ABSTRACT
My aim in this chapter is to examine some of the contradictions that characterise the Modernist avant-garde in Europe. The chapter begins in 1912, a date that becomes its fulcrum, and looks from there back to Symbolism in Paris in the 1880s and ’90s, to ask whether the avant-garde derives its claim to autonomy from Symbolist aestheticism. The concept of an avant-garde within Modernism is then re-examined. The second part of the chapter reconsiders aspects of Cubism in Paris and Expressionism in Munich, drawing attention to ambivalent political and social attitudes, and to overlooked continuities with the avant-garde of Realism, which is discussed in Chapter 1. A clear political alignment is seen in Italian Futurism, which is discussed in Chapter 3 together with Le Corbusier and the Modernist architectural avant-garde.
