1920-1929, United States, "1920s America" | DMA Staging Content Management System

GENERAL DESCRIPTION

Few moments in American cultural history are as readily recognized as the "roaring" twenties—their mere mention conjures dynamic images of flappers, Fords, and skyscraper cities. And yet, American artists responded to this dizzying new modern world with art that evoked stillness, clarity, and order. The artwork of this time expresses the artists' individual responses to the cultural upheaval that occurred in the interval framed by the aftermath of the Great War and the onset of the Great Depression. Confronted with a population and an environment that was newly and permanently altered by a sweeping wave of mechanization and urbanization, artists coined a lean modern realism to process an overwhelming barrage of stimuli and to create something authentic and grounded. Though long perceived as entirely conventional, this new brand of realism is tellingly inscribed with the dislocations and adaptive struggles of the individual in a profoundly changed world.

One quickly comes to recognize works of American art created during the decade of the twenties. They are objects in which opposites appear to meet and recombine: formal perfection with blunt immediacy, visual clarity with an erasure of detail. In the new realism that typified American art of the decade, liberated modern bodies resonate with classical ideals, the teeming modern city is rendered empty and silent, and still life is pared to an essentialized clarity. Rising to a self-imposed challenge, American artists sought to be vividly present and emphatically modern—to extend, in the words of Thomas Hart Benton, "new feelers for new realities." Their modernity was evinced, above all, in a desire for direct engagement, a faith in the potency of youth, and a belief in the sustaining value of beauty.

TIMELINE:

1920

Prohibition is enacted, making the manufacture, transportation, and sale of alcohol illegal.
The Nineteenth Amendment grants women the right to vote.
Violence in Matewan, West Virginia, anticipates the nationwide miner's strike.
The Olympics resume after an eight-year hiatus.
Agatha Christie publishes her first Hercule Poirot mystery.

1921

The American population is now more urban than rural.
Betty Crocker is created by the Washburn Crocker Company to promote Gold Medal flour.
Wonder Bread is introduced.
The first Miss America Pageant is held in Atlantic City.
West Coast manufacturers begin producing the "California style" one-piece knit swimsuit.
The Federal Aid Highway Act is passed and will produce 96,000 miles of highway by 1927.
Frigidaire (owned by General Motors) produces its first home refrigerator.

1922

Charles Atlas (Angelo Siciliano), named "Most Perfectly Developed Man," markets a mail-order-body-building course.
Sinclair Lewis publishes Babbitt, whose title character is a booster for American commercialism.
Ida Cohen Rosenthal invents the "Maiden Form" support bra, although the flattening bandeau bra remains popular.
The Chinese game of mah-jongg becomes a fad in the United States.
True Confessions magazine begins publication.
Archaeologist Howard Carter discovers Tutankhamen's tomb in Egypt, and Grauman's Egyptian Theatre opens in Hollywood.

1923

Time becomes the first weekly news magazine.
Psychotherapist Emile Coué's self-hypnosis program popularizes the affirmation "Day by day, in every way, I am getting better and better."
The all-black Broadway musical Runnin' Wild introduces the Charleston to white audiences.
The French firm Claude Neon sells the first neon gas sign in America to a Los Angeles car dealer.
Clarence Birdseye patents the process for quick-freezing food.
The Cotton Club, featuring black entertainers for white audiences, opens in Harlem.
Coca Cola introduces the six-pack carrier, encouraging bulk purchasing of soda.
Actress Fanny Brice's "nose job" inspires a rage for cosmetic plastic surgery.
Blues singer Bessie Smith's recording of "Gulf Coast Blues" and "Down Hearted Blues" is an overnight success.

1924

The National Origins Act restricts European immigration and prohibits Asian immigration.
Samuel Goldwyn offers Sigmund Freud $100,000 to write a love story for Hollywood.
The Little Orphan Annie comic strip debuts in the Daily News.
Eugene O'Neill's Desire Under the Elms debuts on Broadway but is banned in Boston.
The frosted incandescent light-bulb is invented.
The Graflex RB series B is becoming the camera preferred by many of the decade's leading photographers.

1925

The New York Times reports that 350 new buildings are under construction in the city.
The New Yorker begins publication.
John Scopes is tried in Tennessee for teaching evolution in a public school.
Alain Locke publishes The New Negro, a manifesto for the New Negro movement.
The Ku Klux Klan's resurgence peaks with a rally of 40,000 in Washington, DC.
F. Scott Fitzgerald publishes The Great Gatsby.
The Victor Orthophonic Victrola becomes the first consumer phonograph for electronically recorded records.

