The New Architecture seems to be making little progress in the USA ; . . The advocates of the new style are full of earnestness, and some of them carry on in the shrill pedagogical manner of believers in the Single Tax . . . but, save on the level of factory design, they do not seem to be making many converts.
-H.L.Mencken, 1931

Why brilliant fashion-designers, a notoriously non-analytic breed, sometimes succeed in anticipating the shape of things to come better than professional predictors, is one of the most obscure questions in history; and, for the historian of culture, one of the most central. It is certainly crucial to anyone who wants to understand the impact of the age of cataclysms on the world of high culture, the elite arts, and, above all, the avantgarde. For it is generally accepted that these arts anticipated the actual breakdown of liberal-bourgeois society by several years. By 1914 virtually everything that can take shelter under the broad and rather undefined canopy of 'modernism' was already in place: cubism; expressionism; futurism; pure abstraction in painting; functionalism and flight from ornament in architecture; the abandonment of tonality in music; the break with tradition in literature.

A large number of names who would be on most people's list of eminent 'modernists' were all mature and productive or even famous in 1914.(Matisse and Picasso; Schonberg and Stravinsky; Gropius and Mies van der Rohe; Proust, James Joyce, Thomas Mann and Franz Kafka; Yeats, Ezra Pound, Alexander Blok and Anna Akhmatova.) Even T.S. Eliot, whose poetry was not published until 1917 and after, was by then clearly a part of the London avant-garde scene [as a contributor (with Pound) to Wyndham Lewis's Blast]. These children of, at the latest, the 1880s, remained icons of modernity forty years later. That a number of men and women who only began to emerge after the war would also make most high-culture shortlists of eminent 'modernists' is less surprising than the domination of the older generation.! (Among others, Isaac Babel (1894); Le Corbusier (1897); Ernest Hemingway (1899); Bertolt Brecht, Garcia Lorca and Hanns Eisler (all born 1898); Kurt Weill (1900); Jean Paul Sartre (1905); and W.H. Auden (1907).Thus even Schonberg's successors - Alban Berg and Anton Webern - belong to the generation of the 1880s.)

In fact, the only formal innovations after 1914 in the world of the 'established' avant-garde seem to have been two: Dadaism, which shaded over into or anticipated surrealism in the western half of Europe, and the Soviet-born constructivism in the East. Constructivism, an excursion into skeletal three-dimensional and preferably moving constructions which have their nearest real-life analogue in some fairground structures (giant 1 wheels, big dippers etc.), was soon absorbed into the main stream of architecture and industrial design, largely through the Bauhaus (of which more below). Its most ambitious projects, such as Tatlin's famous rotating leaning tower in honour of the Communist International, never got built, or else lived evanescent lives as the decor of early Soviet public ritual. Novel as it was, constructivism did little more than extend the repertoire of architectural modernism.

Dadaism took shape among a mixed group of exiles in Zurich (where another group of exiles under Lenin awaited the revolution) in 1916, as an anguished but ironic nihilist protest against world war and the society that had incubated it: including its art. Since it rejected all art, it had no formal characteristics, although it borrowed a few tricks from the pre-1914 cubist and futurist avant-gardes, including notably collage, or sticking together bits and pieces, including parts of pictures. Basically anything that might cause apoplexy among conventional bourgeois art-lovers was acceptable Dada. Scandal was its principle of cohesion. Thus Marcel Duchamp's (1887-1968) exhibition of a public urinal as 'ready-made art' in New York in 1917 was entirely in the spirit of Dada, which he joined on his return from the USA; but his subsequent quiet refusal to have anything further to do with art - he preferred to play chess - was not. For there was nothing quiet about Dada.

Surrealism, while equally devoted to the rejection of art as hitherto known, equally given to public scandal and (as we shall see) even more attracted to social revolution, was more than a negative protest; as might be expected from a movement essentially centred in France, a country where every fashion requires a theory. Indeed, we can say that, as Dada foundered in the early 1920s with the era of war and revolution that had given it birth, surrealism emerged from it as what has been called 'a plea for the revival of the imagination, based on the Unconscious as revealed by psychoanalysis, together with a new emphasis on magic, accident, irrationality, symbols and dreams (Willett, 1978).'

In some ways it was a romantic revival in twentieth-century costume, but with more sense of absurdity and fun. Unlike the mainstream 'modernist' avant-gardes, but like Dada, surrealism had no interest in formal innovation as such: whether the Unconscious expressed itself in a random stream of words ('automatic writing') or in the meticulous nineteenth-century academician's style in which Salvador Dali (1904—89) painted his deliquescent watches in desert landscapes, was of no interest. What counted was to recognize the capacity of the spontaneous imagination, unmediated by rational control systems, to produce cohesion out of the incoherent, an apparently necessary logic out of the plainly illogical or even impossible. Rene Magritte's (1898-1967) Castle in the Pyrenees, carefully painted in the manner of a picture-postcard, emerges from the top of a huge rock, as though it had grown there. Only the rock, like a giant egg, is floating through the sky above the sea, painted with equal realistic care.

