Word: 20s
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...catalog is massive, with 23 essays by various hands -- a long symposium. The '20s, Clair points out, were the first "name" decade in cultural history. In an older and slower-changing Europe, cultural periods were identified with long reigns -- the age of Pericles, Louis XIV. But now, in a time of fantastically accelerated communications and stylistic shifts, what Clair calls "the tyranny of the short term" begins: rapid identifiable packaging in culture...
...grotesque theater, full of libido and irony -- the stage of a morality play, updated to reflect the postwar sense of despair. From Grosz in Berlin to Frans Masereel in Antwerp, an enormous iconography of city life -- its edginess, speed, compression, perversion, fixation on style -- developed in the '20s. The idea that the city is constructed of signs, of media and information overload as much as of concrete and steel, was the essence of vision for Dada ) collagists like Raoul Hausmann...
...20s, Modernism was not only a vehicle for political protest or idealist reverie. It also became, for the first time, chic: it entered the salons and diffused through the decorative arts, especially in France. And it turned pompier, as in the morbid and overblown paintings of society artist Tamara de Lempicka. The birth of Art Deco is one of the themes of this show -- designers' homages to larger avant-garde ideas: a Cubist table lamp, for instance, or "skyscraper" furniture...
...Metropolis" does not pretend to cover every kind of image made by artists and craftsmen in the '20s. Its focus is the city, and that alone -- so that although it includes Fernand Leger's The Mechanic, 1920, the arcadian strains in '20s French painting, Matisse and Derain, for example, find no place in it. And quite a lot of lesser art does because -- derivative or coarse though it sometimes is -- it has something to say about the pervasiveness of imagery. Much of Weimar-period German art is a crude mix of De Chirico and cartooning, but one doesn't object...
Jake Barnes, the emasculated expatriate hero of Ernest Hemingway's classic, is the beneficiary of a breakthrough operation in the romantic world of Paris in the '20s. With the help of supplemental hormones, Jacqueline Barnes goes on to become a suffragist and campaigner against alcoholism...