The International Culture of the Belle Epoque: Media, Avant-Garde and Mass Culture in Europe (1880-1920)

Published: April 6, 2016, 3:29 p.m.

Julien Schuh examines the circulation of styles and ideas through periodicals in Europe at the turn of the twentieth century. This paper analyses the conditions that allowed the birth of a culture of virality in the European press at the end the of nineteenth century through a specific style, 'Synthetism', which relied on abstraction and deformation. This style developed at the same time in the modernist magazines and in the periodicals of mass consumption.