2. The Harlem Renaissance
What was the Harlem Renaissance?
• “The New Negro” — Edited by Alain Leroy Locke, Harlem: Mecca
of the New Negro argued that a new era was dawning for black
Americans and that Harlem was the center of this new arena of creative
expression.
• Langston Hughes and the Poetry of Jazz — According to
Hughes, “Negro was in vogue.” He came to understand that his cultural
identity rested not in the grammar and philosophy of white culture, but
in the vernacular expression of the American black, which he could
hear in its music (the blues and jazz especially) and its speech.
• Zora Neale Hurston and the Voices of Folklore — Hurston
undertook anthropological field research to collect folklore in the South.
Her writing concerned itself primarily with the question of African-
American identity—an identity she located in the vernacular speech of
the rural South.
3. • The Quilts of Gee’s Bend — In the isolated community of Gee’s
Bend, Alabama, an indigenous grassroots approach to textile design
flourished. The quilts rivaled in every way the inventiveness and
freedom of modern abstract art.
• All That Jazz — By the end of the 1920s, jazz was the American
music. The blues are by definition laments bemoaning loss of love,
poverty, or social injustice, and they contributed importantly to the
development of jazz. The greatest of the 1920s blues singers was
Bessie Smith. Dixieland jazz originated in New Orleans including Louis
Armstrong. Duke Ellington introduced the term swing to jazz culture.
• The Visual Arts in Harlem — The leading visual artist in Harlem in
the 1920s was Aaron Douglas who illustrated “The Prodigal Son.”
• Discussion Question: What does W.E.B. DuBois mean by “double
consciousness”?
10. Active Listening Guide: Ellington: It Don't Mean A Thing (If It Ain't Got Tha
MyArtsLabChapter 36 – New York, Skyscraper Culture, and the Jazz Age
15. Skyscraper and the Machine:
Architecture in New York
What is the International Style in Architecture?
• The Machine Aesthetic — The Chrysler Building is a monument to
the technology and the spirit of the new that technology inspired. The
photographer Alfred Stieglitz championed photographers and painters
who were all dedicated to revealing the geometries of the world.
Stieglitz believed that in the skyscraper he had discovered the
underlying geometry of modernity itself.
• The International Style — The International Style was
characterized by an austere, clean modernism that revealed its plain
geometries. The label was coined by Alfred H. Barr, Jr. and Philip
Johnson who were the curators of a show called the International
Exhibition of Modern Architecture.
• Discussion Question: What is the cult of the machine?
27. Architectural Panorama: Kaufmann House
(Fallingwater, ground floor)
Architectural Panorama: Kaufmann House
(Fallingwater, second floor)
Video: Fallingwater
MyArtsLabChapter 36 – New York, Skyscraper Culture, and the Jazz Age
28. Making It New: The Art of Place
What is suggested by the adage “make it new”?
• The New American Novel and Its Tragic Sense of Place — F.
Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby is set in New York City and Long
Island and illuminates the quintessential American dream represented
by crass materialism. Earnest Hemingway wrote about American
expatriates but preferred the wilder settings and untamed nature,
particularly the lakes and rivers of upper Michigan. William Faulkner
created the Southern Novel in his imaginary Mississippi county of
Yoknapatawpha.
• The New American Poetry and the Machine Aesthetic —
Ezra Pound, in his translation of Chinese text, invoked centuries of
Chinese tradition in order to underscore the necessity of continual
cultural renewal. William Carlos Williams concentrated on the stark
presentation of commonplace objects to the exclusion of inner realities.
E.E. Cummings celebrates the machine culture and depends on the
visual characteristics of capitalization, punctuation, and line endings to
29. • The New American Poetry and the Machine Aesthetic
(Continued) — surprise the reader. Hart Crane believed that the
modern poet must “absorb the machine.” For him, the symbol of the
machine aesthetic was the Brooklyn Bridge.
• The New American Painting: “That Madam…is paint.” —
The new American landscape can be seen in Demuth’s Incense of a
New Church which is a deeply ironic commentary on the American
worship of machine and manufacture. Marsden Hartley was most
influenced by Paul Cezanne. The mountains of New Mexico became a
motif for Hartley. Georgia O’Keeffe would become the most famous of
the American artists who came into their own in the 1920s and 1930s.
