Roaring Twenties

1920s Arts and Entertainment: The Cultural Renaissance

The 1920s was not merely an era of economic expansion and social upheaval. It was, just as importantly, one of the most explosive cultural renaissance in modern history. In a single decade, jazz escaped the bordellos of New Orleans to fill the concert halls of Europe, the New York City skyline was reinvented in stone and chrome from the ground up, a generation of American writers expatriated to Paris and redefined the novel, and a generation of African American artists, writers, and musicians gathered in a single Manhattan neighborhood to forge a new Black modernism. The 1920s were the moment when American art stopped being a provincial echo of Europe and began, instead, to set the terms of the conversation.

This pillar explores the visual arts, architecture, literature, theater, dance, music, and film of the decade. Three large movements stand above the rest. Art Deco gave the Jazz Age its signature look: the zigzag, the sunburst, the skyscraper setback, the beaded evening dress. The Harlem Renaissance transformed a community of migrants into the cultural capital of Black America, producing figures of international stature from Langston Hughes to Duke Ellington. The Golden Age of Hollywood turned Los Angeles into the film capital of the world, perfected the grammar of silent cinema, and then scrambled to reinvent itself for the sound era. Together, these three movements, alongside a parallel revolution in the museum, the gallery, and the dance hall, made the 1920s a decade whose aesthetic still defines the way we picture the modern.

Two Fronts: The Paris Generation and the American Modernists

American painting in the 1920s was a story of two fronts. On one front, young American artists were flooding into the Latin Quarter of Paris, the unchallenged capital of the international avant-garde. On another, a smaller but determined group of American modernists was beginning to invent a visual language rooted in the American subject matter of factories, farms, skyscrapers, and small-town streets.

The Parisian generation was the larger phenomenon. Paris in the 1920s was cheaper, more permissive, and more intellectually charged than it had been before the war, and the Americans arrived in numbers that alarmed even seasoned Parisians. A walk down the Rue de la Grande Chaumière in Montparnasse would routinely turn up more Americans than Frenchmen, and the cafés of the Boulevard du Montparnasse, including La Rotonde, Le Dôme, and La Coupole, became a kind of expatriate graduate school. The art they encountered in Paris had moved beyond the early Cubist breakthroughs of Picasso and Braque. Purism, the stripped-down, machine-aesthetic style developed by Amédée Ozenfant and Le Corbusier, was influential in the mid-1920s. Surrealism announced itself with André Breton’s 1924 manifesto and pulled younger painters toward dreamlike imagery. The legacy of Fauvism, with its wild color, lingered in every studio. Even more important was the flood of African and Oceanic sculpture arriving in the Louvre’s new museum of ethnography and in the studios of Picasso, Matisse, and Modigliani; the formal lessons of African masks and figures were absorbed into mainstream modernism well before the 1920s but were now being internalized by the first generation of American painters who had never seen a Victorian academic canvas.

The Americans who came home from Paris did so with very different conclusions. Georgia O’Keeffe, who had studied with Arthur Wesley Dow and taught in Texas and South Carolina before arriving in New York, produced in the 1920s the bleached-bone, flower, and skyscraper paintings that would become her signature. Stuart Davis, who had seen the 1913 Armory Show as a teenager, returned from Paris in 1929 with a brighter palette and a sharper sense of American subject matter; his tobacco-store paintings of Gloucester and his later egg-beater series began in the late 1920s. Edward Hopper, who had spent three years in Paris between 1906 and 1910, returned to New York to work in a style of sober, lonely realism that would not receive wide recognition until the 1940s, but his “New York Movie” preparatory drawings and his etchings of the period show the same melancholic eye that would later define American painting. The Ashcan School, centered on Robert Henri, John Sloan, George Luks, and Everett Shinn, had begun before the war as a project to dignify the urban poor as subject matter, and in the 1920s it was carried forward by younger artists including Charles Sheeler, whose precisionist renderings of the Ford River Rouge plant and the New York waterfront defined a new American modernism. Sheeler’s “Upper Deck” of 1929 and his contemporaneous photographs of industrial architecture stand at the threshold between American painting and American photography, and the precisionist style, with its hard edges, its clean color, and its reverence for the machine, was one of the most distinctive visual inventions of the decade.

