'Avant-Garde' - An Innovative Subcategory of Bohemianism

‘Avant-Garde’ – An Innovative  Subcategory of Bohemianism

“Avant-Garde“ means new and experimental ideas and methods in art, music, or literature. 

                  

                    
  

Avant-garde ideas, styles, and methods are very original or modern in comparison to the period in which they happen or ahead of times : avant-garde art/cinema/painting/literature.   The Victorian avant-garde was one of the first avant-garde works to appeal to a wide audience.

                                                   Avant-Garde Victorian Art -1

                                                     Avant-Garde Victorian Art -2

 

Avant- Garde favors introduction of new and experimental ideas and methods. A group of artists, musicians, or writers working with new and experimental ideas and methods are called Avant-Garde artists.

Who Is The World's Most Avant-Garde Artist ?

 








                
 

              

Pablo Picasso was undoubtedly one of the pioneer of Avant-Garde with his experimental  art of Cubism in painting.  His mastery of figurative and abstract art in almost all media was notable.  With his development of Cubism, Pablo Picasso was part of the early 20th-century art world's avant-garde.

                                                          Avant-Garde  Sculpture
     

In the late nineteenth century, sculpture was not considered to be in line with the avant-garde movements.  Most sculptures of the period were used as monuments and were still Neoclassical in style.  However, a few artists tried to make sculpture modern.

Who Is The World's Most Avant-Garde Artist ?

An impossible question to answer, so the top contenders include: Pablo Picasso (the most important figure of 20th century, in terms of art, and art movements that occurred over this period), JMW Turner (a painter arguably 50 years ahead of his time); Claude Monet (the first revolutionary of modern painting); Ilya Repin (the first painter to capture the authentic detail of life in Russia; Marcel Duchamp (the pioneer of Dada and Object Art, from which Conceptual Art emerged); the husband and wife team Christo and Jeanne-Claude (empaquetage, or packaging); Andy Warhol (the first and arguably greatest postmodernist); Gilbert & George (living sculptures); Damien Hirst (art's greatest self-publicist) and of course the graffiti terrorist Banksy. In architecture, top candidates include: Le Corbusier (Charles-Edouard Jeanneret) (1887-1965), the functionalist utopian architect and pioneer of Brutalism; and Frank O. Gehry (b.1929), the champion of De-constructivism in both America and Europe.

Avant-garde is originally a French term, meaning in English vanguard or advance guard or fore-guard (the part of an army that goes forward ahead of the rest). It first appeared with reference to art in France in the first half of the nineteenth century, and is usually credited to the influential thinker Henri de Saint-Simon, one of the forerunners of socialism. He believed in the social power of the arts and saw artists, alongside scientists and industrialists, as the leaders of a new society. In 1825 he 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 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!

Avant-garde art can be said to begin in the 1850s with the realism of Gustav Courbet, who was strongly influenced by early socialist ideas.

                                                                Avant-Garde Realism

                  

   

Avant-Garde Fantasy Realism                                                        Avant-Garde Magic Realism

This was followed by the successive movements of modern art, and the term avant-garde is more or less synonymous with modern.

Some avant-garde movements such as cubism for example have focused mainly on innovations of form, others such as futurism, De Stijl or surrealism have had strong social programs.  Surrealism is a 20th-century avant-garde movement in art and literature which sought to release the creative potential of the unconscious mind, for example by the irrational juxtaposition of images.

                                Avant-Garde Surrealism -1                                    Avant-Garde Surrealism -2

Surrealism art often shows weird, bizarre, dreamlike subject matter because Surrealist artists were interested in depicting the world of dreams, nightmares, desire, and imagination.

In the video curator Chris Stephens introduces a period of huge innovation in British art at the beginning of the twentieth century, when avant-garde ideas and creativity flourished and new forms in art emerged.

