Just as you can write the history of the world using the biographies of the famous men and women who changed it (Confucius, Alexander the Great, Queen Elizabeth, Winston Churchill, etc.), you can tell the story of humankind by going from one great cultural center to another. Certain cities at certain moments have defined the course of the arts . Consider Xi’an in the Tang dynasty, Florence and Amsterdam in the Renaissance, London in the time of Shakespeare, or Vienna during the era of Mozart, Haydn, and Beethoven. In exactly this way, Paris during the Jazz Age was one of the most fun and one of the most important cities in the history of art, music, literature, and fashion.
The terrible destruction of World War I, the war to end all wars, was over. Paris was full of joy, and people from all over the world were arriving there to create and live it up. At café tables lit by spring sunshine, new visitors drank coffee and sent postcards about the discoveries that were being made back home to China, Japan, America, and England as well as many other places. They were young and lucky to have survived the war. As artists and writers, they were breaking and remaking the rules. Jazz music gave them a new freedom to improvise and be original, to depart from the written notes and make it up as they went along. They were free.
The greatest painters of the Jazz Age (Pablo Picasso and Fernand Léger) worked not just on art but on stage designs for the ballet and theater. The hottest stars in jazz (Cole Porter and George Gershwin) and writing (James Joyce, F . Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, E.E. Cummings and John Dos Passos) were not just using words but also interested in painting, music, and dance. They came from New York, London, Berlin, Shanghai, Nanjing, Tokyo, Hong Kong, and other cities just to see each other and be seen. The spirit of the age was formed by the friendships among the artists and writers. The most famous of these friendships, between Hemingway and Fitzgerald, led to the greatest masterpieces by these authors as they were both supporters and rivals of one another.
For many culture lovers, the artistic community in Paris during the Roaring Twenties represents the first pick of history’s most glorious gathering of people in one place at one period. It offers the ideal mix of personalities and ideas, talent and fun, elegance and edge. Their French hosts found the newcomers, refreshingly energetic and liberating. It was an astonishingly international cast of characters, including not just the giants of the school of Paris, such as Léger, Picasso, Andr é Derain, and others, but a talented group of Asian artists, including Pan Yuliang and Xu Beihong from China and Fo ujita and Isamu Noguchi from Japan. They were joined by Kurt Schwitters and Emil Nolde from Germany and Constantin Brâncuşi from Romania. Their achievements were nothing less than dazzling. The powerful outpouring of highly original art, fiction, music, dance, fashion, and interior design was so profuse that it belies the brevity of the period.
The era is precisely defined by familiar red-letter dates. It began when World War I ended on November 11, 1918 (at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, just over a year after the October Revolution in Russia) . The United States went dry when the Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution went into effect on January 17, 1920, starting Prohibition. A month later, the Nazi Party was named in Germany. On August 18 of that year, women gained the vote in the United States. Ernest Hemingway and Cole Porter began their long expatriate periods in 1921, and in 1922, the fourth volume of Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past, Joyce’s Ulysses, and T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land were published. (Eliot was in Paris, as were Ezra Pound, Archibald MacLeish, E.E. Cummings, John Dos Passos, and many other writers). In 1923, Picasso painted the stately portrait of Sara Murphy known as The Woman in White, and George Gershwin was at the piano for the debut of Rhapsody in Blue at Aeolian Hall in midtown Manhattan on February 12, 1924. On April 10, 1925, The Great Gatsby was published, with Celestial Eyes, a hauntingly mysterious gouache by Francis Cugat on its cover. Twelve days later, the Exposition Internationale des Arts D écoratifs et Industriels Modernes (the world’s fair that put art deco on the map) opened in Paris. Charles Lindbergh landed the Spirit of St. Louis on May 21, 1927, after a 3,600-mile flight across the Atlantic that began at Roosevelt Field on Long Island, New York and ended in Paris. The impresario of the Ballets Russes, Sergei Diaghilev, died in Venice on August 19 with Coco Chanel at his side. On October 24, 1929, the US stock market crashed after its historic decade-long, over-leveraged bull run, and the epoch came to its end.
Modern art, music and literature were redefined by the Jazz Age in many ways. It signified the height of jazz as a musical genre, although jazz music went through many changes afterword, eventually leading to rock and roll. Painting became more abstract thanks to cubism, which many think was shaped by World War I and its destruction. Literature turned more toward stream of consciousness and away from realism. The influence of abstract art and jazz music, as well as the theories of Sigmund Freud, changed the course of literary history. Finally, society was changed too, with greater equality among the races (jazz had been an African-American invention) and between men and women and a more tolerant attitude toward foreigners because of the international quality of the era. Maybe it was “just one of those bells that now and then rings,” as Cole Porter wrote, but the echoes of the Jazz Age go on.