Surrealism was a genuine addition to the repertoire of avant-garde arts, its novelty attested by the ability to produce shock, incomprehension, or what amounted to the same thing, a sometimes embarrassed laughter, even among the older avant-garde. This was my own, admittedly juvenile, reaction to the 1936 International Surrealist Exhibition in London, and later to a surrealist painter friend in Paris, whose insistence on producing the exact equivalent in oils of a photograph of human entrails I found hard to understand. Nevertheless, in retrospect it must be seen as a remarkably fertile movement, though chiefly in France and countries such as the Hispanic ones, where French influence was strong. It influenced first-rate poets in France (Eluard, Aragon); in Spain (Garcia  decors by the likes of the cubists Georges Braque (1882-1963) and Juan Gris (1887-1927); music by, or rewritten by Stravinsky, de Falla, Milhaud and Poulenc became de rigeur, while both styles of dancing and choreography were modernized accordingly. Before 1914, at least in Britain, the 'Post-Impressionist Exhibition' had been jeered by a philistine public, while Stravinsky caused scandal wherever he went, as did the Armory Show in New York and elsewhere. After the war, the philistines fell silent before the provocative displays of 'modernism', deliberate declarations of independence from the discredited pre-war world, manifestos of cultural revolution. And, through the modernist ballet, exploiting its unique combination of snob appeal, the magnetism of vogue (plus the new Vogue) and elite artistic status, the avant-garde broke out of its stockade. Thanks to Diaghilev, wrote a characteristic figure in the British cultural journalism of the 1920s, 'the crowd has positively enjoyed decorations by the best and most ridiculed living painters. He has given us Modern Music without tears and Modern Painting without laughter' (Mortimer, 1925).

Diaghilev's ballet was merely one medium for the diffusion of the avant-garde arts which, in any case, varied from one country to the next. Nor, indeed, was the same avant-garde diffused throughout the Western world for, in spite of the continued hegemony of Paris over large regions of elite culture, reinforced after 1918 by the influx of American expatriates (the generation of Hemingway and Scott Fitzgerald), there was actually no longer a unified high culture in the old world. In Europe Paris competed with the Moscow-Berlin axis, until the triumphs of Stalin and Hitler silenced or dispersed the Russia or German avant-gardes. The fragments of the former Habsburg and Ottoman Empires went their own way in literature, isolated by languages which nobody seriously or systematically attempted to translate until the era of the anti-fascist diaspora in the 1930s. The extraordinary flowering of poetry in the Spanish language on both sides of the Atlantic had next to no international impact until the Spanish Civil War of 1936-39 revealed it. Even the arts least hampered by the tower of Babel, those of sight and sound, were less international than might be supposed, as a comparison of the relative standing of, say, Hindemith in and outside Germany or of Poulenc in and outside France shows. Educated English art-lovers entirely familiar with even the lesser members of the inter-war Ecole de Paris, might not even have heard the names of German expressionist painters as important as Nolde and Franz Marc.

There were really only two avant-garde arts which all flag-carriers of artistic novelty in all relevant countries could be guaranteed to admire, and both came out of the new world rather than the old: films and jazz. The cinema was co-opted by the avant-garde some time during the First World War, having previously been unaccountably neglected by it. It not merely became essential to admire this art, and notably its greatest personality, Charlie Chaplin (to whom few self-respecting modern poets failed to address a composition), but avant-garde artists themselves launched themselves into film-making, most notably in Weimar Germany and Soviet Russia, where they actually dominated production. The canon of 'art-films' which the highbrow film-buffs were expected to admire in small specialized movie-temples during the age of cataclysms, from one side of the globe to the other, consisted essentially of such avant-garde creations: Sergei Eisenstein's (1898-1948) Battleship Potemkin of 1925 was generally regarded as the all-time masterpiece. The Odessa Steps sequence of this work, which no one who ever saw it - as I did in a Charing Cross avant-garde cinema in the 1930s - will ever forget, has been described as 'the classic sequence of silent cinema and possibly the most influential six minutes in cinema history' (Manvell, 1944, pp. 47-48).

From the mid-1930s, intellectuals favoured the populist French cinema of Rene Clair; Jean Renoir (not uncharacteristically the painter's son); Marcel Carne; Prevert, the ex-surrealist; and Auric, the ex-member of the avant-garde musical cartel lLes Six\ These, as non-intellectual critics liked to point out, were less enjoyable, though no doubt artistically more high-class than the great bulk of what the hundreds of millions (including the intellectuals) watched every week in increasingly gigantic and luxuri-ous picture-palaces, namely the production of Hollywood. On the other hand the hard-headed showmen of Hollywood were almost as quick as Diaghilev to recognize the avant-garde contribution to profitability. 'Uncle' Carl Laemmle, the boss of Universal Studios, perhaps the least intellectually ambitious of the Hollywood majors, took care to supply himself with the latest men and ideas on his annual visits to his native Germany, with the result that the characteristic product of his studios, the horror movie (Frankenstein, Dracula etc.) was sometimes a fairly close copy of German expressionist models. The flow of central-European directors, like Lang, Lubitsch and Wilder, across the Atlantic - and practically all of them can be regarded as highbrows in their native grounds - was to have a considerable impact on Hollywood itself, not to mention that of technicians like Karl Freund (1890-1969) or Eugen Schufftan (1893-1977). However, the course of the cinema and the popular arts will be considered below.

