Colours of the Avant-garde: Romanian Art 1910-1950 (Italian and English Edition)

Colours of the Avant-garde is decidedly not an exhibition thoroughly and honestly dedicated to the avant-garde, not even to the complex and contradictory, Romanian one. Seen from the purist, advanced avant-garde outposts, the exhibition is almost disloyal. It not only starts with modernist works of the 1910s, long before the Dadaist European debut through the agency of the lunatic proceedings at Cabaret Voltaire, but it also ends with pseudo-avant-garde, realist-socialist collages produced in 1950s, long after the official expiration of the properly historical avant-garde. Moreover, the very bulk of the exhibition is assigned to a mixture of various kinds of mellow modernisms, ranging from Symbolism to a Cézanne-touched classical, traditional post-impressionism or from Constructivist to Surrealist and even somehow retarded, Expressionist works. Despite the fact that most of their ideological standpoints were theoretically adverse, one is struck by the unexpected recurrence of some prominent iconographical data that link together artists, works and events apparently disconnected, placed at the opposing ends of the same art scene. But this is precisely the point of the exhibition. Read more