Europe in Crisis and Frontier Discourses of America Essay

World War I left the world in a confusion pertaining not just to the political re-arrangement (or dislocation) but also to the mental faculties of the people. A material disillusionment had set in the minds of the people who were unsure of their priorities. The specter of destruction loomed large on their mind and made them view life in its shortness and extreme vulnerability. Under such circumstances, the only way they could demonstrate their anguish, fear, and frustration was through art and letter. Thus, art and letter channeled into different movements during the inter-war period, acting as avenues for the hopes and frustrations of the people and the intellectuals.

One such movement, which made its appearance during this period, was Dadaism. Zurich was the city of birth of this movement. They were not merely an art movement but also included poetry and theater. Important artists of this movement were Tristan Tzara, Francis Picabia, Kurt Schwitters, Max Ernst and Marcel Duchamp. “Dadaism was not exclusively an artistic, literary, musical, political or philosophical movement. Indeed it was all of these and at the same time the opposite: anti-artistic, provocatively literary, playfully musical, radically political but anti-parliamentary, and sometimes simply childish.” (Dietmar Elger 6). Their main intention was to shock people out of their aesthetic veil and face the real world of barbarity and destruction. Dadaism as an art and letter movement left a lasting impression on the artists of the age who could use it later to develop the artistic genre of Expressionism and Surrealism (Dietmar Elger 8).

Simultaneously with Dadaism developed another art movement known as the Bauhaus in Weimer, Germany. The leaders of this movement were Walter Gropius, Hannes Meyer, and Ludwig Mies Van Der Rohe. They too represented an anarchic artistic style where dependence was not on well-depicted figurines and individual aesthetic sense but disengaged bodies and masses, which were often geometric figures. Bauhaus was more of an architectural revolution influenced by which buildings of a new style began to be built. In their style “ In the interior of buildings completely enclosed rooms gave way to open-plan spaces divided by movable partitions.” (Wasserstein 215).

The third art movement, which became popular during the inter-war period was Art Deco, which was born in Paris, France. The leading figures in this movement were Tamara de Lempicka, “Erte”-Romain De Tirtoff, William Van Allen and “Cassandre”-Adolphe Mouron. “Work that is often classified under the tag of Art Deco features certain typefaces and a typographic or calligraphic practice that gave a strong flavour to some print of the interwar period…” (Blackwell 61).

However, it was Surrealism that made the greatest impact on art during the interwar period. This genre drew its inspiration directly from Sigmund Freud and Carl Gustav Jung. There is always a distance maintained between literal reality with a spark of absurdity attached to it. This method was followed so as to suppress the conscious and free the subconscious following the influence of Freud. “…Surrealist visual art was commonly portrayed in contemporary criticism, not as poetic, but as a ludicrous attempt at obfuscation and aesthetic chicanery masterminded by a few poets with no understanding of the concerns of visual art and the terms of its particular poetry.” (Grant 1-2).

Nineteenth-century was the age, which believed in the Philosophy of Art promulgated by Kant, Hegel, Schiller, Coleridge, and others. With this age developed the mystical faculty called ‘aesthetics’, which became the benchmark of all kinds of performance and its reception. “Art was extricated from the material practices, social relations and ideological meanings in which it is always caught up, and raised to the status of a solitary fetish.” (Eagleton 18-19). Compared to that twentieth-century absurdity stood out as a protest. There was no romantic notion attached to the art style of the twentieth century. It was more of a protest, a desperate attempt to free oneself from the ominous clutches of the authorities, and of rules. Twentieth-century art style stood out in stark contrast to the drawing-room romanticism of the previous century. World War I suddenly pushed them out from their drawing room dream comfort into a world, which was naked and brutal, yet made every attempt to hide it under a façade of law and order.

The change noticeable in the art form of the period can be attributed to the socio-political change, which was wrought on Europe by World War I. A rebellious attitude developed amongst the people who were shocked by the barbarity of the war, which hanged behind them. This made them visualize their life hanging in an uneasy balance. Every art and literary work produced during this period was a shout-out of this uncertainty that hanged over the minds of the generation and made them unique not merely as art forms but as mirrors of the minds of an entire continent on canvas.

Bibliography

Blackwell, Lewis. 20th-century type. London: Laurence King Publishing, 2004.

Dietmar Elger, Uta Grosenick. Dadaism. London: Taschen, 2004.

Eagleton, Terry. Literary Theory: An Introduction. London: Blackwell Publishers, 1983.

Grant, Kim. Surrealism and the Visual Arts: Theory and Reception. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005.

Wasserstein, Bernard. Barbarism and civilization: a history of Europe in our time. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007.