Staff Pick: The Avant Gardists
Published on 1st September 2025
The Avant Gardists by Sjeng Scheijen
Realism, the Avant-Garde, and Dada are distinct, yet interconnected, artistic and intellectual movements that emerged in the 19th and 20th centuries. Realism focused on accurate, detailed depictions of everyday life, while the Avant-Garde pushed boundaries and challenged traditional artistic norms. Dada, born out of the disillusionment of World War I, embraced nonsense, irrationality, and anti-art principles.
The Avant Gardists is an enthralling, narrative biography of the art movement that transformed the modern world, tracing the lives and activities of the key protagonists as they set about a revolution in art.
October 1917 - The Russian Revolution wipes the old tsarist empire off the map. Marc Chagall, Wassily Kandinsky, Kazimir Malevich, Lyubov Popova, Alexander Rodchenko, Olga Rozanova, Vladimir Tatlin and other avant-garde artists participate in the revolutionary struggle, transforming inner cities with their progressive murals, posters, installations and performances.
The new political leaders soon want nothing to do with these radical artists.
Scheijen describes the events that shaped the artistic revolution in the first illustrated biography to relate the rise and fall of the leading figures of the Russian avant-garde.
Excerpts from diaries and correspondence reveal the extent of the avant-garde’s energy and determination to survive a totalitarian regime, civil war, hunger and terror.
A great book to dip in an out of if you're interested in the subject as much as I am.
I will be buying this book. It also sent me down the rabbit hole for my favourite artist George Grosz; a German artist known especially for his caricatural drawings and paintings of Berlin life in the 1920s.
He was a prominent member of the Berlin Dada and New Objectivity groups during the Weimar Republic.
Borrow the book today from your local library!
There's availability on tickets for this event at The Dublin History Festival HERE
Submitted by Karen in Comms.