Introduction to Modern Art – Europe and America in the Early Twentieth Century

At the beginning of the twentieth century, the fragile idea that “civilization” would inexorably continue to progress began to fissure and finally crack in a mass of violence during World War I. Beginning in August 1914, the war initially pitted the Allies (Britain, France, and Russia) against the Central powers (Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire) and the Ottoman Empire. The United States eventually entered the war on the side of Britain and France in 1917, the American contribution helping guarantee victory of the Allies the following year.

World War I transformed almost every aspect of politics, economics, and society in the Western world. Trench warfare and the Maxim gun caused the deaths of millions of soldiers and the horrible maiming of as many again. The war also caused Europe to question the nineteenth-century imperial social and political order that had precipitated this carnage and foreshadowed a change in the character of warfare itself.

The October 1917 Russian Revolution led to the Russian Civil war, which in turn led to the triumph of the Bolshevik Communist Party, led by Vladimir Lenin, and to the founding of the U.S.S.R. in 1922. After Lenin’s death and an internal power struggle, Joseph Stalin emerged as leader of the U.S.S.R. Under Stalin, the U.S.S.R. annexed several neighboring states, suffered through the Great Purge of the 1930s and lost tens of millions during the war against Nazi Germany.

Fascism first took firm root in Italy when Benito Mussolini came to power in October 1922. In Germany, meanwhile, the postwar democratic Weimar Republic was destroyed by a combination of rampant hyperinflation and the enmity between different parties. By the time of the 1932 parliamentary election, Germany’s political and economic deterioration had paved the way for a Nazi Party victory and the promotion of its leader, Adolf Hitler, to chancellor.

The Stock Market Crash of 1929 in the United States plunged the Western world into a Great Depression that exacerbated political hostility between the major European countries and tore apart the social and political fabric of Britain and America. In America, President Franklin D. Roosevelt created the New Deal programs in 1933 to stimulate the economy with government spending, and France and Britain took their first steps toward the modern welfare state. But ultimately the Great Depression was only ended by the military build-up of World War II. The latter lasted from 1939 to 1945, and the human carnage it caused both in battle and to civilians raised some difficult questions about the very nature of our humanity.

The twentieth century also witnessed amazing new innovations in technology and manufacturing: the first powered flight (1903); the mass manufacture of automobiles (1909); the first public radio broadcast (1920); electrification of most of Western Europe and America (1920); the development of television (1926); and the jet engine (1937), to mention only a few.

Modern artists invented myriad new ways of seeing our world. Few read academic physics or psychology texts, but they lived in a world that was being transformed by such fields, along with so many other technological advances. Modern at was frequently subversive and intellectually demanding, and it was often visually, socially, and politically radical. In the modern period it seemed as if every group of artists developed a manifesto or statement of intent along with their art, leading this to be described later as the age of “isms.”^[1]