The European Avant-Gardes, 1905-1935 by Sascha Bru

Author:Sascha Bru
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press

Figure 51 Cover of the brochure for the 1937 Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art) exhibition showing Otto Freundlich’s sculpture Der neue Mensch (The New Man, 1912). Freundlich’s work recalls ‘primitive’ Easter Island sculpture and evokes the pre-First World War hope among Expressionists for a spiritual awakening. The work was most likely destroyed and Freundlich eventually died in a concentration camp.

It would be wrong to say that the European avant-gardes after 1935 vanished completely – to that extent, the periodisation of this book’s subtitle is somewhat aleatory. Among others, the so-called École de Paris (School of Paris) – that is, the many non-French Cubists and Surrealists who added to the fame of France as the country of the avant-gardes in the interwar period – continued on after the Second World War as well. Moreover, many who fled the continent simply carried on their business in other parts of the world. Nonetheless, despite the clear continuation of avant-garde activity in certain parts of Europe (and in other parts of the world), totalitarian political forces in the 1930s seized and annihilated ever more centres of avant-garde activity in Europe. As a result, the network of the avant-gardes shrunk so dramatically that it is difficult to still speak of the ‘European’ avant-gardes from this point onwards. The avant-gardes had witnessed their fair share of radical changes on the continent, yet by the mid-1930s Europe had changed so much that there was far less room left in the public space for the avant-gardes to flower. In the period in which they did flourish, they looked at ‘man’ as a cultural construction, a body overwritten by countless discourses and perceived through ‘rational’, ossified (sensorial) conventions – ‘MAN, an invention’, opened the editorial of the first issue of the Romanian magazine Integral (1925–8).15 As avant-gardists tried to create a New Man, it became clear early on how many directions could be taken, how many issues had to be factored in, and how full of tensions and contradictions their project really was. Precisely because of its richness, its thick crust of conflicting views and affects, the sustained, collective project for a New Man remains one of the avant-gardes’ most impressive contributions to modern European cultural history.

Box 5: Dadaisms

The origins of the word Dada are notoriously confusing, because various members of the movement claimed to have discovered it in diverse circumstances. ‘Dada’: a more open-ended word (a noun? a verb? an adjective?) that sounds equally well in all languages can hardly be found. Recalling everything and nothing, being an affirmation as well as a negation, Dada in many ways marked the zero hour of all avant-garde isms.

When in 1916 Hugo Ball – along with fellow-German cabaret performer Emmy Hennings, Alsatian Hans/Jean Arp, Swiss-born dancer and textile designer Sophie Täuber, and Romanians Tristan Tzara and Marcel Janco – adopted the label Dada for their creative work in the Cabaret Voltaire in Zürich, the word gained a ring it would never quite lose again. Soon joined by German writers Richard Huelsenbeck and Walter

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