The challenge of the avant-garde / edited by Paul Wood.

Format:

Book

Contributor:

Wood, Paul.

Series:

Art and its histories ; bk. 4.

Art and its histories ; bk. 4

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Avant-garde (Aesthetics).

Art, Modern.

Physical Description:

284 pages : illustrations (some color); 26 cm.

Place of Publication:

New Haven, CT : Yale University Press, 1999.

Summary:

The book is divided into three chronological parts, each of which consists of a number of related case studies. In the first part the contributors discuss the emergence of the idea of an artistic vanguard in the writings of early utopian socialists, and trace the impact of these ideas on artists and photographers in France particularly, but also in Britain and Germany. Against a background of issues ranging from gender and class to modernity itself, there are discussions of Delacroix, Ingres, Courbet, the English Pre-Raphaelites and the influential German painter Adolph Menzel.

The second part concentrates on France, and debates the impact of the Paris Commune on ideas of artistic avant-gardism in the late nineteenth century. As well as discussions of Manet and the Impressionists, there is an examination of the modern nude in the work of Caillebotte and Degas, followed by two case studies of contrasting responses to modernization focused through the lens of the great Universal Exhibition of 1889: on the one hand, the embrace of technology by engineers such as Eiffel and, on the other, the retreat from bourgeois modernity typified by the circle around Gauguin.

The third part explores the emergence of a transcontinental avant-garde in the form of Futurism, and the subsequent impact of World War I and the Russian Revolution. There are linked discussions of the critical avant-gardes of Dada, Constructivism and Surrealism. The book concludes with a discussion of the crisis of the European avant-garde in the 1930s under the impact of Fascism and Stalinism, and its apparent redefinition as a form of independent aesthetic across the Atlantic in the early writings of Clement Greenberg.

Contents:

Introduction: the avant-garde and modernism / Paul Wood 7

Part 1 The Early Avant-Garde

1 The avant-garde from the July Monarchy to the Second Empire / Paul Wood 35

2 Material differences: the early avant-garde in France / Gen Doy 56

3 Photography and modernity in nineteenth-century France / Steve Edwards 70

4 Modernity in Germany: the many sides of Adolph Menzel / Jason Gaiger 91

Part 2 The Avant-Grade In Its Own Right

5 The avant-garde and the Paris Commune / Paul Wood 113

6 Caillebotte, masculinity, and the bourgeois gaze / Fionna Barber 137

7 Exhibiting modernity: the 1889 Universal Exhibition and the Eiffel Tower / Tim Benton 156

8 Exhibiting 'les Independants': Gauguin and the Cafe Volpini show / Gill Perry 164

Part 3 'The Point is to Change It'

9 The avant-garde in the early twentieth century / Paul Wood 183

10 The Futurists: transcontinental avant-gardism / Gail Day 204

11 The revolutionary avant-gardes: Dada, Constructivism and Surrealism / Paul Wood 226

Conclusion: for and against the avant-garde / Paul Wood 257.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages [273]-276) and index.

ISBN:

0300077610

0300077629

OCLC:

39614632