Classicism of the Twenties Art, Music, and Literature

Classicism” is not a term we usually associate with the music, art, and literature of the 1920s, with their embrace of primitivism, expressionism, and experiment in general. But the broader current of modernism in fact produced a distinctive classical movement during the 1920s. Theodore Ziolkowski here provides a compelling account of this classical revival. Classicism” of the early twentieth century was classical in two senses. First, its writers, artists, and musicians often took themes from Greek and Roman history and mythology as their subjects. Second, they sought to achieve in their own works the form and the values of simplicity and order that epitomized ancient classicism. With Igor Stravinsky, Pablo Picasso, and T. S. Eliot as his exemplary figures, Ziolkowski shows how this classicism manifested itself in various works during the 1920s (while also acknowledging competing movements such as expressionism, surrealism, and dada) and how they differed from works of the prewar and wartime years that were sometimes superficially classical” without exemplifying the true spirit of classicism.