2 Audley Square
Mayfair, London W1K
UK
Founded in 1994, THE COURSE offers art history lectures, opera and literature courses, guided museum visits and London walks.
In this series of 5 lectures, Patrick Bade, looks at the end of the Great War and how the Western World attempted to forget the recent past by launching into a hedonistic decade characterized by cocktails, dance crazes and the jazzy Art Deco style. For those who could not afford Haute Couture and luxury liners there was the glamorous escapist world created by the new Hollywood studios and their European counterparts. Another and quite different response to the war was what Jean Cocteau called “The Call to Order” – a desire to return to the timeless values of Classicism. This course will explore the arts and lifestyles of this fascinating and ultimately doomed period between the wars.
HOLLYWOOD GLAMOUR PHOTOGRAPHY
In the third lecture, we explore interwar period, photographers such as Clarence Bull (“the man who shot Garbo”) and George Hurrell in the service of the great Hollywood studios created some of the most glamorous and seductive photographic portraits of the twentieth century to promote the careers of stars such as Garbo, Dietrich, Joan Crawford and Jean Harlow.