Jazz Age City Life Flashcards

Urban Trends

• Urban areas were crucial for the development of Jazz Age art, architecture, and popular culture, including music, fashion, theater, and movies.
• Cities became sites of ethnic and racial mixing due to increased migration.

Population Shifts in the 1920s

• In-migration to cities from rural areas:
  • America had been a majority-rural nation for most of its history.
  • The 1920 census showed that most Americans lived in cities for the first time.
  • An additional six million Americans moved from the countryside to urban areas in the following decade.
• The Great Migration:
  • Movement of African Americans from the rural South to industrial cities (e.g., Birmingham, Cleveland, Detroit, Los Angeles, Chicago, New York).
  • New York City’s Black population more than doubled during the 1920s (from 152,000 to 328,000).
  • Occurred between 1915 and about 1970, with around six million African Americans seeking better opportunities and higher wages.
• Foreign immigration:
  • Continued to shape American cities’ culture, landscape, and languages.
  • Estimated 26 million new immigrants entered the country in the fifty years leading up to the Jazz Age.
  • 1910 census: In New York, 78.6 percent of residents were either foreign-born or first-generation children of immigrants.
  • Most of the fifteen largest cities in the country in 1910, recorded a majority of their population as immigrants or first-generation, except Baltimore and New Orleans.
  • Immigration quotas were established in legislation passed in 1921, 1924, and 1929, which began to taper off immigration.
  • Artists like Yasuo Kuniyoshi, Tina Modotti, Man Ray, and Alfred Stieglitz were immigrants or children of immigrants.

Infrastructure and City Planning During the 1920s

• Progressive Era Influence:
  • Urban America was still shaped by the policies of the Progressive Era (1890s-1920s).
  • The movement favored government regulation and intervention in citizens’ lives.
  • Reforms addressed political corruption, pollution, poverty, health and safety, and other urban challenges.
  • Growth of specialized education and professionalization in fields like medicine and law.
  • Ernest W. Burgess and Robert E. Park at the University of Chicago established urban studies as an academic discipline in the 1920s.
• Zoning Laws:
  • Used to manage sprawl, create orderly cities, and segregate industrial areas from residential areas.
  • Controlled the shape, height, type, and capacity of buildings.
  • Architects devised clever strategies to satisfy zoning laws.
  • New York City’s “setback” law (1916) required buildings to be set back a certain distance from the lot line and recede further with increasing height, in order to increase the amount of light that would reach the streets.
  • Led to “pyramidal” towers and inspired artistic responses.
  • The stepped-back profile became a fashionable marker of modernity and Art Deco, even where not legally required.
  • In 1926, the Supreme Court upheld zoning as constitutional.
  • At the end of the 1920s, 60% of urban Americans lived in a city or neighborhood with zoning laws.

William Van Alen, Chrysler Building (1928–30)

• Background:
  • William Van Alen (1888- ) was a New Yorker who studied at Pratt Institute and École des Beaux-Arts in Paris.
  • The École des Beaux-Arts curriculum stressed classical and Renaissance architectural models.
  • Van Alen worked as a professional architect in New York starting in 1911.
• Chrysler Building:
  • Commission secured in 1927.
  • Construction spanned from the late 1920s to the stock market crash.
  • At 1,046 feet, it was briefly the tallest building in the world.
  • Skyscrapers were uniquely American, enabled by steel frame construction, fireproofing, and elevator technology.
  • Architects competed to build taller structures.
• Walter P. Chrysler:
  • Automotive tycoon who bought the land and the commission in 1928, retaining Van Alen as architect.
• Art Deco Style:
  • Named after the 1925 “Exposition internationale des Arts décoratifs et industriels modernes” in Paris.
  • Reflected a new direction for architecture and applied arts.
  • Opulent and colorful, using new materials like plastic, aluminum, and chrome.
  • Visually exciting, with repeating patterns, geometric shapes, and iconography of trains, gears, and lightning bolts.
  • Appealed to consumers’ sense of dynamism, progress, and energy.
  • Exclusive New York stores commissioned designs for fabric patterns and ceramics with geometric motifs.
  • The Metropolitan Museum of Art put on an exhibition of Art Deco interior design in 1929.
  • The style’s popularity declined with the Depression’s financial crisis.
• Architectural Details:
  • Filled with opulent materials and Art Deco details.
  • Sits on a two-tiered square base with a slender middle section.
  • Corners feature eight oversized chrome eagle heads (gargoyles).
  • Decorative brickwork incorporates chevrons and images of wheels.
  • The crown is a massive pyramidal form with seven arch-shaped tiers faced with stainless-steel panels and triangular windows.
  • The exterior resembles a luxury automobile.
  • The crown references the Statue of Liberty and Egyptian pyramids.
  • Egyptian motifs were popular due to the “Egyptomania” craze after the opening of Tutankhamun’s tomb in 1922.
  • The lobby features colorful marble veneer, a mural, and elevator doors with Egyptian-inspired foliage designs.
• Significance:
  • The Chrysler Building was not primarily meant to house the Chrysler automotive corporation.
  • Its image was connected to Chrysler cars in the public mind.
  • Remains an emblem of the glamor, dazzle, and optimism of the Art Deco style and 1920s New York.

