• What is avant-garde?
• Origin of avant-garde
• Characteristics of avant-garde
• Main manifestations of the avant-garde
• Authors and representatives of the avant-garde
• Avant-garde works

We explain what avant-garde is, its origin, main manifestations and other characteristics. Also, their representatives.

The avant-gardes challenge the limits of artistic forms.

What is avant-garde?

The avant-garde or “Avant-garde”(In French and other languages), is the artistic trend marked by the innovation, rupturism, experimentation and in general the expansion of the limits of what is accepted by the status quo. It is a term of majority use in the art, but applicable with the same sense also to the politics, the society, the philosophy and other areas.

The term “avant-garde” comes from the military term “avant-garde”, which designates the soldiers who take the lead in the formation. This term is originally from the French (avant-garde) and could be translated as “front guard”. Its use in the artistic field comes from the first texts of the socialism utopian, and eventually became popular under the logic that the new forms of art had to combat the traditional nineteenth-century and academic models.

Avant-garde is a general trend, present in all times and in all arts, although in some times with a much clearer and more defined character.

Specifically, at the beginning of the 20th century, it constituted a set of aesthetic, philosophical and political movements known as the avant-gardes, which sought to take artistic language to unknown limits, with revolutionary ideas and novel procedures. In this context, talking about the avant-garde or the avant-garde movement is the same.

Origin of avant-garde

Avant-garde as a movement emerged in the first quarter of the 20th century, in the midst of a time of violent changes in the world political configuration and loss of faith in the ideas of order and progress that the previous century proposed as a model to follow (the positivism).

The First World War (1914-1918), for example, had dragged the great powers colonial of the time to a conflict devastating and uncivilized, which had involved almost the planet whole and had cost millions of lives.

In the same context, the Russian Revolution overthrew the tsars and installed the first socialist republic of the history (which later became the Soviet Union), giving a large section of the world hope that an alternative to capitalism were possible.

These ideas were reinforced by the gigantic depression of 1929, which also spawned other political monsters such as the fascism and Nazism, which later led to a new world war.

But that did not prevent cars and new technologies They will flood the market, predicting an industrial society never seen before, capable of telecommunications, electrification and conquering flight. It was a time of tension and hope.

In the artistic world, there had already been a first avant-garde at the end of the 19th century in which the impressionist painters rebelled against the taste of the time, spawning at the beginning of the 20th century a whole line of painters far from the classical.

Fauvism (1905-1907), the cubism and the expressionism they were the first avant-garde pictorial movements. Soon after, the futurism was the first to publish a manifesto, where artistic and literary intentions were declared, under the slogan that "a roaring car is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace", that is, exalting modernity and technology.

Characteristics of avant-garde

Malevich's suprematism avoided imitation of the real.

The avant-garde in general was characterized by:

• To encompass a diverse set of "-isms", that is, of particular artistic manifestations, endowed with a meaning, a group policy, a set of aesthetic principles, and different members. It was a movement of movements, really, which tended to be short-lived and to be succeeded by new ones.
• It can be classified into two major trends: the historical avant-garde or first avant-garde, which covers the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and the second avant-garde, after World War II and ending in the 1970s.
• Own a attitude provocative, challenging and combative, which was often expressed openly in the manifestos of each “-ism”.
• Oppose traditional ways and value experimentation, free expression, boldness and speed.
• Embracing a political sense of art, often viewing it as a critique of established society.
• Propose new metaphors, images and expressive techniques, often exploring the limits between one and the other, and defending subjectivity and originality as a guarantee of a new art, adapted to the new times.

Main manifestations of the avant-garde

Impressionists like Monet changed the line and the way of perceiving the work.

Some of the main "-isms" of the avant-garde movement were:

Historical Vanguards (1874-1939)

• Impressionism (1874-1910). In many classifications of avant-garde, impressionism is usually left out, as it was a movement of the late nineteenth century. However, it was the first artistic movement that rebelled against the traditional taste of the time, proposing the representation of the reality from the light: the impression that it leaves, and that makes up the painting. For this he changed the line and the way of perceiving the construction site, so influential that it spawned Neo-Impressionism and Post-Impressionism.
• Expressionism (1905-1913). Arisen in Germany, cradle of Romanticism, Expressionism was an important pictorial, poetic and cinematographic movement, which defended the work as a reflection of the inner and sentimental reality of the artist, rather than a copy of the real world. Exaggerations, deformations, abstractions, all were welcome to represent the artist's world.
• Cubism (1907-1914). Attacking the traditional Renaissance perspective and the realistic way of representing the reality, Picasso and Braquet's cubism undertakes its own way of looking at the world, in which objects can be seen in their three dimensions at the same time, moving away from impressionism and its photographic accuracy, to rather value the subjective perspective of things.
• Futurism (1909-1914). Futurism, under the baton of the Italian writer Filippo Marinetti, aspired to be the first truly modern artistic movement, in which the machine, speed, technology and other industrial aspects were, in his view, aesthetically undervalued. Futurism culminated very quickly, but it was rediscovered some years later and proved to be very influential in Dadaism and Surrealism.
• Dadaism (1915-1922). It was perhaps the most radical and aggressive of all the avant-garde movements. Born in Switzerland, by the hand of the Romanian poet Tristan Tzara, he embraced the anarchism as an alternative to any moral, social, poetic or aesthetic convention. Its name, in fact, comes from a random search in the dictionary, which meant a pure, free creation, capable of expressing itself through new and amazing ways. It was very influential for the later avant-gardes.
• Suprematism (1915-1919). Born in revolutionary Russia by the hand of Kasimir Malevich, it was a pictorial exploration in search of a language new and pure plastic, devoid of figurative inheritances. He embraced geometry and abstraction as an escape from the imitation of reality, with special use of black and white, or not very bright colors. It was one of the main movements of the abstract art.
• Ultraism (1918-1922). Arisen in Spain after the First World War, it was a renewing movement of poetic writing, defending the verse free and the metaphor, contrary to the anecdote and the rhyme. It spawned other movements such as creationism, and its greatest exponents were Vicente Huidobro, Guillaume Apollinaire and Jorge Luis Borges.
• Stridentism (1922-1927). Born in Mexico as a mixture of other diverse avant-garde movements, he had a modern, cosmopolitan and urban literary spirit, with dissatisfied, snobbish and irreverent tastes, which rejected everything that was ancient. Its greatest antecedent was Futurism, in its Soviet Russian side.
• Surrealism (1924-1939). Reflecting the instability of the interwar period, this movement arises thanks to the work of the French poet André Bretón, and soon spreads to painting, where it acquires a double meaning: figurative and abstract surrealism. Each one, in his own way, tried to explore no longer the visible reality, but the dream reality: the one that was trapped in the artist's head and which can only be accessed in dreams, through intriguing and sinister mechanisms. That is why surrealism valued methods unaware of creation, such as automatic writing or exquisite corpse, and cultivated letters, movie theater and painting with an incomparable style.

