One of Elsa Schiaparelli’s most iconic pieces is the Skeleton Dress (1938). Real bones and white silk hugged the woman’s curves. Ribs shaped her torso, and a spine rippled down the back. This piece was not just a dress; it was a vision, an entire story. At a time when couture was all about elegance and restraint, Schiaparelli turned it into visual storytelling, into art. Let’s explore Schiaparelli’s groundbreaking designs, feminist resonance, and enduring legacy revived today by Daniel Roseberry’s visionary reinterpretations.

Elsa Schiaparelli: Fashion’s Surreal Genius

Nicknamed fashion’s “mad genius,” Schiaparelli was the darling of 1930s Paris, a provocateur who moved easily among artists like Salvador Dalí, Jean Cocteau, and Man Ray. They all shared the same visions about transformation, illusion, and they blurred the boundaries between reality and imagination.

However, Elsa Schiaparelli’s fashion went well beyond mere visions. Her art reimagined how a woman’s body could be treated; she did not just dress it or decorate it. In her hands, surrealism escaped the gallery and entered daily life. The question her work still poses is radical: how can fashion, that most intimate of arts, transform the body from an object into imagination itself?

Surrealism Meets Fashion: Paris in the 1930s

Paris in the 1930s was the place to be for the avant-garde scene. Surrealism, an avant-garde movement founded by André Breton, was on the rise at that time. In salons, ateliers, and cafés, Surrealists met and discussed ideas about challenging the perceptions of reality, dreams, the subconscious, eroticism, the inexplicable, and the bizarre. Elsa Schiaparelli fit right into this circle not as a visitor, but as a prominent figure. Under these influences, she managed to transform her ideas into wearable pieces of art.

The movement drew attention to automatism, juxtaposition, and the irrational. Furthermore, it explored erotic fantasies, ethereal dreamscapes, and disturbing visual associations. The male Surrealists depicted women as muses and objectified them. Even though Schiaparelli was deeply involved in the movement and its social circle, her approach towards women was completely different. She clearly understood Surrealism’s principles and applied them to the body, turning the female silhouette into a canvas of conceptual exploration.

She worked closely with many Surrealists to bring her visions to life. For example, Salvador Dalí painted lobsters on her gowns. Man Ray captured the fantastical universes of her designs, and Jean Cocteau designed dramatic motifs. Schiaparelli’s atelier became a cauldron boiling with ideas. She tested Surrealist philosophy with experiments on materials. Thus, zippers became statements, silk became an element of surprise, and garments became performative objects.

However, like any true artist, Schiaparelli drew inspiration from many sources, such as contemporary exhibitions and artworks. For instance, the 1936 International Surrealist Exhibition in London left a huge mark on her. The exhibition presented shocking contrasts and disturbing sculptures that she would later introduce into her own designs. She was the only couturier of that time who could incorporate such eccentric surrealist elements into fashion and actually make it both wearable and intellectually provocative.

The Surreal Body: Schiaparelli’s Key Designs

Schiaparelli’s designs were the meeting point of surrealist art and fashion. The Lobster Dress (1938) is an iconic example of that. Dalí painted the lobster, an erotic symbol in the surrealist vocabulary, across the skirt of a simple evening gown made of silk. The dress transformed the body into something playful yet provocative. On the one hand, having a sea creature on a formal dress was something original and amusing. On the other hand, it was shocking, as Surrealism meant to be in all its notions.

In the same spirit, she created the Tears Dress. She rendered shimmering tears in embroidery and appliqué, from the top to the bottom of the dress. It was the designer’s own way to capture the fragility and the violence of this human state. Next, she made another shocking piece, the Skeleton Dress. That is, a dress with white silk stitching that outlines the human anatomy. Hence, the body itself becomes the ornament, the decoration that merges scientific precision and theatricality.

Another piece Elsa Schiaparelli created was iconic and surrealist to its core: The Shoe Hat (1937). Working with Dalí on the design, she basically turned footwear into headwear. It was her way to transform an everyday object into a wearable absurdity. Her Butterfly Dress (1938) had delicate wings printed or appliquéd onto the skirt. It evoked a sense of movement with metamorphosis, inviting the wearer to inhabit the delicate boundary between human and creature.

Schiaparelli embroidered and painted on silk, taffeta, and velvet with extra attention to detail. Every little thing on her garments was thoughtfully placed there. These designs are just a few examples of what she offered to the fashion and art world. Elsa transformed the female body into a canvas, ready to present surrealist concepts. Her persistence in intellectual engagement is what made her fashion so special and original. It proved that this art form was much more than just decoration and frivolity. It was a way to explore one’s identity, cultural inquiries, and psychological expeditions.

Redefining Femininity

Surrealism was generally a male-dominated movement, even though several female artists were part of its social circles. The male general consensus was that women were passive objects of desire. However, Elsa Schiaparelli actively opposed this predicament and treated women as they truly were: smart, intelligent, and beautiful in all possible and bizarre ways. Socialites and actresses of the time adored her creations and wore them constantly. They became Schiaparelli’s embodiments of theatricality and wit, and transformed the act of dressing up into a statement of empowerment. The dress itself became a performative act, challenging the boundaries of conventional femininity and beauty.

This transformation has been noticed by several scholars. Whitney Chadwick spoke of the female Surrealist artists and designers who, through humor, fantasy, and irony, restored the woman’s position. On a similar note, Xavière Gauthier explored how women critiqued and destabilized the male gaze using the Surrealist language. Thus, erotic imagery became a scene of female empowerment and self-determination. Both Chadwick and Gauthier made very accurate observations that applied to Elsa Schiaparelli; her work indeed reflects all these principles, as she reimagined the female body both as aesthetic pleasure, but for itself, no one else, and intellectual involvement.

These qualities were expanded through humour, spectacle, and theatricality. Her pieces provoked surprise, laughter, and curiosity, providing women with the chance to attract attention on their own terms. Once again, she redefined femininity as something other than passive or purely decorative. The woman who wore her designs became an active participant in an extensive discussion on fashion, art, and philosophy.

Reception and Cultural Impact

Elsa Schiaparelli’s designs were eccentric for their time. Naturally, this raised criticism, as not everyone understood Schiaparelli’s originality and boldness. Some said her creations were shocking but whimsical, while others said they were controversial and not elegant enough for the world of fashion. In popular magazines, such as Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar, journalists and editors saw her audacity and praised her originality. At the same time, they wondered about the wearability of some of her theatrical pieces. The combination of Surrealism, humor, intellectuality, and impeccable tailoring earned her the title of fashion’s “mad genius,” capturing both admiration and awe.

The designer’s influence went well beyond Paris. Women of the high society, as well as cinema icons, such as Wallis Simpson and Marlene Dietrich, often wore Schiaparelli designs. The general public was quite fascinated too. They loved the Lobster Dress and the Shoe Hat, and they wanted to be part of the artist’s surrealist world. Moreover, museums and collectors acknowledged the innovative character of her garments. So, they began acquiring her clothes and preserving them as cultural artifacts and works of great artistic importance. Right from the start, Schiaparelli’s clothes were not made only for commercial purposes.

The critical discourse surrounding Schiaparelli also highlighted the gender dynamics of the fashion industry at the time. Male designers paid attention to technical skill and exotic elements. Schiaparelli, on the other hand, told a story. Of course, this made her both respected and scrutinized by her colleagues for breaking traditions. Yet no one can deny that she was acknowledged, even from the early stages of her career. Quickly, she became a prominent figure in the fashion world, a status that inspires to this day.

Reinvention: Schiaparelli Today

In the 21st century, her influence and reputation are still strong. This is evident in the reinvention of her fashion house under the creative direction of Daniel Roseberry. In 2019, when he took over, Roseberry resurrected the brand’s surrealist and theatrical DNA. His haute couture collections, especially Spring/Summer 2022 and Fall/Winter 2023, are characteristic of his ability to emulate Elsa Schiaparelli’s creative genius in the contemporary era.

Roseberry has revisited many of Schiaparelli’s original designs and transformed them into new, contemporary garments. To do so, he has used new materials and technologies. For example, while revisiting the Skeleton Dress, he created anatomical corsets and bone elements from gilded metal and bronze, giving a more robust feel to the design. Another recurring symbol of Schiaparelli that Roseberry revamped is the dove, a symbol of freedom and transformation. He created a bodice with a golden dove that Lady Gaga wore at the 2021 U.S. presidential inauguration, making it iconic.

The 2023 fashion show featured models wearing hyper-realistic animal heads inspired by Dante’s Inferno. It sparked a global conversation that echoed similar themes from Schiaparelli’s 1930s collections: shock, beauty, and playfulness. Therefore, Roseberry’s success lies in his ability to channel Schiaparelli’s surreal sensibility into contemporary designs. His personal interpretation revolves around the same dualities as Elsa Schiaparelli: discipline and delirium, humor and grandeur. In our time, fashion is becoming increasingly minimal, clean, and maybe even conceptual. Roseberry for Schiaparelli brings back the notion that fashion can be wearable sculpture too.

Elsa Schiaparelli’s Enduring Influence

Elsa Schiaparelli’s art remains relevant today because it reminds us that fashion is not just about attire. It is a means of empowerment and a cultural commentary. Her designs are testaments to an outlook that sees the female body as an actively engaged presence, occupying space in ways the owner wants, not as the male gaze usually sees it. Contemporary designers, most notably Daniel Roseberry, but also Iris van Herpen, and others, are inspired by Schiaparelli’s surrealist vision. In the end, Elsa Schiaparelli’s fashion was an audacious, intelligent, and playful assertion that the imagination need not remain confined to canvas, gallery, or text. She showed, decades ago, that the female body could be re-envisioned as art, spectacle, and story, a lesson that continues to inspire both wearers and creators alike.

Born in the small town of Zundert in the province of North Brabant, the Netherlands, Van Gogh grew up around nature. In his later years, he lived in other areas, such as Nuenen and Etten-Leur, surrounded by fields and gardens. The years spent here instilled in him a deep love of the land that lay the foundation for his art. Not only was he fascinated by nature itself, but also the people who worked closely with it. Continue reading to find out more about Van Gogh’s “Head of a Peasant.”

Before Van Gogh’s “Head of a Peasant”: The Borinage

Before becoming an artist, Van Gogh had decided to follow in his father’s footsteps and join the church. His father, Theodorus van Gogh, was a Protestant minister working in North Brabant. Van Gogh was a religious man and wished to dedicate his life to the service of God, which led him to work as a preacher in the mining village of Borinage in Belgium. This experience was transformative for him and guided him toward art and service to those in need, as he befriended miners living in extreme poverty and helped them whenever he could. He would share his own food and clothing with the families. However, failing at his work as a preacher, the church did not renew his contract, so Van Gogh left the Borinage in 1880.

In 1882, he wrote a letter to his brother Theo from The Hague recalling his experiences during the time he spent in the village: “Once I nursed a poor burnt miner for six weeks or 2 months—I shared my food with an old man a whole winter long . . . But to this day I don’t believe that this was foolish or bad, I see it as so natural and self-evident that I can’t understand how people can be so indifferent to each other normally.” Van Gogh’s attentiveness to people leading difficult lives stemmed from his religious inclinations. He carried this dedication into his life as an artist, particularly as a peasant painter.

Life in North Brabant

After the stay in Borinage, Van Gogh had to leave the church, which led him to move back in with his parents in Nuenen. He had already decided to become an artist and had set up his studio at the back of his parents’ house. This was not easy because Van Gogh’s relationship with his parents became strained after he was rejected from the church. His decision to become an artist heightened the tension, as earning a living in this profession was difficult, which his parents found disappointing. However, Van Gogh was determined to follow this path, even if it meant living in poverty. He relied on his brother Theo, an art dealer in Paris, for financial support throughout his life as an artist.

