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Timothy O. Benson, ed., Central European AvantGardes: Exchange and Transformation,19101930Central European AvantGardes: Exchange and Transformation, 19101930 by Timothy O.BensonReview by: Paul BettsThe Journal of Modern History, Vol. 76, No. 3 (September 2004), pp. 671-672Published by: The University of Chicago PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/425453.

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Book Reviews 671

Central European Avant-Gardes: Exchange and Transformation, 19101930.

Edited by Timothy O. Benson.Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press; Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art,

2002. Pp. 447. $59.95.

It is not all that long ago that the concept of Central Europe was mostly the stuff ofpolitical adventurism and wistful cultural nostalgia. While the regional designation maybe traced back to the Holy Roman Empire, it enjoyed a renaissance after the breakupof the Austro-Hungarian Empire as a new cultural ideal transcending geopolitical di-vision. The Soviet Unions imperium over the region from the early 1940s on nevercompletely snuffed out this cultural dream. Milan Kunderas famous essay from 1984,The Tragedy of Central Europe, is perhaps the best-known expression of the regionssense of loss and dispossession. In it, Kundera lamented how Central Europes onceirrepressible cultural depth and diversity had been devastated by both Nazi and Sovietoccupation, not least because he saw the regions Jews as the binding element in CentralEuropes rich and far-flung cultural heritage. No surprise, then, that the events of 1989

gave the concept of Central Europe a new lease on life, as the end of the cold waropened up the possibility of liberating both the present and past from cold war confines.

In large measure the catalog of the exhibition Central European Avant-Gardes:Exchange and Transformation, 1910 1930 springs from this new dispensation. Theshow was organized by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in the spring of 2002and traveled to Berlin for several months after that. The catalog is composed of somethirty short essays penned by a clutch of international scholars and art historians onCentral European cultures, cities, and avant-garde figures; it is handsomely illustratedwith hundreds of reproductions chronicling the dizzying variety of artistic productionfrom the period. Not that the shows concept is all that new. There were a number ofexhibitions already in the 1950s and 1960s (many of which were mounted in Paris)dedicated to rescuing Central European culture from cold war marginalization. Whilethese shows tended to stress cultural unity, more recent ones emphasized the regionsdiversity. The catalogs to the Italian show Futurismo & Futurismi (1985), edited byK. G. Pontus Hulten, and the show in Bonn in 1994, Europa, Europa: Das Jahrhundertder Avantgarde in Mittel- und Osteuropa, edited by Ryszard Stanislowski and Chris-toph Brockhaus, were milestones in this respect. In this spirit, the curators of the Central

European Avant-Gardes exhibition strove to challenge the conceptual unity of theregions avant-garde. In the words of the shows principal organizer, Timothy O. Ben-son, the point is not to foreground one but many avant-gardes, interacting with oneanother yet each retaining its unique characteristics (p. 16). Notable too is the showsdeliberate effort to shift the study of avant-garde activities from specific national(ist)contexts: the catalog is organized around fourteen regional cities, ranging from Weimarto Warsaw, Budapest to Bucharest, Zagreb to Ljubljana. But this is more than simplyextending the cultural geography of modernism beyond the well-worn circuit of Berlin,Paris, and Prague. The larger task instead is to return these cities to the avant-gardeweb of early twentieth-century European modernism. As Benson put it: While thisapproach pushes to the forefront the phenomena of reciprocal influence, and meaningas determined by immediate social and cultural setting (phenomena that have longmystified historians and theoreticians of culture), it opens us to a recognition that artistsof the era had themselves arrived at: the avant-garde had become at once regionallydiverse and irretrievably international (p. 16).

On this theme the catalog features a few informative essays. Michael Henry Heimspiece, Central Europe: The Linguistic Turn, neatly recalls the linguistic diversity ofthe region and how this shaped avant-garde activity; Eva Forgacss contribution, Be-

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672 Book Reviews

tween Cultures: Hungarian Concepts of Constructivism, ably discusses Hungarian

variations on one of the key artistic movements in the region, including some goodmaterial on Laszlo Moholy-Nagys pre-Bauhaus beginnings and post-Bauhaus influ-ence on regional artists. Esther Levingers essay, Ljubomir Micic and the ZenitistUtopia, offers some suggestive observations about Balkan modernism. Likewise,Krisztina Passuths more general essay on Berlin and Pal Derekys piece on Viennaare useful and perceptive. A common thread in many of the essays is how largerWestern European movements (futurism, dada, cubism) and Russian influences (con-structivism) were received and remade in smaller Central European urban hubs. Thereare also many interesting comments on long-obscure movements and figures across theregion.

Even so, there are a number of disappointing drawbacks. Chief among them is thatthe catalog is often quite difficult to read. The cumulative effect of all of these shortessays is not only an appreciation of the utter diversity of modernism in the region butalso a confused sense as to its myriad thematic connections. The short pieces on na-tionalism and modernity, for example, are too superficial to locate these movements in

any sturdy conceptual framework. No doubt diversity is the shows main theme, butthis doesnt mean that there are no patterns in the carpet. Indeed, there are a fewpotential interpretative keys strewn throughout the text that go largely unremarked. Forexample, there is mention at various points about the importance of periodicals (suchas the Hungarian Ma and A Tett, as well as the wide circulation of French, German,and Russian journals) in disseminating avant-garde activities across the region. Toolittle attention, however, is directed toward how this new, visual medium of masscultureprecisely because of the regions daunting linguistic diversityfunctionedas the real binding influence for artistic production in early twentieth-century CentralEurope, providing a new common visual vocabulary of modernism that could be easilyreproduced, dispensed, and reworked locally. Its visual nature and links to internationalmass media made it a very different story from modernist literature in the region, andit should be treated as such.

Second, Benson at one point makes a reference to Polish art historian Tomasz Gry-glewicz, who is quoted as saying that it was precisely the disbelief in absolute pro-gress in art that most distinguished the Central European avant-garde from its WesternEuropean counterparts (p. 50). This seems to me a suggestive perspective for reas-sessing what is so Central European about Central European art and culture, but, un-fortunately, there are no real takers. It is also quite ironic that the most clear and cogentsections of the catalog are the ones that refer to the major Western European or Russianinfluences, such as how Czech was Czech cubism, or how Micic was a kind of SlavicF. T. Marinetti.

Andrzej Turowskis statement at the end of the catalogArtistic and stylistic pro-cesses in Central Europe lacked consistent continuity and identity. They referred tofragments of works, functioned in different discourses, and mixed up terms and con-cepts. It was a stylistics of indetermination (p. 372)may be true. But given that thesubject in question is being studied from a distance of nearly a century, and given theslew of excellent new scholarship on Eastern European art and architecture, it seemsthat there could and have been more conceptual daring in interpreting these movementsafresh. In the end, the beautifully illustrated catalog provides little in the way of novelinterpretation: it thus serves as a missed opportunity to test some new hypotheses inreconsidering this rich field of study.

PAULBETTSUniversity of Sussex