David Hopkins and Disa Persson, the editors of Contagion, Hygiene, and the European Avant-Garde, open their volume with a contradiction central to cultural modernism: while nineteenth-century scientific medicine revolutionized understandings of germs and disease, holding out the promise of a healthier, more hygienic future, urban industrial life was also by its very nature a breeding ground for disease with its crowded cities, polluted skies, and dirty streets. The possibilities of a sanitized society were held in check, in other words, by the realities of an environment that had never been filthier. The fact that by the late nineteenth century, contagious disease was understood to spread through microorganisms invisible to the naked eye meant that germs contaminated air, water, food, skin, and clothing, making hygienic vigilance a daily requirement for modern urban life. Whether “real or imagined, metaphoric or material,” as Hopkins and Persson put it in their introduction, “all kinds of perceived pathogens [were] felt to be spreading, at rapid speed, through modern culture and contaminating the social body” (9). It is a timely topic for twenty-first-century audiences intimately attuned to the threat and transmission of contagion following the Covid-19 pandemic.

The seven contributors to this volume, including Hopkins and Persson, who have written individual essays in addition to their coauthored introduction, connect this culture of modernity to avant-garde art from in the late nineteenth century through the early decades of the twentieth century primarily, though not exclusively, through the visual arts. Broadly put, the purpose of their volume is to examine “how and to what critical effect the European avant-garde mobilised, negotiated, and repurposed motifs and rhetoric of hygiene and contagion” (23-24). The essays are organized into three loosely-configured, overlapping sections: the first highlights specific avant-garde examples in Paris and London, the capital cities at the center of the volume; a second is built around particular forms of contagion—syphilis, the “Spanish Flu” and tuberculosis; and a third explores the metaphoric capacities of contagion.

In these essays, contagion sometimes assumes physical form. This is true of Anthea Callen’s essay in part one, “Degas and the Matter of Contagion: Dirt, Skin, Touch, and the Cosmetic Arts,” which hews closely at times to her prior work in The Spectacular Body: Science, Method and Meaning in the Work of Degas, though there are new insights here on the artist’s use of materials, in particular. As Callen shows, Degas’s “greasy inks and oils, his dusty pastels, crayons and charcoal, diluents, resins, and fixatives” become deliberate and resonant materials for an artist interested in laundresses, prostitutes, and other working-class women (38). She considers the ways in which skin, touch, dirt, and contagion intersect in Degas’s visceral and highly experimental use of pigments; his physical mark-making in his waxes, printed inks, and pastels, which can sometimes “form in relief an encrusted terrain, evoking a skin scarred and blemished” (54); and his use of handmade “skin-like” paper with thick textures adept at holding the weight of his pastel pigments. In addition to their material presence, the “constitutive materialities” of Degas’s work, Callen explains, also “serve as sensory metonyms for dirt and disease” (38).

In part two, Fae Brauer argues in “Exposing ‘The Venereal Peril’: Fournier’s Syphilography, Munch’s Heredo-Syphilitic, La Syphilis Arabe, and Picasso’s Prostitutes” that France’s “civilizing mission” might well be reimagined as a “syphilizing mission” given the ways colonization spread the disease to French African prostitutes, who were also exploited by North African medico-scientific syphilitic experiments (84). She illuminates the influential work of Alfred Fournier, whose writings on heredo-syphilis heightened fears of late-nineteenth-century degeneration, and notes how these fears were amplified by visual culture, including highly graphic book illustrations as well as wax models of patients with contorted and sometimes grotesquely damaged faces. While Brauer is not the first to link Picasso and his painting to syphilis, she takes the theme of prostitution and venereal disease beyond white working-class women in Paris, connecting it to French colonialism in Northern Africa, and to African prostitutes in Paris. She reads the two central figures in Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907), with their almond-shaped, Kohl-lined eyes, as Moroccan, while the two figures in masks at far right represent the French African Congo. Brauer asserts that one of the Moroccan figures (left) appears to have traces around her left eyebrow of an experimental serum injection then being used by scientists at the Pasteur Institute to test syphilitic immunity. The ultimate effects of the disease, Brauer asserts, can be seen in the masked faces at right who read both as Africans and as horrifically disfigured syphilitic women.

