Chaos and Classicism: Art in France, Italy, and Germany, 1918-1936

Now available in paperback, Chaos and Classicism explores the classicizing aesthetic that followed the immense destruction of World War I: the poetic dream of antiquity in the Parisian avant garde of Fernand Léger and Pablo Picasso; the politicized revival of the Roman Empire under Benito Mussolini by artists such as Giorgio de Chirico and Mario Sironi; and the austere functionalist utopianism of the Bauhaus, as well as, more chillingly, the pseudo-biological classicism, or Aryanism, of nascent Nazi society. Among the other artists surveyed here are Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, André Derain, Gino Severini, Jean Cocteau, Le Corbusier, Amédée Ozenfant, Madeleine Vionnet, Émile-Jacques Ruhlmann, Carlo Carrà, Giorgio Morandi, Massimo Campigli, Achille Funi, Ubaldo Oppi, Gio Ponti, Arturo Martini, Georg Kolbe, Oskar Schlemmer, Otto Dix, Georg Scholz, Georg Schrimpf, Wilhelm Schnarrenberger and August Sander.