The 'jazz' of the 'Jazz Age', i.e. some kind of combination of American Negroes, syncopated rhythmic dance-music and an instrumentation which was unconventional by traditional standards, almost certainly aroused universal approval among the avant-garde, less for its own merits than as yet another symbol of modernity, the machine age, a break with the past - in short, another manifesto of cultural revolution. The staff of the Bauhaus had itself photographed with a saxophone. A genuine passion for, the sort of jazz which is now recognized as the major contribution of the USA to twentieth-century music, remained rare among established intellectuals, avant-garde or not, until the second half of the century. Those who developed it, as I did after Duke Ellington's visit to London in 1933, were a small minority.

Whatever the local variant of modernism, between the wars it became the badge of those who wanted to prove that they were both cultured and up to date. Whether or not one actually liked, or even had read, seen or heard, works by the recognized OK names - say, among literary English schoolboys of the first half of the 1930s, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, James Joyce and D.H. Lawrence - it was inconceivable not to talk knowledgeably about them. What is perhaps more interesting, each country's cultural vanguard rewrote or revalued the past to fit in with contemporary requirements. The English were firmly told to forget about Milton and Tennyson, but to admire John Donne. The most influential British critic of the period, F.R. Leavis of Cambridge, even devised a canon, or 'great tradition', of English novels which was the exact opposite of a real tradition, since it omitted from the historical succession anything the critic did not like, such as all of Dickens, with the exception of one novel hitherto regarded as one of the master's minor works, Hard Times

For lovers of Spanish painting, Murillo was now out, but admiration for El Greco was compulsory. But above all, anything to do with the Age of Capital and the Age of Empire (other than its avant-garde art) was not only rejected: it became virtually invisible. This was not only demonstrated by the vertical fall in the prices of nineteenth-century academic painting (and the corresponding but still modest rise of the Impressionists and later modernists): they remained practically unsaleable until the 1960s. The very attempts to recognize any merit in Victorian building had about them an air of deliberate provocation of real good taste, associated with camp reactionaries. The present author, grown up among the great architectural monuments of the liberal bourgeoisie which encircle Vienna's old 'inner city', learned, by a sort of cultural osmosis, that they were to be regarded as either inauthentic or pompous or both. Such buildings were not actually torn down en masse until the 1950s and 1960s, the most disastrous decade in modern architecture, which is why a Victorian Society to protect buildings of the 1840-1914 period was not set up in Britain until 1958 (more than twenty years after a Georgian Group, to protect the less outcast eighteenth-century heritage).

The impact of the avant-garde on the commercial cinema already suggests that 'modernism' began to make its mark on everyday life. It did so obliquely, through productions which the broad public did not consider to be 'art', and consequently to be judged by a priori criteria of aesthetic value: primarily through publicity, industrial design, commercial print and graphics, and genuine objects. Thus among champions of modernity Marcel Breuer's (1902-81) famous tubular chair (1925—29) carried an enormous ideological and aesthetic charge (Giedion, 1948, pp. 488-95). Yet it was to make its way through the modern world not as a manifesto, but as the modest but universally useful movable stacking chair.

But there can be no doubt at all that, within less than twenty years of the outbreak of the First World War, metropolitan life all over the Western world was visibly marked by modernism, even in countries like the USA and Great Britain, which appeared entirely unreceptive to it in the 1920s. Streamlining, which swept through the American design of both suitable and unsuitable products from the early 1930s, echoed Italian futurism. The Art Deco style (derived from the Paris Exposition of Decorative Arts of 1925) domesticated modernist angularity and abstraction. The modern paperback revolution in the 1930s (Penguin Books) carried the banner of the avant-garde typography of Jan Tschichold (1902-74). The direct assault of modernism was still deflected. Not until after the Second World War did the so-called International Style of modernist architecture transform the city scene, though its chief propagandists and practitioners - Gropius, Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe, Frank Lloyd Wright, etc.- had long been active. Some exceptions apart, the bulk of public building, including public housing projects by municipalities of the Left, which might have been expected to sympathize with the socially conscious new architecture, showed little sign of its influence except an apparent dislike for decoration. Most of the massive rebuilding of working-class 'Red Vienna' in the 1920s was undertaken by architects who figure barely, if at all, in most histories of architecture. But the lesser equipment of everyday life was rapidly reshaped by modernity.

How far this was due to the heritage of the arts-and-crafts and art nouveau movements, in which vanguard art had committed itself to daily use; how far to the Russian constructivists, some of whom deliberately set out to revolutionize mass production design; how far to the genuine suitability of modernist purism for modern domestic technology (e.g. kitchen design) we must leave to art history to decide. The fact remains that a short-lived establishment, which began very much as a political and artistic avant-garde centre, came to set the tone of both architecture and the applied arts of two generations. This was the Bauhaus, or art and design school of Weimar and later Dessau in Central Germany (1919-33), whose existence coincided with the Weimar Republic - it was dissolved by the National Socialists shortly after Hitler took power. The list of names associated with the Bauhaus in one way or another reads like a Who's Who of the advanced arts between the Rhine and the Urals: Gropius and Mies van der Rohe; Lyonel Feininger, Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky; Malevich, El Lissitzky, Moholy-Nagy, etc. Its influence rested not only on these talents but - from 1921 - on a deliberate turn away from the old arts-and-crafts and (avant-garde) fine arts tradition to designs for practical use and industrial production: car bodies (by Gropius), aircraft seats, advertising graphics (a passion of the Russian constructivist El Lissitzky), not forgetting the design of the one and two million Mark banknotes during the great German hyper-inflation of 1923.

