Few works of modern literature are as entwined with their visual imagery as Fitzgerald’s 1925 American classic, The Great Gatsby. Even a simple champagne coupe has become a kind of cultural shorthand for the symbolically rich, gracefully written novel we all adore. From hotel lobbies to Pinterest boards, luxury advertisements to fashion house runways, Gatsby visuals permeate contemporary culture. But beyond the obvious glamor of Gatsby’s swanky world—with its Marie Antoinette rooms and Restoration salons—the reason for our obsession with Gatsby’s visuals might just cut a little deeper, and require a bit more reading between the lines. Beneath the surface, Fitzgerald’s novel reads almost like a visual art piece, subtly influenced by the modern art movements of his time.
Indeed, the 1920s saw parallel revolutions in both literature and art. Departing from the straightforward language of earlier writers like Henry James and Edith Wharton, Fitzgerald’s emotive, metaphorically layered language places emphasis on Nick’s subjectivity and leaves ample room for discovery, allowing the reader’s imagination to fill in the blanks. Like a layer of chunky paint against soft watercolor, one sentence may be lyrical and rhythmic, and the next clipped and direct. It is the reader who gets to decide how the paint dries—what actually transpired as Nick reflects on that fateful summer. Take this sentence in Chapter 9 for example:
“So when the blue smoke of brittle leaves was in the air and the wind blew the wet laundry stiff on the line I decided to come back home.”
Like tension points on an abstract canvas, “blue smoke and brittle leaves,” while alliterative, cause friction with each other as your mind attempts to pair these competing elements together, leaving the whole sentence convoluted in a dreamlike scape of loosely suggested meaning.
As Fitzgerald and his contemporaries explored more imaginative and fragmented literary styles, the modern art world was also rapidly transforming in the aftermath of WWI. In fact, the 1920s marked the emergence of a distinctly American form of modernism as American artists sought to break free from European influences. Shifts in America’s political, cultural, and intellectual climate gave rise to new modernist movements like Art Deco, Precisionism, Regionalism, Harlem Renaissance, and Surrealism. Artists of these movements began to place more emphasis on the formal qualities of their works (line, shape, composition, etc.) rather than narrative potential alone. So let’s take a look at five different movements and artistic styles that emerged in the 1920s, and their striking parallels to Gatsby’s themes, landscape, and prose.
1. Duchampian Defiance → Fitzgerald’s Critique of Upper Class Carelessness
While Fitzgerald was not deeply immersed in the world of visual modern art, he would have been at least broadly aware of avant-garde trends. He surely overheard conversations around Marcel Duchamp’s now-infamous presentation of Fountain in 1917, a porcelain urinal ripped out of context and presented as a work of conceptual art. A “ready-made,” as the French painter and sculptor called it, Duchamp radically declared anything could be art, leaving modern art—and the way the artistically inclined see everyday objects—forever changed.
Fitzgerald’s satirical take on the upper class mimics Duchamp’s mockery of art world superiority and the institution of art itself. Both Duchamp and Fitzgerald use humor to assert that their subjects—or in Duchamp’s case, his viewers—should take themselves a lot less seriously and consider stepping out of their own gilded, narrow box. Take the bigoted buffoon Tom Buchanan for example, who Fitzgerald laughingly describes as having reached his peak at 21, with everything afterward “savoring of anticlimax.” Both artists’ shrewd critiques were born from observation of the elite world around them, and a desire to bring high-brow snobbery down to earth.
2. Art Deco Glam → Glittering Opulence of Gatsby’s World
Moving beyond the frame of Fitzgerald’s social and cultural criticism lies a far more obvious allusion to the dominant movement of the 20s, one that influenced art, architecture, fashion and design. The novel’s pearly descriptions of expansive rooms, opulent architecture, and Long Island green space are riddled with the over-the-top elegance of Art Deco glamour:
“We walked through a high hallway into a bright rosy-colored space, fragilely bound into the house by French windows at either end. The windows were ajar and gleaming white against the fresh grass outside that seemed to grow a little way into the house.”
