The Art of Living in Avant-Garde Paris - by Rachel Silveri (Hardcover)

About the Book

"This book reshapes our understanding of the art-into-life ambitions of the European avant-gardes. Early twentieth-century artists' desire to abandon traditional forms of art making (easel painting, sculpture), exit established venues for art viewing (the gallery, the Salon), and integrate directly with life has been intimately tied to the definition of the historical avant-garde. Reorienting the typical focus on Soviet Constructivism and Berlin Dada, Rachel Silveri examines the art-into-life projects of a range of multinational practitioners living and working in interwar Paris. All were concerned with ethical questions--"How should I live?" "How should I relate to others?" "What is a good life?"-that they sought to address beyond the canvas and the page, using their bodies, identities, and social interactions as material to redesign and remake. With chapters exploring Tristan Tzara's performances of a Dadaist identity, Sonia Delaunay's fashions and self-branding, and the collective endeavor to operate the Surrealist Research Bureau, this book traces how an "art of living" developed against normative types of "lifestyle" in France between 1910 and 1930. As Dada becomes an identity, Simultanism becomes a business, and Surrealism becomes a workplace, ethical practices of self-making converge with issues of gender, ethnicity, and ways of relating to others, yielding a new narrative of the avant-garde endeavor to merge art and life"-- Provided by publisher.

Book Synopsis

How artists of interwar Paris created an "art of living," treating their daily lives as an aesthetic, ethical, and creative practice.

With The Art of Living in Avant-Garde Paris, Rachel Silveri takes a fresh look at the desire to unify art and life, an ambition long regarded as foundational to the European historical avant-gardes. She reveals how many early twentieth-century artists saw their own everyday lives--their bodies, identities, and relationships--as a type of creative material and a central component to their avant-garde practice. These artists abandoned traditional forms of artmaking and venues of art viewing, instead aspiring to integrate art with everyday life, creating an "art of living."

Considering Tristan Tzara's performances of Dadaist identity, Sonia Delaunay's simultaneous fashions and self-branding, and the collective endeavor to open and operate the Surrealist Research Bureau, Silveri offers a new narrative about how the artists of interwar Paris developed experiential life practices that resisted dominant forms of "lifestyle" and normative discourses surrounding gender, ethnicity, and office work. This book argues that ethical questions of "How should I live?" and "How should I relate to others?" were as important to the avant-garde as politics, and that aspirations to change the world played out in daily practices of self-making.

Review Quotes

"Silveri offers a transformative reformulation of the critical stakes in the art of living for the historical avant-gardes. Close analyses of the material practices of Tristan Tzara, Sonia Delaunay, and André Breton reveal that, far from a utopian ideal doomed to failure, their loosely shared ambition required variously differentiated negotiations--and accommodations--with normative social and ethical modes: the technologies of management, commerce, publicity, consumer culture, and gender relations foremost among them. Not least, by drawing on theoretical writings of Henri Lefebvre, Michel Foucault, and Judith Butler, she limns a fertile legacy--an everyday way of living--for our contemporary moment."--Lynne Cooke, curator and editor of "Woven Histories: Textiles and Modern Abstraction"

"Cutting through the myths of utopianism and failure regarding the avant-garde's unification of art and life, Silveri masterfully orchestrates rigorous historiography with archival discovery and luminous insight to reveal how Dada, Simultanist, and Surrealist artists transformed daily practices into acts of radical creativity amidst modernity's monolithic everyday. The Art of Living in Avant-Garde Paris invites us to see beyond the roster of avant-garde artists and objects to their concrete, ethical experiment in how to live."--Nell Andrew, University of Georgia

"In crystalline prose, Silveri analyzes these artists' strategies of self-fashioning through pointed research on the more ephemeral aspects and materials of their quotidian lives. In doing so, she traces the commerce embedded in modernism, disrupting entrenched perspectives that refute (or deliberately ignore) the coupling of art and business, and thus illuminates how interwar artists manipulated the entrepreneurial to promote themselves and their art."--Vivien Greene, Senior Curator, 19th- and Early 20th-Century Art, Guggenheim Museum

"This is a profoundly innovative and field-defining analysis of the productive intersections of aesthetics, ethics, and politics in the avant-garde exploration of the self. Its highly original thesis reframes avant-garde experimentalism as a vital precursor to critical theory. Silveri's arguments are of major significance for the ongoing scholarly revaluation of international modernism and its complex relations to emergent media and processes of production and consumption."--Patricia Allmer, University of Edinburgh

About the Author

Rachel Silveri is assistant professor in the School of Art + Art History at the University of Florida.