The meaning of a poem is always another poem, to paraphrase Harold Bloom, and perhaps the meaning of a book is another book. I thought of Bloom as I read David Cottington’s layered, labored Radical Art and the Formation of the Avant-Garde, whose title echoes Renato Poggioli’s The Theory of the Avant-Garde, first published in English in 1962 and now half-forgotten, but back in the yesteryear a must-read for Serious Gen-X Literature Majors. Poggioli’s book merits a mention in Cottington’s bibliography but that’s it, suggesting the anxiety of influence is real. It may be in an author’s interests to elide the recent past, putting forth a fresh, arresting argument on his own terms.
Which is what Cottington does here. This tension between old and new, between reactionary and revolutionary forces, drives Radical Art and the Formation of the Avant-Garde, a painstaking — and occasionally painful-to-read — study of the transitions from 19th-century academic painting to the birth of avant-garde movements in Paris and London just prior to World War I. He nods to similar trends in other European cities, as well as New York, but by sticking to the Channel rivalry he teases out granular details of what constitutes a genuine avant-garde. Amid the dense thickets of his prose, we glimpse into Montmartre cafés and Belgravia dining rooms, where the rich and raucous gathered in a shared spirit of collaboration.
A professor of art history at London’s Kingston University, Cottington writes in the register of a tweedy don. (I’ve retained his anglicized spellings.) For example: “This appropriation and commercialisation of a Parisian café-concert culture that had begun in working-class sociability and solidarity was a part of a broader development that included also the appropriation of bohemianism, and the substitution of the cultural disposition of affective relations on which this last one was partly founded by a professionalism that would shape the emergent artistic avant-garde.” I often had to read his sentences multiple times as I parsed their meaning.
Caveat aside, Cottington delves vigorously into his topic. Radical Art and the Formation of the Avant-Garde is a mural of big ideas, and he deftly taps the scholarly literature. Avant-gardes were seeded by “Brotherhoods” in the 19thcentury, such as the Pre-Raphaelites and Nabis, who shared their work for purposes of critique and community. Today it’s a stretch to think of the Impressionists as radical, enshrined as they are in museums across the globe; but in the 1860s and 1870s they broke barriers — and affronted sensibilities — with canvases whose immediacy and everyday subjects challenged the stiff, stylized mores of the Académie des Beaux-Arts. But it wasn’t all rupture: Manet’s Le Déjuener sur l’herbe (“Luncheon on the Grass”) borrowed from Raphael and other Renaissance masters, affirming a continuity of art history while also subverting it.
Rejected by the Académie in 1863, Manet took Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe to the Salon des Refusés, helping to launch, in Cottington’s term, the “Secessionist” movement, which gathered steam throughout the latter century, fueled by Manet’s circle, including Monet, Degas, and Pissarro. For just over a decade the Impressionists reigned supreme among the insurgents. “An irregular event held roughly every two years in a diversity of locations, the exhibition series began in 1874 and ended with the eighth in 1886,” Cottington writes, “and although it has become established in the historiography of modernism as the vehicle for consecrating Impressionist painting and the Impressionist group as the first manifestation of an avant-garde, it was, as the initiative of a group of painters facing a complex and changing art market and professional dynamic, neither so clear-cut a departure from then-current custom nor so epochal a phenomenon. Rather … the Impressionists’ 12-year project was part of that broad process of the privatisation of the fine-art profession … in this case, an initiative that from start sought above all to improve the market prospects for its participants, rather than primarily to declare and cement a specific and new kind of painting.”
Cottington is also adept in drawing fine lines between bohemianism and embryonic avant-gardes, distinguishing between “’bohemia’s ‘art as a way of life’ from the avant-garde’s ‘art as a way of working’, but also, and crucially, the latter shifted the former into a commodified register: from ‘way of life’ to ‘lifestyle’,” true believers versus the arrivistes. Secessionist art defined itself not just with respect to a cultural establishment, but also against the aspirations of an emerging professional class. New technologies and cheaper costs, combined with the legacy of the French Revolution and the political upheavals of 1848, blasted open the door to economic opportunity as well as mass entertainment, rolling out “publicity techniques of eye-catching posters, press notices and social networking whose use was unprecedented in the sphere of art.” Cottington unpacks the co-dependency of all parties involved, from the bourgeoisie to bohemians to avant-gardes to highborn elites, who scorned the strivers (and still do). There’s a whiff of class struggle here, the fragility of status and privilege.
