---

A Cultural History of the Avant-Garde in the Nordic Countries 1950-1975 is the first publication to deal with the postwar avant-garde in the Nordic countries from a transnational perspective including all the arts and a broader cultural and political context.

---

A Cultural History of the Avant-Garde in the Nordic Countries 1950-1975 is the first publication to deal with the postwar avant-garde in the Nordic countries. The essays cover a wide range of avant-garde manifestations in arts and culture: literature, the visual arts, architecture and design, film, radio, television and the performative arts.
It is the first major historical work to consider the Nordic avant-garde in a transnational perspective that includes all the arts and to discuss the role of the avant-garde not only within the aesthetic field but in a broader cultural and political context: The cultural politics, institutions and new cultural geographies after World War II, new technologies and media, performative strategies, interventions into everyday life and tensions between market and counterculture.

---

"The subseries´ emphasis on cultural history, rather than a narrower focus on art history, [...] is particularly apt in a Nordic context, where a distinct set of model welfare states emerged in the twentieth century that helped generate funding, space, resources, and networks for, and public debates on, experimental arts, as these were deemed vital to the health and welfare of a modern democratic society.
[...]
While the scope and heterogeneity of the volume is imposing, its thoughtful organization into seven coherent sections makes it an accessible, dynamic, and useful scholarly reference work for anyone with an interest in avant-garde movements in, from, and including the Nordic region."
- Ursula Linqvist, Gustav Adolphus College , USA in Recherche Littéraire/Literary Research , 2017 pp. 193-198

"Serien A Cultural History of the Avant-Garde in the Nordic Countries er utrolig viktig, b†de i seg selv og som en del av en ›kt oppmerksomhet rundt nordisk modernisme. I dette andre bindet, som strekker seg fra 1950 til 1975, f†r vi essays om nordisk kunst fra Öyvind Fahlström til den alternative Melodi Grand Prix. Blant de 85 (!) essayene beskrives Galleri K›pcke i K›benhavn, Pistolteatern i Stockholm, De skandinaviske situasjonistene (selvf›lgelig), Morten Krohgs periode som intendant p† Kunstnernes Hus i Oslo, Lene Adler Pedersen og Bj›rn N›rgaards kvinnelige kristus-performance p† B›rsen i K›benhavn, Kjartan Slettemarks passprosjekt med portrettet til Nixon, og enormt mye annet. N†r de to siste bindene foreligger vil vesentlige deler av det 20. †rhundres nordiske avantgarde v‘re beskrevet i dette bokverket.

Den virkelige revolusjonen kommer imidlertid n†r dette blir pensum for kommende kunstnere og kunsthistorikere. Da vil endelig den Paris- og New York-sentrerte fortellingen om modernismen kunne erstattes med en bredere, global fortelling, der ogs† Norden inng†r."
- Jonas Ekeberg, Kunstkritikk

www.kunstkritikk.dk/artikler/24-desember-jonas-ekeberg-2/

---

Tania �rum, cand. mag. (1975), is associate professor at the University of Copenhagen. She has published monographs and articles on modernism and avant-garde and is General editor of A Cultural History of the Avant-Garde in the Nordic Countries, a subseries of Avant-Garde Critical Studies (Brill Rodopi).

Jesper Olsson, PhD (Stockholm 2005) is associate professor at the Department of Culture and Communication, Linköping University, Sweden, where he leads the research group "Literature, Media History, and Information Cultures". He has published extensively on literature, media, and the avant-garde.

---