AVANT-GARDE.

Although the use of the military term avant-garde goes back to medieval times, and it started to be applied to vanguard art long before the nineteenth century, consensus sets the use of this label for those early-twentieth-century art movements that combined artistic innovation with political dissent. Avant-garde artists were activists of progress, both artistic and social.

Avant-garde movements were thriving in metropolitan environments early in the twentieth century, finding their exhibition and publication venues as well as audiences in the midst of urban populations.

The outbreak of World War I in the summer of 1914 was a serious setback for artistic activities in Europe. Italian futurists and German expressionists lost talented members to the war. Among the many artist victims, the Italian futurist sculptor Umberto Boccioni (1882–1916) and architect Antonio Sant'Elia (1888–1916) and the German expressionist painters August Macke (1887–1914) and Franz Marc (1880–1916) died in the trenches, while several artists suffered incurable nervous exhaustion.

During and after World War I art got intensely politicized. Artists felt responsible for the new direction that history would take and acted as public figures. One of the political concepts of the post–World War I avant-gardes was pan-European internationalism. Having learned the catastrophic lesson of war between nations and witnessing the birth of new nation-states after the falling apart of the Habsburg Empire, artists considered the dissolution of national boundaries a token of progress. Progress, a central tenet of modernism, was particularly embraced by the vehemently modernist avant-garde groups, which set out to eliminate all boundaries that had been imposed on artistic expression by academic and bourgeois mentalities. Dada was particularly radical in doing away with everything that had been held sacred before the war, challenging the art world by using garbage and decomposing images and by politically provoking viewers. The Bauhaus proposed the elimination of boundaries between traditional genres and the equal ranking of art and design. The constructivists set out to redesign the entire society. The surrealists sought to find and master the nuts and bolts of the human psyche. The feverish activity of the avant-gardes culminated in the early 1920s, when general optimism and faith in a better future dominated the art scene and the intellectual landscape of Europe. As these expectations turned dim in the late 1920s and Europe turned increasingly conservative, with a Fascist regime rising in Italy and the Nazis gaining ground in Germany, the gleaming images of a new international culture turned out to be utopian.

With the Nazis lampooning and outlawing modernist art in their notorious 1937 Degenerate Art exhibition, the avant-gardes were charged with even more profound political meaning. Abstraction rose in the wake of World War II as the organic continuation of antiwar humanism and intellectual independence, often implying leftist political views. Artists formed the group CoBrA in Copenhagen, Brussels, and Amsterdam in 1948 and its offshoot, the Imaginist Bauhaus, in 1954. American abstract expressionism had a great impact on European art, radicalizing the neo-new avant-garde views and artistic practices.

The increasing wealth of Western societies absorbed criticism, and in the 1950s and 1960s the younger generation considered the avant-gardes the institutionalized culture of the establishment. The neo-avant-gardes emerged: Gruppe Zero , which defied museums and all art institutions, was launched in Germany in 1957, and the Situationist International was founded the same year in Italy. The international Fluxus movement was launched by the Lithuanian American George Maciunas in Wiesbaden in 1962. Fluxus denied the art object, and with this iconoclastic attitude discarded the entire concept of the art object. Pop art, the introduction of mass culture and consumer culture into the field of art, originated in England in the late 1950s and rapidly conquered American art, followed by strictly geometric minimalism, which traced its roots back to 1920s constructivism, and, in the 1970s, by photo realism. The development of the neo-avant-garde implied criticism of both the classic avant-gardes and establishment culture, accelerating the cycles of innovation and obsolescence of the emerging new trends but keeping the function of art as cultural criticism alive.

ZURICH

In February 1916 the German writer Hugo Ball (1886–1927) transformed the former Hollandische Meierei Café in Zurich into the Cabaret Voltaire. He wrote in his diary on April 14: "Our cabaret is a gesture. Every word that is spoken and sung here says at least this one thing: that this humiliating age has not succeeded in winning our respect"(Ball, p.61). Expatriates from various European countries joined him in staging radically nonsensical shows, sound-poem recitals, and primitivist dances. This is where Dada was launched in 1916. The origin of the name is not clear. According to legend, it was obtained from a dictionary by a blindfolded member of the group. Leading personalities of the Dada movement were the Alsatian poet, painter, and sculptor Hans (Jean) Arp (1887–1966); his wife, the dancer and marionette maker Sophie Taeuber Arp (1889–1943); the German dancer and cabaret singer Emmy Hennings (1885–1948); the German writer Richard Huelsenbeck (1892–1974); the Romanian painter and sculptor Marcel Janco (1895–1984); the German painter Hans Richter (1888–1976); and the Romanian poet Tristan Tzara (1896–1963), who published the magazine Dada in Zurich between 1917 and 1920. In 1917 they were joined by the Swedish painter and experimental filmmaker Viking Eggeling (1880–1925), who was also a member of the Radical Artists Group, set up by Richter in Zurich in 1919.

