American Gothic
1930 · Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago
Wood posed his sister and his dentist in front of a farmhouse window, and people have argued ever since whether he meant tribute or mockery.
★ 8.3
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1930
Showing 38 works across all media from 1930
As I Lay Dying
1930 · 267 pages
Addie Bundren dies and her family hauls the coffin across Mississippi through flood and fire. Fifteen voices tell it, and you laugh at people whose misery you can feel.
★ 8.0
Mood Indigo
1930
Ellington inverted the horns, trombone high and clarinet low, and the overtones invent a fourth instrument that is not there.
★ 6.9
The Foundation Pit
1930 · 224 pages
Workers dig a foundation for the building that will house the whole proletariat, and the pit keeps widening. Platonov's Russian buckles under its own slogans, and the Soviets suppressed the book until 1987.
★ 6.6
All Quiet on the Western Front
Directed by Lewis Milestone
1930
The Nazis sent brownshirts to disrupt its German screenings and banned it outright once in power: the first great sound film about war, told entirely from inside a German schoolboys' trench.
★ 6.5
Narcissus and Goldmund
1930 · 320 pages
Two friends split the world between them: Narcissus stays in the monastery with logic and God, and Goldmund walks out into women, wandering, and the Black Death, then carves it all in wood.
★ 6.3
Civilization and Its Discontents · 1930
Tintin in the Land of the Soviets
1930 · 141 pages
Hergé sent his boy reporter into a Soviet Union he had never visited, cribbed from one anti-Bolshevik tract of rigged elections and staged factories. Crude work, and the series it opened conquered Europe.
★ 4.4
Civilization is nothing more than the effort to reduce the use of force to the last resort.
The Revolt of the Masses · 1930
The Greek Way · 1930