“Art has poisoned our life”, proclaimed Dutch artist and De Stijl co-founder Theo van Doesburg. Reacting to the tumultuous crises of the twentieth century, especially the horrors of the First World War, avant-garde artists and writers sought to destroy art by transforming it into the substance of everyday life. Following the evolution of these revolutionary groups, How to Be Avant-Garde charts its pioneers and radical ideas. From Paris to New York, from Zurich to Moscow and Berlin, avant-gardists challenged the confines of the definition of art along with the confines of the canvas itself. Art historian Morgan Falconer starts with the dynamic Futurist founder Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, whose manifesto extolling speed, destruction and modernity seeded avant-gardes across Europe. In turn, Dadaists Hugo Ball and Emmy Hennings sought to replace art with political cabaret and the Surrealists tried to exchange it for tools to plumb the unconscious. He guides us through the Russian Constructivists with their adventures in advertising and utopianism and then De Stijl with the geometric abstractions of Piet Mondrian. The Bauhaus broke more boundaries, transmuting art into architecture and design. Finally, the Situationists swapped art for politics, with many of their ideas inspiring the 1968 Paris student protests. How to Be Avant-Garde is a journey through the interlocking networks of these richly creative lives with their visions of a better world, their sometimes sympathetic but often strange and turbulent conversations and their objects and writings that defied categorisation.

"From André Breton to Robert Smithson, the book nimbly threads the stories of many figures into a coherent and pleasurable read… With a talent for setting the scene and rendering vivid portraits, Falconer brings the stories of these artists, each with conflicting agendas, into one comprehensible argument." -- Aaron Peck - The Times Literary Supplement
"The book rushes readers at a velocity Marinetti would have enjoyed.… [F]ascinating." -- Orlando Whitfield - The New York Times
"A group biography of the modern artists who at one point or another had enough of the artistic status quo.… [B]eing avant-garde, Mr. Falconer reminds us, meant going yet further and abandoning art as traditionally conceived." -- Max Norman - The Wall Street Journal
"A future classic along the lines of Lipstick Traces, one of those books that anyone hoping to bring true newness into the world will find and pass along like a shibboleth to others seeking the same." -- Mark Braude, author of Kiki Man Ray
"Morgan Falconer is the pitch-perfect cheering but skeptical guide through the intricacies, infighting, backbiting, dead ends, crazy schemes, mad ideas, wild leaps, and triumphs of the avant-garde." -- Jerry Saltz, Pulitzer Prize winner and best-selling author of How to Be an Artist

Morgan Falconer, a critic and art historian, teaches at Sotheby’s Institute of Art. He is the author of Painting Beyond Pollock and has written for publications including the Economist, the Times (UK), Art in America, and Frieze. He lives in Queens, New York.