David Hopkins’s “Marcel Duchamp’s Paris Air: The ‘Spanish Flu’, Black Humour, and Dada Contagion,” adeptly moves the reader into the realm of art as both literal and metaphoric contagion. Arguing against a conceptual analysis of Duchamp’s Paris Air (1919) as a nihilistic Dada gesture, Hopkins situates the work within debates about disease and air during the Spanish influenza, which killed two of the artist’s friends, Guillaume Apollinaire and Morton Schamberg. Paris Air originated in a pharmacy, where the glass ampoule would have been filled with medicine, which the artist replaced with Paris air for his American patron Walter Arensberg. However, as Hopkins writes, the resulting assisted readymade object, “far from being headily exotic (as it might have been for Americans longing to get a whiff of the ‘City of Lights’), was in fact potentially lethal” (125). It was perhaps an ironic move—an attempt to return the germs to their source—as the so-called “Spanish flu” was introduced to Europe through the arrival of US troops during WWI. Regardless, Hopkins shows how Duchamp, in keeping with Dada sensibilities, produced art which could be transmitted across continents and could “infiltrate” the social body, much like disease.

Further mobilizing the rhetoric of contamination, Disa Persson shows in “Spittle, Dust, and Flies: Documents and Tuberculosis in the Visual Culture of Interwar France” how the short-lived but influential avant-garde journal Documents purposefully and playfully countered the public health discourse around hygiene touted by Third Republic France. Redeploying ubiquitous signs of spittle, dust, and flies—the surest sources of disease contamination—photographs which circulated in Documents subversively revel in an image of France “deglorified, dethroned, depasteurized" (141). In response to a multimedia public health campaign against the dangers of microbe-laden flies, Documents displayed a close-up black-and-white image by Jacques-André Boiffard of flies stuck to paper—a photograph, Persson explains, that upended nationalist health campaigns intended to educate the public with an avant-garde agenda that belonged instead to “an opposing, anti-idealist program: one that did not set out to protect but to attack, not to prevent but spread” contagion (150).

These essays prove that the “metaphorical elasticity” (16) of contagion expands beyond the contexts of science, the natural world, medicine, politics, and other domains into avant-garde art, where it has energized the motifs, methods, and concepts of artistic production and circulation in modernity. Because contagion lacks visibility and material presence, it has been easy to miss in a field premised on what the eye can see. However, these essays demonstrate how and where we might look for contagion, and in doing so they bring new insight to both canonical and lesser-known works of modern art and visual culture. While some essays are more effective and impactful in analyzing this theme, the volume makes a compelling case overall for how modern artists found contagion useful in conceiving, creating, and disseminating their work. Importantly, they did not do so in strictly conceptual ways. Each of these essays situates the specific artist and work of art within a rich historical context to underscore how the idea and rhetoric of contagion was operationalized within a particular time and place, whether French colonial medical experiments, the outbreak of the “Spanish influenza,” or the “war on tuberculosis” to name a few examples. In doing so, these essays make a valuable contribution to scholarship on the relationship between medicine, disease, and art. At the same time, they contribute to an interest in environmental aspects such as atmosphere and air as part of a recent eco-critical turn in art history.

In part three, the collection ends on a provocative note with an essay by Carl Lavery, “Avant-Garde Hygiene and Contagion: Artaud’s Ecology in the Chemical Century,” which shows how Artaud used performance to challenge the medicalized body created by Pasteur and post-Enlightenment Europe. Artaud’s 1933 essay, “Theatre and the Plague,” foregoes the ambition of modern medical science to eliminate disease, instead considering an engagement with “the organism’s capacity to become different through infection” (192). In contrast to other essays in this collection, which are built around the tension between avant-garde art and contagion, Lavery considers through Artaud what it might look like to soften this divide, “insisting on the symbiotic vulnerability and the possibility of the human body” (194), thus allowing “new and unexpected futures [to] reveal themselves in the here and now of the theatrical encounter” (192). Such corporeal and even alchemical encounters would seem to carry greater possibility and urgency in our current globally connected and highly mobile world than they did when Artaud imagined them nearly a century ago.