The End of the American Avant Garde

American Social Experience Series

Stuart D. Hobbs

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 1997
• ISBN:
  9780814773253
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: History of Art

"By 1966, the composer Virgil Thomson would write, "Truth is, there is no avant-garde today." How did the avant garde dissolve, and why? In this thought-provoking work, Stuart D. Hobbs traces the avant garde from its origins to its eventual appropriation by a conservative political agenda, consumer culture, and the institutional world of art.

PART I


Toward the Last American Vanguard 1930–1955

CHAPTER 1

Introduction: The Avant Garde and the Culture of the Future

In 1935, David Bernstein, editor of the American literary magazine The New Talent, characterized the avant garde as a group of writers motivated by the “spirit of revolt … against artificial boundaries of so-called good taste, against hypocritical ‘sweetness and light,’ against formalistic strictures of language.” Through this revolt, members of the avant garde heralded and to a great extent created unprecedented changes, not only in art, but also in all areas of intellectual and material life in the West. The powerful impact of the movement was still apparent half a century and more later not only in museums and libraries, but also in advertisements and popular culture.¹

Yet, by the 1960s, many critics, scholars, and artists began proclaiming the death of the avant garde. “Truth is,” wrote composer Virgil Thomson in 1966, “there is no avant-garde today. Dada has won; all is convention; choose your own. What mostly gets chosen … is that which can be packed and shipped . . . [for] a conditioned public.” In 1967, critic Irving Howe argued that

it seems greatly open to doubt whether by now, a few decades after the Second World War, there can still be located in the West a coherent and self-assured avant-garde. . . . Bracing enmity has given way to wet embraces, the middle class has discovered that the fiercest attacks upon its values can be transposed into pleasing entertainments, and the avant-garde writer or artist must confront the one challenge for which he has not been prepared: the challenge of success.

An important cultural development had taken place, which on the surface, given the cultural impact of the movement, was not to be expected. Destroyed by a combination of external forces and internal weaknesses, the end of the avant garde set the stage for the present period of postmodernist culture and poststructuralist thought. Why the dissolution of the avant garde occurred is the subject of this work.²

The term avant-garde was originally a military one, referring to troops in the lead, or vanguard. In the eighteenth century, the word began to be applied metaphorically to politics. For example, in 1794 it appeared in the title of a French periodical addressed to intellectuals in the army, urging them to continue defending the principles of the Revolution.³

The social and political connotations of the term grew increasingly important in the next century. French socialist Henri de Saint-Simon was one of the first, Donald Egbert argues, to apply the idea of vanguard to art. In his Opinions littéraires, philosophique et industrielles, Saint-Simon wrote a dialogue between an artist and a socialist in which the artist declares: “It is we, artists, who will serve you as avant garde: the power of the arts is in fact most immediate and most rapid: when we wish to spread new ideas among men, we inscribe them on marble or on canvas;… and in that way above all we exert an electric and victorious influence.” Saint-Simon believed that he lived on the eve of the greatest period of intellectual and artistic development in human history and that artists had a “priestly” mission to lead the way into that future.⁴

By the 1840s, French radicals regularly described themselves as avant-garde, and the term had become a political cliché. Indeed, after 1848 the term lost the older artistic connotations, a meaning that had always been subordinate to politics, even for Saint-Simon. In the early 1860s, Charles Baudelaire knew avant-garde only as a military-political word. Not until the 1870s did cultural and political radicalism come together once more as the avant garde. Literary historian Renato Poggioli argues that the crises of the Franco-Prussian War and the suppression of the Communards gave innovative artists and political radicals a sense of common purpose that brought them together, if only for a short time. It was during the 1880s that avant garde became a synonym for artistic innovation in the modern sense and lost its political connotations. Exactly why this happened is not clear. Egbert suggests that the dissociation occurred because, at the turn of the century, most members of the avant garde were divided: political radicals tended to be Marxists, whereas cultural radicals tended to be anarchists.⁵

The Vanishing Avant Garde

The avant garde might be described as a vanishing topic in American intellectual history at the end of the twentieth century. The writers of earlier classic works of intellectual history, such as Oscar Cargill and Merle Curti, describe the intellectual rebellion of the first decades of the twentieth century in some detail, typically characterizing the event as something of a coming of age, an “end to American innocence,” as Henry May put it. In more recent surveys of American intellectual history, authors give some attention to the early phase of the avant garde in America but ignore evidence that there was an avant garde after the 1920s. Lewis Perry, for example, in his 1984 survey of American intellectual life, discusses the avant-garde rebellion against Victorianism that took place in the 1910s and 1920s and created modernist culture. But in his work, as in others, the subject largely disappears from subsequent chapters. Perry, like other contemporary intellectual historians, makes brief reference to the “beatniks” as precursors to the counterculture of the 1960s, but neither in Perry’s work nor in most other intellectual histories of the last decades of the twentieth century can the reader learn that an avant-garde community persisted in America from the 1920s through the late 1950s.⁶