Although the term avant-garde was originally applied to innovative approaches to art making in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, it is applicable to all art that pushes the boundaries of ideas and creativity, and is still used today to describe art that is radical or reflects originality of vision.

 

                       

            

 



The notion of the avant-garde enshrines the idea that art should be judged primarily on the quality and originality of the artist’s vision and ideas.

As applied to art, avant-garde means art that is innovatory, introducing or exploring new forms or subject matter.

In the times of yore LSD use was limited to an intellectual avant-garde of writers, artists and musicians.

 

Avant-garde art, music, theater, and literature is very modern and experimental.

The avant-garde artists are those artists, writers, musicians, etc, whose techniques and ideas are markedly experimental or in advance of those generally accepted. 

 Avant-Garde is state -of –the-art, innovative and trendsetting methods and techniques.

Performance art can be considered avant-garde in the way it communicates with its audience addressing them often in a confrontational or interactive manner.

Avant-Garde is the advance group in any field, especially in the visual, literary, or musical arts, whose works are characterized chiefly by unorthodox and experimental methods. 

          

         Fashion Avant-Garde  - 1                                                           Fashion Avant-Garde - 2

 

                                                       Indian fashion Avant-Garde

What is The Meaning of "Avant-Garde"? – AVANT - GARDE ART

In fine art, the term "avant-garde" (from the French for 'vanguard') is traditionally used to describe any artist, group or style, which is considered to be significantly ahead of the majority in its technique, subject matter, or application. This is a very vague definition, not least because there is no clear consensus as to WHO decides whether an artist is ahead of his time, or WHAT is meant by being ahead. To put it another way, being avant-garde involves exploring new artistic methods, or experimenting with new techniques, in order to produce better art. The emphasis here is on design, rather than accident, since it seems doubtful that a painter or sculptor can be accidentally avant-garde. But what constitutes 'better' art? Does it mean, for instance, painting that is more aesthetically pleasing? 

Or more  meaningful? Or more vividly colored? The questions go on and on!

Perhaps the best way of explaining the meaning of avant-garde art, is to use the analogy of medicine. The vast majority of doctors follow mainstream rules when treating patients. (Similarly, most painters follow traditional conventions when painting.) However, a very small group of doctors and researchers experiment with radically new methods. (This group corresponds to avant-garde artists.) Most of these new methods lead nowhere, but some change the course of medicine for ever. (Picasso and Braque's Cubism had a similar effect on art.)

Radical Even Subversive

The term was reportedly first applied to visual art in the early 19th century by the French political writer Henri de Saint-Simon, who declared that artists served as the avant-garde in the general movement of social progress, ahead of scientists and other classes. However, since the beginning of the 20th century, the term has retained a connotation of radicalism, and carries the implication that for artists to be truly avant-garde they must challenge the artistic status quo - that is, its aesthetics, its intellectual or artistic conventions, or its methods of production - to the point of being almost subversive. Using this interpretation, Dada (1916-24) is probably the ultimate example of avant-garde visual art, since it challenged most of the fundamentals of Western civilization.

History of Avant-Garde Art

The Italian Renaissance was probably the single most avant-garde epoch in the history of painting and sculpture. Figures from the Biblical Holy Family were represented in an entirely natural manner - a radical departure from Byzantine, even Gothic, artworks. In addition, nudity became not only acceptable, but the noblest type of figurative imagery - witness Masaccio's Expulsion from the Garden of Eden (1426, Brancacci Chapel, Florence) by Masaccio, and the hypermodern bronze sculpture David by Donatello (c.1440, Bargello Museum, Florence).

Despite a brief flourish from Caravaggio, who reinvigorated the humanistic trend in painting with his peasant-like depictions of Christ and other members of the Holy Family, (and Giuseppe Arcimboldo with his fruit and vegetable portraits), the hyper modern traditions of the Renaissance were gradually replaced by repetition, imitation and total conformity. The great European Academies of Fine Arts, supported by the Catholic Church, introduced a set of unbending rules and conventions, which artists ignored at their peril - deviants were refused entry to the Salons and other official exhibitions. Perhaps only in Holland was there a genuine spirit of artistic exploration, notably in the form of intensely evocative portraiture by Rembrandt, and the new type of genre painting exquisitely rendered by Jan Vermeer and others.

