Dickran Tashjian, Skyscraper Primitives: Dada and the American Avant-Garde. 1910–1925. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1975. 283 + xiii pp., illus., $20.00

Science Avant-Garde

o think that the neoimpressionists are painters who cover canvases with little multicolored spots is a rather widespread mistake, " wrote Paul Signac in his manifesto of their movement. " This mediocre dot method has nothing to do with the aesthetic of the painters we are defending here, nor with the technique of divisionism they use. " Signac was referring to, among others, Georges Seurat, who...

The heroic age of American avant-garde art

A major contribution of Pierre Bourdieu to the study of art was his analysis of the autonomization of modern art fields. His model of autonomy and legitimacy in modern art was based on a study of the genesis of an avant-garde in French art in the late nineteenth century. I argue that a similar autonomization of art occurred in the midtwentieth century in the United States. I present studies in ...

reADing the LAte AvAnt- gArDe

Middle-Class Middletown? Wesleyan University and the Reinvention of Urban Space

Free Jazz and the Avant-Garde

Free jazz refers to a historical movement that, despite earlier precedents, first significantly flowered in the late 1950s in the US. Its central focus was a liberation from musical conventions – but from a jazz player’s perspective, since no liberation is ever complete. Initially known simply as the New Thing, it became Free Jazz by borrowing the title of a seminal 1960 album by saxophonist/co...