THOMAS HUNKELER, OR THE NATIONALISM OF THE AVANT-GARDES

Review par Catherine Dufour

May 3, 2020

These two works deal with the same theme, the nationalism of the avant-gardes.

The first, Paradoxes of the Avant-Garde. Artistic Modernity Put to the Test of its Nationalization, brings together, under the direction of Thomas Hunkeler, the proceedings of a conference held at the University of Fribourg in March 2011. Three chapters develop the three great "paradoxes" of the avant-gardes: the conflict between cosmopolitan aspirations and national rivalries (I), between center and periphery (II), between modernity and traditionalism (III). This volume consists of quite eclectic studies, which constitute a mosaic of cases centered around emblematic or marginal personalities, journals or movements. The introduction to the work, "Towards a 'Counter-History' of the Avant-Gardes" explains that, if the words "rupture" and "internationalism" have long served to characterize the avant-gardes, reality is more complex. Indeed, the history of the avant-gardes was forged by their very protagonists, often hagiographers or mythologists in the post-Second World War period. But this historiography itself has been called into question by a "counter-history" which, instead of seeking to unify and idealize, has established disparities, ambivalences, contradictions, areas of shadow. The comparative approach is claimed here as a methodological tool proper to "relativize" instead of "totalize": it never loses sight that cosmopolitanism has often given way to nationalism, even in the case of Dada, champion of internationalism. The aim is therefore to rethink the notion of "avant-garde" in a less totalitarian way. Alas, the rivalries between historians are still not closed, and researchers or critics often identify with the artists, movements or countries they study.

The second volume, Paris and the Nationalism of the Avant-Gardes 1909-1924, is a synthesis by Thomas Hunkeler, which extends the themes addressed in the first volume, in six chapters devoted to essential movements and journals of the European avant-garde: futurism and cubism in Paris (I), German expressionism (II), the Russian avant-garde (III), English vorticism (IV), art journals in France (V), Dada in Paris (VI). The introduction again pleads for "another history of the avant-gardes", which recognizes the place taken by nationalisms at the heart of the internationalist project. The author specifies his intentions by defending himself from any "relativism" (which would see in the nationalism of the avant-gardes only a normal fact for the time, thus approaching the right or the extreme right) and any "revisionism" (which would consist in reading the avant-gardes in terms of nationalism exclusively). A dialectical approach is claimed, which does not forget, as in the previous volume, that the history of the avant-gardes was written in a first time by its own actors. This introduction insists at length on Apollinaire's contradictions: "bastard, métèque and broke" at the origin, long kept aside because of his origins (sometimes described as Jewish!), then traumatized by a war that made him patriotic, Apollinaire began to cherish the idea of an international platform where to defend national Parisian superiority, threatened at its periphery by awakening nationalisms. This example brings us back to an obvious fact: if the avant-gardes, Dada in the first place, claimed internationalism, it is because nationalism was raging and hegemonic desires were parasitizing the cosmopolitan idea. This explains why Apollinaire's cultural proximity to Italy took on paternalistic, chauvinistic and dominating airs, and why Marinetti tried to inscribe futurism on Parisian territory. The central position of Paris in the history of the avant-gardes was inevitably called into question. We must pay tribute to Pascale Casanova's The Republic of Letters for having studied these mechanisms in detail. If futurism is often cited as the example of collusion between nationalism and cosmopolitanism, we must not forget that all avant-gardes participated in this ambiguity. This is why they are often apprehended first according to their national origin: German for expressionism, Italian for futurism, etc.

Paradoxes of the Avant-Garde. Artistic Modernity Put to the Test of its Nationalization.

I. The Avant-Garde Between National Aspirations and International Rivalries

This first part presents itself as a catalog that successively considers collectives (Zurich Dadaism, Der Sturm, The Letterist International), a journal (Europe), major personalities (Tzara, T. S. Eliot, Cendrars) to highlight in each case the tension between cosmopolitanism and nationalism.

