The European Avant-Gardes

This volume in the series of scholarly catalogues of the Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection deals with some of the most innovative art-works of the first half of the 20th century. More than forty artists from ten countries, including France, Spain, Italy, Britain and the Netherlands, are represented, and the catalogue throws new light on a period of intense creative ferment in the visual arts, when proponents of the new avant-gardes vied to demolish old dogmas and to be modern. The volume offers new research on significant groups of works by Braque, Ernst, Gris, Kupka, Leger, Picasso and Schwitters, as well as important new discoveries concerning major paintings by Balla, Bomberg, Dali, Miro and Wadsworth. Besides providing the basic evidence for securing attributions, provenances and dates, the texts in this catalogue uncover crucial material for the interpretation of many works, and place them individually in their specific historical contexts. A special feature of many entries is the use of technical investigations to address questions concerning processes of conception and making, questions which are often fundamental to the study of 20th-century art. Fresh light is thrown on the so-called 'automatist' procedures of the leading Surrealists (especially Ernst), on the open-ended working methods of the leading Cubists and Mondrian, as well as on the explicitly mechanistic methods of artists like van Doesburg or Servranckx.

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Nonfiction. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.