Movement, Manifesto, Melee

The years before World War I were a fertile period for artists in Europe and the United States who were challenging aesthetic convention in music, writing, and the visual arts. These early pioneers of modernism sometimes preferred to work alone, but just as often they were associated with groups whose boundaries were permeable and freely changing. While these individual groups—including the Futurists, Imagists, Blue Rider, and the Second Vienna School—have been thoroughly studied, scholars of the period have often neglected the formative and pervasive interactions of these groups across geographic and artistic boundaries.

Providing a historical taxonomy of this influential milieu, Milton Cohen demonstrates how these groups were largely responsible for the artistic innovation and nearly all the avant-garde agitation and major events of these years. With concluding appendices intended for scholars and specialists, this engagingly written book will be useful not only for classroom use and scholarly research, but will appeal to anyone interested in reading a fresh approach to the history of early modernism.