Sculpture in the 1920s was dominated by a movement that announced itself in deliberate opposition to academic practice. Direct carving, the practice of hewing a sculpture from a single block of stone or log of wood with the artist working the material directly rather than modeling in clay for a foundry, became the central dogma of the new American sculpture. William Zorach, born in Lithuania, raised in Cleveland, trained in Paris, and converted to direct carving after visiting the Trocadero ethnographic museums, produced in the late 1920s the simplified, rounded mother-and-child and head forms that became emblematic of the new American sculpture. John B. Flannagan, an Irish-American who had worked as a trapper and a stonecutter, carved his first major direct works in stone in the early 1920s; his “Tournament” of 1928, a pair of rough-hewn granite rams locked in combat, won a prize at the Carnegie International and signaled that direct carving had arrived. The movement was given an institutional home in 1927 by the opening of the Gallery of Living Art in New York, founded by A.E. Gallatin and dedicated almost exclusively to direct carving and European modernism. The intellectual godfather of the movement was the British critic Herbert Read, whose 1931 book Art Now would codify the doctrine.

The 1916 Zoning Law and the Birth of the Setback Skyscraper

The most visible art form of the 1920s was architecture, and within architecture the most visible form was the skyscraper. New York added roughly 4,000 buildings of eight stories or more between 1920 and 1930, a building boom that changed the silhouette of every American downtown.

The skyscraper of the 1920s was shaped above all by a single piece of legislation: the 1916 New York City Zoning Resolution, which required towers to “step back” from the street in proportion to their height in order to admit light to the street below. Architects learned to make a virtue of the requirement, and the setback skyscraper, with its characteristic wedding-cake profile of receding volumes, became the dominant type of the decade. The same zoning law, ironically, also produced a generation of architects who would soon rebel against it: the International Style pioneers of the 1930s, including Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Walter Gropius, and Le Corbusier, advocated a smooth, prismatic, unornamented tower in which the building stepped straight up from the sidewalk in a single shaft.

The decade’s most iconic buildings were Art Deco, a hybrid style that combined the geometric ornament, the machine aesthetic, and the streamlined silhouette with materials new to architecture: chrome, aluminum, stainless steel, terra cotta, and glass block. The American Radiator Building of 1924, designed by Raymond Hood and John Mead Howells, was one of the first Art Deco skyscrapers in New York, a black brick shaft ornamented with gold terra cotta that gave the Bryant Park neighborhood a new visual anchor. The Paramount Building of 1926 and the General Electric Building of 1929 followed, but the two buildings that most powerfully fixed the Art Deco image in the public mind were the Chrysler Building of 1930, designed by William Van Alen with its sunburst-pattern stainless steel crown, and the Empire State Building of 1931, designed by Shreve, Lamb and Harmon, which at 1,250 feet stood as the tallest building in the world for nearly four decades.

Frank Lloyd Wright was no part of the Art Deco mainstream, but his late-1920s work set the alternative course of organic architecture, in which the building was meant to grow from its site and to dissolve the boundary between interior and exterior. Wright’s Taliesin West in Arizona was built beginning in 1937, his masterpiece Fallingwater was designed in 1935 (and built 1936-39), but the relevant 1920s work was the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo, completed in 1923 and demolished in 1968, whose cantilevered construction was meant to flex in an earthquake. Wright’s earlier Robie House in Chicago, completed in 1910, was the first major statement of the prairie style that would lead, by long paths, to the open plan of the postwar American house. (For the political and economic story behind the boom that built the towers,

The American Writers Who Reinvented the Novel in the 1920s

The most consequential body of writing in the 1920s came from a group of American novelists who, in the years after the First World War, expatriated to Paris and produced the body of work that came to be called the Lost Generation. The label was Gertrude Stein’s, repeated by Ernest Hemingway in A Moveable Feast (published posthumously in 1964 but drafted in the late 1950s): “You are all a lost generation.” It was meant as a diagnosis, not a manifesto, but the writers who gathered in Sylvia Beach’s Shakespeare and Company bookshop at 12 rue de l’Odéon and in the cafés of the Left Bank turned it into a shared project of writing about the war, about the failure of inherited values, and about the new emptiness of American life.

