Morgan Falconer is the pitch-perfect cheering but skeptical guide through the intricacies, infighting, backbiting, dead ends, crazy schemes, mad ideas, wild leaps, and triumphs of the avant-garde.--Jerry Saltz, Pulitzer Prize winner and best-selling author of How to Be an Artist

Chock full of engaging details and anecdotes, Morgan Falconer's book takes us on a lively romp through many of the locales where twentieth-century vanguard figures sought to create a new relationship between art and life. How to be Avant-Garde should appeal both to those in search of a good read and to those intrigued by the vexing question of what it all meant.--Jerrold Seigel, author of Bohemian Paris and The Private Worlds of Marcel Duchamp

A future classic along the lines of Lipstick Traces, one of those books that anyone hoping to bring true newness into the world will find and pass along like a shibboleth to others seeking the same.--Mark Braude, author of Kiki Man Ray

What is art for? How to Be Avant-Garde examines what happened when the horrors of World War I made it clear that the traditional answer?that it's for making rich people's homes nicer?could no longer apply. Maybe art's time was up? Maybe it should no longer exist at all? Why was art between the wars so vivid and interesting? Read How to Be Avant-Garde and find out."--Ruth Brandon, author of Spellbound by Marcel: Duchamp, Love, and Art

How to Be Avant-Garde can take its place alongside such mainstays as Roger Shattuck's The Banquet Years and Robert Hughes's The Shock of the New as a lively and thought-provoking survey of the twentieth century's most impactful contribution to cultural life.--Mark Polizzotti, author of Why Surrealism Matters

With entertaining asides about his own experiences as critic, scholar, and maker of art, Falconer offers a vivid picture of the fervent efforts of artists questioning the meaning of art itself. A well-informed, spirited cultural history.--Kirkus Reviews, starred review

[A]n engrossing survey, full of colorful characters and winning personal touches... [Falconer] takes readers on a tour of last century's most radical avant-garde movements.--Michael Patrick Brady "Boston Globe"

[A] group biography of the modern artists who at one point or another had enough of the artistic status quo... [B]eing avant-garde, Mr. Falconer reminds us, meant going yet further and abandoning art as traditionally conceived.--Max Norman "Wall Street Journal"

The book rushes readers at a velocity [Filippo Tommaso] Marinetti would have enjoyed... What's fascinating in Falconer's brief studies of these avant-gardists is how, in stark contrast to many artists today, their art-making seemed to exist outside the context of the market.--Orlando Whitfield "New York Times"

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

Pub date: 2025-02-18

Length: 288 pages