Avant-garde
The avant-garde - French for an army's 'advance guard' - names art that deliberately breaks with established conventions to point somewhere new. Borrowed from military and utopian socialist language in nineteenth-century France, the tag attached first to Courbet and the realists and then to the sequence of modern movements that defined themselves against academy and market: Fauvism, Cubism, Futurism, Dada, Surrealism, and their successors. What unites them is less a look than a stance: manifesto-making, scandal as strategy, and a conviction that art should lead culture rather than decorate it. Many avant-gardes also blurred art into life, politics, and industry. As the label became honorific, each new rupture declared the previous one exhausted.
Defining characteristics
- Deliberate rupture: rejection of academic rules and the previous generation
- Manifestos, declarations, and provocative self-publicity
- Scandal and shock used to force public attention
- Rapid succession of '-isms' that supersede one another
- Blurring of art with life, politics, technology, and mass media
Key figures
- Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (1876-1944) — Futurist founder whose manifestos made rupture a public program
- Kazimir Malevich (1878-1935) — Took painting to pure abstraction in the name of the new
- Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968) — Ready-made that questioned the artwork's very definition
- Tristan Tzara (1896-1963) — Dadaist whose antics made anti-art a method
Example works
- Zang Tumb Tumb — Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (1914)
- Black Square — Kazimir Malevich (1915)
- Fountain — Marcel Duchamp (1917)
Sources
- Avant-garde - Wikipedia encyclopedia