By addressing key issues in visual culture and the politics of representation, this book provides a reference and an analysis of the work of Orton and Pollock, internationally acknowledged as the leading exponents of the social history of art.

Martha Ward tracks the development and reception of neo-impressionism, revealing how the artists and critics of the French art world of the 1880s and 1890s created painting's first modern vanguard movement. Paying particular attention to the participation of Camille Pissarro, the only older artist to join the otherwise youthful movement, Ward sets the neo-impressionists' individual achievements in the context of a generational struggle to redefine the purposes of painting. She describes the conditions of display, distribution, and interpretation that the neo-impressionists challenged, and explains how these artists sought to circulate their own work outside of the prevailing system. Paintings, Ward argues, often anticipate and respond to their own conditions of display and use, and in the case of the neo-impressionists, the artists' relations to market forces and exhibition spaces had a decisive impact on their art. Ward details the changes in art dealing, and chronicles how these and new freedoms for the press made artistic vanguardism possible while at the same time affecting the content of painting. She also provides a nuanced account of the neo-impressionists' engagements with anarchism, and traces the gradual undermining of any strong correlation between artistic allegiance and political direction in the art world of the 1890s. Throughout, there are sensitive discussions of such artists as Georges Seurat and Paul Signac, as well as Pissarro. Yet the touchstone of the book is Pissarro's intricate relationship to the various factions of the Paris art world.

The title of this book, The European Avant-Garde – A Hundred Years Later, implies the European avant-garde took place a century ago, that it is a thing of the past. However, it does not aim to consolidate this position, but to question it. It addresses temporality as the central dimension related to the notion of the avant-garde. The book brings forth original revisions of the theories of the avant-garde, the works of the avant-garde, the idea of the avant-garde as being the vanguard, the leading force of change. It addresses the returning of the avant-garde during the twentieth century and today.

Assembling a remarkable group of scholars, these essays explore how the circulation and exchange of 'vectors of the radical' shape the avant-garde. Mapping the movement of scripts, theatre activists, performances, and other material entities, they provide unprecedented perspectives on the transnational performance culture of the avant-garde.

This revised edition features ten new articles and is fully updated to take account of new critical approaches to post-war American art.

The Challenge of the Avant-Garde is the fourth of six books in the series Art and its Histories, which form the main texts of an Open University course. The course has been designed for students who are new to the discipline but will also appeal to those who have undertaken some study in this area. This volume traces the challenge posed to the academic canon by the emergent avant-garde of the early and mid-nineteenth century.It looks at significant shifts in the development of the concept, both in moves away from the sense of social leadership to a desire for artistic autonomy in the later nineteenth century and then a reverse movement to bridge the gap between art and life in the revolutionary avant-gardes of the early twentieth century. The book closes with an examination of the eventual incorporation of the avant-garde as a form of modern canon by the eve of World War II. Throughout, it seeks to relate the discourse of artistic avant-gardism in all its forms to contemporary social and political histories.

Combining a range of content with self-reflexive examination by scholars and practitioners, this edited volume interrogates the contemporary significance of the avant-garde. Rather than focusing on a particular region, period, or movement, the contributors bring together case studies to examine what constitutes the avant-garde canon.