It is often asked how the various historical avant-gardes were able to persist in their avant-gardism and gain recognition, when support from the art market was denied them out of hand. From the Realism of the 1850s to the virulent varieties of avant-gardism in the 1910s, artistic innovation was made possible by avant-garde painting’s physical as well as symbolic detour abroad. This detour allowed artists to remain avant-garde within the Parisian field while at the same time exporting a more saleable kind of painting. On the symbolic level, especially, it was a basis for the legitimacy of avant-garde claims about the internationalization of their careers, stirring European elites’ national guilty consciences. This internationalization was rendered possible by the large range of cultural divisions among various countries. One could therefore work to adapt avant-garde exhibitions abroad. From the Realist period onward, the artists themselves, then increasingly their dealer friends, critics, and collectors, took charge of this vast movement of cultural transfer, but at the risk of making many compromises.