Includes bibliographical references (pages 363-370) and index.
Contents:
1. Brotherhoods -- 2. Affective affinities -- 3. Bohemians and avant-gardes -- 4. Paris: towards the avant-garde -- 5. Paris: the avant-garde's alternative professionalism -- 6. Paris: consolidating the avant-garde, 1905-14 -- 7. London before 1912: a pre-avant-garde conjuncture -- 8. London: amateurism, professionalism and friendship -- 9. Aristocratic aspirations: London 'Society' between the bourgeoise and bohemia -- 10. London's avant-garde moment: Paris, avant-gardehood and 'futurism', 1912-15 -- Coda: into the future.
Summary:
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.0 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.
This resource is supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act as administered by State Library of Iowa.