1926

Greta Garbo and John Gilbert perform the first cinematic horizontal-position kiss in Flesh and the Devil.
Gertrude Ederle is the first woman to swim the English Channel, beating the men's record.
Hollywood heartthrob Rudolph Valentino's death leads to mass hysteria and rioting in New York.
"Milk Duds" are christened when a new machine designed to make round coated candies produce flat ones.
The wealthiest Americans receive a major tax cut.
The cigarette vending machine is invented.
Book-of-the-Month Club is introduced.

1927

Ford Motor Company's River Rouge plant opens as the world's largest industrial complex, employing 75,000.
Charles Lindbergh makes the first solo nonstop flight across the Atlantic.
The first miniature-golf course opens, in Tennessee.
Rotary-dial telephone service begins.
Max Factor introduces makeup products for nontheatrical consumers.

1928

Gerber baby food goes on the market.
Kraft unveils the processed cheese Velveeta.
Walt Disney introduces Mickey Mouse in the animations Plane Crazy and Steamboat Willie.
Dubble Bubble becomes the first bubble gum.
Republican presidential candidate Herbert Hoover employs the slogan "a chicken in every pot, a car in every garage."
IBM redesigns the punch card, a data-processing tool that is used for fifty years.

1929

The first Academy Awards ceremony is held in Hollywood.
Ninety million movie tickets are sold each week.
7-Up is first introduced as Bib-Label Lithiated Lemon-Lime Soda, a cure for hangovers.
Federal agent Eliot Ness heads a new Prohibition unit in Chicago to combat the mob violence escalating under Al Capone.
The U.S. stock market crashes on October 29, ending a five-year bull market with losses of $319 billion.

Adapted from

Exhibition label copy, 2012.

NOTES

Youth and Beauty Installation (photo of opening wall text from the exhibition), March 2012:

If the OLC allows links to exhibitions, this can be applied to the ply to exhibition- Youth and Beauty: Art of the American Twenties

ID: 11831

education files, material for Contemporary Extravaganza, 2000-- context for Precisionism-

Cultural/political/economical Context:

• The Depression marks a major turning point: Industry collapsed after the stock market crash curtailed American consumers' disposable income. (1940s: "the ideological underpinnings of the era came undone" and "sophisticated weapons used in WWII--esp. the atom bomb, diminished popular idealization of advanced technology as a benign force for social regeneration" ..... "at this time [1940s], machine iconography decreased and abstract pictorial idioms increased"...(Lucic, p. 22)

• "During the years between the world wars, the products of rationalized industrial production- grandiose factory complexes, proliferating mass-produced goods, and towering, steel-framed skyscrapers--seemed to represent modernity in its very essence." (Lucic, p.9)

• This was an age oftechnological advancement and the list of buildings and consumer goods mentioned above were the defining products of this era.

200 Years of American Painting, October 5 to November 4, 1946. Dallas Museum of Fine Arts. (Assembled for the State Fair of Texas) no author listed, unpaginated. 12711185: UMO.

1920-1940: TIME FOR EXPERIMENTS

Because America is mechanically and scientifically minded,

Qur artistS naturally have been interested in all the new

theories from afar and have evolved some of their own. h

became a lcmprarion to forget art as a human expression

and use it only as a means of scientific research. Simplifying

some of these complex theories, we might say mat Cubiml

was a study of the structure of aU things, animate and inanimate;

Dadaism broke up objects and re-formed them

grotesquely to make rhe point that we were doing a bad

job of running the world; Futurism in painting attempted

to depiCt objects in motion; Abstraction showed many sides

of an object simuhaneously; ExpreJIionism was an automarie

rendering of rhe essentials of an experience; Surrea/

iJ111 dealt with dreams, fantaSy, and other phases of

memory and psychology... A great number of American

paimers adopted one or anOther of these technical and

philosophical procedures, adding their COntributions. Represemarive

of the more inventive artistS have been Abraham

Ranner, Mark Tobey, S. MacDonald Wright, George Grosz,

Peter Blume, Emil 8iJllram, Niles Spencer, Loren "fad",er,

Karl Knaths, Francis Chapin, Philip Ef-'ergood, Milton

Avery, Paul Burlin, and I. Rice Peteira.

Youth and Beauty First Glances—TAZ:

America in the 1920s—often called the Jazz Age or the Roaring Twenties—is characterized by dynamic change: a rapidly morphing cityscape, industrialization, the emergence of a mass culture, and the collapse of traditional moral codes. The art of the decade reflects individuals' responses to this new and modern society. While some artists embraced modernity, others expressed anxiety over their rapidly changing environment.

