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From Beinecke’s The Postwar Avant-Garde and the Culture of Protest, 1945 to 1968 and Beyond.

The Postwar Avant-Garde and the Culture of Protest, 1945 to 1968 and Beyond

Ends Dec. 19. Beinecke Library, Yale University, 121 Wall St. Free. 203-432-2977, library.yale.edu/beinecke.

Were the revolutions of the 1960s — and 1968 in particular — just a dream (or nightmare, if you were part of the ruling class)? Based on evidence presented in a fascinating show at the Beinecke Library, the revolutions were both real and surreal.

The Postwar Avant-Garde and the Culture of Protest, 1945 to 1968 and Beyond tracks the influence of a generation of artistic rebels in Europe. These artists/activists sought not just to change art but to change life.

According to curator Kevin Repp, 2008 — the 40th anniversary of 1968, when the globe convulsed with multiple upheavals — would have been the ideal year to mount the show. But Beinecke was undergoing renovations at the time.

Meanwhile, the collection has been further fleshed out. The library purchased more than 240 posters produced during the May 1968 uprising in France when students occupied the universities and some 10 million workers went on strike.

"Rather than focus solely on 1968, the focus here is to put 1968 into the larger story," Repp says.

Radical posters from that year ring the glass tower on the first and second floors. Downstairs display cases, or vitrines, document the avant-garde's development after World War II, which culminated in the revolution in France.

The exhibit gives special attention to the role of the Situationist International and its chief theorist Guy Debord. Upstairs, a sucession of virtrines chart the post-1968 fallout: the burgeoning underground press, the feminist movement, the sexual liberation movement, gay rights, anarchism, Italy's Movimento del '77 and punk.

Besides the bold revolutionary posters, the show includes radical journals; broadsheets; collections of rare, hand-typed newsletters; personal manuscripts of key participants; and copies of underground newspapers.

As its champions readily acknowledged, the postwar avant-garde owed much to the pathbreaking of the prewar avant-garde, particularly the Futurists, Dadaists and Surrealists. Those movements not only produced recognizable works of "art" in the conventional sense; they also positioned themselves as radical critiques of society.

By the late 1940s, the mandarins of artistic rebellion had lost their edge. When surrealist theoretician André Breton returned to Paris in 1947, after spending the war years exiled in the United States, radical artists formed the Revolutionary Surrealists in response. They accused Breton of abandoning Communist politics and going commercial.

Revolutionary Surrealism lasted barely a year, Stalinism being inhospitable to the avant-garde. But the contacts made between artists amid the hubbub over Breton's apparent apostasy proved durable and influential.

Equally enduring was a vision of art as revolution.

A transnational network emerged of groups and movements dedicated to experimentation: Cobra, Arte Nucleare, the Lettrist International and the International Movement for an Imaginist Bauhaus. Each had its own manifesto, publication, art and interventions. However, common ground existed in the belief that art had a responsibility to engage in the struggle over "everyday life," a concept that included, but went beyond, politics.

Various currents converged with the founding of the Situationist International in 1957. Among its key figures were Danish painter Asger Jorn and French theorist Guy Debord, who became editor of Internationale Situationniste, the group's slickly produced journal.

According to Repp, where Jorn and Debord came together was in their desire to "move out into the urban landscape, break out of the salon and gallery scene and bring the revolutionary potential of art and the revolutionary potential of detournement into the streets."

Detournement was the process of taking existing cultural products like advertising and comic strips and substituting their own subversive texts. It aimed to disrupt the "spectacle" — the mass media-drenched society in which the public functioned as passive consumers rather than active participants.

Decrying boredom and alienation, the journal sought forms of resistance and amplified them through theory.

"We will only organize the detonation," an anonymous Situationist emphasized in the 1963 edition of the journal. "The free explosion must escape us and any other control forever." When the detonation came in May 1968, Situationist slogans — reproduced on posters by the Atelier Populaire (Popular Workshop), many of which are on display at Beinecke — blanketed Parisian walls.

"Abolish class society."

"Occupy the factories."

"Power to the imagination."

"Beneath the paving stones, the beach." The cobblestones tossed at police were aimed at liberating society.

With so much text in this show, some may be frustated if they don't read French, Italian or German. Title cards, however, offer translations for some of the shorter manifestos; translations for the pithy posters would be welcome as well. These title cards also provide a comprehensible narrative to a potentially bewildering subculture.

Otherwise, there's a jarring irony in having this material presented in such a staid context. There are no paving stones to throw at Beinecke, and there is no beach.

The avant-garde was a movement explicitly in revolt against the sequestering of the creative impulse in museums. The posters, according to activists with the Atelier Populaire, were designed for the "centers of conflict" — streets and factories. "To use them for decorative purposes, to display them in bourgeois places of culture is to impair both their function and their effect," they declared at the time.

Yet here they are.

Still, if these documents serve as inspiration for a new generation of radicals, then their imprisonment in a "bourgeois place of culture" will not have been in vain.

Hank Hoffman blogs about the arts in Connecticut at ctartscene.blogspot.com.