The first Dada exhibition opened in January 1917 at the Galerie Corray, followed by an exhibition in March in the group's new location, Galerie Dada. The French painter Francis Picabia (1879–1953) joined in 1919, publishing the Zurich number of his journal 391.

A key document of the group, among many to follow, was Tzara's 1918 "Dada Manifesto," where he stated that "Dada does not mean anything." The Dada group protested against the ongoing war with activities pointedly refusing to make sense in order to express their contempt for rational, high-brow Western culture, which had not been capable of helping to avoid the war.

After the Zurich years, which ended in the wake of World War I, Dada was dispersed all over the globe, from Zurich to Paris, Berlin, Cologne, Hanover, Vienna, Budapest, Prague, Warsaw, Poznan, Lviv, Sofia, New York, Tokyo, and other urban centers.

BERLIN

The city of Berlin, officially Greater Berlin after 1920, had 3.8 million inhabitants. After the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1918 and the defeat of the Hungarian Soviet Republic in the summer of 1919, many German-speaking eastern European emigrants set up shop in the accommodating and wildly eventful city. Berlin was crammed with theaters, cabarets, publishers, movies, exhibitions, and cafés, was home to a variety of art movements, and was vibrant with ongoing debates.

In the wake of the war's end in November 1918, which brought the abdication of Emperor William II, the declaration of the Weimar Republic, the organization of right-wing paramilitary troops, and the formation of the German Communist Party, almost all progressive artists living in Germany joined forces in two major societies: the Novembergruppe (November Group) and the Arbeitsrat für Kunst (Work Council of the Arts). Many artists and intellectuals were members of both. The choice of name in both cases reflects the progressive, politically leftist direction of these groups (council being the equivalent of the Russian word soviet).

Berlin emerged as the new cultural capital of Europe. The tremendous energy of artists and intellectuals, fueled by the opportunity to found a new republic, was contagious: artists, writers, and thinkers flocked to Berlin from central Europe, Russia, Holland, Sweden, and other parts of the world.

The passionately critical and rebellious expressionists, who were radicalized during the war and represented a strong antiwar stance in many venues, including the periodicals Der Sturm (Storm), Die Aktion (Action), and Der Gegner (The opponent), as well as in their art, were invigorated after the war. Although lambasted by the establishment, expressionism gained currency and emerged by 1918 as Germany's national modern style. It was, along with Dada, the dominant progressive art current in Germany until international constructivism's geometric abstraction and collectivist ethos occupied center stage in 1922.

The headquarters of expressionist art was Herwarth Walden's Der Sturm gallery, which gave visibility to an international group of artists and was instrumental in turning Berlin into a cosmopolitan art center. The Russian painters Ivan Puni (1892–1956) and Wassily Kandinsky (1866–1944), the Romanian painters Arthur Segal (1875–1944) and Max Hermann Maxy (1895–1971), the Czech sculptor and painter Otakar Kubin (1883–1969), the Polish sculptor Teresa Zarnower (1895–1950), the Ukrainian sculptor Alexander Archipenko (1887–1964), the Hungarian artists Sándor Bortnyik (1893–1976), LászlóPéri (1899–1967), and László Moholy-Nagy (1895–1946), and the Swiss painters Johannes Itten (1888–1967) and Paul Klee (1879–1940) showed their avant-garde works here along with German artists, which greatly contributed to the wide scope and international vibrancy of the Berlin art life. Progressive artists who set up shop in Berlin regularly gathered in the studios of the German painters Gert Caden (1891–1990) or Erich Buchholz (1891–1972) to discuss art and politics, and visited or participated in the Bauhaus, a factory of ideas as well as modern design, operating in Weimar (1919–1925), Dessau (1926–1932), and, during its last year, in Berlin (1932–1933). The Bauhaus was a magnet for the young and progressive artists and designers and had a great impact on the Berlin art discourse. Founded and directed by the architect Walter Gropius (1883–1969), its international faculty included Johannes Itten, Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky, László Moholy-Nagy, the German American painter Lyonel Feininger (1871–1956), and the German painter Oskar Schlemmer (1888–1943); but its student body was also packed with future designers and artists.