Wolfgang Asholt (Dada from Zurich to Paris. A Nationalization of Internationalism?) details the strategy by which Tzara in Zurich would have worked towards a Frenchification of Dada, in order to be able, himself originating from a small nation, to integrate the Parisian literary circles who were wary of the too German part of Dada, like Apollinaire or the journals Sic and Nord-Sud. Granting an increasingly important place to French artists and writers, which culminated in his collaboration with Picabia or Arp, he would have knowingly contributed to a deradicalization of a movement very cosmopolitan at its beginnings, which Huelsenbeck did not fail to reproach him for. But Tzara did not suspect that he would in turn, in accordance with Bourdieu's analyses, be sidelined from French literary life...

William Marx's article (Modernism Between Internationalism and Nationalism. T. S. Eliot: Paris Round Trip) is devoted to T. S. Eliot's ambivalences, fascinated by Paris, French culture and the destiny of these immigrants born across the Atlantic, such as Stuart Merrill or Francis Vielé-Griffin, who became true French symbolist poets. But paradoxically, the influences that Eliot underwent in Paris in 1910-1911, from La NRF, from Paul Claudel, Saint-John Perse, Bergson, and especially Maurras, led him, in a desire for rooting indispensable to the work of writing, to settle a few years later, and until his death, in a village in Somerset, cradle of his family, supporting the monarchy and the Anglican church out of loyalty to the principles of Action française...

Hubert van den Berg (Der Sturm. A Berlin Avant-Garde Journal and Gallery Between Internationalism and Nationalism) is devoted to the Der Sturm gallery and journal of the same name, animated by Herwarth Walden in Berlin, whose legendary internationalism in the 1910-1920s contributed greatly, at the time of the writing of the avant-gardes in the 1960-70s, to making the words "internationalism" and "avant-garde" inseparable. But we have known since then that Der Sturm participated during the war in intelligence activities for the German secret services, using expressionism as the cultural banner of a nationalism that did not say its name. The Sturm artists therefore played various scores, from Kurt Schwitters' convinced internationalism to frankly nationalist positions, like those of Lothar Schreyer, a "degenerate" artist... who pledged allegiance to Hitler.

Bruno Curatolo (Promotion and Reception of the Avant-Gardes in the Europe Journal: 1923-1939) tries to understand the ambiguities of the Europe journal, founded in 1923 under the auspices of Romain Rolland and officially favorable to the avant-gardes, by tracking the semantic vagueness and contradictory judgments that surround the word "avant-garde" in different articles on music, literature, visual arts, theater. Along the way, the author notes that as it progressed towards the sinister 1930s, the journal gradually abandoned the meanings associated with post-war experiments, to adopt the humanist and democratic meaning that the term would take a few years later, at the time of Jean Vilar's TNP or André Malraux's Houses of Culture.

Question of terminology again: Was Cendrars avant-garde? This is the question asked by Claude Leroy (Modernity in Cendrars. The Love of Beginnings) about this writer who satisfied his destructive impulses and his hatred of the Boches at the "avant-garde" of the battlefields, but who detested, like Baudelaire, the military metaphor applied to literature, except when it was used at first degree by Marinetti. An undeniable pioneer of European thought, Cendrars had affinities with the Dadas and surrealists, but he detested "isms", groups, leaders (notably Breton), and clan rivalries. He preferred the delirious and singular modernity of Moravagine and cherished the Present more than the "singing tomorrows". Wary of the embusqued Dadaists who waged war with words, he became after 14-18 a true modern, a creator-pioneer (descobridor) rid of modernist accessories. He then gave free rein to the tropism of "leaving" and beginnings, in homage to "the original partition of the mother's body", his first missed departure, and to a body amputated of a hand "gone to combat".

Laurent Jenny (Between Functionalism and Surrealism. The Letterist International) shows how The Letterist International, after having laid the foundations of Situationism, failed because of a fundamental incompatibility between the two avant-gardes from which it originated: Asger Jorn's functionalist architecture, voluntarist and constructive, and Debord's surrealism, devoted to the passivity of the unconscious. Jorn contested Le Corbusier's urbanism, as repressive as Haussmann's: the "radiant cities", intended to improve living conditions, neglected the aesthetic and imaginary aspirations of the New Babylon dreamed of by Constant in the 1960s. Debord for his part wanted to go beyond Breton's hypnotic wandering by leading it towards an activist "unitary urbanism". But in Debord, as in Constant, construction killed the situation, and, at the crossroads of functionalism and surrealism, the Revolution did not take place... The New Babylon turned into a contemporary art museum managed by curators, deviant plagiarists of situationist technical teams.

