The Jazz Age

Introducing the "Jazz Age"

• The Jazz Age, Roaring Twenties, and Machine Age occurred between the end of World War I (1918) and the stock market crash of October 1929.
• The United States experienced prosperity and hope during this period.
• Fashion was opulent and glamorous, music was fast, cities grew, and car and home ownership increased.
• New roles for women, the growth of Black arts, and rapid technological change characterized this dynamic era.
• The era also faced labor conflicts, racial tensions, and violence.
• Arts captured the period's contradictions through abstraction and realist representation.
• This resource guide explores artistic modernism and experimentation in the 1920s through painting, photography, architecture, decorative arts, and sculpture.

Overview of Art in America Between 1900 and the End of World War I

• At the start of the 20th century, American artists operated within the academy system established in the 1820s.
• The National Academy of Design was the most influential arts organization, favoring narrative paintings and landscapes in Impressionist styles.
• Exhibition opportunities were controlled by juries, discouraging risks in subject matter or style.
• By the end of World War I, America was becoming a center for modernist experimentation in the arts.
• Key moments, individuals, and groups facilitated the exciting experiments of the 1920s.

The Ashcan School

• Robert Henri, a portrait artist with training in Philadelphia and Paris, led the Ashcan School.
• Henri taught in New York starting in 1901 and mentored John Sloan, William Glackens, George Wesley Bellows, and George Benjamin Luks.
• These artists depicted New York City, including working-class life and poor neighborhoods.
• Their style featured thick impasto brushwork inspired by European painters like Diego Velazquez, Frans Hals, and Édouard Manet.
• They exhibited in small, independent art galleries due to rejections from conservative venues.
• In 1908, a group show at the Macbeth Gallery in Manhattan featured works by Henri, Sloan, Glackens, Luks, Everett Shinn, Maurice Prendergast, Ernest Lawson, and Arthur B. Davies.
• They were known as "The Eight" and later nicknamed the "Ashcan School" by a critic.
• They often depicted immigrant neighborhoods and working-class entertainment venues like bars, restaurants, music halls, and boxing clubs.
• The group disbanded around 1917 but brought social issues into American painting.

The Armory Show of 1913

• While the Ashcan School challenged art exhibition norms, their work maintained naturalism rather than aggressive formal experimentation.
• European avant-garde movements like Cubism, Fauvism, and Expressionism explored abstraction.
• The International Exhibition of Modern Art, held at the 69th Regiment Armory in New York in February and March 1913, introduced these styles to the U.S.
• The show was nicknamed "The Armory Show."
• Organized by Arthur B. Davies, Walt Kuhn, and Walter Pach, it featured over 1,300 works of modern European and American art.
• The exhibition included nineteenth-century movements like Impressionism and contemporary art from Europe and the United States.
• Between 250,000 and 275,000 people attended the exhibition across its three venues.
• Artists like Claude Monet were familiar to American audiences, but Pablo Picasso and Marcel Duchamp were not.
• Movements like Cubism, Expressionism, and Futurism (an Italian movement focused on speed, technology, modern life, and dynamism) were also new.
• Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 (1912) puzzled viewers with its angular depiction of the human form in motion and the merging of space and time.
• Compared to these, American landscape and still life paintings appeared old-fashioned.
• Some critics were alarmed by the Armory Show, associating visual experimentation with political unrest.
• One critic called modernist abstraction "Lawless Art," while another described the artworks as "the chatter of anarchistic monkeys."
• John White Alexander, president of the National Academy of Design, supported the younger artists, recognizing the need for change.
• The Armory Show, although controversial, energized the American art world before World War I.
• It inspired American collectors and fostered independent galleries, salons, and artistic publications.

New York Dada

• The outbreak of war in Europe in 1914 influenced early 20th-century American art.
• Dada, an antiwar art movement, originated in Switzerland in 1915 and spread across Europe.
• French artists, including Marcel Duchamp (arrived in 1915) and Francis Picabia, moved to New York.
• These artists gathered at the home of Louise and Walter Arensburg, collectors and supporters of modernism.
• Artistic "salons" and support from critics in "little magazines" bolstered cutting-edge artistic experimentation during World War I.
• While European works in the Armory Show challenged visual representation, New York Dada artists focused on conceptual art.
• Conceptual artworks prioritize the idea behind the art over fabrication, technique, or representation.
• These artists embraced chance, randomness, nonsense, and the transformation of everyday objects into artworks, questioning authorship and artistic skill.
• Duchamp's ready-mades, such as In Advance of the Broken Arm (1915), a snow shovel, transformed ordinary consumer products into "art."
• Duchamp was fascinated by American engineering, architecture, plumbing, and popular culture, bringing irreverence to the art world.
• He influenced artists like Man Ray and a younger generation in the 1950s and 1960s.
• Duchamp is sometimes considered the "father" of conceptual art.

