Tag: art history

A review of How to Be Avant-Garde: Modern Artists and the Quest to End Art by Morgan Falconer

Falconer gives us a detail-rich survey of those movements, beginning with Futurism, announced in a 1909 manifesto on the front page of Paris’ Le Figaro, and running through Dadaism, Russian Constructivism, De Stijl, and the Bauhaus, and ending with the post-WWII movement Situationism. The story he tells is of artists willing to break with art’s past and to reinvent its formal language, its materials, and above all, its relationship to life.