II. Between Center and Periphery

Flanders, Denmark, Serbia and Romania, peripheral nations around which the second part of the collection is organized, have multiplied paradoxes and nationalist tropisms.

The Flemish avant-garde evoked by Geert Buelens ("In Flanders, revolutionaries who are not Flemish nationalists are very rare". Some remarks on nationalism, internationalism and activism in the Flemish avant-garde after the Great War) was torn, during and after the war, between a conservative neo-symbolist tendency, and a progressive tendency influenced by humanist German expressionism, Whitman's free verse, Dada, abstract art and the Bauhaus, the aborted Revolution of Berlin in 1918. Now this second tendency, against all expectations, rallied to a Flemish nationalism... which sympathized with the communist international! Paul van Ostaijen and the journal Het Overzicht (1921) by Fernand Berckelaers (alias Michel Seuphor) played a leading role there. This paradoxical nationalism, very much in the minority, actively fought against traditional Belgian nationalism strengthened by the war. But the beautiful revolutionary impulse came to an end... and Flemish nationalism radicalized until later joining Nazism...

Sylvain Briens (The Gothic Renaissance and The Great Journey of Johannes V. Jensen. Cosmopolitan Phantasmagoria and National Historiography at the Origins of the Danish Avant-Garde) has chosen two works by the Danish writer Johannes V. Jensen, The Gothic Renaissance (1901) and The Great Journey (1908-1922), to highlight the intertwined themes of national identity and cosmopolitanism, and their decisive influence on the avant-gardes of Denmark and Sweden. The Wheel, one of Jensen's recurring figures, inspired by a Scandinavian mythological background, is both an atemporal cosmic representation and a hymn to technical progress. The Great Journey, a gigantic epic that goes back to Prehistory, establishes astonishing bridges between the Vikings, the discovery of America and industrial modernity, celebrates the genius of the Goths, source of a Danish nationalism open to the universal. Jensen invented a new genre, the "myth", a short fictional prose text devoted to an aspect of the contemporary world, which makes one think of the mythologies of Aragon (The Peasant of Paris), Barthes or W. Benjamin. His "phantasmagoria of history" is close to W. Benjamin's "profane illumination". Jansen will influence the Swede Harry Martinson in the 1930s, then Danish Situationism and CoBra, his direct heirs.

Jens Herlth analyzes the contradictions of Miloš Crnjanski ("All this therefore without any pretension". Miloš Crnjanski, the nation and the Serbian avant-garde), champion of the Serbian avant-garde in the years 1919-21, but accused in the 1930s of a nationalism illustrated as early as 1929 by his novel Migrations. Jens Herlth refuses to use the word "avant-garde" according to the normative criteria of the 1960-70s. This would indeed be to forget that, for the young multicultural Yugoslavia of 1918, the word "nationalism" had a very particular meaning. Miloš Crnjanski wished that the young nation integrate European modernism, but he also wanted it to distinguish itself from the tabula rasa of Westerners or Russian futurists. His only manifesto, "The Explanation of Sumatra", pleads for a poetry without warlike posture, inspired by Roland Barthes' "neutral" and almost Buddhist. A committed "subtext" nevertheless emerges there, a poetic vision of the "nation", fruit of a tension between jugoslovenstvo, multicultural Yugoslav modernism freed from provincialism, and srpstvo, inspired by the Serbian national past. Similarly, the writers of Zagreb could not ignore their Croatian roots, nor Ivo Andrić his Bosnian origins... The romantic idea of nation unfortunately turned in Crnjanski into a nationalism that drifted towards the worst...

