1920s

Culture in the 1920s

According to one journalist in 1920, Americans were “weary of being noble” after a decade of intense progressive reform, morality, and self-righteousness. Due to new technology available allowing movies to have both sound an color, the movie industry free fast.  IN 1919, laws were passed, institution Prohibition of the consumption and even possession of alcohol, making it illegal.  Due to these laws, the 1920s provided some of the most well known gangsters a means to create wealth by opening illegal bars.  The most well known gangster of the time was Al Capone.  Also this period saw the growth of the Ku Klux Klan and the growth of the Vigilante groups who took the law into their own hands and lynched black victims without any trial.  After World War I, the birth of commercial radio helped the radio to become a significant provider of news and entertainment.  The 1920s saw the growth of popular recreation, in part because of higher wages and increased leisure time.  Professional sports gained a new popularity, as well. Baseball star Babe Ruth enjoyed massive fame, as did boxers such as Jack Dempsey. College sports rose to national attention, as demonstrated by the fame of the Notre Dame football team’s “four horsemen.” The 1920s also saw the emergence of nonsporting national heroes like Charles Lindbergh, who made the first solo nonstop flight across the Atlantic in May 1927.

Art: Marcel Duchamp


Marcel Duchamp (1887–1968) has had a huge impact on twentieth-century art.  By World War I, he had rejected the work of many of his fellow artists as "retinal" art, intended only to please the eye.  Instead, Duchamp wanted, he said, "to put art back in the service of the mind."  Duchamp was born in Normandy in northern France.  His initial foray into modern art followed the trends of his contemporaries, with his first paintings in the mode of Cézanne and the Impressionists, while after 1910 his work reflects a shift toward Cubism.   One of his most important works, Nude Descending a Staircase (1912) reflects Duchamp's ambivalent relationship with Cubism.  Duchamp received a lot of criticism for his controversial artwork.  Subverting traditional or accepted modes of artistic production with irony and satire is a hallmark of Duchamp's legendary career.  His most striking, iconoclastic gesture, the readymade, is arguably the century's most influential development on artists' creative process.  Duchamp, however, did not perceive his work with readymade objects as such a radical experiment, in part because he viewed paint as an industrially made product, and hence painting as an "assisted-readymade."  He wanted to distance himself from traditional modes of painting in an effort to emphasize the conceptual value of a work of art, seducing the viewer through irony and verbal witticisms rather than relying on technical or aesthetic appeal.  The object became a work of art because the artist had decided it would be designated as such.  The mundane, mass-produced, everyday nature of these objects is precisely why Duchamp chose them (other works would include a snow shovel, a urinal, and a bottle rack).  He ensured that the fruits of modern industrial life would be a fertile resource in the production of works of art.  Satirical works such as Duchamp's readymade Fountain (1917) tested the limits of public taste and the boundary of artistic technique.  By pushing and ultimately transgressing such boundaries within the art world, Duchamp's works reflected the artist's sensibility.  His use of irony, puns, alliteration, and paradox layered the works with humor while still enabling hi to comment on the dominant political and economic systems of his time. Duchamp's iconoclasm appealed to the vehemently untraditional and bitingly critical nature of the Dada movement.  His work can easily be understood as a forerunner to this revolutionary sensibility, which actively sought to undermine the reigning values of conservatism that governed Europe and that perpetuated the devastating reality of World War I.  The reality of the war hit the art world hard, breaking all boundaries and pushing all limits.  A prolific artist, his greatest contribution to the history of art lies in his ability to question, admonish, critique, and playfully ridicule existing norms in order to transcend the status quo- he effectively sanctioned the role of the artist to do just that.  

Music: Cole Porter


Cole Porter's name derives from the surnames of his parents, Kate Cole and Sam Porter.  Cole composed songs as early as 1901 (when he was ten) with a song dedicated to his mother, a piano piece called Song of the Birds, separated into six sections with titles like The Young Ones Leaning to Sing and The Cuckoo Tells the Mother Where the Bird Is.
His first Broadway show was See America First, which was a 1916 flop despite the social luminaries in the early audiences -- a feature of hiring Bessie Marbury as theatrical producer. 
In July of 1917, he set out for Paris and war-engulfed Europe. Paris was a place Cole flourished socially and managed to be in the best of all possible worlds. He lied to the American press about his military involvement and made up stories about working with the French Foreign Legion and the French army. This allowed him to live his days and nights as a wealthy American in Paris, a socialite with climbing status, and still be considered a "war hero" back home, an 'official' story he encouraged throughout the rest of his life.
The parties during these years were elaborate and fabulous, involving people of wealthy and political classes. His parties were marked by much gay and bisexual activity, Italian nobility, cross-dressing, international musicians, and a large surplus of recreational drugs.  By 1919, Cole was spending time with the American divorcee Linda Thomas. The two became close friends quickly. Their financial status and social standing also made them ideal candidates for marriage -- as a business contract, not for passion. The fact that Linda's ex-husband was abusive and Cole was gay made the arrangement even more palatable. Linda was always one of Cole's best supporters and being married increased his chance of success, and Cole allowed Linda to keep high social status for the rest of her life. They married on December 19, 1919 and lived a happy friendship, a mostly successful public relationship, but a sexless marriage until Linda's death in 1954.

Literature: Gertrude Stein


Disgusted with the American life they saw as overly material and spiritually void, many writers during this period lived in Europe, including Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, and Ernest Hemingway.  Gertude Stein was an imaginative, influential writer in the 20th century and a patron of the arts. She collected post-Impressionist paintings, helping artists like Henri Mastisse and Pablo Picasso. She and her brother established a famous literary and artistic salon, hosting writers from around the world. The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas by Stein is a book about the life of her companion.  Gertrude Stein had been writing for several years and began to publish her innovative works, Three Lives (1909), The Making of Americans: Being a History of a Family's Progress (written 1906–11; published 1925), and Tender Buttons: Objects, Food, Rooms(1914). Intended to employ the techniques of abstraction and Cubism in prose, much of her work was virtually unintelligible to even educated readers.

During World War I she bought her own Ford van, and Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas served as ambulance drivers for the French. After the war, she maintained her salon (although after 1928 she spent much of the year in the village of Bilignin, and in 1937 she moved to a more stylish location in Paris) and served as both hostess and inspiration to such American expatriates as Sherwood Anderson, Ernest Hemingway, and F. Scott Fitzgerald. (She is credited with coining the term, “the lost generation.”) She lectured in England in 1926 and published her only commercial success, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933), written by Stein from Toklas's point of view.

Stein pushed boundaries even before the war but after she had seen the direct consequences from the war upon the soldiers she pushed even farther away from the mainstream.  She encouraged the production of raw art, whether it was literary or artistic.  She critiqued and guided many of the most influential artists and authors of the 20th century, helping them to develop a style that can communicate the confusion they felt.  Gertrude Stein was a groundbreaking author, she pushed both herself and others, she was an incredible influence in 20th century culture.

Architecture: Frank Lloyd Wright