Nuenen provided an ideal setting for Van Gogh to develop his practice as a peasant painter. He wrote in April 1885, “After all, I desire nothing other than to live deep in the country and to paint peasant life.” He also wrote: “I’ve become so absorbed in peasant life by continually seeing it at all hours of the day that I really hardly ever think of anything else.” Due to the rural environment of Brabant, there was no shortage of subject matter to sketch or paint, and Van Gogh took advantage of this.

He would go out in search of working peasants to draw or paint them, such as Peasant Woman Digging and Woman Lifting Potatoes. Apart from peasants, he also befriended several weavers in the region who worked on looms inside their small houses. Van Gogh sketched and painted numerous works depicting the weaver at work, capturing the complicated structure of the loom impressively. Together, peasants and weavers form the majority of his works from Nuenen, as he also hinted in a letter from January 1884 to Theo, “I don’t think there’s been a day since I’ve been here when I haven’t sat working with the weavers or peasants from morning till night.”

By the time he was in Nuenen, the artist not only aspired to paint the reality of peasant life, but also hoped to develop himself as a figure painter. Painting peasants working in the fields enabled him to capture the proportions of the human body as well as the complexities of their movements. In 1885, Van Gogh painted his first large-scale painting depicting a family of peasants sitting around a small table with steaming potatoes and coffee, titled The Potato Eaters. He considered this work a personal success. Today, The Potato Eaters is in the permanent collection of the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam and is considered one of Van Gogh’s first masterpieces.

Head of a Peasant (Woman)

To prepare himself to undertake the project of painting The Potato Eaters, Van Gogh made numerous studies of the peasant family. These included sketches of the scene depicted in the painting and portraits of individual family members. These paintings, which also allowed Van Gogh to improve his skills in portraiture, depict the subject in front of a dark background in plain clothing.

The portrait titled Head of a Peasant Woman (Gordina de Groot) was described by Van Gogh as “simply a peasant woman who came back from planting potatoes, still covered in dust from the field.” The painting has a rustic character that does not idealize the woman; instead, it focuses on the reality of her life as someone who performs difficult physical labor and lives in poverty.

Van Gogh held strong opinions about such depictions, as he wrote in a letter, “For my part, I’m convinced that in the long run it produces better results to paint them in their coarseness than to introduce conventional sweetness.” He went on to describe the beauty of a peasant woman over a lady, as well as the importance of honest representations over depicting a ‘perfect’ version of peasant life: “If a peasant painting smells of bacon, smoke, potato steam—fine . . . But a peasant painting mustn’t become perfumed.” The artist expressed his intention to paint 50 peasant heads in Nuenen in multiple letters. In total, 47 such paintings survive today, affirming the artist’s dedication to the subject. However, these portraits were not intended to capture individual identities but to represent types.

Van Gogh did not discuss his subjects as individuals in his letters, but always referred to them as ‘peasants’ because he wanted to capture their very character as people who work on the earth: “They remind one of the earth, sometimes appear to have been modelled out of it.” This characterization of the peasants may be why none of the people in the portraits are known, except Gordina de Groot.

Artistically, the peasant portraits from Nuenen were a crucial step in Van Gogh’s development as a figure painter. This was a challenging skill to master, and the artist even enrolled at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp, Belgium, to deepen their technical knowledge of figure painting. Drawing heads of peasants was particularly helpful for him as he could exaggerate their facial features to signal the effect of their daily physical labor in the fields. He described them as belonging to “the old Brabant stock through and through.” In Head of a Woman (Gordina de Groot), the lines on the peasant woman’s face, as well as the angles, are highlighted by playing with shadows along with using a muted, somber color palette dominated by shades of browns and greens.

Further, the artist considered the white headdresses worn by Brabant women in the 19th century both a challenge to paint, but he also found them visually interesting because they created a beautiful contrast to the dark background: “It’s precisely the chiaroscuro—the white and the part of the face in shadow, that has such a fine tone.” Van Gogh had already started experimenting with color theory while painting these heads. The white headdresses of the peasant women are not painted white; they contain shades of dark green, appearing white only due to the contrast with the dark background. This play of colors is particularly visible in two other paintings titled Head of a Woman, one depicting an older member of the De Groot family and another depicting a woman seated in front of a window.

Both portraits are darker than that of Gordina de Groot, which shows how skillfully Van Gogh employed color theory in the work. The woman seated in front of a window is especially complex as the artist managed to depict her facial features and the white headdress in front of a lighter background. He employed a color resembling “dark green soap” that he had used to describe an interior scene he had witnessed in a cottage in Nuenen. Not only did the dark color palette of these portraits serve to emphasize the connection between the land and the peasants, but it was also the only palette he was familiar with through his exposure to the art of the Old Masters.

Impressionism had established its position in Paris, but its impact was not as well known beyond the city. Van Gogh was familiar with the emergence of new ideas in painting, but had not witnessed these ideas in motion until he left for Paris in 1886. Nevertheless, his choice of earth tones adds symbolic value to the peasant paintings.

This practice of instilling symbolism through color is also evident in works from later in his career, such as the Sunflowers, which use vibrant shades of yellow to symbolize the sun. This intentional choice of subjects and their colors is what makes Van Gogh’s art stand out today. His paintings are highly recognizable because they do not depict perfection but rather a strong character, captured through color and line that embody the essence of the subject.

Van Gogh’s Goodbye to the Netherlands

After spending nearly two years in Nuenen, Van Gogh moved to Antwerp, never to return to the Netherlands again. He hoped to sell his work, experience the city’s rich culture, and enroll in the art academy to study figure painting. In a few short months, he moved to Paris to live with his brother. This period revolutionized his art and transformed his palette from the dark, earthy tones of Brabant to the luminous colors of the Impressionists. Despite this experience of vibrant urban culture, the artist longed for the rural life he had left behind in Brabant.

He wrote to Theo in 1885, “I so often think that the peasants are a world in themselves, so much better in many respects than the civilized world.” Eventually, Van Gogh’s longing for the countryside led him to the south of France and later to Auver-sur-Oise, where he was surrounded by the simplicity and honesty of peasant life once again.

Jane Austen’s novels promote the idea of virtuous living within a complex social setting, delivering stories that contain moral education. Austen drew on a classical tradition that had enumerated the virtues necessary for a good life and the ideas of Christian virtue that permeated her own life. In the novels, moral improvement involves, as writer and critic C.S. Lewis observed, the experience of a profound self-awareness. Austen carefully choreographs her characters’ actions, using what Lewis calls a “grammar of conduct,” leading them on a journey of success or failure in achieving moral improvement.

Austen’s Use of Classical Virtues

The Greek philosopher Aristotle defined virtue as that which “will be the state of character which makes a man good and which makes him do his own work well.” Jane Austen’s novels flesh out the complexity of that process. For Austen, a virtue is not the capacity to obey rules and meet obligations. She focuses on character virtues developed through life experience that define the choices her characters will make.

Many critics have speculated about the sources of Austen’s approach to virtue, with some pointing to similarities she shares with Aristotle, who, in his work The Nicomachean Ethics, outlined a detailed scheme of what was necessary to achieve happiness. For Aristotle, the pursuit of happiness was both practical, rooted in action and choices, and philosophical, leading to wisdom.

Aristotle produced what philosopher Gilbert Ryle described as “copious and elastic discriminations,” focusing on excesses and deficiencies that strayed from what Aristotle defined as the mean, or the ideal middle way. For Aristotle, the way to happiness was to find the middle way in conduct.

Thus, in Austen’s novels, characters are drawn away from this middle ground by complex family and social relationships as they strive for happiness. For some, like Darcy and Elizabeth in Pride and Prejudice, this results in joy; for others, like Lydia and Mr. Wickham, the refusal to follow the path of moderation ends in hardship.

Some critics detect a Christian aspect of Austen’s view of the virtues. Her father, a clergyman, had a scholarly background and may well have influenced Jane’s interest in the virtues. As a result, although not explicitly depicted in the novels, Christian virtues such as faith, hope, and charity were added to the classical virtues of prudence, justice, temperance, and fortitude.

The Challenges of the Virtuous Life

In Jane Austen’s novels, the virtuous life is not easy. Happiness comes at a cost and is won by struggle and sacrifice. The choice to pursue a course of virtuous action can follow careful deliberation, as with Elinor in Sense and Sensibility. It can also emerge from a natural inclination learned through habit, as Fanny Price demonstrates in Mansfield Park. In both cases, the decision to pursue virtue and seek personal happiness creates obstacles that disrupt the lives of the protagonists and those in their immediate social circle.

In Sense and Sensibility, unlike her sister Marianne, who allows emotion to overwhelm her, Elinor keeps her head, preserving the vital virtue of prudence. By contrasting the two sisters, Austen highlights the importance of maintaining self-control in society. For Elinor, the virtues of temperance and prudence are essential. For Marianne, their lack becomes problematic.

Fanny Price, in Mansfield Park, is placed in a domestic situation with the Bertram family, which requires her to draw on her hard-won internal resources. She becomes what Lewis calls the “spectator of deceptions.” While the characters who inhabit or pass through the grand Bertram family house act out their virtues and vices, Fanny remains constant in her refusal to be affected or changed by them. Fanny resists the advances of Henry Crawford and the attempts by his sister Mary to tempt her into making ill-judged choices. Fanny emerges resolute and, by the novel’s end, is ready to marry Edmund.

The Complexity of a Life of Virtue

Aristotle described the path of the virtuous life as one of moderation. In Jane Austen’s novels, we also witness the complexity and variety of virtues. There are no simple choices between good and evil in Austen’s work. Her characters are not cardboard characters inhabiting a simplistic moral universe. This enables subtle comparisons of temperament, desire, and capacity. Fine details of excess or deficiency in virtue are examined for narrative effect.

In Sense and Sensibility, the difference between Lucy Steele and the Dashwood sisters lies in the contrast between false emotion and the capacity for careful deliberation in moral matters. With Elinor and Marianne, we see the inner complexity of their lives as they struggle for coherence in their ethical judgments.

Darcy, in Pride and Prejudice, is portrayed as a snob who is disdainful of those he considers inferior. But Elizabeth senses depth to Darcy’s character and explores these throughout the novel, challenging him whenever necessary. Darcy eventually succumbs to Elizabeth’s pressure. But Austen does not stop there. In prompting the transformation of Darcy, Elizabeth comes to important self-knowledge. “I never knew myself,” Elizabeth admits after encountering Darcy in all his complexity.

Austen displays skill at delineating subtleties of character, even with someone as imperturbable as the hero of her most famous novel. Austen does not confine this approach to her hero and heroine. Each of the Bennet sisters exemplifies an aspect of pride gone wrong. Jane’s lack of pride becomes indifference to consequences, while Lydia’s presumption leads to an ill-judged marriage.

Doing the Right Thing in Austen’s World

For Aristotle, what was correct in personal conduct was whatever was done “at the right times, with reference to the right objects, towards the right people, with the right motive, and in the right way, is what is both intermediate and best, and this is characteristic of virtue.”

In Jane Austen’s novels, this principle dominates the narrative. It is the principle of the moderate middle way, and few characters escape its controlling effect. At the foundation of this principle is the necessity of deliberation. In Austen’s novels, characters who cannot deliberate bring disorder into their lives. Even with a character as prudent in her judgments as Elizabeth in Pride and Prejudice, it may take the course of the entire narrative for the right balance to be achieved.