Four articles are devoted to the prolific Romanian avant-gardes. Ion Pop (Offensives and Defensives of the Romanian Avant-Garde) traces their stages since the end of the 19th century, divided between nationalist literary currents of rural inspiration and cosmopolitan symbolist tendencies. The beginning of the 20th century gives rise to an anti-traditionalist poetic offensive (Ion Vinea, Adrian Manu), which culminates in 1913-1916, without ever reaching the radicality of Tristan Tzara. Romania was not ready for the Dadaist shock wave, any more than it had been for Marinetti's manifesto published in Bucharest as early as 1909. It was not until the years 1924-30 that an avant-garde worthy of the name emerged, embodied by Ion Vinea, Ilarie Voronca, Max Hermann Maxy, Geo Bogza. Its detractors, xenophobic or anti-Semitic, taxed it as a "imported" fashion phenomenon, forgetting that Romanian literature had always drawn from foreign sources and that Dada, an "exported" movement, had been inspired by certain deconstructive specificities of traditional literature. The Romanian avant-garde evolved from the futurist constructivism of the 1920s towards the surrealism of the 1940s (Gellu Naum, Ghérasim Luca), in a "mosaic of tendencies" punctuated by bouts of fever and covered by Soviet occupation. Saşa Pană or Geo Bogza then rallied to proletarian communism, while Gherasim Luca, D. Trost or Paul Păun took the path of exile...

Ionannah Both (How Can One Be Romanian? Brief History of the Critical Reception of Romanian Avant-Gardes, in Romania) was interested in the reception of Romanian avant-gardes in literary histories, punctuated by ideological reversals. In 1924, to qualify avant-garde artists, "communist" is an insult that rhymes with "Jew", mentally ill or degenerate. In 1941, in times of Hitlerian domination, Tzara and his friends, judged accomplices of the West, are evaluated according to a despised Jewishness. But in 1944, when the Red Army enters Poland, the "prodigal sons" returning from the West are praised as Romanian conquerors of European culture, whose Jewish origins are "rediscovered"... Socialism of Soviet inspiration gets along well with the triumphant surrealism of the 1940s, but dissident surrealists must leave the country... Saşa Pană in 1969 publishes the first anthology that "canonizes" the avant-gardes, envisaged under the sole "aesthetic" angle, and omits their compromises with Stalinist power. In 1983, under Ceaușescu, "protochronism" is king: the avant-gardes would have invented nothing that is not already found in Romanian literature! Ion Pop, an essential critical authority, also plays, from 1970 to 2006, the game of depoliticization in favor of the structural, the eternal or the intertextual. Paul Cernat, an eminent member of the new Romanian criticism, publishes in 2007 a work of still vigorous nationalism...

Adriana Copaciu (Romanian Avant-Garde Journals in Search of a New Space of Speech) draws a panorama of Romanian avant-garde journals, from Vinea's founding manifesto in 1924 to surrealism. The author deepens the three logics deployed between 1923 and 1928: synthesis, synchronization, internationalization. The synthesis was achieved thanks to Voronca's "Integralism", this Romanian variant of constructivism, distinct both from imported radicalism and traditionalism. Synchronization was adaptation to the present, which allowed journals to fill the "delay" taken by a despised peripheral culture. Internationalization finally corresponded to a sort of "inverted cultural colonialism" – in accordance with Bourdieu's theories or those of Pascale Casanova in The Republic of Letters – by which the journals triumphed over national resistances while consolidating their link to the nation thanks to external networks; thus was legitimized, without submission or plagiarism, a Romanian culture hitherto kept at a distance by the great European centers.

Adrian Tudurachi ("The Ethnic Stereotype in Romanian Avant-Garde Literature and the Drifts of Internationalism") studied the "ethnic stereotype" put at the service of internationalism by futurism, and by Zurich Dadaism which brought on stage the linguistic specificities of its artists for the benefit of polyglottism. In the Romanian avant-garde we note a tension between resistance to the Parisianism of the symbolist generation, and the impossibility, proper to any minor culture, of rejecting external borrowings. This avant-garde oscillated, in the 1920s, between the spiritual model of a universal aesthetic sensibility advocated by Vinea and the materialist quest for equality of access to cultural means. After having hesitated, Voronca opted for the spiritual model, capable of valorizing the different ethnic stereotypes. But, under the pretext of cosmopolitanism, empathy for "the agile cowboy of Colorado" or "the Hindu banana seller in Calcutta" (Integral, 1925) perpetuated an ethnically reified world. And if philosopher Agamben inscribes these stereotypes in the framework of an antinationalist ethnic irony, they cannot mask a nationalist background... In short, the ethnic stereotype, which occupied various functions in the Romanian avant-garde, cannot be reduced to the desire to preserve nationalism at the heart of internationalism.

