World War I as a Cause of Ephemeral Hope in the Artistic Avant‑Gardes

The article shows, first, how Sociology has approached the concepts of “hope” and “war” and how throughout the history of the discipline these terms have gone from being neglected to arousing considerable interest. Second, the paper analyzes how and why avant-garde artists understood the First World War as a motif of utopian hope to annihilate a civilization in crisis and to transform it through its aesthetic formalization. Third, the essay tries to find out whether that hope was preserved over time or, on the contrary, was soon dissolved as a result of the drama of the events. It is shown here that the savagery of the fighting dissolved all European values of modernity and progress, including artistic ones. In fact, theoretical and stylistic conceptions, aesthetic categories, ethical postulates, and artists’ aspirations for conscience to rule the world were blurred. For the artistic avant-garde, utopian promises of a better world broke down. Consequently, this obliges sociologists to pay more attention to both phenomena—that of the war and that of the avant-garde—and to seek a more objective and critical interpretation of modernity, calling for its actualization, and of Sociology itself.


From Oblivion to the Sociology of Hope
As Malesêvic (2015) points out, classical Sociology did not place hope at the center of its attention; so it can be said that until relatively recently, Sociology has paid little attention to the study of hope (Gili and Mangone, 2023;McGeer, 2004).Nor had Sociology taken into account the great transforming power of hope, especially regarding its capacity to create social transformation (Lueck, 2007).The situation changed in the middle of the twentieth century (Gili and Mangone, 2023).In a climate of terminal crisis and radical transformation, apocalyptic visions and messianic enthusiasms were awakened, as research arose after the radical crisis caused by the two wars, the Russian Revolution, the emergence of totalitarian movements, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and Auschwitz (García and Gramsci, 2013).
Hence, hope came to constitute both a disposition of our being in the world and a pressing debate about the human existential condition and its destiny (Bauman, 2004a, b;Naishtat, 2013;Gili and Mangone, 2023).Moreover, this dispute was linked to a modernist utopian discourse that believed in social change (Petersen and Wilkinson, 2015), without forgetting that furthermore, it fostered a self-critical and self-reflexive process of modernity (García and Gramsci, 2013).
Precisely these questions, and others, are present in the sociologist Ernst Bloch, who, in his book Principle of Hope (originally written 1938-1947; enlarged 1954-1959), revalorizes utopian thought, just in times of mass destruction and of anguish.Although it seems that hope is not an emotion, it is associated with the other emotions, by filling it with an "affection" (TenHouten, 2023) opposed to fear or indifference, by linking it to transformative action and to the condition of possibility (Lemarchand, 2010;Andrade, 2010;Naishtat, 2013).Consequently, hope is formalized in an active utopia and constitutes the engine of a "new history," born of the present and the unfulfilled dreams generated in the past (Lemarchand, 2010;Ainsa, 2010;Andrade, 2010;Naishtat, 2013).Not for nothing is it integrated into "the sovereignty of the waking dream," which designs a better world (Bloch, 1977: p. 26;Lemarchand, 2010: p. 22;Meneses, 2010: p. 107), especially in the aesthetic sphere (Andrade, 2010).In fact, Bloch is the "first systematic theorist of the avant-garde" (García and Gramsci, 2013: p. 16).
The hopeful utopia is also connected with the "anticipatory consciousness" of humanity (Bloch, 1977: p. 190;Ainsa, 2010: p. 18), capable of forging a new world and opening, in tension, a horizon of possible future (Andrade, 2010;Naishat, 2013;Gili and Mangone, 2023).This is linked to memory, acts in the form of utopian promise or catastrophic threat (Lemarchand, 2010), and secures its primacy over the present, considering that the latter expands into the future.In fact, the future becomes a living possibility of "what can be and is not yet," of the not-yet-realized, of the not-yet-achieved (Andrade, 2010;Cervio and Bustos, 2019).And it is that the world is "changeable" because it is not given, it is still unfinished-aesthetically and open to a possible future (Ainsa, 2010).
However, this is not an obstacle to accepting the premise that hope must be mediated, founded, and contrasted with a reality that always resists being altered, since all practices, including innovative ones, can only occur within the space or world of the possible (Bourdieu, 2005).And, finally, it entails being aware that, by opening hope towards the future, it irremediably deploys it towards what is frustrating, failed, random, and chance (Bloch, 1977), so it should not be surprising that, in the end, the future, and with it utopia, possesses a dimension of precariousness and uncertainty (Cervio and Bustos, 2019).
Desroche also insists, in Sociology of Hope, 1973, that the ideals of humans do not always become reality, but rather, on most occasions, prove to be short-lived (Desroche, 1976).In fact, for him, collective imaginary phenomena-those of war-and their cultural, ideological, and utopian representations can give rise to an emptied hope (Desroche, 1976), something that happens, as will be seen during the Great War.
Current Sociology returns to dealing with hope, with a keen interest (TenHouten, 2023), believing that it is still necessary, although it does not possess a single essence or defining meaning, as multiple senses, articulations, and implications are attributed to it (Petersen and Wilkinson, 2015).However, some common elements are visualized.Thus, hope continues to be invoked-as in Bloch-in contexts of foreboding, anguish, and despair (Petersen and Wilkinson, 2015), countering fear (Gili and Mangone, 2023).
