Category: Roaring Twenties

Frida Kahlo: Self Portrait in a Velvet Dress (1926)

Art, Counter Culture, Paintings, Roaring Twenties

Self Portrait in a Velvet Dress, is one of Frida Kahlo’s early portraits. This portrait implied the emotional tension as well as showing with her other paintings. This painting she used as a token of love to regain the affection from her lover. She started working on this painting during the late summer of 1926 when her relationship with Alejandro is turning sour because Alejandro thinks she is too liberal. She wrote letters to him and promised that she will be a better person to deserve him. And when she finished this portrait in September of 1926 she wrote a letter to: “Within a few days the portrait will be in your house. Forgive me for sending it without a frame. I implore you to put it in a low place where you can see it as if you were looking at me.”

In this self-portrait, Frida was wearing a wine-red velvet dress and looks like a princess in it. She sent it to Alejandro and hope he will keep her in his mind. This painting worked: after Alejandro received this paining, they went back to be together again. But he left for Europe in March 1927 because his parents didn’t want him to be together with Frida. She wrote a lot of letters after they are apart and in those letters she calls herself with her Self Portrait in a Velvet Dress, calling it “your ‘Boticeli’. She wrote this: “Alex, your ‘Boticeli’ has also become very sad, but I told her that until you come back, she should be the ‘sound asleep one’; in spite of this she remembers you always.” And in a few months on awaiting him coming back to Mexico, she wrote the letter with reference to this portrait: “You cannot imagine how marvelous it is to wait for you, serenely as in the portrait.” It was obvious Frida was hoping her self-portrait has the magical power that can win back her love.

Source: http://www.fridakahlo.org

Notable Books of the Twenties: A Passage to India – EM Forster (1924)

Counter Culture, Literature, Most Admired Authors, Notable Books, Roaring Twenties

A Passage to India by EM Forster (1924)

This has proved the ultimate decline-of-empire classic, backdropped by the British Raj and the Indian independence movement in the 1920s. When Adela Quested and her ageing travelling companion Mrs Moore arrive in the Indian town of Chandrapore, they are put out by its repressed and prejudice atmosphere. So they set out to find the ‘real India’. They engage the charming and respectable Dr Aziz as their guide, but after a mysterious incident at the Marabar caves, he is thrust into the eye of a scandal that grips both British and Indian sides of the imperial coin.

It was, said celebrated Indian novelist Anita Desai, Forster’s ‘great book… masterly in its prescience and its lucidity.’

Eulogy on the Flapper – Zelda Fitzgerald (1922)

Counter Culture, Criticism, Literature, Quips & Wit, Quotes, Roaring Twenties

What follow is the first couple of paragraphs of Eulogy of the Flapper, published in 1922. Of course the flapper was very much a part of the years to come, but she makes some salient observations.

“The Flapper is deceased. Her outer accoutrements have been bequeathed to several hundred girls’ schools throughout the country, to several thousand big-town shopgirls, always imitative of the several hundred girls’ schools, and to several million small-town belles always imitative of the big-town shopgirls via the “novelty stores” of their respective small towns. It is a great bereavement to me, thinking as I do that there will never be another product of circumstance to take the place of the dear departed.

“I am assuming that the Flapper will live by her accomplishments and not by her Flapping. How can a girl say again, “I do not want to be respectable because respectable girls are not attractive,” and how can she again so wisely arrive at the knowledge that “boys do dance most with the girls they kiss most,” and that “men will marry the girls they could kiss before they had asked papa”? Perceiving these things, the Flapper awoke from her lethargy of sub-deb-ism, bobbed her hair, put on her choicest pair of earrings and a great deal of audacity and rouge, and went into the battle. She flirted because it was fun to flirt and wore a one-piece bathing suit because she had a good figure; she covered her face with powder and paint because she didn’t need it and she refused to be bored chiefly because she wasn’t boring. She was conscious that the things she did were the things she had always wanted to do. Mothers disapproved of their sons taking the Flapper to dances, to teas, to swim, and most of all to heart. She had mostly masculine friends, but youth does not need friends—it needs only crowds, and the more masculine the crowds the more crowded for the Flapper. Of these things the Flapper was well aware!

