed women's clubs and benevolent societies all over the U.S. Male domination of the public arena was no longer within acceptable limits to many of these middle-class activist women. Beginning with the Seneca Falls ConventionSeneca Falls Convention
The Seneca Falls Convention was an early and influential women's rights convention held in Seneca Falls, New York, July 19–20, 1848. It was organized by local New York women upon the occasion of a visit by Boston-based Lucretia Mott, a Quaker famous for her speaking ability, a skill rarely...
in 1848, American feminists held state and national conventions until the early 20th century. Some spokeswomen of the feminist movement connected the feminist cause with free love and the sexual revolution, which were the taboo issues of the Victorian Age. Therefore, feminists in both Britain and the United States concentrated on political and legal issues, the vote in particular, and other important women's issues regarding the domestic roles of women and the organization of domestic life in general. Eventually, after a long and hard struggle that included massive, sometimes violent protests, the imprisonment of many women, and even some deaths, the battle for women's suffrage
Women's suffrage
Women's suffrage or woman suffrage is the right of women to vote and to run for office. The expression is also used for the economic and political reform movement aimed at extending these rights to women and without any restrictions or qualifications such as property ownership, payment of tax, or...
was won. The suffrage law was passed in the United States in 1920 for women who were householders or wives of householders and in 1928 for all adult women. (African-American women were not included. They only received the right to vote in the Civil Rights Movement
Civil rights movement
The civil rights movement was a worldwide political movement for equality before the law occurring between approximately 1950 and 1980. In many situations it took the form of campaigns of civil resistance aimed at achieving change by nonviolent forms of resistance. In some situations it was...
of the 1960s.) The National Organization for Women
National Organization for Women
The National Organization for Women is the largest feminist organization in the United States. It was founded in 1966 and has a membership of 500,000 contributing members. The organization consists of 550 chapters in all 50 U.S...
(NOW) was founded in 1966 by a group of feminists. The largest women's rights group in the U.S. NOW aimed to end sexual discrimination, especially in the workplace, by means of legislative lobbying, litigation, and public demonstrations. The following years of the late 20th century witnessed a great expansion of women's rights in all areas of the modern society.
Modernist artists had an ambivalent attitude towards feminism: on the one hand they opted for equal treatment of men and women with regard to law, franchise, and professions; on the other hand they still had the perceived female inadequacies in terms of biology, culture, and transcendence in mind. As the radical feminist Emma Goldman
Emma Goldman
Emma Goldman was an anarchist known for her political activism, writing and speeches. She played a pivotal role in the development of anarchist political philosophy in North America and Europe in the first half of the twentieth century....
proclaimed, "true liberation begins neither at the polls nor in courts [but rather] in a woman's soul" (qtd. in Lyon 223).
Gender and sexuality
The roles of gender and sexuality in American modernism were elaborated through studies of national identity and citizenship, racial identity and race politics, queer identity and aesthetics, magazine culture, visual culture, market economies, and historical accounts of 20th century political modernity. Immense work done by scholars of feminism, gender, and sexuality helped to restructure the field of American modernist scholarship. Women writers have become the subjects of extensive literary study. Gay and lesbian communities have been revalued as patterns of modern aesthetic experimentation, and sexual identity and gender formation were interpreted in a new way.The turn of the 20th century cultural life saw a shift to a dichotomy of mass culture versus high culture, with the former being generally gendered as feminine and high culture being considered to be male-oriented. Formerly denounced popular fiction now served the feminist purpose; "it formed the bedrock for defenses of a new phase of free love and the concomitant promotion of birth control" (Lyon 225). The upcoming interest in popular psychology, especially Freudian theories, encouraged this new approach to gender roles and sexuality in the arts. Sexual difference was portrayed by women themselves with the help of the media available to them. This manifested itself for example in Mina Loy
Mina Loy
Mina Loy born Mina Gertrude Löwry was an artist, poet, playwright, novelist, Futurist, actress, Christian Scientist, designer of lamps, and bohemian. She was one of the last of the first generation modernists to achieve posthumous recognition. Her poetry was admired by T. S...
's "sex-talk" which is "stunning both for the focus it places on a woman's sexual disappointment and for the balance it strikes between clinical frankness and poetic indirection" (Lyon 225). It also entailed the breaking up of traditional gender roles. They were no longer exclusively male or female but there was also an acknowledgment of homosexuality, feminine men, and masculine women. Thus the concept of sexuality became multi-layered, as in Djuna Barnes
Djuna Barnes
Djuna Barnes was an American writer who played an important part in the development of 20th century English language modernist writing and was one of the key figures in 1920s and '30s bohemian Paris after filling a similar role in the Greenwich Village of the teens...
