Surveying the Avant-Garde examines the art and literature of the
Americas in the early twentieth century through the lens of the
questionnaire, a genre as central as the manifesto to the history
of the avant-garde. Questions such as "How do you imagine Latin
America?" and "What should American art be?" issued by avant-garde
magazines like Iman, a Latin American periodical based in Paris,
and Cuba's Revista de Avance demonstrate how editors, writers, and
readers all grappled with the concept of "America," particularly in
relationship to Europe, and how the questionnaire became a
structuring device for reflecting on their national and aesthetic
identities in print. Through an analysis of these questionnaires
and their responses, Lori Cole reveals how ideas like "American
art," as well as "modernism" and "avant-garde," were debated at the
very moment of their development and consolidation. Unlike a
manifesto, whose signatories align with a single polemical text,
the questionnaire produces a patchwork of responses, providing a
composite and sometimes fractured portrait of a community. Such
responses yield a self-reflexive history of the era as told by its
protagonists, which include figures such as Gertrude Stein, Alfred
Stieglitz, Jean Toomer, F. T. Marinetti, Diego Rivera, and Jorge
Luis Borges. The book traces a genealogy of the genre from the
Renaissance paragone, or "comparison of the arts," through the rise
of enquetes in the late nineteenth century, up to the contemporary
questionnaire, which proliferates in art magazines today. By
analyzing a selection of surveys issued across the Atlantic, Cole
indicates how they helped shape artists' and writers' understanding
of themselves and their place in the world. Based on extensive
archival research, this book reorients our understanding of
modernism as both hemispheric and transatlantic by narrating how
the artists and writers of the period engaged in aesthetic debates
that informed and propelled print communities in Europe, the United
States, and Latin America. Scholars of modernism and the
avant-garde will welcome Cole's original and compellingly crafted
work.
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