Paris et le nationalisme des avant-gardes: 1909–1924 par Thomas Hunkeler (review)

A drive for cultural purity, international collaboration as treachery, a suspicion of all foreigners, a rhetorical landscape in which each person seems to have already made up their mind and believes that their position is the best.. . These are some of the overriding themes dealt with in Thomas Hunkeler’s study, which — apart from the final sentence — focuses not on the present but on European avant-garde movements that one might generally associate with progressive, cosmopolitan attitudes. As Hunkeler points out, scholarship has tended to associate the avant-garde movements under discussion with specific countries: Vorticism with Britain, Dada and Surrealism with France, Expressionism with Germany, Futurism with Italy, and Constructivism with Russia. Notwithstanding some familiarly French centres of mass (Apollinaire, Paris), Hunkeler’s transnational approach facilitates his convincing argument that this compartmentalization has occluded the significant and illuminating tension between nationalism and internationalism in avant-garde movements. Much of the book discusses various prises de position established between the Futurist manifesto of 1909 and the formal inception of Surrealism in 1924, with some productive leeway outside of this timeframe. Alexandra Exter and Amédée Ozenfant are among the figures that help to freshen a cast that will largely be very familiar to scholars of the avant-garde (Alberto Savinio, as an international intermedial, is surprisingly absent). Hunkeler also shows how even avant-garde production was intimately caught up in state-level policy to revalorize national heritage. In Russia, for instance, French artists were progressively excluded from the Toison d’or salons (1908–10) as part of ‘l’émancipation de l’art russe’ (p. 112). Albert Gleizes uses martial language to prescribe Cubist cultural purity despite acknowledging historical outsider influence and migration by the Celts, while an even harder line on external influences is taken by the Symbolists. Reference is made to important questions regarding folk traditions, ethnicity, and the position of regional languages. There remains, however, a much broader discussion to be had about how (inter)national cultural politics maps onto gender, race, religion, and ideology tout court. Indeed, avant-garde homosociality is itself a form of ideological ‘nationalism’, and the corpus is heavily masculinized. Conversely, the work of Hannah Höch, Céline Arnauld, and numerous other women would have contributed richly to the discussion of (anti-)nationalist–internationalist discourse. Source analysis tends to focus on authorial intention, even as the cover image for the book, Robert Delaunay’s Champ de Mars: la tour rouge (1911/23), invitingly proposes a formal reading of avant-garde aesthetics in relation to history (the Champ de Mars as a site of national unity and conflict during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; the Eiffel Tower as the entrance to the 1889 Exposition universelle; and Gustave Eiffel’s physical and symbolic gift to the US of La Liberté éclairant le monde). Nonetheless, Hunkeler makes a substantial contribution in foregrounding the extent to which a chauvinistic vying for cultural superiority accompanied — and sometimes surpassed — the attempt by individual authors to build an aesthetic project. His impressive erudition also nuances individual cases (Wyndham Lewis is an excellent highlight). Numerous avant-garde writers retrospectively censored nationalistic aspects of their early work. Hunkeler, however, vitally demonstrates the lure of nationalism even to those for whom such impulses might seem inherently antithetical.