The poet Céline Arnauld (1885-1952) was at the heart of Paris Dada. Her experimental texts appeared in the most prominent avant-garde journals and she published almost a dozen books. Yet Arnauld predicted as early as 1924 that she would be written out of history. Isolated by personal loss and financially insecure, she took her own life in 1952. Her story is one of an individual with an elusive identity - she was a Jewish émigré, born Carolina Goldstein in Romania - who left behind a body of work rich in innovation. In this study, Ruth Hemus conveys the pleasure of discovering this neglected figure and her inventive writing. Charting one woman's navigation of the avant-garde over a thirty-year period (1918-1948), she sets out Arnauld's quest for an autonomous poetry that she herself called 'ultra-modern.' Ruth Hemus is a Reader in French and Visual Arts at Royal Holloway, University of London.

This rich, in-depth exploration of Dada’s roots in East-Central Europe is a vital addition to existing research on Dada and the avant-garde. Through deeply researched case studies and employing novel theoretical approaches, the volume rewrites the history of Dada as a story of cultural and political hybridity, border-crossings, transitions, and transgressions, across political, class and gender lines. Dismantling prevailing notions of Dada as a “Western” movement, the contributors to this volume present East-Central Europe as the locus of Dada activity and techniques. The articles explore how artists from the region pre-figured Dada as well as actively “cannibalized”, that is, reabsorbed and further hybridized, a range of avant-garde techniques, thus challenging “Western” cultural hegemony.

Scansion in Psychoanalysis and Art examines a strain of artists spanning more than a century, beginning at the dawn of photography and culminating in the discussion of contemporary artists, to illustrate various psychoanalytic concepts by examining artists working in a multitude of media. Drawing on the theories of Sigmund Freud, who applied psychoanalytic methods to art and literature to decipher the meaning and intention of the creator, as well as Jacques Lacan’s dissemination of scansion as a powerful disruption of narrative, the book explores examples of the long and rich relationship between psychoanalysis and the fine arts. Whilst guiding readers through the different artists and their artforms – from painting and music to poetry, collage, photography, film, performance art, technology and body modification – Sinclair interrogates scansion as a generative process often inherent of the act of creation itself. This is an intriguing book for psychoanalysts, psychologists and creative arts therapists who wish to explore the generative potential of scansion and the relationship between psychoanalysis and the arts, as well as for artists and art historians interested in a psychoanalytic view of these processes.

There’s nothing pure about modernism. For all the later critical emphasis upon “medium specificity”, modernist artists in their own times revel in the exchange of motifs and tropes from one kind of art to another; they revel in staging events where different media play crucial roles alongside each other, where different media interfere with each other, to spark new and surprising experiences for their audiences. This intermediality and multi-media activity is the subject of this important collection of essays. The authoritative contributions cover the full historical span of modernism, from its emergence in the early twentieth century to its after-shocks in the 1960s. Studies include Futurism’s struggle to create an art of noise for the modern age; the radical experiments with poetry; painting and ballet staged in Paris in the early 1920s; the relationship of poetry to painting in the work of a neglected Catalan artist in the 1930s; the importance of architecture to new conceptions of performance in 1960s “Happenings”; and the complex exchange between film, music and sadomasochism that characterises Andy Warhol's “Exploding Plastic Inevitable”.

The poet Céline Arnauld (1885-1952) was at the heart of Paris Dada. Her experimental texts appeared in the most prominent avant-garde journals and she published almost a dozen books. Yet Arnauld predicted as early as 1924 that she would be written out of history. Isolated by personal loss and financially insecure, she took her own life in 1952. Her story is one of an individual with an elusive identity -- she was a Jewish émigré, born Carolina Goldstein in Romania -- who left behind a body of work rich in innovation. In this study, Ruth Hemus conveys the pleasure of discovering this neglected figure and her inventive writing. Charting one woman's navigation of the avant-garde over a thirty-year period (1918-1948), she sets out Arnauld's quest for an autonomous poetry that she herself called 'ultra-modern.' Ruth Hemus is a Reader in French and Visual Arts at Royal Holloway University.

"He is the invisible oxygen of our poetry."--Octavio Paz

Combining a range of content with self-reflexive examination by scholars and practitioners, this edited volume interrogates the contemporary significance of the avant-garde. Rather than focusing on a particular region, period, or movement, the contributors bring together case studies to examine what constitutes the avant-garde canon.