I find I have been thinking a lot recently about the early twentieth-century avant-garde.¹ This probably has something to do with my long-standing nostalgia for the idea of standing apart from mainstream culture. I have always valued most highly art that rejects easy assimilation, one that chooses the path of difficulty over popularity.

The refusal to flatter conventional taste, the desire to confound connoisseurship; these are traits I admire. The work of that moment of rupture/rapture in European culture, when nothing seemed possible, and as a result anything was, appears to offer a perfect fit. This is obviously a romantic, and to some degree absurd, position to take. But over the course of much of the twentieth century it was often the correct position, the one most likely to generate productive ideas and challenging art. But as a result of this undeniable success, anti-formalist dissent has become the mode of the establishment, and we seem stuck in an odd cycle of repetitions whose rhetorical clamour seems increasingly hollow. Thus does it seem urgent to reconsider the contributions of the early avant-garde again, to discover what we can still learn that may be of use.

The great dream of the avant-garde was to make art anew in such a way that it would cause people to be somehow jolted out of their everyday prejudices and forced to reconsider the various conventions shaping their lives. It was a dream of emancipation, a breaking away from the various tyrannies of culture