This lecture goes with Chapter 14 in HUM 2020.

1. Identify major figures in today’s humanities.
The Last 100 Years
All non-cited images were gathered from the free domain and are not under any copyright law restrictions. All images gathered from wikipedia.org.

2.  The early part of the twentieth century was a time of
change and instability, leading some to call it an
“Age of Uncertainty.”
 World War I began in 1914, and it is hard to
overstate its impact on the arts.
 After the war, which took the lives of more than
eight million soldiers, the whole world mourned.
Early 20th Century

3. Early 20th Century
• One response to the war
was the creation of the
Dada movement, which
rejected tradition and
thrived on childlike,
sometimes imbecilic
behavior.
• Marcel Duchamp
claimed Dada was a
kind of “anti-art” that
opposed all recognized
values in art and
literature.

4. Early 20th Century
• Dada’s negative reaction to World
War I was in contrast to the De Stijl
movement which represented a
universal, hopeful response.
• Piet Mondrian was the leading painter
of the De Stijl school.
• Both Dada and De Stijl demonstrate
the spirit of the avant-garde in the arts
which thrived after the war.

5. Early 20th Century
Another response was
Surrealism, which was
dedicated to the realm of
dreams.
The most famous of the
Surrealist artists was Salvador
Dali, who depicted
illogically juxtaposed
objects and impossibly
distorted forms.

6. Early 20th Century
A number of sculptors
began to work with
abstract forms, including
Constantin Brancusi and
Henry Moore.
Alexander Calder’s
mobiles were sculptural
forms suspended from the
ceiling.

7. Early 20th Century
Alfred Stieglitz was the leading
photographer of his day, and
his art gallery helped
introduce avant-garde art to
America.

8. Early 20th Century
Stieglitz’s wife, Georgia O’
Keefe, was primarily
known for her expressive
organic abstractions of
nature.

9. Early 20th Century
Post-war Paris was the scene of the most adventurous new writing by authors such as
James Joyce.
Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot are considered the two most influential American modernist
poets.
James Joyce introduced startling technical innovations to modern fiction, including
intricate mythic and literary references and a stream of consciousness narrative
technique.
Virginia Woolf used her novels to reveal her characters’ inner thoughts and feelings,
rather than dwelling on what the character said or did.
Ernest Hemingway, one of the most influential writers of the period, had a style which
relied on simple plots and laconic and spare language.

10. Early 20th Century
Before World War I, Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring
created quite a stir in the world of music, as did
Viennese composer Arnold Schoenberg’s atonal
music.
In the U. S., the stock market crash of 1929 exposed a deep social
imbalance between the haves and the have-nots.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt wanted to give the have-nots what he
called a “New Deal.”
A program inaugurated by the Farm Security Administration included
talented photographers Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans.
After the Depression, many American artists turned to a more
naturalistic representation of the world’s experiences through regional
scenes.

11. Early 20th Century
Edward Hopper
attempted through his
art to show the lives of
the middle class.

12. Early 20th Century
Thomas Hart Benton
painted murals across the
country, representing
American themes and
experiences.

13. Early 20th Century
The inspiration for American regionalist painting was the Southern
regional fiction that emerged between the wars.
William Faulkner chose to be a chronicler of the American South,
experimenting widely with narrative and even using a stream of
consciousness technique.
Flannery O’Connor was a social satirist who set her fiction in the South
and often challenged American attitudes towards issues such as race
relations.

14. Early 20th Century
Aaron Copland was one of the most highly esteemed composers.
His music often imitates American fiddle tunes and hymns.
George Gershwin blended classical and jazz elements in music that
was also inspired by African American blues. Scott Joplin made famous
ragtime, a type of jazz piano.
Louis Armstrong was a vocalist and premier jazz trumpeter. Duke
Ellington was one of the greatest jazz pianists and arrangers.

15. Early 20th Century
Fascism was first established in Italy
under dictator Benito Mussolini.
The movement spread to Germany,
where Adolf Hitler took advantage of
public despair over the state of
Germany’s economy following World
War I.

16. Early 20th Century
In 1934, Hitler became president
of Germany, leading to World
War II and the Holocaust.
Bundesarchiv, Das. Adolf Hitler-1933. 1952. JPG.

17. Early 20th Century
Francisco Franco led Spain’s
right wing against the new
Republican government. He
ruled Spain as a Fascist
dictator from 1939 until he
died in 1975.

18. Late 20th Century
The modern world came into being after World War II.
At least seventeen million soldiers had died fighting, and the
economies of Europe and Asia had been destroyed.
In 1940, German troops invaded France, and the French
eventually turned over two-thirds of France to the Germans.

19. Late 20th Century
Britain fought back under new
Prime Minister Winston Churchill.

20. Late 20th Century
In the Pacific, Japanese
Emperor Hirohito joined
forces with Adolph Hitler;
in December 1941, Japan
attacked the American
naval base at Pearl
Harbor, Hawaii, bringing
America into the war.