’ novel Nightwood (1936) in which she obliterates all established ideas of gender and sexuality. This early debate dealing with these issues cleared the way for contemporary approaches to gender, for instance that of Judith Butler
Judith Butler
Judith Butler is an American post-structuralist philosopher, who has contributed to the fields of feminism, queer theory, political philosophy, and ethics. She is a professor in the Rhetoric and Comparative Literature departments at the University of California, Berkeley.Butler received her Ph.D...
in her book Gender Trouble
Gender Trouble
Gender Trouble by Judith Butler is a highly influential book in academic feminism and queer theory. It is also the book credited with creating the seminal notion of gender performativity. It is considered to be one of the canonical texts of queer theory and postmodern/poststructural feminism.-...
(1990).
Definition of "American Icon"
This section focuses on persons and objects which are representative of American modernism. Generally speaking, these famous human beings and well-known objects are called icons since, apart from radiating an aura of uniqueness as well as originality (cf. Wagner 2006: 121.), they sparked public interest in this period and have had a lasting influence on future generations (cf. Czech 2006: 27-28). Thus, they serve as focal points for collective memory or identity at present (cf. ibid.). Even some people in Europe still recognize them as symbols of American modernism.The medial/public depiction lays the foundation stone for the creation of icons. In this way, a certain image of a biological person or a real object (signifier) is produced and becomes the signified (cf. Volkmann 2006: 94-96). The emanated configuration of signs (cf. ibid. 96) helps turn the signified into an icon, if it captures the atmosphere of a particular period/country and is acknowledged by contemporary societies as well as future generations.
New York City
To read more about New York City, please see New York CityNew York City
New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...
New York City is one of the most iconic cities in the United States and one of the major global cities of the world due to its important business, financial, trading and cultural organizations, such as Wall Street, United Nations, the Metropolitan Museum of Arts and Broadway theaters with their (in that time innovative) electric lighting. It is regarded as the birthplace of many American cultural movements, including the Harlem Renaissance in literature and abstract expressionism
Abstract expressionism
Abstract expressionism was an American post–World War II art movement. It was the first specifically American movement to achieve worldwide influence and put New York City at the center of the western art world, a role formerly filled by Paris...
in visual art.
New York City is iconic not only for Americans but also for many Europeans as the city of melting pot where many different ethnic groups live often in ghettos such as Chinatown, Little Italy. "Culture just seems to be in the air, like part of the weather". In American modernism, New York became the first stop for immigrants seeking a better life. The city's population boomed, 5 boroughs were formed, the New York City Subway was opened and became a symbol of progress and innovation. The city saw construction of skyscrapers in the skyline.
"Take New York City skyline, for example – that ragged man-made Sierra at the eastern edge of the continent. Clearly, in the minds of immigrants and returning travelers, in the iconography of the admen who use it as a backdrop for the bourbon and airplane luggage they are selling, the eyes of poets and of military strategies, it is one of the prime symbols" (Kouwenhoven 1998: 124). Iconic is especially the Manhattan skyline and its structural properties. It is regarded as a symbol of American progress and competition in height, creativity of structure, advancement and efficiency. It is considered an icon of "architectural individualism" (cf. ibid. 125). The typical gridiron pattern of the city's streets is an icon of simplicity (cf. ibid 127), while vertical steel construction of many stories is an icon of progress and innovation.
Charlie Chaplin
For extensive reading on Charlie Chaplin, please go to Charlie ChaplinCharlie Chaplin
Sir Charles Spencer "Charlie" Chaplin, KBE was an English comic actor, film director and composer best known for his work during the silent film era. He became the most famous film star in the world before the end of World War I...
Charlie Chaplin is regarded as a film icon. Born in London, and while not a U.S. citizen, he had a strong sense of belonging to American society. Chaplin became famous after starring in his first film, Making a Living
Making a Living
Making a Living is the first film starring Charlie Chaplin. It premiered on February 2, 1914. Chaplin plays Edgar English, a lady-charming swindler who runs afoul of the Keystone Kops....
, (1914). As a 10-year-old boy "he worked as a mime on the British vaudeville circuit". The fact that he was once very poor inspired his Tramp's trademark. He created a distorted version of a formal dinner suit (which was regarded to be a symbol of an adult man personified) combined with the attitude of an innocent child.
He was the first and the last person who was in charge of every aspect of making his films. He started his own film studio United Artists
United Artists
United Artists Corporation is an American film studio. The original studio of that name was founded in 1919 by D. W. Griffith, Charles Chaplin, Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks....
; was in charge of directing, writing, editing, producing and casting the films in which he played. It is said that he changed the film industry into an art form in the first decades of the 20th century. It was his personality, and his genius with "expressive grace", "endless inventiveness" and creativity that made him an American icon He preferred making silent films, (he made more than 75 silent films) setting the acting and the plot in the center of the action. His best known films are The Great Dictator
The Great Dictator
The Great Dictator is a comedy film by Charlie Chaplin released in October 1940. Like most Chaplin films, he wrote, produced, and directed, in addition to starring as the lead. Having been the only Hollywood film maker to continue to make silent films well into the period of sound films, this was...