Gender, Fashion, and Consumer Culture

• Clothes reflect the wearer’s class, age, gender, race or ethnicity, occupation, and values.
• New clothing styles mark historical moments.
• Consumer goods provided the resources out of which an individual could fabricate such an identity.

Guy Pène du Bois, Woman on Sofa (c. 1922–27)

• Artist Background:
  • Guy Pène du Bois (1884-1958) was born in Brooklyn, New York.
  • Studied with William Merritt Chase and Robert Henri.
  • Lived in Westport, Connecticut, among artistic friends like F. Scott Fitzgerald and Sherwood Anderson.
  • Relocated to Paris and later moved to the village of Garnes in the French countryside from 1924 to 1930.
  • Known for images of Jazz Age spaces like cafes, art galleries, restaurants, and supper clubs.
• Description of Woman on Sofa:
  • Visual harmony in tones of red.
  • A young woman sits half-reclined on a couch, wearing red high-heeled shoes.
  • Short, curly red hair and bright red lip accent her face.
  • Boxy coral pink to orange-red dress and long string of beads.
  • The background and couch are painted in almost the same color.
  • Her confident facial expression and modern styling give the work both intimacy and power.
• The “New Woman”:
  • Emerged in the late 19th century as women took advantage of educational opportunities and moved into more public roles.
  • Early New Women were white and middle class, advocating for voting rights and women’s ability to work outside the home.
  • After the turn of the century, women stressed independence, intelligence, and unconventionality.
  • Art focused on rich European American women engaged in physical pursuits, like golf, tennis, and bicycling.
  • The exemplar was the “Gibson Girl,” imagined by Charles Dana Gibson.
  • Ashcan artists embraced a more working-class vision of the New Woman: one who rode urban public transportation, strolled with girlfriends in parks and downtown shopping streets, frequented cafes, lived on her own rather than with parents, and worked in factories or department stores.
• The Flapper:
  • The Jazz Age version of the New Woman became one of the most characteristic stereotypes of the Jazz Age: the flapper.
  • Flappers were imagined as young, liberated women who wore the latest trends and frequented jazz clubs in big cities.
  • The flapper style featured shorter skirts, uncorseted bodices, loose boxy silhouettes, long dangling necklaces, high heels, shorter haircuts, and makeup.
  • Flapper identity was associated with youth culture and “social emancipation.”
  • The idea of the flapper in popular culture was spread through fiction, including Anita Loos’s satirical novel Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1925).
  • Another popular iteration of the flapper was seen in John Held Jr.’s cartoons and covers for Life Magazine.
• Woman on Sofa as a Representation of the New Gender Dynamic:
  • The woman’s bold pose and direct gaze show her as a powerful figure.
  • Her hair and clothes identify her as a flapper figure.
  • Her appearance may have been taken from a character in a short story by Pène du Bois’s friend F. Scott Fitzgerald.
  • The painting may also reference the growing role of female patrons in the American art world.
  • Pène du Bois creates almost a mirror image of a well-known work by his former teacher, Robert Henri: a daring portrait of the art collector Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney (1916).
  • Whitney embodies the energy, openness, and daring glance of a liberated woman.
  • Whitney, the daughter of one of the richest industrialists in America, was a sculptor and a major patron of the arts.
  • The emergence of women as important patrons of the arts also appears frequently in Pène du Bois’s paintings.

Florine Stettheimer, Spring Sale at Bendel’s (1921)

