Frivolity in the Jazz Age…

When I think of the 1920’s, sometimes I think of the iconic image of spoiled heiress Nancy Cunard modeling dozens of African-inspired arm bangles, or “Shipwreck Kelly” sitting on his flag pole in rain coat and hat for days upon end with masses of spectators at his feet.  Why did they do it?  Was Nancy really trying to make a statement about African relations or did it actually  start before she became an activist on all things African?  Why did Shipwreck Kelly die immediately after a pole sitting reprise in the 1950’s with only clippings of his glory days in his pocket?  There was something about the Jazz Age…

What people did then was all about novelty–doing something exotic and doing it over-the-top.  Some of it was the reaction after World War I and the horrors of poison gas and general world turmoil.  The Bentons, art deco historians, wrote that the need to create fantasy was “functionally necessary for survival.”

The interesting thing, I think, is that most Americans were bitterly aware of their need to be frivolous.  It was a self-conscious act of desperation.  In 1927, Edwin Avery Park, the American critic, wrote that a “new spirit in design is creeping in about the edges.  It fastens first upon objects of a transitory and frivolous nature.”  Frivolity became the catch-word of the day.  But the “fragility and tragedy lurking behind the glitter,” from all the painful leftover emotions of WWI, that combined the dream’s fundamental frivolity with ruthless commercial interests to create something grandiose…  its transitory effects, the wave of color in shop windows … became art deco, in fact.