For 25 years Peter Bürger's Theory of the Avant-Garde (1974) has shaped the understanding of the avant-garde. A quarter of a century on there is a need to take the discussion further.

The first step was a three-day research seminar on the European avant-garde in 2000 at Yale, which was designed to lay the foundations for a comprehensive reassessment of the avant-garde art movements of the 1910s and 1920s which have produced such an eminent wealth of new art forms and new artistic techniques in painting and literature, cabaret, theatre and film. The contributions made to the seminar at Yale have been published together with some invited papers in a volume entitled European Avant-Garde: New Perspectives.

The seminar group agreed to embark on further explorations undertaken of this research field. The research group formed on the occasion of the seminar at Yale have continued working together towards a new theory of the avant-garde, exploring widely the art production of the avant-garde in all its forms, genres, techniques and mutual interactions, and developing neo-avant-garde art as a new field for wide-ranging research in the coming years.

The group is confident that the new theoretical approaches explored and the investigations into the rich material of the avant-garde's art production provided an excellent basis for future research that would greatly enhance current knowledge of the avant-garde. A symposium entitled Avant-Garde/Neo-Avant-Garde held at the University of Edinburgh in March 2002 was the next event in the research group's activities, and a publication Avant-Garde/Neo-Avant-Garde came out in 2005.

Hans Richter

The conference in Edinburgh had two aims, firstly a consolidation of the new approaches through explorations of further instances of the historical avant-garde; and secondly mapping out and exploring artistic activities of the neo-avant-garde of the 1960s and 1970s which Bürger had so quickly and short-sightedly dismissed as inauthentic.