HOW TO BE AVANT-GARDE

The shock of the new.

Art historian Falconer charts the atmosphere of disillusion, anger, and restlessness that gave rise to avant-garde art, disparate movements that swept across Europe and Russia, beginning around 1910 and continuing for decades. Futurists, Dadists, Surrealists, Russian constructivists, De Stijl, the Bauhaus, and Situationists were bound together by their rebellion against the academy as gatekeepers for artists and against stultifying bourgeois values. They were intent on creating shocking, disorienting works “that defied all the prior categories of art,” such as multimedia performances featuring a rowdy mix of poetry, orations, and music. Some anointed everyday objects as art—such as Marcel Duchamp’s urinal titled Fountain; others insisted that art must evolve into architectural structures. Although some avant-garde artists railed against conventional forms of writing, they produced their own manifestos: The bombastic Filippo Tomasso Martinetti’s Futurist Manifesto was published on the front page of Le Figaro in 1909. André Breton’s Surrealist Manifesto appeared in 1924. Some were drawn to the occult, the unconscious, and dreams; many harbored utopian visions, especially after World War I. Dada, Falconer asserts, arose from the trenches: “anarchic, acidic, preoccupied with a violent, politically turbulent, mechanized world.” Falconer creates lively capsule biographies of idiosyncratic characters in his well-populated history, including Guillaume Apollinaire, who invented new “isms” to describe the new art; Duchamp, “a prankster without a program”; Dadaists Hugo Ball and Emmy Hennings; Tristan Tzara, Dada’s chief publicist; the Russians Vladimir Tatlin and Aleksandr Rodchenko; Theo van Doesburg, leader of De Stijl, whose aim was to connect with the universal; Walter Gropius, founder of the Bauhaus. With entertaining asides about his own experiences as critic, scholar, and maker of art, Falconer offers a vivid picture of the fervent efforts of artists questioning the meaning of art itself.

A well-informed, spirited cultural history.