Alfred Stieglitz and 291 Gallery

• Alfred Stieglitz, a photographer and gallerist, was another influential figure.
• Stieglitz, the son of German immigrants, studied in Germany in the 1880s and settled in New York after 1890.
• He was associated with Pictorialism, advocating for photography as a fine art.
• In 1903, Stieglitz began publishing his journal, Camera Work, which featured important photographers.
• In 1905, Stieglitz opened his first art gallery, "291" on Fifth Avenue.
• Originally a photographic gallery, 291 became a display site for European modernism, showcasing works by Picasso and Henri Matisse.
• It was among the first American venues to exhibit non-Western art, featuring African sculpture in 1914.
• The gallery used unconventional display methods, highlighting fewer works with neutral white walls and ample space.
• These practices became standard for exhibiting modern and contemporary art.
• While 291 closed in 1917, Stieglitz continued to organize art shows, later managing the Intimate Gallery and An American Place.
• Stieglitz championed American painters like Arthur G. Dove, Marsden Hartley, Max Weber, and Georgia O’Keeffe.
• He maintained his photographic practice and wrote art criticism in the 1920s.
• Despite his support, Stieglitz was known for being exclusive and rigid in his definitions of modernism, which could impact an artist’s reputation.

Modernist Painting

• The first two selected works are by members of the Stieglitz group.
• Inspired by the European avant-garde, modernist painters incorporated innovations from Cubism and Expressionism.
• They sought to move away from narrative and naturalism towards abstract forms.
• These artists responded to a broader culture of modernist experimentation in literature, poetry, and music.

Charles Demuth, I Saw the Figure 5 in Gold, 1928

• Charles Demuth (1883-1935) studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and in Paris.
• His works include watercolor paintings of still lifes, industrial landscapes, and entertainment scenes.
• In Paris, Demuth befriended Marsden Hartley, and both found European society more accepting of gay men.
• Hartley introduced Demuth to Alfred Stieglitz, who gave him a solo show in 1926.
• Art historian Wanda Corn suggests Stieglitz's support for Demuth was less enthusiastic due to Demuth's sexual orientation.
• I Saw the Figure 5 in Gold employs geometric abstraction, using straight lines and simple shapes.
• Geometric abstraction breaks down three-dimensional objects and represents them as arrangements on a two-dimensional surface, avoiding illusions of depth.
• Early Cubism, Italian Futurism, Russian Suprematism and Constructivism, and Vorticism also fall into this category.
• Artists using geometric abstraction aim to present movement, volume, and depth on a two-dimensional surface.
• Demuth was inspired by Cubists Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso.
• John Marin and Max Weber also practiced geometric abstraction in the Stieglitz circle.
• Demuth maintained friendships with artists in various media and invented "poster portraits" to celebrate them.
• Poster portraits referenced the subject using symbols, images, and texts rather than visual likenesses, visually resembling advertising and Cubism.
• I Saw the Figure 5 in Gold is a "portrait" of poet William Carlos Williams, whom Demuth met in Philadelphia.
• Williams practiced imagism, conveying direct imagery without figurative language or rhyme.
• Williams believed poetry's meaning came from its composition, sensory impressions, and sounds.
• Demuth's composition complements the sharpness of Williams's poems.
• I Saw the Figure 5 in Gold uses red, gold, and gray applied with thin brushstrokes to create stencils like commercial advertising.
• The number 5 is repeated three times, creating an impression of recession, movement, or fading sound.
• An irregular polygon of red square and triangular forms sits behind the gold numbers.
• Pale gold circles mimic streetlamps, and hints of angular buildings suggest an urban setting.
• The words "BILL" and "CARLO" mimic electrical signage.
• Demuth signs the work with block letters and uses the initials "WCW."
• The painting represents Williams's poem "The Great Figure" (1921), which describes a fire engine's movement down a street.
• Demuth uses the shrinking numbers and angular lines to indicate the engine's noise and speed, creating an illusion of rushing movement and echoing sound.
• Demuth and Williams shared a mission to promote modernism, and the painting visually represents Williams's words.

