Mick Hartley

A new exhibition at the British Library, Breaking the Rules, looks at the Avant Garde from 1900 to 1937:

Explore Europe’s creative revolution of the early 20th century – one that ripped up the rule books of visual art, design, photography, literature, theatre, music and architecture, and whose effects are still felt, heard and seen today.

Mainly through the medium of print, Breaking the Rules throws new light on Cubism, Expressionism, Futurism, Dadaism, Suprematism, Constructivism, Surrealism and other movements; on the artists who changed the face of modern culture for ever; and on the cities that experienced their work, from Brussels to Budapest, Vienna to Vitebsk.

It only took a couple of minutes for me to realise I’d have to come back to do it justice – preferably having downed a couple of strong espressos beforehand. A dismal mid-November morning, still trying to shake off a bad cold; somehow I wasn’t in the mood to get excited over what can seem in the sober light of the 21st Century a load of self-indulgent pretentiousness. The exhibition is all low illumination, and booklets in illegible handwriting you have to study for some time to make sense of. The sober presentation isn’t in keeping with the spirit of the subject matter as it was, say, in the Surreal Things exhibition at the V&A. Quite right too, of course: this is the British Library, not an art gallery. But it means you have to do all the work yourself, and when it’s about the avant garde scene in Bucharest in the 1920s, well, the spirit does tend to flag.

I think part of the reason for my feeling of lassitude is the sheer effort it takes now to recapture that feeling of revolutionary possibility, the great hopes of modernism at the start of the 20th Century. Looking at works of art is one thing – you can appreciate them (a surrealist painting, say) without necessarily subscribing to or even being aware of the ideology behind them. But the written word – manifestos, automatic writing and the like – require at least some sympathy, a deeper engagement with the subject, and, really, it was all so long ago. We’re so much older, wiser, (duller?) now.

The story as the exhibition tells it is of a movement – a new renaissance – snuffed out by the twin evils of Nazism and Communism. Part of the problem in trying to get to grips with all this is that what we have here are the first moderns, the first rebels – people like us – and yet they were unaware of what was to come. They didn’t know what we know. They had no idea of the horrors of the camps and the gulag. So the whole enterprise seems innocent, simplistic, from another world.

And it’s not as if the European Avant Garde were themselves all innocent victims of historical forces. Many of them were, of course, but many openly embraced the developing political totalitarianisms, whether it was the Italian Futurists’ flirtation with Fascism, or the Surrealists (Andre Breton’s) embrace of Trotsky, or Brecht’s Stalinism.

It’d be wrong though, as well as ridiculously condescending, to dismiss it all. They may have bequeathed us little besides concrete poetry, Bauhaus chairs, and the insufferably tedious call for art to be, above all, subversive, but the world was different then, and they tried, and succeeded, in making it more interesting. It was hardly their fault that the term avant-garde was later to become synonymous with pretentious nonsense. The show’s on till the end of March, and it’s free, so I imagine I’ll be visiting again.

I wish they’d get their quotes right though. “Beautiful as the chance encounter on an operating table of a sewing machine and an umbrella” isn’t Max Ernst, you dolts, it’s Isidore Ducasse, Comte de Lautréamont. Don’t these librarians know anything?