Online Exhibition

The Avant-Garde Between the Wars

Small magazines were of fundamental importance in disseminating the literature, ideas, and art of the avant-garde, for example, the Dada and Surrealist movements, between the two world wars. The titles of various reviews indicate in themselves the iconoclastic aims of the editors. Here are a few examples from the Pia collection:

La Ligne de Coeur . The first issue is dated November, 1925.

L’oeuf dur. Aragon, Cocteau, and Jacob were active in this review. The spring 1924 issue includes the poem, « Délectation, » by François Mauriac.

Max Jacob, illustrated poem, « Romances, » in Feuillets inutiles, November 1931.

Illustrated page from « Romances»

Postcard from Blaise Cendrars (1887-1961) to André Blandin in Brussels, referring to the latter’s Belle Violence.

Verso of postcard from Cendars to Blandin.

Cendrars’ poetry of this period was an important contribution to modernism: Du monde entier (1919), Dix-neuf poèmes élastiques (1919), Documentaires (original title, Kodak, 1924).