City University of New York (CUNY) CUNY Academic Works Open Educational Resources Kingsborough Community College 2021 HUM1: Modern Humanities: Arts & Ideas Michelle Turnbull CUNY Kingsborough Community College Paul Ricciardi CUNY Kingsborough Community College Matthew Forman CUNY Kingsborough Community College Maria Rosario CUNY Kingsborough Community College Monica Walker CUNY Kingsborough Community College See next page for additional authors How does access to this work benefit ou?y Let us know! More information about this work at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu/kb_oers/21 Discover additional works at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu This work is made publicly available by the City University of New York (CUNY). Contact: [email protected] Authors Michelle Turnbull, Paul Ricciardi, Matthew Forman, Maria Rosario, Monica Walker, and Andrew Wilder This textbook is available at CUNY Academic Works: https://academicworks.cuny.edu/kb_oers/21 Open Educational Resource HUM 1: Modern Humanities: Arts & Ideas 1900-onward Produced & Remixed by: Michelle Turnbull & Paul Ricciardi, Matthew Forman, Maria Rosario, Monica Walker & Andrew Wilder 2021 This work is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 Table of Contents I. Birth of Modernism & The Modern World (1900-1920’s) ....................................................... 2 1. Modernism ......................................................................................................................................... 2 2. War & Revolution ............................................................................................................................... 4 3. Freudian Revolution ......................................................................................................................... 22 4. Modern Art ....................................................................................................................................... 26 5. Modern Architecture ........................................................................................................................ 40 6. Music & Dance .................................................................................................................................. 52 II. The Jazz Age (1920’s-1945) ..................................................................................................... 52 1. The Jazz Age ...................................................................................................................................... 52 2. The Great Migration ......................................................................................................................... 55 3. The Harlem Renaissance .................................................................................................................. 58 4. Modern Art ....................................................................................................................................... 60 5. The Lost Generation ......................................................................................................................... 70 6. The Great Depression ....................................................................................................................... 72 7. The Mexican Muralism Movement .................................................................................................. 74 8. World War II ..................................................................................................................................... 84 III. The Search for Meaning & the Beginning of Globalism (1945-1950’s) ................................. 95 1. The Cold War .................................................................................................................................... 95 2. Existentialism .................................................................................................................................. 102 3. Origins of Theater & Theater of the Absurd ................................................................................... 104 4. Abstract Expressionism .................................................................................................................. 118 IV. Liberation & Equality (1960-onward)................................................................................... 122 1. Quest for Equality ........................................................................................................................... 122 2. The Civil Rights Movement ............................................................................................................. 130 3. The Women’s Rights Movement .................................................................................................... 140 4. LGBTQIA+ History ........................................................................................................................... 143 5. The Vietnam War ............................................................................................................................ 145 6. Hippies & The Counter Culture....................................................................................................... 151 7. Rock, Pop Culture & Mass Media ................................................................................................... 158 8. New Modern Art Movements ........................................................................................................ 161 1 | P a g e I. The Birth of Modernism & The Modern World (1900-1920’s) 1. Modernism WHAT IS MODERNISM? People use the term “modern” in a variety of ways, often very loosely, with a lot of implied associations of new, contemporary, up-to-date, and technological. We know the difference between a modern society and one that remains tied to the past and it usually has less to do with art and more to do with technology and industrial progress, things like indoor plumbing, easy access to consumer goods, freedom of expression, and voting rights. In the 19th century, however, modernity and its connection with art had certain specific associations that people began recognizing and using as barometers to distinguish themselves and their culture from earlier nineteenth century ways and attitudes. In Western culture the term modernism has several meanings. This movement began in the late 19th century and reached its peak in the period between 1910 and 1930. It tried to redefine various artforms in a radical manner. Leading lights within the literary wing of this movement include Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, Marcel Proust, Gertrude Stein, Wyndham Lewis, H.D, Marianne Moore, William Carlos Williams and Franz Kafka. Composers such as Schoenberg and Stravinsky represent modernism in music. Artists such as Picasso, Matisse, Mondrian and the Surrealists represent the visual arts, while architects and designers such as Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe brought modernist ideas into everyday urban life. Modernism centers on its rejection of tradition. It emphasizes the return of the arts to their fundamental characteristics, as though beginning from scratch. This dismissal of tradition also involved the rejection of conventional expectations. Hence modernism often stresses freedom of expression, experimentation, radicalism and even primitivism. In many art forms this often meant startling and alienating audiences with bizarre and unpredictable effects. Hence the strange and disturbing combinations of motifs in Surrealism, or the use of extreme dissonance in modernist music. In literature this often involved the rejection of intelligible plots or characterization in novels, or the creation of poetry that defied clear interpretation. Many modernists believed that by rejecting tradition they could discover radically new ways of making art. Schoenberg believed that by ignoring harmony (the relationship between consonance and dissonance) he had discovered a wholly new way of organizing sound, based in the use of twelve-note rows. This became known as serial music. Abstract artists began with the assumption that color and shape formed the essential characteristics of art, not the depiction of the natural world. Kandinsky, Mondrian and Malevich all believed in redefining art as the arrangement of pure color. The use of photography, which had rendered much of the representational function of visual art obsolete, strongly affected this particular aspect of modernism. However, these artists also believed that by rejecting the depiction of material objects they helped art move from a materialist to a spiritualist phase of development. Ezra Pound’s maxim, ‘Make it new’ (‘Canto LIII’) is often quoted as a succinct summary of modernism. What’s most inspirational about modernism, in my view, is its determination to question the basic assumptions of our lives, and art’s relation to them. Everything is up for grabs—from how we think, to 2 | P a g e what kind of world we should live in, from the impact of new technologies, to what kind of role the artist should play in contemporary life. Reading such literature is invigorating and challenging and, sometimes, difficult. But how could such profound questioning be easy? This is not to say that modernist literature is inaccessible, as its reputation can suggest. There is no ideal reader of The Waste Land or Ulysses, who understands all T.S. Eliot’s or James Joyce’s allusions—and there never was such an ideal reader. If you think about it, we read all literature, understand