        

It is not a photograph...









                                                                        ......but a Diego Koi portraiture



 
Not until the dust settled after the French Revolution did artists really begin to experiment again. It began with landscape painting. A new plain-air tradition was initiated by Corot and others from the Barbizon School; the German symbolist painter Caspar David Friedrich injected his landscapes with a new form of romanticism; and the genre was taken to even higher and more extraordinary levels by the English genius JMW Turner. 

The next really avant-garde school was Impressionism, - the first major movement of modern art - which turned color conventions upside down. All of a sudden, grass could be red and haystacks could be blue, depending on the momentary effect of sunlight as perceived by the artist. Today, Impressionism may be seen as mainstream, but back in the 1870s the public, as well as the arts hierarchy, were scandalized. As far as they were concerned, grass was green, and haystacks were yellow - and that was that.

Avant-Garde Art of the Early 20th Century

The first three decades of twentieth century art gave rise to a wave of revolutionary movements and styles. First, came Fauvism (1905-8) whose color schemes were so dramatic and anti-nature that its members were dubbed 'wild beasts'. Then Analytical Cubism (1908-12) - probably the most intellectual of all the avant-garde movements - which rejected the conventional idea of linear perspective in favor of greater emphasis on the two-dimensional picture plane, scandalizing the arts academies of Europe - along with visitors to the Parisian Salon des Independants and the New York Armory Show (1913) - in the process. Meanwhile, in Dresden, Munich and Berlin, German Expressionism was the cutting edge style, as practiced by Die Brucke (1905-13) and Der Blaue Reiter (1911-14), while in Milan, Futurism introduced its unique blend of movement and modernity.

Five important dealers in avant-garde art, in Paris, during the period 1900-30, include Solomon R Guggenheim (1861-1949), Ambroise Vollard (1866-1939), Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler (1884-1979), Paul Guillaume (1891-1934) and Peggy Guggenheim (1898-1979). In Germany, the great centre of the expressionist avant-garde, was Walden's Sturm Gallery.

But the most iconoclastic movement of all time is perhaps Dada, founded by Tristan Tzara (1896-1963) which ignited in Zurich in 1916 before spreading to Paris, Berlin and New York. Dadaists rejected most, if not all, bourgeois values of visual art, in favor of a heady mixture of anarchism and hyper modern innovation. The latter included a number of subversive ideas which are now seen as relatively mainstream, such as the creation of junk art from 'found objects' (Duchamp's 'readymades'), and the introduction of 3-D collage (Schwitters' Merzbau). Dada artists may also be said to have invented Performance Art, and Happenings, as well as Conceptual Art, more than fifty years ahead of their postmodernist successors. Dada's less intransigent successor was Surrealism, which amused but ultimately failed to maintain the momentum for change. After Dada, arguably only the Dutch painter Piet Mondrian, with his De Stijl style of geometric abstraction (neo-plasticism), was authentically experimental. In plastic art, the avant-garde was ably represented by the modernist Constantin Brancusi, the Futurist Umberto Boccioni, the Kinetic artist Alexander Calder, and Barbara Hepworth the Yorkshire sculptress who, in her celebrated 1931 work Pierced Form, introduced the 'hole' to the art of sculpture.

