Revolutions: Art and Culture Between the Wars
Visual Arts:
Between the end of the Great War and the return to arms in 1939, the visual arts across Europe and the United
States mirrored a world where destructive and creative forces seemed constantly at war. The age of Art Deco
Streamlining and Bauhaus design was also that of Dada negation. The Surrealist unconscious undermined the
rational utopianism of Constructivism in Soviet Russia. Realism was threatened with extinction by the prophets
of abstraction. Whether motivated by disgust and despair or euphoric optimism in the machine and the New Man,
interwar artists explored solutions to the modern world’s dilemmas every bit as radical as the social and political revolutions
they lived through.
Communication Studies:
The formal discipline of Communications only began to emerge during WWII, but its issues
and methods were being formulated between the wars. When WWI destroyed what Carl Dryer saw
as the "Grand Illusion" of an older European class-bound culture, what replaced
it was a society using the new media in the form of radio, picture-magazines,
film and gramophones. It was in this jazz-age that a new nexus emerged between pop and
avant-garde.
English and Comparative Literature:
1919-1939 saw the flowering of literary modernism, as writers struggled to express in poetry
and prose their sense that the nineteenth-century verities had, like so many of
their young comrades, perished in the bloodbath of the Great War. Both the Americans of the Lost
Generation, like Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, and F. Scott Fitzgerald,
and the groundbreaking English novelists and poets of the Bloomsbury group, like Virginia Woolf,
T.S. Eliot, and E.M. Forster, bravely refashioned literature to reflect the uncertainties, anxieties,
and hopes of a world haunted by memories of unprecedented carnage and destruction.
Theatre and Dance:
The period from the end of one war to the beginning of another was innovative and exciting from
the perspective of theatre and dance. Martha Graham and Doris Humphrey created Modern Dance.
The modern, American musical began with Kern and Hammerstein’s Show
Boat. Vsevolod Meyerhold pioneered "biomechanics," and Bertolt Brecht’s Epic Theatre
was a significant move away from Realism. The changes made during
this time still affect theatre and dance today.
Schedule of Events
Back to School of Communication Arts