The Werkbund: Design Theory & Mass Culture before the First World War

1998 ◽  
Vol 21 (3) ◽  
pp. 612
Author(s):  
Joan Campbell ◽  
Frederic J. Schwartz
Author(s):  
Jane Stevenson

This chapter examines city life, mass culture, and the ways that cities were a challenge to modernism in that they were theatres of memory, both individual and collective: it is no accident that modernism was best received in those cities so damaged by the First World War that many links with the past were broken, which was not the case in Paris or London. It argues the importance of Charlie Chaplin, whose art descended from the commedia dell’arte via the slapstick tradition of British harlequinade (loved by the Sitwells), and also examines the popular surrealism of some early cartoons (notably Felix, Krazy Kat, and Betty Boop). Ideas cycled back and forth between high and low, expanding the basis of modernism’s audience. Both cubism and surrealism were interpreted as styles, while artists, poets, and ballet designers drew on popular culture, quoting and reinterpreting.


2016 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 102-106
Author(s):  
John M. Thompson

As Eric Hobsbawm recounts in his classic work, The Age of Empire: 1875–1914, the final decades of the nineteenth century and the initial decades of the twentieth century were years of enormous change and activity across the globe. It was the apogee of imperialism for the West; mass, or at least more broadly based, democracy emerged in many countries; total wealth increased dramatically; technological changes greatly reduced travel times and facilitated rapid, even instantaneous, communication between states and continents, which, in turn, allowed the spread of mass culture in a way the world had never seen before. At the center of these events were the great powers of Europe—in particular Britain, France, Germany, Russia, and Austria-Hungary—and the United States. Indeed, the interaction between Europe's great powers and the United States drove much of the political, economic, cultural, and technological ferment that culminated in the First World War. No American played a more important role in this process than Theodore Roosevelt, and this special issue is devoted to exploring key facets of TR's, and by extension his country's, relationship with Europe.


Slavic Review ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 76 (3) ◽  
pp. 647-654 ◽  
Author(s):  
Svetlana Malysheva

The article analyzes the instrumentalization of death during the first two decades after the 1917 Russian Revolution. The Bolsheviks made use of two trends in the culture of death that took shape during the First World War. One, a cult of the dead communist “leaders and heroes”, and two, the minimalist, non-religious, pragmatic treatment of the dead recommended for “ordinary” citizens, who were supposed to help build new Soviet hierarchies. As a result, by the end of the 1930s, a peculiar hybrid mass culture of death took shape that combined the surviving religious tradition with elements of the Soviet cult.


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