VANGUARDIA movements: definition, types and artists

The contexts of social crisis not only affect the economic and political structure of a country, in different historical periods wars, epidemics or abrupt changes have led to the invention of new forms of art. This is the case of the avant-garde movements that emerged during the 20th century. In this lesson from a Teacher we will delve into what these movements meant and did, as well as their different types.

The artistic vanguards they are known as groups that have a political, ideological or artistic commitment. However, although it is possible to speak of avant-garde in a general sense, certain groups of people are often called “avant-garde movements”. artists who developed in literature and the plastic arts in different parts of Europe from the first decade of 1900.

The avant-garde movements sought to break with the cultural tradition of the 19th century West. It was the very context in which they were born that gave them their name. Vanguard is a word that was used in French military settings to designate the most advanced fraction of a troop. Precisely, its etymology comes from

advance guard that breaks down into ahead which means "forward" and guard which refers to the "outpost of a political, literary, ideological or artistic group."

In this way, the avant-garde movements sought to get ahead of the aesthetic practices inherited from bourgeois art that was created during the different decades of 1800 with the processes of industrialization and the advance of the great empires.

Characteristics of avant-garde movements

Under the aforementioned context, during the nineteenth century the advances of photography as an art were implemented and, punctually, in 1895, the invention of the cinema occurred. These two new ways of representing reality affected the fine arts and gave them a new perspective to interpret the world. This amalgam of changes defined certain characteristics in avant-garde movements which we could summarize in the following points:

• Freedom in the way of expressing your art.
• Exploration of new aesthetics.
• Revolutionary charge in his speech.
• Uses of the irrational, dreamlike and emotional.

The vanguards are usually divided into two periods (the first wave and the second wave); However, this time we will present them according to their type, that is, grouped by the art they used. Thus, there are three main types of vanguards: 1) interdisciplinary, which used painting and literature; 2) the artistic ones, which used only the plastic arts; 3) the literary ones, which were developed narratively.

Interdisciplinary vanguards

Within this first group that used both literature, including poetry, dramaturgy and narrative, as well as the plastic arts, we find three main avant-garde subtypes:

• Futurism: belonging to the first wave, it was created between 1909 and 1944 in Italy. Its pioneer was the poet and writer Filippo Tommaso Marinetti who wrote the Futurism Manifesto. From there we can rescue the maxims of this type of avant-garde that concentrated on expressing the speed, dynamism, sensuality and technological evolution of the society of its time.
• Dadaism: it was created during the First World War in Europe. With the ideological influence of anarchism, the rejection of the socio-political order established by the bourgeoisie and making use of the concept of the absurd, he built the aesthetics of it. The critique of Dadaism focuses on the way capitalism has commodified art and its creators.
• Surrealism: with exponents in literature such as Salvador Dalí and in literature such as André Breton, it is the avant-garde movement of the oneiric. By mixing reflections on the unconscious with its aesthetics, Surrealism rethinks time, the mind, emotions, and the use of creativity.

Artistic Vanguards

Although they have been varied, some of the main avant-garde movements that exclusively used plastic art could be listed as follows:

• Cubism: between 1900 and 1910 it emerged as a new look at a chaotic world full of conflicts. With a hint of gray and with the intention of representing reality as a collage, painters like Pablo Picasso gave a name to this first wave avant-garde with their art.
• Abstract expressionism: as part of the second wave it was created in 1940 in the United States. With the use of oil and abstraction they sought to escape from conventional ways of making art. One of the main exponents of him was Jackson Pollock with his "drip" technique.
• Pop art: It emerged in the United Kingdom and the United States in the second half of the 20th century. Starting with market goods, advertising and comic aesthetics, he used images that sought to criticize mass production and the consumer society.

Literary vanguards

To finish, let's review two of the avant-gardes that used only literature as an artistic medium:

• Creationism: was a particularly Hispanic-American movement started by Vicente Huidobro, Chilean poet. Unlike surrealism, creationism validates human reason within poetic writing. In the same way, he considered that writing should be of absolute freedom and acquired its maximum creation in poetry.
• Ultraism: was born in 1918 with Rafael Cansinos Assens in Spain. In Latin America,Jorge Luis Borges it was its greatest exponent in Argentine literature. It was characterized by using metaphor, prose and avoiding sentimentality.