Années folles
The Années folles was the decade of the 1920s in France. It was coined to describe the social, artistic, and cultural collaborations of the period. The same period is also referred to as the Roaring Twenties or the Jazz Age in the United States. In Germany, it is sometimes referred to as the Golden Twenties because of the economic boom that followed the hyperinflation in 1923 until the Wall Street crash of 1929.
Precursors
The utopian positivism of the 19th century and its progressive creed led to unbridled individualism in France. Art Nouveau extravagance began to evolve into Art Deco geometry after the First World War.André Gide, who founded the Nouvelle Revue Française literary review in 1908, influenced Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus. Tristan Tzara's 1918 Dada manifesto and the resulting Dada movement were very much a product of the interbellum: "Dadaists both embraced and critiqued modernity, imbuing their works with references to the technologies, newspapers, films, and advertisements that increasingly defined contemporary life". All these served as the precursors for the ''Années folles.''
Café society
Cafés around Paris became places where artists, writers, and others gathered. On the Rive Gauche the scene centered around cafés in Montparnasse while on the Rive Droite, the Montmartre area.Left bank
The Années folles in Montparnasse featured a thriving art and literary scene centered on cafés such as Brasserie La Coupole, Le Dôme Café, Café de la Rotonde, and La Closerie des Lilas as well as salons like Gertrude Stein's in the rue de Fleurus.The Rive Gauche, or left bank, of the Seine in Paris, was and is primarily concerned with the arts and the sciences. Many artists settled there and frequented cabarets like Le Boeuf sur le Toit and the large brasseries in Montparnasse. American writers of the Lost Generation, like F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway, met and mingled in Paris with exiles from dictatorships in Spain and Yugoslavia. They, along with the Jewish artists of the School of Paris such as Isaac Frenkel and Mane-Katz frequented also Le Select.
The painters of the School of Paris for example included among others Chaïm Soutine, Amedeo Modigliani, and Marc Chagall, who were Jews from Lithuania, Italy, and Russia, respectively. Later the American Henry Miller, like many other foreigners, gravitated to the rue Vavin and Boulevard Raspail. Montparnasse was, he said, "the navel of the world". Gertrude Stein also lived in Montparnasse during this period.
Right bank
Montmartre was a major center of Paris nightlife and had been famous for its cafés and dance halls since the 1890s. Trumpeter Arthur Briggs played at L'Abbaye and transvestites frequented La Petite Chaumière. After World War I, the artists who had inhabited the guinguettes and cabarets of Montmartre invented post-Impressionism during the Belle Époque.In 1926, the facade of the Folies Bergère building was redone in Art Deco style by the artist Maurice Pico, adding it to the many Parisian theatres of the period in this architectural style.
Art
School of Paris
In the 1920s a loose group of mainly immigrant artists emerged in Paris who were termed, the School of Paris by Andre Warnod in 1925 while writing for Comœdia. The artists tended to cloister around cafes, salons and other establishments in the Montparnasse quarter. Among these immigrant artists were many Jewish artists, most of whom originated from Eastern Europe such as Chaim Soutine, Jules Pascin, Yitzhak Frenkel, March Chagall and Amadeo Modigliani. These artists had an expressionist tendency, exploring Jewish themes as well as French and Parisian themes. Frenkel described the Jewish artists of the school as "members of the minority characterized by restlessness whose expressionism is therefore extreme in its emotionalism". The artists of the school according to Lurie would also portray humanity and emotion through facial expression. The art of the school during the Années folles would later on having a profound impact on the onset and development of modern art in Israel through Yitzhak Frenkel. Other artists who were associated with the school include Japanese artist Tsuguharu Foujita, Singaporean Liu Kang and others.Surrealism
came to the forefront in the 1920s cultural scene, bringing new forms of expression to poetry with authors like André Breton, whose Surrealist Manifesto appeared in 1924, Louis Aragon, Paul Éluard, and Robert Desnos. Émigré artists had created Post-Impressionism, Cubism, and Fauvism in Paris before World War I, and included Pablo Picasso, Marc Chagall, Amedeo Modigliani, and Piet Mondrian, along with French artists Pierre Bonnard, Henri Matisse, Jean Metzinger, and Albert Gleizes.Surrealists also included artists like Max Ernst, Joan Miró, Salvador Dalí, and Francis Picabia, sculptors like Jean Arp, Germaine Richier and even early film-makers, like Luis Buñuel and René Clair.