The Bauhaus - as its problems with unsympathetic politicians shows — was considered deeply subversive. And, indeed, political commitment of one kind or another dominates the 'serious' arts in the Age of Catastrophe. In the 1930s it reached even Britain, still a haven of social and political stability amid European revolution, and the USA, remote from war but not from the Great Slump. That political commitment was by no means only to the Left, though radical art-lovers found it hard, especially when young, to accept that creative genius and progressive opinions should not go together. Yet, especially in literature, deeply reactionary convictions, sometimes translated into fascist practice, were common enough in Western Europe. The poets T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound in Britain and exile; William Butler Yeats (1865-1939) in Ireland; the novelists Knut Hamsun (1859-1952) in Norway, an impassioned collaborator of the Nazis, D.H. Lawrence (1885-1930) in Britain and Louis Ferdinand Celine in France (1884-1961) are obvious examples. The brilliant talents of the Russian emigration cannot, of course, be automatically classified as 'reactionary', although some of them were, or became, so; for a refusal to accept Bolshevism united émigrés of widely different political views.

Nevertheless, it is probably safe to say that in the aftermath of world war and the October revolution, and even more in the era of anti-fascism of the 1930s and 1940s, it was the Left, often the revolutionary Left, that primarily attracted the avant-garde. Indeed, war and revolution politicized a number of notably non-political pre-war avant-garde movements in France and Russia. (Most of the Russian avant-garde, however, showed no initial enthusiasm for October.) As Lenin's influence brought Marxism back to the Western world as the only important theory and ideology of social revolution, so it assured the conversion of avant-gardes to what the National Socialists, not incorrectly, called 'cultural Bolshevism' (Kultur-bolschewismus). Dada was for revolution. Its successor, surrealism, had difficulty only in deciding which brand of revolution it was for, the majority of the sect choosing Trotsky over Stalin. The Moscow-Berlin axis which shaped so much of Weimar culture rested on common political sympathies. Mies van der Rohe built a monument to the murdered Spartacist leaders Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg for the German Communist Party. Gropius, Bruno Taut (1880-1938), Le Corbusier, Hannes Meyer and an entire 'Bauhaus Brigade' accepted Soviet commissions - admittedly at a time when the Great Slump made the USSR not merely ideologically but also professionally attractive to Western architects. Even the basically not very political German cinema was radicalized, as witness the wonderful director G.W. Pabst (1885— 1967), a man visibly more interested in presenting women rather than public affairs, and later quite prepared to work under the Nazis. Yet in the last Weimar years he was the author of some of the most radical films, including Brecht-Weill's Threepenny Opera.

It was the tragedy of modernist artists, Left or Right, that the much more effective political commitment of their own mass movements and politicians - not to mention their adversaries - rejected them. With the partial exception of Futurist-influenced Italian fascism, the new authoritarian regimes of both Right and Left preferred old-fashioned and gigantic monumental buildings and vistas in architecture, inspirational representations in both painting and sculpture, elaborate performances of the classics on stage, and ideological acceptability in literature. Hitler, of course, was a frustrated artist who eventually found a competent young architect to realize his gigantic conceptions, Albert Speer. However, neither Mussolini nor Stalin nor General Franco, all of whom inspired their own architectural dinosaurs, began life with such personal ambitions. Neither the German nor the Russian avant-garde, therefore, survived the rise of Hitler and Stalin, and the two countries, spearhead of all that was advanced and distinguished in the arts of the 1920s, almost disappear from the cultural scene.

In retrospect we can see better than contemporaries could what a cultural disaster the triumph of both Hitler and Stalin proved to be, that is to say, how much the avant-garde arts were rooted in the revolutionary soil of central and eastern Europe. The best wine of the arts seemed to grow on the lava-streaked slopes of volcanoes. It was not merely that the cultural authorities of politically revolutionary regimes gave more official recognition, i.e. material backing, to artistic revolutionaries than the conservative ones they replaced, even if their political authorities showed no enthusiasm. Anatol Lunacharsky, the 'Commissar for Enlightenment', encouraged the avant-garde, though Lenin's taste in the arts was quite conventional. The social-democratic government of Prussia, before it was expelled in 1932 from office (unresistingly) by the authorities of the more right-wing German Reich, encouraged the radical conductor Otto Klemperer to turn one of the Berlin opera houses into a showcase of all that was advanced in music between 1928 and 1931. However, in some indefinable way, it also seems that the times of cataclysm heightened the sensibilities, sharpened the passions of those who lived through them, in Central and Eastern Europe. Theirs was a harsh not a happy vision, and its very harshness and the tragic sense that infused it was what sometimes gave talents which were not in themselves outstanding a bitter denunciatory eloquence, for instance B. Traven, an insignificant anarchist bohemian emigrant once associated with the short-lived Munich Soviet Republic of 1919, who took to writing movingly about sailors and Mexico (Huston's Treasure of the Sierra Madre with Bogart is based on him). Without it he would have remained in deserved obscurity. Where such an artist lost the sense that the world was intolerable, as the savage German satirist George Grosz did on emigrating to the USA after 1933, nothing remained but technically competent sentimentality.

