continuity and change in art, design, literature, music, cinema, radio and popular culture between 1918 and 1939, including modernism, mass media, jazz, Hollywood, and the use of culture by ideological regimes

What this dot point is asking

VCAA expects you to explain the cultural transformation of the interwar period: the maturing of high modernism in art and literature, the rise of mass media (radio, cinema, popular press), and the harnessing of culture by ideological regimes. Strong responses pair specific cultural products (named books, named films, named buildings) with dated state institutions (the BBC, the Reich Chamber of Culture, the Federal Art Project) and cite a historian.

The answer

Modernism as an established movement

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.

Visual art. 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. Surrealism, founded by Andre Breton with the First Manifesto of Surrealism (15 October 1924), drew on Freud and offered a politics of the unconscious; Salvador Dali (The Persistence of Memory, 1931), Max Ernst, Joan Miro and Rene Magritte produced major work.

Architecture and design. 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.

Literature. 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.

Music. 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. Bela Bartok, Anton Webern and Sergei Prokofiev belonged to the same generation.

The rise of mass media

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.

Radio. 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.

By the late 1930s, radio reached majorities of households. In Germany, the Volksempfanger (people's receiver, launched 1933) was a cheap state-subsidised model designed to limit foreign broadcasts; around 70 per cent of households owned one by 1939. Roosevelt's Fireside Chats (from 12 March 1933) made radio a national political medium.

Cinema. 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.

Newspapers and tabloids. 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.

The Harlem Renaissance and jazz

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 Harlem Renaissance (around 1918 to 1937) produced Black American literature and music with national reach: Langston Hughes (The Weary Blues, 1926), Zora Neale Hurston (Their Eyes Were Watching God, 1937), Claude McKay, and Countee Cullen. The Cotton Club in Harlem (1923 to 1940) presented Black music to white audiences.

In Europe, jazz crossed the Atlantic in the early 1920s. Josephine Baker arrived in Paris on 22 September 1925 and became a star at the Folies Bergere. Berlin jazz clubs (the Eldorado, the Romanisches Cafe) became cultural landmarks. The Nazi regime attacked jazz as "Negro music" but could not suppress it.

The Great Depression and cultural shift

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

American documentary culture. 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.

The Federal Art Project (1935 to 1943). Part of the Works Progress Administration, the FAP employed around 10,000 artists, including Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Lee Krasner and Arshile Gorky. The Federal Theatre Project employed 12,700 actors and stagehands; the Federal Writers' Project produced American Guide books for every state and recorded around 2,300 narratives from formerly enslaved people.

British documentary cinema. John Grierson's Documentary Film Movement (Drifters 1929; Night Mail 1936, with W.H. Auden's verse) developed public-purpose cinema.

Soviet socialist realism. From the First Congress of Soviet Writers (August 1934), Soviet culture was officially socialist realist: accessible, heroic, anti-modernist art celebrating workers, peasants and the Party. The Moscow Metro (opened 15 May 1935) was a socialist realist showpiece.

Ideological use of culture

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

Nazi Germany. The Reich Ministry for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda (founded 13 March 1933) under Goebbels coordinated cinema, radio, press, theatre, music and visual art. Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will (1935) and Olympia (1938) defined Nazi propaganda cinema. The Degenerate Art exhibition (Munich, opened 19 July 1937) defined the negative of Nazi aesthetic policy.

Fascist Italy. The Istituto Luce (founded 1924) controlled newsreels. Cinecitta (opened 21 April 1937) was Europe's largest film studio outside Germany. Mussolini's image was reproduced on posters, stamps and schoolbook covers.

Soviet USSR. Soyuzkino (1930) centralised film production. Eisenstein's Alexander Nevsky (1938) used cinema for nationalist mobilisation against the Teutonic enemy. Pravda's editorial line (after the 28 January 1936 attack on Shostakovich's Lady Macbeth) set the cultural orthodoxy.

Democratic regimes. The BBC under John Reith defended a public-service model with limited political content. Roosevelt's Fireside Chats showed democratic radio could compete with authoritarian uses. Hollywood produced both escapist comedy and engaged social cinema (Frank Capra's Mr Smith Goes to Washington, 1939; John Ford's The Grapes of Wrath, 1940, after Steinbeck's 1939 novel).

Continuity within change

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.

But the centre of cultural gravity shifted decisively from the elite salon to the cinema, the radio set and the popular newspaper. By 1939, around 60 per cent of British adults went to the cinema at least once a week; around 70 per cent of American households owned a radio.

Historiography

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.

Eric Hobsbawm (Age of Extremes, 1994) treats interwar mass culture as a global democratising force that survived the political reaction of the 1930s and matured into postwar consumer society.

Peter Gay (Weimar Culture, 1968) is the standard on Weimar Berlin's centrality in 1920s European modernism.

Lawrence Levine (The Unpredictable Past, 1993) treats American mass culture as a producer of cross-class and cross-racial cultural exchange, with jazz as the central example.

Common exam traps

Treating modernism as a 1920s invention. Modernism was a long process from the 1860s; the interwar period was its mass-cultural diffusion.

Equating "mass culture" with "American culture." Hollywood was dominant but mass culture had national variants: BBC public service, German Volksempfanger, Soviet cinema. Pin national differences.

Saying authoritarian regimes "controlled" culture absolutely. They tried, but jazz, foreign radio, samizdat, and the persistence of private cultural life all limited the project.

Forgetting the Great Depression's cultural impact. The 1920s and 1930s were culturally different decades within the interwar period: 1920s experimental and consumerist; 1930s documentary, social-realist and more politically engaged.

In one sentence

Between 1918 and 1939, high modernism in art, architecture, literature and music spread from pre-war avant-gardes into mass culture through the Bauhaus, surrealism, Joyce and Eliot; radio (the BBC from 1922, the Volksempfanger from 1933), Hollywood cinema (sound from 1927, the Hays Code from 1934) and jazz (Armstrong, Ellington, Baker in Paris from 1925) created the first true mass culture; the Great Depression turned cultural production towards documentary and social realism; and authoritarian regimes built ministries (Goebbels March 1933) to harness the same media for ideological ends.