Hope, of course, is also linked to the improvement of individuals (McGeer, 2004) or to that of the collectivity.In fact, hope is connected-in the same way as aestheticswith the imaginary, memory, dream, and utopia, which, together, constitute a stimulus for social change (Lueck, 2007) and attempt to build a better world, based on concrete objectives and principles (Braithwaite, 2004;Valdés, 2006).In this sense, hope postulates a relationship between the present and the future in which the former unfolds in the latter and in which the latter has primacy (Petersen and Wilkinson, 2015).Now, the time to come can be imagined, but not known with certainty and, although modern societies emphasize the concern for the future through scientific rationality (Valdés, 2006), hope-as Bloch had anticipated-is presented without scientific certainty or historical promise; moreover, it finds the improbable in the dramatic moments of history, in the human possibilities still unexplored, and, therefore, bets on the improbable (Morin, 2018).
This article tries, precisely, to find out, in the following sections, if this is what happens during the First World War and if the avant-garde artists, when experiencing the tragic events that took place, keep their anticipatory conscience based on hope and utopia to build a better world, or if this hope soon faded away.For the elaboration of the analytical categories of the artistic avant-gardes in "The Artistic Avant-Garde, the Hope and the War" section, we have taken into account four general questions about hope: Who are the historical actors and bearers of hope?What are its main socio-historical forms?What social, political, and cultural conditions favor its emergence and strengthening?What are its effects and consequences on personal and social life?We will analyze whether hope is an individual or collective fact, whether it turns to the future or to the past, how it is linked to fear, whether it is realistic or illusory-utopian, or whether it is short-or long-term experience (Gili and Mangone, 2023).

War in Sociological Theory: From Oblivion to Recovery
As with hope, war, understood as a social phenomenon, resulting from conflicts between States, was scarcely analyzed at the beginning of the establishment of Sociology, which does not imply the non-existence of studies, especially in the classics-as we shall see below.In any case, this topic represents a new, dynamic field of work in full construction (Tiryakian, 2004;Gallegos, 2020).Indeed, this discipline has not considered it as a structural characteristic constitutive of modernity (Beriain, 2004;Malesêvic, 2015).In fact, it has devoted itself more to the violence of individual offenders than to the genesis of collective and state violence (Joas, 2005).
The causes of this omission are diverse.On the one hand, there is the dream of a modernity without violence, rooted in the optimistic interpretation of the Enlightenment, which believed in the possibility of a future peace and in an innate goodness of human beings, guided by reason (Tiryakian, 2004).Continuers of these postulates are also liberalism and Marxism that promise a world without violence, while, paradoxically, they observe, with surprise, the obstinacy of modern barbarism.The sociological theory of classical modernization, for its part, maintains the hypothesis of a modernity without violence due to the close relationship between the social sciences and the conceptions of liberalism (Joas, 2005;Gallegos, 2020).This is the case with the sociocultural rationalization of Weber and Elias and with the functional differentiation of Durkheim, Parsons, and Luhmann, who, in effect, projected a "peaceful" vision of modernity (Beriain, 2004;Gallegos, 2020).Finally, the scarce attention paid in Sociology to war is explained because there were few wars during the process of modernization (Tiryakian, 2004); in fact, before the Great War, the first of the twentieth century were the Civil War-1861-1865, the Boer War-1898-1902, and the Russo-Japanese War-1904-1905(Nouschi, 1999), all of them outside Western European territory.
As has been indicated, classical Sociology has not totally relegated the study of war, and concerned about it, but the influence of the most famous sociologists was not yet great in these early moments (Malesêvic, 2015), so it should not be surprising that war became a marginal sociological object (Gallegos, 2020).On the other hand, the Social Scienceslike the intellectuals and avant-garde artists of the time, as will be discussed in the next section-were put at the service of propaganda and the exegesis of the Great War.And the fact is that a considerable part of sociologists inherited the vision of vitalist and existentialist philosophy, with accentuated warmongering characteristics, which defined violence as creativity, struggle as inner experience, and the community of the battlefront as the impetus for a new state order.This is what happens, for example, with the great German sociologists, who interpret the Great War as an opportunity to break the tragic tendency of modern culture and to recognize, in it, an invigorating and ecstatic existential experience that liberates its participants and society as a whole (Joas, 2005).In Weber, for example, there is no explicit Sociology of war and he only marginally deals with it (Vallejos, 2018).He develops an openly warmongering position (Gallegos, 2020), as he argues that it is "great and wonderful, whatever the outcome" and that "…we should have risked this war.We should have done it, even if we had had reason to fear succumbing…" (Weber, 1982: p. XXIII).Simmel defends the value of the defense of the nation and takes into account the affective character of war violence (Gallegos, 2020), since it intensifies human feelings-Weber also defends this-and creates new social meanings, while he considers that it transmits that the struggle conveys a vision of the "organic" nature of individuality-as opposed to the "mechanical"-and that it constitutes a profound existential experience, an absolute (Malesêvic, 2015;Vallejos, 2018) that shakes the conscience of individuals amidst the relativities of modern objective culture.Scheler, for his part, also interprets war as a great opportunity to break with the tragedy of modern culture, expressed in the growing commodification and bureaucratization of all orders of life (Beriain, 2004).Finally, Sombart, in relation to the war conflict, has a fundamentally aesthetic position, of "creative destruction," since he believes that it is the fruit of a heroic cosmovision necessary to counteract the commercialization of all aspects of human existence and the capitalist spirit of possessive, utilitarian, and eudaimonistic individualism (Joas, 2005;Beriain, 2004).