III. What Traditions for Modernity?

The third part looks at the more or less explicit inscription of traditionalism in collectives or avant-garde personalities.

Roxana VICOVANU (The Difficult Balance of the "Return to Order", "Modern Classicism" and the Avant-Garde. The Case of L'Esprit nouveau) draws up a catalog of the numerous concessions to the "return to order" in L'Esprit Nouveau (1920) by Paul Dermée, Amédée Ozenfant and Le Corbusier. This journal, officially open to the avant-gardes, omits El Lissitzky, constructivist typography, Lajos Kassák, etc. Pretending to be cosmopolitan and pacifist, it aspires to Le Corbusier's European hegemony. Elitist, it defends perfection, the eternal, and an art devoted to the useful. It opposes, despite Dermée, subversive artistic conceptions and revolutionary political ideas. Its preferences are national and traditionalist: cubism is appreciated because it is compatible with Ingres! The return to craft and "academicisms" dominates there. Paris is very prized there because it reconciles cosmopolitan influence and French genius. L'Esprit Nouveau finally hesitates between two distinct tendencies: the "modern classicism" of the "return to order" and "aesthetic modernism", which is interested in the past (the Parthenon) without excluding the formal research of international avant-gardes.

It is no secret to anyone, as Isabel Violante recalls (The Cosmopolitan Stations of Ardengo Soffici) that the Italian avant-gardes, cosmopolitan before 1914, became nationalist after 1918. The futurist Ardengo Soffici is no exception to the rule. His writings on Italian stations, sensitive to the cosmopolitan charm of these places, are imbued with melancholy, rural nostalgia and hymn to slowness, at the antipodes of the futurist conceptions of the architect Antonio Sant'Elia. When Mussolini in the 1930s projects a megalomaniacal reconstruction of stations, including that of Florence, Soffici rebels: indeed, despite the use of regional stones and marbles and respect for certain local traditions, this station is a hymn to the forms, materials and tendencies of European avant-garde architecture. Nikolaus Pevsner, hardly suspect of indulgence for totalitarian regimes, sings its praises. And while Italian artists, fascist or not, are divided by this project according to their degree of adherence to European innovations, Soffici unleashes himself against a modernity dominated by foreigners, métèques, Jews, freemasons, Bolsheviks and other degenerates; or by the "Nordic and Protestant" world leagued "against Rome and its Latinity". The fascist orientation of this former futurist, who became an ally of the Nazis, will crescendo...

Denis Pernot (Barrès and the Princes of the New Youth. The Avant-Gardist Virtues of a Corpse) shows how Barrès, considered before the war of 14 as a surpassed writer and competed with by Maurras, worked skillfully to become again "prince of youth" and guide of the new avant-garde. Eclipsing himself behind the words of the fighters and taking on, after the war, the role of champion of "writers dead for the fatherland", he went so far as to contest the legitimacy of literature, thus feeling authorized to federate the avant-garde, even if it was his enemy. Very ambivalent, the Dadas made a trial of him in 1921, while aspiring to his recognition as a major reference of a French literary life... that they rejected. Barrès bequeathed his work to avant-garde writers, so that they would inscribe it in a heritage that he himself had neglected, from Rimbaud to Apollinaire. The distance taken, apparently, vis-à-vis his "intellectual magistracy" facilitated the "integrating rupture" of the young rebels, at the origin of a "filiation of an unaccomplished project of the master", very perceptible notably in Joseph Delteil.