Avant-Garde Art of the Mid 20th Century

Avant-gardism during the 1940s onwards, came in fits and starts. This was partly because abstract art dominated, and there was very little about abstraction that was fundamentally new. In America, it's true, Jackson Pollock (1912-56) invented action-painting; Mark Rothko (1903-70) invested his abstract compositions with colorful emotion, while Robert Motherwell and Barnett Newman invested theirs with narrative; but by the mid-60s abstraction was a spent force. Minimalism streamlined it and attempted to inject it with a more high-powered message, but the public weren't really interested. They much preferred Pop art - the new 60s aesthetic which suddenly made art accessible again. However, except for a few exceptional multi-media artists, like Robert Rauschenberg and Andy Warhol, and possibly the sculptor Claes Oldenburg, Pop art remained trendy but predictable. (For more, see Andy Warhol's Pop Art of the sixties and seventies.) In Italy meanwhile, during the late 1960s, the humble raw materials used in the assemblages, installations and performance art of Arte Povera reinforced the experimental nature of the movement, while in America both the wooden assemblage art of Louise Nevelson (1899-1988) and the 'accumulations' of Arman (1928-2005) were a welcome exception to the dominant pop culture. Meantime, in Europe, during the 1950s and early 1960s, a taste of avant-gardism was provided by the experimental artists Jean Dubuffet (see Art Brut) and Yves Klein, as well as the Swiss sculptor and Jean Tinguely (1925-91) who joined Alexander Calder in developing kinetic art.

An influential figure in the avant-garde art of the New York School of the 1940s and 50s, was John Cage (1912-92), the composer and print-maker. Noted for his revolutionary musical composition 4 minutes 33 seconds (which contained not a single note of music!), Cage lectured at Black Mountain College and influenced artists like Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns.

Avant-Garde Art of the Late 20th Century

Postmodernist art arrived during the late 1960s and early 1970s. It led to the appearance of brand new forms of contemporary art, much of which was almost, by definition, avant-garde. These new art forms included: Fine art photography, exemplified by Robert Mapplethorpe (1946-89) and Nan Goldin (b.1953); But see: Is Photography Art? Also Installation art, exemplified by Joseph Beuys (1921-86), Bruce Nauman (b.1941), Christian Boltanski (b.1944), Richard Wilson (b.1953), and Martin Creed (b.1968); Video art as practiced by the likes of Andy Warhol (1928-87), Peter Campus (b.1937), Bill Viola (b.1951), and Turner Prize Winner Mark Wallinger (b.1959) and Steve McQueen (b.1969); Conceptual art, typified in works by Sol LeWitt (b.1928), Eva Hesse (1937-70), Lawrence Weiner (b.1942), and Joseph Kosuth (b.1945); Performance art and its associated style of Happenings, exemplified by Allan Kaprow (b.1927), Yves Klein (1928-62), Wolf Vostell (1932-98), Gunter Brus (b.1938), Hermann Nitsch (b.1938), Gilbert & George (b.1943, 1942), and the Fluxus movement; and Land art, as practiced by Christo & Jeanne Claude [Jeanne-Claude Denat de Guillebon (1935-2009) and Christo Javacheff (b.1935)], and Andy Goldsworthy (b.1956). For a non-commercial contemporary art form, see: Ice Sculpture - arguably the latest word in "found objects." 

For information about the top venues for avant-garde art around the world, see: Best Galleries of Contemporary Art.

The late 1980s and 1990s saw the rise of a UK avant-garde group known as Young British Artists (YBAs), whose members included the Turner Prize Winners Mark Wallinger (b.1959), Rachel Whiteread (b.1963), Gillian Wearing (b.1963), Damien Hirst (b.1965), Douglas Gordon (b.1966), Chris Ofili (b.1968), and Steve McQueen (b.1969). Another controversial member was Tracey Emin (b.1963). These young postmodernist artists attracted huge controversy for their challenging, even subversive, approach to their subject matter and use of materials (elephant dung, maggots, dead shark, human blood) - which shocked both art critics and the public. Even so, their avant-garde approach revitalized British art and won them a huge following, including the patronage of Charles Saatchi, Britain's leading collector or contemporary art, along with numerous exhibitions at the famous Saatchi Gallery, and the Sensation exhibition (1997) at the London Royal Academy.