In sum, all these German sociologists agree that only the loss of naïve faith in progress makes possible the opening of the historical.Hence, in both Simmel and Scheler, the hope in a revitalizing effect of war and, consequently, in a solution to the crisis of contemporary civilization dominates (Joas, 2005) There were also British, Russian, American, and French sociological conceptions of war.Sorokin is a good example (Tiryakian, 2004), since he understands war as a determinant of social change (Malesêvic, 2015;Gallegos, 2020).Also Durkheim, the most prominent representative of all these visions, is left to war, but he has a fervent love for France that expresses more his nationalism than the causes of that one (Rodríguez Zúñiga, 2014), without forgetting that he does not consider it as a social fact (Gallegos, 2020).Moreover, he glorifies it as the source of the highest virtues-"war is holy and moral," while denouncing Kantian eternal peace as unethical (Beriain, 2004;Rodríguez Zúñiga, 2014).This traditional sociological "forgetting" of war (Gallegos, 2020) is recently recovering, as sociologists begin to recognize that the historical legacy of violence is part of modernity (Joas, 2005: p. 65;Malesêvic, 2015), that it is an essential component of its development process (Bauman, 2004b) and that it represents its "hidden face" (Tiryakian, 2004;Beriain, 2004).
War violence has not disappeared, but rather increased dramatically in the last two centuries, which means that the destructive potential of the Modern Era has increased (Malesêvic, 2015) because of the importance of its defensive character; because of the close relationship between modernization, war, and revolution; because fascism is the product of the warrior spirit; because of the role of war in the emergence of modernity; and because of the imprint that war experiences have left on modernization (Joas, 2005).It could be said, in short, that there is a close connection between forms of violence and modern ways of life and that, under the conditions of modernity, human individuals are defined as producers/soldiers (Bauman, 2004b).But there is something more, because today we begin to recognize that it was wars that gave rise to the modern era, without forgetting that, in the collective memory, they are glorified, precisely, as the vanguard of this modernity.

Enthusiasm and Initial War Patriotism
Hence, the Great War-as well as the artistic avantgardes-can no longer be observed from the point of view of mere propaganda (Foster, 2001), but should be interpreted more objectively and critically, something that should also affect Sociology.In fact, it is an event of capital importance, since, due to its medium and long-term consequences, it represents the cradle of the twentieth century.Thus, it initiates the "age of catastrophes," the "globalization" of war conflicts, and the "age of total war" with unlimited objectives that lasts until the end of the Second World War.Furthermore, it competes directly with the ethical-religious sphere (Vallejos, 2018), it constitutes a religious or ideological contest for both sides, insofar as, since the French Revolution, the State promotes a new "religion," secular and national which produces a rise of nationalism, leading to the confrontation between the new religion and Catholicism, especially in Italy (Gutiérrez, 2012).This anticipates the "times of ideology" of the 20 s, 30 s, and 40 s of the twentieth century in which the Bolshevik revolution, fascism, and Nazism burst in.Along with this, the war of '14 deeply questions progress and modernity and reveals itself as a great European failure (Nouschi, 1999;Hobsbawm, 2001).
It all began with the assassination of heir Franz Ferdinand on June 28, 1914, although, in its origins, this conflagration was the last of the nineteenth century, since it manifested the disputes accumulated in the last decades of that century.Certainly, the influx of industrial development and neo-colonialist competition produced by the great economic powers was associated with the formula of imperialism with which they stimulated a stagnant capitalism.They also encouraged expansion into other territories to provide them with the raw materials necessary for the production of their industries and markets.In addition, there was a constant social instability that generated a feeling of insecurity, propitiated by a high degree of poverty and exclusion that had an impact on European social unrest.And, at the same time, nationalist sentiments were erupting, which led to an escalation of armaments that turned the world into a powder keg ready to explode.In fact, in 10 days all the great European powers entered the war (Hobsbawm, 2001;Arendt: 2007;Gutiérrez, 2012;Rodríguez Zúñiga, 2014;Pérez, 2016).
For Joas (2005), it is probably only possible to understand its causes and consequences by analyzing the enthusiastic support of the intellectuals-of the artists-and the ecstasy of the masses at its beginning, in that summer of 1914.The whole of the generations of young Europeans who participated in the trench warfare went enthusiastically to the battle front.Without forgetting that these young people related to the war as if it were a game, perhaps because they lacked clear reasons to enter it (Jünger, 1995).
As we shall see, this is what happened in the first months of the war (Rodríguez, 2004: pp. 263-264), when most artists were enthusiastic about it.
The Artistic Avant-Garde, the Hope and the War

Artists' Enthusiasm for the War
The hope of "changing life" through art arises at the end of the nineteenth century when a process of crisis and generalized transformation of languages, the status, and place of art in society appears, that is, in a tumultuous stage in which the "stylization of politics" and the "politicization of art" take place (García and Gramsci, 2013: p. 3).
At the beginning of the twentieth century, most young artists resisted nationalism and were clearly anti-colonialist, although some of them, a few, thought that the war was "an abuse of progress," such as Karl Kraus, who clearly abhorred the war, or Haubitzer, a painter on the battlefield, a convinced antimilitarist (Arnaldo, 2008).However, the Great War revived national causes in culture, to the point that, during the war fervor, an alliance was established between it and the war.In fact, the first artistic avant-gardes saw in the war the realization of some of their fantasies, related to the will of destruction and demolition (Alsina, 2016).Thus, for the artists-as well as for Simmel and Scheller-the modern war represented a true "catharsis," since it freed them from the cultural crisis of their time, so it represented the new, which was precisely what they also sought on the artistic level, and was considered a true mission (Arnaldo, 2008), to the point that it became the most outstanding content of the new painting (Corbett, 1998).
