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- The avant-garde movements that followed—including Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, Cubism, Futurism, Expressionism, Constructivism, de Stijl, and Abstract Expressionism —are generally defined as Modernist.
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Mar 26, 2016 · The dates of Modernism are disputable, it can be rightly claimed that nascent Modernism budded with the Avant-Garde (a military metaphor, meaning ‘advance guard’) which refers to a small, self-conscious group of artists and authors who deliberately undertook, in Ezra Pound’s phrase, to “make it new”.
The avant-garde pushes the boundaries of what is accepted as the norm or the status quo, primarily in the cultural realm. The avant-garde is considered by some to be a hallmark of modernism, as distinct from postmodernism.
Be able to summarize the main theories of Modernism and some of the dominant thinkers. Distinguish between Modernism and modernity. Understand the development of Modernism from out of the Avant-Garde and the Victorian Era. Identify characteristic traits of modernist literature and art in the world around you today.
- Beginnings
- Concepts and Trends
- Important Texts
- Later Developments
The Origins of the Phrase
Originally, "avant-garde" was a French military term for what would be called in English the vanguard of an army. However, its first application to art precedes by some decades the emergence of any distinctly avant-garde art movements. The coinage has generally been attributed to the French social theorist Henri de Saint-Simon. In his book Opinions litteraires, philosophiques et industrielles (Literary, Philosophical, and Industrial Opinions) (1825), published in the year of his death, Saint-...
Precursors
The idea of avant-garde art germinated in an era of social unrest, and was originally one of a number of competing theories to define and address it. However, Saint-Simonism, emphasizing the importance of the industrial class and science in renewing society, had become a particularly dominant force by the early 1800s. The unique distinction of Saint-Simon's theory was that it expanded the concept of the working class to include scientists, businesspeople, bankers, and managers. This expansion...
The French Revolution of 1848
The concept of avant-garde art took more distinct shape across the early-to-mid decades of the 19thcentury in France, especially between the July Revolution of 1830 and the French Revolution of 1848. This eighteen-year period was marked by political turmoil, movements for social reform, and counter forces of suppression. In 1848, revolt and rebellion occurred throughout Europe, from Scandinavia to Italy to Germany and Hungary. Amongst its causes were widespread famine and poverty, the inequal...
Avant-garde Art Movements
Avant-garde art was synonymous with the idea of the "movement" as the primary concept for understanding the development of art during the 20thcentury. As contemporary philosopher Alain Badiou has noted, "More or less the whole of twentieth-century art has laid claim to an avant-garde function." Sometimes an avant-garde movement consisted - at least initially - of only a few artists, as in Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque's Cubism or Delaunay and Sonia Delaunay's Orphism (though both movements...
Galleries and Museums
An essential characteristic of avant-garde art was its rejection of previous social and aesthetic orthodoxies. As such, its initial success often depended upon a small group of critics and gallerists willing to fly in the face of those orthodoxies. As the art critic Rosalind McEver notes, "avant-garde is a noun as well as an adjective. It refers to groups of artists and writers in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, specifically, those making and distributing art in a different way to the...
The Avant-garde and Alienation
The Romantic movements of the early 19h century were the first to emphasize the idea of the solitary and independent artist, often portrayed as a kind of Byronic hero. As Linda Nochlin notes, "the idea of the artist as an outcast from society, rejected and misunderstood by a philistine, bourgeois social order was...not a novelty by the middle of the nineteenth century." This had developed into a more pronounced sense of social alienation by the middle of the 19th century. Nochlin adds that fo...
Avant-Garde and Kitsch
By Clement Greenberg Originally published in Partisan Review, 1939 In 1939, Clement Greenberg published his essay "Avant-Garde and Kitsch," which argued that the avant-garde artist attempts to create "something valid solely on its own terms, in the way nature itself is valid...something given, increate, independent of meanings, similars or originals." Later associated with Abstract Expressionism, which he championed, Greenberg's theories became the leading art-critical concepts of the era. Th...
Theory of the Avant-Garde
By Peter Bürger Originally published as Theorie der Avantgardeby Suhrkamp Verlag, 1974 In the 1970s Peter Bürger's Theory of the Avant-Gardebecame so influential that two years after its publication, a volume of responses by leading art historians, artists, and critics was published. A member of the Frankfurt School, Bürger developed the idea of what he called "the historical avant-garde," which he placed during the era of 1910-40. He argued that avant-garde art represented the unification of...
Return of the Real: The Avant-Garde at the End of the Century
By Hal Foster Published by MIT Press, 1996 Art historian and critic Hal Foster has played a leading role in contemporary analysis of the avant-garde. Through his work The Return of the Real, Foster aimed to refute Bürger's argument that the neo-avant-garde of the 1960s and 70s had failed, and primarily represented a repetition of the historical avant-garde. As his publisher noted, "after the models of art-as-text in the 1970s and art-as-simulacrum in the 1980s, Foster suggests that we are now...
The Neo-Avant-Garde
The Second World War represented a kind of hiatus for the development of avant-garde art, which had continued more or less unabated since the 1870s, the most recent internationally successful example being the Surrealist movement. After the end of the Second World War and the recalibration of international politics and culture, including the US's consolidation of power as the dominant economic and social force of the era, avant-garde movements began to regroup across continents and media. The...
The Death of the Avant-Garde?
In the 21st century, the question of whether the avant-garde still exists is often questioned. In a sense, the neo-avant-garde movements of the 1970s were the last to be debated and celebrated as unambiguously avant-garde. The term's relevance following the intellectually levelling effects of postmodernism- which challenged the idea that any artistic, cultural, or political position could be more viable than any other - is certainly questionable. For the philosopher Alain Badiou, "today the t...
The avant-garde movements that followed—including Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, Cubism, Futurism, Expressionism, Constructivism, de Stijl, and Abstract Expressionism—are generally defined as Modernist.
Within the context of modernism, historical avant-garde movements (such as Dada, Futurism, Vorticism, Anarchism, and Constructivism) radicalized innovations in aesthetic forms and content, while also engaging viewers and readers in deliberately shocking new ways.
In most histories of most of the arts, modernism has been taken to be what the avant-garde has created, and reciprocally, the avant-garde is significant and distinguishable for the modernist qualities that it has explored and developed.