Pierre Drieu la Rochelle, it's also a paradoxical story, studied by Fabien Dubosson (Pierre Drieu la Rochelle and Surrealism. A "Right-Wing Avant-Gardist" in a "Left-Wing Rear-Guard"?). Despite his right-wing training, Drieu engaged alongside the surrealists from 1924, before compromising himself with fascism ten years later. His experience at the front linked him to Breton's group. But for him the war was charged with a mystical sign of refounding values, including aesthetic ones. His Symbolic Earth, which was not Barrès' sacred soil, glorified self-sacrifice and virile friendships. Drieu expected Dada and the Surrealists to be its bearers. But these allies of a moment were antinationalist! Long before Gilles (1939), Drieu reproached them for their abandonment of God, then, after the Rif events, their adherence to communism, to Hegel, to the love of the Orient against the Occident. He saw the surrealists as men of the 19th century, preferring real engagement to the revolution of the spirit... of which he should have been the guide. The indecision of his writings, between mystical lyricism and deconstruction, reflects the ambivalence of a man also tempted by Action française, contested for other reasons... His polemics with the surrealists may have revealed the totalitarian aspects of the movement, those very ones that fascinated him. Irremediably solitary, he sent back to back two authoritarian groups between which he could not decide... before opting for more radical choices...

With Alain Clavien (The "Helvetists", Between Avant-Garde and Reaction) we are in Geneva at the beginning of the 20th century, when small avant-garde groups seek to emancipate themselves from Parisian tutelage. A nationalist movement, called "Helvetist", is born, notably in La Voile latine from 1906 to 1910, and rushes into the debates aroused by the structural upheavals of Switzerland in the years 1908-1910: industrialization, urbanization, social movements, rural exodus, growing foreign presence. The Helvetists orient themselves towards antidemocratic, xenophobic and anti-Semitic positions, in the name of the ancestral warrior spirit, heritage and traditions against foreigners, the Ancien Régime against the decadent 19th century. Strange movement, which, on the one hand, claims to be avant-garde, on the model of the poet-prophet and the enlightened artist, and on the other adopts the reactionary ideas of a moral, religious, rural, frugal order, devoted to work. The Helvetists do not hesitate to take hostage the Parisian figure of Ramuz and to use Maurras and Barrès as "avant-garde" alibis. So many contradictions leave one dumbfounded! Federated in a patriotic league from 1912, these nationalists welcome the war with satisfaction...

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The synthesis that follows, taken entirely in charge by Thomas Hunkeler, proposes an overview of the nationalism of the European avant-gardes, envisaged from the angle of their desire for symbolic conquest of the dominant cultural centers, Paris in the lead.

Paris and the Nationalism of the Avant-Gardes: 1909-1924

I. "We Have Taken the Lead of the European Painting Movement". Futurism and Cubism in Paris

Futurism and cubism are in rivalry in Paris. The futurists lead from 1909 a veritable war of conquest, which culminates at the time of the February 1912 exhibition at the Galerie Bernheim-Jeune. But as early as 1911 they put their Italianness at a distance to be recognized as masters of European painting and Boccioni tries to distinguish futurism from a cubism suspected of pro-Germanism. Officially a friend of the futurists, Apollinaire opposes to their will for ascension a demonstration of national superiority, and takes sides without sharing for cubism, alongside Salmon and Gleizes, who want to consecrate it as "Parisian art" to the detriment of its futurist twin. Cubism is then interpreted as heir to Courbet, Manet, Cézanne or Matisse, and futurism as descendant of the Italian Renaissance, this "attack" on national genius. Gleizes claims the "Celtism" of the neo-symbolists and the return to medieval art; many cubist painters illustrate this Frenchification by the traditionalism of their subjects. The journal Montjoie! founded in 1913 by the Franco-Italian Ricciotto Canudo becomes an "organ of French Artistic Imperialism", Celtic and Parisian, anti-Semitic on occasion, a sort of bridge between the Middle Ages and the innovations of the avant-garde. In Italy, Papini and Soffici militated for their part, before and after the war, for good understanding between a Gallo-Roman, Celtic France, and an Italy of Greek, Semitic and Etruscan blood. But the Treaty of Versailles will give vigor back to anti-French Italianism!