It should also be kept in mind that, when the war of 1914 broke out, a large number of intellectuals took part in it and that there are numerous artists who enlisted (Dogliani, 2013); they are now "soldier-artists," subjects who are divided between the functional and the aesthetic (Baiges, 2016).Among them are Kirchner, Heckel, Dix, Marc, Macke, and Kokoschka, volunteers to defend the Reich.Also, the Italian Futurists, Sironi, Marinetti, Boccioni, and Antonio Sant-Elia, entered the war in 1915, as they formed the "Eighth Platoon," together with Russolo, Funi, and Piatti.The British Vorticists, Christopher Nevinson, William Roberts, Edward Wadworth, David Bomberg, Lawrence Attenson, Garfdier, and Eptein, were also mobilized in the war.Finally, other important artists of other nationalities who participated in the war were Pavel Filonov, Ossip Zadkine, Marc Chagall, Paul Klee, Barlach, and, the French, Henri Gaudier and Moise Kisling.Of these artists who enlisted, many of them even lost their lives, as happened with August Macke; Franc Marc, who died in 1916, next to a horse-that he painted so much-in Verdun; the sculptor Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, in 1915; Umberto Boccioni, Sant-Elia, and Era; and Raymond Duchamp-Villon and Apollinaire, the great apostle of cubism (Arnaldo, 2008).
However, all these artists not only fought in the trenches, but also in the field of aesthetic ideas, since it could be said that the decisive battle of modernity-and of culture, therefore-was fought precisely in the Great War.No wonder, therefore, that the artistic avant-garde complimented itself with the war (Alsina, 2016) and that it strongly determined its trajectory.In fact, not by chance, it is closely related to the military progress that involved Napoleon's tactical use of advanced "avant-garde" attack troops; it is likewise associated with the industrial and financial world and its totalitarian political and cultural projects (Subirats, 2001;Subirats, 2009;Longoni and Davis, 2009;Pérez, 2016).No surprise, in sum, that artist is ardently enthusiastic about the war conflict (Tiryakian, 2004;Arnaldo, 2008).
Thus, most artists, at the beginning of the war, become militant warmongers, which is clearly seen in the works of, among many others, Carrá, Boccioni and Léger, ardent defenders of the war (Arnaldo, 2008).Franz Marc (2001: p. 23), for his part, writes that "in the war the dream of the invisible became a reality" or that "it represents the hope for the dignity of culture."Otto Dix believes that "it was horrible, but, in spite of everything, also great.I could not miss it for the world…" (Martin, 2005: p. 80) and that "I go to war to see all the unfathomable abysses of life" (Lorenz, 2006: p. 160).The constructivists Gabo and Pevner (1979: p. 325) defend that "…war and revolution are purifying currents of a future era that has led us to consider the new forms of a life that already beats and acts."Giovanni Paipai openly declares that "we love war" (Arnaldo, 2008: p. 29), and Julius Meier-Graefe that "it is a friend of art" (Arnaldo, 2008: p. 31), while Max Beckmann says that, "for me, war is a miracle, albeit a somewhat uncomfortable one" (Arnaldo, 2008: p. 32).Apollinaire is amazed at the events of war: "Ah Dieu! Que la guerre est jolie" (Jongeneel, 2014: p. 3); "…a machine gun or a butt of a 75 are more the subject of painting than four apples on a table…" (Arnaldo, 2008: p. 130); "behold the nose of the invisible soldiers" (Apollinaire, 1965: p. 265); "and the secret future that the rocket elucidates" (Apollinaire, 1965: p. 224).Bauquier, for his part, exclaims that "nothing is more cubist than a war like this" (Bauquier and Léger, 1987: p. 74) and, Henri Gaudier, that "…this war is a great remedy.It kills arrogance, selfesteem, pride in the individual" (Silver and Finn, 1996: p. 46).Marinetti (1912: pp. 19 and 45) writes that in the trench he feels a "delirious joy" and that "we go to war dancing and singing" and Boccioni (2004: p. 14) calls for "exacerbating our faith in this future greatness.For this we need blood, we need dead people…." As will be seen below, what war really destroys are the individual combatants as such, the spaces and territories where they fight, the ideas they bring into play, and the hope that art formalizes.

The Mechanical Dynamism of War, Art, and Modernity
The Great War stimulates in artists, at first, the great hope of changing the crisis of contemporary civilization through the new function of art (Subirats, 1989).In this sense, the first emotions that accompany this hope are enthusiasm, patriotic fervor, and propagandist exaltation of their respective countries, of the values, and of the technological and scientific modernity they represent.
This happens both in the Russian artistic avant-garde, which joins, full of enthusiasm and hope, the October Revolution (Vázquez, 1972;Longoni and Davis, 2009), and in the rest of European avant-gardes, which make a synthesis between artistic form and machinism (Subirats, 1998), considering the person as a hybrid between human and machine (Martin;2005;Hidalgo, 2021).