• Artist Background:
  • Florine Stettheimer (1871-1944) spent most of her childhood and young adulthood in Europe.
  • Lived in a large apartment in New York with her mother and sister after 1914.
  • She painted portraits of important members of the New York art world.
  • Her style did not fit within the rigorous definitions of modernism expected of the Stieglitz circle.
  • Her paintings are unique in this period for their fantastical, colorful style.
• Subject Matter:
  • Stettheimer’s paintings often depict subject matter that would have seemed “vulgar” to critics like Stieglitz.
  • Broadway plays, advertising signage, people cavorting on beaches, marching bands, and beauty pageants.
• Spring Sale at Bendel’s:
  • Parodies the frenzied consumption of fashion and accessories at modern department stores.
  • The painting takes place in the changing room of Henri Bendel, an upscale department store that catered to wealthy women.
  • A dramatic scene unfolds in the changing room of the store, which is framed theatrically with heavy red velvet curtains.
  • Many of the shoppers have the bobbed hair associated with flappers.
  • Women try on clothes, gaze at themselves in the mirror, and even fight over a pile of goods.
  • In a whirlwind of textiles and flying brassieres, the frenzied activity shows a “moment of unabashed liberation.”
  • The frenzied activity shows a “moment of unabashed liberation.”
• Style and Technique:
  • Spring Sale at Bendel’s blends “high” and “popular” culture to create a work that is funny and serious at the same time.
  • The paint is applied thickly in places, built up with textured layers when Stettheimer wants to represent flowers, feather plumes, and textiles.
  • The figures are almost cartoonish, without traditional attention to proportion or musculature.
  • The color palette is mostly warm and saturated, including violet purples, brilliant oranges, reds, and yellows, with a few accents in washed-out jade green; the color combinations are jarring, lacking restraint.
  • This may display Stettheimer’s “camp” sensibility, an over-the-top quality that includes an ironic embrace of bad taste or tackiness.
• Art Historical Influences:
  • Stettheimer was interested in non-Western art, including Persian miniature painting.
  • Another art historical reference is the woman in black lingerie at the right.
  • While her pose, with arms thrown out and one leg kicking, resembles a flapper doing the Charleston, it is a reference to Nicolas Poussin’s Baroque painting The Adoration of the Golden Calf (1634).
• Significance:
  • Spring Sale at Bendel’s refers to the growth in the ready-to-wear clothing industry and its associated rituals of shopping and bargain hunting.
  • Uses references that are educated and art historical.

James Van Der Zee, Couple, Harlem (1932)

• Artist Background:
  • James Van Der Zee (1886-1983) was born in a middle-class Black family in Massachusetts.
  • In 1916, he opened his own portrait studio in New York’s Harlem neighborhood.
• Subject Matter:
  • Most of Van Der Zee’s output was photographic portraits.
  • Some of his famous clients included African-American leaders and celebrities like Adam Clayton Powell Jr. and Marcus Garvey.
  • The subjects of Couple, Harlem, like those in most of Van Der Zee’s works, are anonymous.
• Historical Context:
  • Van Der Zee’s work intersects with important historical and cultural events.
  • Many of his clients were part of the Great Migration.
  • The Great Migration led to wealth creation, better education, and freedom of movement, but it did not always lead to integration.
  • Urban newcomers tended to cluster in neighborhoods that already had large Black populations.
  • The Great Migration vitalized Black arts.
  • From being dispersed in rural areas, African-American artists found themselves clustered together in vibrant communities.
  • The Harlem Renaissance, also known as the New Negro Movement, occurred during this time.
  • The concept of a “New Negro” described an upwardly mobile, educated, affluent, and self-determining Black population.
• Couple, Harlem as a Representation of Black Life:
  • Van Der Zee catered to consumers who wanted to show their status through the material trappings of success.
  • Couple, Harlem positions the clients in the street outside a row of grand brownstone houses, with the man in the front seat of a Cadillac and the woman standing next to him.
  • Their poses reflect self-assurance and confidence.
  • Both are wearing full-length fur coats and fashionable hats, showing expense and dedication to the latest styles.
• Style and Technique:
  • Couple, Harlem captured not just the visual appearance of their sitters, but also a moment in fashion history.
  • With expensive furniture, curtains, and props usually supplied by the photographer, clients could project not just who they were, but who they wanted to be.
• Significance:
  • Van Der Zee’s clients could rely on him to deliver an image of luxury that presented them as up-to-date, fashionable, and proud Black Americans.
  • Van Der Zee’s work was “rediscovered” due to a 1969 exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum.

Archibald Motley Jr., Saturday Night (1935)

• Artist Background:
  • Archibald Motley Jr. (1891-1981) was born in New Orleans but relocated to Chicago in 1894.
  • His family was part of an earlier group of migrants than those who made up the Great Migration.
  • Motley studied at the prestigious School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
• Artistic Focus:
  • His early work focuses on portraits of the city’s affluent African-American community.
  • Motley was interested in the varieties of skin color and physiognomy in Black communities.
  • He was committed to painting diversities of appearance, skin tone, experience, and class identity.
• Travel to Paris:
  • In 1929, Motley won a fellowship from the Guggenheim Foundation and used it to spend a year in Paris.
  • Returning to Chicago in 1930, he increasingly incorporated influences from Black popular music, dance, and nightlife into his paintings of cabarets, pool halls, and dance clubs.
• Saturday Night:
  • Saturday Night may represent Washington, D.C., where Motley briefly held a teaching residency at Howard University.
  • It shows a female dance performer and a band playing live music.
  • Groups and couples are seated at round tables drinking wine and cocktails, while in the upper right corner musicians play on piano, saxophones, and drums.
• Style and Technique:
  • Motley interweaves and overlaps figures throughout the composition, creating a human rhythm to match the music’s syncopated beat.
• Cultural Context:
  • Saturday Night references new urban entertainments pioneered by Black performers, including song and dance variety shows, musicals and plays, comedy revues, and live jazz and blues sets.
  • Some venues, like the legendary Cotton Club nightclub in Harlem, were even segregated, allowing Black Americans to participate only as performers—not audience members.
• Controversies:
  • Some critics felt that Motley’s work showed caricatured representations of Black Americans.
  • Motley tried to incorporate both stereotypical and more nuanced representations of African-American people into his work, to present the diversity of modern Black life.
  • Motley maintained his representation of Black nightlife into the 1960s.