Emma Woodhouse in Emma takes it upon herself to become a matchmaker. She fails to deliberate sufficiently about the consequences of this choice, and it falls to Mr. Knightley to act as the correcting force. He stands back, viewing the results of Emma’s interference. Throughout the novel, George Knightley openly critiques Emma, ultimately guiding her to moral improvement. In his eyes, Emma has failed to do what was right for the right person at the right time. Her scheming has been born of a deficiency in practical reasoning, which leads to an insensitivity toward others. Emma has strayed from the middle way of careful reasoning.

In Emma, the heroine illustrates the negative impact upon others of a lack of empathy. Acceptance of the judgment of others and personal humility are the only ways this vice can be corrected. Mr. Knightley becomes the source of that correction.

The Rewards of Virtue

For Aristotle, each person seeks a goal, or what Aristotle called a “telos.” In Jane Austen’s novels, this end is dramatized as the final reward of virtuous acts, often in the form of marriage. While the novels have been described as domestic comedies, and marriage ultimately plays a central part in their conclusions, the happiness achieved by Austen’s characters is not confined to marital bliss. Happiness is achieved in a life lived well, meeting the demands of virtue, and in accordance with the principle of moderation. It is also illustrated by the establishment of a renewed social order.

Throughout the course of the narratives, each of Austen’s characters is challenged. They must show the extent to which they possess the virtues. Some meet the challenge, achieving personal union with another. Elizabeth and Darcy marry; Emma and Mr Knightley are wed at the end of the novel. By contrast, Henry Crawford and Maria in Mansfield Park reap the rewards from their transgressive choices, outcasts of the Bertram family society. Mr. Elliott and Mrs. Clay in Persuasion also suffer social banishment after straying from the path of moderation.

The virtues gained by Austen’s characters strengthen society. In this sense, she adds a Christian dimension to her narratives. Charity, the central virtue of Austen’s Christian faith, becomes the means whereby the disorder of polite society is banished, to be replaced by an order essential for the future lives of her characters.

Jane Austen’s novels promoted virtuous living through stories that dramatized the challenges of being virtuous, its complex nature, and the dangers of straying from the middle way into excess and deficiency in conduct. Her large array of characters allowed Austen to use narrative to overcome the limitations of moral instruction delivered in philosophical and religious tracts.

Though Thomas Hardy began writing poetry from a young age, he gained notoriety with his novels. As a Victorian realist, Hardy did not shy away from criticizing Victorian society and was sympathetic toward the declining rural populations in the United Kingdom. Many of his novels are set in a fictional region of rural Wessex in southwest England. Hardy’s novels are often dark, suspenseful, and even controversial, as he illustrated the darker side of human nature within his texts.

Here are ten of his most prominent novels. Most were inspired by Hardy’s own life, the people in it, and the rugged countryside surrounding him.

Who Was Thomas Hardy?

Born on June 2, 1840, in Dorset, England, Thomas Hardy grew up with a father who was a stonemason and a mother who devoted her time to educating her son before he began school at age eight. Hardy demonstrated academic potential. However, his formal education ended at age 16, as his parents could not afford to send him to university. He instead became apprenticed to a local architect and, skilled at the trade, moved to London in 1862 to work in the field. He enrolled in King’s College, London, in that same year.

Hardy never grew accustomed to life in London. He felt inferior to others in the city and was infuriated by the class divisions in its society. He became interested in social reform initiatives and began reading the works of English philosopher John Stuart Mill and English poet and cultural critic Matthew Arnold.

After a few years, Hardy returned to Dorset and settled in Weymouth, where in 1871 he began his writing career. In September 1874, Hardy married English writer and suffragist Emma Gifford. Her death in 1912 profoundly affected Hardy, who fell into a deep depression. He married again in 1914 to an English teacher and children’s writer named Florence Emily Dugdale.

In 1910, Hardy was appointed a Member of the Order of Merit and was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature. By 1927, he had received 25 nominations and was a finalist for the prize in 1923.

In his later years, Hardy adopted a Wire Fox Terrier, Wessex, who remained by Hardy’s side as he continued to write. On January 11, 1928, at the age of 87, Hardy dictated his final poem to his wife before passing away.

Hardy’s reflections on such themes as morality, social judgment, class, fate, and remorse were controversial in his own time and remain vital subjects of discussion in the 21st century. Hardy’s ashes can be visited in Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey in London.

1. Desperate Remedies (c. 1871)

Hardy’s first published novel and one of his lesser-known works, Desperate Remedies, follows Cytherea Graye, who, after her father’s death, seeks employment and becomes a lady’s maid to the mysterious Miss Aldclyffe.

Cytherea falls for the architect Edward Springrove, but complications arise when she discovers he is already engaged. Meanwhile, the sinister Aeneas Manston pursues her, hiding a dark secret involving his supposedly dead wife.

Hardy interweaves gothic suspense into his sensation novel as arson, blackmail, and mistaken identities threaten Cytherea’s safety. Ultimately, Aeneas’s crimes are exposed, Edward’s prior ties dissolve, and Cytherea achieves both freedom and a hard-won future with Edward. The novel was released anonymously by the publisher Tinsley Brothers.

2. A Pair of Blue Eyes (c. 1873)

Hardy’s A Pair of Blue Eyes follows Elfride Swancourt, a young, impressionable woman drawn into a love triangle with her first suitor, the earnest architect Stephen Smith, and later the older, intellectual critic Henry Knight. When Elfride’s past with Stephen is revealed, social prejudice and pride undermine both men’s claims to her affection.

Henry’s dramatic rescue binds him to her emotionally, but his moral rigidity soon drives them apart. Seeking security, Elfride impulsively marries another man, then dies tragically. Stephen and Henry confront their failures as they travel together to Elfride toward the end of the novel, both unaware that she had married another man and subsequently died. A Pair of Blue Eyes was Hardy’s first novel not to be published anonymously.

3. Far From the Madding Crowd (c. 1874)

Perhaps Hardy’s most celebrated novel, Far from the Madding Crowd follows Bathsheba Everdene, an independent young woman who inherits a farm and attracts three very different suitors: steadfast shepherd Gabriel Oak, wealthy but lonely farmer William Boldwood, and reckless soldier Sergeant Troy.

Bathsheba’s impulsive marriage to Sergeant Troy leads to heartbreak, financial strain, and tragedy, especially after Sergeant Troy’s neglect. William’s obsessive love culminates in violence when Sergeant Troy briefly reappears. After Sergeant Troy is killed and William is imprisoned, Bathsheba learns the value of loyalty and quietly builds a future with Gabriel, whose devotion endures.

Far from the Madding Crowd explores the conflict between independence and emotional responsibility through Bathsheba’s romantic relationships. By contrasting Gabriel’s stability with William’s obsession and Troy’s recklessness, Hardy critiques impulsive desire and romantic idealism. The novel highlights how chance and social conventions shape people’s lives, with Hardy ultimately arguing that stability, patience, and quiet endurance should be valued over passion.

4. The Hand of Ethelberta (c. 1876)

Hardy’s The Hand of Ethelberta depicts Ethelberta Petherwin, a clever, ambitious young woman who rises socially after marrying a wealthy, elderly man, only to have him die soon after their marriage.

Determined to support her large working-class family, Ethelberta becomes a celebrated poet and storyteller while carefully concealing her origins. Pursued by multiple suitors, including the loyal architect Christopher Julian, the aristocratic Lord Mountclere, and others drawn to her beauty and talent, Ethelberta navigates social ambition, romantic pressure, and family duty. Ultimately, she marries Lord Mountclere for security rather than love, only to find the union stifling.

The novel critiques class mobility, performance, and pragmatic marriage. Hardy employs the hallmarks of Victorian realism, a 19th-century literary movement that focused on social issues and the day-to-day lives of people, to depict life in the Victorian era, particularly the experience of ordinary people in rural communities in the southwest of England.

5. The Return of the Native (c. 1878)

The Return of the Native begins with Clym Yeobright’s return from Paris, in hopes of uplifting his community, but he is met instead by his mother, who disapproves of his marriage to the beautiful, restless Eustacia Vye.

Eustacia dreams of escaping her new home and grows disillusioned as Clym’s ambitions falter. Misunderstandings involving Clym’s cousin Thomasin and her unreliable husband, Damon Wildeve, intensify the tensions within the family.

A tragic chain of events leads to the drowning deaths of Eustacia and Damon. Clym, grief-stricken, becomes a wandering preacher, while Thomasin eventually finds stability with Diggory Venn.

The novel is set on Egdon Heath, a fictional moor of Hardy’s Wessex. Although the area is depicted as rural and largely uninhabited, residents earn their living by cutting the furze that grows there.

6. The Trumpet-Major (c. 1880)

Set during the Napoleonic Wars, Hardy’s The Trumpet-Major follows Anne Garland, who is pursued by the steady, honorable trumpet-major John Loveday, his impulsive sailor brother, Bob, and Festus Derriman, the cowardly nephew of a local squire.

Anne’s household is unsettled by military encampments, wartime anxieties, and the vain attentions of the boastful Festus Derriman. While John’s quiet devotion offers stability, Anne is drawn to Bob’s charm, despite his unreliability.

After romantic misunderstandings, departures, and returns, Bob ultimately reforms and wins Anne’s hand. John, heartbroken but dutiful, withdraws. The novel blends romance with the tensions of wartime England. The Trumpet-Major was Hardy’s only historical novel.

7. The Mayor of Casterbridge (c. 1886)

Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge follows Michael Henchard, a hot-tempered laborer who drunkenly sells his wife and infant daughter at a fair.

Years later, now a prosperous grain merchant and mayor of Casterbridge, Michael is shaken when his wife and daughter return. His attempt at restitution is undermined by pride, secrecy, and rivalry with the capable Donald Farfrae, who gradually surpasses him in business and public favor.

Michael’s past deceptions erode his remaining relationships. Bankrupted and isolated, he dies alone, leaving a note asking to be forgotten, embodying the novel’s themes of fate and remorse.

8. The Woodlanders (c. 1887)

The Woodlanders depicts Grace Melbury, raised above her humble origins by her ambitious father, and Giles Winterborne, the loyal woodsman who has long loved her.

When Grace marries the sophisticated but morally weak Dr. Edred Fitzpiers, jealousy, betrayal, and class tensions unravel their union. Edred’s affairs leave Grace isolated, while Giles’s unwavering devotion leads him to sacrifice his health and ultimately his life to protect her reputation. After Edred seeks reconciliation, Grace realizes too late the worth of Giles’s steadfast love.

The novel explores loyalty, desire, and the painful cost of social aspiration.

9. Tess of the d’Urbervilles (c. 1891)

One of Hardy’s most controversial novels, Tess of the d’Urbervilles follows Tess Durbeyfield, a poor but dignified young woman whose family’s claim of a noble ancestry sets her on a tragic path.

Sent to seek favor from the wealthy d’Urberville branch, she is exploited by Alec, an experience that shadows her life. Tess later finds love with the idealistic Angel Clare, but when she confesses her past, he rejects her. Poverty and desperation drive her back to Alec until Angel returns, repentant. Tess kills Alec in anguish and briefly escapes with Angel before her capture and execution.

The novel condemns social hypocrisy and rigid moral judgment and reflects on class, gender, and sexual norms in Victorian society. It exposes the double standards that punish Tess for her victimization while excusing male wrongdoing. Hardy presents Tess as morally pure yet socially condemned, emphasizing the role that rigid social structures have in shaping her tragic life. Through Tess’s suffering, the novel challenges notions of justice and purity, and portrays a society that destroys innocence through hypocrisy rather than compassion.