Tom’s house makes itself grand here, with its open windows, rose-colored rooms, and high hallways, as if powdering its cheeks with a rosy blush and donning its sleekest, flashiest dress for the evening ahead. Just like seven proud arches at the top of the Chrysler building (completed in 1930), Gatsby’s guests “came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars.” Opulence begets more opulence when it comes to Fitzgerald’s prose, which unfolds like diamonds on a channel set ring.
3. Precisionism’s Interest in the Machine Age → Industrial Beauty and Decay
While Fitzgerald’s bleak portrait of miserable men surrounded by smokestacks in the Valley of Ashes may seem distinct to Gatsby, in fact, an early modern American art movement called Precisionism also took an interest in the machine age. Some artists even highlighted how machines alienated and dehumanized society; Charles Sheeler’s American Landscape (1930) depicts a drab factory next to a reflective canal, the whole landscape utterly devoid of humans. Interested in the sleek lines and distinct shapes of machinery, Precisionist works often feature factories and cityscapes in geometric forms, highlighting the beauty and sinister undertone of industrial progress. Fitzgerald, too, shows a fascination with the foreboding grandeur of cityscapes. Nowhere is that more evident than in his kaleidoscopic description of the newly built Queensboro Bridge:
“Over the great bridge, with the sunlight through the girders making a constant flicker upon the moving cars, with the city rising up across the river in white heaps and sugar lumps all built with a wish out of non-olfactory money. The city seen from the Queensboro Bridge is always the city seen for the first time, in its first wild promise of all the mystery and the beauty in the world.”
4. Harlem’s Cultural Embrace → Whitewashed Jazz for Long Island’s Elite
One of the most glaring omissions in Gatsby is the presence of African Americans, whose rare mention in the novel comes with a heavy dose of racial stereotyping. And yet, Black culture permeates Gatsby’s parties via the constant backdrop of jazz, its quick rhythms and dynamic sounds keeping partygoers on their toes and the champagne continuously flowing. Like jazz’s quickly-changing rhythms, Fitzgerald’s descriptions of Gatsby’s parties take on a staccato quality, becoming pronounced and improvisational, as the music propels Gatsby’s guests into a world of limitless possibility.
“The lights grow brighter as the earth lurches away from the sun, and now the orchestra is playing yellow cocktail music… Laughter is easier minute by minute, spilled with prodigality, tipped out at a cheerful word.”
While art of the Harlem Renaissance sought to tease out racial stereotypes, featuring paintings filled with vibrant color, African influences, and full-throttle creative expression, Gatsby’s white partygoers live vicariously through Black culture, dancing to white-washed forms of jazz appropriated for homogenous audiences.
5. Georgia O’Keeffe’s Sensual Minimalism → Daisy’s White Perfection
In the 1920s, Georgia O’Keeffe developed her signature style, featuring soft, flowing florals filled with eroticism. While the artist pushed back against reductive, sexualized readings of her work, there is no denying that her many depictions of the reproductive core of flowers are evocative of female anatomy—open, exposed, and blooming. But beyond their erotic undertones, the way they elevate, magnify, and sensualize the flower mimics Fitzgerald’s depiction of Daisy Buchanan. Graceful, sophisticated, and virginal, Daisy is the ultimate embodiment of white womanhood. The days of her youth are described as being “redolent of orchids and pleasant, cheerful snobbery”; like the dark green leaves that encroach upon the pure flower’s center in Jimson Weed/White Flower No. 1, the orchestral music playing in the backdrop of Daisy’s “white girlhood” sums up “the sadness and suggestiveness of life in new tunes.”
While Fitzgerald’s allusions to modern artworks and emerging artistic movements of the 1920s could surely continue, it’s your turn to reread The Great Gatsby and discover which lines of pearly prose spark visual connections. Find a visual that feels strikingly similar to a work of modern art? Write to me at annie@bondandgrace.com, I’d love to hear from you!
