Quick questions on Modernism and mass culture in the interwar period: VCE Modern History Unit 3

By 1918, modernism in art and literature was three decades old, but WWI made it the dominant idiom. Pre-war pioneers (Picasso, Stravinsky, Schoenberg, Kandinsky) became canonical in the 1920s; their style spread from elite avant-gardes to design schools and mass markets.

The interwar period was the first age of mass culture. Radio, cinema and the popular press reached majorities in the industrial world for the first time.

Jazz, born in New Orleans before WWI, moved north with the Great Migration. The 1920s were the "Jazz Age" (the term is F. Scott Fitzgerald's, 1922). Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Bessie Smith and Jelly Roll Morton became national figures.

The Great Depression (from October 1929) shifted cultural production towards social realism and documentary.

Authoritarian regimes recognised the political power of mass media and reorganised cultural production under the state.

Some pre-1914 cultural patterns continued. The opera house, the concert hall, the museum and the literary salon remained elite venues; classical repertoire remained dominant in those venues. The Catholic Church's cultural authority remained strong in Italy, Spain, Poland and France. Rural folk culture was largely unchanged.

Modris Eksteins (Rites of Spring, 1989) treats Stravinsky's 1913 ballet as the symbolic break that produced WWI and the modernist culture of the interwar period. The book frames culture and politics as inseparable.

Cubism (Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, 1907; Braque) had defined the new visual logic. After 1918 it spread into commercial design and architecture. Abstract art (Kandinsky, Mondrian, Malevich) matured.

The Bauhaus (Weimar 1919, Dessau 1925, closed 1933) unified art, craft and industry under Walter Gropius and later Mies van der Rohe. Le Corbusier's Villa Savoye (1929) defined the International Style: pilotis, flat roofs, ribbon windows, free facades. Bauhaus alumni shaped postwar industrial design across Europe and America.

James Joyce's Ulysses (Paris, 1922), T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land (1922), Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway (1925) and To the Lighthouse (1927), Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time (final volume 1927), and Franz Kafka's posthumously published The Trial (1925) and The Castle (1926) defined literary modernism.

Igor Stravinsky's Rite of Spring (1913) anchored modernist music. Arnold Schoenberg's twelve-tone system (Method of Composing with Twelve Tones, 1923) was the high-modernist response. Alban Berg's opera Wozzeck (premiered 1925) brought atonality to the opera house.

The first commercial broadcasts began in 1920 (KDKA Pittsburgh, 2 November 1920; the BBC, 14 November 1922). The BBC became a public corporation under Royal Charter on 1 January 1927. In the United States, NBC (1926) and CBS (1927) built national networks.

Silent film matured in the 1920s; sound arrived with The Jazz Singer (October 1927). Hollywood produced around 750 features in 1937 alone. The Hays Code (drafted March 1930, enforced from 1 July 1934) imposed moral censorship: no nudity, no profanity, no sympathetic adultery.

The Daily Mail (Britain), the New York Daily News (founded 1919) and the German Illustrierte Beobachter (Nazi-owned from 1926) reached mass urban readerships. Tabloid sensationalism (crime, sport, celebrity) became the dominant popular journalism.

James Agee and Walker Evans's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941) documented Alabama sharecroppers. Dorothea Lange's Migrant Mother (1936) became the visual icon of the Depression. The Farm Security Administration photographers (1935 to 1944) produced around 175,000 images.