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The Theory of the Avant-Garde

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Over 20 years ago while an undergraduate in college, I was roaming the library stacks looking for a book to use for my Art History class. I spotted Poggioli's "Theory of the Avant Garde" and sat down on the floor and opened it to the first page. About an hour later, I got up with sore muscles but an invigorated intellect. It was easily the most significant book on art theory I would ever read.

Poggiolli exams the avant-garde movement with a critical eye. He neither castigates it as foolishness, nor excuses it the nihilism embedded in the movement. Rather, he takes it apart bit by bit and holds it up for reasoned examination.

This is not an easy book to make your way through. I recently began re-reading it prior to giving a copy to an artist friend and was surprised at how much harder it was for me in my 40's than it was in my 20's. I suppose it was all those brain cells I sacrificed to good beer and even better wine. Still, if you care deeply about the intellectual influences that guided art for the last 150 years, then you'd best work your way through it. Though it's translated from the Italian, it still reads elegantly enough in English.