Ernest Hemingway, who had driven an ambulance in Italy and been wounded on the Piave in 1918, arrived in Paris in 1921 and published In Our Time (1925), a collection of short stories that combined brutal economy of language with a deliberate repudiation of Victorian prose. The Sun Also Rises (1926), published in the United States, fixed the image of the Lost Generation expatriate in the popular mind; A Farewell to Arms (1929) was the war novel that no one had been able to write. F. Scott Fitzgerald was, by 1925, the most famous novelist of his generation, and the success of The Great Gatsby (1925) confirmed his central place in the canon. Tender Is the Night would not appear until 1934, but Fitzgerald’s short stories of the late 1920s, including “Babylon Revisited” and “The Rich Boy,” mapped the moral wreckage of the Jazz Age. John Dos Passos, whose Three Soldiers (1921) and Manhattan Transfer (1925) had already announced his technical ambitions, began publishing the U.S.A. trilogy with The 42nd Parallel in 1930. William Faulkner, who would not receive the Nobel Prize until 1949, produced The Sound and the Fury in 1929, the year of his breakthrough; its experimental, four-part structure was as radical a departure in American fiction as Hemingway’s stripped prose.

The Southern Renaissance, a parallel movement centered in Nashville, Chapel Hill, and the region around the University of the South at Sewanee, took a different tack. The Fugitive poets, a group that included John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, and Donald Davidson, met at Vanderbilt from 1915 and began publishing the magazine The Fugitive in 1922. Their work was conservative in its formalism and agrarian in its politics, but it produced a generation of writers, including Robert Penn Warren and Andrew Lytle, who would lead the Agrarians of the 1930s. Faulkner’s Mississippi and the regional writers around him, including Eudora Welty (who published her first story in 1936) and Thomas Wolfe (Look Homeward, Angel, 1929), turned the American South into a self-conscious literary country.

Eugene O’Neill towered over American theater of the decade. His The Emperor Jones (1920), Anna Christie (1921, winner of the 1922 Pulitzer Prize), The Hairy Ape (1922), Desire Under the Elms (1924), The Great God Brown (1926), and Strange Interlude (1928) reinvented American drama as a vehicle for psychological realism and tragic sweep; he would receive four Pulitzer Prizes in his career. The Provincetown Players, the little theater group that had staged O’Neill’s first plays on a wharf in Cape Cod, had moved to Greenwich Village by 1916 and ran the Playwrights’ Theater at 133 MacDougal Street until 1929, providing an experimental stage that Broadway itself could not.

How Harlem Became the Capital of Black Modernism

The most concentrated burst of African American cultural production in the nation’s history was unfolding simultaneously, in a single Manhattan neighborhood, a few miles north of the Greenwich Village stages. The Harlem Renaissance was the name later given to the explosion of Black literature, art, music, and scholarship centered on Harlem between roughly 1920 and 1935. (For a deep dive, see our Harlem Renaissance cluster page.)

The cultural flowering grew out of the Great Migration, the movement of roughly 1.6 million African Americans out of the rural South between 1910 and 1940, and the development of Harlem itself as a Black middle-class enclave. The neighborhood’s Black population grew from about 50,000 in 1914 to about 200,000 by 1930, and the arrival of the Cotton Club (1923) and the Savoy Ballroom (1926) made Harlem a nighttime destination for white slummers as well as Black New Yorkers. The institutional framework was the NAACP, founded in 1909 and edited by W.E.B. Du Bois in the pages of The Crisis (founded 1910), and the rival National Urban League, whose magazine Opportunity (founded 1923) was edited by Charles S. Johnson. In 1925, the philosopher Alain Locke of Howard University published The New Negro, an anthology that effectively named the movement. Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association, founded in Jamaica in 1914 and headquartered in Harlem from 1918, added a mass movement of Black nationalism, complete with the Black Star Line steamship company (incorporated 1919) and the Liberty Hall meeting hall, to the intellectual ferment of the neighborhood.

The writers of the Harlem Renaissance, including Langston Hughes (whose first book, The Weary Blues, appeared in 1926), Zora Neale Hurston (whose first anthropological field work in Eatonville, Florida, dates from 1927), Countee Cullen (Color, 1925), Claude McKay (Home to Harlem, 1928), Jean Toomer (Cane, 1923), James Weldon Johnson (God’s Trombones, 1927), and Nella Larsen (Quicksand, 1928; Passing, 1929), produced a body of work that did not yet exist in American letters. The visual artists of the movement, including Aaron Douglas, whose murals for the Countee Cullen Library and the YMCA on 135th Street defined a new Black visual vocabulary; Augusta Savage, the sculptor; Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller; Archibald Motley; and the young Jacob Lawrence, all developed an idiom that fused African mask traditions, Art Deco geometry, and American subject matter. The musicians of the movement, including Duke Ellington at the Cotton Club, Cab Calloway, Louis Armstrong, Fletcher Henderson, and Bessie Smith, transformed American popular music in the same decade. (For the role of the nightclubs,

Broadway, the Concert Hall, and the Invention of Modern Dance

Broadway in the 1920s was the most concentrated theatrical marketplace in the world. The Theatre District between 42nd and 53rd Streets was the most expensive real estate in the United States outside of Wall Street, and the hits came thick: Abie’s Irish Rose (1922, the longest-running Broadway play of its time at 2,327 performances), What Price Glory? (1924), The Student Prince (1924), The Green Goddess (1921), Rain (1922), and The Shanghai Gesture (1926) defined the commercial main stem.