(1940), Monsieur Verdoux
Monsieur Verdoux
Monsieur Verdoux is a 1947 black comedy film directed by and starring Charles Chaplin. The supporting cast includes Martha Raye, William Frawley, and Marilyn Nash.-Plot:...
(1947), Limelight (1952), The Kid
The Kid (1921 film)
The Kid is a 1921 American silent dramedy film written by, produced by, directed by and starring Charlie Chaplin, and features Jackie Coogan as his adopted son and sidekick. This was Chaplin's first full-length movie...
(1921), The Gold Rush
The Gold Rush
The Gold Rush is a 1925 silent film comedy written, produced, directed by, and starring Charlie Chaplin in his Little Tramp role. The film also stars Georgia Hale, Mack Swain, Tom Murray, Henry Bergman, Malcolm Waite....
(1925), The Circus (1928), City Lights
City Lights
City Lights is a 1931 American silent film and romantic comedy-drama written by, directed by, and starring Charlie Chaplin. It also has the leads Virginia Cherrill and Harry Myers. Although "talking" pictures were on the rise since 1928, City Lights was immediately popular. Today, it is thought of...
(1931) and Modern Times
Modern Times (film)
Modern Times is a 1936 comedy film by Charlie Chaplin that has his iconic Little Tramp character struggling to survive in the modern, industrialized world. The film is a comment on the desperate employment and fiscal conditions many people faced during the Great Depression, conditions created, in...
(1936)
He was so highly recognizable that a movement of "Chaplinitis" was formed by 1920. There were Chaplin songs, dances, comic books, dolls, and cocktails. Poems were written about him and his pantomime. The Beat Generation
Beat generation
The Beat Generation refers to a group of American post-WWII writers who came to prominence in the 1950s, as well as the cultural phenomena that they both documented and inspired...
(of writers) made him one of its icons. In the '80s IBM took the Tramp for the logo in the their advertisements of personal computers
"Every few weeks, outside the movie theater in virtually any American town in the late 1910s, stood the life-size cardboard figure of a small tramp — outfitted in tattered, baggy pants, a cutaway coat and vest, impossibly large, worn-out shoes and a battered derby hat — bearing the inscription I AM HERE TODAY". "The endearing figure of his Little Tramp
Little Tramp
Little Tramp is a musical with a book by David Pomeranz and Steven David Horwich and music and lyrics by David Pomeranz.Based on the life of comedian Charles Chaplin and named after his most famous character, it opens at the 1971 Academy Awards ceremony at which the aging star, long exiled from the...
was instantly recognizable around the globe and brought laughter to millions. Still is. Still does"
During the McCarthy era he was attacked and condemned by some for the increasingly politicized messages of his films; and he was accused of "anti-American activities" and of being a suspected communist supporter. He maintained his British citizenship, and after a trip to England in 1952 and for many years he wasn't allowed to re-enter the U.S. Finally in 1972 he triumphantly returned and was awarded an honorary Oscar. He is perceived today as an American film icon due to the charm and brilliance of his films.
The Model-T Ford
Icons are usually capable of conveying, on the one hand, awareness of tradition and, on the other hand, the notion of progress (cf. www.ikonothek.de). At this point, it is worth mentioning some concepts of modernism in the U.S., namely the sense of forward-looking contemporaneity (Wilk 2006: 2) the be-lief in the power and potential of the machine and industrial technology (ibid. 3) and the emphasis on process (Kouwenhoven 1998: 133-136). All these aspects can be associated with the 1913 Model-T Ford. By using assembly-line systems, Henry Ford and his men applied continuous-process principles (Strasser 1989: 6) during its production. What should be mentioned, in this context, is the fact many unskilled immigrants were employed by the expanded Ford factory in order to meet the increasing demand for this material icon of American modernism on the emerging mass market. In consequence, the foreign workers’ contribution also underscored the myth of The American Melting Pot (see also: Meyer 1998).Today, the Model-T Ford continues to represent the idea of process and mobility. Therefore, although modernism aimed at rejecting any form of tradition and history, this icon, interestingly, transmits, up to a certain degree, a sense of tradition.
Everyday life and culture
The modernist movement caused vast changes in societies in which it took place. With the introduction of industrial developments, the American people started to enjoy the outcome of the new modernist era. Everyday life and culture are the areas that reflected the social change in the habits of the society. Developments that occurred with modernism influenced American people life standards and gave way to new style of living.Widespread use of electricity and mass production of technological house appliances like refrigerator brought about the change of eating habits of American people. Use of frozen food became more common. After the war the U.S. government passed new laws concerning food. So some new foods came right out of the ration kits to the stores. "Foods formerly manufactured solely for army use were put on the civilian market", Frozen and dried food products also became popular after the war. National Research Corporation of Boston introduced frozen orange juice concentrate called "tang." The company became Minute Maid, and, by 1950, a quarter of Florida's orange crop was going into concentrates. The frozen product quickly overtook fresh squeezed orange juice in most American homes. Full frozen meals were not far behind. In the 1950s, a Nebraska company Swanson's brought out their TV Dinners to great success.
