The Jazz Age

Flashcards about The Jazz Age

Jazz Age

Term applied to the period between the end of World War I in 1918 and the stock market crash of October 1929, characterized by opulence, fast music, urbanization, and technological change.

National Academy of Design

Powerful arts organization that rewarded narrative paintings and landscapes done in Impressionist styles, with tightly controlled exhibition opportunities.

Ashcan School

Group of artists led by Robert Henri, known for their representations of New York City, including images of working-class people and the grittier side of life in poor neighborhoods.

The Eight

Group of artists including Henri, Sloan, Glackens, Luks, Shinn, Prendergast, Lawson, and Davies, who exhibited together at the Macbeth Gallery in 1908 and were later nicknamed the Ashcan School.

Armory Show of 1913

International Exhibition of Modern Art held in New York, Chicago, and Boston that brought European avant-garde art movements like Cubism, Fauvism, and Expressionism to public awareness in the United States.

New York Dada

Antiwar art movement that began in Switzerland in 1915 and spread to New York, characterized by conceptual art, chance, randomness, nonsense, and the refashioning of everyday items into artworks.

Ready-mades

Ordinary consumer products purchased by artists like Marcel Duchamp, titled, and displayed in artistic spaces, transforming them from commodities into art.

Alfred Stieglitz

Photographer and gallerist who promoted photography as a fine art and opened the 291 Gallery, an important display site for European modernism and non-Western art.

291 Gallery

Art gallery on Fifth Avenue, founded by Alfred Stieglitz, that showcased European modernism and non-Western art. Known for neutral white walls with space between pieces which later became methods used for galleries today.

Geometric Abstraction

Type of abstraction that builds forms using primarily straight lines and rigid, simple shapes such as squares and triangles and breaks down three-dimensional objects.

Poster Portraits

Nonrepresentational portraiture style invented by Charles Demuth that referenced the subject using symbols, images, and texts relating to their life and work.

Imagism

Type of poetry practiced by literary modernists like William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound and H.D. This movement focused on conveying clear, direct imagery without the mediation of figurative language.

Biomorphic Abstraction

Abstraction that takes forms from the natural world, often incorporating references to the human body, plants, trees, water, or other landscape elements.

Taos art colony

Group of artists interested in representing the local landscape, people, and traditions in a modernist style and founded by Ernest Blumenschein and Bert Geer Phillips.

Pictorialism

Global movement that argued for photography to be accepted as a fine art.

New Objectivity

Form of photography that shied away from overly emotional, dramatic imagery and tried to return to purely objective recording without intervention from the photographer.

Group f/64

Group of California-based photographers who banded together in 1932 under the name Group f/64 that refers to an f-stop. Their visual style was similar to German New Objectivity.

Rayographs

Photographs made without a camera or film, in which Man Ray would lay objects directly onto light-sensitive paper and then expose the composition with bright light.

Photogram

Also called a contact print, this is a kind of print made when a photo is made by direct contact with a light-sensitive surface rather than in a camera.

Surrealism

Literary movement launched in 1924 by André Breton that embraced strange juxtapositions, uncanny imagery, and chance encounters to unlock the viewer’s unconscious mind.

Automatism

Form of creation used by Surrealists involving the writing or drawing without any preconceived plan.

Great Migration

Relocation of millions of African Americans from the rural South to industrial cities all over the country from 1915 to about 1970.

New Negro Movement

More all-encompassing term for the Harlem Renaissance that describes an upwardly mobile, educated, affluent, and self-determining Black population.

Progressive Era

Movement that lasted from around the 1890s to the 1920s that privileged regulation and the intervention of local, state, and federal government into citizens’ lives.

Zoning Laws

Laws to manage sprawl, create more orderly and navigable cities, and segregate industrial areas from residential areas to avoid pollution, but could also control building shapes/height and support racial and class segregation.

Art Deco

The style reflected a new direction for architecture and the applied arts, including furniture, lighting, textiles, jewelry, tableware, and metalwork. Its visual style was opulent and colorful.

Flappers

Jazz Age young women who wore the latest trends and frequented jazz clubs in big cities. Flapper identity was associated with youth culture.

Camp

An over-the-top or exaggerated quality that includes an ironic embrace of bad taste or tackiness.

Sprezzatura

a form of studied grace and elegance in portraiture that appears natural and spontaneous.

Social History

The interface of historical effects on the lives of ordinary people.

Speakeasies

Underground clubs serving illegal liquor that emerged as new sites of urban entertainment during the Prohibition Era.