Julieta Anyul Hisi López Global History III

ART AND ENTERTAINMEMNT

ART AT THE TURN OF THE CENTURY
- Right after WWI, wide range of styles and genres of art are brought together
- This proliferation was due to the parallel forces of globalization
- Academic art (form the Royal Academy in Britain to the Real Academia de Fernando in
Madrid) was stablished since the Renaissance: it maintains its predominance
- BUT artist outside of the mainstream start a disruption, to assort bourgeoise values
- Despite the disruptive styles of the beginning of the 20th century, art is not isolated from
political changes of the time
- Communism and fascism try to find new state approved, sponsored, orthodox ways of art
- Art is a powerful tool for social transformation: painting and literature as moral forces
- Also, occidental regimes used art as a form of propaganda
- The upheaval and disruption of the WWI has stopped us for perceiving how truly
revolutionary were the first years of the 20th century in the artistic domain
- Significant break with the past reflects and influences political change all around the world

The Avant-Garde in Europe

Painting
- Artistic mirror to the political changes
- Paul Cézanne: plant the seeds of what will become the artistic avant-garde
- Henri Gaudier-Brzeska: inspired Picasso
- Picasso: Les demoiselles d’Avignon
o Proto cubism: representation of several perspectives at once
o Influence of non-European art: “the primitivists”
- Gauguin: look to the Asia Pacific to escape from the degenerated modern Europe
- Kandinsky: look to the East in his spiritual search

Architecture
- Bauhaus: German art school (1919-1933), combined crafts and fine arts
- Modernist architecture
- Founded by Walter Gropius

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Julieta Anyul Hisi López Global History III

Classical music
- Rejection of European classical music
- Stravinsky: The rite of spring
→ go back to a Russian tradition untouched by European
Academia
→ the future of art is going back to an imagined past
- Strauss: Salome → based of a play by Oscar Wilde. Modern, disruptive, premiered in
Dresden, because it was not well received

Literature

- Proust: A la recherche du temps perdu → idea that time is malleable

Revival of the past

- Great Britain: Arts and Crafts Movement → response to urban modernity through a retreat
to the simple and rural
- Germany: Völkisch artists and writers → lauded the ancient spiritual past of Germany
- Russia: Narodniks (“motherland”) → radicals, associated with the first revolution of 1905,
reinvented a rural and cooperative past in their writings.

Art outside the West

- Artistic modernity in China or India
- Not seek to break with tradition, but to clean colonial or imperial influences
- Going back to the past (pre-colonial past) to create a new future for these countries
o India: Tagore: founder of the Calcutta School of Art → new movement to modernize
Indian art
o China: Shanghai School → collect and loosen up traditional Chinese representation

What does this represent: a change in religion

- Radical change in the ways of understanding religion, politics
- Several artists influence by paganism and new religions, such as theosophy
- Theosophy: identifies the East as the true origin of religious experiences → inverts the
paradigm
- E.g. The Beatles or Kandinsky looking for spirituality in the East