Art, Music, Architecture, Literature and Culture

Art

Max Ernst, The Elephant Celebes 

     Created by Max Ernst in 1921, this painting is largely influenced by Ernsts experience on the battle field and the emotions that he felt while he was there.  The painting depicts a mechanical elephant, which could easily be inspired by a WWI tank.  The smoke trail behind it in the sky could also be a representation a aircraft being shot down.  As for the body in the foreground, it could symbolize the actual battle field and what he experienced.   

Music

James P. Johnson, The Charleston (1923)

     The Charleston by James P. Johnson was composed in 1923 and was written to accompany the famous dance, The Charleston.  Jazz songs, such as this one, played a huge roll in history and can be reflected from the ever changing times the world was experiencing during the 1920s.  People were questioning the status quo and were expressing themselves in different ways.  Jazz is the perfect musical example of how the times changed.  Jazz was a completely different style of composing and playing music which took the world by storm once it had caught on. Even though it was not a direct result of World War I, it was still influenced by what other people were doing and trying during that time period. 

Architecture
Frank Lloyd Wright

Frank Lloyd Wright was an amazing American architect from Wisconsin who created a new type of architecture which he called "organic architecture".  Wright believed that architectures should design a building so that it fits its location, and idea which was not a traditional one.  This again, is not a direct result of the happenings of World War I, but simply the creative thinking that was being passed around through Art, Music, Literature and now Architecture.

Literature 

Break of Day in the Trenches

"The darkness crumbles away 

It is the same old druid Time as ever, 

Only a live thing leaps my hand, 

A queer sardonic rat, 

As I pull the parapet's poppy

To stick behind my ear. 

Droll rat, they would shoot you if they knew 

Your cosmopolitan sympathies, 

Now you have touched this English hand 

You will do the same to a German

Soon, no doubt, if it be your pleasure 

To cross the sleeping green between. 

It seems you inwardly grin as you pass 

Strong eyes, fine limbs, haughty athletes, 

Less chanced than you for life,

Bonds to the whims of murder, 

Sprawled in the bowels of the earth, 

The torn fields of France. 

What do you see in our eyes 

At the shrieking iron and flame

Hurled through still heavens? 

What quaver -what heart aghast? 

Poppies whose roots are in men's veins 

Drop, and are ever dropping; 

But mine in my ear is safe,

Just a little white with the dust." 

-Isaac Rosenberg

     Isaac Rosenberg is known as one of the best World War I poets of all time, and his poem "Break of Day in the Trenches" is one of his best pieces of work.  Rosenberg described the poem in a letter to his friend Eddie Marsh while he was on the Front.  He mentioned the poem being, “A poem I wrote in the trenches, which is surely as simple as ordinary talk.”  Below is a narrative of the poem which gives a new feeling to the poem.

Culture- Dance!
The Charleston 

The Dance the Charleston became popular after James P. Johnsons The Charleston became popular in 1923.  It became popular originally by flapper girls and then soon grew into a national dance craze.  Before the 1920s, dance rarely involved any movement of the upper body, but the Charleston changed all of that.  This famous dance era helps represent how times were rapidly changing in the 1920s, and how our culture responded to that change.