The Arts of the Twenties [antikvár]

The Roaring Twenties The art world has a tendency to produce creative individuals who are at once heir lo all that has gone before them and at the same time in revolt against their immediate predecessors. Consequently, the Twenties really began well before 1920, a date we have chosen largely for convenience. Early traces of 1920s movements can be found from 1911 onwards, in a Malevich or a Picasso, for example, or in a Kandinsky or a Delaunay It would lake several years, however, for the inevitable turning of son against father to lake form. The vegetable arabesques of Art Nouveau gave way to the circles and squares of Art Deco. But the transition was progressive; between the two, there was a curious union of swirls and cubes, curls and spheres. The Twenties were fundamentally a period of transition, witness to a new art taking over from the old. By comparing and contrasting, for the first time, all the fields of art-painting, sculpture, architecture, design, stage design, graphics, photography and cinema-and by placing them against their artistic, socio-political and scientific background, we arrive at a whole greater than the sum of the individual parts—not simply an assemblage of subjects previously separated in volumes on the shelves of an immense library, but a bringing to light of the extent of interaction between the fields, how much they complement each other, and to what degree the spirit of the age emerges from their interaction. There is a tendency in conventional art histories—and this is true too of the great Paris-Berlin, Paris-Moscow and Paris-New York exhibitions at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris—to highlight only the avant-garde. This is to forget the middle-class aesthetics that govern everyday life. When Le Corbusier designed his famous tubular armchair we so appreciate today, the heart's desire of the ordinary French public was to be found-and would be for a long lime to come—in the Henri II furniture by Dufayel. From this confrontation between makers and users—too often kept arbitrarily apart-emerged, little by little, a style crystallizing the era, containing both the good and the less satisfying elements. In the 1920s, the same ordinary French person was well content with the new, low-rent housing, whose constricted size led to a new conception of space: the single room, ancestor of the living room, was transformed into a bedroom, thanks to the cozy corner; stacking chairs enabled the same space lo be converted temporarily into a dining room. Two worlds coexisted and influenced each other in the frenetic pace of living that-understandabiy—followed the war, The adherents of official art were still present, with their Salons and their State Commissions. Yet in all areas, even though some references to turn-of-the-century art were still in evidence, it is clear that a new art was coming into being, The beginnings of design can be discerned: a search for the functional and simple, ideas upheld not only by the Bauhaus, which called for a 1 Tamara de Lempicka:Se/f-por(ra/l 2 Fernand Léger: Trte B(cyc/e 1929 C. 1928. Oil on canvas, 35 x 26 cm. Oil on canvas, 92 x 65 cm, Nadia Private collection, London, Léger Colleclion,