10. Jude The Obscure (c. 1895)

Hardy’s last major work of fiction, Jude the Obscure, portrays Jude Fawley, a bright, ambitious stonemason longing to study at Christminster, a fictional city modeled on Oxford. Trapped by a loveless marriage to Arabella Donn, he later falls deeply in love with his cousin, Sue Bridehead, whose intellectual independence challenges social norms.

Their attempt to live together outside marriage sparks public condemnation, poverty, and instability. The burden worsens when Sue’s children die in a horrific murder-suicide by Jude’s neglected son, “Little Father Time.” Crushed by guilt and societal pressure, Sue returns to her estranged husband, while Jude dies alone and defeated.

The novel critiques social rigidity, marriage laws, and thwarted aspiration.

Gesamtkunstwerk is an ancient Greek concept with a 19th-century German name, which boomed across Europe and beyond in the early 20th century. The Gesamtkunstwerk is indelibly associated with the German opera composer Richard Wagner, although he did not invent the term and only used it a few times. By the time modernism hit its peak, artists of all kinds were fascinated by the Gesamtkunstwerk, a total synthesis of all art forms into one unified work.

Who Invented the Gesamtkunstwerk?

The term Gesamtkunstwerk came into use long after the first examples appeared, some 2,000 years, in fact. It is thought to have first appeared in print in 1827 in a philosophical treatise by Karl Friedrich Eusebius Trahndorff titled Aesthetics, or Doctrine of Worldview and Art. This was at the height of the Romantic period when artists and philosophers were reconceptualizing the arts in their relationship to the self, divinity, and the universe.

Many Romantics turned to Ancient Greece as a model for the arts and their place in the world. When the composer Richard Wagner took up the term Gesamtkunstwerk in 1849, he had his eye on Greek tragedy as the apex of artistic achievement.

Why Greek tragedy? The works of dramatists such as Aeschylus and Sophocles were (as many translators render the “Gesamt” part of the German compound word) ‘total.’ They involved poetry, music, and dance. They were also presented in amphitheaters, which brought audiences together in a ritualistic celebration of the arts, not conceived of separately but experienced simultaneously.

Trahndorff had invoked the Gesamtkunstwerk, with its connotation of a unified, exalted experience, to argue for the importance of aesthetics as a conduit to faith in an increasingly rational world. For Wagner, this Ancient Greek ideal needed reviving because, over the centuries, the arts had been separated and—even worse—subjected to commercialism.

The Romantic period saw several figures strive to bring the arts together, whether in theory or practice. Philosophers such as the Schlegel brothers, Ludwig Tieck, and Novalis used ‘poetry’ as a blanket term for the spirit animating all art. E.T.A. Hoffmann’s opera Undine (1816), which vividly brought to life a Romantic folk tale, was praised by fellow composer Carl Maria von Weber in terms which would later sound very much like the Gesamtkunstwerk: “an art work complete in itself, in which partial contributions of the related and collaborating arts blend together, disappear, and, in disappearing, somehow form a new world.”

Richard Wagner’s Theory of Gesamtkunstwerk

Richard Wagner used the term Gesamtkunstwerk in two essays published in 1849, Art and Revolution and The Art-Work of the Future. The concept was not the only subject covered by these verbose essays, but it was one that became inextricably associated with the composer.

In the first essay, Wagner celebrates ancient Greece as the last period in human history when art was a free and authentic expression of the race which made it (the idea of art as expressive of a race is another of Wagner’s best-known theories and one which endeared him to the Nazis).

Wagner argues that in ancient Greece, people had unfettered access to beauty, and all of their senses were thrilled in ceremonies that fused the arts of Dance, Tone, and Poetry, as he calls them. Now, in the 19th century, art is in a state of “civilized barbarianism.” It serves industry, commercialism, and greed—things he saw embodied, as it happened, in the contemporary opera world.

In The Art-Work of the Future, Wagner looked ahead to a kind of art that would revive the Greek principle of unity. In the artwork of the future, there would be no second-rate lyrics accompanying great music just for the sake of it. There would be no grand tragedies whose impact was negated by being staged in shoddy or stuffy theaters. Every aspect of the experience of art would be considered, and each element would complement the other.

It mattered little that Wagner only used the word Gesamtkunstwerk a handful of times in these essays and then not at all afterward, seemingly growing ambivalent toward it (Ross 2020, p. 13). In the second half of the 19th century, as he slowly became known, then notorious, then ubiquitous, he seemed to be enacting the Gesamtkunstwerk again and again.

When Wagner published the 1849 essays, he was beginning to taste success with works such as The Flying Dutchman and Tannhäuser, but still struggling to get his operas staged. It was only later that he wrote the works that made his name, each one taking him closer to achieving the Gesamtkunstwerk: Tristan and Isolde (1865), the Ring cycle (premiered in full 1876), and Parsifal (1882).

The latter two music dramas (a term usually used instead of ‘opera’ for Wagner’s productions) were premiered at a location that might also be considered one of Wagner’s great Gesamtkunstwerken: the Bayreuth Festival theater.

This purpose-built venue was dedicated, like a consecrated religious building, to the sole performance of Wagner’s works. For many years, it was forbidden to perform Parsifal outside Bayreuth. This is because the building itself, with its egalitarian fan-shaped seating, invisible orchestra pit, and double proscenium, was built in conjunction with Wagner’s works, designed to fully immerse audiences in every facet of the experience.

The Gesamtkunstwerk in the 19th Century

Although Wagner had used the term Gesamtkunstwerk only a few times, it became representative of his work and ideas, as Wagnerism—a craze for all things relating to the composer’s music dramas, their characters, settings, plots, and forms—spread in the second half of the 19th century. As Wagnerism blossomed, the meaning of its central concepts expanded, with each of its proponents finding something new in it.

In architecture, the Gesamtkunstwerk influenced a movement toward making every aspect of a building beautiful. Art Nouveau designers in Belgium and France looked to Wagner’s comprehensive vision to inspire their efforts to make entire cities aesthetically pleasing. Expert artists from all fields—sculpture, metalwork, stained glass, carpentry, textiles, lighting—collaborated in these efforts.

The Arts and Crafts movement in Britain operated on the same principle. The maxim “Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful,” attributed to William Morris, captures the idea of the Gesamtkunstwerk: everyday life can be geared towards an experience of all the arts blended together in harmony.

Aestheticism, a related movement whose spokespeople included Oscar Wilde, similarly promoted the role of art in everyday life and the vital importance of satisfying our aesthetic needs by living in beautiful surroundings and engaging with all of the arts.

Disciples of Aestheticism in the 1870s and 1880s were profoundly influenced by French artists of the previous few decades, many of them fervent Wagnerians who meditated on the possibilities of the Gesamtkunstwerk. Perhaps most influential was the poet Charles Baudelaire, whose experience of Wagner’s Tannhäuser in 1861 produced exactly the kind of multi-sensory immersion, overwhelming to the point of exhaustion, that the composer had hoped to achieve.

According to Baudelaire’s essay about this experience, Wagner’s music revealed to him that “true music evokes analogous ideas in different brains,” reflecting the “complex and indivisible totality” of the world (Ross 2020, p. 81). By “true music,” Baudelaire means an experience in which all the arts are synthesized or correspond. The latter was a key term in Baudelaire’s own work, which repeatedly plays on synesthesia, or the correspondence of sight, smell, sound, taste, and touch (see his poem ‘Correspondances’ in Les Fleurs du mal).

Several 19th-century movements, whether in poetry, painting, or music, took up the idea that one art might imitate another and thereby move closer to the total experience Wagner had written about. Symbolist poetry, painting, and theater aimed toward an essential aesthetic experience in which the limitations of one artistic form or another were unimportant.

From the Impressionists to the Parnassians to the Aesthetes, many artists tried to achieve musical effects. The art critic and theorist Walter Pater proposed: “All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music.” Pater’s idea was not explicitly Wagnerian (although he nodded to a shared basis in German aesthetics by terming this aspiration Anders-streben, or “other-striving”). Still, the Gesamtkunstwerk had by now exceeded its most famous theorist, filtering into all areas of intellectual and artistic culture.

Modernist Literature and the Gesamtkunstwerk

By the first half of the 20th century, examples of Gesamtkunstwerk were being identified across the arts, not only the operatic or theatrical stage where it had begun. Like Wagnerism, modernism took many forms and is difficult to define, but correspondence between the arts was a key feature.

In literature, writers took inspiration from the visual arts and music to create arresting novels, poetry, and plays that reconfigured the experience of language itself: figures like W.B. Yeats, T.S. Eliot, James Joyce with his monumental Ulysses, and Virginia Woolf in her stream-of-consciousness novel. Woolf’s The Waves, or Joyce’s Finnegans Wake (which continues to baffle readers), created rhythmic effects, moving language beyond its ordinary usage of simply communicating meaning.

The Gesamtkunstwerk Throughout the 20th Century

Examples of the modernist Gesamtkunstwerk on stage were similarly baffling and shocking to audiences. Igor Stravinsky and Sergei Diaghilev’s The Rite of Spring famously caused a sensation on its premiere in 1913, usually attributed to the new and unusual sound of its music. But the ballet was equally noteworthy for its correspondence of the arts, with meticulous care over the costuming, choreography, and stage design.

Companies such as Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes and individual composers, playwrights, and impresarios promoted collaboration between artists of all kinds to ensure that every aspect of the theatrical experience was artistically perfect.

Wilde even hoped to infuse theaters with a variety of scents during performances of his controversial production, Salome (1893), corresponding to emotions in the play—an aspiration harking back to Greek plays. However, logistical limitations prevented him from achieving his plan.

Another Ballets Russes production brought together innovative artists in all forms. Parade (1917) was written by Jean Cocteau, set to music by Erik Satie, and featured costumes and sets designed by Pablo Picasso. Although it confused many spectators and, therefore, did not quite achieve the Gesamtkunstwerk aim of taking its audience to a higher sphere, Parade was conceived as a Gesamtkunstwerk. Indeed, it was a production in which all the arts worked together, unfettered by their formal differences, striving to attain unity and transforming elements of ordinary life into art—using everyday settings and making music with ‘found’ objects such as a typewriter and milk bottles.

Parade led to the coining of the term Surrealism. An early 20th-century movement, Surrealism, along with near-contemporary movements such as Bauhaus and Dada, drew on the Gesamtkunstwerk in its commitment to blending art forms and seeking to make life itself an artistic experience. Walter Gropius‘s 1919 Bauhaus manifesto echoed Wagner’s language 70 years previously, lamenting how “the arts exist in isolation” and calling for “the new structure of the future,” requiring the “conscious, cooperative effort of all craftsmen” (Ross 2020, p. 460).

Although Dada’s anti-art stance might seem to make it the polar opposite of Wagner’s glorification of the perfected aesthetic experience in the Gesamtkunstwerk, the movement did not entirely discard the concept. Dada artists like Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray treated all kinds of objects as material for art. They emphasized the continuous, performative nature of artistic experience, leading to encounters with art that simultaneously played on all the senses.

The Gesamtkunstwerk Now

Critic Alex Ross writes that the definition of the Gesamtkunstwerk mutated in the 20th century beyond what Wagner (or, for that matter, its original creator, Trahndorff) had meant because the term became a way of projecting 20th-century ideas (generated by 20th-century technologies) back onto 19th-century origins.

