by Jeanne Willette | Apr 26, 2019 | Modern, Modern Aesthetics, Modern Art
The New Woman needed new clothes. Once they had shortened their skirts and worn trousers women would refuse to be immobilized again. But after the Great War, she literally had nothing to wear and an entirely new wardrobe was invented in a period of a very few years....
by Jeanne Willette | Apr 19, 2019 | Modern, Modern Aesthetics, Modern Art
She was called the “Flapper” and was known as the New Woman. A product of the Great War, she was of the new generation of women who had been liberated from the past but the upheavals of the War. Her first act of assertion had been to take over the jobs of men, absent...
by Jeanne Willette | Apr 12, 2019 | Modern, Modern Aesthetics, Modern Art
The New Woman and her counterpart, the New Man, were post-war products of a decade of many names. The 1920s were The Jazz Age, the Roaring Twenties, and Les Années folles, the crazy years. Each name has a slightly different connotation: the Jazz Age is obviously about...
by Jeanne Willette | Apr 5, 2019 | Modern, Modern Aesthetics, Modern Art
The new woman, who debuted after the Great War had a prewar predecessor. Irene Castle (1893-1969) and American ballroom dancer who performed with her husband Vernon, found that long hair was hot and heavy and incompatible to the athleticism of dancing. In 1915, she...
by Jeanne Willette | Mar 29, 2019 | Modern, Modern Aesthetics, Modern Art
Looking back, one can say that the Great War merely accelerated an ongoing trend in female fashion. Women, particularly younger women, were rejecting the constraining clothing that prevented them from playing tennis with comfort, going swimming without being drowned...
by Jeanne Willette | Mar 22, 2019 | Modern, Modern Aesthetics, Modern Art
It would be safe to say that everything women wore before the Great War ceased to be acceptable and that after the war all that was left as useful models for the future was men’s clothing. It is one of the ironies of women’s fashions and the redesigning of the modern...
by Jeanne Willette | Mar 15, 2019 | Modern, Modern Aesthetics, Modern Art
Norman Wilkinson was British, an artist, and had just returned from submarine patrol during the disastrous Gallipoli campaign, where he realized that the British ships, painted black, made the perfect silhouette and the perfect target for a lurking U-boat. He had the...
by Jeanne Willette | Mar 8, 2019 | Modern, Modern Aesthetics, Modern Art
Based upon the knowledge of how the animal kingdom disguised itself to blend into a hostile environment, modern camouflage, still used today, allows the soldier to disappear and blend into the landscape. At sea, however, the issue of camouflage presented a very...
by Jeanne Willette | Mar 1, 2019 | Modern, Modern Aesthetics, Modern Art
According to Romy Golan, writing of the avant-garde artists who served on the battlefield in Modernity and Nostalgia: Art and Politics in France Between the Wars: “Some, like Dunoyer de Segonzac and Hebin, were drafted into the new camouflage sections; although...
by Jeanne Willette | Mar 1, 2019 | Modern, Modern Aesthetics, Modern Art
If one accepts the premise that the most interesting art created during and in response to the Great War was made by British artists and that the most powerful art created after and in response to the Great War was done in Germany, then the conclusion is that over...
by Jeanne Willette | Mar 1, 2019 | Modern, Modern Aesthetics, Modern Art
When the Great War began in August of 1914, European armies had not gone to war on the continent since the Franco-Prussian War of 1870. For four decades, the Germans grew stronger and the French thought of revenge and watched their former foe to the north warily. The...
by Jeanne Willette | Mar 1, 2019 | Modern, Modern Aesthetics, Modern Art
In her book, Recycling the disabled: Army, medicine, and modernity in WWI Germany, Heather R. Perry, began by noting that the German veterans who were physically challenged insisted on being called “war cripple” (Kriegskrüppel) to distinguish themselves from the “war...
by Jeanne Willette | Mar 1, 2019 | Modern, Modern Aesthetics, Modern Art
In 1920, the German artist Otto Dix, an eager volunteer who fought for his country and was wounded multiple times, produced four paintings of disabled veterans. In each of these paintings, the men, mutilated and dismembered by war are missing multiple limbs. Although...