In the seminal 1979 anthology New Directions in American Intellectual History, John Higham implicitly suggested why the avant garde did not figure in the discussion. Contributors to the book showed a marked turn away from literature and psychology, two staples of earlier discussions of the avant garde. Clearly, the focus of intellectual history was changing. Contributors showed an interest in the social and institutional basis of knowledge and in the history of mentalities—important subjects, but ones that took historians away from the issues raised by the avant garde.⁷

Since the 1960s, researchers in modern American intellectual history have tended to focus on two areas. One group has examined the professionalization of the sciences from the late nineteenth century to the middle of the twentieth century. Another group has explored the ideas and cultural impact of the New York intellectuals. These authors do show that the intellectuals in the New York community sometimes described themselves as avant garde or mourned the passing of that vanguard, but they see that identity as incidental to the history of ideas and relationships in the group. Many historians have been more interested in the New York intellectuals as anti-Communists than as modernists.

The postwar American avant garde has not been completely ignored in historical scholarship. Anthony Linick, Harry Russell Huebel, and Michael Davidson, for example, wrote important works on the interrelated literary avant-garde movements of the Beats and the San Francisco Renaissance. These scholars describe a community of intellectuals alienated from their society who understood both their work and their community to be, in Davidson’s phrase, an “oppositional sign” expressing the avant-garde hope for a new culture.

Art historians have described another vanguard community, the abstract expressionist painters. The work of Irving Sandler, Ann Gibson, Stephen Polcari, and Alwynne Mackie combines a close study of the iconography and stated purposes of these artists with an examination of the intellectual milieu in which they worked. These scholars describe how the avant garde created an art that expressed life-affirming mythological and religious themes, which members of the van hoped would contribute to the regeneration of Western culture.

As the above examples suggest, most recent work on the avant garde has focused on particular genres, such as literature or painting. Walter B. Kalaidjian, Richard Candida Smith, and Sally Banes have attempted to bring the various strands of the American avant garde together, at least for limited places or times. Kalaidjian examines the literary and artistic American vanguard of the 1920s and 1930s as part of an international vanguard movement and argues that an oppositional vanguard continues to exist in the last decades of the twentieth century. Smith looks at the literary and artistic avant garde in California in the mid-twentieth century, while Banes chronicles the diverse avant-garde activities in New York City in the early 1960s.

History after the Linguistic Turn

By the 1990s, poststructuralist thought—what has been called the “linguistic turn”—began to have a significant impact on intellectual history. Historians have argued that the discourse of intellectuals is not about universalist principles, but is merely the self-referential conversation of elites. According to this postmodern view, language does not describe an objective reality “out there,” but rather is a self-contained system in which meaning results from the relations among words, not between words and the world.⁸

This book fits into the new world of discourse in two ways: as a study of discourse and as an examination of the origins of the postmodern linguistic turn. As a study of intellectual discourse, this work addresses the ideas of a specific, self-defined, and self-conscious community—the American advance guard—about the relationship between art and society. I describe the music, poetry, novels, and visual art of avant gardists, and in particular the notion of art as process that is the chief innovation of the postwar van. But the primary focus is on the meaning that members of the advance guard believed their work had for American society. In the primary sources upon which this work is based—that is, the manifestoes, little magazine essays, exhibition catalogs, and letters and diaries written by the members of the avant garde—they discussed their belief that the integration of art and life could create a new consciousness and transform American culture.⁹

The fundamental problem of human discourse—that language, and indeed any form of communication, is open to interpretation—also appears in this account. In postwar America, journalists, critics, gallery owners, museum curators, educators, and others interpreted avant-garde work in ways counter to the vanguard’s self-understanding. Far from transforming American culture, cultural Cold Warriors appropriated the radical van as a weapon in the Cold War; curators, gallery owners, and publishers absorbed the advance guard into traditional institutions of culture; and advertisers and businesspeople commodified the movement in consumer culture. The meanings that avant gardists gave to their work, which they believed was expressed in a form that tapped into a universal human subconscious, proved susceptible to diverse interpretations. Ironically, these alternative readings overwhelmed vanguard intentions.

The second relation between this book and the linguistic turn is as a contribution to the history of the transition from modernism to postmodernism. The avant garde is the source of postmodern, poststructuralist notions of language that concern many present-day historians and literary theorists. The genealogy of the linguistic turn can be traced to Friedrich Nietzsche and his contention that the artist, through the innovative use of language, could destroy the banal bourgeois world and create a new consciousness and thus a new world.¹⁰ The Nietzschean vision of the power of word (and image) in the hands of the artist formed the basis for the faith American vanguardists had in the future. Ironically, however, by the middle of the twentieth century, the legacy of these vanguard ideas would not be cosmopolitanism and universalism but exactly the opposite. From human communication having the power to create a new world and a new culture, intellectuals came to emphasize the limits of communication.

