I lived through two quirky times in history. When I was in my teens and early twenties, I experienced the groovy era of minishirts, psychedelic posters, and Twiggie. Later in life, I observed the “Occupy Wall Street” movement. All through history groups of people have broken away from the norm, wondering if things could be better if the status quo was questioned. They tried to make something new, hoping to create something better.
It happened during the Renaissance, for example. And even where I grew up in Western and Central New York State. I wrote about it in my blog post,”Flesh and Blood, Bits and Pieces. Before the Civil War, my area was a hotbed for divergent thinking and reform.
I stumbled on one particular quirky era, The Age of Modernizm, after learning about Antoni Gaudi, a totally off the wall architect from Spain who died in 1926. I always thought that people from the early 1900’s were kind of dull . I learned about Pablo Picasso and cubism in school but there was a lot more going on. It was a time when traditions in art, politics and social views we being broken by a small group of social pioneers. It was the time of the machine age, Margaret Sanger and birth control, the formation of labor unions, Matisse, T.S. Eliot, Theater of the Absurd, Nihilism and other edgy occurrences, small slices of society in cultural revolt.
This energy did not bypass Israel. In Germany, an architectural movement started in 1919 called Bauhaus. It was characterized by undecorated surfaces, ribbon window, flat roofs, and outdoor living spaces. Because Jews in Germany were being increasingly discriminated against, many of the Bauhaus group fled to Israel and ended up in Tel Aviv. From 1920 to 1940, 4000 Bauhaus structures were built. The urban planning of Sir Patrick Geddes (mentioned in one of my previous posts) offered a wonderful ordered environment for the clean lines of this type of architecture. The buildings were popular since they took into account the warm Israel weather and were designed to use natural ventilation from windows and doors to cool rooms.
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I also went to a museum that paid homage to Dada, an artist movement started in 1916 in Zurich, Switzerland that was a negative reaction to the horrors of WWI. Artists created nonsensical works of art and plays in protest of the established social order. The museum in Israel was found by Marcel Junco one of the founders of the Dada. In 1941, he and his family fled to Israel from Romania during the Bucharest Progrom during which 125 Jews were killed.