In France, Apollinaire joins the nationalist camp (Nouschi, 1999), turning the war apotheosis into a cubist crusade, while the Gallic representatives of this style are, in general, chauvinistic, and patriotic.Indeed, both cubism and cubo-futurism develop, around 1914, a militaristic language of patriotic insurgency (Arnaldo, 2008) and warmongering propaganda (Cottington, 1998).But, simultaneously, cubist painting-or sculpture-became a combatant force, and hence, the artists fought in the field of the trenches and in the field of aesthetic ideals and, therefore, their language was consummated in the war, which they imitated by assimilating its essential aspects (Arnaldo, 2008).Thus, art and war were inseparably fused.
Alongside this, abstract paintings by Kandinsky, Braque, Picasso, Léger, and R. Duchamp-Villon declare that the machine is a source of art, a creator of beauty (Lorenzo, 2014) or aesthetic value (Cabanne, 1975;Ganteführer-Trier and Grosenick, 2004;Arnaldo, 2008).In the same way, Italian futurism establishes a close connection between art and modern, mechanical, and industrial combat and, related to this, exalts war, linked to nationalist and imperialist passion, obsession with dynamism and speed, technological optimism, and the emancipatory virtues of mechanical progress (Martin, 2005;Granés, 2011;Gutiérrez, 2012;Lorenzo, 2014;Hidalgo, 2021).
Marinetti is a sample of this, as he calls for adapting art to the modern world, and exalts nationalism and the dynamism of technological advances, while extolling danger, energy, the beauty of speed, strength, courage, efficiency, recklessness, the love of danger, and war as the only "hygiene" of the world (Marinetti, 1909: p. 91;Granés, 2011;Barrón, 2017).Therefore, he praises the destructive machinery-the armored turrets, the cannons, the shells-and the martial fervor and war (Gutiérrez, 2012;Pérez, 2016).And it is that, for Marinetti (1978), man is identified with the engine, so that the human of the future will possess a body molded like an airplane.Similarly, Sironi, Carrá, Severini, and Balla joins Marinetti's warmongering enthusiasm, a generation fascinated and vibrating with militaristic themes, with aggressive images and with the thunderous war noise, which offers them strong sensations (Nouschi, 1999;Martin, 2005;Arnaldo, 2008;Alsina, 2016).Therefore, futurist painting has been defined as "the painting of the outburst" (Drudi and Fiori, 1986: p. 100), as the energy of a detonation, and as an expression of the dynamism of modern life induced by the machine, considered an aesthetic object and a sign of the emancipation of a new civilization.In other words, futurism wishes to take a vital modernizing impulse through the liberating power of the machine-and of war (Arnaldo, 2008).
A dynamism like that of the Cubists and Futurists is manifested in the German artists of the Great War (Arnaldo, 2008;Baños, 2008), such as the Berlin sculptor Rudolf Belling, who adopts from cubo-futurism the interest in the geometrization of the components of the figure and imitates the effects of the explosion.Otto Dix, for his part, also captures mechanized warfare in attack situations, in the impact of fire on the contenders, in explosions, and in the devastating effects of combat.
The machinist warrior dynamism is also evident in the Vorticist artists of Great Britain.Heirs of the cubofuturists, but rebels with their own identity, they possessed a nationalist air and a mechanistic and anti-sentimental gesture, coinciding with the Great War.In addition, they were ascribed to geometric abstraction and anti-realism to manifest the mechanical forces and the visual transfer of unconscious energies of the human being and to make the world a map subjected to competing forces.Among its representatives are Nevinson, Roberts, Wadworth, Bomberg, Attenson, Garfdier, and Epstein (Arnaldo, 2008).
Finally, also the constructivist experimenters, who transfer to their works the scientific apparatus that physicists use in their laboratories-pieces of glass, metal plates, coiled springs, wood, etc., defined the machine as an aesthetic object (Lorenzo, 2014) and, in the case of Tatlin, went so far as to conceive an "art of machines" (Hidalgo, 2021: p. 544).

Anticipation of the Future
The hope that the artistic avant-garde deposited in the war is also based on temporality, one of its central axes, which is evident in the ideas of dynamism that we have just analyzed, as well as in those of simultaneity, fragmentation, or splitting (Alonso, 2000).They are aware that the past is in decadence and the present is exhausted and from there springs precisely the confidence that the contest represents, on the one hand, a break with History and the past (Vázquez, 1972;Subirats, 1998;Longoni and Davis, 2009;Barrón, 2017) or a longing to eliminate the present (Arnaldo, 2008;Olábarri-Gortázar, 2021).On the other hand, they also consider war as a "drug" (Isnenghi, 2007), as a cure and antidote against the many fears that circulated (Dogliani, 2013), and as a remedy for the present (Arnaldo, 2008: 75), as well as an escape from the gray everyday (Nouschi, 1999).
At its side, art takes the form of premonition, while anticipation and prophecy-especially in Futurism and Expressionism-constitute its fundamental values.Thus, an important part of the artists assumes, through abstraction and in the 1910s, a "poetics of longing" and, around 1913, transform art into a means of anticipation and "prophecy management" (Alonso, 2000: pp. 2 and 3;Arnaldo, 2008: pp. 33 and 60).Now, modern artistic anticipation is more linked to the future than to the past and it is precisely the crisis and collective anguish, unprecedented in History, that makes us think about it (Subirats, 1989;Barrón, 2017).Perhaps, for this reason, time is energized towards the "suicidal" future (Alonso, 2000: p. 2), both for its ephemeral character (Longoni and Davis, 2009) and for constituting a traumatic "gap towards the future" (Foster, 2001: p. 34), which has no clear handles (Barrón, 2017).Moreover, by being directed, fundamentally, towards the future, it links it with the artistic capacity to create a "second vision," focused on knowing distant or near events and becoming the reverse of the crisis.In fact, artists break or oppose bourgeois values and possess an emancipatory or transformative will and hope-both issues assumed as ideals of modern life.Furthermore, they are inclined to "become in the decline," to embody a promise of novelty, of a new era, and to become agents of indefinite progress, actors of future combat, "prophets of rebirth," "apostles of the future"-the futurists-and creative priests of new worlds and paradises.All this founded on the cumulative and linear development of industry, technology, and scientific knowledge (Subirats, 1998;Alonso, 2000;Shinner, 2004;Arnaldo, 2008;Hidalgo, 2021).
