Avant-garde: what it is and what are its characteristics and types

In October 1905, Parisians were officially able to witness the first artistic avant-garde. It was an exhibition organized at the Grand Palais, which brought together, for the first time, the great names of Fauvism, the current that is traditionally considered the beginning of the vanguards.

However, this is not exactly so. The impressionists had already rebelled against the precepts of the academy in the 1870s. Long before, other movements, such as the Pre-Raphaelites or the Nazarenes, had also reacted against the absolutism of official art. Why are they not included, then, within the avant-garde? And, to begin with, what exactly defines the avant-garde?

In this article we will give a brief review of the avant-garde, its origins and its characteristics.

What is avant-garde?

The concept Vanguard it is inevitably related to its original meaning, of a clear military nature. In the artistic field, it refers to trends that present a strong critical attitude against society and norms., especially against the rules of artistic creation. One of the important aspects when defining avant-garde is that it must be practiced by a group of artists.

Throughout the history of art we find authors who have distanced themselves, to a greater or lesser extent, from the official precepts. It is even possible to find a small number of artists, generally linked to a school or with the same origin, that at some point have worked more or less together and have been inspired mutually. This is the case, for example, of the Barbizon school, framed in the realist current.

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Historical context: children of the Great War

However, It is commonly accepted that, to be considered avant-garde, an artistic current must be accompanied by a manifesto, in which the founding group publicly expresses its intentions and objectives. For this reason, the inclusion of movements such as Fauvism or Expressionism in the great sack of avant-garde is highly debatable, since they were artists united by certain ideals and a common aesthetic, but at no time did they have a solid awareness of cohesion, nor did they express it officially in any manifesto foundational.

On the other side of the coin, there are the movements that did have a group conscience and expressed their ideals in writing, but that, despite this, are not included within the avant-garde. This is the case of the aforementioned Pre-Raphaelites, who 1) were aware of belonging to an artistic group and 2) did put their objectives in writing. Why then is the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood not included in the vanguard? The answer is actually simple. The vanguards, as we understand them, are the daughters of a very specific context: the crisis of values ​​that had taken over the West at the end of the 19th century. At this time, when the great conflict that would dismember the European continent a few years later is predicted, a deep religious and social crisis ensues that plunges many intellectuals into acute pessimism. The incessant search for a vital meaning leads many artists to play with a provocative and rebellious art that, In addition, he captures in his works the ugliness of the big cities, of progress and of the darkest part of the human being.

Thus, the expressionists represent human beings-automata on their canvases, whose faces are, in general, masks. Dadaism elevates trivial aspects of daily life to the category of art (let us remember Duchamp's urinal) in a clear denunciation of artistic marketing and its norms. Cubism "decomposes" reality and recreates it again from an original and completely new point of view. The surrealists, for their part, collect the most hidden part of the human psyche and put it under the nose of the hypocritical bourgeois society.

But, above all, the great event that marks the generation of the avant-garde is the First World War, which further plunges the world in which the avant-garde is born. It is the great scar of the artists of the generation; some, like the expressionist Auguste Macke (1887-1914), even died in the fight.

The 6 most important avant-garde movements

What are the most important currents framed within the avant-garde? It is not our intention in this article to carry out an exhaustive tour of each of them, since we only intend to briefly summarize what the avant-garde consists of and why it originated. However, we believe it is essential to review its most important movements.

1. fauvism

Traditionally considered the first of the avant-garde, experts currently doubt whether to keep the fauvism in avant-garde art. Because, Despite the fact that it was a current with very different characteristics from official art, it did not have a manifesto, nor did its members enjoy a strong cohesion while it lasted..

Fauvism did not intend to make any social complaint, as did expressionism and dadaism, for example. Its essential characteristics are of an aesthetic nature. On the one hand, they pick up from the pointillists the use of direct color on the canvas, without mixing it; on the other, they are among the first artists to use tonality exclusively expressive and not realistic. That is why many expressionist painters (such as Kirchner or the first Kandinsky) took their concept of color from the Fauves.

