The European Avant-garde

‘“This is not a Cultural History of the Avant-Garde”: the section title, teasing Magritte’s pipe, says it perfectly. Like the famous painting, this book is more, namely a beautiful blend of history and analysis, criticism and theory, in my favorite phrase: cultural analysis. If, after reading it, it is as if one sees avant-garde all around, in contemporary culture, this is because Andrew Webber has made sense of the past in terms that reflect the urgency posed by the present. Tightly argued yet generously clear, abundantly illustrated with close readings of specific works yet proposing an unambiguously innovative reading of the early avant-garde as a state of culture as a whole, this book will make you wish you had been among the first to see those trenchant texts and images that shocked the world. Learning about the avant-garde, the reader also learns “how to”: how to read and understand, how to analyse, how to frame those texts that are so notoriously hard to grasp.’

Mieke Bal, University of Amsterdam

‘Andrew J. Webber's superb new book looks at the constitution of the avant-garde in early twentieth-century European thought. Ranging from architecture and urban space to theatre and film, Webber's take on the avant-garde throws new light on its contradictions and complexities. This is a book for all humanists interested in the formation of twentieth-century sensibilities across the entire spectrum of modern cultural life.’Sander L. Gilman, University of Illinois at Chicago