![]() ![]() ![]() The European artist! What a dazzling figure! André Breton, Louis Aragon, Jean Cocteau, Tristan Tzara, Picasso, Matisse, Arnold Schoenberg, Paul Valéry-such creatures stood out like Gustave Miklos figurines of bronze and gold against the smoking rubble of Europe after the Great War. “The colonial complex” now took hold like a full nelson. The motto of the Lost Generation was, in Malcolm Cowley’s words, “They do things better in Europe.” What was in progress was a postwar discount tour in which practically any American-not just, as in the old days, a Henry James, a John Singer Sargent, or a Richard Morris Hunt-could go abroad and learn how to be a European artist. In fact, he couldn’t have gotten it more hopelessly turned around. Calverton wrote that American artists and writers had suffered from a “colonial complex” throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and had timidly imitated European models-but that after World War I they had finally found the self-confidence and sense of identity to break free of the authority of Europe in the arts. ![]() This great boho adventure is called “the Lost Generation.” Meaning what? In The Liberation of American Literature, V. Young American architects, along with artists, writers, and odd-lot intellectuals, are roaming through Europe. OUR STORY BEGINS IN GERMANY JUST AFTER THE FIRST World War. ![]()
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