At the turn of the century there was a marked difference between the mood of the Old World and the New. The United States, with its vast stretches of unoccupied territory, was indeed the Promised Land. This feeling of general optimism was merely heightened in 1901 when Theodore Roosevelt, the country’s youngest and most energetic President, strode into the White House promising everyone a ‘square deal’.
In contrast, England’s mood was cautious, even apprehensive. Maintaining an Empire had its physical, financial, and moral problems. In 1901 Queen Victoria, revered image of an age that bore her name, died, and with her went the sense of security her people had enjoyed for more than sixty years. There was a rumour that Germany was studying plans for an invasion of England. No one really believed it, yet in 1903 when the Wright Brothers proved at Kitty Hawk that men could fly, and within six years Bleriot succeeded in flying across the English Channel in twenty-six minutes, England’s cheers changed to shocked silence as she realized the significance of what had happened.
By now, another wonder, the ‘horseless carriage’, had become the toy of the rich. While proud owners were having the time of their lives, others who still preferred horses to horsepower and couldn’t afford not to resented being coated with dust every time a ‘wretched’ car went hooting and bumping past. But nothing could prevent the inevitable, and in 1908 when Henry Ford introduced his Model T, the first massproduced car, a new age of motoring began.
Despite disturbing undercurrents of ‘progress’, the Edwardians, led by the most pleasure-loving of monarchs, Edward VII, adored pretty faces and lobsters for tea, were as good at playing ostrich as the ladies were at feathering their hats. They sat down to six-course dinners, dressed to the nines for Ascot, watched a little tennis at Wimbledon and cricket at Lord’s, played the new game of Ping-Pong, and fled to the Riviera at chilblain time. American millionaires, before opening their seaside’ cottages’ at Newport, Bar Harbor, or Southampton, might take the Grand Tour of Europe, stopping en route in England to choose, perhaps, a Rolls-Royce or to marry a title.
In 1910 King Edward died, and George V succeeded. Two American men of letters died that year also, Mark Twain and O. Henry. H. G. Wells, very much alive, came out with two new books, Edith Wharton finished Ethan Frome, and John Galsworthy‘s play, Justice, was produced. In New York Caruso sang at the Metropolitan in Puccini’s new opera Girl of the Golden West. Broadway also had a new Victor Herbert hit, Naughty Marietta, a new clown, Fanny Brice, in The Ziegfeld Follies of 1910, and a slightly older clown, Marie Dressler, singing ‘Heaven Will Protect the Working Girl’ in Tillie’s Nightmare.
It was a good season, too, for those whose idols included Marie Tempest, John Drew, Minnie Maddern Fiske, Maude Adams, Otis Skinner, John Barrymore and his sister Ethel. In 1910 Mrs. Patrick Campbell was onstage in The Foolish Virgin, but her greatest triumph was to come in 1914 as Eliza Doolittle in George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion. That was the year Somerset Maugham finished writing his greatest novel, On Human Bondage.
In 1912 the White Star Line’s Titanic, the biggest, most glamorous ‘floating hotel’ ever known, struck an iceberg on her maiden voyage to New York and sank with the loss of fourteen hundred and ninety lives. Bernard Shaw, often consulted on matters of topical interest because he could be counted on for good newspaper copy, criticized the gross mismanagement of the captain and crew instead of praising their heroism. This caused great public dismay and aroused a furious Conan Doyle to call Shaw a sadist. No disaster had made such headlines since the San Francisco earthquake and fire of 1906.
Three of the century’s greatest cultural developments occurred between 1910 and 1920. One was the Russian Ballet, organized by Diaghilev in 1909 in Paris, danced in London in 1911 with Thomas Beecham conducting the orchestra and in New York five years later. Nothing like this had been seen before. It was not only the dancing of Nijinsky, Karsavina, and company, or the music of Stravinsky, Debussy, and Ravel, or the fantastic settings by Bakst, Goncharova, Picasso, and Chagall; it was the total kaleidoscopic effect of the three integrated marvels, an advantage so lacking, for instance, in the solo and sceneless performances of the great Anna Pavlova after she. left Diaghilev.
More universal was the influence of jazz, which came out of the South, New Orleans most famously, and developed into the well-known derivatives danced to from the days of Irving Berlin’s Alexander’s Ragtime Band in 1911, through the Harlem nightclub era of the twenties, to today.
The third big contribution to the arts was the motion picture, which in twelve years had developed from a flickering nickelodeon novelty, The Great Train Robbery of 1903, into the art form created by D. W. Griffith in his full-length Birth of a Nation. Aided by the popularity of Lillian Gish, Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, Charlie Chaplin, and others who deserted the stage for Hollywood, motion pictures were becoming the world’s favourite form of entertainment. In the fine arts, popular taste was meeting new challenges.
French impressionist and post-impressionist painting, exhibited for the first time in London in 1905 and 1910 respectively, was not at all appreciated, and in the Armory Show of 1913 in New York when expressionism, futurism, fauvism and cubism were first seen, much ofthe public was 
outraged. Said one young man, aghast at Marcel Duchamp’s abstract Nude Descending a Staircase, ‘If that’s the way women are going to look in the future, I’m off girls.’ Gibson’s (Left) were more to the taste so, even, was Whistler’s Mother.
Industrialist Frank Pick, of the London Underground Railways, was farsighted enough to see the value of art in advertising, and before World War I was commissioning work by artists of the stature of Frank Brangwyn and Spencer Pryce. Among his discoveries was Montana-born Edward McKnight Kauffer, whose Underground posters became world famous in the twenties through the forties.
John Hassall’s ‘Skegness’ is typical of the jolly, infectious poster the English loved in the 1910s-and still do. Tom Browne’s Johnnie Walker’ ad, used in adaptations ever since, first appeared in 1906. Leonetto Cappiello, Cecil Aldin, Tony Sarg, Hans Rudi Erdt, and Ludwig Hohlwein were other leading designers of the period. In America Palmer Cox, Maxfield Parrish, J. C. Leyendecker, and Coles Phillips were making brand names familiar household words.
In 1914 when a Serbian nationalist murdered Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austrian Empire, the curtain arose on one of the most terrible dramas in European history-the Great War. To begin with, recruits were made up of volunteers, and poster artists such as Alfred Leete were called upon to switch from selling products with a smile to playing on human emotions.
After three years of utter horror at the front, Great Britain and France were joined by the United States, bringing the tragedy to an end on November 11, 1918. Meanwhile, in 1917, the Bolsheviks murdered the Russian Czar and his family to put into practice the theory of communism.
| Text from “The Art of ADVERTISING” by Bryan Holme |
Click Thumbnail for gallery featuring advertising artwork from 1990 – 1920 |
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