These changes in eating habits caused huge changes in appliances, transportation and farming. Since people began buying the new products, new refrigerators were quickly developed with bigger freezer sections Shock resistant refrigerator units for trucks had to be invented and used by the military before frozen products could distributed and marketed around the country and around the world. These developments forced farmers to change what they grew and how they grew their products to meet new consumer demands.
In the following are there a few of the foods that were first produced and sold in the 1940s.
- Mrs. Paul's frozen fish sticks
- Cheerios (first sold as Cheeri Oats, the first ready-to-eat oat cereal) and Kellogg's Raisin Bran
- Minute Rice
- Reddi-Whip whipped cream
- Nestles Quick powdered drink mix
- Packaged cake mixes
- M&Ms Chocolate Candies, Peppermint Patty, Junior Mints, Almond Joy, Whoppers malted milk balls, Jolly Rancher Candies
- Deep Dish Pizza (Pizzeria Uno, Chicago)
With the increasing number of automobiles, American people started to get out of their homes and had dinner outside. However, during the war people drove their cars as little as possible. Gas and tires were limited by the government. Car production ceased as factories had to manufacture tanks, Jeeps and other military vehicles. After the war families piled into cars again, as a consequence, new highways were built. The number of drive-ins increased immediately. Drive-ins became part of the social life in America by the end of 1940.
Modernism showed its effects nearly in all areas. One of the immense developments was to supply the rural areas with the electricity. The REA, Rural Electrification Administration, began in the 1930s, however, it took time to build power lines scores of miles into rural areas. Throughout the 1940s, the REA continued to build the electricity lines.
Electricity changed the lives of farm families, from the moment they got up early in the morning, through meals, chores, and work until they went to bed at night. Electricity brought power for lights to work, read, and sew at night; power for appliances like refrigerators and freezers to preserve food; power for small kitchen devices such as mixers and blenders; and power for other labor saving devices such as electric stoves, irons and clothes washers. Electricity brought changes that just made life safer and better – like colored lights instead of dangerous candles on Christmas trees, refrigerators to keep food fresh and electric fans to bring relief on a hot summer day.
- In 1930, only 13 percent of farms had electricity.
- By the early 1940s, only 33 percent of farms had electricity.
- Locally in York, Nebraska, the Perennial Public Power District had strung nearly 250 miles of electric line to more than 500 customers by September 1945.
- By 1950 nearly all of Nebraska farms were "hooked up", and electricity replaced kerosene lanterns in homes and barns.
There were some crucial steps taken in the communication and media devices like the invention of radio and television.
Radio was the nation's first mass medium, linking the country and ending the isolation of rural residents. Radio was so important that the 1930 Census asked if the household had a radio. Radio provided free entertainment (after you bought the radio) and connected country people to world events. Walter Winchell and Lowell Thomas were popular news commentators on the radio.
- Families laughed at comedians Jack Benny, Fred Allen, George Burns and Gracie Allen, Amos and Andy, and Fibber McGee and Molly.
- Radio featured daytime soap operas.
- In the evening, people listened to the Lone Ranger, the Green Hornet, The Shadow, and Jack Armstrong.
- Singers Bing Crosby and the Mills Brothers, as well as Guy Lombardo's orchestra and the Grand Ole Opry were popular.
- Families listened to baseball, cheering for stars like Lou Gehrig and Joe DiMaggio. Nearly 40 million people listened to the horserace between Seabiscuit and War Admiral in Maryland.
- In news coverage, the German airship Hindenburg caught fire in 1937 as it landed in New Jersey. Thousands of people across the country heard Herb Morrison describe the terrifying scene on live radio, saying "Oh the humanity!"
The first practical TV sets were demonstrated and sold to the public at the 1939 World's Fair in New York. The sets were very expensive and New York City had the only broadcast station. When World War II started, all commercial production of television equipment was banned. Production of the cathode ray tubes that produced the pictures was redirected to radar and other high tech war uses. After the war television was something few had heard of. That changed quickly. In 1945, a poll asked Americans, "Do you know what television is?" Most didn't. But four years later, most Americans had heard of television and wanted one! According to one survey in 1950, before they got a TV, people listened to radio an average of nearly five hours a day. Within nine months after they bought a TV they listened to radio, but only for two hours a day. They watched TV for five hours a day. The 1940s TVs didn't look like today's televisions. Most had picture screens between 10 and 15 inches wide diagonally, inside large, heavy cabinets. And, of course, color broadcasts and sets didn't arrive until much later, in 1954.
