A Passion For The New

By ROBERT HUGHES

It's no exaggeration to say that the 1920s formed modern America in ways so vast and far-reaching that we take them for granted today--particularly in the field of culture but no less in America's consciousness of itself as a society and of the place it might have in the world. World War I had destroyed the Old Order in Europe and made a superpower of democratic, industrial America. It seemed obvious to many Americans that they were poised, collectively, to lead the world. And the future American, wrote a Jewish dramatist named Israel Zangwill in a play famously titled The Melting Pot, would be the supreme alloy of obstructive difference: "the fusion of all races, perhaps the coming superman."

In the '20s, American painters, sculptors and architects still defined themselves largely in terms of European models, whether of "traditional" art or of Modernism. But the decade also saw the emergence of a genius of American design who was perhaps the greatest architect of the century: Frank Lloyd Wright. The decade's supreme collective artifact, in steel and stone, was, of course, Manhattan itself, with its immense towers--Chrysler, Empire State and the rest--rising like blasts of congealed and shining energy from the bedrock, a spectacle of Promethean ambition and daring.

Institutional novelty was the American way, and the '20s created institutions that would have seemed contradictions in terms in Paris or London: a Museum of Modern Art, for instance, which opened in 1929. New York City was turning into an international culture, which would make it a natural haven for artists and intellectuals displaced by Nazism in the '30s--whose presence, in turn, would help make the city into Modernism's center of gravity in the '50s. New York was the world's "shock city," and would remain so for decades to come--not least because it harbored such cultural variety. Another sign of this was the Harlem Renaissance, permeated by America's greatest indigenous American musical forms, jazz and the blues.

But the biggest change was the rise of American popular culture: not only jazz and its innumerable variants but also what happened onstage, across the airwaves and on the movie screen. America took the European operetta, fused it with burlesque and jazz and created--through the genius of Irving Berlin, Jerome Kern, Richard Rodgers, Oscar Hammerstein II and others--a broad, unique musical form. The '20s saw the rise of the Hollywood studio system, which had grown from its humble origins among (mostly immigrant Jewish) nickelodeon proprietors into the most powerful industry for the invention and spread of dreams in human history, at least until the advent of TV. Walt Disney invented a little mouse, no larger than a man's thumb, that would become a behemoth.

Americans discovered their insatiable hunger for the electronic, which would create huge communal audiences: some 60,000 households had radio sets in 1922; more than 10 million had sets in 1929. The country began to turn itself into an image-saturated, stimulus-bombarded factory of desire. By the '70s and '80s, with the explosion of electronic communications, U.S. popular and kitsch culture would dominate the globe as no other had, with no limit in sight. So it was in the '20s that America's cultural fantasies started to become, for good or ill, the world's.