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  • Embattled Avant-Gardes: Modernism's Resistance to Commodity Culture in Europe
  • Laura Winkiel
Embattled Avant-Gardes: Modernism's Resistance to Commodity Culture in Europe. Walter L. Adamson. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2007. Pp. xii + 435. $45.00 (cloth).

Walter Adamson's new book joins a movement of sorts within modernist studies—spawned most notably by Pierre Bourdieu, Peter Bürger, and Lawrence Rainey—to interpret modernism as a field of contesting positions within the institution of art—a set of norms, expectations, and values that determines what counts as art. Moreover, this institution mediates between the artists, their works of art and the public, thereby defining what art will be produced, distributed, viewed and read, and evaluated. In tracing how this institution mediates the public sphere of art, Embattled Avant-Gardes also ventures into the burgeoning field of material modernisms, a subfield within modernist studies that concerns the production, reception, and distribution of modernist art, periodicals, and literature, and the everyday modernisms of fashion and design. And while Bürger's Theory of the Avant-Garde has been critiqued ad nauseum, Adamson returns to his work as well as to his Frankfurt School precursor, Theodor Adorno, with a refreshing and productive lens. Shearing from these critics their Marxist teleologies and terminologies, he focuses on the historical and aesthetic contexts in which avant-gardists from both the right and left battled the commodification of art. This critical move makes for a rich, compelling, and wide-ranging intellectual history that brings together voices and movements both commonly seen together and those more rarely discussed.

Discarding the assertion that modernists feared and rejected anything so global as "modernity," Adamson makes the case that what modernists dreaded most was the effect of the vast expansion of for-profit cultural media wherein entertainment and commodity cultures replace sacralized art. This thesis allows Adamson to join populist F. T. Marinetti with mandarin modernists such as Guillaume Apollinaire and Wassily Kandinsky in their common refusal to allow exchange value determine the standard for judging art. Arguing that the avant-garde's concern for the institution of art trumped political ideologies both left and right, Adamson traces a line of continuity with aestheticism and decadence despite the avant-garde's very different strategy of protecting art through public engagement rather than retreat. Indeed, by focusing on the institution of art and the artist's role in defining and evaluating art, Adamson is able to avoid many of the predictable moves of avant-garde studies. Specifically, he links avant-garde's focus on place (whether rural folk or national traditions) to a resistance to rootless commodity culture following (and transforming) the arts and crafts tradition of Ruskin and Morris. From this tradition, Adamson, with great clarity and depth, traces a critical genealogy through avant-gardist [End Page 439] precursors Baudelaire, Zola, Huysmans, Mallarmé, Wagner, Hermann Muthesius, and the German Werkbund as well as to expected critics of commodity culture, Marx and Benjamin, to show their engagement with and resistance to commodity culture. Then, after a lengthy and detailed examination of how Marinetti's Futurism, Apollinaire's cubism, and Kandinsky's constructivism failed in their prewar quest for modernist hegemony over culture, Adamson's framework allows him to find continuities between prewar and postwar avant-gardes. He demonstrates how German Bauhaus, Dutch De Stijl and French purism, fascist-leaning Futurism and other Italian avant-gardes (strapaese and Novecento), and communist-leaning surrealism sought alliances with industry and political parties in order to more effectively influence the shaping of aesthetics in the postwar return to order. The last chapter focuses on the neglected figure of Herbert Read, particularly in his guise as founding director of the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) in London after the Second World War, where he played a key role in educating the public about modernist art, literature, and design. The autonomous prewar avant-gardes may have failed to transform the public sphere, but the postwar avant-gardes continued in their quest to institutionalize modernism in order to resist commodity culture.

Such a summary only gestures at the complex depth of this erudite, richly comparative study of avant-garde aesthetics and...

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