In 1917, coincidentally with the first Dada exhibition in Zurich, the leftist publishing house Malik Verlag was opened in Berlin by Wieland Herzfelde (1896–1988) and his brother Helmut, who anglicized his name as John Heartfield (1891–1968) in an antiwar and antipatriotic gesture, as did the painter Georg Gross (1893–1959), who changed the spelling of his first name to George Grosz.

In January 1918 the periodical Club Dada was founded by Huelsenbeck, Raoul Hausmann (1886–1971), also known as Dadasopher, and the expressionist writer Franz Jung (1888–1963), who was also active in the circles of the leftist antiwar journal Die Aktion. Jung's own periodical Die freie Strasse (Free road), which he published between 1915 and 1918, was an important inspiration for Berlin Dada.

While Zurich Dada was mostly literary and theatrical, Berlin Dada was a highly politicized left-wing art movement led by Hausmann, Hanna Höch (1889–1978), and Johannes Baader (1875–1955), alias Oberdada. Walter Mehring (1896–1981), also known as Pipidada, founded the radical left-wing journal Political Cabaret in 1920.

In June 1920 the Dada exhibition titled The First International Dada Fair opened in the gallery of Dr. Otto Burchard, who sponsored the show and got the name Finanzdada for it. Organized by George Grosz (the Propaganda Marshall), Raoul Hausmann, Johannes Baader, and John Heartfield (Dadamonteur), it was an international exhibition featuring 174 works, including photomontages, collages, effigies, posters, and objects, densely lining the walls. An effigy, The Prussian Archangel, made by Rudolf Schlichter (Dadameisterkoch; 1890–1955) and John Heartfield, hung from the ceiling. A slogan of the show was "Art is dead, long live the new machine art of Tatlin!" voicing the intense interest of Berlin artists in the Russian avant-garde, which was manifest also in Hausmann's exhibited collage Tatlin at Home.

A wave of émigrés left Russia after the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution. Berlin's Russian population reached a hundred thousand by the end of the war. More than a dozen daily newspapers were published in Russian, and the city's Charlottenburg district was dubbed Charlottengrad.

The first authentic information about the new Russian art originated from the journalist Konstantin Umansky, who traveled from Russia to Berlin, where he became the correspondent of the Soviet news agency TASS in 1920. In January 1920 he published a series of articles on new Russian art in the Munich journal Der Ararat and later that year published his book Neue Kunst in Russland, 1914–1919 (New art in Russia, 1914–1919). In November he gave a slide-illustrated talk in Vienna for the Hungarian exile avant-garde circle Ma, members of which were in regular contact with their compatriots living in Berlin.

After the end of the civil war in Soviet Russia in 1922, the Soviet ministry of culture adopted a new strategy to cultivate official cultural relations with Germany. In addition to Russian émigréartists like Ivan Puni and the sculptor Naum Gabo (1890–1977), who were active in Berlin in the years 1920–1923 and 1922–1932, respectively, El Lissitzky (1890–1941) arrived from Moscow late in 1921, presumably as a cultural ambassador, to establish personal contacts with Berlin artists. He brought news about the First Working Group of Constructivists, formed in Moscow in March 1921, and constructivism soon became the buzzword in the German capital's modernist art world.

Lissitzky, together with the Russian writer Ilya Ehrenburg (1891–1967), published the trilingual periodical Veshch, Gegendstand, Objet (Object) in 1922, which had two issues altogether but was influential nevertheless. The journal's program was to familiarize Berlin artists with the latest developments in the Russian-Soviet avant-garde and inform Soviet artists of the latest in Western art. Its title referred to the Russian constructivists' concept of the irrelevance of painting and their idea that objects, not pictures, were what should be created.