The central European avant-garde art of the Age of Cataclysm rarely articulated hope, even though its politically revolutionary members were committed to an upbeat vision of the future by their ideological convictions. Its most powerful achievements, most of them dating from the years before Hitler's and Stalin's supremacy - 'I can't think what to say about Hitler', quipped the great Austrian satirist Karl Kraus, whom the First World War had left far from speechless (Kraus, 1922) - come out of apocalypse and tragedy: Alban Berg's opera Wozzek (first performed 1926); Brecht and Weill's Threepenny Opera (1928) and Mahagonny (1931); Brecht-Eisler's Die Massnahme (1930); Isaac Babel's stories Red Cavalry (1926); Eisenstein's film Battleship Potemkin (1925); or Alfred Doblin's Berlin-Alexanderplatz (1929). As for the collapse of theHabsburg Empire, it produced an extraordinary outburst of literature, ranging from the denunciation of Karl Kraus's The Last Days of Humanity (1922) through the ambiguous buffoonery of Jaroslav Hasek's Good Soldier Schwejk (1921) to the melancholy threnody of Josef Roth's Radetskymarsch (1932) and the endless self-reflection of Robert Musil's Man without Qualities (1930). No set of political events in the twentieth century has had a comparably profound impact on the creative imagination, although in their own ways the Irish revolution and civil war (1916— 22) through O'Casey and, in a more symbolic mode, through its muralists, the Mexican revolution (1910—20) - but not the Russian revolution -inspired the arts in their respective countries. An empire destined to collapse as a metaphor for a Western elite culture itself undermined and collapsing: these images had long haunted the dark corners of the Central European imagination. The end of order found expression in the great poet Rainer Maria Rilke's (1875-1926) Duino Elegies (1913-23). Another Prague writer in the German language presented an even more absolute sense of the incomprehensibility of the human predicament, both singular and collective: Franz Kafka (1883-1924), almost all of whose work was published posthumously. This, then, was art created

in the days the world was falling the
hour the earth's foundations fled

to cite the classical scholar and poet A.E. Housman, who was far from the avant-garde (Housman, 1988, p. 138). This was art whose view was that of the 'angel of history', whom the German-Jewish marxist Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) claimed to recognize in Paul Klee's picture Angelus Novus:

His face is turned towards the past. Where we see a chain of events before us, he sees a single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon ruin till they reach his feet. If only he could stay to wake the dead and to piece together the fragments of what has been broken! But a storm blows from the direction of Paradise, catching his wings with such force that the Angel can no longer close them. This storm drives him irresistibly into the future, to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris at his feet grows into the sky. This storm is what we call progress (Benjamin, 1971, pp. 84-85).

West of the zone of collapse and revolution the sense of a tragic and ineluctable cataclysm was less, but the future seemed equally enigmatic. In spite of the trauma of the First World War, continuity with the past was not so obviously broken until the 1930s, the decade of the Great Slump, fascism and the steadily approaching war. (Indeed, the major literary echoes of the First World War only began to reverberate towards the end of the 1920s when Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front (1929, Hollywood film 1930) sold two-and-a-half million copies in eighteen months in twenty-five languages.)  Even so, in retrospect the mood of the Western intellectuals seems less desperate and more hopeful than that of the central Europeans, now scattered and isolated from Moscow to Hollywood, or the captive East Europeans silenced by failure and terror. They still felt themselves to be defending values threatened, but not yet destroyed, to revitalize what was living in their society, if need be by transforming it. As we shall see, much of the Western blindness to the faults of the Stalinist Soviet Union was due to the conviction that, after all, it represented the values of the Enlightenment against the disintegration of reason; of 'progress' in the old and simple sense, so much less problematic than Walter Benjamin's 'wind blowing from Paradise'. It was only among ultra-reactionaries that we find the sense of the world as an incomprehensible tragedy, or rather, as in the greatest British novelist of the period, Evelyn Waugh (1903-66), as a black comedy for stoics; or, as in the French novelist Louis Ferdinand Celine (1894—1961), a nightmare even for cynics. Though the finest and most intelligent of the young British avant-garde poets of the time, W.H. Auden (1907—73), had a sense of history as tragedy — Spain, Musee des Beaux Arts — the mood of the group of which he was the centre found the human predicament acceptable enough. The most impressive British artists of the avant-garde, the sculptor Henry Moore (1898-1986) and the composer Benjamin Britten (1913—76), give the impression that they would have been quite ready to let the world crisis pass them by, had it not intruded. But it did.

The avant-garde arts were still a concept confined to the culture of Europe and its outliers and dependencies, and even there the pioneers on the frontier of artistic revolution still often looked longingly at Paris and even — to a lesser but surprising extent — at London. It did not yet look to New York. What this means is that the non-European avant-garde barely existed outside the western hemisphere, where it was firmly anchored to both artistic experiment and social revolution. Its best-known representatives at this time, the mural painters of the Mexican revolution, disagreed only about Stalin and Trotsky, but not about Zapata and Lenin, whom Diego Rivera (1886-1957) insisted on including in a fresco destined for the new Rockefeller Center in New York (a triumph of art-deco second only to the Chrysler Building) to the displeasure of the Rockefellers.

