Realism, rationalism, surrealism

This is the third in a series of four books about art and its interpretation from the mid-nineteenth century to the end of the twentieth. The books seek to explain the most important issues confronting any study of modern art, without attempting exhaustive coverage. They present a range of approaches characteristic of current art-historical debates. The authors of the present book address debates in, and about, the avant-garde in the years between the two world wars. The first chapter, '"This liberty and this order": art in France after the First World War', considers responses by artists, primarily in France, to the First World War. The emergence of a 'School of Paris', and the competing avant-gardes of Purism, Dada and early Surrealism, is related to the wider social conditions existing in the wake of both devastation and victory. However, there is also a concern to indicate ways in which art can achieve independence from its framing conditions.^ Chapter 2, 'The language of construction', looks at the emergence of a concept of construction art. The focus is the post-revolutionary Soviet Union, though work in France and Weimar Germany is also considered. There is an examination of