Cours n° 2

In the end of 19° century, a new vision of the human mind developed, imposing the reality of the unconscious. WW1 radicalized this vision. Why?

Like the figure or pattern of fragmentation as a new esthetic in Art, WW1 was the first war in which new weapons were used, weapons characterized by their power of fragmentation (explosives). As a result, there were missing limbs and fragmented bodies on the battlefields. It was the first war in which photos circulated (fragments of reality). A war which was characterized by a radical contrast, a huge gap of the reality between battles and the population’s pleasant life (far from the front). A war which produced a very disquieting demonstration; in the 1910s a new social context started (different from the ones in previous wars). Soldiers were young people for whom education had been compulsory until the age of 14 (they had never been so educated in previous wars).

During the first years of the 20° century, there were scientific discoveries and social improvements (telephone, electricity, cars…) and comfort. Progress and faith in progress were growing, there was hope. WW1 imposed the idea that scientific and social progress could not prevent the butchery, the savagery of the human nature. WW1 in itself was a demonstration of the fragmentation of the human mind, capable of remarkable progress and of the most savage behavior.

Another source of fragmented esthetics.
K. Malevitch (a Russian painter) with his several fragments and abstraction (fields seen from above). They were the first abstract paintings invented. Images were not supposed to be representations of reality.
With the discovery of the unconscious, the outer world and the perception of it was entirely conditioned by human perception and its limits. Hence a radical interest in the inner world, human mind’s impressions and interpretations. Painters decided to find representation for these visions of the mind; interior visions. Abstract painting was an attempt to produce representations of these visions without the constraints of the outside world. It was connected to new shapes.

Now it was possible to observe the earth from a plane; a new experience to observe countries and cities from the sky. Hence the new shapes and the visual experiments.

From abstraction, we can draw any interpretation or experiment we want.
An opera, “Ariadne auf Naxos” (1913) which was based on a Greek and sad legend, was performed for rich bourgeois families (an opera in an opera). So their were two performances at the same time and on the same stage (Greek tragedy and Italian Comedy).
The autobiographic album of photographs by Rosamond LEHMANN is a momentum of her youth. It is a picnic echoing a battlefield, an expression of the most profound mood in the 1920s.

After WW1, life radically changed. It had nothing in common with the 1900s. 11 million young men had died and 11 million came back home mutilated. It was a common, a current experience to meet sometimes faceless men. It was a very hard context, especially for children.
Modernism is divided into several periods. The young people had experienced WW1 without the philosophical equipment to understand the social change they could observe. There was a different between generations in front of the reality of the war. Middle age and old ones could talk about it with patriotism, the younger did not see meaning in those words (only a sacrifice), they saw adults who justified a war who accept it without revolting against its reality which was the death of a generation and an impotent political power unable to stop the war earlier. They saw their past as a lost period/continent. After the war, the generation (20s) felt depressed and lost because their first contact with the world have been distorted and cheated. They found themselves in a position to reinvent a new contact with language.

2 periods
- High Modernism (1900s – 1920s) with Virgina Woolf, James Joyce, T.S. Elliot, the “cannon makers” building esthetics in literature. They were adults in those years (born in 1880s)
- Late modernism (generation born in the 1900s) they were children during WW1, searching maturity afterwards (1930s). They had a very different and depressed artistic message to deliver; to reinvent reasons, motivations for artists to go on creating and to face a major crisis.

Merci Louis ! Tout ceci est d'une grande aide quand on a oublié/laissé volontairement ses cours à Dijon ^^
Juste, si je peux me permettre, la photo de jeunesse que nous a montrée la prof est de Rosamond LEHMANN. La prononciation est effectivement équivoque

Oups, thanks Eleonore ! Je vais corriger cela ^^