Left bank

The Années folles in Montparnasse featured a thriving art and literary scene centered on cafés such as Brasserie La Coupole, Le Dôme Café, Café de la Rotonde, and La Closerie des Lilas as well as salons like Gertrude Stein's in the rue de Fleurus.

The Rive Gauche, or left bank, of the Seine in Paris, was and is primarily concerned with the arts and the sciences.^[3] Many artists settled there and frequented cabarets like Le Boeuf sur le Toit and the large brasseries in Montparnasse. American writers of the Lost Generation, like F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway, met and mingled in Paris with exiles from dictatorships in Spain and Yugoslavia.

The painters of the School of Paris for example included among others Chaïm Soutine, Amedeo Modigliani, and Marc Chagall, who were Lithuanian, Italian, and Russian, respectively. Later the American Henry Miller, like many other foreigners, gravitated to the rue Vavin and Boulevard Raspail. Montparnasse was, he said, "the navel of the world".^[4] Gertrude Stein also lived in Montparnasse during this period.

Right bank

Montmartre was a major center of Paris nightlife and had been famous for its cafés and dance halls since the 1890s. Trumpeter Arthur Briggs played at L'Abbaye and transvestites frequented La Petite Chaumière.^[5] After World War I, the artists who had inhabited the guinguettes and cabarets of Montmartre invented post-Impressionism during the Belle Époque.

In 1926, the facade of the Folies Bergère building was redone in Art Deco style by the artist Maurice Pico, adding it to the many Parisian theatres of the period in this architectural style.^[6]

Surrealism

The Elephant Celebes, Max Ernst 1921. The Tate, London.

Surrealism came to the forefront in the 1920s cultural scene, bringing new forms of expression to poetry with authors like André Breton, whose Surrealist Manifesto appeared in 1924, Louis Aragon, Paul Éluard, and Robert Desnos. Émigré artists had created Post-Impressionism, Cubism, and Fauvism in Paris before World War I, and included Pablo Picasso, Marc Chagall, Amedeo Modigliani, and Piet Mondrian, along with French artists Pierre Bonnard, Henri Matisse, Jean Metzinger, and Albert Gleizes.

Surrealists also included artists like Max Ernst, Joan Miró, Salvador Dalí, and Francis Picabia, sculptors like Jean Arp, Germaine Richier and even early film-makers, like Luis Buñuel and René Clair.

Avant-garde

Jean Cocteau, while he denied belonging to the surrealists, was unquestionably avant-garde and collaborated with many of its members.

American influence

American culture of the Roaring Twenties had a substantial influence on France, which imported jazz, the Charleston, and the shimmy, as well as cabaret and nightclub dancing. Interest in American culture increased in the Paris of the 1920s, and shows and stars of Broadway theatre introduced as innovations for the élite and were imitated thereafter.

This was the case for the famous Revue Nègre in 1925 at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées. Josephine Baker danced the Charleston almost naked, with provocative gestures set to music by Sidney Bechet. Important Paris designers like Paul Poiret fought to design clothes for her.^[11] Inspired and influenced by the French Colonial Empire, Josephine Baker put on La Folie du Jour in 1926, and from the cafés chantants, also successfully picked up popular songs such as La Petite Tonkinoise by Vincent Scotto. In 1927 she starred in the silent film Siren of the Tropics, which opened to rave reviews. The 1930 song J'ai Deux Amours enshrined Baker as a full-featured star of Parisian nightlife, who not only danced, but also commented on the music and did comedy.

While she appeared at the Folies Bergère, Baker opened her own nightclub, called "Chez Joséphine", in the rue Fontaine.

Dance

Amedeo Modigliani - Paul Guillaume

Paul Guillaume in 1919 organized a "Negro festival" at the Théatre des Champs-Élysées. Six years later, he also produced the Paris La Revue Nègre. On rue Blomet, the Bal Nègre cabaret attracted both aesthetes and the curious.

Music

Casino de Paris poster featuring Josephine Baker

During this period the music hall permanently replaced the café-chantant. People often went to the Casino de Paris, the Paris concert, the concert Mayol and the theater; spectacles, attractions, and songs occurred at a rapid pace. Artistic productions had a meteoric rise. Some of the best-known examples were American-influenced shows at the Casino de Paris -- Paris qui dance (1919), Cach' ton piano (1920), and Paris qui jazz (1920–21), Mon homme and Dans un fauteuil gave rise to stardom for Maurice Chevalier and Mistinguett. American influences such as musicals underlay the success of the Folies Bergère, the famous "Mad Berge", inaugurated with Les Folies raging in 1922.