Concretely, what the German expressionists, the Italian futurists, and the Dutch neoplasticists thought was to break with the past, abandon tradition, deny bourgeois art, put an end to the false and oppressive, free themselves from power, and conquer freedom and the artistic capacity to shape the world from scratch.What they proposed, in the end, was a utopian hope for a historical world governed by human conscience (Subirats, 1989;Subirats, 1998).
As we have seen, at first, enthusiasm took the form of warlike anxiety, but also of anticipation, which is very well exemplified in Kandinsky, with his finalist vision (Kandinsky, 1980;Düchting, 2005) and, in Marc, who foresees the Great War (Kandinsky/Marc, 1989;Partsch, 2003;Wolf and Grosenick, 2004;Arnaldo, 2008).

To Create Is to Destroy the World with Transforming Energy: The Apocalypse or the End of Days
The future longed for by the avant-gardists is accompanied by the fusion between art and violence or war and between the artistic processes of creation and destruction (Sombart).In expressionism, violence and war are understood as a necessary evil, as a rite of passage announcing the change of era and the arrival of spirituality.And, in the futurism of Boccioni, violence is contemplated as the very condition of the act of creation (Olábarri-Gortázar, 2021).
The fusion between creativity and violence (Joas, 2005) is also evident in some Cubist sculptures in which the materials used for their construction are war debris, as is the case with Head of a Woman, 1915Woman, -1918, by Derain, a piece built from a brass shell, and with Gaudier's shrapnel material sculpture, Brzesken, Torpedo-fish, 1914, an image of destruction and creation shared with Epstein's Drill, an anthropoid robot.
On the other hand, the fusion between creation and destruction to which I am referring, according to the artists, is linked to the previous sacrifice of the fallen and of the world (Alonso, 2000;Partsch, 2003;Arnaldo, 2008;Gutiérrrez, 2012).That is, that it is necessary to deconstruct and break into a thousand pieces an exhausted present, without renouncing to violence and the explosion of the transforming energy that is necessary to achieve such goals.These ideas are present in some works by Boccioni (Coen and Calvesi, 1983;Martin;2005;Arnaldo, 2008) and by R. Duchamp-Villos, especially in The Horse, from 1914, a bronze sculpture in which the rider and his mount are made of connecting rods and straps (Arnaldo, 2008).
Moreover, sacrifice leads to the end of the world, a prerequisite for its renewal.Artists like Macke or Beckmann, and especially Meidner, a millenarian who was familiar with Karl Kraus's The Last Days of Humanity, conceived it in this way.Like the expressionists-and the sociologists Simmel and Weber-he observes the advances of materialist societyindustrialization-as a premonition of the Great War, as a threat in which order, in reality, is down (Wolf and Grosenick, 2004;Alonso, 2000;Arnaldo, 2008;Granés, 2011).

Art and the Disappearance of the Concrete World and of Nature
The artists think that the apocalypse must affect the world, nature, the soldier-artists, and war itself.The former is tested through the various formulas of pictorial abstraction developed in the 1910s and which have in common what Paul Klee once said about it, that is, that a happy world produces an art of the hereafter, terror creates abstraction.In this respect, abstraction-and the fear behind it-entails the dissolution of external reality through the rejection of the imitative function of art and the questioning of the epistemological relevance of external nature (Arnaldo, 2008).
This is what happens, in Kandinsky, with his immaterial energy, accompanied by the almost total abolition of figurative elements and the disintegration of the effective, and also, in Marc's expression of the conflict between abstract reasons, symbolized by two whirlwinds of color-red and blue-black, seeking to destroy the form so that the soul can free itself (Partsch, 2003;Arnaldo, 2008).
In futurism, the fading of the concrete vision is produced, fundamentally, through speed, as can be seen in Depero, or in Boccioni (Janson, 1991;Arnaldo).Furthermore, speed joins movement, light, and steel, which fracture the differentiated space, which destroy the materiality of bodies and generate the fading of the concrete (Drudi and Fiori, 1986;Arnaldo, 2008).This happens, for example, in Balla, who considers the machine as an ideal that liquidates the materiality of space, replaces it with energy in act, and transforms it into a metaphor of war (Arnaldo, 2008).This, in Severini, becomes aseptic and idealized, and the world, abstracted by geometrization (Martin, 2005).
This same fading of the concrete, associated with the representation of speed, of vertiginous movement, is produced in the sculptor R. Duchamp-Villon, who machines animals and people, unrecognizable as physical bodies (Ganteführer-Trier and Grosenick, 2004;Arnaldo, 2008).