Second vanguards (1945-1970)

• Tachismo (1940-1950). Belonging to a broader and more diverse movement known as Informalism, it is a type of abstract painting based on stains (hence its name, from the French cross out, "stain"). It was a reaction to Cubism, which used squiggles, thick, messy lines, and had ties to American lyrical abstraction.
• Arte Póvera (mid 1960). Its name comes from the Italian: "poor art", a name given to it by the critic Germano Celant, because he used humble, non-industrial materials for his works, such as fats, ropes, canvas bags, dirt, logs, etc. Thus, a work was made whose changes with the weather they were evident and appreciable, since the materials of their manufacture decomposed.
• Kinetic art (1965-1970). A type of plastic arts that tried to reproduce in his works the movement and optical effects, as the viewer entered or walked next to the sculpture or the picture. In some cases, small motors were even used to produce the movement. It was one of the most rational arts of the moment, close to design since its works required a huge planning.

Authors and representatives of the avant-garde

The avant-garde authors are too numerous to list, but one resume of the most famous would have to include the following:

• Claude Monet (1840-1926). French painter, creator along with others of impressionism. In fact, one of his works gave the movement its name: "Impression, rising sun" from 1872.
• Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919). Another of the great impressionist painters, whose works tend to be more sensual and ornate than those of the rest of his fellow movement, with a bright palette and an optimistic view of reality.
• Edvard Munch (1863-1944). Norwegian painter and printmaker, whose expressionist works were always influenced by anguish and passions, strongly influenced by Neo-Impressionism.
• Fritz Lang (1890-1976). Austrian filmmaker whose work was developed in Germany and the United States, is considered one of the great exponents of expressionism in cinema, before his career took a turn for the black film after his emigration to the United States and his incorporation into Hollywood.
• Pablo Picasso (1881-1973). Spanish painter and sculptor who, together with Georges Braque, created Cubism. He was one of the greatest painters of the 20th century, and a fervent militant communist and pacifist.
• Tristan Tzara (1896-1963). Romanian poet and essayist of Jewish origin, he founded the anti-artistic movement Dadaism, of which he is the greatest exponent. An ancestor of surrealism, he is one of the great avant-garde artists of the 20th century.
• Guillaume Apollinaire (1880-1918). French poet, novelist and essayist, famous for his calligrammatic poetry that he sought to represent, through typography and layout on the page, new meanings beyond what was said in words. He was the first to use the term "surrealism" and "surrealist" in 1917, referring to one of his works by theater.
• André Breton (1896-1966). Poet, essayist, communist activist and father of surrealism, Breton was a pioneer of Dadaism too, before his break with Tzara. His work is the most representative of surrealism.
• Luis Buñuel (1900-1983). Spanish film director whose work was mostly produced in Mexico and France, due to the rigors of the Spanish Civil War. Cultor of surrealism, a collaborator of Salvador Dalí, he is considered one of the most original film directors in history.
• Salvador Dalí (1904-1989). Spanish painter, sculptor, printmaker, set designer and writer with a strong surrealist affiliation, his paintings are famous for their dreamlike and disturbing settings, known throughout the world. Of enormous originality, narcissism and megalomania, he collaborated extensively with such filmmakers as Alfred Hitchcock and Walt Disney.

Avant-garde works

Picasso's work "Guernica" recalls the bombing during the Civil War.

Again, the catalog of avant-garde works is too extensive and diverse. Next, we will simply name some of the best known of the authors listed above.

• Impression, rising sun Y Lunch on the grass by Monet.
• The rowers' lunch Y The big bathers by Renoir.
• The Scream Y The kiss by Munch.
• Metropolis Y M, the vampire of Dusseldorf by Fritz Lang.
• The Lordships of Avignon , Man with guitar and Guernica by Picasso.
• First Dada manifesto Y Where wolves drink scored by Tristan Tzara.
• An Andalusian dog Y The discreet charm of the bourgeoisie of Buñuel.
• The great masturbator , The persistence of Memory Y The temptation of San Antonio by Salvador Dalí.