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2. expressionism

Violently confronted with society, the expressionismIt is perhaps the first avant-garde that represents, exclusively, a denunciation. Indeed; More than an aesthetic renovation, the expressionists intend, through their work, to forcefully rebel against the world in which they have had to live.

The expressionists focus their interest on everything that bourgeois society detests: madness, sex, prostitution, the marginalized, the excluded. His paintings are a strong denunciation, usually expressed in an "unsightly" way; disfigured faces, machine men and women, gloomy cities and other disturbing elements. Some of its most famous representatives are Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (1880-1938), the leader of the group die brucke (The bridge); Emil Nolde (1867-1956) or George Grosz (1893-1959). On the other hand, Franz Marc (1880-1916) and Vasili Kandinsky (1866-1944) are the essential names of Der Blaue Reiter, the other great expressionist group, which allowed the soul to express itself through color (very much in line, therefore, with the Fauves).

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3. futurism

In 1909 the first avant-garde manifesto was finally born.. It is the manifesto of futurism, a movement that was born in an Italy dotted with problems and social struggles. Like all the other vanguards, Futurism aims to be a reaction to tradition, and it does so in a radical and curious way: placing all its emphasis on modernity and technology.

Thus, the futuristic works are based on "modern" concepts such as speed, the motor, the lights of big cities, sports; in short, everything that represents the modern human being. For this reason, Futurism is, in essence, radically opposed to Expressionism, which fled precisely from the progress that was leading Europe to the gates of a war. In fact, some of its most significant representatives, such as Filippo Tomasso Marinetti (1876-1944), went so far as to consider war as “social hygiene”.

4. The cubism

It is probably one of the best known vanguards. Unlike other avant-garde movements such as expressionism or futurism, more inclined to a social ideology and obviously emotional, cubism is a much more rational current. It is for this reason that cubist authors, especially during the so-called analytical cubism, dispense with color in an almost radical way, and focus their chromatic range on browns, blacks and greys.

The main idea behind this movement is to "break" the object, fragment it and build it again with another perspective, uniting planes that are not juxtaposed in reality. In his second period, synthetic cubism, the analysis loses force and the artists simply “summarize” what they see. In both one and the other, some of the great names of cubism are George Braque (1882-1963), Juan Gris (1887-1927) and, of course, Pablo Picasso (1881-1973).

5. Dadaism

Directly linked to its predecessors, whose objective was focused on social denunciation, the Dadaism or Dada is created in Zurich as a bitter fruit of the collective disappointment of young artists Europeans. For Dada nothing makes sense anymore, not even the name of the movement, which means absolutely nothing.

The Dadaists deny everything, even art itself. Hence Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968) presented a toilet to the Society of Independent Artists, or for him to draw a Gioconda mustache on a sheet, accompanied by a sufficiently provocative (she has a hot ass), which was formed by quickly reading a few letters in French.

6. The surrealism

It was one of the last vanguards to appear, but probably one of the most profound. And it is that, inspired by the theories of Sigmund Freud and the advances of psychoanalysis, in 1924 André Breton (1896-1966) and his colleagues publish the first surrealist manifesto, where they set out the goals of the new motion.

Surrealism tries, like the other avant-gardes, to "annoy" the bourgeoisie. The resource used in this case is the world of the unconscious, where it is supposed that all fears and desires that society does not want to face (among them, the great bourgeois taboo subject: sex).

So, the surrealists penetrate the human psyche and try to "rescue" all the material stored in itthrough different techniques. Although at first Breton and the others used the so-called "automatic writing", through which the unconscious was given freedom to capture whatever he wanted on paper, later some authors such as Salvador Dalí (1904-1989) distanced themselves from this method and followed their own path. In the case of the Catalan painter, through his paranoid-critical method, who played with visual traps to deceive the viewer.