The most consequential development on Broadway, however, was the musical theater revolution of the late 1920s. Before 1920, American musical comedy was a Viennese-derived form built around leggy chorus girls and interpolated novelty numbers. The decisive break came with Show Boat (1927), with book and lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II and music by Jerome Kern, based on the 1926 Edna Ferber novel. Show Boat integrated its songs into the plot, took its characters seriously as human beings, addressed the realities of race in post-Reconstruction America, and was the first American musical to treat its form as a serious dramatic vehicle. The musical theater revolution was not the only 1920s innovation: the Black musicals that came up from Harlem, including Shuffle Along (1921, the first Broadway musical written and performed by African Americans), Blackbirds of 1928, and the all-Black Porgy (1927, a play with music) brought the rhythms of the Harlem Renaissance to the downtown stage.

The concert hall also opened up to American vernacular music. George Gershwin, who had been a Tin Pan Alley songwriter since his teens, performed Rhapsody in Blue with Paul Whiteman’s orchestra at Aeolian Hall on February 12, 1924, a moment now treated as the symbolic birth of the American art-music synthesis. The follow-up An American in Paris (1928), the piano concerto in F (1925), and the opera Porgy and Bess (1935, with DuBose Heyward and Ira Gershwin) built on the breakthrough.

Modern dance in America was invented in the 1920s. The pioneers had begun earlier: Isadora Duncan had rejected the academic ballet of the Paris Opéra as early as the 1900s and had built a free-form, barefoot, Greek-inspired dance that toured Europe and America through the 1910s. Ruth St. Denis and Ted Shawn founded the Denishawn school in Los Angeles in 1915 and sent companies across the country. Martha Graham, who had studied at Denishawn from 1916 to 1923, presented her first independent concert at the 48th Street Theater in New York on April 18, 1926, a date now treated as the symbolic birth of modern dance. By the end of the decade Graham had founded her company and a school, and her technique of contraction and release, her single bare studio, and her collaborations with the composer Louis Horst and the sculptor Isamu Noguchi would define the art for the rest of the century.

The Whitney, MoMA, and the New York Art Market

The institutional framework for the new arts was created, in significant part, in the 1920s. The Whitney Studio Club had been founded by Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney in 1914 at 8 West 8th Street in Greenwich Village as a place where young American artists could meet, exhibit, and support themselves. The Whitney Studio held annual exhibitions of living American artists that ran in deliberate opposition to the conservative taste of the National Academy of Design. In 1928 the Whitney Studio Galleries opened at 10 West 8th Street, the first museum in the United States dedicated exclusively to the work of living American artists, and the Whitney Museum of American Art formally opened on its current Upper East Side site in 1931.

The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) was founded in November 1929 by Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, Lillie P. Bliss, and Mary Quinn Sullivan, with Alfred H. Barr Jr. as its founding director. The opening exhibition, in November 1929, displayed Cézanne, Gauguin, Van Gogh, and Seurat; within a year Barr had added a Picasso room and a Matisse room, and within a decade the museum had invented the very idea of the modern-art survey exhibition. The founding of MoMA in the same year as the Wall Street Crash is, in retrospect, almost too neat: a marker of the moment when the institutional framework for modernism was complete, just as the economic conditions that had fed its expansion were about to collapse.

The art market was, in the meantime, moving on a different and at times unhinged trajectory. The great American fortunes of the 1920s, accumulated in oil, steel, banking, and the automobile industry, were buying European modernist paintings at a pace that exceeded the supply. Duncan Phillips, the founder of the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C. (opened 1921), the first museum of modern art in the United States, was already assembling his collection in the years before 1920. Andrew Mellon, the Secretary of the Treasury, was assembling a collection of Old Masters and Impressionists that would become the founding gift of the National Gallery of Art in 1937. Calvin B. Jones and F. Scott Fitzgerald in fiction, and Henry McBride and Paul Rosenberg in the trade, all wrote about the speculative atmosphere of the 1920s market, in which paintings by Cézanne and Renoir were passing from hand to hand at sums that, by 1929, were straining the social and economic categories that had contained the trade since the 19th century. (The economic boom that made this art market possible is treated in The 1920s Economy.)

