Freedom and Order in Jazz Age Art: Picasso & Hemingway

“Live it up to write it down,” was the motto of the Jazz Age, turning loose on the page, stage or canvas the youthful excesses of a blissful pavanne of parties without end in Montparnasse and the Cote d’Azur. The War was over and the bubbles were endlessly rising in the champagne.

Ernest Hemingway’s famous phrase was: “If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast.” But Hemingway also knew that during the War, his generation witnessed more than its share of destruction and was ready for a clean and formal “call to order,” as the architect Le Corbusier declared. From the wild rhapsodies of jazz and the experimental poetry of e.e. cummings to Corbusier’s white-cube houses of Le Corbusier and the crisp outlines of Fernand Leger’s still life painting, the dialectic of freedom and order played out in an era of unparalleled creativity. The central figures in the debate were Hemingway and Picasso, whose masterpieces of the period combined rule-breaking with precision, freedom and form.

Charles Riley II, PhD, is an arts journalist, curator and professor. He is the author of thirty-one books on art, architecture and public policy including Echoes of the Jazz Age.

Held: Thursday, April 21
From: 7:30pm – 9:00pm
At: Berg’n
Cost: $12