“Now audacity and earrings and one-piece bathing suits have become fashionable and the first Flappers are so secure in their positions that their attitude toward themselves is scarcely distinguishable from that of their debutante sisters of ten years ago toward themselves. They have won their case. They are blasé. And the new Flappers galumping along in unfastened galoshes are striving not to do what is pleasant and what they please, but simply to outdo the founders of the Honorable Order of Flappers: to outdo everything. Flapperdom has become a game; it is no longer a philosophy.

~ Zelda Fitzgerald, from Metropolitan Magazine, June 1922.

Notable Books of the Twenties: So Big – Edna Ferber (1924)

Algonquin Round Table, Counter Culture, Literature, Most Admired Authors, Roaring Twenties

So Big by Edna Ferber (1924)

This was the biggest selling novel in 1924 and won its author a Pulitzer Prize a year later. Set in Chicago, So Big tells the story of the life of gambler’s daughter Selina as she navigates the many huge challenges life throws in her face – challenges to her dignity, to her family, and to her mental health.

But what truly makes her one of the 20th century’s great literary characters is her inextinguishable ability to find joy in the most unlikely of places. She is a flawed delight. But more than just a larger-than-life story of a go-getting ‘modern woman’, what makes it stand out as a timeless work of literature is the vivid snapshot it provides of a vanished time in history, through the high life and low life of 1920s Chicago society. ‘Critics of the 1920s and 1930s,’ wrote the New York Times, ‘did not hesitate to call [Ferber] the greatest American woman novelist of her day.’ This was her masterpiece.

Robert Benchley (1889-1945)

Algonquin Round Table, Counter Culture, Literature, Most Admired Authors, Quips & Wit, Roaring Twenties

A graduate of Harvard University (1912), Benchley held a variety of jobs in New York City before becoming managing editor of Vanity Fair in 1919. There he worked with Robert Sherwood and Dorothy Parker until January 1920, when both Sherwood and Benchley resigned to protest the firing of Parker. About this time Benchley, Parker, and other wits of the Algonquin Round Table—which its members referred to as the Vicious Circle—began their celebrated lunchtime meetings at Manhattan’s Algonquin Hotel. In April 1920 Benchley joined the staff of Life magazine as drama critic (1920–29). During this period he published his first collection of essays, Of All Things! (1921), and became a regular contributor to The New Yorker (1925). He was drama critic for The New Yorker from 1929 to 1940 and wrote its “The Wayward Press” column (under the pseudonym Guy Fawkes).

His monologue “The Treasurer’s Report,” initially delivered as a skit in an amateur revue for the Algonquin group in 1922, was the basis for one of the first all-talking cinema short subjects. He subsequently acted in and sometimes wrote motion-picture short subjects—The Sex Life of a Polyp (1928), Stewed, Fried, and Boiled (1929), How to Sleep (1935; Academy Award for best live-action short film), The Romance of Digestion (1937), and The Courtship of the Newt (1938)—among them. In all, he made more than 40 short subjects and appeared in minor roles and a few supporting roles in some 50 feature films. He often played a confused, annoyed, and mildly sarcastic drunk. It was a role that suited him. He once said, “I know I’m drinking myself to a slow death, but then I’m in no hurry”; he died of cirrhosis of the liver.

Benchley, Robert

Although films and radio brought Benchley wide public acclaim, his writings constitute his most lasting achievement. His essays are collected in 15 books and illustrated with Gluyas Williams’s superb caricatures; the books include Pluck and Luck (1925), The Early Worm (1927), My Ten Years in a Quandary, and How They Grew (1936), and Benchley Beside Himself (1943). As he grew older, however, his whimsical, even absurd humor became increasingly at odds with his darker vision of the world. Many critics consider his early writing his best, and he himself said in 1943:

It took me fifteen years to discover I had no talent for writing, but I couldn’t give it up because by that time I was too famous.