Cinema: The Silent Masterpieces and the Sound Revolution

The 1920s was the last full decade of silent cinema, and it produced the most concentrated body of great films in the medium’s history. The major studios of the era, the so-called Big Eight that would dominate the industry for the next thirty years, were MGM (the Mayer-Thalberg company), Paramount (the Zukor company), Fox (the William Fox company), Warner Bros., RKO (Radio-Keith-Orpheum, formed in 1928 by the merger of the Radio Corporation of America with the Keith-Albee-Orpheum theater chain), Universal, Columbia, and United Artists (the 1919 company founded by D.W. Griffith, Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pickford, and Douglas Fairbanks to distribute their own films).

The major films of the decade, in roughly chronological order, included The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920, Robert Wiene, the German Expressionist masterpiece), Nosferatu (1922, F.W. Murnau, the first screen vampire), The Ten Commandments (1923, Cecil B. DeMille), Greed (1924, Erich von Stroheim, the eight-hour cut later reduced to two), The Gold Rush (1925, Charlie Chaplin), Ben-Hur (1925, Fred Niblo, the most expensive silent film ever made at the time), Metropolis (1927, Fritz Lang, the German science-fiction epic), Wings (1927, William Wellman, the first Best Picture winner), The General (1927, Buster Keaton), Sunrise (1927, F.W. Murnau, the most honored silent film of its era), and The Jazz Singer (1927, Alan Crosland, the first feature-length talkie).

The introduction of synchronized sound was the single most disruptive technical event in the history of cinema. Warner Bros., then the smallest of the major studios, acquired the Vitaphone sound-on-disc system in 1925 and released Don Juan with a synchronized musical score in 1926. The Jazz Singer of 1927, with its few lines of synchronized dialogue, demonstrated that the audience would pay to hear actors speak, and the industry converted to sound within three years. Fox introduced the Movietone newsreel in 1928, putting the new medium to immediate use in the presidential campaign of that year, and RCA developed the Photophone sound-on-film system that would become the industry standard. By 1930, silent film production in the United States had effectively ended. (For the broader technological story,

The 1927 Academy Awards, the first Academy Awards ceremony, took place on May 16, 1929, at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel, and honored films from the period 1927-28. Wings won Best Picture, Sunrise won Unique and Artistic Production (a separate award created at the request of the Academy’s first president, Douglas Fairbanks), Emil Jannings won Best Actor for The Last Command and The Way of All Flesh, and Janet Gaynor won Best Actress for 7th Heaven, Street Angel, and Sunrise. The ceremony, designed by Louis B. Mayer and his associates to defuse the labor unrest that had roiled the industry in 1926-27, established the awards as the industry’s principal instrument of self-celebration. The same year, the studios formed the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (MPPDA) under Will H. Hays, the former Postmaster General, to head off the threat of state and federal censorship; the Hays Code would not be fully implemented until 1934, but its production guidelines began to constrain the content of American films in 1930.

How African and Oceanic Art Reshaped Western Modernism

It is impossible to overstate the influence of African and Oceanic art on Western modernism. From the moment in 1907 when Picasso, working his way through the African masks in the Trocadero, painted Les Demoiselles d’Avignon and broke the representation of the human body that had stood since the Renaissance, the formal vocabulary of African sculpture, the carved mask, the abstracted figure, the geometricized face, was being absorbed into the international avant-garde. By the 1920s, the lesson had been taken up by Amedeo Modigliani (whose caryatid figures of 1910-14 were already in American collections), by Constantin Brâncuși (who was in New York in the mid-1920s), by Henry Moore (whose early carvings of the 1920s owed everything to non-Western sources), by the German Expressionists, and by almost every American modernist of any ambition. Aaron Douglas’s murals of the 1920s, with their silhouetted Black figures, their flat planes, and their rhythmic geometry, fused African sources with Art Deco design in a way that defined a specifically African American modernism. The same fusion was being made, in a different register, in the cubist and primitivist paintings of Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, and the German Expressionists. The 1920s, in short, was the decade in which the modern museum, the modern gallery, and the modern stage all began to display African art alongside European art, and the visual vocabulary of the new century was set.