Yet for most artists in the non-Western world the basic problem was modernity not modernism. How were their writers to turn spoken vernaculars into flexible and comprehensive literary idioms for the contemporary world, as the Bengalis had done since the mid-nineteenth century in India? How were men (perhaps, in these new days, even women) to write poetry in Urdu, instead of the classical Persian hitherto obligatory for such purposes; in Turkish instead of in the classical Arabic which Ataturk's revolution threw into the dustbin of history with the fez and the woman's veil? What, in countries of ancient cultures, were they to do with or about their traditions; arts which, however attractive, did not belong to the twentieth century? To abandon the past was revolutionary enough to make the Western revolt of one phase of modernity against another appear irrelevant or even incomprehensible. All the more so when the modernizing artist was at the same time a political revolutionary, as was more than likely. Chekhov and Tolstoy might seem more apposite models than James Joyce for those who felt their task — and their inspiration — was to 'go to the people' and to paint a realistic picture of their sufferings and to help them rise. Even the Japanese writers, who took to modernism from the 1920s (probably through contact with Italian Futurism), had a strong and from time to time dominant socialist or communist 'proletarian' contingent (Keene, 1984, chapter 15). Indeed, the first great Chinese modern writer, Lu Hsun (1881-1936), deliberately rejected Western models and looked to Russian literature where 'we can see the kindly soul of the oppressed, their sufferings and struggles' (Lu Hsun, 1975, p. 23).

For most of the creative talents of the non-European world who were neither confined within their traditions nor simple Westernizers, the major task seemed to be to discover, to lift the veil from, and to present the contemporary reality of their peoples. Realism was their movement. In a way, this desire united the arts of East and West. For the twentieth century, it was increasingly clear, was the century of the common people, and dominated by the arts produced by and for them. And two linked instruments made the world of the common man visible as never before and capable of documentation: reportage and the camera. Neither was new (see Age of Capital, chapter 15; Age of Empire, chapter 9) but both entered a self-conscious golden age after 1914. Writers, especially in the USA, not only saw themselves as recorders or reporters, but wrote for newspapers and indeed were or had been newspapermen: Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961), Theodore Dreiser (1871-1945), Sinclair Lewis (1885-1951). 'Reportage' - the term first appears in French dictionaries in 1929 and in English ones in 1931 - became an accepted genre of socially-critical literature and visual presentation in the 1920s, largely under the influence of the Russian revolutionary avant-garde who extolled fact against the pop entertainment which the European Left had always condemned as the people's opium. The Czech communist journalist Egon Erwin Kisch, who gloried in the name of 'Reporter in a Rush' (Der rasende Reporter, 1925, was the title of the first of a series of his reportages) seems to have given the term currency in central Europe. It spread, mainly via the cinema, through the Western avant-garde. Its origins are clearly visible in the sections headed* 'Newsreel' and 'the Camera Eye' - an allusion to the avant-garde film documentarist Dziga Vertov - with which the narrative is intercut in John Dos Passos' (1896— 1970) trilogy USA, written in that novelist's Left-wing period. In the hands of the avant-garde Left 'documentary film' became a self-conscious movement, but in the 1930s even the hard-headed professionals of the news and magazine business claimed a higher intellectual and creative status by upgrading some movie newsreels, usually undemanding space-fillers, into the more grandiose 'March of Time' documentaries, and borrowing the technical innovations of the avant-garde photographers as pioneered in the communist AIZ of the 1920s to create a golden age of the picture-magazine: Life in the USA, Picture Post in Britain, Vu in France. However, outside the Anglo-Saxon countries it only began to flourish massively after the Second World War.

The new photo-journalism owed its merits not only to the talented men - even some women - who discovered photography as a medium, to the illusory belief that 'the camera cannot lie', i.e. that it somehow represented 'real' truth, and to the technical improvements that made unposed pictures easy with the new miniature cameras (the Leica launched in 1924), but perhaps most of all to the universal dominance of the cinema. Men and women learned to see reality through camera lenses. For while there was growth in the circulation of the printed word (now also increasingly interwoven with rotogravure photos in the tabloid press), it lost ground to the film. The Age of Catastrophe was the age of the large cinema screen. In the late 1930s for every British person who bought a daily newspaper, two bought a cinema ticket (Stevenson, pp. 396, 403). Indeed, as depression deepened and the world was swept by war, Western cinema attendances reached their all-time peak.

In the new visual media, avant-garde and mass arts fertilized one another. Indeed, in the old Western countries the domination of the educated strata and a certain elitism penetrated even the mass medium of film, producing a golden age for the German silent film in the Weimar era, for the French sound film in the 1930s, and for the Italian film as soon as the blanket of fascism which covered its talents had been lifted. Of these perhaps the populist French cinema of the 1930s was most successful in combining what intellectuals wanted from culture with what the larger public wanted from entertainment. It was the only highbrow cinema which never forgot the importance of the story, especially about love and crime, and the only one capable of making good jokes. Where the avant-garde (political or artistic) had its own way entirely, as in the documentary movement or agitprop art, its work rarely reached beyond small minorities.

