The Theory of Avant-Garde

Excerpt from book's Prologue: "It is my intention in these pages to study avant-garde art as a historical concept, a center of tendencies and ideas. I want to outline its anatomy or biology: the aim is diagnosis and not, as with severe adversaries and the more indulgent would-be-reformers, therapeutic treatment. In one sense, this study means to be a vivisection or a spectroscopic analysis. I use these figurative terms to emphasize that this investigation is scientific in character, not practical or critical, and also to call attention to its synthetic and analytic method. Avant-garde art, in this essay, will be considered both as a manifold and as a general phenomenon. In this case of a phenomenon belonging to the history of art, this means treating it not so much as an aesthetic fact as a sociological one."