The Avant-garde
· The term avant-garde first appeared with reference to art in 1825 when Henri de Saint Simon wrote:
we artists will serve you as an avant-garde, the power of the art is most immediate: when we want to spread new ideas we inscribe them on marble or canvas. What a magnificent destiny for the arts 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!
· Avant-garde is a military word, in English, it is ‘vanguard’ or ‘advance guard’.
· In art, it means the group of writers and artists who ‘push the boundaries of conventional and conservative art and look for new dimensions.
· In 1863, the annual exhibition of art ‘Paris Salon’ refused two-third of the paintings, including the works of Edouard Manet, Camille Pissarro, John Jongkind.
· Due to the protests by the rejected artists and their admirers the Emperor had to place their paintings in another part of the Palace.
· It was named as the Salon des Refusés ‘exhibition of rejects’. Multitudes of people visited this exhibition in a day. Later they successfully exhibited their works outside the traditional Salon beginning in 1874.
· In this way, avant-garde opened new ways to successive movements in modern art.
Avant-garde movements:
Standing at a front line of challenging the way art was made and thought about and because of its radical nature and the fact that it challenges existing ideas, processes and forms; avant-garde artists and artworks often go hand-in-hand with controversy. The first soldiers (“vanguard” or “fore-guard”) either die first or receive some of the most prestigious acknowledgments. Most of the movements occurred during the inter-war and post-war periods, where it is understandable that major shifts in society were needed.
Some avant-garde movements are Impressionism, Expressionism, Cubism, Futurism, Constructivism, Dadaism, De Stijl, and Surrealism, etc.
Impressionism (1872-1892):
· The Impressionism artists advocated radical theories of painting, which broke almost all the major rules concerning the composition and the choice of the subject matter.
· It can be considered the first distinctly modern movement in painting.
· Developing in Paris in the 1860s, its influence spread throughout Europe and eventually the United States.
· Its originators rejected the official, government-sanctioned exhibitions, or salons, and were consequently shunned by powerful academic art institutions.
· Promoting the painting of a contemporary society, which was quickly modernizing itself, artists, during this movement introduced an original subject matter of the every day leaving behind the grandeur of historical paintings
· In turning away from the fine finish and detail to which most artists of their day aspired, the Impressionists aimed to capture the momentary, sensory effect of a scene.
· To achieve this effect, many Impressionist artists moved from the studio to the streets and countryside.
Expressionism (1905-1933):
· Originating in Germany at the beginning of the 20th century. Its typical trait is to present the world solely from a subjective perspective, distorting it radically for emotional effect in order to evoke moods or ideas.
· The arrival of Expressionism announced new standards in the creation and judgment of art. Art was now meant to come forth from within the artist, rather than from a depiction of the external visual world, and the standard for assessing the quality of a work of art became the character of the artist's feelings rather than an analysis of the composition.
· Expressionist artists’ techniques were meant to convey the emotional state of the artist reacting to the anxieties of the modern world.
· Through their confrontation with the urban world of the early twentieth century, Expressionist artists developed a powerful mode of social criticism.
Cubism (1907-1911):
· The early 20th century was a time of change in the art world in France, yet cubism was still highly rejected. Many people said it was ugly and that they were unable to understand it.
· The scientific and philosophical changes at the time influenced the subject matter within the cubist artwork and people’s ability to accept the changes cubism was making in the art world.
· The idea behind Cubism is to show the essence of an object by displaying it from many different angles and points of view at the same time. An object is broken up, analyzed from many different perspectives, and reassembled in intangible form.
· The Cubists wanted to make pictures that reached beyond the rigid geometry of perspective fusing both their observations and memories into the one concentrated image.
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