However, the avant-garde input is not what makes the mass arts of the period significant. It is their increasingly undeniable cultural hegemony even though, as we have seen, outside the USA they still had not quite escaped from the supervision of the educated. The arts (or rather entertainments) which became dominant were those aimed at the broadest masses rather than at the large, and growing, middle-class and lower-middle class public with traditional tastes. These still dominated the European 'boulevard' or 'West End' stage or its equivalents, at least until Hitler dispersed the manufacturers of such products, but their interest is slight. The most interesting development in this middlebrow region was the extraordinary, explosive growth of a genre that had shown some signs, of life before 1914, but no hint of its subsequent triumphs: the detective puzzle story, now mainly written at book-length. The genre was primarily British - perhaps a tribute to A. Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes, who became internationally known in the 1890s - and, more surprisingly, largely female or academic. Its pioneer, Agatha Christie (1891-1976) remains a bestseller to this day. The international versions of this genre were still largely, and evidently, inspired by the British model, i.e. they were almost exclusively about murder treated as a parlour game requiring some ingenuity, rather like the high-class crossword puzzles with enigmatic clues which were an even more exclusively British speciality. The genre is best seen as a curious invocation to a social order threatened but not yet breached. Murder, which now became the central, almost the only crime to mobilize the detective, irrupts into a characteristically ordered environment - the country house, or some familiar professional milieu - and is traced to one of those rotten apples which confirm the soundness of the rest of the barrel. Order is restored through reason as applied to the problem by the detective who himself (he was still overwhelmingly male) represents the milieu. Hence perhaps the insistence on the private investigator, unless the policeman himself is, unlike most of his kind, a member of the upper and middle classes. It was a deeply conservative, though still self-confident genre, unlike the contemporary rise of the more hysterical secret agent thriller (also mainly British), a genre with a great future in the second half of the century. Its authors, men of modest literary merits, often found a suitable metier in their country's secret service.(The literary ancestors of the modern 'hard-boiled' thriller or 'private eye' story were much more demotic. Dashiell Hammett (1894-1961) began as a Pinkerton operative and published in pulp magazines. For that matter the only writer to turn the detective story into genuine literature, the Belgian Georges Simenon (1903-89), was an autodidact hack writer.)

By 1914 mass media on the modern scale could already be taken for granted in a number of Western countries. Nevertheless, their growth in the age of cataclysms was spectacular. Newspaper circulation in the USA rose much faster than population, doubling between 1920 and 1950. By that time something between 300 and 350 papers were sold for every 1,000 men, women and children in the typical 'developed' country, though the Scandinavians and Australians consumed even more newsprint, and the urbanized British, possibly because their press was national rather than localized, bought an astonishing six hundred copies per thousand of the population (UN Statistical Yearbook, 1948). The press appealed to the literate, although in countries of mass schooling it did its best to satisfy the incompletely literate by means of pictures and comic strips, not yet admired by the intellectuals, and by developing a highly-coloured, attention-grabbing, pseudo-demotic idiom avoiding words of too many syllables. Its influence on literature was not negligible. The cinema, on the other hand, made small demands on literacy, and after it learned to talk in the late 1920s, practically none on the English-speaking public.

However, unlike the press, which in most parts of the world interested only a small elite, films were almost from the start an international mass medium. The abandonment of the potentially universal language of the silent film with its tested codes for cross-cultural communication probably did much to make spoken English internationally familiar and thus helped to establish the language as the global pidgin of the later twentieth century. For, in the golden age of Hollywood, films were essentially American — except in Japan, where about as many full-size movies were made as in the USA. As for the rest of the world, on the eve of the Second World War Hollywood produced about as many films as all other industries combined, even if we include India which already produced about 170 a year for an audience as large as Japan's and almost as large as the USA's. In 1937 it turned out 567 films, or rather more than ten a week. The difference between the hegemonic capacity of capitalism and bureaucratized socialism is that between this figure and the forty-one films the USSR claimed to have produced in 1938. Nevertheless, for obvious linguistic reasons, so extraordinary a global predominance of a single industry could not last. In any case it did not survive the disintegration of the 'studio system' which reached its peak in this period as a machine for mass-producing dreams, but collapsed shortly after the Second World War.

The third of the mass media was entirely new: radio. Unlike the other two, it rested primarily on the private ownership of what was still a sophisticated piece of machinery, and was thus confined essentially to the comparatively prosperous 'developed' countries. In Italy the number of radio sets did not exceed that of automobiles until 1931 (Isola, 1990). The greatest densities of radio-sets were to be found, on the eve of the Second World War, in the USA, Scandinavia, New Zealand and Britain. However, in such countries it advanced at a spectacular rate, and even the poor could afford it. Of Britain's nine million sets in 1939, half had been bought by people earning between £2.5 and £4 per week - a modest income - and another two million by people earning less than this (Briggs, II, p. 254). It is perhaps not surprising that the radio audience doubled in the years of the Great Slump, when its rate of growth was faster than before or later. For radio transformed the life of the poor, and especially of housebound poor women, as nothing else had ever done. It brought the world into their room. Henceforth the loneliest need never again be entirely alone. And the entire range of what could be said, sung, played or otherwise expressed in sound, was now at their disposal. Is it surprising that a medium unknown when the First World War ended had captured ten million households in the USA by the year of the stock exchange crash, over twenty-seven millions by 1939, over forty millions by 1950?

Unlike film, or even the revolutionized mass press, radio did not transform the human ways of perceiving reality in any profound way. It did not create new ways of seeing or establishing relations between sense impressions and ideas (see Age of Empire). It was merely the medium, not the message. But its capacity for speaking simultaneously to untold millions, each of whom felt addressed as an individual, made it an inconceivably powerful tool of mass information and, as both rulers and salesmen immediately recognized, for propaganda and advertisement. By the early 1930s the President of the USA had discovered the potential of the radio 'fireside chat', and the king of Britain that of the royal Christmas broadcast (1932 and 1933 respectively). In the Second World War, with its endless demand for news, radio came into its own as a political instrument and as a medium of information. The number of radio sets in continental Europe increased substantially in all countries except some of the worst victims of battle (Briggs, III, Appendix C). In several cases it doubled or more than doubled. In most of the non-European countries the rise was even steeper. Commerce, though from the start it ruled the airwaves over the USA, had a harder conquest elsewhere, since by tradition governments were reluctant to give up control over so powerful a medium for influencing citizens. The BBC maintained its public monopoly. Where commercial broadcasting was tolerated, it was nevertheless expected to defer to the official voice.