Language can create a new world, postmodern intellectuals argued, but the world created is purely subjective. The artist’s vision passes through a myriad of interpretive prisms, creating a plethora of new visions. Cultural radicals abandoned the idea of a unified culture with themselves in the vanguard. Avant gardists looked less to the future and instead emphasized the infinite possibilities of meaning their work could have in the subjective present. Cultural radicals thus led the way to the present state of pluralism in which, as David Hollinger notes, universalist, “species-centered discourse” has been replaced by particularist, “ethnoscentered discourse.” At the same time, the idea of the future had been discredited; intellectuals increasingly focused on present injustices against particular communities and looked for elements of the past that could be used in present political struggles.¹¹

The Avant Garde and Culture: Alienation, Innovation, and the Future

Culture is that complex combination of values, ideas, myths, and institutions that enables members of a social group to interpret their environment and organize their society. Culture functions to establish order and stability. Historian Warren I. Susman has shown that, in the United States, culture and cultural change have historically been the focus of the “liberal-radical” tradition. In particular, Susman contends, liberal and radical critics have been concerned with cultural restrictions on individual self-expression and self-fulfillment. Self-fulfillment through the synthesis of art and life was the goal of members of the avant garde. Thus, while avant gardism was at least partially rooted in Europe, it also had significant intellectual connections with American traditions of social criticism.¹²

To define the avant gardists in relation to their culture goes beyond many definitions of their movement, which focus merely on its aesthetic innovations. The resistance of cultures to change explains the extremely innovative quality of avant-garde creativity. With their innovations, members of the avant garde expressed both their alienation from their culture and their desire to transform that culture to create a new future. Thus, a distinct set of ideas defined the van. Some avant gardists illustrated particular points better than others; and there was certainly much room for variation on particular themes. However, the family resemblance, to use a phrase from Ludwig Wittgenstein, between avant gardists was strong, regardless of specific differences among members of the movement.¹³

Three themes explain the relationship of avant gardists to their culture: alienation, innovation, and the future.

The modern understanding of alienation comes from Karl Marx. Marx took this term from Hegel and from legal terminology to describe a sense of uselessness and isolation felt by people estranged from their work and, ultimately, society. Others subsequently used the term to describe modern people in general and intellectuals in particular.¹⁴

The alienation of the avant garde was rooted in social and economic changes that took place in Europe in the nineteenth century, which transformed the status of the artist. With the rise of the modern middle class and industrial capitalism, the old system of patronage disappeared. Artists were no longer artisans but laborers, selling their products on the open market and subject to the same economic risks as other laborers. And they had to compete against the new mass-produced culture. In this context, artists could either join the culture or define themselves by their opposition to it. Alienation was the beginning, therefore, of self-definition.

The result of this economic change was the creation of a new model for the artist—the bohemian. No longer the artisan, artists became intellectual vagabonds, living in poverty on the edge of society and defying the conventions of the middle class. The idea of bohemia was idealized from the beginning, but the model remained both the stereotype and the reality for artists well into the twentieth century.

The avant garde constituted an opposition culture. It emerged to counter the values of the new Victorian middle class that rose to cultural dominance with the industrial revolution. The Victorian world view of the English and American middle classes emphasized innocence. The Victorians desired to separate themselves from corruption and create a harmonious world. In the United States, this Victorian culture has also been referred to as the “genteel tradition.” Promoted by a group of literary publicists centered in cities of the Northeast, the genteel tradition was an attempt to civilize the emerging industrial order by encouraging graceful manners, strict morality, and respect for cultural tradition, especially that of England.¹⁵

Avant-garde critics of the dominant culture, who themselves came largely from the middle classes, experienced their society as over-civilized, inauthentic, formalist, and artificial. They believed that the genteel tradition smothered creativity and individuality. They rejected Victorian culture in the name of “real humanity.” Thus, in 1930, the editors of the American little magazine Blues, the poets Charles Henri Ford and Parker Tyler, declared in an editorial that “the hideous genteel, the sham culture of the admirers of William Lyon Phelps … comprise the elements in American life which are … hostile to the experimental enterprise of Blues’s artists; and by experimental enterprise we mean simply: freedom of the spirit and the imagination.” Vanguardists sought to combine that which the Victorians had tried to separate: the human and the animal, the civilized and the savage. Drawing on the new biology, physics, and social sciences, cultural radicals created ...