II. "The Enemy is Not Where the Arrows Were Launched". German Expressionism

This chapter deepens the analyses of Hubert van den Berg exposed in the previous volume. The nationalists attack the "foreign conspiracy" of the futurist painters exhibited at the Sturm gallery in 1912, but also, at the time of the "Agadir coup", of the French painters who invade the market. A response to the polemics launched by the nationalist painter Carl Vinnen nevertheless brings together, at the initiative of Kandinsky and Franz Marc, very many signatures favorable to aesthetic internationalism. But Franz Marc, as early as 1912, under the influence of the theorist Wilhelm Worringer, proposes a "Gothic" reading of the Blaue Reiter, linking it to an atemporal, abstract, spiritual painting, turned towards the art of peoples, children and primitives, Russia and the Orient. Represented especially in Northern Europe, this current, prior to the Renaissance originating from the South, would be superior to it. With the Brücke, a step is taken: the "Gothic" becomes exclusively Germanic. Franz Marc, a volunteer engaged who died at the front, thinks that war is a necessary "purgatory" for the refounding of German aesthetics, in crisis certainly, but destined to triumph in Europe... At the same time, the cosmopolitan activities of the Sturm mask Walden's nationalist double game, who prospers on the art market and away from the front... His aesthetic convictions, sincerely internationalist, like those of Franz Marc, ensured the success of great works... German expressionist notably...

III. "Hail to You, Magnificent Orient". The Russian Avant-Garde, from Xenomania to Russocentrism

The Russian avant-garde of the early 20th century knows the same vicissitudes as an empire divided between a desire for Western emancipation and growing nationalism. The Golden Fleece, published in Russian and French (1906-1909), undergoes the influence of French symbolism and post-impressionist painters exhibited in Moscow. But Larionov and Gontcharova are increasingly interested in loubki (popular prints with religious connotations), medieval Russian art, the icon and national craftsmanship. The "Hyleïa" group (1912), animated by the painter David Bourliouk and the poet Bénédikt Livchits, moves away from French imitation in favor of primitivism and the Orient. The gap widens between those who, like Bourliouk, remain faithful to the Western avant-garde despite the "cubo-futurist" particularism, and those who dissociate themselves from it. A Slap in the Face of Public Taste (1913), which marks the apogee of Russian futurism (Bourliouk, Khlebnikov, Kroutchonykh, Mayakovsky), is inspired by Italian manifestos. But Khlebnikov draws from the archaisms of the Russian language and is inspired by the poetics of the steppe more than that of the city; Russia is enlarged to the Asian continent. Gontcharova and Larionov approach the Georgian Ilia Zdanevich, thurifer of an anti-urban rural nationalism. Nothing surprising that "Italian imperialism" of Marinetti clashes, in Moscow and Saint Petersburg in 1914, with the aesthetic nationalism of a new Orient, interior and spiritual more than territorial...

IV. "Oh Yes, Down with France". English Vorticism, an Avant-Garde in Trompe-l'œil?

Futurism proclaimed in England by Marinetti and the painter Christopher R. W. Nevinson in 1914, quickly gives way to the "vorticism" of Thomas Ernest Hulme, Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis. Hulme, influenced by Worringer, defends the "geometric" art of preclassical and "Gothic" times, the art of the Byzantines, primitives, expressionists and cubists. Fry's post-impressionism, Bloomsbury's "aestheticizing modernism" and the universal flux of the futurists are rejected in favor of the cubism of Epstein, Cézanne or Picasso. Compatible with the abstraction of Balla or Severini, the new avant-garde claims the Present and spontaneous popular art. The first issue of Blast, of nationalist connotation in July 1914, is a hodgepodge of contradictory references, copied from futurist typography and provocations – despite Lewis's anti-futurism – from which emerges an apology for modern genius: resolutely Nordic, Anglo-Saxon, anti-French and anti-Parisian. With the war, everything changes. Vorticism, allied to German aesthetics, is contested. The second issue of Blast, in 1915, sides with the Entente, while making the distinction between a nationalist Germany, anti-cubist, anti-expressionist and an underground Germany, aesthetically allied. Lewis enunciates an artistic credo above nationalisms, which should be cubist after the war... This is how vorticism manages to free itself from dominant influences, Italian and French, to assert an identity compatible with a universalist orientation.