by Jeanne Willette | Feb 22, 2019 | Modern, Modern Aesthetics, Modern Art
Writing for Smithsonian Magazine, Caroline Alexander explained the importance of the work of the New Zealand reconstructive surgeon, Harold Gilles. She said, “While pioneering work in skin grafting had been done in Germany and the Soviet Union, it was Gillies who...
by Jeanne Willette | Feb 15, 2019 | Modern, Modern Aesthetics, Modern Art
Before the Great War there seems to have been little attention paid to the state of mind of the patient or to the psychological well being of the medical subject. Although psychology was emerging as a separate field of study, one of the major practitioners, Sigmund...
by Jeanne Willette | Feb 8, 2019 | Modern, Modern Aesthetics, Modern Art
Whether as a painting or as a photograph or even as a sculpture, portraiture is one of the main achievement of Western art. Perhaps no other culture has been so interested in the human likeness, focusing on the face, its moods, its expressions, as the revelation of a...
by Jeanne Willette | Jan 18, 2019 | Modern, Modern Aesthetics, Modern Art
Adolf Loos Experimental Architecture and the Question of Windows Before the Great War, Vienna was the city of Otto Wagner, and Loos would have to wait a decade before he would be allowed to build to his own standard of “purity” or lack of inauthentic decoration. Like...
by Jeanne Willette | Jan 11, 2019 | Modern, Modern Aesthetics, Modern Art
The Architectural Gadfly of Vienna The Origins of Ornament and Crime As if to distance himself from the culture that celebrated and commissioned Otto Wagner, the renegade architect, Adolf Loos (1870-1933) posed for photographs as a common man, a man of the people, He...
by Jeanne Willette | Jan 4, 2019 | Modern, Modern Aesthetics, Modern Art
The Great War The Great War is known to have inspired some of the most powerful and moving poetry—from both sides—ever written in reaction to combat and death. Literature which had been mired in nineteenth century conventions was liberated by innovative uses of...
by Jeanne Willette | Jan 4, 2019 | Modern, Modern Aesthetics, Modern Art
THE WIENER WERKSTÄTTE PROJECTS Overshadowed by the Bauhaus designs of the 1920s, the Wiener Werkstätte experiment at the turn of the century laid the groundwork for modern design. Tucked away in Eastern Europe, the city of Vienna was off the beaten path of the...
by Jeanne Willette | Dec 28, 2018 | Modern, Modern Aesthetics, Modern Art
The Modern Workshop Like the Viennese Secession, the Wiener Werkstätte emerged as an independent body of artisans out of the prevailing concern among a young generation of artists about the stagnation of culture in Vienna. The Akademie de bildende Kunste, with...
by Jeanne Willette | Dec 21, 2018 | Modern, Modern Aesthetics, Modern Art
A Modern Workshop Beyond Biedermeier, Part One The Wiener Werkstätte was an idea about modern design. That said, as modern as the concept of the Workshops was, its historical roots can be traced back to the early nineteenh century Biedermeier period, when, weary of...
by Jeanne Willette | Dec 14, 2018 | Modern, Modern Aesthetics, Modern Art
Architect to the Emperor There is a portrait of Otto Wagner (1841-1918) by Gottlieb Kempf-hartenkampf, conventionally painted in 1896, showing the famous architect in formal dress with an Imperial medal around his neck, indicating that he had been recently appointed...
by Jeanne Willette | Dec 7, 2018 | Modern, Modern Aesthetics, Modern Art
The Patronage of Modernism in Vienna One of the tropes of Fin-de-Siècle Vienna is the contradiction within the culture. The regime with its outmoded and ineffectual monarchy represented a long-dead past and the members of the court and the governing bodies of the...
by Jeanne Willette | Nov 30, 2018 | Modern, Modern Aesthetics, Modern Art
Pre-War Modernism in Fin-de-Siècle Vienna The Last of the Old: The Ringstraße To understand Vienna, the heart and soul of Austria, the seat of the aging but glitzy Austro-Hungarian Empire, it is necessary to understand the Ringstraße, an urban development project that...
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