It is difficult to recognize the innovations of radio culture, since so much that it pioneered has become part of the furniture of everyday life -the sports commentary, the news bulletin, the celebrity guest show, the soap opera, or indeed the serial programme of any kind. The most profound change it brought was simultaneously to privatize and to structure life according to a rigorous timetable, which henceforth ruled not only the sphere of labour but that of leisure. Yet curiously this medium - and, until the rise of video and VCR its successor, television -though essentially centered on individual and family, created its own public sphere. For the first time in history people unknown to each other who met knew what each had in all probability heard (or, later, seen) the night before: the big game, the favourite comedy show, Winston Churchill's speech, the contents of the news bulletin.

The art most significantly affected by radio was music, since it abolished the acoustic or mechanical limitations on the range of sounds. Music, the last of the arts to break out of the bodily prison that confines oral communication, had already entered the era of mechanical reproduction before 1914 with the gramophone, although this was hardly yet within reach of the masses. The years between the wars certainly brought both gramophones and records within the range of the masses, though the virtual collapse of the record-market for 'race records', i.e. typical poor people's music during the American slump, demonstrates the fragility of this expansion. Yet the record, though its technical quality improved after about 1930 had its limits, if only of length. Moreover, its range depended on its sales. Radio, for the first time, enabled music to be heard at a distance at more than five minutes' unbroken length, and by a theoretically limitless number of listeners. It thus became both a unique popularizer of minority music (including classical music) and by far the most powerful means for selling records, as indeed it still remains. Radio did not change music - it certainly affected it less than the theatre or the movies, which also soon learned to reproduce sound - but the role of music in contemporary life, not excluding its role as aural wallpaper for everyday living, is inconceivable without it.

The forces which dominated the popular arts were thus primarily technological and industrial: press, camera, film, record and radio. Yet since the later nineteenth century an authentic spring of autonomous creative innovation had been visibly welling up in the popular and entertainment quarters of some great cities (see Age of Empire). It was far from exhausted, and the media revolution carried its products far beyond their original milieus. Thus the Argentine tango formalized, and especially amplified from dance into song, probably reached its peak of achievement and influence in the 1920s and 1930s, and when its greatest star Carlos Gardel (1890-1935) died in an air crash in 1935, he was mourned all over Spanish America, and (thanks to records) turned into a permanent presence. The samba, destined to symbolize Brazil as the tango did Argentina, is the child of the democratization of the Rio carnival in the 1920s. However, the most impressive and, in the long run, influential development of this sort was the development of jazz in the USA, largely under the impact of the migration of Negroes from the southern states to the big cities of middle west and north-east: an autonomous art music of professional (mainly black) entertainers.

The impact of some of these popular innovations or developments was as yet restricted outside their native milieus. It was also as yet less revolutionary than it became in the second half of the century, when - to take the obvious example — an idiom directly derived from the American Negro blues became, as rock-and-roll, a global language of youth culture. Nevertheless, though — with the exception of film - the impact both of mass media and popular creation was more modest than it became in the second half of the century (this will be considered below); it was already enormous in quantity and striking in quality, especially in the USA which began to exercise an unchallengeable hegemony in these fields, thanks to its extraordinary economic preponderance, its firm commitment to commerce and democracy and, after the Great Slump, the influence of Rooseveltian populism. In the field of popular culture the world was American or it was provincial. With one exception, no other national or regional model established itself globally, though some had substantial regional influence (for instance, Egyptian music within the Islamic world) and an occasional exotic touch entered global commercial popular culture from time to time, as in the Caribbean and Latin American components of dance-music. The unique exception was sport. In this branch of popular culture - and who, having seen the Brazilian team in its days of glory will deny it the claim to art? - US influence remained confined to the area of Washington's political domination. As cricket is played as a mass sport only where once the Union Jack flew, so baseball made little impact except where US marines had once landed. The sport the world made its own was association football, the child of Britain's global economic presence, which had introduced teams named after British firms,or composed of expatriate Britons (like the Sao Paulo Athletic Club) from the polar ice to the Equator. This simple and elegant game, unhampered by complex rules and equipment, and which could be practised on any more or less flat open space of the required size, made its way through the world entirely on its merits and, with the establishment of the World Cup in 1930 (won by Uruguay) became genuinely international.

And yet, by our standards, mass sports, though now global, remained extraordinarily primitive. Their practitioners had not yet been absorbed by the capitalist economy. The great stars were still amateurs, as in tennis (i.e. assimilated to traditional bourgeois status), or professionals paid a wage not all that much higher than a skilled industrial worker's, as in British football. They had still to be enjoyed face-to-face, for even radio could only translate the actual sight of the game or race into the rising decibels of a commentator's voice. The age of television and sportsmen paid like filmstars was still a few years away. But, as we shall see not all that many.