The actual encounter with Russian art happened in the fall of 1922, when the Erste Russische Kunstausstellung (First Russian Art Exhibition), a joint Soviet-German undertaking, opened in the Galerie van Diemen and presented the works of the Russian avant-garde—suprematists, constructivists, productivists—for the first time in the West. Although many critical reviews expressed disappointment because of the great proportion of traditional (impressionist and postimpressionist) artworks, this show was the breakthrough of the young Soviet-Russian art in Berlin. The exhibition traveled to Amsterdam early in 1923. An important forum for what started to be called international constructivism was the journal G: Zeitschrift für elementare Gestaltung (G: Journal for elementary design), edited by Hans Richter and El Lissitzky in 1923–1924.

PARIS

Still a central scene of the arts, Paris continued to play a very important role in the unfolding of new art and remained the city where artists made pilgrimage. Paris Dada, with more of a penchant for the absurd than politically leftist Berlin Dada, morphed into surrealism by the early 1920s.

The French writers Louis Aragon (1897–1982) and André Breton (1896–1966) contributed to Tristan Tzara's Dada journal, published in Zurich. In turn, Tzara contributed the Paris journal Littéraire, edited by Breton and Aragon. Picabia, having visited New York and cooperated with Alfred Stieglitz and his 291 Gallery there, started to publish the mostly dadaist 391 magazine in 1917.

Paris Dada was mainly literary, featuring manifestos, theater events, short-lived periodicals, and demonstrations. The artists of the movement in Paris—the German painter Max Ernst (1891–1976), Arp, and Picabia—were not in the forefront of these events. Paris Dada split into two factions, headed by Tzara and Breton, and it expired in the congress convoked in 1922. Before the split Breton, Tzara, Picabia, and Marcel Duchamp (1887–1968) regarded Dada as the boldest, most anarchic, and most provocative direction in the arts. Together they published an issue of Bulletin Dada in 1920, but by 1922 had Breton turned against Dada, claiming that it had become conformist. He disrupted the Dada congress in Paris, and to break new ground he explored "automatic writing," which artists adopted as "automatic drawing," doodling without conscious intention. By 1924 Breton's group, joined by the poets Paul Éluard (1895–1952), Jean Cocteau (1889–1963), and Ezra Pound (1885–1972), adopted the name surrealism. The term was first used by Guillaume Apollinaire (1880–1918) in 1917, in reference to his own drama Les mamelles de Tirésias (The breasts of Tirésias).

The first surrealist group exhibition opened in the Galerie Pierre in 1925. Participants included Arp, Giorgio De Chirico (1888–1978), Ernst, Paul Klee (1879–1940), Man Ray (1890–1976), André Masson (1896–1987), Joan Miró (1893–1983), and Pablo Picasso (1881–1973). In 1927 the Surrealist Gallery was opened, where Yves Tanguy (1900–1955), Duchamp, and Picabia also exhibited. The Belgian painter René Magritte (1898–1967) and the Spanish painter Salvador Dalí (1904–1989) soon joined the group.

The ideas of the surrealists were most clearly articulated by Breton, who thoroughly studied Freud's teachings. He hoped to open up new fields by a new kind of imagery drawn from the subconscious, which was manifested in dreams or by associations. He published the first "Manifesto of Surrealism" in 1924, the "Second Manifesto of Surrealism" in 1930, and the "Political Position of Surrealism" in 1935. Surrealism inherited Dada's revolt against the establishment and its culture. In the first "Manifesto" Breton declared that "Surrealism, such as I conceive of it, asserts our complete non-conformism. … Surrealism is the 'invisible ray' which will one day enable us to win out over our opponents" (Breton, p. 47). He pronounced his conviction that by exploiting the vast reservoir of the unconscious, surrealism, "as a method of creating a collective myth with the much more general movement involving the liberation of man" (Breton, p. 210), could transcend all previous forms of thought and expression.

Surrealists created cinematic works as well. The first surrealist film was the 1928 collaboration between Dalí and the Spanish film director Luis Buñuel (1900–1983), Un chien andalou (An Andalusian dog).

A current of clean forms, purism unfolded parallel with surrealism. The Swiss-born architect Charles-Édouard Jeanneret, known as Le Corbusier (1887–1965), and the French painter Amédée Ozenfant (1886–1966) initiated the movement with the publication of their manifesto After Cubism in 1918, going on to publish the journal Esprit nouveau (New spirit) from 1918 to 1925. Their friend Fernand Léger (1881–1955) cooperated with them. They celebrated modern machines and new technologies, combining the new possibilites they offered with pure classic forms, rejecting Dada and surrealism: "Purism fears the bizarre and the 'original,"' as they put it in After Cubism.

