Describe the postwar cultural boom in America.

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

After a half century of war, people needed to process their experiences, leading to a postwar boom in the arts. In true existential fashion, artists needed to express the emotional and psychological consequences from seemingly chaotic brutality, as well as the theoretical advances in physics that called into question the nature of existence. These artistic explorations lead to many innovations in the arts. Many American artists, such as the composer John Cage, embraced the nature of chaos, basing their works on elements of chance and randomness.

In America, abstract expressionism embraced the role of chance with existential fervor; it also seemed resonant of the quantum physicist's description of the universe as a series of continuously shifting random patterns. The style ushered in the so-called heroic age of American painting. Jackson Pollock, with his unique style of action painting, said "It seems to me," he observed, "that the modern painter cannot express his age, the airplane, the atom bomb, the radio, in the old forms of the Renaissance or of any other past culture. Each age finds its own technique."

Further, as capitalism continued to emerge as a dominating force in American culture, architecture began to reflect its effects. International style skyscrapers became symbols of corporate wealth and modern technocracy. They reflected the materialism of the twentieth century as powerfully as the Gothic cathedral summed up the spirituality of the High Middle Ages.