Berfrois

The subject of the avant-garde and World War I not only summons the historical environment in which modernism originated, but leads to the critique of a dominant model of modernism centered on the notion of “autonomy,” the term theorized in Marxist art criticism of the late 1930s. This term conjures a neo-Kantian selfreflexive meditation on materials as a function of the artist’s retreat from the contradictions of capitalism. The term is still invoked by many, though with ivory-tower results, as it is usually denuded of its Marxist genealogy following Clement Greenberg’s shift during the McCarthy period. This article counters that discourse by focusing on the anarchism of four major modernists who were central figures in the development of Parisian modernism: Maurice de Vlaminck, André Derain, Pablo Picasso and Juan Gris. In formalist and semiotic discourse, the two movements associated with them, fauvism and cubism, are understood as entirely distinct — if not opposed — idioms, but when framed in terms of these artists’ anarchist antimilitarism, such stylistic innovations in both movements are better understood as manifestations of the formative impact of anarchist discourse.

“Modernist Abstraction, Anarchist Antimilitarism, and War”, Patricia Leighten, Anarchist Developments in Cultural Studies