Encounters with the 1930s – Visual Culture

Encounters with the 1930s. International seminar held at the Museo Reina Sofía. March 2011

Jeffrey Schnapp, professor of Cultural History at Harvard University: The 1930s were a very important moment in the development of cultural forms that have been integrated into our daily reality.

Romy Golan, professor of 20th Century Art at Lehman College, The City University of New York: Never was there a moment when visual culture, mass culture and propaganda became so spectacularised as in the ‘30s.

One could say that the ‘30s was the first time that mass media and politics were really lumped into one project.

Jeffrey Schnapp: It’s an era of convergence between different areas of cultural experimentation that followed independent courses before this time. The relationship between the emergence of totalitarian states, new forms of mass politics and media phenomena is a complicated connection.

Romy Golan: The ‘30s were not a moment necessarily about nationalism and power, but also of networks where artists were connected, they went to fairs, exhibitions travelled from one city to another. That’s the kind of visual culture you have.

Christina Kiaer. specialist in Russian and Soviet Art: There is certainly this proliferation of mass culture in the Soviet Union as well. In the ‘30s there was a transformation of culture under what’s known as Stalinism. But it’s accompanied also in art by a turn to large traditional oil on canvas. But what is important to realise is that they weren’t conceptualised that way. It wasn’t the individual brilliant author creating a work that they invented; it was also a message. And once it was made, it was massively reproduced in school books, factories, on fabrics, on postcards, sometimes even painted several times to be sent around the country. So, they developed a new conception of art as a media object, even though it looks like a traditional oil painting.

Tags: Postal art, International fairs, Mass media, Frontiers

Romy Golan: One thing that obsessed the ‘30s was the question of monumentalism versus miniature. On one hand we have the big, the monumental and colossal and on the other the most impressive final phase of the postcard. Postcards were used in the world fairs, for propaganda, there were postcards of the Spanish pavilion, photos of the civil war turned into postcards, so that the smallest thing disseminated, moving beyond frontiers. However in the late ‘30s, as people travelled more and had other media, the epic of the postcard died.

Tags: Role played by women in the 1930s. Liubov Popova, Margherita Sarfatti, Leni Riefenstahl, Hannah Höch

Jeffrey Schnapp: It could seem like a time of returning to more traditional models from a certain point of view, but it depended on the particular national situation.

Christina Kiaer: In Russia, the ‘20s were a period of more liberation and flowering for women. The ‘30s become much more complicated in the sense that there was a kind of loss of women’s role in visual culture.

Jeffrey Schnapp: In the US, the development of new freedoms and a new social, political and cultural role for women continued during the ‘30s.

Christina Kiaer: The art system became more conservative and traditional in Russia and it became more difficult for women to work in this new artistic system. Women couldn’t gain access to studios and therefore didn’t get the commissions they needed to make these big canvases.

Jeffrey Schnapp: In countries like fascist Italy and Germany, the return to order corresponded to the reaffirmation of more traditional definitions of deep-rooted themes in the cultures of those countries.

Christina Kiaer: Increasingly women became postcard artists or children’s book illustrators. By the mid-1930s, there was a retreat from Stalinist culture to more traditional models of women as mothers, as attractive, wearing the latest fashions and make-up: women and good wives for their working husbands.

Jeffrey Schnapp: But even in those countries, even in fascist Italy, there was an important presence of female figures, like Margherita Sarfatti, who was absolutely fundamental for the cultural debates of the 1930s in Italy.

Tags: Inheritance, Reminiscence, Visual Culture

Jeffrey Schnapp: Culture today has inherited from the 1930s this great experimentation with new hybrids of language. It didn’t inherit the hierarchical tendencies to interpret this new culture.

Andreas Huyssen (Professor of Comparative Literature at Columbia University): What would be interesting would be to ask the historical question of how the technological media and media practices of artists in the ‘20s and ‘30s can be compared to the media situation today.

Jeffrey Schnapp: Our era is one of the proliferation of producers of content that have reinterpreted this multimedia revolution, but in a language that is more participatory and democratic.