1922 ........ ten stories about a seminal year .... on the wireless

 Now, it might be seen as contrived history to pick a year and seek to argue that this was a seminal moment in time.

Tutankhamun, 2016

But that is what Matthew Sweet has done for the year 1922, arguing that it was a crucial year for modernism which still has an impact in many different ways right up to today.*

The series has been going out on Radio 4 all this week.

The subjects covered in no particular order, include The discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb, Noserfartu, The Shabolovka Tower, Louis Armstrong goes to Chicago, Bertolt Brecht’s play Drums in the Night and the Wasterland.

And I have to say it is the sort of radio the BBC do so well.

I discovered it by accident, have missed the odd one but have always found each 15 minute broadcast, an excellent listen.

Yesterday’s was on Nosferatu, and Modernist Horror, and the day before the Discovery of Tutankhamun and Egyptomania, and because as much as I like on Nosferatu, I have always found that Egyptian King most fascinating.

The Shabolovka Tower, 1979

“The tomb of Tutankhamun was discovered in 1922, and this fuelled the Egyptomania that swept across Europe and America, influencing diverse aspects of culture from dance to music to architecture. Grauman’s Egyptian Theatre opened in Hollywood in this pivotal year, and the craze for the Egyptian style can still be seen in many British buildings from cinemas to pubs. 

Matthew explores how this exemplifies Modernism’s fascination with the distant past, the roots of civilisations, and their relics - with the historians Debbie Challis and Roger Luckhurst. Also, Egypt gained full independence from Britain in 1922, and the disintegration of Empire was another catalyst of Modernism.

Producer: Eliane Glaser

Readings by Rebecca Crankshaw and Michael Begley”

Location; 1922

Picture; The funerary mask of Tutankhamun, Roland Unger, 2016, Egyptian Museum in Cairo, Roland Unger Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no Invariant Sections, no Front-Cover Texts, and no Back-Cover Texts. A copy of the license is included in the section entitled GNU Free Documentation License, and 32 kopeks postage stamp, USSR 1979, 50 years Radio Moscow, 1979, Postal Service of USSR, from  The Shukhov Tower, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shukhov_Tower

*1922; The Birth of Now, https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0013r19/episodes/player

The Cult of King Tut ................ one to listen to ......... today on the wireless

Now this one is fascinating.

"As the largest collection of Tutankhamun's treasures to travel outside of Egypt goes on display in London, Patricia Clavin, Professor of International History at the University of Oxford, explores the cult of Egyptomania following the opening of King Tutankhamun’s Tomb in 1922.

Patricia visits the Griffith Institute in Oxford to view the original glass plate negatives of Harry Burton, who meticulously documented Howard Carter and Lord Carnarvon's archaeological excavations of the tomb of Tutankhamun. She notes how Burton set up and staged his photos to make them as dramatic as possible and how these images then flashed around the world in the new mass circulation newspapers, so that "everybody could have a bit of King Tut".

At the Clothworkers' Centre in London, Patricia looks at the V&A’s stunning hand-beaded gold lamé evening jacket, made in Paris in 1923, which uses generic Egyptian motifs of birds, snakes and lotus flowers: imagery that appeared everywhere in 1920s art deco design, as well as in mass-produced consumer goods, available to all.

The four statues of the goddess Isis, who guarded Tutankhamun's canopic shrine, are notably modern-looking. Their bobbed hair and shift dresses chimed with the style of the new 1920s modern girl, embodied in the "Jazz Cleopatra", Josephine Baker. From outside Baker’s haunt, the Folies Bergère in Paris, Patricia speaks to the musicologist Martin Guerpin about how her styling as a Garçonne and her dancing of the Charleston struck people as the epitome of the liberated woman after the First World War.

When Tutankhamun’s mummy was unwrapped in 1925, he was discovered to be a boy king, whose body carried multiple injuries. Patricia talks to Roger Luckhurst about how this captured the imagination of people after the First World War, many of whom were mourning their war dead. This culture of mourning and death also fed the King Tut curse stories which flooded through the Western press at the time.

Patricia concludes that Tut-mania was as much a global project of the imagination as it was about the history of the objects themselves. It connected people to an ancient place and to one another, including the ones they had lost. Through consumption of the past they were able to re-imagine themselves in a different and possibly better world.

Produced by Melissa FitzGerald

A Blakeway production for BBC Radio 4"*

Pictures; gold face mask, Roland Unger, 2016, Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no Invariant Sections, no Front-Cover Texts, and no Back-Cover Texts. A copy of the license is included in the section entitled GNU Free Documentation License, Tutankhamun receives flowers from Ankhesenamun. This image is on the lid of a box found in Tut's tomb.
Date 20 December 2006 (original upload date), Transferred from en.wikipedia to Commons by Closedmouth.

*The Cult of King Tut, https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0009r52