Roaring 20s

Jazz Age (1914-1928)

Jim Crow

See the "Consumerism in the Coolidge Era" section of the Gerald Murphy biography (taken from the Connect site for Razor)

Interest in the Body

During the 1920s, a variety of factors contributed to a generation fixated on the healthy body. First, the death and destruction caused by World War I scarred many Americans. Second, the effect of industrialization on society was a serious concern. Third, visual reminders—through popular advertisements and movies—of what constituted physical perfection permeated 1920s society. The term “clean” was commonly used to refer to an ideal physicality by artists and writers.

Many 1920s artists were interested in presenting the figure at its full potential, as fit, strong, and clean. The bather or modern swimmer—sleek, athletic, and exposed—emerged during the decade as the most appropriate example of the clean, ideal body. While Kuniyoshi’s figure in Bather with Cigarette does not exemplify the ideal physique as suggested by 1920s society, her lack of self-consciousness of her exposed body reflects the heightened interest in the body.

New Rights for Women

Many new social and legal freedoms were granted to women during the 1920s. Not only did women receive the right to vote with the 19th Amendment in 1920, but it also became socially acceptable for women to cut their hair into bobs, shorten their skirts, and wear trousers and makeup. Women also engaged in other activities previously deemed inappropriate, such as driving, dancing, and smoking cigarettes.

In a sense, the 1920s liberated women from the strict social mores of Victorian times. The women who embraced their new freedoms were often referred to as flappers. With her cigarette and bold expression, Kuniyoshi’s bather celebrates the relaxed behavioral codes of the decade.

Excerpts from Connect page for Kuniyoshi

see this note for possible consolidation: art deco/art moderne/art nouveau

ASSOCIATED CONTENT CHUNKS

AUDIO ASSETS

Amanda Vaill and Dorothy Kosinski, "The Great Fair: Sara and Gerald Murphy and the World of 1920s Modernism," Lecture in conjunction with Making It New: The Art and Style of Sara and Gerald Murphy, June 1 - September 14, 2008. File Name- MurphyModernism. (Located on DMA Archives, Digitized Audio and Video Recordings.) Draft of transcript from "The Great Fair," (July 7, 2008) located on TAZ. Audio file: 20080724_AmandaVaill_theGreatFair.

13318167: UMO

VIDEO ASSETS

IMAGE ASSETS

WEB RESOURCES

Library of Congress—Prosperity and Thrift: The Coolidge Era~Examine source materials related to consumerism in the 1920s.
Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin~Access lesson plans and resources for teaching about America during the 1920s.
Brooklyn Museum~Check out the Brookyln Museum's Teacher Resource Packet from the exhibition Youth and Beauty: Art of the American Twenties.
Khan Academy~Learn more about American culture in the 1920s from Khan Academy.

ARCHIVAL RESOURCES

FUN FACTS

TEACHING IDEAS

RULES

apply to objects where geography_ancestor_id equals 7012149

apply to objects where date_begin gte 1920

apply to objects where date_end lte 1929

apply to content where content contains United States

apply to content where content contains 1920s

General Description

Few moments in American cultural history are as readily recognized as the "roaring" twenties—their mere mention conjures dynamic images of flappers, Fords, and skyscraper cities. And yet, American artists responded to this dizzying new modern world with art that evoked stillness, clarity, and order. The artwork of this time expresses the artists' individual responses to the cultural upheaval that occurred in the interval framed by the aftermath of the Great War and the onset of the Great Depression. Confronted with a population and an environment that was newly and permanently altered by a sweeping wave of mechanization and urbanization, artists coined a lean modern realism to process an overwhelming barrage of stimuli and to create something authentic and grounded. Though long perceived as entirely conventional, this new brand of realism is tellingly inscribed with the dislocations and adaptive struggles of the individual in a profoundly changed world.

One quickly comes to recognize works of American art created during the decade of the twenties. They are objects in which opposites appear to meet and recombine: formal perfection with blunt immediacy, visual clarity with an erasure of detail. In the new realism that typified American art of the decade, liberated modern bodies resonate with classical ideals, the teeming modern city is rendered empty and silent, and still life is pared to an essentialized clarity. Rising to a self-imposed challenge, American artists sought to be vividly present and emphatically modern—to extend, in the words of Thomas Hart Benton, "new feelers for new realities." Their modernity was evinced, above all, in a desire for direct engagement, a faith in the potency of youth, and a belief in the sustaining value of beauty.