<i>Concepts of the World: The French Avant-Garde and the Idea of the International, 1910–1940</i> . By Effie Rentzou <i>Concepts of the World: The French Avant-Garde and the Idea of the International, 1910–1940</i> . By RentzouEffie. (FlashPoints.) Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2022. vii + 394 pp., ill.

How did avant-garde artists in France — a nation at the forefront of capitalist and imperialist growth — conceive of the world in an era of rapid capitalist globalization, of ideologies justifying colonial invasion with claims of western superiority, and of an unstable political climate fed by war and fascism? In her highly engaging and meticulously researched work, Effie Rentzou deconstructs the relationship between the avant-garde and globalization, recasting it as ambivalent and complex, thereby challenging the longstanding account of modernity’s unhesitant ideological alignment with the forces of globalization. Drawing on rich examples of the diverse literary and visual production of the French avant-garde, from polemical texts to poetry, to periodicals and exhibitions, Rentzou illuminates the duality that characterizes the political language of this movement. Oscillating between apprehension and jubilation, the language of the avant-garde is situated in both a resistance to and embrace of globalization; it is from this irresolute position that the artists of the avant-garde construct the world. The book is divided into five chapters. The first investigates the role of the nation in the pre- and post-war avant-garde and posits Paris as its insecure ‘centre’. Rentzou demonstrates how the avant-garde undermined the stability of the centre–periphery model, examining in particular the work of Guillaume Apollinaire, who both reinforced the notion of French supremacy and subverted the authority of the nation. The second chapter studies what Rentzou refers to as the ‘messy internationalism’ of Dada as she ties this movement’s lack of centralization to the practices of anarchist internationalism. Dada, as Rentzou astutely illustrates, is its magazines, which harbour a conglomeration of social and artistic networks, reinforcing — as exemplified in Francis Picabia’s group portraits — Dada’s disparate internationalism in which the parts, together, do not cohere into a whole. Chapter 3 focuses on the avant-garde’s ‘cosmopolitan peasants’ and their embracing of a foreign, broken French in which error represents a structural method used to ‘create multiple positionings within and through language’ (p. 216). Criticizing the morals of French bourgeois society, Picabia reappropriated the negative characteristics associated with the cosmopolitan, and Louis Aragon the national attributes of the peasant, to reinscribe these figures in anti-nationalism. Chapter 4 examines the surrealists’ fusion of aesthetics and politics in the sumptuous periodical Minotaure (1933–39), which created an alternative universalism through the materiality of the body. Rejecting Greek humanism and corporeal ideals, the surrealists embraced the monstruous body, incarnated by the figure of the minotaur, as a universal body that privileges multiplicity. The final chapter analyses how the surrealists utilized their 1938 Parisian exhibition to critique bourgeois society from within its own institutions: held at Georges Wildenstein’s prestigious Galerie des Beaux-Arts, the exhibition represented the world as a city that is created by, and simultaneously creates, the specifically female body. It aimed to unmask the simulacra of capitalist internationalism by revealing a dynamic vision of the world in which community is prioritized over hierarchy. The conclusion underscores the avant-garde’s rethinking of the world as the rethinking of the human. This book ­represents a valuable contribution to avant-garde studies and reminds us that, in our own tumultuous times, it is all the more urgent that we dare to recreate the world.

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