The avant-garde is a twentieth-century phenomenon. By the turn of the nineteenth century, artists were beginning to address a far larger audience than ever before, and it was one on whose understanding they could no longer depend. Aesthetic concerns, too, had shifted from representing visual phenomena to reconfiguring the visible world in new and complicated ways.

The public was rarely amused. Indeed, as these newer forms of art were presented in now famous exhibitions, derision and anger were the customary responses of the public and the critics. Artists formed more or less cohesive groups of like-thinking individuals who styled themselves the "avant-garde," really a military term for those pathfinders who first venture into unknown or enemy territory.

Through photographs of personalities, installations, and works of art, and in a lively text that recounts the artistic thinking and the gossip that surrounded each new movement, The Avant-Garde in Exhibition: New Art in the 20th Century traces this phenomenon from its beginnings in the Fauvist Salon d'Automne in Paris in 1905 through such notorious events as the exhibitions of the Section d'Or (Paris) and the Blue Rider (Munich), the Armory Show (New York), the Futurist 0-10 exhibition (Petrograd), the Dada Fair (Berlin), the Nazi's Degenerate Art Exhibition (Munich), the First Papers of Surrealism (New York), Peggy Guggenheim's Art of This Century (New York), the Ninth Street Show (New York), the Gutai Art Association (Japan), Le Vide (Paris), Full-Up (Paris), the New Realists (New York), Primary Structures (New York), and When Attitudes Become Form (Bern).