1918–1939 (Interwar)
Art and design made between the world wars: the Bauhaus, Art Deco, Surrealism, Mexican muralism and art under the pressure of dictatorship.
No works indexed yet · 10 related artists
No open-access works for 1918–1939 (Interwar) are in the index yet. They will appear here as more collections are indexed.
About
Between the two world wars, artists and designers set out to reshape everyday life. The Bauhaus, founded in Weimar in 1919, trained students to design furniture, textiles and buildings for industrial production until Nazi pressure closed it in 1933. Piet Mondrian reduced painting to black grids and blocks of primary colour, Constantin Brâncuși polished his soaring Bird in Space series, and the 1925 Paris exhibition of decorative arts later lent Art Deco its name. Gabrielle Chanel's little black dress and jersey tailoring modernised fashion.
The unconscious offered another frontier. André Breton's Surrealist manifesto of 1924 opened the way for Salvador Dalí's melting watches in The Persistence of Memory (1931) and René Magritte's puzzles of word and image. In the Americas, Diego Rivera painted industrial murals, Frida Kahlo painted herself, and the Harlem Renaissance flourished in New York. The Nazis mocked modern art in their 1937 'Degenerate Art' exhibition, the year Pablo Picasso painted Guernica.
