Art

What a difference a century makes. Today, aeroplanes supposedly spell the destruction of the planet, but in 1907 they were nothing less than a miracle. While the young and rebellious of the twenty-first-century campaign to stop the expansion of airports, in the days of the Wright Brothers youthful radicals saw aeroplanes as an exhilarating escape from tradition. In 1909, in his famous futurist manifesto, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti enthused about 'the gliding flight of aeroplanes whose propellers sound like the flapping of a flag and the applause of enthusiastic crowds'. Dynamic, dangerous, and the embodiment of the early twentieth century's most sexy commodities, speed and technology; who would have dreamt that the plane's magical promise would dwindle, decades later, into environmental regrets and Ryanair? Feature continues

That's just one of many questions that may be provoked by a new exhibition about the avant-garde at the British Library. Intriguing titles mooted for the show included 'Tango With Cows' and 'A Slap in the Face', but curator Dr Stephen Bury has finally settled on 'Breaking the Rules' to capture the flavour of the revolutionary fermentation of ideas which animated cities across Europe and America between 1900 and 1937. Its scope is vast: as well as looking at the planes, trains and automobiles that so caught the modernist imagination, it embraces subjects ranging from Charlie Chaplin to World War I, through materials that include recordings of James Joyce and TS Eliot, musical scores for instruments and coloured lights, and, slightly incongruously, a Sex Pistols T-shirt. It deals with – take a deep breath here – cubism, expressionism, futurism, dadaism, constructivism, surrealism and vorticism, and covers such cities as London, Paris, Milan, Berlin, Prague, Krakow and Tbilisi. No wonder that on the day I meet him, the man bringing together all this information – Dr Bury – is looking as if his sense of calm has been taken on a couple of loop the loops in a rickety old biplane.

Max Ernst's collage novel 'Un Semain de Bonte'

'Having called the exhibition "Breaking the Rules" we found we needed to set some rules to keep it simple,' he declares as we walk to the main display area. He opens the doors on to a dauntingly blank space. 'Want a Christmas tree?' he quips, pointing to a large black minimalist specimen left over from the BL's last exhibition, 'Sacred'. Leading me further into the empty room, Bury attempts to convey the thrust of the exhibition, which tracks the movements through the different cities, and comes to a chronological climax with the Nazi book burnings. 'We're trying to look at the printed face of the avant-garde. We're interested in manifestos, little magazines, artists' books – that's how we're different from the modernism show at the V&A, or the surrealism show at the Hayward.'

In one of his many essays on the avant-garde, critic and novelist Malcolm Bradbury argued that modernism was an art 'especially of the polyglot cities', where 'literary voyagers' and 'exiles' were an important part of the 'fervent atmosphere of new thought and new arts'. That sense of an era where people could get on a high just from suddenly being able to travel with ease from one cultural capital to another – rattling across vast landscapes on trains that were slower, but still every bit as sexy as the Eurostar – comes across particularly strongly in the work of one of Bury's favourite authors in the exhibition, the Swiss Blaise Cendrars. The all-too-obscure writer's 'Trans-Siberian Prose and Little Jeanne from France' reads like the 'Howl' of the 1910s.
'I was 16,000 leagues from my birthplace
I was in Moscow, in the city of a thousand and three belfries and seven railroad stations
And they weren't enough for me, the seven railroad stations and the thousand and three towers
For my adolescence was so blazing and so mad
That my heart burned in turns as the temple of Ephesus, or as Red Square in Moscow
When the sun sinks.
And my eyes shone upon the ancient routes
And I was already such a bad poet
That I didn't know how to go all the way to the end.'
(Extract translated from the French.)

Detail from Cendrars' 'La Prose du Transsiberien'

Cendrars' drugs of choice were little more than travel and sheer exuberant youth. Yet as speed both contracted the world around him and presented a more dynamic, fractured picture of what he could experience, the results impacted on the way he used text and language. 'Cendrars and Apollinaire [the poet, critic, and publisher of semi-pornographic books who Cendrars influenced hugely] brought so much innovation to poetry through free style, they really moved it into the modern era,' enthuses Bury. 'What Apollinaire also did was reinvent poetry visually – so, you have "Calligrammes" '. He shows me one of the texts. In these poems, which represent an important development in the crossover between the written word and art, the shape in which the words was arranged was as important as the words themselves. For example, in Apollinaire's revolutionary 'It rains' the words seem to pour down the page. It's symptomatic of both the playfulness of the times, and the need to explode convention, and it's this kind of experimental text that forms the lifeblood of the exhibition.

Central to modernism's revolutionary spirit was its abundance of manifestos in all shapes and forms, including Naum Gabo and Antoine Pevsner's 1920 'The Realistic Manifesto' (a three-column poster accompanying an open-air show on the Tverskoy Boulevard in Moscow), Breton's hundred-page-long 'Manifesto of Surrealism' in 1924, and, of course the 1932 'La Cucina Futurista', or Futurist Cookbook, presided over by Marinetti – which, in its attack on the bourgeois conventions of cooking, includes recipes for strawberry breasts, and one called 'Carrot + Trousers = Professor'. (The British Library will hold a banquet based on such recipes in the new year.) Because of his involvement with fascism, Marinetti dropped off the art historians' radar for much of the twentieth century but, in putting together this exhibition, Bury has found himself dazzled by how influential the poet and ideologue was.

Kamenskii's 'Tango with Cows'

'He came to London, and also went to St Petersburg and Moscow, where he inspired the Russian futurists: though some Russians pretended they'd had their ideas first, and even predated some material to try and prove it.' Part of the soundtrack that visitors will hear when they first enter the exhibition will be Marinetti's 'Battle of Adrianople' – a 'sound poem' with audacious onamatopaeic effects that include gunfire and bomb explosions.

Despite the exhibition's sprawling geographical expanse, Bury confesses that if he had been allowed to live anywhere during the avant-garde era it would have been 'Paris – just before, or just after the First World War'. As well as loving Cendrars and Apollinaire, he's intrigued by such figures as Daniel Henry Kahnweiler, another trans-European figure who was the son of a German stockbroker, and ditched his own business career in order to deal in the art, thereby becoming a pioneering influence for the cubist era, and the first person truly to recognise Picasso's genius. Looking back through Bury's eyes, it's tempting to wonder how our century will compare – where the new Picassos, Kandinskys, Marinettis, and those who inspire them will come from. Is it depressing to realise that they will come probably come from far further east than anybody in this exhibition, or should we just follow the modernists' example, by leaping on a plane and joining the party?

'Breaking the Rules: The Printed Face of the European-Avant Garde 1900-1937' is at the British Library from Nov 9-Mar 30. For related events visit www.bl.uk