By the early 1900s, artists could look to the burgeoning world of the cinema as the epitome of the Gesamtkunstwerk: sound and vision synthesized in an experience so overawing that early audiences—so the story goes—fled in fear when the screen showed a train approaching.

Cinema was recognized early on as a medium in which what Wagner called the sister arts could exist in harmony. Music is so ubiquitous in a film that we find it noteworthy if it deliberately omits it and plays with silence instead. Film composers work with directors and writers to ensure that the music corresponds with the images, assisting with the narrative, and deepening our understanding of a character’s psychology (many film scores use Wagner’s technique of the leitmotif, in which a musical phrase is paired with a particular character or idea), and playing on our very emotions.

But the modern Gesamtkunstwerk is not limited to the cinema. Artists in all media continue to explore how one art can imitate another to expand the boundaries of art, make life itself an aesthetic experience, and stage sacralized ceremonies in which the audience hopes to achieve some kind of transcendence.

The vast scale of concerts in the pop and rock music worlds is a good example. Audiences can now expect a sensory onslaught, not just hearing music but witnessing curated choreography, costuming, and cinematic visuals on screens behind the artist. These artists may not always be conscious of it, but their high-concept tours are perpetuating and expanding the possibilities of the Gesamtkunstwerk.

Bibliography

Ross, A. (2020). Wagnerism: Art and Politics in the Shadow of Music. 4th Estate.

When referring to alternative music, the connotation changes depending on the context, as this article sets out to explain. For example, most rock music from the 1990s and 2000s is described as “alternative” nowadays, but this differs vastly from the original connotation attached to alternative music. Pinning down a single, authoritative definition of alternative music is nearly impossible. This article will explore alternative music through various bands that were instrumental in its rise and fall, as well as the aftermath of the “great alternative music schism” when Nirvana “sold out” and went commercial.

Defining the “Alternative” in Alternative Music

So, let us begin with a general definition: alternative music is a catch-all, umbrella term for music that rose from the post-punk movement in the mid-1980s. It extends to terms like “new music” and “post-modern.” There is an underground status attached to alternative music—artists favored working with independent record labels rather than commercial, mainstream labels. There is also a do-it-yourself (DIY) ethos that rose to prominence and found a footing in the punk movement, combined with the desire to stay underground and shun commercialism and commercial success.

Artistic authenticity is also at the heart of alternative music—an ideal alternative music espoused before a split occurred when Nirvana reached commercial success with their album Nevermind. Nirvana’s breakthrough into and onto commercial radio stations established alternative (rock) music as a commodity that could be commercialized.

The line becomes blurred when we compare the American idea of alternative to that of the British across the pond. In British English, alternative music is the preferred term, but confusion arises because the lines become blurred. After all, hip-hop and electronic music are included in the British idea of alternative music. In the USA, “alternative rock” is the preferred term. Shall we make matters slightly more confusing? In the UK, “indie” (stemming from independent) is sometimes used when referring to alternative rock… but in general, indie refers to artists who sign with independent record labels.

In the US, “underground” music refers to little-known artists who sometimes sign with independent labels, music you only find through word-of-mouth. For this article, alternative music, alternative rock, and underground music will refer to alternative rock in the American sense of the word.

Alternative Rock: A Decade-by-Decade Overview

Before Nirvana’s commercial breakthrough in the early 1990s, alternative rock was known by a variety of terms. In the United States, “college rock” was often used in the 1980s because of its link with college radio stations appealing to the tastes of college students. Across the pond, “indie” was used. Sometimes, “indie rock” is used to refer to alternative rock from the 1980s. But scholars rather reserve the term for independent artists who upheld the underground ideologies associated with its punk roots while remaining underground.

In the United States, alternative rock had its genesis in the late 1960s. Bands like Iggy and the Stooges, MC5, Silver Apples, and Velvet Underground set the stage for the movement. Each offered a distinct sound that broke away from the mainstream mold. While the term would only emerge nearly two decades later, the foundations were in place.

Through artists like Andy Warhol and his Factory, bands like Velvet Underground had the financial backing they needed to pursue their art to their heart’s content.

1960s: Proto-Punk

Proto-punk was never a cohesive movement and the term is applied retrospectively today. Punk emerged around 1975/6 but the proto-punk bands all seem unrelated when you compare their sound palettes. However, some elements tie these bands together—these bands are fully aware of their outsider status and love thumbing their nose. There is the conscious challenge of mainstream rock conventions and the utopianism the hippies sought out. Overall, the proto-punk sound was stripped-down, unpolished, and sometimes even primitive. However, these artists were venting, and it was deeply personal. They sought to expose society’s grimy underbelly and often chose taboo subjects and shone a spotlight on them.

What made these bands “alternative” when compared to their contemporaries? Well, someone had to pick up the torch from the Beat Generation. The aftermath of World War II was still present in society, and conservativism was the name of the game. Now imagine a band of writers and their followers talking openly about homosexuality, sexual liberation, and women’s rights. The arts were shifting out of the claws of modernism into the pluralism of postmodernism.

The Velvet Underground (and Nico) (Active: 1964-1973)

The Velvet Underground was revolutionary in a few ways: they borrowed elements from rock ‘n’ roll, the avant-garde scene (e.g. collaborating with John Cage and La Monte Young), and wrote lyrics that did not shy away from being sexually explicit or hinting at sexual acts (e.g., Venus in Furs). Alternative guitar tunings leading to drones are another feature from their early days. Combining their music with lyrics reminiscent of post-beat realism set them apart from their contemporaries.

The Stooges (Active: 1967–1971, 1972–1974, and Reunited 2003–2016)

While the Velvet Underground were the intellectual outsiders, the Stooges went in the opposite direction.

“The Stooges revealed the underside of sex, drugs, and rock & roll, showing all the grime beneath the myth. … Taking their cue from the over-amplified pounding of British blues, the primal raunch of American garage rock, and the psychedelic rock (as well as the audience-baiting) of the Doors, the Stooges were raw, immediate, and vulgar. Iggy Pop became notorious for performing smeared in blood or peanut butter and diving into the audience.” (Stephen Thomas Erlewine, 2005).

The band had a devoted core audience, but Iggy Pop’s on-stage antics and the band’s shock tactics did not sit well with the broader audience. Nevertheless, a talent scout from Elektra Records signed them in Detroit when they went to see MC5 in concert.

Sometimes infamy also leads to opportunities. In 1973, the band released their album Raw Power. David Bowie stepped in to save the band and produced the album, but there were various technical problems and the result was a strange, thin sound. Although Stooges purists blame Bowie for the sound, it laid the foundation for the punk revolution. With the thin audio and fierce attack on the ear, punk was one step closer to becoming a reality two years later.

MC5 (Active: 1963-1973, Reunion Tours in 1992 and 2022)

MC5, or Motor City 5, where Detroit is also known as Motor City, are contemporaries of the Stooges. MC5 played a significant role in the development of punk rock. Their music was loud and intense, and their politics, revolutionary. They believed in the unholy trinity of sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll with their performances taking an energetic and defiant stab at the hippies’ counter-culture ideals of love and peace. Despite their short-lived and controversial existence, MC5 paved the way for numerous music genres like hard rock, punk, and other heavy kinds of music.

Silver Apples (Active: 1967-1970, 1995)

The Silver Apples are the most enigmatic and otherworldly of the alternative music scene’s ancestors. Their music adopted a wide range of pulsing rhythms, synthesizer-generated melodies, and drones and hums. Their minimalist and electronic approach to music never achieved commercial success but inspired generations of musicians after them.

1970s: Punk Enters the Scene

Politically, the 1970s was the age of Thatcherism, the Watergate Scandal, the defeat in Vietnam, and the Anti-Apartheid Movement. The common person became disillusioned with their politicians, economic crises abounded, and there was a growing spirit of discontent among the youth worldwide. The time was ripe for movements like punk to emerge and give a voice to the disenfranchised masses.

New York Dolls (Active: 1972-1976)

During the early 1970s, a bona fide punk rock scene was emerging in New York City. One of the pioneering, yet short-lived bands of the era was the New York Dolls. The band was the brainchild of Malcolm MacLaren, a London clothier. Their amateurish approach to performing, combined with a glam look, laid the foundations for punk and glam rock.

Often, they would perform in high heels, spandex, sports make-up, and lipstick—perhaps the antithesis of the punk movement’s favor of a rough street look—but a look that set them apart. Although the band only released two albums, they are considered the pioneers of the punk rock movement.

The Ramones (Active: 1974-1996)

The Ramones played simple music (a maximum of four chords in a song), and fast (most songs last around two-and-a-half minutes) with a raw edge and energetic fun. They appealed to audiences because they only performed their material and because of their amateurish musical abilities. The Ramones did not have the musical training to learn other people’s music, so they had a make-do attitude which appealed to punkers. They did not follow the narcissistic tendencies of singer/songwriters and other types of confessional music like other rock bands. In 1976, while touring in England, the Ramones helped to establish the British punk scene.

Sex Pistols (Active: 1975–1978, Brief Revivals: 1996, 2002-2003, 2007-2008, and 2024–Present)

Of all the bands thus far, the Sex Pistols may be the most controversial and short-lived band, but their impact still echoes today. Some call the band a farce and marketing gimmick by Malcolm MacLaren (who briefly managed the New York Dolls between 1972 and 1976) who used them to promote his London clothing store, Sex, which sold leather, and S&M fashions. Thus, the name “Sex Pistols” was used to advertise MacLaren’s store and served his nihilistic ideas.

Their anti-authority stance combined with their defiant spirit appealed to the discontent young people across the UK felt: the hypocrisy within the British establishment, unemployment was around one million people, and the inflation rate of 18 percent in 1975. Combine this with school leavers who had dim prospects, and many went on welfare (“the dole”). The overall mood in the UK was boredom, cynicism, and despair.

One month after performing at London’s 100 Club at the Punk Rock Festival, organized by Malcolm MacLaren, they signed their first record deal with EMI in October 1976. They received an advance of £50,000 and released Anarchy in the UK. It seemed like the band was on a path of destruction and controversy from the start. Consider this interview on nationwide television on the state-owned BBC program Today:

John Lydon (aka Johnny Rotten): You dirty bastard.

Grundy (host): Go on, again.

Lydon: You dirty f**ker!

Grundy: What a clever boy. 

Lydon: You f**king rotter! 

(Watch the full interview here.)

The furor that followed catapulted the Sex Pistols to national notoriety. But, in January 1977, EMI struck the band off their artist roster, and they lost their advance. In March 1977, A&M Records signed the band for £50,000, and a week later they also fired the band. Firing the Sex Pistols cost the record company a further £25,000 as a buyout fee. Virgin Records signed the band in May, and they released their first single, God Save The Queen. Furthermore, the single coincided (unintendedly) with Queen Elizabeth II’s silver jubilee. Although the BBC refused to play the song on any of its public stations and many stores refused to sell the record, it quickly became the number-one hit in the UK, selling over 200,000 copies.

Some say the Sex Pistols were one man’s rebellious act to promote his endeavors, others think they were a complete farce. There is another camp that regards them as a breath of fresh air in the music industry. Whichever camp you belong to, the Sex Pistols had a lasting impact on the future of alternative and mainstream rock for decades to come.

1980s: Golden Age of Alternative

The 1980s was a time of fast change around the world. The Berlin Wall fell in 1989, the outbreak of the AIDS epidemic occurred, and the Chornobyl disaster happened. At the same time, various subcultures emerged: the goths, skinheads, and punks, to name a few. In the US, the political landscape was still conservative and Republican—fertile ground for the alternative music scene to follow its mind and go in the opposite direction.

