central & Eastern European avant-gardes

Pour qui entreprend une histoire transnationale des avant-gardes picturales au XXe siècle, la période que couvre ce deuxième tome, de 1918 à 1945, est la plus périlleuse. Car l'auteur doit se colleter avec le grand récit dicté par les avant-gardes elles-mêmes. Tout commence-t-il avec Dada? Dès 1910 s'observait la remise en cause symbolique de Paris par les nouvelles générations dans de nouveaux centres : Berlin, Munich, Londres, Bruxelles, Cologne, Moscou, New York. Dada, certes né dans les charniers de la guerre, fut plus encore issu de l'histoire de la modernité artistique et littéraire depuis les années 1850. Les avant-gardes furent-elles idéologiquement progressistes? Les acteurs ne cessèrent de négocier entre les logiques révolutionnaires, leurs ambitions nationales et celle de continuer tant bien que mal à se faire connaître sur la scène internationale. Loin que Paris fût la capitale unique, d'une ville à l'autre, et en particulier à Berlin, Prague, Budapest, Vienne, Moscou, mais aussi à Amsterdam, Bucarest, Zagreb, Barcelone et jusqu'à São Paulo, Mexico et au Japon, apparurent régulièrement de nouveaux groupes décidés à se faire une place dans le courant du modernisme. En revanche, l'entre-deux-guerres fut une période de marchandisation aboutie de l'innovation artistique. Dans les pratiques et les débats des avant-gardes, une problématique était récurrente : quelle place faire au marché, surtout en cas de succès?

The Slovene avant-garde movements of the first three decades of the twentieth century can be clearly linked to Italian Futurism. All three generations of the Slovene historical avant-garde were familiar with Futurist activities from their very beginnings. The third generation Slovene avant-garde, represented by Ferdo Delak and Avgust Černigoj and his Triestine circle, adapted some Futurist innovations, but the complicated and controversial relation of Italian Futurism to Fascism made them turn away from Futurism and move into the realms of Constructivism. Ideologically and politically linked to Russian Constructivism as well as to its intermediaries at the Bauhaus, the manifestos of the Young Slovene Theatre were filled with Russian Constructivist terminology, but they also echoed the proclamations issued by Marinetti, Prampolini and other Futurists. In this essay, I outline the specific political circumstances of the Slovene reception of Italian Futurism and, on this basis, investigate its influence on the Slovene theatrical avant-garde of the 1920s. This evokes the specificity of the interrelation of the two movements that can be explained by an artistic and political game of liaisons dangereuses.

Let us take a short walk first, and then try to map it in theory and in politics of avant-garde respectively. Central Europe is a space which is in no way the centre of Europe. It is an in-between; under avant-garde terms it is a space between Paris and Moscow, between Berlin and Moscow, and between New York and Moscow; different accents with different in-betweens in different times of the Twentieth Century. Speaking politically, it was in-between modernized West and backward East, it was in-between Western decadence and Eastern health, in-between communist freedom and capitalist/imperialist exploitation, in-between two imperialisms and totalitarianisms, then liberated from one totalitarianism to belong to the other, and again liberated from socialism to enter capitalism once again-as an in-between. What next? This in-between was felt as a division of the first avant-garde in different cultures between prevalence of constructivism or surrealism (for instance in Polish and Hungarian constructivism, and in Serbian or Czech surrealism and poetism). At the start, after trying to adopt avant-garde proposals from all sides of Europe including Russian Proletkult and constructivism, and Italian Futurism and French Dada, Micić expressed this in between withhis Zenitist formula: To save Europe, radical new position has to be adopted. Italian futurism is civilized and individualist. Russian avant-garde is barbarian and collectivist. What is needed, however, is a barbarian individualist, and that is what Balkan (i.e. Serbian) barbarogenius represents. Balkan barbarogenius can save Europe. Two points of theoretical interest are involved: one, that dependent relationship with the West from the period of nation-building and the first industrialization during and after the First World War developed into this in-between to be understood as a source of the renaissance and redemption of the West; second, that the position of equal influence of Paris and Moscow could very early change into Aristotelian equidistance from these two extremes, or two ways of avant-garde failure.

2019 marks the centenary of the Bauhaus, which, during its short existence, became one of the most influential art institutions in Europe. Its active members constituted an international network that included architects and artists from several countries in Central Europe, among them the former Czechoslovakia. The Czech and Slovak connections to the Bauhaus can be studied from various perspectives, and this essay focuses on the role of print periodicals in this history. Here, Sonia de Puineuf highlights some of the Czech and Slovak magazines published between the two world wars and considers how they promoted and disseminated Bauhaus ideas and aesthetics.