Radical Art and the Formation of the Avant-Garde

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David Cottington
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An authoritative re-definition of the social, cultural and visual history of the emergence of the “avant-garde” in Paris and London

Over the past fifty years, the term "avant-garde" has come to shape discussions of European culture and modernity, ubiquitously taken for granted but rarely defined. This ground-breaking book develops an original and searching methodology that fundamentally reconfigures the social, cultural, and visual context of the emergence of the artistic avant-garde in Paris and London before 1915, bringing the material history of its formation into clearer and more detailed focus than ever before.
 
Drawing on a wealth of disciplinary evidence, from socio-economics to histories of sexuality, bohemia, consumerism, politics, and popular culture, David Cottington explores the different models of cultural collectivity in, and presumed hierarchies between, these two focal cities, while identifying points of ideological influence and difference between them. He reveals the avant-garde to be at once complicit with, resistant to, and a product of the modernizing forces of professionalization, challenging the conventional wisdom on this moment of cultural formation and offering the means to reset the terms of avant-garde studies.

David Cottington is Emeritus Professor of Art History at Kingston University, London.

“Radical Art and the Avant-Garde . . . 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.”—Hamilton Cain, On the Seawall

‘There is no more sophisticated and compelling historian of the avant-garde now at work than David Cottington. This is a sustained, elegant, and erudite account of its subjects, wide-ranging, unfailingly insightful, and certain to be the standard work.’ – David Peters Corbett, The Courtauld Institute of Art

‘A subtle and multifaceted exploration of how early twentieth-century avant-gardes coalesced in the distinctive cultural and political circumstances of pre-World War I London and Paris, Cottington’s wide-ranging book makes a groundbreaking contribution to our understanding of critically important episodes in the history of art.' – Nancy J. Troy, Stanford University

‘Cottington’s new and unparalleled study lays bare the social conditions that led to the rise of the radical artistic avant-garde. A formidable book indispensable to all readers interested in the social history of modern art.’ – Sascha Bru, University of Leuven
ISBN: 9780300166736
Publication Date: April 19, 2022
384 pages, 6 1/6 x 9 1/4
56 color + 8 b/w illus.