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The Arts

HOW TO BE AVANT-GARDE

Morgan Falconer

Modern Artists and the Quest to End Art

The strange story of the twentieth-century artists who sought to destroy art by transforming it into the substance of everyday life.

"Art has poisoned our life," proclaimed De Stijl cofounder Theo van Doesburg. Reacting to the tumultuous crises of the twentieth century, especially the horrors of World War I, bands of writers and artists explored different ways to end art by having it become part of how they lived. In dynamic engagement with these revolutionary groups, Morgan Falconer starts with Futurist founder Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, whose manifesto extolling speed, destruction, and modernity seeded avant-gardes across Europe. In turn, Dadaists Hugo Ball and Emmy Hennings sought to replace art with political cabaret, and the Surrealists tried to exchange it for tools to plumb the unconscious. Falconer next guides us through the Constructivists, De Stijl, and the Bauhaus, who explored how art could transmute into architecture and design. Finally, the Situationists swapped art for politics, with many of their ideas inspiring the 1968 Paris student protests. How to Be Avant-Garde brings forward these extraordinary radicals and their wild attempts to create utopia by destroying art. Morgan Falconer, a critic and art historian, teaches at Sotheby's Institute of Art. He is the author of Painting Beyond Pollock and has written for publications including the Times (London), Frieze, the Economist, and Art in America. He lives in Queens, New York.

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Book Published 2025-02-01 by W. W. Norton

Comments

A future classic along the lines of Lipstick Traces, one of those books that anyone hoping to bring true newness into the world will find and pass along like a shibboleth to others seeking the same.

What is art for? How to Be Avant-Garde examines what happened when the horrors of World War I made it clear that the traditional answerthat it's for making rich people's homes nicercould no longer apply. Falconer whirls us through the movements that constituted various responses to this question. Maybe art's time was up? Maybe it should no longer exist at all? Why was art between the wars so vivid and interesting? Read How to Be Avant-Garde and find out.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book. How to Be Avant-Garde can take its place alongside such mainstays as Roger Shattuck's The Banquet Years and Robert Hughes's The Shock of the New as a lively and thought-provoking survey of the 20th century's most impactful contribution to cultural life.

Chock full of engaging details and anecdotes, Morgan Falconer's book takes us on a lively romp through many of the locales where twentieth-century vanguard figures sought to create a new relationship between art and life. How to be Avant-Garde should appeal both to those in search of a good read and to those intrigued by the vexing question of what it all meant.

Morgan Falconer is the pitch-perfect cheering but skeptical guide through the intricacies, infighting, backbiting, dead ends, crazy schemes, mad ideas, wild leaps, and triumphs of the avant-garde.