But there was money to be found in those broken brushstrokes and plein-air methods. Cottington’s most subtle achievement is his meticulous analysis of an industry aborning, how savvy dealers and curators lined the pockets of painters against a backdrop of the Franco-Prussian War and Baron Haussmann’s urban transformation of Paris. One group of speculators, the Société de la Peau de l’Ours, or “Skin of the Bear Society,” bought up newcomer pieces from 1904 until 1914; when they auctioned off their collection, they turned a 300% profit. Cottington jokingly compares the avant-garde to an illicit trade, like thievery. “There was a variety of reasons for which a small clutch of Parisian dealers pursued this strategy in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: for Durand-Ruel, Vollard, Le Barc, Kahnweiler and Weill, to name the most celebrated of these, dealing was a matter not only of aesthetic discernment but also (even rather) of acute and adventurous entrepreneurship, of the love of a gamble, the enjoyment of patronage, the ties of friendship and — not least — a consequence of the spaces left for each of these in a fairly conservative and hierarchised market.”
Radical Art and the Formation of the Avant-Garde drills deep into the City of Light, but Cottington’s heart remains in London. Here his anecdotes are richer: he probes, with wit and insight, all kinds of nooks and crannies, from the famous, such as the Bloomsbury Group and the Grosvenor Gallery, to obscure figures and venues, like Augustus John — “charismatically handsome, sartorially louche, sexually voracious, swaggering yet shy in demeanor” — and the brief, hedonistic cabaret known as the Cave of the Golden Calf. As London lagged behind Paris, it sought out a “Rhythm” of its own, one less devoted to technical formulas and more to cross-fertilization of ideas (and poses, and people). An amorphous conceit, “Rhythm” was distinct from Continental training and technique, organic somehow, akin to music and poetry. And yet, as Cottington notes, “Despite ‘rhythm’ acquiring a currency among [critics] from around 1910 until the war, sufficient to warrant both the naming of a magazine with it and the use of it as a catch-all for contemporary cultural innovations across the arts, none of them ever managed to define it. The failure to do so is striking.”
[left: Vanessa Bell, self-portrait, 1915] The champagne flowed; affairs flourished; artistic debates exploded; frenzied dancing lasted into the wee hours. Modern is as modern does. In its final chapters the book sifts through the oeuvres of the Vorticists, an authentically English avant-garde, and founder Wyndham Lewis in particular. Shaped by Cubism and Futurism, the Vorticists revered Picasso above all. Radical Art and the Formation of the Avant-Garde illuminates, too, why London took a keener interest in textiles and interior fashion. (Abstraction seem to come easily to English artists; Vanessa Bell was enthralled by carpet design.) While Paris teemed with journals and broadsides (“petites revues”) devoted to experimental art and writing, the Brits were slower to catch on with “little” magazines. The aristocracy embraced the fledgling technology that allowed photographs to be reproduced on paper, though; in the pages of Tatler and The Pall Mall Magazine, the younger lords and ladies created public performative personas, extolling themselves as arbiters of taste. The salons of Lindsays and the Countess of Drogheda could hold their own with their Parisian counterparts, and then some.
In June, 1914, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, presumptive heir to the Austro-Hungarian empire, and his wife were assassinated by a Serbian nationalist. War ground Europe to a halt, ground down its cities and farms and a generation of young men; but as Cottington scrupulously shows, the Modernist ferment churned on, avant-gardes firmly rooted in the imaginations of artists, critics, and dealers alike. The next decade ushered in yet more change, with the rise of the Dadaists and Surrealists. Some of Picasso’s greatest paintings were years in the future. Radical Art and the Avant-Garde is, in many respects, tough sledding, but it brilliantly charts the joints and interstices of modernity’s foundations, an estimable contribution to art history and a roadmap to understanding our own unsettled era.
[Published by Yale University Press on April 19, 2022, 384 pages, 54 color and 8 b&w illustrations, $45.00 hardcover]