AMSTERDAM

A will to radical innovation and the reinvention of the visual arts pervaded the artistic and theoretical output of the De Stijl (The Style) group, founded in Amsterdam in 1917. The painters Piet Mondrian (1872–1944), Theo van Doesburg (1883–1931), Vilmos Huszar (1884–1960), and Bart van der Leck (1876–1958), the Belgian sculptor George Vantongerloo (1886–1965), and a group of architects including Cornelis van Eesteren (1897–1988) and Johannes Jacobus Pieter Oud (1890–1963) embraced the program of neoplasticism, new architecture, and new design based on total abstraction. The architect and designer Gerrit Rietveld (1888–1964), who would build the emblematic Schröder House in 1924, joined in 1918.

The De Stijl philosophy was purely spiritual and radical at the same time. The straight line, pure mathematical relations, and the reduction of the palette to the three primary colors and the three "non-colors" (black, white, and gray) served the attainment of spirituality and harmony. Mimesis and representation were unacceptable. Emotional expression in painting was incompatible with lucidity and spirituality. De Stijl's interior design considered a room as a six-sided box, the ceiling and floor of which play as important a part in the overall design as the walls and furniture. To achieve the ideal of "spiritual living," squares or rectangles running across corners were often painted in a color that differed from that of the wall, overwriting the architectural structure.

De Stijl architecture, which was part of the modernist trend labeled "international style" by the American architect Philip Johnson, was the earliest effort to simplify the living space, painting it white and light tones of gray with occasional highlights of one or another of the primary colors, using built-ins and clear outlines to offer the inhabitants an easier, liberated, and rational lifestyle.

Van Doesburg published the trilingual (Dutch, German, French) journal De Stijl between 1917 and 1931, which soon became one of the most important venues of the international avant-garde, recruiting authors from all over Europe. Van Doesburg himself was a personal link between the Bauhaus, De Stijl, the Russian avant-garde, international constructivists, and Dada. He secretly doubled as the Dada poet I. K. Bonset and as the editor and publisher Aldo Camini, putting out the short-lived avant-garde journal Mecano in 1922–1923.

In Amsterdam, as in Berlin and Paris, modern architecture was a contested field of the avant-garde. In 1918 the architect Hendricus Theodorus Wijdeveld (1885–1987) launched Wendingen, a periodical of modern architecture, art, and design that ran until 1931, for which El Lissitzky designed a cover (November 1922 issue).

The anarchist and essayist Arthur Lehning (1899–2000) edited and published a little magazine titled Internationale revue i 10 between 1927 and 1929 with the intention to integrate art, sciences, philosophy, and sociology into the political reality of the society. Moholy-Nagy did the typography and layout, and among the contributors were Lehning's friends Walter Benjamin and Ernst Bloch, along with Arp, Kurt Schwitters (1887–1948), Wassily Kandinsky, Moholy-Nagy, and others.

See alsoArp, Jean; Bauhaus; Constructivism; Dada; De Stijl; Expressionism; Futurism; Kandinsky, Wassily; Le Corbusier; Lissitzky, El; Malevich, Kazimir; Moholy-Nagy, László; Mondrian, Piet; Painting, Avant-Garde; Surrealism.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Altshuler, Bruce. The Avant-Garde in Exhibition: New Art in the Twentieth Century. Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1994.

Ball, Hugo. Flight Out of Time: A Dada Diary. Edited by John Elderfield and translated by Ann Raimes. Berkeley, Calif., 1996.

Blotkamp, Carel, et al. De Stijl: The Formative Years, 1917–1922. Translated by Charlotte I. Loeb and Arthur L. Loeb. Cambridge, Mass., and London, 1986.

Breton, André. Manifestoes of Surrealism. Translated by Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane. Ann Arbor, Mich., 1972.

Bürger, Peter. Theory of the Avant-Garde. Translated by Michael Shaw. Minneapolis, Minn., 1984.

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Huelsenbeck, Richard, ed. The Dada Almanac. English edition presented by Malcolm Green, translated by Malcolm Green et al. London, 1993.

Lodder, Christina. Russian Constructivism. New Haven, Conn., 1981.

Poggioli, Renato. The Theory of the Avant-Garde. Translated by Gerald Fitzgerald. Cambridge, Mass., and London, 1968.

Eva Forgacs