Chapter Fourteen: Art, Literature, and Music of the 20th Century

A set of flashcards covering key vocabulary and concepts from Chapter Fourteen, focusing on 20th-century art, literature, and music themes.

Jackson Pollock

The leading action painter of the twentieth century.

Paris → New York

The two cities between which major art production shifted after 1945.

Spiritual emptiness / understanding of modern dislocation

What T. S. Eliot claimed was brought closer by the knowledge accumulated by Western civilization in his poem The Rock.

Abstract Expressionists / Wassily Kandinsky

Artists who aimed to purge the canvas of all recognizable subject matter.

Provocateur

The role artists should embrace according to Marcel Duchamp and other Dada figures, as concept creators rather than mere craftsmen.

Stanislavsky Method

The realistic acting method associated with Konstantin Stanislavsky.

Ballet / modern dance

The type of art Vaslav Nijinsky is associated with.

Repression of instinctual drives

According to Freud, civilization was the product of this control of human impulses.

Experimentation, abstraction, rejection of realism, expression of subconscious, fragmentation

Some characteristics of art in the first half of the twentieth century.

Antisemitism and racist ideology

What the Holocaust resulted from under Hitler's regime.

Dada (or Surrealism)

The artistic movement that thrived on nihilism and irrationalism.

Bombing of Guernica during the Spanish Civil War

What Picasso's landmark painting, Guernica, immortalized.

Improvisation, syncopation, swing rhythms, blue notes

The major characteristics of jazz music.

Montage

The use of cinematic shots in rapid succession.

American folk music / rural life

Where Aaron Copland found inspiration for much of his music.

Human behavior / sexual energy

The important drive associated with the libido according to Freud.

Archetypes, myths, and symbols across cultures

What Jung argued the collective unconscious manifested itself in.

Fantasy, trick films, early story-based cinema

The popular genres exemplified by the pioneering narrative films of George Méliès and Edwin S. Porter.

Georges Méliès

The early filmmaker who created the pioneering narrative film, A Trip to the Moon.

Clarity, precision, concrete imagery

The most distinctive feature of Imagist poetry.

Soviet Union / Russia under Lenin (or Stalin)

The first totalitarian state of the twentieth century.

Space, time, and energy are relative / physics is not absolute

What Albert Einstein and other twentieth-century physicists argued.

Color / non-naturalistic colors

The bold use of these in Fauvist artworks.

Ulysses

The landmark work by James Joyce featuring the central figure Leopold Bloom.

Modern architecture / Bauhaus movement

The movements associated with the names Gropius and Le Corbusier.

Science fiction

The literary genre pioneered by Jules Verne and H. G. Wells.

Cantilevers and integration with the natural landscape

The inventive use upon which Wright's extraordinary house, 'Fallingwater,' depended.

Cubism

The style that Picasso's landmark work Les Demoiselles d'Avignon was a precursor to.

Jacob Lawrence

The Harlem Renaissance artist who painted 'The Migration Series,' depicting the movement of African-Americans post-World War I.