Avant-garde means "advance guard" or Vanguard.
In the military, they're the ones out front - they can see what’s ahead, seek out the
enemy, analyze the terrain, and so on.
But what does it mean in art?
Hey guys, It’s Karin, Welcome back to Little Art Talks.
Today let’s talk about what is the avant-garde and why is it important to the arts.
In the arts, Avant-garde can be used both as a noun and an adjective.
It can be used to refer to the artists who introduce these new, experimental ideas
For example, "works by artists of the Russian avant-garde"
But also be used as a way to describe the work:
"a controversial avant-garde composer"
The term first appeared in reference to art during the first half of the nineteenth century
in France.
The influential thinker Henri de Saint-Simon, one of the forerunners of socialism, had this
idea that artists, alongside scientists and industrialists, were leaders of a new society.
He wrote in 1825: We artists will serve you as an avant-garde,
the power of the arts is most immediate: when we want to spread new ideas we inscribe them
on marble or canvas.
What a magnificent destiny for the arts is that of exercising a positive power over society,
a true priestly function and of marching in the van [i.e. vanguard] of all the intellectual
faculties!
The term avant-garde pretty much goes hand-in-hand with with modern art.
Now, I’ve said before, that modern art is kind of a difficult thing to pinpoint when
exactly it starts, but for the sake of this video, let’s say it’s around the 1850s
with the realism of Gustave Courbet.
The notion of the avant-garde is based on the idea that art should be judged based on
the quality and originality of the artist’s vision and ideas.
This can be innovations on form, such as in cubism, which rejected traditional techniques
of perspective, modeling, and foreshortening, and instead emphasized the two-dimensionality
of the canvas and used multiple or contrasting vantage points.
Other avant-garde artists had strong social programmes, such as futurism, De Stijl or
surrealism.
Their radical nature in challenging existing ideas, processes and forms makes these artists
no stranger to controversy.
So if you ever thought that modern, post-modern, and contemporary art is a whole lotta nonsense,
it’s partially because these avant-garde artists are intentionally confronting more
traditional schools of thought.
While the term was originally used to describe innovative approaches to art making in the
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it’s still used today to describe art that
pushes the boundaries of ideas and creativity
I hope this video helped you better understand the meaning of the avant-garde.
If you enjoyed it, please like and subscribe for more videos on art history.
Thanks so much for watching, and I’ll see you guys next time.