Fashion
For a further, more formal account, please see FashionFashion
Fashion, a general term for a currently popular style or practice, especially in clothing, foot wear, or accessories. Fashion references to anything that is the current trend in look and dress up of a person...
Referring to fashion, usually one would think of dressing styles or costumes. Of course, dressing style is a very important category of the word "fashion". On the other hand, "fashion" has more meanings and could be explained and found in many other fields, such as architecture, body type, dance and music, and even forms of speech, etc.
1. Costumes
In the early 1920s, the ready-to-wear fashion began to spread America. More women earned their own wages and didn’t want to spend time on fittings. Fashion as the status symbol was no more important as class distinctions were becoming blurred. People especially women called for inexpensive fashion. In the aspect of mass production of contemporary style clothing for women, America went ahead of other countries. Several designers of this fashion including Jane Derby
Jane Derby
Jane Derby was a top-of-the-line ready-to-wear American fashion designer from the 1930s to 1965....
made a stage pose.
Women: By 1921 the longer skirt, which was usually long and uneven at the bottom was out of date. The short skirt became popular by 1925. No bosom, no waistline, and hair nearly hidden under a cloche hat. The manufacturing of cosmetics also began from this decade. Powder, lipstick, rouge, eyebrow pencil, eye shadow, colored nails, women had them all. Moreover, pearls came in fashion as well.
Men: In this period, the clothing for men was a bit more conservative. Trousers widened to 24 inches at the bottoms. Knickers, increased the width and length, were called "plus fours". During the summer white linen was popular, while in the winter an outstanding American coat---- the raccoon coat was in fashion. The slouch hat, made of felt, could be rolled up and packed into a suitcase. These were very popular with the college men.
2. Furniture
There's no pure American modern style in the designing world. The American modern artists inherited the style characterized by simplicity of form, absence of decorative ornament, and focused on functional concerns from their precedents. At the same time, the American designers blended the wild style of Parisian painting, as well as the features of modern architecture in their works, such as Art Deco. Moreover, the designers also placed much emphasis on the materials, especially those invented in the modern age.
American modernist literature
American Modernism covered a wide variety of topics including race relations, gender roles, and sexuality. It reached its peak in America in the 1920s up to the 1940s. Celebrated Modernists include Ezra PoundEzra Pound
Ezra Weston Loomis Pound was an American expatriate poet and critic and a major figure in the early modernist movement in poetry...
, William Carlos Williams
William Carlos Williams
William Carlos Williams was an American poet closely associated with modernism and Imagism. He was also a pediatrician and general practitioner of medicine, having graduated from the University of Pennsylvania...
, F. Scott Fitzgerald
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald was an American author of novels and short stories, whose works are the paradigm writings of the Jazz Age, a term he coined himself. He is widely regarded as one of the greatest American writers of the 20th century. Fitzgerald is considered a member of the "Lost...
, Ernest Hemingway
Ernest Hemingway
Ernest Miller Hemingway was an American author and journalist. His economic and understated style had a strong influence on 20th-century fiction, while his life of adventure and his public image influenced later generations. Hemingway produced most of his work between the mid-1920s and the...
and William Faulkner
William Faulkner
William Cuthbert Faulkner was an American writer from Oxford, Mississippi. Faulkner worked in a variety of media; he wrote novels, short stories, a play, poetry, essays and screenplays during his career...
, and while largely regarded as a romantic poet, Walt Whitman
Walt Whitman
Walter "Walt" Whitman was an American poet, essayist and journalist. A humanist, he was a part of the transition between transcendentalism and realism, incorporating both views in his works. Whitman is among the most influential poets in the American canon, often called the father of free verse...
is sometimes regarded as a pioneer of the modernist era in America.
The loss of self and need for self-definition is a main characteristic of the era. Workers faded into the background of city life, unnoticed cogs within a machine yearning for self definition. American modernists echoed the mid-19th-century focus on the attempt to "buid a self" - a theme well illustrated by the classic modernist work The Great Gatsby
The Great Gatsby
The Great Gatsby is a novel by the American author F. Scott Fitzgerald. First published in1925, it is set on Long Island's North Shore and in New York City from spring to autumn of 1922....
Black writers need to be mentioned when talking about modernism in America, as they seem to have brought a breakthrough in literature and mentality, as far as the self-esteem of Afro-Americans is concerned. The folk-oriented poetry of Sterling Brown and Langston Hughes
Langston Hughes
James Mercer Langston Hughes was an American poet, social activist, novelist, playwright, and columnist. He was one of the earliest innovators of the then-new literary art form jazz poetry. Hughes is best known for his work during the Harlem Renaissance...
