art and artists of 1920s€¦ · art and artists of 1920s charles sheeler edward hopper georgia...
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Art and Artists of 1920sCharles Sheeler
EdwardHopper
Georgia O’Keefe
Literature of 1920sF. Scott Fitzgerald
EugeneO’NeillCarl Sandburg
Ernest Hemingway
• Motion pictures were enormously popular beginning in the early 1900s. They offered inexpensive entertainment for Americans.
• Permanent theaters were called “nickelodeons” after the Nickelodeon Theater that opened in Pittsburgh in 1905. These theaters offered patrons about an hour of entertainment for the price of five to ten cents.
• In 1904 there were very few permanent theaters. By 1908 that number had increased to between 8,000 and 10,000. About 20 motion‐picture production companies turned out comedies, westerns, and historical epics, to the delight of audiences.
• As the story unfolded on the screen, live musical accompaniment made the experience even more exciting. Some “big‐budget” movies featured full orchestras
• By 1916 the smaller nickelodeons had been replaced by elaborate movie theaters known as “dream palaces.” More than 21,000 movie theaters were operating in the United States at that time.
Questions to Ponder…• How is today’s mass media similar to the 1920s?– Mass media = radio, movies, newspapers, magazines
• Why was art and literature so diverse?• How did artists and writers describe the 1920s?
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The Writers of the Harlem Renaissance
Claude McKay
Langston Hughes
Zora NealeHurston
• The Cotton Club began as the Club Deluxe, a 400‐seat nightclub. It was opened in 1920 by Jack Johnson, the first African American heavyweight boxing champion. At the time, patrons and performers were African American.
• In 1922 Owney Madden, a white New York gangster, took over the club and made vast changes. Renaming it the Cotton Club, Madden changed the interior to resemble a lush Southern plantation.
• Madden also instituted strict segregation. Performers and staff remained mostly African American, but the clientele was strictly white and upper class.
• Radio broadcasts from the Cotton Club gave national recognition to some of the biggest jazz and blues performers, including Duke Ellington, Cab Calloway, Ethel Waters, Louis Armstrong, and Lena Horne. From the African American perspective, the Cotton Club was a mixed blessing. While the club gave a unique opportunity to African American performers, it also perpetuated offensive stereotypes within its jungle‐inspired music and plantation décor.
• The Harlem riots in 1935 temporarily closed the Cotton Club. It reopened in a new location in 1936, but it never regained its immense popularity. It closed permanently in 1940.
Dancer Josephine Baker was known in the United States and abroad for
her unique performance style.
Duke Ellington’s legendary career as a
composer, musician, and bandleader spanned more than 50 years.
Louis Armstrong and his band, the Hot Five, were extremely influential in the development and
evolution of jazz music.
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Bessie Smith was one of the earliest and most famous women blues singers.
Singer and actor Paul Robeson created a sensation in a 1925 production of Eugene O’Neill’s play “Emperor
Jones.”
The Great Migration
1.Northern Migration2.NAACP3.Black
Nationalism
Marcus Garvey(1887‐1940)
Marcus Garvey was an influential African
American leader and champion of “black pride,” ultimately
undone by controversial comments and
questionable business practices.
Born in St. Ann’s Bay, Jamaica, in 1887, Garvey grew up to travel extensively
before returning home to found the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA),
which was devoted to establishing a black government in Africa.
Receiving little support from his fellow
Jamaicans, Garvey took the UNIA to the United States. He worked to
reach African Americans in
impoverished areas.
He became an early proponent of African American pride and celebrated its culture in his newspaper Negro
World.
He argued that the key to African American
economic independence was to
work within the boundaries of capitalism and
established numerous African American–run
businesses.
As much as Garvey was respected for his
leadership, he was also controversial for his opinions about the
races.
He was a strong believer in separating whites and African Americans and even endorsed the racist organization the Ku
Klux Klan for promoting similar
values.
Garvey’s reputation suffered further following his
conviction, two‐year imprisonment, and deportation for his
involvement in a mail fraud scheme in the
1920s.
He was never able to equal the influence he built in the United States. He died in England in 1940.