On the music front, the slump of the 1970s came to an end. The introduction of the compact disc (CD), MTV, and Michael Jackson’s Thriller LP helped the music industry to recover and move along with the times. Alternative music was more than just music, it was about taking control over what you listened to and thumbing your nose at the big, commercial corporations who dictated the public’s tastes.

Alternative bands preferred a DIY approach with a garage band mindset, and they incorporated various elements from folk rock, hard rock, psychedelic music, and of course, punk. Important alternative bands from this time included R.E.M., The Pixies, The Feelies, Red Hot Chili Peppers, The Replacements, The Violent Femmes, and Sonic Youth.

R.E.M. (Active: 1980-2011)

R.E.M. was formed in Atlanta, Georgia in 1980 and was first known as Twisted Kites. Their debut album was Murmur (1983) and they were hailed as “America’s Hippest Band.” The president of I.R.S. Records signed the band after hearing them perform in New Orleans in 1983. With Murmur they shot to stardom and won Rolling Stone magazine’s Band of the Year, Best New Artist, and Album of the Year awards.

Free Radio Europe became a staple on college radio stations and, combined with their extensive touring in a beat-up van, helped establish a cult-like, although underground, following. As one of the alternative scene’s first bands to reach superstardom, R.E.M. helped to push the genre into the limelight.

Camper Van Beethoven (Active: 1983-1990 and 1999-Present)

Camper Van Beethoven merges ska, folk, punk, and world music. The band’s instant trademarks are violin (played by Jonathan Segel) and their laid-back California style. Camper van Beethoven was formed in Redlands, California in 1983. Their influence on the alternative music scene is undeniable and still resounding today.

Sonic Youth (Active: 1984-1997, 2010-2017)

With their alternate tunings, feedback, and combination of hardcore punk, the aesthetic of New York’s downtown music scene found in the works of Philip Glass, Glenn Branca, and Steve Reich’s Sonic Youth redefined the sonic landscape. Their influence would ripple far beyond their timeframe and elements can even be heard in the 1990s grunge bands like Nirvana.

Their albums EVOL (1986) and Sister (1987) were released on SST, and Daydream Nation, which was released in 1988 on the Enigma label, became important sonic and alternative music artifacts. They achieved some of their alternative tunings—inspired by Glenn Branca—by not only changing the way the guitar strings are tuned but also by jamming screwdrivers and drumsticks between the strings and fretboard.

As time passed, their music took on a more pop-friendly sound, which furthered their reputation among listeners outside the alternative scene. In 1990, they signed with major label Geffen and released ten albums with the label.

1990: The “Great Alternative Music Schism” and Fragmentation

The 1990s signaled the march towards the 21st century and technological developments that would shape the face of the world. Some events shocked the world, like the trial of O.J. Simpson and the passing of Princess Diana. South Africa elected its first democratically elected president, Nelson Mandela, and the first babies of Gen Z were born.

Musically, a new type of music emerged, especially in Seattle, namely “grunge.” Nirvana and Pearl Jam pivoted the alternative music scene into the spotlight. Yet, alternative music has become a catch-all term that ranges from experimental music to more accessible pop-rock. Female artists like Alanis Morissette and Tori Amos made significant contributions to the scene and paved the way for later female artists like Avril Lavigne and Billie Eilish.

Towards the new millennium, the alternative genre became fragmented, and subgenres and the term “indie rock” emerged as the replacing descriptor when referring to alternative rock describing the diverse and independent artists expressing themselves through music.

Nirvana (Active: 1987-1994)

Nirvana sent a clear call that the 1980s were over with their album Nevermind. For Generation X, it is the album that encapsulates their being, and Kurt Cobain became their generation’s version of John Lennon of Beatles’ fame.

Nevermind greatly differed from their first and independent album, Bleach (1989). Their debut album followed the punk rock ethos of staying underground, yet it sold 35,000 copies. But the grunge foundations were laid. Nirvana and other grunge musicians followed the punk ethos in music and attitude, many songs use a slow tempo combined with simple chord progressions, start-stop dynamics where a soft passage is suddenly followed by a loud one (like Baroque music’s terraced dynamics), and with lyrics favoring dark themes and delivered in a lamenting tone.

However, when Nirvana signed with Geffen Records and Nevermind hit the shelves many alternative fans believed that Nirvana became sellouts—they abandoned their authenticity and independence. Others felt that the band abandoned their ethical values and turned their backs on the alternative scene’s values of not chasing money and fame. Kurt Cobain sometimes joked about the band becoming sellouts, but also defended their position of pursuing mainstream success.

Alanis Morisette (Active: 1987-Present)

Alanis Morisette is especially known for emotive and candid lyrics combined with her distinctive sound which blends pop and rock influence. Her album, Jagged Little Pill catapulted her to fame in the American market in 1995.

It was unheard of for a female singer to offer her perspective on the themes of heartache and love, especially in the hit single, You Oughta Know. Many of her songs were censored on radio broadcasts due to the explicit references and language. With her evocative mezzo-soprano voice and expressive songwriting, she paved the way for numerous female artists and gave women a voice to express their feelings.

The 1960s were a decade of political and social unrest in the United States. Seven thousand miles away, an unpopular war raged in Vietnam. Its effects were felt in the home of every American family. As a result of the war, mass protests broke out across the country, on college campuses, and in major cities. No American was spared the psychological toll the war took on the nation’s psyche and many turned to music, both as an escape and as a means of protest.

The Vietnam War & Origins of the Counterculture Movement

The Vietnam War was unpopular and divisive. The United States began its involvement in the war in 1954, which was fought between the communist government of North Vietnam, and South Vietnam, the latter of which the United States was aligned with. The United States was committed to preventing the spread of communism and feared that South Vietnam was vulnerable to its influence. As a subscriber to the “domino theory,” the United States government feared what would happen to surrounding nations if South Vietnam fell to communism.

As the United States strengthened its attacks on North Vietnam, public awareness of the war grew back home. However, the American public’s support for the war wavered and turned to disillusionment following an event known as the Tet Offensive in 1968. The Tet Offensive was an attack by North Vietnam on South Vietnamese cities and government buildings, as well as on US forces. The attack was considered a success. This shook the confidence of Americans and brought into question the purpose of the United States’ involvement in the war.

Approximately two million young men were drafted during the war, a fact that contributed to its unpopularity in the United States. Many were skeptical and viewed the draft as a convenient way for the United States government to continue the war at the expense of America’s youth. Opposition to the draft and the war itself fueled much of the anti-war sentiment of the time and gave rise to the counterculture movement. This opposition often took the form of and was strengthened by popular music.

In addition to anti-war beliefs, counterculture youth of the 1960s rejected values deemed important by their parents’ generation. In the 1940s and 50s, emphasis was placed on the “nuclear family,” traditional gender roles, and conformity. In the 1960s, the generational gap between children and parents became more apparent. Disillusioned by their parent’s way of life and the actions of the American government, many young people felt that American society was essentially “broken.” This belief, coupled with other social and political factors created a perfect storm out of which the counterculture movement was born.

Oral contraceptives had recently been introduced and allowed young people the sexual freedoms not granted to previous generations. This fueled the “free love” mentality of the counterculture movement, which broke from traditional social norms, further widening the gap between the youth and older generations. Many members of the counterculture movement felt that people from older generations could not be trusted.

Folk Music as Protest 

In the 1940s, following the Great Depression, traditional American folk music began to see a revival. This kind of music was special because the lyrics often carried political and social messages. Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie were among the most well-known and influential figures of the early folk revival.

Seeger saw a breakthrough in the 1940s and gained popularity for his versions of traditional American folk songs as well as originals that focused on the civil rights movement and environmentalism. Woody Guthrie, an outspoken socialist, wrote the American folk mainstay “This Land is Your Land” in 1940, the song’s melody inspired by an old Baptist hymn.

It was not uncommon for folk songs written in the 1940s to borrow melodies and lyrics from gospel hymns. “This Land is Your Land” was not only a musical celebration of America’s physical features, but also contained anti-establishment lyrics which criticized the privatization of land. One (originally banned) variation of the song contained the lyrics “There was a big high wall there that tried to stop me/ Sign was painted, it said private property/ But on the back side it didn’t say nothing/ This land was made for you and me.”

Renewed interest in folk music reached its peak in the 1960s. This coincided with the genesis of the counterculture movement. Traditional folk songs preached messages of living simply and embracing anti-materialism. In addition, these songs were often very critical of social institutions such as the American government.

These anti-establishment messages spoke to the youth of the 1960s, who were feeling disillusioned with the United States government. Folk artists such as Bob Dylan, Judy Collins, and Peter, Paul, and Mary, began to cover traditional folk songs, the messages of which began to take on renewed meaning to youthful audiences.

Bob Dylan, in particular, embodied certain traits that aided in his making as a folk hero. He rejected conformist attitudes, lived simply, and was vocal about political and social causes. His lyrics dealt with topics such as war, economic struggles, and violence poetically. Dylan espoused the feelings of the counterculture youth in his 1963 song “Masters of War,” in which he wrote: “How much do I know/ To talk out of turn/ You might say that I’m young/ You might say that I’m unlearned/ But there’s one thing I know/ Though I am younger than you/ That even Jesus would never/ Forgive what you do.”

In 1963, during the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his famous “I Have a Dream” speech to thousands gathered in front of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington DC. During this demonstration, young folk singer and Dylan collaborator Joan Baez performed a rendition of “We Shall Overcome,” the basis of which is thought to have been the hymn “I’ll Overcome Someday,” originally composed by Charles Albert Tindley, an African-American minister, in 1901.

The song, which had resonated with formerly enslaved African-Americans living in poverty in the United States in the early 1900s, resonated with members of the counterculture and became an anthem for the movement. Pete Seeger had also performed the song on numerous occasions prior. The renewed popularity of “We Shall Overcome” acted as an example of the journey taken by many traditional American songs, from hymns and gospel songs to staples of the counterculture movement.

Folk Rock and Protest Music for a New Generation

Folk music began to decline in popularity in the mid-to-late-1960s. New genres, such as folk rock, which combined traditional folk with heavier rock elements, and psychedelic music, began to dominate music scenes around the country. Bands such as Buffalo Springfield, the Byrds, and Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young became the new musical voices of the counterculture movement. However, despite a sonic divergence from folk music, these bands still used their platforms to speak out.

In May 1970, National Guardsmen shot and killed four university students in Ohio, who had been part of a protest against President Richard Nixon’s expansion of the war into Cambodia. The crowd of protestors was ordered to disperse by National Guardsmen, and when students refused, the Guardsmen opened fire, killing four students and wounding several others.

Only two weeks after the massacre, Neil Young, then living in the musical paradise of Los Angeles’s Laurel Canyon and working on an album with Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, wrote “Ohio.” The song began with the line “Tin soldiers and Nixon coming,” which not only sneeringly reduced the Guardsmen to toy soldiers playing at being combat soldiers but directly implicated Nixon as responsible. Though Young was not physically present at the protest, the lyrics “we’re finally on our own” placed him in firm alliance with the student protestors, as did his use of “we.” The line “We’re finally on our own” also voices the feelings of abandonment felt by the American youth. The young members of the counterculture movement felt abandoned by leaders tasked with protecting them as citizens, by the National Guard, and more generally, the American government.