Where the Movements Overlapped: Paris, Harlem, and New York

The 1920s arts world was not a single thing but a thicket of overlapping, sometimes contradictory, sometimes mutually reinforcing movements. The Lost Generation novelists in Paris and the Harlem Renaissance writers in New York were contemporaries, with the same publishers (Boni & Liveright, Knopf, Harcourt Brace) and sometimes the same agents. The Art Deco designers in Paris and the setback skyscraper architects in New York were reading the same magazines (L’Illustration, Architectural Record) and exhibiting at the same world’s fairs. Martha Graham’s first concert in 1926 and The Jazz Singer in 1927 both happened in New York, ten months apart. The Museum of Modern Art was founded in 1929 and the Whitney Museum in 1931, and both institutions have, in the century since, been among the principal framers of how we see the 1920s as a decade.

The decade ended as it had begun, with a crash. The Wall Street Crash of October 1929 brought the speculative art market to an end, closed the Denishawn school, killed the expatriate community in Paris (Hemingway left for Key West in 1928; Fitzgerald went home in 1931), and set the economic and political conditions under which the visual, literary, and musical modernism of the 1920s would, in the 1930s, be reabsorbed into the popular culture of the American century. The legacy of the decade, however, was already secured. The Chrysler Building is still on the skyline. The Great Gatsby is still on the shelf. The Jazz Singer is still cited as the moment that ended one art form and began another. The Harlem Renaissance is still the foundational moment of African American modernism. Art Deco is still the signature look of the machine age.

The Millionaires Who Underwrote the Modernists

The 1920s arts were made possible by an unprecedented expansion of patronage. The new American fortunes, accumulated in oil, steel, banking, and the automobile industry, were not only buying European modernist paintings at a pace that exceeded the supply; they were also underwriting a generation of American writers, dancers, musicians, and visual artists through direct commissions, stipends, and foundation support. Gertrude Stein in Paris received regular stipends from the Cone sisters of Baltimore, who had bought Matisse and Picasso in the years before the war and who used the income from the Baltimore family’s laundry-supply business to support the art and artists they loved. Paul Sachs of Goldman Sachs, a son of one of the firm’s founders, gave up a career in banking to become the second director of the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard. John D. Rockefeller Jr.’s support of MoMA, Andrew Mellon’s assembly of the Old Master and Impressionist collection that became the National Gallery, and the Whitneys’ underwriting of the American modernist generation were all of a piece.

The other side of this expanded patronage was the commercial market: the magazine and newspaper that paid the writers, the publisher that paid the printer, the gallery that paid the painter, the theater that paid the actor, the recording company that paid the musician. The mass magazine, the commercial gallery, the popular theater, and the gramophone record had all matured in the years between 1900 and 1920, and the new mass market for the new art forms was, in large part, the reason the 1920s were so productive. The same economic conditions that produced the automobile and the radio produced the new literature, the new music, the new painting, and the new film. (For the wider economic story, and The Automobile Industry in the 1920s.)

American Art in a Global Modernist Conversation

The 1920s arts were not, of course, an American event alone. The decade saw the consolidation of modernism in Paris, Berlin, Vienna, Moscow, and London; the establishment of the Bauhaus at Weimar and then at Dessau; the publication of the major theoretical manifestos of the new movements (Breton’s first Surrealist Manifesto in 1924, Le Corbusier’s Vers une architecture in 1923); the international careers of Picasso, Matisse, Mondrian, Kandinsky, Stravinsky, Ravel, de Chirico, Bauhauslers Gropius and Mies, and the Italians of the Novecento; the founding of the major international collections of modern art (the Stedelijk in Amsterdam, the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin, the Tate in London, the Museum of Modern Art in New York); and the international circulation of the new visual vocabularies through exhibitions, magazines, and the new international cinema.

The American contribution to this international modernism was, by the late 1920s, no longer entirely a derivative. Georgia O’Keeffe’s bleached-bone paintings were being exhibited in New York and Alfred Stieglitz’s gallery, the Anderson Galleries, the Intimate Gallery, and An American Place had been the principal venues for the showings; Aaron Douglas’s murals were being reproduced in Europe; Aaron Copland was beginning his studies with Nadia Boulanger in Paris; George Gershwin was the most frequently performed American composer on the European concert stage. The American modernist art of the 1920s was, for the first time in the country’s history, beginning to be received on its own terms.

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