Her work was most often described solely in terms of its “female”
imagery.
• The American Stage: Eugene O’Neill — It was on stage that
both the visual texture of American life and the language of modern
America were best experienced. Eugene O’Neill’s plays stress the
isolation and alienation of modern life.
• Discussion Question: What do you take to be the meaning of
Hemingway’s “Big Two Hearted River”?
37. The Golden Age of Silent Film
What characterizes the “golden age” of silent film?
• The Americanization of a Medium — Hollywood came to be the
center of the movie industry in part because of weather, the city’s
remoteness from the East, and cheap available property.
• The Studios and the Star System — The studio system was an
organizational structure of production, distribution, and exhibition within
the same company. The most important early stars were Mary
Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, and Charlie Chaplin.
38. • Audience and Expectation: Hollywood’s Genres — The
genres that characterized Hollywood production through the 1950s
were comedy; fantasy; adventure; the crime or gangster film; the
coming-of-age film; the so-called woman’s film; romantic drama; the
horror film; war films; and the western.
• Cinema in Europe — Europeans tended to regard cinema as high
art. After the war, some German filmmakers, influenced by
Expressionist painters, began to search for ways to similarly express
themselves in film. The surrealist film used skillful editing of startling
images and effects as a new tool for exploring the unconscious.
Salvador Dali and Luis Bunuel were the Spanish Surrealists.
• Discussion Question: How did the studio system in Hollywood develop?
What was the Harlem Renaissance? Originating in the writings of W. E. B. Du Bois, the Harlem Renaissance explored the double-consciousness defining African-American identity. Poet Claude McKay, Charles S. Johnson of the National Urban League, and philosopher Alain Locke all saw Harlem as the center of an avant-garde destined to rehabilitate African Americans from a position of spiritual and financial impoverishment for which, in Locke’s words, “the fate and conditions of slavery have so largely been responsible.” To this end, first in the Harlem issue of the sociology journal the Survey Graphic , and then in his anthology The New Negro , both published in 1925, Locke emphasized the spirit of the young writers, artists, and musicians of Harlem. What elements of Harlem culture were they especially interested in capturing in their work? Harlem was, after all, the center of the blues and jazz. The greatest of the blues singers in the 1920s was Bessie Smith. What new kind of phrasing did Smith bring to her work? In jazz, Louis Armstrong’s Dixieland jazz originated out of New Orleans and made its way north to Chicago. What are the characteristics of Dixieland? In 1927, Duke Ellington began a five-year engagement at Harlem’s Cotton Club. What distinguishes his brand of jazz?
Carl Van Vechten. Portrait of Countee Cullen in Central Park . 1941.
Jessie T. Pettway. Bars and String-Pieced Columns . 1950s.
Carl van Vechten. Portrait of Bessie Smith . n.d. 4" × 5".
The Cotton Club, Lenox Avenue and 143rd Street, New York City. Early 1930s.
Aaron Douglas. “The Prodigal Son,” illustration in James Weldon Johnson, God’s Trombones: Seven Sermons in Verse . 1927.
Jacob Lawrence. In the North the Negro had better educational facilities, from The Migration of the Negro (panel 58). 1940-41. 12" × 18”.
What is the International Style in architecture? The 1920s represent a period of unprecedented growth in New York City, as downtown skyscraper after skyscraper rose to ever greater heights, and the promise of the machine became a driving force in culture. What did artists and photographers see in both the skyscraper and the machine? The New York building boom of the 1920s, dominated by the highly ornamented and decorative architecture epitomized by Cass Gilbert’s neo- Gothic Woolworth Building and William van Alen’s Art Deco Chrysler Building, was countered by the International Style. How does the International Style differ from Gilbert’s and van Alen’s work?
Map: New York City Skyscrapers.
William van Alen. Chrysler Building, New York . 1928-30.
Margaret Bourke-White. Chrysler Building: Gargoyle . 1930. 12-15/16" × 9-1/4”.
Alfred Stieglitz. The Steerage . First published in Stieglitz's Camera Work , 1911. 1907. 13-3/16" × 10-3/8”.
