The Avant-Garde in Exhibition: New Art in the 20th Century

The Avant-Garde in Exhibition: New Art in the 20th Century—a book by the prominent art historian Bruce Altshuler—provides a thorough analytical survey of the most influential exhibitions of vanguard Western and Eastern art throughout the six decades from 1900 until the late 1960s. From the 1905 Autumn Salon in Paris to Harald Zeeman’s When Attitudes Become Form of 1969, all of the shows are described in great detail and put into a clear evolutionary framework, demonstrating the development of innovative forms in art and criticism over the twentieth century.

Focusing on the ever-changing relationship between avant-garde art, society, the art market, and the media, Altshuler explains that whereas Impressionism operated in symbiosis with the bourgeois culture, postwar modernist art strived to free itself from commercialization by turning to nonsubstantial, or supersubstantial mediums. By the 1980s, however, the latter approach also proved outdated having been integrated into the existent cultural paradigm and the art market, where galleries and dealers had gained almost more importance than artists and curators. Still, one of the book’s key recurring ideas remains its author’s belief in the opportunity of radical change in the field of aesthetics, based on avant-garde art’s ability to exert critical influence on the world and human society.