Georgia O’Keeffe, The Lawrence Tree, 1929

• Georgia O’Keeffe (1887-1986) studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and in New York, and was one of the yougest memebrs of Stieglitz group.
• She was influenced by Arthur Wesley Dow, whose book Composition (1899) derived aesthetic principles from East Asian art.
• Dow stressed connections across the arts and saw music as a model for abstract painting.
• O'Keeffe was also influenced by Vasily Kandinsky's On the Spiritual in Art (1912, translated 1914).
• O’Keeffe used biomorphic abstraction, taking forms from nature and the human body, rather than geometric abstraction.
• Her radical works, such as Blue and Green Music (1918), used music as inspiration.
• This approach was influenced by painters like James Abbott McNeill Whistler, who used color "harmonies" and "symphonies."
• Kandinsky saw paintings as "new symphonic construction[s]" using brushstrokes instead of notation.
• Kandinsky influenced fellow Stieglitz circle member Arthur G. Dove, who echoed jazz rhythms in works like George Gershwin – Rhapsody in Blue, Part I (1927).
• O’Keeffe visited exhibitions at Stieglitz’s 291 gallery, and in 1917, Stieglitz presented her first solo show.
• O’Keeffe often modeled for Stieglitz’s photographic portraits.
• They married in 1924, and Stieglitz supported O’Keeffe’s career but also tried to control her imagery as an idealized “feminine voice."
• While known for floral paintings, O’Keeffe also painted New York City skyscrapers and New Mexico desert landscapes.
• After Stieglitz's death, O’Keeffe moved to Abiquiu, New Mexico, in 1949, where she lived and worked until her death in 1986.
• O’Keeffe was not the first to draw inspiration from the Southwest. In 1898, Ernest Blumenschein and Bert Geer Phillips founded the Taos art colony, representing the local landscape and people in a modernist style.
• In 1915, The Taos Society of Artists was established providing Euro-American artists with support.
• The artists' representations of the Southwest essentialized the area and its peoples.
• By 1927, John Sloan mocked the commercialization of Native American culture in his print The Indian Detour.
• In 1917, Mabel Dodge moved to Taos, hosting discussions about art, literature, and politics with guests including D. H. Lawrence, O’Keeffe, and Marsden Hartley.
• Lawrence, known for controversial novels, wrote while sitting under a ponderosa pine tree that became known as the "Lawrence tree."
• O’Keeffe stayed with Dodge Luhan in 1929 and enjoyed lying under the tree.
• The Lawrence Tree uses blackish-green for the canopy, reddish-brown for the trunk and branches, and blue for the night sky.
• The exaggerated trunk mimics rushing movement, emphasizing the tree's growth.
• The clustered needles resemble clouds, and O’Keeffe instructed that the painting be hung upside down, disrupting traditional landscape conventions.
• O’Keeffe appreciated Lawrence’s honesty about relationships and reverence for nature. Lawrence imagined trees as sentient beings.
• The confluence of artistic and literary inspiration underscores the tree's cosmic significance.

Modernist Photography

• By the end of World War I, photography had become a complex art form.
• Some photographers promoted it as fine art, while others dismissed it as mechanical.
• Pictorialism in the 1890s and early 1900s established photography as an art form.
• Constructivism, Dada, and Surrealism embraced photography.
• Photographers pushed boundaries through cropping, lighting, focus, and techniques.

Imogen Cunningham, Leaf Pattern, Before 1929

• Imogen Cunningham (1883-1976) began studying photography at the University of Washington, majoring in chemistry.
• She emphasized the importance of technological and chemical expertise for photographers.
• She assisted ethnographic photographer Edward S. Curtis from 1907 to 1909.
• Cunningham corresponded with Pictorialists like Alvin Langdon Coburn.
• She opened her own studio in Seattle in 1910, creating posed narrative photos with soft focus, similar to F. Holland Day and Clarence White.
• Her goal was to evoke emotional states and memories.
• In 1915, Cunningham married painter George Roy Partridge and moved to San Francisco, meeting Edward Weston in 1920.
• In 1923, Cunningham shifted from Pictorialism to sharply focused images of botanical specimens, inspired by Germany's New Objectivity movement.
• New Objectivity aimed for objective recording without manipulation.
• Cunningham subscribed to magazines like Das Deutsche Lichtbild, which featured images by photographers such as Albert Renger-Patzsch.
• In 1929, Leaf Pattern and nine other photographs were accepted into the important international exhibition, “Film und Foto.”
• Weston described Cunningham's works as honest presentations without tricks.
• In the 1930s, Cunningham exhibited with Group f/64, which used settings (f/64) to create images with sharpness across focal depth.
• Other members of the group included Weston, Alma Lavenson, Consuelo Kanaga, Ansel Adams, and Willard Van Dyck.
• Their style mirrored New Objectivity, using crisp focus, tight cropping, and dramatic lighting.
• Edward Weston wrote photography was unique due to its instantaneous recording process, precision, and subtle gradations.
• Leaf Pattern is modernist in its high contrast and exploration of pure form.
• The leaf represents interesting shapes, and the dramatic shadows give the composition visual interest.
• Willard Van Dyck noted that Cunningham's work was a response against manipulation in Pictorial practice.