Book Review
Finally, before summer came to a close, I finished the book gifted to me by its author, Sascha Bru, a Belgian scholar and professor of critical theory at the University of Leuven. In 2008, Bru co-founded the European Network of Avant-Garde and Modernism Studies (EAM), which has since united over 2,000 humanities scholars from around forty countries to discuss advances in avant-garde studies.
The book is a commendable effort to provide a synthetic treatment of the history of the European Avant-Gardes, from 1905 to 1935. What makes it particularly significant is that it’s not a typical art history book – it is polemical and often coy. As the author describes it, the book is a portable guide, modelled after Duchamp’s Boîte-en-valise (literally “box in a suitcase”).
Second, I was intrigued by the concept of the fourth dimension. Many avant-garde innovations arose from attempts to capture this dimension. I discovered that French sociologist Pierre Francastel claimed avant-garde experiments in painting, starting with Cubism, represented a perceptual revolution comparable to the Renaissance invention of linear perspective—a discovery credited to Filippo Brunelleschi. Linear perspective allowed a perfect representation of three-dimensional space on a two-dimensional plane, a convention that took centuries to be accepted in Western society. Similarly, Cubism’s fracturing of perspective fundamentally changed our understanding of space. Artists like Picasso, Metzinger, and Gleizes referenced the fourth dimension through the use of multiple perspectives, revealing four-dimensional space. This revolution extended to avant-garde literature.
Another key takeaway was my improved understanding of the avant-garde’s place in world history. I found Peter Bürger’s theory of the avant-garde particularly enlightening, especially his argument that the classical avant-garde sought to reunite art and life. To illustrate this, Bürger distinguished three phases in Western European art history: sacral (when art was a communal affair), courtly (when art began to represent power and was commissioned by rulers for collective enjoyment, either in small elite groups at the court or by whole nations), and bourgeois (which blossomed from the 18th century onward, where art from individual artists was used to decorate private spaces). In this sense, the avant-garde came full circle, returning to the communal spirit of sacral art (they favoured collaboration and believed that everyone could be an artist).
The futurist Italian novel The Codex of Perelà by Aldo Palazzeschi. Blaise Cendrars’ Prose of the Trans-Siberian and of Little Jehanne of France, a story of a boy and a girl traveling by train from Moscow to Mongolia through an apocalyptic landscape of war and revolution. Kurt Schwitters’ short story Franz Müller’s Wire Spring, an absurd narrative about how a man, simply by standing still and quiet in the street, unintentionally triggers a revolution as more and more people gather around him in confusion.