, for example, written in a rhythm fit to be either sung or told as a story, melancholically describes the joyful attitude of Afro-Americans towards life, in spite of all the hardships they were confronted with. The protagonists of these poems are shown in such a light which offers insight into their cultural identity and folklore. An insight into culture and folklore is also a topic that prose deals with, such as, for example, Jean Toomer
Jean Toomer
Jean Toomer was an American poet and novelist and an important figure of the Harlem Renaissance. His first book Cane is considered by many as his most significant.-Early life:...
's Blood-Burning Moon and William Faulkner's That Evening Sun
That Evening Sun
"That Evening Sun" is a short story by the American author William Faulkner, published in 1931 on the collection These 13, which included Faulkner's most anthologized story, "A Rose for Emily". "That Evening Sun" is a dark portrait of white Southerners' indifference to the crippling fears of one of...
.
Race relations between blacks and whites, the gap between what was expected of each of the two and what the facts were, or, better said, prejudice in the society of the time are themes dealt with in most of the modernist American literature, whether we speak about prose (Jean Toomer
Jean Toomer
Jean Toomer was an American poet and novelist and an important figure of the Harlem Renaissance. His first book Cane is considered by many as his most significant.-Early life:...
, Zora Neale Hurston
Zora Neale Hurston
Zora Neale Hurston was an American folklorist, anthropologist, and author during the time of the Harlem Renaissance...
, William Faulkner
William Faulkner
William Cuthbert Faulkner was an American writer from Oxford, Mississippi. Faulkner worked in a variety of media; he wrote novels, short stories, a play, poetry, essays and screenplays during his career...
, Ernest Hemingway
Ernest Hemingway
Ernest Miller Hemingway was an American author and journalist. His economic and understated style had a strong influence on 20th-century fiction, while his life of adventure and his public image influenced later generations. Hemingway produced most of his work between the mid-1920s and the...
), or about drama (Eugene O'Neill
Eugene O'Neill
Eugene Gladstone O'Neill was an American playwright and Nobel laureate in Literature. His poetically titled plays were among the first to introduce into American drama techniques of realism earlier associated with Russian playwright Anton Chekhov, Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen, and Swedish...
). In other words, such stereotypes as the lack of education, the poor use of the English language and their portrayal in a dangerous light are not dealt away with, on the contrary, they are still present during the modernist period, as far as literature is concerned. However, with Ernest Hemingway's The Battler
The Battler
"The Battler" is a short story written by Ernest Hemingway. It was included in the collection In Our Time .In the story, Nick Adams is thrown from a train and finds temporary shelter at a campfire. There, he meets an ex-boxer named Ad Francis. Francis takes an immediate liking to Adams, who he...
, for example, there seems to be a reversal of stereotypes. The Afro-American character in this short story proves out to be a kind, calculated and polite man, whose good manners and carefully chosen vocabulary are easily noticeable from the first moment he appears in the story.
Madness and its manifestations in the human being seems to be another favorite theme of American modernist writers. Eugene O'Neill's The Emperor Jones
The Emperor Jones
The Emperor Jones is a 1920 play by American dramatist Eugene O'Neill which tells the tale of Brutus Jones, an African-American man who kills a man, goes to prison, escapes to a Caribbean island, and sets himself up as emperor...
, Ernest Hemingway's The Battler and William Faulkner's That Evening Sun, all deal to a certain extent with this topic.
The modernist period also brought changes to the portrayal of gender roles and especially to women's role in society. It is an era under the sign of emancipation and change in society, issues which reflect themselves in the literature of the period, as well. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby
The Great Gatsby
The Great Gatsby is a novel by the American author F. Scott Fitzgerald. First published in1925, it is set on Long Island's North Shore and in New York City from spring to autumn of 1922....
, for example, deals with such topics as gender interaction in a mundane society.
Influenced by the first World War, American modernist writers, such as Ernest Hemingway, offer an insight into the psychological wounds and spiritual scars of the war experience. The economic crisis in America at the beginning of the 1930s also left a mark on the literary creations of the period, such as John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath
The Grapes of Wrath
The Grapes of Wrath is a novel published in 1939 and written by John Steinbeck, who was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1940 and the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1962....
. Nevertheless, all these negative aspects led to new hopes and aspirations, and to the search for a new beginning, not only for the contemporary individuals, but also for the fictional characters in American modernist literature.
The New Criticism in America
From the 1930s to the 1960s, New Criticism
New Criticism
New Criticism was a movement in literary theory that dominated American literary criticism in the middle decades of the 20th century. It emphasized close reading, particularly of poetry, to discover how a work of literature functioned as a self-contained, self-referential aesthetic...
became a critical force in the United States. It was the most powerful perspective in American literary criticism. The representatives were John Crowe Ransom
John Crowe Ransom
John Crowe Ransom was an American poet, essayist, magazine editor, and professor.-Life:...
