Central European Avant Gardes

This volume presents an interpretive overview of the complex webs of interaction among the artists and intellectuals of early 20th-century Central Europe.

Item consists of texts written 1910-1934, translated into English.

Expanding the horizon of established accounts of Central European art under socialism, this book uncovers the neglected history of artistic engagement with the natural environment in the Eastern Bloc. The turbulent legacy of 1968, which saw the confluence of political upheaval, spread of counterculture, rise of ecological consciousness, and emergence of global conceptual art, provides the setting for Maja Fowkes’s innovative reassessment of the environmental practice of the Central European neo-avant-garde. Focussing on artists and artist groups whose ecological dimension has rarely been considered, including the Pécs Workshop from Hungary, OHO in Slovenia, TOK in Croatia, Rudolf Sikora in Slovakia, and the Czech artist Petr Štembera, 'The Green Bloc: Neo-avant-garde Art and Ecology under Socialism' brings to light an array of distinctive approaches to nature, from attempts to raise environmental awareness among socialist citizens to the exploration of non-anthropocentric positions and the quest for cosmological existence in the midst of red ideology. Embedding artistic production in social, political, and environmental histories of the region, this book reveals the Central European artists’ sophisticated relationship to nature, at the precise moment when ecological crisis was first apprehended on a planetary scale.

The works of the classic European avant-gardes (cubism, futurism, expressionism, Dadaism, constructivism and many other -isms) today still strike many students of modernism as strange or incomprehensible. Is this art? Do we have to take a sound poem seriously? How, at all. are we to read and interpret avant-garde works? And what on earth is the fourth dimension in physics that fascinated so many avant-gardists? This engaging introduction is designed to answer all these questions and more.

The title of this book, The European Avant-Garde – A Hundred Years Later, implies the European avant-garde took place a century ago, that it is a thing of the past. However, it does not aim to consolidate this position, but to question it. It addresses temporality as the central dimension related to the notion of the avant-garde. The book brings forth original revisions of the theories of the avant-garde, the works of the avant-garde, the idea of the avant-garde as being the vanguard, the leading force of change. It addresses the returning of the avant-garde during the twentieth century and today.

Its twelve chapters are describing the breaking two decades of the modern and avant-garde art in Central Europe. The book brings a deep view into history of Austrian-Hungarian Empire and the new states established after its breakup in 1918. The readers will find out new details about central European visual art, scupltures, typography, photography, film and scene making - all that explained on examples of more than hundred authors from expresioninsm of 1908 till abstraction of 1928. Not only well known artists as Emil Filla, František Kupka, Max Oppenheimer, Oskar Kokoschka, László Moholy-Nagy, Władysław Strzemiński or Anton Jaszusch are presented; there are many other artists who took part on the exciting art scene of this moving period. The complex presentation of this period comes together with almost forty period magazines and almanacs which were connecting Central European centers of art as Budapest, Vienna, Prague, Cracow, Zagreb, Belgrade, Košice, Lvov, Warsaw, Vilnius or Novi Sad. The book is written by more than twenty international professionals from al the countries of the Central Europe and from the USA and it took them several years to finish such a vast and unique professional publication which has never been published before in such a bride scope.

The wave of anti-authoritarian political activity associated with the term “1968” can by no means be confined under the rubric of “protest,” understood narrowly in terms of street marches and other reactions to state initiatives. Indeed, the actions generated in response to “1968” frequently involved attempts to elaborate resistance within the realm of culture generally, and in the arts in particular. This blurring of the boundary between art and politics was a characteristic development of the political activism of the postwar period. This volume brings together a group of essays concerned with the multifaceted link between culture and politics, highlighting lesser-known case studies and opening new perspectives on the development of anti-authoritarian politics in Europe from the 1950s to the fall of Communism and beyond.