The Great Gatsby
Art in the 1920's
"Even when the East excited me most, even when I was most keenly aware of its superiority to the bored, sprawling, swollen towns behind the Ohio, with their interminable inquisitions which spared only the children and the very old-even when it had always for me a quality of distortion. West Egg especially still figures in my more fantastic dreams. I see it as a night scene by El Greco: a hundred houses, at once conventional and grotesque, crouching under a sullen, overhanging sky and lustrous moon" (185).
El Greco lived in the 16th century. He was born in Greece, in 1541. He spent most of his life in Toledo, Spain. Later on he moved to Italy and did some extensive study there as well. He dies in 1614. He was a part of the mannerist movement. His paintings typically involve religious themes. Elongated forms and a strong focus on hands are known to be part of El Greco's dramatic styles. These elongations are symbolic of the distortion of reality that is a theme in Gatsby.
The Annunciation
The Adoration of the Shepherds
The Harlem Renaissance
In the 1920s a group of artists speculated on the attitude of the time period. This movement began in Harlem, New York. These artists were not only painters but also writers, poets, playwrights, dancers and many others. They held a general feeling that the generation did not have a real sense of direction. The people in the 1920s were absorbed with their country's position in the world, the new inventions of the time period and their own place in society. The county overall was experiencing massive amounts of new wealth. There were exuberant amounts of unnecessary wealth which created a materialistic view of the world, not only for the many people that held this wealth, but for all those who looked up to the elite social class.
"The Harlem Renaissance - proclaimed in a collection of prophetic black tracts and manifestos, and distinguished by the iconic bodies and voices of Paul Robeson, Marcus Garvey, Josephine Baker and others - was a cultural and psychological watershed, an era in which black people were perceived as having finally liberated themselves from a past fraught with self-doubt and surrendered instead to an unprecedented optimism, a novel pride in all things black and a cultural confidence that stretched beyond the borders of Harlem to other black communities in the Western world. The 'Renaissance' artists who immediately come to mind - painter Aaron Douglas, author Langston Hughes, jazz musician Duke Ellington, blues singer Bessie Smith, dancer Josephine Baker and the consummate all-round performer Paul Robeson - had certain attitudes about the black experience as art that, through paintings, writings, musical compositions and performances, explored an assortment of black representational possibilities, from Langston Hughes's and Bessie Smith's images of the rural and folkloric to Aaron Douglas's and Duke Ellington's invocations of the progressive and ultra modern."
Extracts from Re/Birth of a Nation by Richard J. Powell and
Harlem on Our Minds by Henry Louis Gates Jr.
Page last updated on March 5, 1999.
Curator: Alyson Stokowski