, Allen Tate
Allen Tate
John Orley Allen Tate was an American poet, essayist, social commentator, and Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 1943 to 1944.-Life:...
, Cleanth Brooks
Cleanth Brooks
Cleanth Brooks was an influential American literary critic and professor. He is best known for his contributions to New Criticism in the mid-twentieth century and for revolutionizing the teaching of poetry in American higher education...
, Robert Penn Warren
Robert Penn Warren
Robert Penn Warren was an American poet, novelist, and literary critic and was one of the founders of New Criticism. He was also a charter member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers. He founded the influential literary journal The Southern Review with Cleanth Brooks in 1935...
. "The influential critical methods these poet-professors developed emphasized the sharpening of close reading skills. New Criticism privileged the evaluation of poetry as the justification of literary scholarship". Brooks and Warren's Understanding Poetry (1938) became one of the most influential college poetry textbooks of the 1930s and continued to be revised and reprinted well into the 1970s" (Morrisson: 29).
New Criticism showed itself in such works as Eliot
T. S. Eliot
Thomas Stearns "T. S." Eliot OM was a playwright, literary critic, and arguably the most important English-language poet of the 20th century. Although he was born an American he moved to the United Kingdom in 1914 and was naturalised as a British subject in 1927 at age 39.The poem that made his...
's and Yeats
Yeats
W. B. Yeats was an Irish poet and playwright.Yeats may also refer to:* Yeats ,* Yeats , an impact crater on Mercury* Yeats , an Irish thoroughbred racehorse-See also:...
’ poems. "Poetry that best fit the aesthetic criteria of the New Critics was emphasized in important classroom teaching anthologies" (Morrisson: 29).
T. S. Eliot redefined tradition in his essay "Tradition and the Individual Talent". He formulated such critical concepts as "objective correlative", and rethought the literary canon in his elevation of Jacobean drama and metaphysical poetry. His work had a fundamental influence on New Criticism in America.
Architecture and space
The United States played a great role in the modernism movement concerning new advanced building and construction technologies.Among construction innovations there are such materials as iron, steel and reinforced concrete.
Brooklyn Bridge by John and Washington Roebling (1869–1883) (for more details see John Roebling/Washington Roebling)
Louis Henry Sullivan headed the so-called Chicago school of architecture, which was distinct by its development of functional design along with modern materials. Sullivan's follower Frank Lloyd Wright
Frank Lloyd Wright
Frank Lloyd Wright was an American architect, interior designer, writer and educator, who designed more than 1,000 structures and completed 500 works. Wright believed in designing structures which were in harmony with humanity and its environment, a philosophy he called organic architecture...
absorbed from his 'lieber Master' (dear master) the German romantic tradition of organic architecture. He developed a new and original approach to residential design before World War I, which became known as the "prairie style." It combined open planning principles with horizontal emphasis, asymmetrical facade elevations, and broad, sheltering roofs. Robie House in Chicago (1909) and the Guggenheim Museum in New York City (1946–59) are two of his seminal works.
In his works Wright moved closer and closer to an earth-bound sense of natural form, using rough-hewn stone and timber and aiming always in his houses to achieve an effect of intimate and protective shelter.
Foreign-born architects as Richard Neutra
Richard Neutra
Richard Joseph Neutra is considered one of modernism's most important architects.- Biography :Neutra was born in Leopoldstadt, the 2nd district of Vienna, Austria Hungary, on April 8, 1892. He was born into both-Jewish wealthy family...
, Rudolf Schindler
Rudolf Schindler
Rudolph Michael Schindler Rudolph Michael Schindler Rudolph Michael Schindler (born Rudolf Michael Schindler (1887 Vienna - 1953 Los Angeles) was an American, born in Austria, architect whose most important works were built in or near Los Angeles during the early to mid-twentieth century....
, and William Lescaze
William Lescaze
William Edmond Lescaze was a Swiss-born American architect, and is one of the pioneers of modernism in American architecture....
during the 1920s played a great role in development of American architecture performing later a style, which got the name of international style
International style (architecture)
The International style is a major architectural style that emerged in the 1920s and 1930s, the formative decades of Modern architecture. The term originated from the name of a book by Henry-Russell Hitchcock and Philip Johnson, The International Style...
and was reflected in the design of corporate office buildings after World War II. Such buildings as Skidmore, Owings and Merrill's Lever House (1952) and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe's Seagram Building (1956–58) in New York City are the examples of this new style. When such famous Europeans as Walter Gropius
Walter Gropius
Walter Adolph Georg Gropius was a German architect and founder of the Bauhaus School who, along with Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier, is widely regarded as one of the pioneering masters of modern architecture....
and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe was a German architect. He is commonly referred to and addressed as Mies, his surname....
immigrated to the United States, many American architectural schools went under the influence of the traditions of the Bauhaus
Bauhaus
', commonly known simply as Bauhaus, was a school in Germany that combined crafts and the fine arts, and was famous for the approach to design that it publicized and taught. It operated from 1919 to 1933. At that time the German term stood for "School of Building".The Bauhaus school was founded by...
in Germany.