Paul Strand. Abstraction, Porch Shadows . 1916. 12-15/16" × 9-5/8”.
Alfred Stieglitz. Looking Northwest from the Shelton, New York . 1932. 9-1/2" × 7-9/16”.
Cass Gilbert. Woolworth Building, New York City , elevation sketch. 1910, December 31.
Frank Lloyd Wright. Robie House, South Woodlawn, Chicago, Illinois. 1909.
Frank Lloyd Wright. Robie House, South Woodlawn, Chicago, Illinois: Plan. 1909.
Frank Lloyd Wright. Fallingwater (Kaufmann House), Bear Run, Pennsylvania. 1935-36.
What is suggested by the adage “make it new”? American novelists of the era responded to the sense of the country’s new and unique identity—embodied perhaps most of all in its “jazz”—by concentrating on the special characteristics of the American scene. How would you distinguish between F. Scott Fitzgerald’s sense of place and Ernest Hemingway’s? What distinguishes William Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County? The “new” sound of jazz also embodied the modernist imperative, first expressed by Ezra Pound, to “make it new.” In poetry, this imperative was realized in the work of William Carlos Williams, E. E. Cummings, and Hart Crane. The work of all three celebrates the new machine culture of the era even as it attempts to capture the vernacular voice of everyday Americans. These interests are reflected as well in the painting of Joseph Stella, Charles Demuth, Marsden Hartley, and Georgia O’Keeffe. How is the idea of a new “machine-inspired classicism” expressed in American verse and painting of the 1920s? Like the poets of the era, the experimental plays of Eugene O’Neill captured, as perhaps never before in the theater, the vernacular voices of the American character even as they stressed the isolation and alienation of modern experience.
William Carlos Williams. Williams's "The Great Figure". 1921.
Charles Demuth. Demuth's The Figure 5 in Gold . 1928. 35-1/2" × 30”.
Joseph Stella. The Voice of the City of New York Interpreted: The Brooklyn Bridge (The Bridge) . 1920-22. 88-1/2" × 54”.
Charles Demuth. Incense of a New Church . 1921. 26-1/4" × 20”.
Charles Sheeler. Classic Landscape . 1931. 25" × 32-1/4”.
Marsden Hartley. New Mexico Landscape . 1920-22. 30" × 36”.
Georgia O’Keeffe. Red Hills and Bones . 1941. 29-3/4" × 40”.
What characterizes the “golden age” of silent film? During the early 1900s, large numbers of immigrants, particularly second-generation American Jews, migrated out of New York, where many had worked in the garment industry, to California, where they founded the motion picture industry in and around Hollywood. The studio system they developed dominated filmmaking worldwide. What are the features of the studio system? By the end of the 1920s, there were five major American studios—Fox, MGM, Paramount, RKO, and Warner—and three smaller ones—Universal, Columbia, and United Artists. They focused their promotional efforts on the appeal of their stars, including Mary Pickford, Charlie Chaplin, and Douglas Fairbanks. They also depended on their audience’s attraction to certain genres. What are some of the chief genres that they developed? Experimental film flourished in Europe—in German Expressionist cinema and Surrealist film—but the American studios dominated the industry, producing between 75 percent and 90 percent of all films in the 1920s.
The "Hollywoodland" sign. Rebuilt and shortened to "Hollywood" in 1978. 1923.
William Cameron Menzies. Sets for The Thief of Bagdad , starring Douglas Fairbanks. 1924.
Charlie Chaplin. Charlie Chaplin in The Gold Rush . 1925.
Douglas Fairbanks. Douglas Fairbanks in The Thief of Bagdad . 1924.
Tom Mix. Tom Mix in The Great K & A Train Robbery . 1926. 11" × 17”.
Fritz Lang and Thea von Harbou. The City, in Fritz Lang and Thea von Harbou’s Metropolis . 1926.
Salvador Dalí and Luis Buñuel. Scene from Salvador Dalí and Luis Buñuel’s Un Chien andalou (An Andalusian Dog) . 1929.
Continuity & Change: The Rise of Fascism: Burning books on the Opernplatz, Berlin, May 10, 1933. 1933.