~ Robert Benchley

Notable Books of the Twenties: The Inimitable Jeeves – P.G Wodehouse (1923)

Counter Culture, Literature, Notable Books, Quips & Wit, Roaring Twenties

The Inimitable Jeeves by P.G Wodehouse (1923)

PG Wodehouse is, without a doubt, England’s preeminent genius of gentle comedy. There is not an author of any period in history whose writing better embodies his or her particular time and space. In Wodehouse’s case, bumbling Bertie Wooster and his bacon-saving butler Jeeves have become synonymous with that shrinking gene pool of upper-class Edwardian England, where wars were won on cream tea and croquet and lunch could last a lifetime.

It wasn’t just that his comedy was clever, but that it was so painstakingly precise in its lampoonery of the era. But it was the author and social satirist Evelyn Waugh who said it best, during a BBC broadcast in 1961: ‘Mr. Wodehouse’s idyllic world can never stale. He will continue to release future generations from captivity that may be more irksome than our own. He has made a world for us to live in and delight in.’

The Ten Year Lunch (Movie)

Algonquin Round Table, Counter Culture, Literary Groups, Literature, Most Admired Authors, Roaring Twenties, Video

The Ten-Year Lunch: The Wit and Legend of the Algonquin Round Table

A 1987 American documentary film about the Algonquin Round Table, a floating group of writers and actors during the Jazz Age in New York City, which included great names such as Dorothy Parker, Robert Benchley, George S. Kaufman, Edna Ferber, Marc Connelly, Harold Ross and Harpo Marx. It was produced and directed by Aviva Slesin and narrated by Heywood Hale Broun.

The title refers to how the members of the Round Table met over lunch at the Algonquin Hotel from 1919 until roughly 1929. The film shows how the group drifted apart once the 1920’s ended, as Hollywood beckoned for some and as they grew older.

The film premiered on the PBS series American Masters on September 28, 1987. On April 11, 1988, it won the 1987 Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature.

Notable Books of the Twenties: The Enchanted April – Elizabeth von Arnim (1923)

Counter Culture, Literature, Most Admired Authors, Notable Books, Roaring Twenties

A sun-drenched ode to the transformative power of travel, The Enchanting April is enchanting. Published at a time when international travel was beginning to take off, it was a huge bestseller on both sides of the Atlantic and set off a tourism boom to Portofino, on the Italian Riviera, where it is set.

It follows four very different women who respond to an ad in the paper appealing ‘to Those who Appreciate Wisteria and Sunshine’ and want to live in an Italian castle for a month. The only thing they have in common is a shared dissatisfaction with their respective home lives.

As they get to know each other, their unhappinesses are washed clean by the sun and they find new joys (and loves) in places they never knew existed. In many ways it is a pioneering example of the classic friendship psychodrama you can buy in any airport bookshop today.

Surrealism and the Roaring Twenties

Art, Art Movements, Counter Culture, Paintings, Roaring Twenties, Surrealism
Andre Breton

Surrealism

Surrealism arose from Dadaist activities during the war. Centered in Paris, it quickly became a cultural movement, rather than only artistic. Perhaps the most influential of its forefathers, Andre Breton stressed the importance of Surrealism as a revolutionary movement. Believing that their works expressed the philosophy behind the period in which psychoanalysis was born, elements of surprise, juxtapositions, and importance of the dream-like worlds and the notion of the subconscious dominated. In 1924, Breton published his Surrealist Manifesto and defined the thoughts of the time as pure psychic automatism. Next to Breton, the Spanish self-proclaimed Genius Salvador Dali, known for some of the most thought-provoking and often erotic images, is now revered as one of the crucial surrealist artists of the group.

The maturation of Salvador Dali through the twenties:

Today, Surrealism photography is considered one of the important trends of the medium while questions concerning the lowbrow art and pop surrealism would lead to a better understanding of the original Surrealism as well.

For many, the period of the 1920s art is seen as the first modern decade responsible for the creation of concepts that the world follows even today. As an endlessly fascinating time, artists pushed for the new and the revolutionary which helped create the art as we know it.