See also
- American ModernAmerican ModernAmerican Modern was a distinct American design aesthetic formed in the period between 1925 and World War II. American Modern was created by a pioneering group of designers, architects and artists, among them were Norman Bel Geddes, Donald Deskey, Henry Dreyfuss, Paul Frankl, William Lescaze,...
- American realismAmerican realism300px|thumb|[[Ashcan School]] artists & friends at [[John French Sloan]]'s Philadelphia Studio, 1898American realism was an early 20th century idea in art, music and literature that showed through these different types of work, reflections of the time period...
- Lost GenerationLost GenerationThe "Lost Generation" is a term used to refer to the generation, actually a cohort, that came of age during World War I. The term was popularized by Ernest Hemingway who used it as one of two contrasting epigraphs for his novel, The Sun Also Rises. In that volume Hemingway credits the phrase to...
- Mid-Century modernMid-century modernMid-Century modern is an architectural, interior and product design form that generally describes mid-20th century developments in modern design, architecture, and urban development from roughly 1933 to 1965...
- Visual arts of the United StatesVisual arts of the United StatesAmerican art encompasses the history of painting and visual art in the United States. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, artists primarily painted landscapes and portraits in a realistic style. A parallel development taking shape in rural America was the American craft movement,...
Arts references
- Leja, M. (1996): "Modernism's Subjects in the United States". In: Modernism's subjects in the United States Art Journal - Find Articles.
- Davidson, A. (1981): Early American Modernist Painting 1930-1935. New York: Harper And Row Publishers.
- McDonnell, P. (1998): Concerning Expressionism: American Modernism and the German Avant-Garde. New York: Hollis Taggart Galleries.
- Morrison, M.: Nationalism and the Modern American Canon in Reader Revisiting Modernism: Gender and Ethnicity. Bielefeld.
- Stieglitz, A. (1997): Camera Work. The Complete Illustrations 1903-1917. Cologne: Benedikt Taschen Verlag.
- Tylor, J. (1979): The Fine Arts in America. Chicago & London: The University of Chicago Press.
- Wilk, Ch (ed.). (2006): Modernism: Designing a New World 1914-1939. London: Victoria and Albert Museum.
American icons in the European mind references
- Czech, A. (2006): "Bildkanon im Spannungsverhältnis zwischen individuellem und kollektivem Bildgedächtnis." In: J. Kirschenmann & E. Wagner: Bilder, die die Welt bedeuten: "Ikonen" des Bildgedächtnisses und ihre Vermittlung über Datenbanken. München: kopaed, pp. 27–28.
- Douglas, A. (1998): "Charlie Chaplin". In: New York Times (June 6),
- Ikonothek. URL:
(accessed February 2, 2007). - Kouwenhoven, J.A. (1998): "What's American about America." In: R. O'Modly (ed.) The Jazz Cadence of American Culture. NY: Columbia UP, pp. 123–136.
- Meyer, S. (1998): "Efforts at Americanization in the Industrial Workplace, 1914-1921." In: J. Gjerde: Major Problems in American Immigration and Ethnic History. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company.
- Strasser, S. (1989): Satisfaction Guaranteed: The Making of the American Mass Market. New York: Pantheon Books.
- Volkmann, L. (2006): "Ikonen des neuen Weiblichen: Madonna und Britney Spears" In: J. Kirschenmann & E. Wagner: Bilder, die die Welt bedeuten: "Ikonen" des Bildgedächtnisses und ihre Vermittlung über Datenbanken. München: kopaed pp. 94–96.
- Wagner, E. (2006): "Blue Jeans - eine andere 'Ikone'". In: ibid, pp. 121.
- Wilk, Ch. (2006): "What was Modernism? Introduction". In: Ch. Wilk (ed.): Modernism: Designing a New World 1914-1939. London: V&A Publications, pp. 2–11.
Feminism, gender, and sexuality references
- Lyon, J.: (2000): "Gender and Sexuality." In: Walter B. Kalaidjian (ed.) The Cambridge Companion to American Modernism. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, pp. 221–241.
- O'Kelly, Ch. G. (1980): Women and Men in Society. New York: Van. Nostrand.
- Stieglitz, A. (1997): Alfred Stieglitz. Cologne: Könemann.
Everyday life and culture references
- REA Changes Rural Homes
- Georgia O'Keeffe Museum
- Having Fun–Radio
- Troy, N. J. (2003): Couture Culture: A Study in Modern Art and Fashion. MIT Press: Cambridge, Massachusetts
- American Antiquities Journal
- Freeman, J.: The Making of the Modern Kitchen: A Cultural History