21. Late 20th Century
Slowly the Allies gained the upper hand in both Europe and the Pacific.
In May of 1945, U.S. President Harry Truman declared the war in Europe over.
Three months later, the United States dropped atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of
Hiroshima and Nagasaki, forcing Japan to surrender.
The rebuilding of Europe and Japan required a huge investment. U.S. Secretary of State George
Marshall developed a plan to provide economic aid to European countries on the condition
that they work together for their mutual benefit.
Japan’s new constitution prohibited it from developing an army or air force, freeing up money
for other purposes.
The struggle for world power between the United States and the Soviet Union was called the
“Cold War.”
The period after World War II witnessed a steady movement from destruction to affluence.

22. Late 20th Century
Existentialist philosopher Søren Kierkegaard emphasized the essentially
ethical nature of human life, with each individual responsible for making
choices and commitments.
French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre thought that human beings are
defined by the choices they make, and that it is not the situations
people find themselves in that fix their identities, but the choices they
make in response to those situations.
Simone de Beauvoir emphasized the need for women to make their
own decisions and claim their independent existence.

23. Late 20th Century
The arts also began to emphasize the value of individual
expression, focusing on a style of highly personal and
subjective abstract painting called “abstract expressionism.”
Several Abstract Expressionist artists, supported by the WPA
in the 1930s, went on to lead America to prominence in the
international art scene in the 1940s.
One such artist was Jackson Pollock, whose body of work is
referred to as the “drip” paintings.
Like Pollock, Willem de Kooning was interested more in the
act of creating the painting than in the finished product.
Mark Rothko, who worked in a style known as “color field
painting,” produced a series of works consisting of soft-
edged rectangles in various colors.
Pollock, J. War. 1947. JPG.

24. Late 20th Century
A second generation Abstract Expressionist, Helen Frankenthaler worked on huge, raw canvases
laid out on the floor, pouring paint onto the canvas.
Most of the great postwar architects developed a single international style, based primarily on
the nature of modern materials and structure, using slender steel posts and beams, and
concrete reinforced by steel.
Walter Gropius was one of the leading architects in Germany, and director of the Bauhaus art
school there.
The main principle of the Bauhaus was to closely connect art, science, and technology.
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe was a colleague of Gropius’s at the Bauhaus; he moved from
Germany to the United States, where he created the modern skyscraper.

25. Late 20th Century
Another leader of the International Style was Le Corbusier. He called the functional
homes he designed machines à habiter—“machines to live in.”
The most influential architect of the age was American Frank Lloyd Wright, who
believed that the character of a building must be related to its site and blend with the
terrain.
Modern drama begins in the nineteenth century with the plays of Henrik Ibsen.
The existentialist sense of the absurd dominated post-war theater. Absurdist dramatists
rejected the idea that plot should be structured.
One of the most important of absurdist dramatists was Irish-born playwright Samuel
Beckett, whose best-known work is Waiting for Godot.
Beckett mixed humor with pathos to portray a bleakly pessimistic view of life.

26. Late 20th Century
The 1950s and 1960s saw an explosion of the consumer culture in America.
It was during this time that shopping malls, fast food restaurants, and television
all arrived on the scene.
Many artists and intellectuals realized that art might be made out of almost
anything.
Composer John Cage demonstrated this with his piece 4’33”, which consisted
of nothing but four minutes and thirty-three seconds of silence.
One of Cage’s students, Robert Rauschenberg, began taking junk and trash
and combining them to create “art.”

27. Late 20th Century
Louise Nevelson used small compositional units made of pieces of wood furniture to create wall-
size assemblages, which she unified by painting a single color.
Andy Warhol’s work embodied the world of mass production and image creation.
His style, including his famous portrayals of Campbell’s soup cans and Marilyn Monroe, was
labeled “Pop Art.”
One of Warhol’s contemporaries, Roy Lichtenstein, painted large-scale comics, often depicting
the lives of young women.
Claes Oldenburg’s giant versions of the most banal things, such as clothespins, transform the
everyday into the monumental.
Cage’s minimalist tendencies were attractive to a number of sculptors as well, including Donald
Judd, who created a series of what he called “Specific Objects” which were uniform, modular
boxes made of iron.

28. Late 20th Century
Sol LeWitt also worked in modular units, creating frameworks of white, baked enamel
arranged as an open cube and repeated according to various mathematical
formulas.
Christo and Jeanne-Claude create site-specific sculpture which is usually outdoors,
public, large-scale and temporary.
The artists’ “environmental art,” which has included wrapping large structures such as
the Reichstag in Berlin, is intentionally transitory.
No architect’s work epitomizes pop culture’s collision of styles more than that of Frank
Gehry.
His Santa Monica house represents the consciously assembled style of past and
present elements present in “postmodern” architecture.

29. Late 20th Century
The “Beat” generation of writers saw American prosperity as a negative.
Perhaps the leading voice of the generation was Jack Kerouac, who
wrote in what he called “spontaneous prose.”
This is essentially the same style used by poet Alien Ginsberg.
One of the era’s most highly regarded musical talents was composer,
conductor, and pianist Leonard Bernstein, who is perhaps best known
for West Side Story, a contemporary version of Romeo and Juliet.

30. References
All non-cited images were gathered from the free domain and are not
under any copyright law restrictions. All images gathered from
wikipedia.org.
Pollock, J. War. 1947. JPG.
Bundesarchiv, Das. Adolf Hitler-1933. 1952. JPG.