Songs such as Neil Young’s “Ohio,” The Byrds’ “Draft Morning,” and Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Fortunate Son” all delivered strong anti-war messages. They stayed true to the themes of folk songs but swapped out acoustic guitars for electric ones. Though folk musicians such as Bob Dylan and Joan Baez remained popular throughout the late 1960s and 1970s, they too adapted their sound to the changing musical trends.

Though the popularity of folk music began to decline in the mid-1960s, it had already made a mark on the American musical landscape. The messages in folk music empowered the American youth active in the counterculture movement, giving a voice to those who felt voiceless and overlooked. In addition, music during this era provided an opportunity for people to come together, united under the shared goals of self-expression, freedom, and peace. Though musical trends have continued to come and go over the years, folk music has been cemented in the American musical canon.

Today, “This Land is Your Land” is still sung in school choirs and played at concerts across the United States. Bob Dylans’s unique delivery is recognized the world over and Joan Baez continues to perform at age eighty-two. The music of the folk revival is enduring and a testament to the power of solidarity through song.

From its earliest days, the Soviet state made its attitude towards religion and faith clear. Denounced as prejudice, activities of churches of any denomination were ceased or strictly limited. In the dark 1930s, thousands of people were executed on charges related to their religious beliefs. However, faith persisted, and the Orthodox Christian church managed to maintain its traditions and even gain new followers during these troubled decades.

The USSR’s Beginning: Churches After the Revolution

By the beginning of the 20th century, Orthodox Christianity was an integral part of the Russian Empire’s life and culture, closely connected to monarchy and governmental institutions. Above all, the official bodies of the church served as yet another branch of power that strengthened the monarchy’s position and offered it resources. Still, some churches and priests opposed some of the governmental decisions and even formed isolated cults and movements with political ambitions, but they rarely avoided prosecution. The clergy was a closed community with almost non-existent chances for those not related or otherwise affiliated with incumbent bishops and priests.

During the Russian Civil War, the majority of clergymen supported the anti-communist White Movement, which received its name in opposition to the Bolsheviks’ signature red. After the White Movement’s defeat, many prominent clergymen fled to Europe, establishing the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad.

The clergymen who decided to stay in Russia expected radical changes and reforms from the new government that actively announced itself as secular. One of the first documents signed by the Bolshevik government led by Vladimir Lenin in 1917 abolished all ethnic and religious privileges of limitations. Publicly, the new officials called for the elimination of all “religious prejudice.” Newspapers published caricatures of priests, framing them as lazy and corrupt enemies of the working class, preying on their weaknesses and exploiting their labor.

By the 1920s, the government began the nationalization of all church property and confiscation of works of art and religious artifacts. Some of these objects were moved to museums (paradoxically, the move saved many Medieval artworks from destruction in humid and tightly-packed churches), and others fell into the private hands of governmental officials. Partially, this measure was a provocation aimed at identifying the most active and dangerous actors of the religious scene who would lead an expected insurrection. As a result, around two thousand clergymen and practicing Christians were executed.

Among the early Soviet Christians, the attitude towards the new authority varied. Some decided to comply and collaborate with the officials, following all orders to avoid bloodshed. Others were more radical. Among more conservative branches of Orthodox Christianity, the clergy directly identified the Soviets with the Antichrist, who would come before the Last Judgment disguised as the Savior of all. In 1926, a group of rural conservative priests announced that the upcoming All-Soviet census was a sign of the upcoming Apocalypse. As a result, dozens of people committed suicide, either burying or burning themselves alive.

The 1930s: The Darkest Decade

The 1930s in Soviet Russia were known as the time of great terror, violence, and persecution. The paranoid government led by Joseph Stalin ruthlessly punished even those of their own ranks fighting for power. The church did not manage to stay out of it. In 1929, the Central Executive Committee adopted a law banning all religion-related activities except for church service. Education, social work, child care, and other functions were left to governmentally approved secular bodies. From around one thousand churches of all denominations that existed in pre-revolutionary Moscow, only forty remained functional.

If, during the 1920s, the Orthodox Christian clergymen were the main targets of repressions, a decade later, the focus shifted to practicing believers, including Muslims, Jews, Catholics, Protestants, Buddhists, and others. According to historians’ evaluations, around 300,000 people were arrested during the Great Purge, with about a third of them executed. Still, the exact number of those persecuted for religious reasons is almost impossible to pinpoint since many of them were formally arrested on other charges.

However, faith persisted among those who needed it. Despite oppression and threats, monks from shut-down monasteries organized underground convents disguised as shared houses for workers with no families. According to the 1937 Census, almost 50% of Soviet citizens still identified as Orthodox Christians, even if they were not actively practicing.

Communism as the New Religion

By forcefully tearing the religious component from the daily practices and worldviews of their citizens, the Soviet government left a gaping hole that needed to be filled. The new ideology became a perfect substitute: with the same enthusiasm, earlier reserved for religious rituals, citizens were expected to participate in regime-related activities. In 1931, the famous Cathedral of Christ the Savior in Moscow was demolished using dynamite. The cathedral was relatively new; it was consecrated only in 1883, but it nonetheless became an important symbol of monarchy and faith, which were interconnected.

The cleared plot of land within walking distance from the Kremlin was meant to become a place for the new kind of temple—the monumental Palace of the Soviets. The Palace project, designed by Ukrainian-Jewish architect Boris Iofan, was a tall ziggurat-like structure of columns with a hundred-meter statue of Vladimir Lenin on top. It was meant to house mass demonstrations celebrating the USSR and regular sessions of the Supreme Soviet—the highest organ of state authority. The ambitious and borderline absurd project was never realized due to Nazi Germany invading the Soviet Union in 1941. In 1960, Nikita Khrushchev ordered the construction of a public swimming pool using the Palace’s abandoned foundation. In 1995, however, the pool was demolished, and the new Cathedral of Christ the Savior was constructed instead.

Personality cults of leaders replaced the cult of Jesus and Christian saints. The mythologized figure of Joseph Stalin as the father of the nation, successful in every deed and competent in any sphere of human knowledge, became a sacred symbol. Despite hundreds of thousands killed during the 1930s repressions, Stalin’s funeral in 1953 had around two million attendees, with hundreds (or, according to some evaluations, thousands) of people dying in a crowd clash.

Orthodox Church During World War II

However, the Soviet state never resorted to a complete and radical elimination of all remnants of religious life. After the Nazi Germany opened the Eastern Front in June 1941, the government decided to do the contrary—revive the country’s religious life under the officials’ strict guidance. In April 1942, Moscow authorities lifted a curfew for one night to let the locals attend Easter service. Given the circumstances, the Soviet officials decided to once again make the church their instrument, this time to maintain the spirits of those who had to fight.

In 1943, right before the Tehran conference, focused on the issue of opening the second front among others, Stalin appointed the Russian Orthodox Church patriarch and several bishops to various parts of the Soviet Union. While some believe that this was a sign of Stalin’s change of heart towards faith, historians insist it was a political move aimed at showing Churchill and Roosevelt that the Soviet state could be tolerant and ready for compromise. As for the clergy, many of them volunteered for service during the war, mostly working as doctors and nurses. On the territories occupied by Nazi forces, they communicated with partisan forces, sheltering them or supplying information.

USSR After the War: Scientific Atheism  

Despite the evident change of tone in the relationship between the church and the state, after Stalin’s death in 1958, Soviet clergymen and followers were prosecuted once again, although less violently. This time, the main restrictive measures concerned the churches’ funds and the amount of paid taxes. The 1960s and 1970s were decades of emphasized atheism, not in the least provoked by the rapid advancements in secular social welfare, science, and space exploration. One of the most popular propaganda posters of the time featured the image of Yuri Gagarin happily reporting that he hadn’t seen any God while in space.

Still, despite propaganda and oppressive measures, the new generation of Soviet people started to attend churches. Although executions and prison sentences became extraordinary, citizens still risked their jobs or social status by attending services or baptizing their children. These norms remained in place until the Soviet Union’s ultimate collapse in 1991 when churches of all confessions gradually restored their rights and privileges.

Zines are mini magazines and are often created by individual artists looking to send a short message to the world. These messages can come in any form, from poetry to wordless art. Like many people who want to be heard, zine artists often share political opinions, radical ideas, and defiant art. People have started to create zine collections to collect this form of art, often ignored by the rest of the art world. Zine libraries can be found in a university collection or underground networks that share ideas and art.

What Is a Zine Collection?

Like any kind of art, people collect zines. While most zine collections are held by individual enthusiasts, a few libraries and art galleries have started to gather them. Zines often hold the ideals, passions, and opinions of the time when they are made, making an interesting time capsule piece of art for museums and galleries. Some zine collections started as underground trading networks and then began to gather zines rather than disperse them.

It can be difficult to create a collection of these zines since they are often one of a kind and irregular in shape. They also don’t have ISBN numbers and can often be missing the artist’s name, the date created, and any other information that could be used to categorize them. The difficulty of organizing collections often means that they go entirely unorganized and are just shelves of little books. Sometimes, though, librarians sort them by themes. Many zine collectors request that artists put their names and a date on the zine, but artists don’t always follow the directions.

What Is a Zine?

A zine is a mini magazine. It is most often a little booklet with some kind of binding, like an accordion, stitched or glued. Artists can fill these little books with anything they like. Some choose to fill their zines with photographs or drawings, others with poetry, and everything in between.

Some zines are filled with instructions on how to do things, a recipe to follow, or something else you can create with the help of the zine. Some zines are informative; for example, they tell you the facts about a certain subject. Some zines tell stories—either real ones or fictional ones. Other zines are for giving opinions.

Some zines are designed to be easily copied so they can be distributed in a mini-production run. Others are meticulously made as a one-of-a-kind masterpiece. Easily copied zines are often made of one folded piece of paper that is unfolded, put in a copier, and then the resulting copy can be folded into another zine. Zine copies allow multiple collections to have the same zine and allow patrons to take copies of zines home with them.

The Zine Creators

While anyone can create a zine, most are created by independent artists. A zine is an art format, so many kinds of creators who work in all sorts of mediums can make zines. Zine workshops allow the wider public to create their own zines. Photographers, in particular, often work in the zine format since it creates an easy way to share small photobooks.

Others are people trying to change the world in some way, like environmentalists. Zines have small production runs, so they are eco-friendly and can be used to share tips, express outrage at current practices, and show the desperations of the other creatures on this planet. Anarchists, punks, and people of other subcultures also use zines as a way of communicating graphic rage.

Where to Find Zine Libraries

Zine collections are hard to find. Some libraries will have zine collections but won’t advertise them (due to the disorganization or small number), but some libraries are dedicated to these booklets. The Library of Virginia has a directory of digitized zine collections, but it doesn’t cover every single collection out there. Some of the biggest libraries include The Library of Congress, Internet Archive, and Barnard College. Barnard College also keeps a directory of zine collections around the world. The Book of Zines curates all different kinds of zine information, including where to find zine collections. Digitized art collections may also carry zines.

Many of these libraries have digitized their zine collections, so even if you don’t live close to any of these locations, you can still take a look at zines from all over the world. Internet Archive has one of the largest digitized collections. Individual artists may also have digitized zines for sale. Occasionally, a zine is created for an online audience. These are called e-zines. If you don’t live near any zine-filled locations, this might be the easiest spot to find them.

You can ask your local library if they carry zines. If they don’t, you could suggest they start a zine collection. Some local libraries will allow patrons to display and give away their zines right inside the library. You can also create your own zines to add to zine libraries. Some of them say they are looking for zines, some don’t, and others just approach creators directly. If you can’t find a zine library, you can also look into zine fairs and symposiums, or you can always order zines online from artists.

