David Cottington is Emeritus Professor of Art History at Kingston University London. He has published widely on the Cubist movement and the artistic avant-gardes of the early twentieth century, including Cubism in the Shadow of War: The Avant-Garde and Politics in Paris 1905-1914 (Yale UP, 1998), and Cubism and its Histories (Manchester University Press, 2004). His Modern Art: A Very Short Introduction was published in 2005. The Avant-Garde: A Very Short Introduction of 2013 was followed by his latest book, Radical Art and the Formation of the Avant-Garde, a history and theorisation of the avant-garde's early phases, published by Yale University Press in March 2022.