The Avant-Garde Won’t Give Up: Cobra and Its Legacy

This definitive volume on the renowned postwar avant-garde artistic movement offers a comprehensive insight into Cobra’s history and achievements, and explores its lasting influences on contemporary art. The European artists’ collective known as Cobra was born amid the devastation left by World War II, its name an acronym for the native cities of its founders: Copenhagen, Brussels, and Amsterdam. This group of painters, sculptors, and poets had a tremendous influence on the development of postwar European art and contemporary art in general. Cobra was arguably the longest running avant-garde movement of the twentieth century. Moving chronologically, this book explores the years leading up to Cobra’s formation, charts its complex expansion over a decade, and illuminates how the movement helped shape the trajectory of art today. Numerous images of artworks, many presented as full-page color illustrations, accompany essays by a new generation of scholars, who probe the group’s ideologica