1914 - 1929 the modernist world1914 - 1929 the modernist world
 Whatever else called itself "modernist" in the first quarter of the 20th century - painting, architecture, literature - the great popular apostle of modernism was advertising. Read More
Radio, child of the new technology of electronics, was the first new medium of the 20th century. The Marconi Company had begun... Read More
By 1920 the Saturday Evening Post had a circulation of over two millions copies a week, and, with its mixture of fiction, current affairs and biographies of public figures, was staple reading for the American... Read More
By 1920 the Saturday Evening Post had a circulation of over two millions copies a week, and, with its mixture of fiction, current affairs and biographies of public figures, was... Read More
Throughout all of Europe and the United States, changes in work patterns and new expectations of leisure in the interwar period fueled a demand far leisure that manifested... Read More
In the United States there was particular fascination with records. Two uniquely American games, baseball and football, lent themselves... Read More
Women in sport in the interwar period, the sport of lawn tennis proved to be a platform for female achievement. Read More
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 4 The Rise of HollywoodHollywood movies were among the first and were certainly the most widespread and accessible manifestations of an emergent "mass culture" which brought with it new forms of cultural expression. Businessmen began to realize the financial potential for movies. Read More
4 European Cinema
The idea that the foreign was exotic was a Middle American assumption to which Hollywood happily pandered. In De Mille's films and in those of Erich von Stroheim, Europe represented a half-admired, yet half-condemned sophistication. Read More
4 Silent Cinema and Coming of Sound
By 1920 the industry had embarked on a second phase of monopoly control. It was organized not around patents but around the economies of scale permitted within large companies involved in production... Read More
4 Russian Revolutionary Cinema
"Of all the arts", said Lenin, "for us the cinema is the most important." The energy of the Russian Revolution was closely attached to the impact of rapid industrialization, and nowhere were the effects of that conjunction more firmly felt than the arts.
For a brief period in its early years, the October Revolution produced an atmosphere in which, it seemed, the nature of perception itself had changed. Revolutionary artists endorsed the polemical purposes of new art forms for the people - poster art... Read More
4 The success of Griffith and Aitken
From the early 1910s, going to the movies became an event in itself. As Adolph Zukor explained, middle-class audiences demanded better facilities: "The nickelodeon had to go, theaters replaced shooting galleries, temples replaced theaters, and cathedrals replaced temples". By 1925, the United States had a thousand picture palaces.
The cathedrals of the movies were to be found in the business and shopping centers of large cities. Their elaborate exteriors, featuring exotic motifs from ancient, oriental or European culture, were massive outdoor advertising displays. Read More
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 In a New Jersey recording studio, Paul Whiteman, made the first of several attempts to record same newly-minted...Read More
Then there was Prohibition, the policy which made the manufacture, sale and consumption of alcoholic drinks illegal throughout the twenties.F. Scott Fitzgerald's familiar phrase, the Jazz Age... Read More
The object of condemnation, collectively known as jazz, included various related styles: the "raggy" music of white New Orleans musicians such as the Original Dixieland Jazz Band and their imitators... Read More
Within black culture itself music was perceived rather differently. Through the recording industry, the blacks' vernacular culture was made available to them as a result of mass... Read More
The white audience was also far from homogeneous. "Hillbilly" music began to be recorded in 1923, and again surprised the record industry... Read More
Although the fashions gaining ground before World War I prefigured the "modernism" of the 1920s... Read More
At this period Chanel' s designs were for the leisured rich, the new international set who traveled Europe and the United States in a restless search... Read More
Chanel's collaboration with the Parisian artistic avant garde had been much more successful. As early as 1922... Read More
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