How to Be Avant-Garde: Modern Artists and the Quest to End Art

$19.99 at de Young Museum.

The strange story of the twentieth-century artists who sought to destroy art by transforming it into the substance of everyday life. “Art has poisoned our life,” proclaimed Dutch artist and De Stijl cofounder Theo van Doesburg. Reacting to the tumultuous crises of the twentieth century, especially the horrors of World War I, 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…