GRMUS H657 — Paris Between the Wars

2 credits
Fall
Benjamin Sosland

 

After the devastation of World War I, Paris emerged as one of the most vital and prolific creative centers in the world. The list of artists who called Paris home at some point between 1919 and 1939 reads like a who’s who of cultural history: Maurice Ravel, Pablo Picasso, Igor Stravinsky, Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, Erik Satie, and Jean Cocteau, to name only a handful. Much of their work was overtly subversive and even countercultural: this is the era when the poet Guillaume Apollinaire coined the term “surreal”; when Marcel Duchamp scandalized the art world by displaying his Fountain; when composers like Satie and his followers worked to free themselves from the weight of Wagnerian influence. This course offers a broad survey of the salient artistic philosophies that informed the fascinating cultural landscape of Paris between the wars.