A new book details innovations in literature, art, music, and architecture in the interwar era

In the interwar era, modernist art continued to challenge prevailing morality and convention. Wassily Kandinsky championed abstraction, using colour and form to convey emotion. Marcel Duchamp’s conceptual works – such as Fountain, an upside-down urinal signed “R Mutt” – defied conventional definitions of art. Joan Miró created whimsical compositions filled with playful shapes and vivid colours that evoked the subconscious. Salvador Dalí, by contrast, produced nightmarish scenes that drew heavily on Sigmund Freud’s ideas about dreams and desire, such as ants and melting clocks in The Persistence of Memory.

Modernism shaped other disciplines too, driven by a desire to break with tradition and reflect a world left spiritually and socially fractured by the carnage of the First World War. This dislocation was compounded by rapid industrialisation and urbanisation, the rise of mass media and machine aesthetics, and new explorations of the subconscious. Modernism’s leading figures were often brilliant and broken – drawn to innovation not just by intellect, but also by inner restlessness.

In literature, 1920s writers mirrored cubism’s fragmentation, abandoning conventional narrative structures to explore the fluidity of time and consciousness. Set over a single day, James Joyce’s Ulysses and Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway each use stream-of-consciousness narrative to explore the inner lives of their characters, presenting thoughts...

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