V. "The First are the First". Art Journals in France Put to the Test of Patriotism

SIC, Le Mot and L'Élan are three journals prior to L'Esprit Nouveau analyzed in the previous volume. SIC (1916-1919) was born from the opportunities offered by the war to its director, Pierre Albert-Birot. After a first issue combining patriotism and aesthetic eclecticism, the journal's futurist orientation becomes clearer, thanks to an exhibition of Severini in Paris in 1916. Inventor of "nunism", a sort of modernist catch-all, Albert-Birot aspires to a synthesis, "typically French", which would integrate tradition. His patriotism, influenced by Apollinaire without being reactionary, gradually distances itself from futurism. When Littérature appears in 1919, Albert-Birot, ridiculed by Aragon, puts a damper on his pretensions as an avant-garde leader. His journal had nevertheless taken sides for Dada and Tzara... Compared to SIC, Le Mot (1914-1915) is fundamentally patriotic. The caricature of the "boches" is omnipresent there and cubism is criticized for its German sympathies. Cocteau puts a brake on this systematic anti-Germanism and, without renouncing his patriotism, strives to open the journal to contemporary art reputed to be anti-French. But his hesitations harm his desire for synthesis, soon taken up again by L'Élan by Amédée Ozenfant. More elitist and less conformist, this journal, far from being pacifist, is interested in the international despite its director's admiration for Barrès. The last issue of 1916 announces "purism" and supports Edouard Jeanneret (Le Corbusier) who, forgetting his chauvinism, mobilizes with Auguste Perret in favor of pro-German architects... in anticipation of a recognition of French architecture in the post-war period! For Ozenfant, Jeanneret or Perret, the enemy was not Germany, but petit-bourgeois, nationalist and reactionary Parisianism... Internationalism and national pride could coexist, which L'Esprit nouveau confirms from 1920.

VI. "These Crackpots Don't Have a Good Accent". Dada in Paris

This chapter extends W. Asholt's article from the previous volume. It is a somewhat saddening indictment against Parisian nationalism which crescendos from 1920 to 1922. Tzara's arrival in Paris in January 1920 disconcerts and quickly eclipses the myth of the young poet-messiah. This métèque from Eastern Europe, this Jew with Dracula's pallor, and so on, arouses articles of the worst kind of racism. Accused of having been in Zurich a friend of German expressionists (in reality refractory), Tzara knew well the French reticence towards him. Confronted with the obsession of a boche Dada spread by Apollinaire, he had struggled to conciliate major personalities of French intellectual life. His Parisian integration was not won for all that. Following Rachilde or Cocteau whose journal Le Coq (1920) was initially to be entitled Cocorico, Gide openly distrusted the young writer, promising... but Jewish. Jacques Rivière, director of the NRF, who published a remarkable "Recognition to Dada" (1920), held very nationalist remarks elsewhere. And what about Breton's attitude? After the euphoria of Dadaist uproars and Dada's rich contribution to Littérature, he distanced himself from Tzara during the Barrès Trial (1921), this masked homage to the great ancestor, and the "International Congress for the Determination of Directives and the Defense of the Modern Spirit" (1922). In Comœdia and Littérature in 1922, he denounced Tzara's German affinities and paid homage to the true French inventors of Dada: Picabia, Duchamp and Vaché. Aragon's Project of Contemporary Literary History, laudatory for Dadaism in its first version, opted for a French interpretation of contemporary literature since 1913, Tzara's role being just touched upon...

Who could still, after reading these two works, consider the avant-gardes only as vehicles of internationalism? They have the merit of unraveling the myths forged in the 1960-70s, such as Peter Bürger was able to relay in his famous Theory of the Avant-Garde (1974). Their point of view is rich, very documented, nuanced. One can certainly reproach the first for its sometimes discontinuous eclecticism and, to both, a sort of naivety: who could indeed believe that the cosmopolitan subversive desires of the avant-gardes could have escaped, in all purity, the constitutive nationalism of the history of Europe at the beginning of the 20th century, as still today? But these two volumes, of which the second deepens and synthesizes the approaches of the first, have the merit of having "historicized", according to Thomas Hunkeler's own term, avant-gardes sometimes fetishized during the lifetime of their inventor-hagiographers, and of revealing the ambiguities and paradoxes that confer on them a living depth.

May 2020