Art & Culture Between the Wars

Between 1918 and 1939, the Western world produced some of the most radical art, music, literature, and architecture in human history. The reason is straightforward: the old world had been blown apart, and no one could pretend otherwise.

World War I killed roughly seventeen million people. It gassed soldiers in trenches, shelled cathedrals, and reduced entire landscapes to mud. The civilization that had produced Beethoven and Shakespeare and the Eiffel Tower had also produced Verdun. For a generation of artists, writers, and musicians who lived through it, the prewar confidence in progress, reason, and Western superiority was finished. The question was what to build on the rubble.

The answers came fast and from every direction. Painters abandoned representation. Composers abandoned tonality. Architects abandoned ornament. Writers abandoned linear narrative. Dancers abandoned the pointe shoe. Jazz musicians abandoned the written score. In every medium, the interwar period became a laboratory for reinvention, and the experiments conducted in those two decades still shape how we see, hear, read, and inhabit space today.