Thomas Hart Benton, City Activities with Dance Hall from America Today (1930–31)

• Artist Background:
  • Thomas Hart Benton (1889-1975) was a Midwestern artist who often chose to paint rural or regional subjects.
  • From 1926 to 1935, he taught at the Art Students League in New York City, where his students included Jackson Pollock.
• America Today Murals:
  • It consisted of ten panels that completely covered the walls of the boardroom, showing different facets of modern life.
  • City Activities with Dance Hall shows several popular urban entertainments of the 1920s, including the circus, soda fountain, movie theater, and dance hall.
• Prohibition Era:
  • City Activities with Dance Hall also refers to the Prohibition era.
  • The Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution went into effect in 1920, beginning an almost fourteen-year period when it was illegal to manufacture, sell, or import spirits, beer, and wine.
  • Underground clubs serving liquor, known as speakeasies, emerged as a new site of urban entertainment.
  • The ban on alcohol led to a sharp rise in organized crime.
• Significance:
  • Like many of Benton’s paintings, the America Today murals explore how historical events interface with the lives of ordinary people.
  • Benton referred to his art as social history.
  • These spectacles included song and dance variety shows, musicals and plays, comedy revues, and live jazz and blues sets.

Section III Summary

• Population Shifts
  • In 1920, most Americans lived in cities for the first time.
  • Six million African Americans moved from the rural South to northern cities between 1915 and 1970.
  • 26 million new immigrants came to the U.S. since 1870.
• Infrastructure and City Planning
  • Progressive Era favored government regulation and reforms.
  • Zoning laws managed sprawl and segregated areas.
  • NYC’s 1916 “setback” law led to “pyramidal” skyscrapers.
• Chrysler Building
  • Briefly the world’s tallest at 1,046 feet.
  • Allowed by steel frame construction and elevator tech.
  • Art Deco style with industrial materials and geometric shapes.
  • Details included eagle heads and wheel images.
  • Crown made of seven arch-shaped stainless steel tiers.
  • Egyptian models adapted due to “Egyptomania.”
• Gender, Fashion, and Consumer Culture
  • Urban identities constructed through fashion and shopping.
• Woman on Sofa
  • Shows a young woman in fashionable clothing.
  • “New Woman” emerged advocating for rights.
  • early 20th-century ideal, culminating in 1920 suffrage.
  • Jazz Age women as “flappers.”
• Spring Sale at Bendel’s
  • Parodies consumption of fashion.
  • Located in Henri Bendel upscale department store.
  • Blends high and popular culture with cartoonish figures.
  • Stettheimer’s camp sensibility with bad taste.
  • Influenced by art history.
  • Refers to growth in clothing industry.
• Couple, Harlem
  • Photographs by James Van Der Zee of Harlem residents.
  • Many clients from the Great Migration.
  • Black arts and literature explored Black experiences.
  • Catered to consumers showing status.
  • Couples wear fur coats with cadillac.
  • Portrays beauty and luxury.
  • Re-discovered in Metropolis musuem.
• Urban Entartainments
• Saturday Night
• Archibald Motley Jr.
  • Early work focuses on portraits of the city’s affluent African-American community.
  • Motley was interested in the varieties of skin color and physiognomy in Black communities.
  • He was committed to painting diversities of appearance, skin tone, experience, and class identity.
  • Motley interweaves and overlaps figures throughout the composition, creating a human rhythm to match the music’s syncopated beat.
• City Activities with Dance Hall
  • A Chicago-based artist.
  • It consisted of ten panels that completely covered the walls of the boardroom, showing different facets of modern life.
  • City Activities with Dance Hall shows several popular urban entertainments of the 1920s, including the circus, soda fountain, movie theater, and dance hall.
  • The Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution went into effect in 1920, beginning an almost fourteen-year period when it was illegal to manufacture, sell, or import spirits, beer, and wine.
  • Benton was a Midwestern artist who often chose to paint rural or regional subjects.