Surveying the Avant-garde ― Questions on Modernism, Art, and the Americas in Transatlantic Magazines

Surveying the Avant-Garde examines the art and literature of the Americas in the early twentieth century through the lens of the questionnaire, a genre as central as the manifesto to the history of the avant-garde.

Questions such as “How do you imagine Latin America?” and “What should American art be?,” issued by avant-garde magazines like Spain’s La Gaceta Literaria and Cuba’s Revista de Avance, demonstrate how these publications, their contributors, and their readers all grappled with the concept of “America,” particularly in relationship to Europe. Engaging with this underexamined trove of primary source material, Lori Cole shows how “modernism” and the “avant-garde” were debated at the very moment of their development and consolidation. Unlike the manifesto, whose signatories aligned with a single polemical text, the questionnaire produced a patchwork of responses, providing a composite portrait of a community. Cole’s analysis of select surveys demonstrates how the genre helped shape artists’ and writers’ understanding of themselves and their place in the world and yields remarkable insights into the history of the era as told by its protagonists—figures ranging from Gertrude Stein to Diego Rivera and Jorge Luis Borges, who were developing an increasingly expansive notion of American identity in their work and in print.

An original and compellingly crafted study, this book further reorients our understanding of modernism as transatlantic by demonstrating how the artists and writers of the period engaged in aesthetic debates that shaped and propelled print communities in Europe, the United States, and Latin America. Scholars, students, and enthusiasts of modernism and the avant-garde will welcome Cole’s field-advancing work.

Lori Cole is Visiting Assistant Professor at the Center for Experimental Humanities at New York University.