Historic Avant-Garde Work on Paper

<p>This book examines the many functions of paper in the fine art and aesthetics of the early twentieth-century modernist or historic avant-garde (Expressionism Cubism Futurism Dadaism Surrealism Constructivism and many more).</p><p>With its many collages and photomontages the historic avant-garde is generally considered to have transformed paper from a mere support into an artistic medium and to have assisted in art on paper gaining a firm autonomy. Bringing together an international team of scholars this book shows that the story of paper in the avant-garde has thereby hardly been told. The first section looks at a selection of canonized individual avant-gardists’ work on paper to demonstrate that the material and formal analysis of paper in the avant-garde’s artistic production still holds much in store. In the second section chapters zoom in on forms and formats of collective artistic production that deployed paper to move around reproductions of fine art works to facilitate the dialogue between avant-gardists to better promote their work among patrons and to make their work available to a wider audience. Chapters in the third section lay bare how certain groups within the avant-garde began to massively create monochrome works because these could be easily reproduced when transferred to or reproduced as linocuts. In the last section of the book chapters explore how the avant-garde’s attentiveness to paper almost always also implied a critique of the ways in which paper and all that it stood for was treated and labored in European culture and society more broadly.</p><p>The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history modernism and design.</p>