Peter Bürger: Theory of the Avant-Garde (1974–) [DE, EN, ES, PT, CZ]

“In this volume, Peter Bürger formulates a theory of the ‘institution of art’. He argues that the social status of literature and art cannot be explained by making simple, direct links between the contents of individual works and social history. Rather, he holds, it is the social status of art, its function and prestige in society, that provides the connection between the individual art work and history. Bürger’s concept of the institution of art establishes a framework within which a work of art is both produced and received.

The French and German literary and visual avant-garde of the 1920s provides the test of Bürger’s theory. Focusing on the role of the artistic manifesto and, particularly, on the collage as an art form, he shows how avant-garde movements questioned the autonomous, self-referential status of art in bourgeois society and thus represented a radical break with the aestheticism of high modernism. Bürger attacks metaphysical aesthetics and argues instead for a materialistic aesthetic theory for today, one that is rooted in the reality of the social sphere. His theory calls into question any conventional concept of art derived from Romantic notions of organic unity.

Theory of the Avant-Garde provoked such discussion in Germany that its publisher, Suhrkamp Verlag, issued a book of responses that was more than twice the size of Bürger’s own book.” (from the back cover)

German edition
Publisher Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main, 1974
Second edition, 1993
147 pages

English edition
Translated by Michael Shaw
Foreword by Jochen Schulte-Sasse
Publisher University of Minnesota Press, 1984
Theory of History and Literature series, 4
ISBN 0816610673
134 pages

Reviews: Benjamin Buchloh (Art in America, 1984), Leah Ulansey (MLN, 1984), Daglind Sonolet (Telos, 1984), Michael T. Jones (German Quarterly, 1986), Martin Vrba (A2, 2016, CZ).

Publisher (DE)
Publisher (EN)
Publisher (CZ)

Theorie der Avantgarde (German, 2nd ed., 1974/1993, updated on 2020-10-13)
Theory of the Avant-Garde (English, 1984, assembled from various sources, no OCR, updated to full version on 2014-5-12 via Charles, updated to OCR version on 2016-1-23 via a2, 12 MB)
Teoría de la vanguardia (Spanish, trans. Jorge García, 1987), 3rd edition (2000, 51 MB)
Teoria da vanguarda (Portuguese, trans. Ernesto Sampaio, 1993)
Teorie avantgardy (Czech, trans. Václav Magid, 2015, added on 2020-4-5)

See also Bürger’s essay Avant-Garde and Neo-Avant-Garde: An Attempt to Answer Certain Critics of Theory of the Avant-Garde, 2010.

Gennifer Weisenfeld: Mavo: Japanese Artists and the Avant-Garde, 1905-1931 (2002)

“The radical Japanese art group Mavo roared into new arenas and new art forms during the 1920s, with work ranging from performance art to painting, book illustration, and architectural projects. Hurling rocks through glass roofs and displaying their rejected works, Mavo artists held peripatetic protest exhibitions against the Japanese art establishment. Ultimately, Mavo’s work became a major influence in Japanese commercial art and had a pronounced and lasting impact on Japanese visual and political culture. This abundantly illustrated volume, the first book-length study in English on Mavo, provides a critical evaluation of this often outrageous and iconoclastic movement, tracing Mavo’s relationship to broader developments in modernism worldwide.

Gennifer Weisenfeld provides a fascinating look into Japanese popular culture by showing how Mavo artists sought to transform Japanese art in response to the rise of industrialism. They deliberately created images that conveyed the feelings of crisis, peril, and uncertainty that were beginning to characterize daily life. Their art often alluded to mechanical environments through the use of abstracted imagery such as interconnected tubular forms and shapes reminiscent of riveted steel-plate girders. Looking in depth at the art itself, the flamboyant personalities of the artists, and the cultural and political history of Japan in this interwar period, Weisenfeld traces the strategies used by these artists as they sought to reintegrate art into daily experience.

Weisenfeld thoroughly documents the links between Mavo artists and a wide range of other artistic and political movements with which they associated themselves, such as futurism, dada, expressionism, socialism, and communism. Capturing the restlessness and iconoclastic fervor of Mavo, Weisenfeld is the first to fully locate this modern Japanese artistic community within the broader historical and intellectual framework of international art of the early twentieth century.”

Publisher University of California Press, 2002
ISBN 0520223381, 9780520223387
368 pages

Reviews: Patricia Failing (caa.reviews), Alexandra Munroe (J Japanese Studies), J. Keith Vincent (J Asian Studies).

Publisher

PDF (95 MB, no OCR, updated on 2017-7-17)
multiple formats (Internet Archive, added on 2017-7-17)

See also Weisenfeld’s essay Mavo’s Conscious Constructivism: Art, Individualism, and Daily Life in Interwar Japan (1996, 10 pp) and
Hagiwara Kyōjirō’s Death Sentence (1925).

László Moholy-Nagy: Painting, Photography, Film (1925–) [DE, EN]

This book presents Moholy-Nagy’s photograms, X-rays, super-wide-angle fisheye pictures, double prints, collages, montages, and the Bauhaus artist’s thoughts on the interrelationship of type, audio, and visual perception.

From the English edition: “The layout of the pages designed by Moholy-Nagy in 1927–bold sans-serif captions surrounded by lots of white space; compositions composed of arrows, dots, photographs, and heavy ruled lines — is much more like a movie storyboard or a musical score. It conveys a suggestion of imploding optical and retinal phenomena, much like driving down the Los Angeles Freeway at 70 mph or jolting through Philadelphia on the Metroliner.. This edition is a translation and facsimile of the second German edition of Malerei, Fotographie, Film published in 1927 by the Bauhaus Press; and it serves as a valuable reminder of the graphic design pioneered at the Bauhaus by Moholy-Nagy and Herbert Bayer..”

“Gropius had invited the twenty-eight-year-old Hungarian phenom onto the Bauhaus faculty in 1923, and Malerei Fotografie Film is Moholy-Nagy’s first attempt to lay out his entire theory and program for photography, and ultimately, for the transformation of human vision.. The book’s bold typography and design enacted Moholy’s concept of ‘typofoto,’ involving the integration of type and images, which was further elaborated in his two later theoretical works, Von Material zu Architektur and Vision in Motion..” (Randell Roth)

Contains photographs by Alfred Steiglitz, Albert Renger-Pazsch, L. Moholy-Nagy, Man Ray, Lucia Moholy, Hannah Hoch and others.

Publisher Albert Langen, Munich, 1925
Volume 8 of Bauhausbücher series
Second edition, 1927
140 pages
via Bibliothèque Kandinsky

English edition
With a Note by Hans M. Wingler, and a Postcript by Otto Stelzer
Translated by Janet Seligman
Publisher Lund Humphries, London, 1969
150 pages
via Sorin Danut

Moholy-Nagy at Monoskop wiki

Malerei, Fotografie, Film (German, 2nd ed., 1925/1927, 131 MB, via Bibliothèque Kandinsky, updated on 2022-4-13)
Malerei, Fotografie, Film (German, 2nd ed., 1925/1927, PDF, JPG, in Heidelberg U Library, added on 2019-7-7)
Painting, Photography, Film (English, trans. Janet Seligman, 1969, added on 2014-8-17)

See also other titles in Bauhaus Books series.