For other exhibitions of postmodernist works around the world, see: Best Contemporary Art Festivals.

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.

ADJECTIVE...avant-garde concert music.

 Robert Wyatt is an avant-garde composer.

Avant-garde in music can refer to any form of music working within traditional structures while seeking to breach boundaries in some manner.  The term is used loosely to describe the work of any musicians who radically depart from tradition altogether.

                                                  

The most prestigious traditional Bohemian glass decoration, Tiefschnit, or deep, intaglio carving, was also adopted by the artists of the avant-garde.

Konig spent much of the 1970s in North America, where he established close ties with the leading artists of the avant-garde.

Avant-garde Art festival of the 1920's & 1930's was held at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Avant-Garde Literature –

The writers experimented with  avant-garde fiction are Samuel Bucket (Waiting for Godot & Happy Days), James Joyce (Ulysses),  Alber Camus (Stranger), Henry Miller (Black Spring) & Virginia Woolf (The Waves) to name a few.  They introduced experiments in their writing and resorted to innovation.
 

The concept of the avant-garde is still today an area of contention since its initial cultural formulation by Saint-Simon in 1825. One of the most important works to emerge that added to the contemporary debate on the avant-garde and post-modernism was the classic work by Peter Burger, The Theory of the Avant- Garde.This work had a profound impact on art and literary theory and on discussions about the European avant-garde.

Avant-Garde Make-Up - 

  

 
An avant-garde look is something new and innovated. A creative makeup look that is inspired in arts.  That means just do a makeup look and try to get some inspiration from magazines and arts to create a new look or innovate a creative technique.

Avant-Garde Furniture  -

          

The furniture which is modern and hitherto non-experienced design and unique is regarded as Avant-Garde furniture.  The new experimental technique of color and design which is the state-of-the-art make is Avant-Garde.

Modern Avant-Garde Furniture which is available in innovative design and colors to suit your  Living Rooms, Dining Rooms, Bedrooms, including office rooms and some of Exclusive Modern style furniture  are designed to create Classy and Elegant look.

Avant-Garde Architecture -

 

Avant-Garde architecture trendsetters were Americans.  The Americans designed the futuristic aesthetic  styles in  origin of Avant-Garde architecture.

   

Avant-Garde Photography –

Avant-Garde Photography offers amazing images even more for creating such a fun and relaxing experience.    Avant-Garde Photography make you feel at ease and inspired while documenting your special day by using innovative methods.

Avant-Garde Film –

The word is taken from French means a creative group in the innovation and application of new concepts and techniques especially in art.  Its birth was inspired by contemporary art.  The first current happened in France, Germany and Russia.

Avant-Garde film has an absurd visual and a form that straying from establish structure.

Avant-Garde film rebelled monopoly of film corporations that controlled film production, distribution and exhibition.

The major two factors that triggered the Avant-Garde’s birth: economics (the condition of production) and aesthetics.

Russian Avant-Garde –

The Russian Avant-Garde is an umbrella term to define the wave of modernist art that flourished in Russia between 1890-1930.  This includes suprematism, constructivism and futurism.  Between 1917 and 1932, the Avant-Garde clashed with the state-sponsored direction of socialist-realism.

Key features of the modernist Avant-Garde -

• Avant-Garde art should be above, beyond, distinct from the academy and market.  The symbolic embodiment of arts freedom.  An alternative and antidote to the commercial, managerial ‘spirit’ of capitalism.

• The power of the ‘new’ permanent revolution.  Overthrowing the ‘tyranny’ of tradition.

• Shock and transgression.

Avant-Garde is a subcategory of Bohemianism.  The innovative techniques and methods adapted in the fields of art, literature, music and painting were interesting to me and found taking inspiration in writing a Blog about ‘Avant-Garde’ the innovative sibling of Bohemianism.