The History of Zines

Zines started outside of the art world, in the sphere of science fiction enthusiasts during the 1930s and 1940s. They were used to communicate snippets of fiction and fan theories and to otherwise discuss science fiction. After a while (in the 1960s), artists found the format as a cheap and easy way to share and spread their art to a larger audience. Photographers found them useful for creating cheaper and easier-to-produce photobooks, and poets could use them as small chapbooks (short books filled with poetry). Zines found their way into defiant art shortly after that because their easily reproducible nature made them the perfect vehicle for spreading ideas. Now, zines are used for any kind of idea or narrative—from telling personal stories to spreading political messages.

What Is Defiant Art?

Defiant art challenges social and political norms. It is made to challenge current ideas and counter the direction society is headed in, showing an alternate path that is preferable to the creator of the zine. Much of this defiance is about radical change and showing kindness in places where it is lacking. Rebellious people, ideas, and subcultures create defiant art to inspire change and show outrage. Often, these radical ideas involve anti-capitalism and anti-authoritarianism. Altogether, many zine creators work together to show what a better world might look like.

Why Do Artists Use Zines to Communicate Ideas?

Zines are a good format for communicating snippets of ideas. Some tell a story through pictures, but others are more direct and use words. Just as a picture can tell a thousand words, a few words can communicate a thousand pictures. Melding these two ideas can communicate quite a bit in the tiny format of a zine. Artists also use zines because they are easy to replicate and pass out, getting their ideas further spread than an individual piece could. People are also used to the structure of a book or magazine, so using that format adds a layer of familiarity to the otherwise opaque art.

A Connection Between Street Art and Zines

Street art is art that is made on the street, for the street. It can come in the form of stickers stuck on signs and poles, graffiti, fliers, etc. It is characterized by its independence. It’s not controlled by any government, corporation, or other entity. It also tends to be done illegally. Zines are the magazine equivalent. They are also created by individuals (who often want to change the world), made to show opinions unwanted by major publishers, and don’t follow any rules.

New styles, ideas, and designs often start as street art and become more mainstream, and street art moves on to new uncharted territories. It is never a static style and communicates how people feel about current events and changes. This all makes its way to the zines. Like zines, street art is most often the realm of anarchists, punks, and other rebellious subcultures.

What Makes Zine Collections Popular?

The root of zines comes from science fiction (often characterized as seeing possibilities beyond current times), but zines are still around because of the punk subculture. Punks and anarchists have used the medium for decades to share ideas and opinions with others both inside and outside of their subculture. Zines are about communication, specifically underground or unrecognized ideas. This makes them the perfect medium for people bucking the current trends and trying to reach beyond what other people deem possible.

While zines have moved beyond just these subcultures, punks are still one of the main driving forces that keep zines popular. Zines are, by nature, non-mainstream. This independence from the publishing norm automatically sets it into the realm of counter-cultural ideals that people like punks have. Zines are a window into the dreams and aspirations of the people making them, and those people often fall outside of the mainstream. Artists can also create zines to show places and people in the world where bad things are happening. Zines are a practice of emotions and communication.

Hans Bellmer was a lesser-known member of the Surrealists who focused on dollmaking and photography. Bellmer’s unsettling, deformed dolls emerged partially as a reaction to the standards of Aryan beauty and health promoted by the Third Reich. However, soon, the dolls turned into a lifelong project that both supported and tormented Bellmer for decades. Read on to learn more about Hans Bellmer, the forgotten dollmaker.

1. Hans Bellmer: Expression Through Opposition

Hans Bellmer, born in 1902 into a rather prosperous middle-class family from present-day Germany, could have enjoyed a comfortable life as an engineer or a civil servant. Instead, from his early years, the dominating force in his life was his opposition to his violent, aggressive, and despotic father. After finding a job in a coal mine (upon his father’s insistence), Hans was soon fired and almost imprisoned for spreading left-wing ideas among other workers. His studies of engineering in Berlin, again forced upon him, were equally unsuccessful—less than a year after enrolling, Bellmer quit and immersed himself into art, exhibiting with German Dadaists and Surrealists. Still, Bellmer was not as impractical as he seemed: soon, he opened a successful advertising agency, designing posters and creating illustrations for major German companies.

It all changed after the Nazis came to power. In 1933, Bellmer shut his agency for good, unwilling to contribute to this government’s wellbeing in any form. Needless to say, his eternal nemesis, the Bellmer family patriarch, turned out to be an ardent Nazi supporter. Around that time, Hans Bellmer started to conceive his lifelong project that would make him one of the most influential artists of his time and a pariah in his country. Horrified by the Nazi propaganda about the perfect Aryan body and ideal beauty, Bellmer invented an opposition to it.

He modeled his ideal from the figure of an adolescent girl in a transitional state between girlhood and womanhood, falling outside of strict categories of age and societal expectations. Some believe the imaginary figure was a product of Bellmer’s obsession with his teenage cousin Ursula—a forbidden relationship that could never be fulfilled. Ursula was either unaware of her role or fully content with it: a few years later, she, a Sorbonne student, brought Hans’ photographs to Andre Breton, introducing him to the Surrealists.

Bellmer’s first doll was a half-assembled carcass with deliberately unfinished body parts. A few years earlier, while visiting one of Berlin’s museums with his Dadaist friends, he found the technique for assembling movable dolls. There, he found articulated wooden dolls from the 16th century, with ball joints allowing for movement and fixation of limbs and torso.

2. Bellmer’s Projects Maturing

Bellmer’s first projects were financed and otherwise supported by his mother and brother, unbeknownst to his oppressive father. Franz, an accomplished engineer, even took part in building them. He designed movable eyes and rotating miniature panoramas inside the dolls’ abdomens. Pressing on one of the doll’s nipples, the viewer would see six scenes demonstrating lace handkerchiefs, tiny boats, or sweets. However, Bellmer soon abandoned the panoramas project to focus on more complex and erotic photographic arrangements of his dolls.

Part of Bellmer’s inspiration came from a short story by Ernst Hoffmann called The Sandman. There, a man falls in love with an automaton, a moving doll he mistakes for a real woman. Realizing his mistake, the romantic hero loses his mind and commits suicide. Similar dramatic tension and fear reveal themselves in the tableaux vivants of Bellmer, with dolls transgressing the boundaries of the animate and inanimate. Bellmer positioned his dolls in enclosed settings of rooms and cabinets, with their joints rearranged and bodies partially assembled. They look both seductive and threatening, representing the deepest desires and the worst nightmares.

3. Femininity

Bellmer’s mother represented all things the father was incapable of expressing: gentleness, understanding, support, and comfort. In fact, adopted femininity became Bellmer’s principal instrument long before he started to work on his dolls. According to the memories of Bellmer’s brother Fritz, Hans sometimes wore dresses and wigs and even signed his letters with female names. Moreover, both Hans and Fritz adopted, as they called it, a girl-like way of behaving around their father, mostly to confuse and destabilize him, avoiding possible attacks.

In 1957, Bellmer met Unica Zurn, a German writer and artist who shocked him with her resemblance to his dream dolls. Bellmer was already a widower with two children but was never truly content with his personal life, haunted by his dreams and doll figures. With Zurn’s enthusiastic consent, he progressed in his art, moving from photographs of dolls to a series of images and montages featuring Zurn’s body, similarly positioned and arranged.

Bellmer’s self-identification with his dolls never went away. Some photographs of his later period include a photomontage of his head inside Zurn’s abdomen as if he was both possessed by her and controlling her from within her body.

4. Modernist Grotesque

Modernist art has a long and detailed history of exploring grotesque bodies and their limits. The works of Egon Schiele, Bellmer’s contemporary, distorted human anatomy almost beyond recognition, and Futurists blended it with heavy industrial machinery. All of them were concerned with the limits of the human body. At what point does the inanimate come alive, and when does a living thing cease its conscious existence?

Bellmer similarly explored the body limits, although in the context of desire and eroticism turning into threatening presences. On the one hand, his dolls were the ultimate creations of the male gaze—they were sexualized bodies devoid of personality. On the other hand, while losing all non-essential parts, they turn from desirable to haunting, possessing a threat to the one who built them for his pleasure. A destructive relationship between a man and his creation is an archetypal story found in many cultures. In 1919, the famous Austrian artist Oskar Kokoschka created a life-sized doll of his ex-lover Alma Mahler before ritually decapitating it.

5. Hysteria as an Aesthetic Phenomenon

One of the peculiarities of the Surrealist movement was its exploration of hysteria—an old phenomenon and pseudomedical diagnosis that mostly referred to women. Hysteria was expressed through prolonged mental disturbance, fits of emotional distress, or simply the refusal to comply with the normative rules of feminine behavior. Prior to the development of psychiatry, hysteria was considered a physical disease but was reclassified as mental in the early 20th century. The origins of hysteria, according to some experts of the time, lay either in prolonged stress or in repressed sexual trauma.

Surrealists, namely their ideological leader Andre Breton, considered hysteria an aesthetical rather than a medical phenomenon. Reading medical reports and observing protographs of hysteria patients in epileptic or catatonic fits, they regarded it as the ultimate expression of the unconscious. Repressed desires finding their way out through hysterical episodes for them represented the highest possible state of automatism. Bellmer’s works explore this concept of hysteria as self-expression. His four-legged creatures, devoid of heads or even torsos, express their torments through convulsions, similar to those of a child during a temper tantrum.

6. Body as Text

In his writings explaining the logic behind his creations, Bellmer mentioned a medical case of two teenagers, both diagnosed with hysteria in their puberty. According to their medical files, the girls were convinced they went blind, and yet one insisted she could see objects through her nose and the other through her right hand. Following the idea of the hysterical body displacing and moving its sense organs, Bellmer further developed the idea. What if the human body could move and concentrate its senses in areas unrelated to its immediate sensory organs? And what if sexual pleasure could be experienced by the entire body rather than by its part?

In his writings, Bellmer formulated the concept of a body as an erotic palindrome or an anagram—a phrase or a word with its letters mixed and reassembled to form another or similar idea. Moreover, Bellmer’s constructions were meant to be not only easy to transform but interchangeable. Many photographs showed disassembled dolls with their torsos and hips made from identical details and breasts turning into buttocks.

What Is Hans Bellmer’s Legacy?

Although Bellmer’s creations and story were too unsettling to make him a superstar artist, his influence on the artistic scene was immediate and transformative. After receiving several photographs from Ursula, Andre Breton almost immediately published them in a Surrealist periodical Minotaure. Figures on dolls and mannequins were already popular among Surrealist painters, but Bellmer’s series launched a new wave of obsession. The issue was not only in the dolls themselves but in the way the artist modeled artificial spaces within his photographs.

For the first time in history, surrealist experiments with collage and montage separated photography from reality, allowing it to create its own alternative realms. One of the most prominent exhibits of the 1938 International Surrealist Exhibition was The Mannequin Alley—a gallery of life-sized mannequins, each decorated by one of the artists present on the show and inspired by Bellmer’s fetishistic figures.

Bellmer continued to work on his dolls and photographs until 1970. That year, Unica Zurn died by suicide, exhausted by her years-long fight with schizophrenia. Historians and medical professionals still argue whether her collaboration with Bellmer was therapeutic or destructive for her. Bellmer died five years later, succumbing to bladder cancer.

Despite its relative obscurity, Bellmer’s work continued to influence creatives of all kinds. In 1997, fashion designer Alexander McQueen released a collection inspired by Bellmer’s designs. Some garments’ proportions were distorted to fit Belmeer’s monstrous creations, while others featured metal cages as parts of their structures.