The article is the second part of the author’s study of the avant-garde of the early 20th century, or early avant-garde, which is considered the third stage in the development of the Romantic movement - not in the narrow art-historical sense, but in a broader social-cultural sense as an “intellectual movement”, a type of worldview defining the culture of Western society. This movement is defined as regressive due to its course toward a return to the “original” and its opposition to the ideological vector of humanism aimed at unleashing human potential in the spirit of the Enlightenment. The antagonism of these intellectual directions constitutes a social-cultural cycle divided into stages. A distinctive feature of the period initiated by “upper Romanticism” is the expansion of the Romantic movement, irreversibly changing the social-cultural landscape of the West. “High” and “late Romanticism” (decadence) were examined from the same perspective as in the first part of the study. The author interprets the avant-garde as an unprecedented “tidal wave” of the Romantic movement, the most radical in its nihilism and ambitious in its scope, which was initially perceived as the final phase in the destruction of the old culture and society and the beginning of the construction of a “new world”. The self-perception as barbarians and titans, superhuman beings of the new world, was determined by the conviction that a social-cultural upheaval was already underway. This “titanic avant-garde” was inspired by the “Dionysian” ideas of F. Nietzsche, H. Bergson, and the spiritualism of the time. Having failed to achieve its maximalist goal, the avant-garde, like the extreme political movements associated with it, integrated into Western society. As the revolution began to decline, C. Greenberg suggested a neopositivist conception of art criticism influenced by J. Ortega y Gasset’s dualistic theory of “new art”, merging rationalism with vitalism. Greenberg’s formalist conception of art was opposite to the “titanic avant-garde” in terms of its conceptual foundation and social-political orientation - it determined a different, “Americanized” avant-garde with a “human face”, which integrated into Western society at the time, becoming the dominant force in Western art. While Western art historians generally “civilized” the early avant-garde, weakening or concealing its chthonic nature, Soviet art historians, on the contrary, sought to expose it, sometimes in an exaggerated form. In creating an image of the degraded art of the bourgeois world, Soviet critics believed to prove its total social crisis and decline. The principles of the “titanic avant-garde” were most fully expressed in surrealism with its psychologistic focus on the unconscious and its understanding of the artist as a medium.