European Avant-Gardes, 1905-1935

Sascha Bru is professor at the Faculty of Arts of the University of Leuven (Belgium). He has produced over a dozen books on European avant-gardes and modernisms, including Democracy, Law and the Modernist Avant-Gardes: Writing in the State of Exception (EUP, 2009) and the co-edited volume The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines: Europe, 1880-1940 (OUP, 2016).

• Preface IllustrationsIntroduction: Packing the SuitcasePart I: Strategies And TacticsChapter 1: A New Art, One and UndividedChapter 2: A Total Art, Pure and RealChapter 3: Anti-Art, Non-Art, Art! Part ii: Spaces and PlacesChapter 4: Cafés, Cities and CentreChapter 5: New Men in Old Europe Chapter 6: A Global Avant-GardePart iii: Times and TemporalitiesChapter 7: The Past Appropriated Chapter 8: The Plural Present Chapter 9: The Futures of TheoryConclusion: En RouteNotes AcknowledgementsIndex

An impressive tour de force which will be welcomed by everyone with an interest in the history of the avant-garde. This book will serve both as introductory survey and an extremely useful tool for teaching. But it is so much more than that. What sets this book apart are perhaps three things: the author is intimately familiar with sources in different languages and cultures; he wears his knowledge and scholarship lightly; and he allows his subject – the European avant-gardes – to dictate the methods and approaches, so that this book genuinely embodies a rigorous, and far from capricious, pluralism.