Nature is also dematerialized by the impact of war and artistic vision, as in Sironi (Arnaldo, 2008: pp. 111 and 120), who in his works on airplanes unloads colors, as if they were explosions of the bombs dropped by the aircraft, irregularly parceling the ground, with geometric planes of different colors, and the earth disappears.Dix, too, paints the impact of war on the landscape and, a destructive whirlwind that sublimates the visual matter and produces the "literal emptiness of the battlefield" (Arnaldo, 2008).
Consequently, war has supplanted the territory and its characters, rendering them insignificant, while it becomes very dynamic and energetic, pure color and light, something abstract and ideal.However, this does not mean that the state of nature produced by the conflict does not hurt, as it happens to Marc (Arnaldo, 2008), who symbolizes the death of nature due to the impact of war.

The Dehumanization and Fading Away of the Artist-Soldier-Producers
Just as the concrete world and nature are crushed by war, its combatants suffer a devastating onslaught, to the point that, first, they are imprisoned by an uncontainable fury and consequently animalized and dehumanized and, second, they are finally vanished.
True, the transforming agents of the world's destruction, those who, full of fury and destructive energy, help bring about the completion of the apocalypse and the last days of humanity, are the violent soldiers and soldier-artists.These ideas are in Nolde, whose characters are full of power or dressed in military clothing, revealing more of a threat than a defense of order or security.Likewise, Le Fauconnier draws the violent impetus of a hunter who, as if he were a soldier, "opens fire," administering the last days of humanity.Dix and Feininger express themselves in a similar violent line (Arnaldo, 2008).
The disproportionate energy of the artist-soldiers not only seems to do away with the environment around them, but also with their own bodies, dislocated, broken, amputated, and, finally, alienated, disembodied, and diluted.In this sense, what happens is that the human figure traditionally represented in art disappears and, simultaneously, the hysterization of the "true" figure emerges, deformed and mutilated (Alsina, 2016).Thus, it happens with the human fragments, geometrized, and fused in clay, of Filonov (Arnaldo, 2008) and with the confusion of space and body that evokes the absence of autonomy and identity, very apt for human perdition (Caillois, 1935).
Léger's painting represents the new beauty, since its dislocated geometric structures exhibit the tense dehumanization of the war actors and something similar occurs in the faceless and bodiless soldiers of Fraye and, in the "machine-soldiers" or soldier-producers (Bauman) of Severini, placed in line, ordered, disciplined (Weber, 1984) and shooting rationally, in a "Fordist" spatial arrangement,1 and that merge to such an extent with their uniform that their individuality disappears (Arnaldo, 2008).Man Ray's soldiers have depersonalized faces, reduced to a single tone-orange or blue-that turn them into abstract forces that oppose each other, and the same happens to the soldier without personality, who becomes only an instrument of war, by Bomberg (Arnaldo, 2008).Roberts exhibits a column of trees-sign of the industrialized death of the place and of the people who were in it (Arnaldo, 2008), and dilutes the soldiers on the landscape, at the same time that he does not recognize them as human beings, dehumanizes them, and destroys them as individuals (Baiges, 2016).
The corporal "Aesthetics of Disappearance" (Virilio, 1980) is found in Macke; in Villon, for whom the combatants are "a machine in movement," dematerialized and desubjectivized, and the landscape, a geometrizing abstraction that turns it into pure space without subject (Arnaldo, 2008); and in Depero, who presents mechanized puppets and abstracted figures made of boxes and gray and metallic tubes, located in a geometric space (Martin;2005).
Added to this generalized fading are the camouflage tactics of the Great War, an art of destruction and of creatively making disappear that merge and are cultivated.Moreover, what it seeks is to confuse reality with fiction, to deceive and invisibilize, to deconstruct form, that is, to replace naturalistic mimicry with the deception of simulation.Well, the deforming skills of Cubist, Fauvist, and Vorticist painting served especially for these purposes (Baiges, 2016), but it was, above all, the development of artistic abstraction that made possible the technique of camouflage that was implemented in this contest for the first time 2 as a tactical resource on a large scale (Arnaldo, 2008).This causes-as Vallotton writes (1975: p. 306)-that "… drawing or painting "forces" would be much more profoundly true than reproducing the material effects, but these "forces" have no form and even less color"; moreover, it could be questioned if they really possess a soul.Besides, the powerful army of fakers transformed the war, its landscape, and the conduct of the combatants, in such a way that, as a whole, it becomes a largescale trap (Delouche, 2004).

The Avant-Gardes and the Invisible War
As in a boomerang effect, the aesthetics of machinization and disappearance, as well as the tactics of camouflage, end up affecting the vision of what war means, the cause of the hope of the avant-gardes, and, consequently, hope itself, diluted before it took shape.
A sample of this is represented by Albert-Birot, as he draws a war conflict without subjects and invisible that has become unreal, an abstract tale, a "waking dream" of hopein Bloch's terms, but so ethereal and impossible to formalize that it ends up fading away, as does the hope for a better time caused by it.This is precisely what happens with some of Filonov's works, where war as such is not seen and, rather, has been transformed into a transit towards a new spirituality (Arnaldo, 2008).
War is also made invisible by Léger and the colorful abstractions of Marc (Arnaldo, 2008), in which we do not observe bombs, houses, destroyed landscapes, nor wounded or dead soldiers.Likewise, in Marc, war is a purifying sign, more an idea than a lived reality, and that is why he dissolves the figurative world, as does the action of artillery.
