Art 330 contemporary humanities
Chapter Review: New York, Skyscraper Culture, and the Jazz Age

The Harlem Renaissance explored the double-consciousness defining African-American identity, which was first defined in the writings of W.E.B. Du Bois. Poet Claude McKay, Charles S. Johnson of the National Urban League, and philosopher Alain Locke all saw Harlem as the center of an avant-garde destined to rehabilitate African Americans from a position of spiritual and financial impoverishment for which, in Locke’s words, “the fate and conditions of slavery have so largely been responsible.” To this end, first in the Harlem issue of the sociology journal the Survey Graphic, and then in his anthology The New Negro, both published in 1925, Locke emphasized the spirit of the young writers, artists, and musicians of Harlem. What elements of Harlem culture were they especially interested in capturing in their work? Harlem was, after all, the center of blues and jazz. The greatest of the blues singers in the 1920s was Bessie Smith. What new kind of phrasing did Smith bring to her work? In jazz, Louis Armstrong’s Dixieland jazz originated out of New Orleans and made its way north to Chicago. What are the characteristics of Dixieland? In 1927, Duke Ellington began a five-year engagement at Harlem’s Cotton Club. What distinguishes his brand of jazz?

1. 36.2 Discuss the International Style in architecture and its development as a response to skyscraper architecture in the 1920s.

2. The 1920s represent a period of unprecedented growth in New York City, as downtown skyscraper after skyscraper rose to ever greater heights, and the promise of the machine became a driving force in culture. What did artists and photographers see in both the skyscraper and the machine? The New York building boom of the 1920s, dominated by the highly ornamented and decorative architecture epitomized by Cass Gilbert’s neo-Gothic Woolworth Building and William van Alen’s Art Deco Chrysler Building, was countered by the International Style. How does the International Style differ from Gilbert’s and Van Alen’s work?

3. 36.3 Examine how both the idea of the new and a sense of place define American modernism.

4. American novelists of the era responded to the sense of the country’s new and unique identity—embodied perhaps most of all in its jazz—by concentrating on the special characteristics of the American scene. How would you distinguish between F. Scott Fitzgerald’s sense of place and Ernest Hemingway’s? What distinguishes William Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County?

5. The “new” sound of jazz also embodied the modernist imperative, first expressed by Ezra Pound, to “make it new.” In poetry, this imperative was realized in the work of William Carlos Williams, E.E. Cummings, and Hart Crane. The work of all three celebrates the new machine culture of the era even as it attempts to capture the vernacular voice of everyday Americans. These interests are reflected as well in the painting of Joseph Stella, Charles Demuth, Marsden Hartley, and Georgia O’Keeffe. How is the idea of a new “machine-inspired Classicism” expressed in American verse and painting of the 1920s? Like the poets of the era, the experimental plays of Eugene O’Neill captured, as perhaps never before in the theater, the vernacular voices of the American character even as they stressed the isolation and alienation of the modern experience. How does O’Neill’s dialogue reflect this sense of alienation?

6. 36.4 Outline the characteristics of silent film in its “golden age.”

7. During the early 1900s, large numbers of immigrants, particularly second-generation American Jews, migrated out of New York, where many had worked in the garment industry, to California, where they founded the motion-picture industry in and around Hollywood. The studio system they developed dominated filmmaking worldwide. What are the features of the studio system? By the end of the 1920s, there were five major American studios—Fox, MGM, Paramount, RKO, and Warner—and three smaller ones—Universal, Columbia, and United Artists. They focused their promotional efforts on the appeal of their stars, including Mary Pickford, Charlie Chaplin, and Douglas Fairbanks. They also depended on their audience’s attraction to certain genres. What are some of the chief genres that they developed? Experimental film flourished in Europe—in German Expressionist cinema and Surrealist film—but the American studios dominated the industry, producing between 75 percent and 90 percent of films screened in most countries during the 1920s and 1930s. How did European audiences differ from those in America?