Avant-garde
, while he denied belonging to the surrealists, was unquestionably avant-garde and collaborated with many of its members.Architecture
Architecture in 1920s in France underwent a shift from the Art Nouveau style to the Art Deco style. The Art Deco was named after the 1925 Paris exposition which was called Exposition internationale des Arts décoratifs et industriels modernes. The art deco style is marked by bold geometric forms, rich ornamentation, and the usage of luxurious materials. The Exposition internationale des Arts décoratifs et industriels modernes attracted over sixteen million visitors, showcased a design ethos that celebrated modernity, ornamentation, and luxurious materials according to the MoMa. According to MoMa the works presented rejected historical styles, and many retained strong connections to French artistic traditions. French designers, who sought to revitalize the luxury trades and to counter competition from Austria and Germany, embraced the emerging Art Deco style. MoMa describes Art Deco as reflecting both technological innovation and a desire for opulence in the post-World War I era. The architecture style was influenced by avant-garde art movements such as Cubism, Orphism, and Fauvism further which brought about a synthesis of abstraction, stylization, and modern design principles.As the Art Deco style flourished, it fostered close connections between design, fashion, and broader cultural trends. Collaborations between couturiers and interior decorators underscored the importance of aesthetic coherence not only in fashion but also in the design of domestic spaces and luxury goods. Following the great depression, in the 1930s, the exuberance of Art Deco diminished, partly as a consequence of the economic downturn brought about by the Great Depression and a growing preference for classical simplicity over lavish ornamentation. This transition, which according to MoMa was known as the “Return to Order,” emphasized monumental forms and a more restrained aesthetic that conveyed stability and confidence during times of social and economic uncertainty. The 1937 Exposition Internationale des Arts et Techniques dans la Vie Moderne in Paris, which focused on technological progress rather than luxury, symbolically marked the end of the Art Deco era.
Simultaneously, during the 1920s modernist architecture was further developed by Le Corbusier. His 1923 publication, Vers une architecture, introduced the "Five Points of Architecture," advocating for principles such as pilotis, flat roofs, open floor plans, horizontal windows, and free façades. These ideas were materialized in projects like the Villa La Roche and the Pavillon de l'Esprit Nouveau, presented at the 1925 Paris Exposition.
Entertainment
In the 1920s, Parisian nightlife was greatly influenced by American culture. One of its greatest influences was the ragtime called jazz, which became very popular in Paris. "Ragtimitis" came to Paris with a rendition of "The Memphis Blues" by a U.S. Army band led by New York Army National Guard Lieutenant James Reese Europe. The band, known as the Harlem Hellfighters of the 369th Infantry Regiment, "... started ragtimitis in France", according to band member Noble Sissle. It was very successful in 1925 at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées where La Revue nègre also was playing, led first by Florence Mills, known by her stage name as Flossie Mills, and later by Josephine Baker.In 1926, Baker, an African American expatriate singer, dancer, and entertainer, caused a sensation at the Folies Bergère. In a new revue, La Folie du Jour, in which she danced the number "Fatou" wearing a costume revealing all but a skirt made of a string of artificial bananas. Wearing only her loincloth of bananas, Baker suggestively performed "danse sauvage" to a Charleston tempo – a genre still new to Europe. Her French producer Jacques-Charles produced her dance numbers with French preconceptions of eroticized savages in mind. Baker performed the piece mostly nude with her partner, Joe Alex. This dance inspired a 1929 tempera painting titled Josephine Baker, first shown by the painter Ivanhoe Gambini in an exhibition of the Radiofuturista Lombardo group he founded.
The scandal which erupted over Baker's dancing gave way to enthusiasm and quickly generated excitement among Parisians for jazz and black music. The Charleston can be danced solo, in pairs or in groups, to the rhythms of jazz. It is based on the movements of the body weight from one leg to the other, with the feet turned inward and knees slightly bent.
Of all the fashionable cabarets, the most famous was called Le Boeuf sur le Toit where the pianist and French composer Jean Wiener played. Such entertainment reached only a tiny part of the French population, the elite. Nevertheless, it gave the impulse, created the event.