Futurism, for its part, with its "naturalization of things -the bullets "meow"-and reification of bodies -considered as machines, as we have seen-" (Marinetti, 1912;Alsina, 2016) and with its sequence of momentarily fixed movements, in reality, instead of uniting art and life (Vázquez, 1972;Cortázar, 2014) becomes even more distanced, particularly in the everyday (Alonso, 2000).In this regard, the artistic avant-gardes impoverished human life in the world of machinism and under the imperatives of a rationalist culture (Subirats, 1998), as they were unable to recreate true movement.Thus, rather, they recall the "beat of a dead body," sinking "in the darkness of abstractions" (Gabo and Pevsner, 1979: p. 326).
Thus, certainly, the outbreak of the Great War uncovers the destructive force of the machine (Arnaldo, 2008) and the disappearance of experience that technological warfare brought with it, as it volatilizes space and time and even corpses become a product of mass production (Alsina, 2016).

Conclusions: Broken Promises
As we have seen, the First World War constitutes, for artists, the origin of the hope for the transformation of European civilization.True, at the beginning, they receive it with great patriotic and technological enthusiasm, with a presentiment of what will happen and as the creation of a utopian future.Moreover, by merging creation and destruction, they consider that the world of phenomena, nature, soldier-artist-producers, and war itself must first be destroyed.Thus, simultaneously with hope, in the artistic works, the world and the nature we inhabit, the living beings that populate it, the combatants who participate in it, and the war itself that originates hope, all come to an end.This has been so because, once the violent energies and the overwhelming forces of combat are unleashed, there is no human being who can stop them, nor can the waking dreams of hope that they have generated.
But, when the conflict and the artistic avant-gardes became so intertwined, the interrelated principles of destruction and creation that nested in them were also annihilated, that is, art also died, something recognized today in the analysis of the artistic avant-gardes (Alsina, 2016).Specifically, the theoretical and stylistic conceptions, the aesthetic categories, the ethical postulates, and the aspirations that the avant-garde deposited in the consciousness to rule the world vanished (Subirats, 1998).
It is possible, therefore, that Adorno was more correct than Bloch in relation to hope.And the fact is that, according to the latter, utopian impulses and their resulting images are historical manifestations of the principle of hope, concretized in sensible representations, in ideals crystallized in works (Alcalá and Jarque, 2013).On the contrary, Adorno thinks that the promises launched by the artistic avantgardes could be considered as "broken," a promise of their own impossibility, which is not fulfilled.Hence, the happiness sketched in the form of artistic representation, far from being taken in real terms, should be understood, rather, as a utopian perspective, as the image or symbolization of what could be, but is not.It is not for nothing that the critical position of avant-garde art has become the dream of an apparent happy world that emerges in a miserable framework (Adorno, 1980).
But, at the same time, the resulting novel artistic forms recall the failed attempt to materialize a utopia, a real world in which to be free, that is, they are forms that aspire to freedom in reality, although in reality there is no such freedom (Marcuse, 1981).And this is linked to the fact that, after the seizure of power by the revolutionary bourgeoisie, art ended up separating itself from society and became incapable of influencing the cultural process to emancipate it (Gutiérrez, 2012).
Nor should we forget that the search for purity and the predominance of action for action's sake-especially, violent action-as well as the desire to impose on everyone their vision of a pure and perfected new Man, allows us to define the artistic avant-gardes as "an epistemological error," since they prefigure the totalitarian ideologies that would soon appear in Europe (Todorov, in Barrón: 2017;Olábarri-Gortázar 2021).For example, the Futurists influenced Mussolini's fascism (Martin, 2005;Granés, 2011;Gutiérrez, 2012) and, the Russian avant-gardists, the October Revolution (Barrón, 2017).
Finally, it should be added that the collapse of the artistic avant-gardes also implies a profound critique of modernity-and the need to update it-and of Sociology itself.Effectively, the result of the war-and the artistic avantgardes rooted in it-produces new economic, social, and political structures, as well as orders of truth, forms of knowledge, and structures of knowledge (Gallegos, 2020).At the same time, the war-and the artistic avant-gardes rooted in it-entails a profound questioning of the meaning of modernity and even a true humanist failure (Rodriguez, 2004).In fact, its individual and collective effects transform it into "suicidal" (Nouschi, 1999: p. 89), since it solved nothing (Hobsbawm, 2001) and meant the "defeat of consciousness" (Rodriguez, 2004: p. 255), the collapse of the whole world, and the "death of a certain idea of Europe" (Hobsbawm, 2013: p. 139).Indeed, all European values-among them the artistic ones-succumbed in the savagery of the combats, among them the guarantee and certainty of the continuous material, immaterial and demographic accumulation of society, definitively disappearing from the European conscience the security in the moral progress produced by reason (Nouschi, 1999;Rodríguez, 2004).
In sum, artistic modernity "has created a monster, the hope that everything can be pure, hiding the reality that what is good for some is bad for others, generating suffering and misery for them" (Law, 1994: pp. 6-7).Furthermore, and this is really important, if the first artistic avant-gardes cannot be conceived dissociated from the war, neither can the twentieth century (Hobsbawm, 2001) nor the process of modernization itself (Joas, 2005); in fact, this makes up a "belligerent modernity" (Alonso, 2000).
Finally, the revision of war itself and of avant-garde art should increase Sociology's interest in both, understanding them as a social phenomenon, collectively violent, while reconfiguring the theory of modernization, relativizing modernity itself (Joas, 2005).