Cultural Mobility in the Interwar Avant-Garde Art Network

This book explores the issue of cultural mobility within the interwar network of the European avant-garde, focusing on selected writers, artists, architects, magazines and groups from Poland, Belgium and Netherlands. Regardless of their apparent linguistic, cultural and geographical remoteness, their mutual exchange and relationships were both deep and broad, and of great importance for the wider development of interwar avant-garde literature, art and architecture. This analysis is based on a vast research corpus encompassing original, often previously overlooked periodicals, publications and correspondence gathered from archives around the world.

Michal Wenderski, PhD, is an architect, translator and scholar of modern Dutch literature specialising in the history of European interwar avant-garde. He currently works at Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznan, Poland.

List of figures List of tables Acknowledgements List of abbreviations of consulted institutions and repositories Introduction Chapter 1: Polish, Belgian and Dutch avant-garde formations, their mutual contacts and cultural mobility within the international network of groups and periodicals 1.1. Interwar avant-garde formations of Dutch, Belgian and Polish provenance 1.2. Cultural mobility between Polish and Belgian avant-garde formations 1.2.1. Traces of Polish-Belgian cultural mobility in Belgian avant-garde periodicals 1.2.2. Traces of Polish-Belgian cultural mobility in Polish avant-garde periodicals 1.3. Cultural mobility between Polish and Dutch avant-garde formations 1.3.1. Traces of Polish-Dutch cultural mobility in Dutch avant-garde periodicals 1.3.2. Traces of Polish-Dutch cultural mobility in Polish avant-garde periodicals 1.4. Traces of Polish-Dutch and Polish-Belgian cultural mobility in relevant international avant-garde periodicals 1.5. Cross-referencing 1.6. Preliminary observations Chapter 2: Avant-garde manifestos and programmatic statements - inspirations, parallels and dissimilarities 2.1. Abstraction as the idiom of universal art 2.2. L'art pour ...? 2.3. Cooperation between disciplines and across borders 2.4. Preliminary conclusions Chapter 3: "What we do is no imitation, but an effort parallel to..." - selected works of art and architecture as representation of mutual influences and similarities 3.1. Avant-garde publications from Poland and the Low Countries in light of international trends in layout and page design 3.2. Piet Mondrian, Theo van Doesburg and Henryk Stazewski 3.3. Katarzyna Kobro and Georges Vantongerloo 3.4. Mieczyslaw Szczuka and Hendrik Nicolaas Werkman 3.5. Henryk Berlewi, Vilmos Huszár and Karel Maes 3.6. Poland, the Low Countries and foreign artists: the examples of El Lissitzky and Pietro (de) Saga 3.7. Interior design 3.8. Architecture 3.9. Preliminary conclusions Closing remarks References Primary sources Secondary sources Appendix