“Vanguards of the Future”: Bernard Shaw, the Avant-Garde, and Cultural Politics

One aspect of modernity, from the French Revolution on, has been the drive toward a utopian future. This has been apparent in artists as well as conscious political revolutionaries or philosophers like Marx. Like his avant-garde contemporaries, Bernard Shaw was not content to turn away from the masses and make works of art for the contemplation of a select minority. He wished to create works of art that might have a place in forging the “new man,” a major trope of the period and of special importance not only to Shaw but also to the avant-garde. Both Shaw and the avant-garde wanted to create original works of art, of course, but they were actually more concerned with giving form to the chaotic, inchoate modern world itself, a time of anxiety but also of excitement and promise. They were cultural politicians, scientists in the laboratory of life hoping to make a new man with the revolutionary artistic techniques fashioned out of their own genius. This essay explores what the author refers to as Shaw’s utopian modernism, particularly as it merged in his politics and in his artistic creation, and compares it to the utopian modernism and politics of the avant-garde, most particularly the Italian futurists and the Russian constructivists.