A number of classical music composers, such as those of the School of Paris and Les Six, also flourished at this time. "The musical influence of Paris, dominated first by Debussy and then by Stravinsky, seems to have been almost inescapable for composers in the first four decades of the century."^[12]

Operetta

Operetta had a turning point on 12 November 1918 with the premiere of Phi-Phi by Henri Christiné and Albert Willemetz. Up to a thousand performances were played in just two years. The popular Dédé was staged in 1921 by Maurice Chevalier.

Operetta attracted talented composers such as Marseille's Vincent Scotto, and also Maurice Yvain (a composer of Mistinguett's signature song Mon Homme), and author Sacha Guitry, who wrote the libretto for L'amour masqué.

In the Olympia at the Bobino, the Théâtre de la Gaîté-Montparnasse showcased Marie Dubas and Georgius, who inaugurated the Singing Theatre by staging popular songs. From 1926, American titles such as No, No, Nanette, Rose-Marie and Show Boat began to be adapted for French viewers.

Sports

Cyclist Henri Desgrange in 1922

Sports spectacles were also popular during the Années folles. Attendance at sporting venues increased significantly in the years following the war and the press gave sporting events an audience and growing popularity. The newspapers played a significant role in promoting sports through dedicated sports pages, giving popularity to the Tour de France, football and rugby. Moreover, sports, which previously had been limited only to those of affluent backgrounds, now began to extend to the masses. The major sporting event during this decade was Olympic Games in Paris in 1924, in which 3,092 athletes from 44 countries participated, and no fewer than 625,000 spectators attended.

Film

Silent film, called "cinéma", rose to popularity in the 1920s. Scientists of the time were predicting little future for it. Silent film is considered by some as the carefree innocence of years or 7th Art. Max Linder, after being discovered by Charles Pathé, became integral in making the film a cultural phenomenon.

European film production almost completely stopped during World War I, as most actors were drafted into the war. The public took refuge in theaters trying to forget the horrors of the front with films such as Charlie Chaplin's A Dog's Life. Hollywood films saw massive growth in demand thanks to a sharp decline in European production; it exported an increasing number of films. In 1919, films from the United States accounted for about 90% of films screened in Europe.

Some films showed the influence of surrealism, with director Luis Buñuel collaborating with Salvador Dalí on his first short film, Un Chien Andalou. René Clair's silent films blended comedy and fantasy.

Theatre

In the Paris of the 1920s, the theater was essentially dominated by four directors -- Louis Jouvet, Georges Pitoëff, Charles Dullin and Gaston Baty. They decided in 1927 to join efforts to create the "Cartel of Four." However, they had much less success than Sacha Guitry in Théâtre des Variétés. There are also parts of Alfred Savoir, comedies of Édouard Bourdet and those of Marcel Pagnol that met with some success.

Specifically, the theatrical performance was a great success with audiences and had an undeniable renewal in 1920, first at the stage performance. Around the "Cartel" develops a creative effort to bring in staging the concerns and aspirations of the time. The change is also reflected in the choice of themes and atmosphere that emerges from the works presented. But parallel to this, the educated public is interested elites increasingly to authors and works that combine classical in the form and the opposition reality/dream at the theatrical atmosphere. Also, the theater Jean Cocteau, the first pieces of Jean Giraudoux such as Siegfried in 1928 and the works of Italian Luigi Pirandello are famous examples that were very successful.

In 1920, post-impressionist painter Nils Dardel and de Maré together created Ballets suédois at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées. In the autumn of 1924, Giorgio de Chirico curated the scenography and costumes for Luigi Pirandello's "The Jar".

The emancipated look

The garçonne (flapper) look in women's fashion emerged in Paris, promoted especially by Coco Chanel. The boyish look was characterized by a loose, streamlined, androgynous silhouette where neither the bust nor the waist are evident, accompanied by a short hairdo. It became the symbol of the emancipated woman: free and autonomous, and expressing a new social freedom for a woman—she goes out on the town, smokes, dances, engages in sports or outdoor activities, drives a car, goes on trips—and, flying in the face of moral conventions of the day, she flaunts an extra-marital liaison, perhaps even her homo- or bisexuality, or cohabits openly with a partner.

Also by Chanel, the celebrated little black dress came out in 1926. A straight sheath with 3/4 sleeves and no collar, the crêpe de Chine tube all in black (a color previously reserved for bereavement) was the perfect evocation of garçonne style, erasing the forms of the female body. Copied many times over, this "Ford signed 'Chanel'" as Vogue magazine dubbed it, referring to the mass-produced American car, would become a classic item of womenswear of the 1920s and beyond.^[13]