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Description of  Concepts of the World: The French Avant-Garde and the Idea of the International, 1910 1940 (Volume 42) (FlashPoints)

How did the avant-garde imagine its interconnected world? And how does this legacy affect our understanding of the global today? The writers and artists of the French avant-garde aspired to reach a global audience that would be wholly transformed by their work. In this study, Effie Rentzou delves deep into their depictions of the interwar world as an international and modern landscape, one marked by a varied cosmopolitanism. The avant-gardes conceptualization of the world paralleled, rejected, or expanded prevailing notions of the global sphere. The historical avant gardewhich encompassed movements like futurism, Dada, and surrealismwas self-consciously international, operating across global networks and developed with the whole world as its horizon and its public. In the heady period between the end of the Belle poque and the tumult of World War II, both individual artists (including Guillaume Apollinaire, Blaise Cendrars, Francis Picabia, Louis Aragon, Leonora Carrington, and Nicolas Calas) and collective endeavors (such as surrealist magazines and exhibitions) grappled with contemporary anxieties about economic growth, imperialism, and colonialism, as well as various universalist, cosmopolitan, and internationalist visions. By probing these works, Read more