AVANT-GARDE

Artists as the spiritual leaders of a coming society were first called the avant-garde in a dialogue written in 1825 by the French mathematician and early socialist Olinde Rodrigues (1794–1851), a close friend of the socialist count Henri de Saint-Simon (1760–1825). This first mention of vanguard artists having a key role in shaping the consciousness of the citizens of a coming, utopian society exalts the artists, but restricts their role to transmitting the ideas of the future political leaders. The concept of the avant-garde broke free from this original idea, and has come to refer to a future-bound attitude in the arts associated with radical social progress.

defining characteristics

The military term avant-garde (meaning vanguard, or advanced guard) started to be widely used as a metaphor for cultural attitudes in the late nineteenth century, but it never entirely lost its militant overtones. It was applied to literary and artistic currents that blended political dissent with artistic modernity. Artists whose new and unusual work was controversial tended to adopt the strategy of forming groups, thus engendering movements, in the frames of which they would collectively show their work, explain their ideas to the public in writing (which often took the form of manifestos), and thus validate each other's activity. Group presence was more protective and efficient than an individual claim to new concepts and aesthetics. The artists could hold their collectively accepted ideas and works as a shield between themselves and the rest of the society. Avant-garde always refers to a group, or a representative of it, not just an innovative individual.

Avant-garde as become an umbrella term for art pervaded by political, social, and aesthetic radicalism and critique. Socialist, anarchist, communist, or even protofascist ideologies were as frequent among avant-garde artists as apolitical attitudes, but a sense of elitism, an awareness of superiority with regard to traditional art and thinking, characterized the avant-garde movements.

Some of the avant-garde groups did not articulate any program that would transcend their artistic production. Nevertheless, even such groups as the fauves are considered avant-garde by consensus because of their artistic radicalism.

One of the great paradoxes of the various groups and generations of the avant-garde was that they saw themselves as potential leaders of a spiritual and social rebirth while they claimed full independence from any political establishment. Another contradiction lies between the elitism of their aesthetics and their politically egalitarian views.

The avant-gardes came to being amid the religious, philosophical, and cultural crises around the end of the nineteenth century, which followed a time of increasing secularization in Western culture. This culture was not able to provide answers to those basic questions that the French postimpressionist painter Paul Gauguin (1848–1903) asked in the title of one of his last paintings: Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? (1897–1898).

The revolt of the avant-gardes manifested itself in their detachment from the tradition of mimetic representation and the illusion of three-dimensionality. Dissatisfied with Western culture, many avant-garde artists sought truthful and authentic artistic expression in faraway cultures—of Africa, Asia, Oceania, and other tribal cultures—or in the uncorrupted artistic output of children and the mentally ill.

The previously unparalleled development of the sciences and new technologies had a great impact on the visual artists of the avant-garde. In the face of these developments, the avant-garde artists could not be contented with copying the surface of nature. They explored underlying structures, tectonic and/or psychological. The home of the avant-garde was the modern metropolis, where fast-paced life and the synchronicity of parallel events were palpable. The avant-garde was an eminently urban phenomenon unfolding in the print media: the daily press, the little journals, regular art criticism, as well as ongoing debates in cafés, theater lobbies, and just all over town.

Romanticism in the early and mid-nineteenth century, mid-nineteenth-century realism and naturalism, the shocking appearance of impressionism in the 1870s, and the great personalities of post-impressionism, all featured some of the characteristics of the avant-garde either in their innovative aesthetics or subversive ideas, but were not full-fledged movements with political or radical aesthetical agendas. The Arts and Crafts movement in late-nineteenth-century England, with protagonists William Morris (1834–1896), Charles Robert Ashbee (1863–1942), and William Richard Lethaby (1857–1931), was an important precursor of later twentieth-century, socially committed design initiatives, but did not go beyond the needs of the upper middle classes in England.

art nouveau

Art nouveau was not a subversive movement either, but it reached out to several social classes and brought about profound changes in their lifestyles. This fin-de-siècle new style was an apparently smooth revolt against the disciplined eclecticism and academic rigor of middle-class taste. Its sensuous, curvilinear, or whiplash lines and floral motives conveyed suppressed eroticism and responded to a new desire for decorative ornaments in architecture, design, painting, and sculpture. While the new style was very popular and vigorously promoted modern interior design and product design, it also conveyed the melodramatic, soul-searching, decadent aestheticism of much of the pre–World War I middle-class youth.

The Belgian architects Victor Horta (1861–1947) and Henry van de Velde (1863–1957), the latter also active in design, tapestry, and painting, introduced the new style, which rapidly spread on both sides of the Atlantic. Called Jugendstil in Germany (named after the magazine Jugend [Youth], launched in Munich in 1896), art nouveau in France, and Liberty Style in Italy (for the brand name of a textile product with typical art nouveau design), it was in Vienna where the new style became the face of an antiacademic and antitraditional movement called Sezession, in reference to a group of young artists and architects who seceded from the mainstream art world. They built their own exhibition hall, the Vienna Sezession Gallery in 1898 and 1899, the work of the German architect Joseph Maria Olbrich (1867–1908). The central artist of the new wave was the painter Gustav Klimt (1862–1918), a prodigy who had been expected to be the next authority of the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts. Instead Klimt took the liberty to live and paint in the new style. Living unmarried with his girlfriend Emilie Flöge, usually wearing a long blue, self-designed gown, and speaking up against the academy, he indulged in lush, often golden finishes in his pictures, and lavish ornamental details. A favorite of highly erudite upper-class ladies, whom he portrayed, he conveyed the new sense of early-twentieth-century nervousness and anxiety, also found in the Austrian literature of those years. The other successful, but more controversial Viennese painters were the boldly erotic Egon Schiele (1890–1918), the visionary Oskar Kokoschka (1886–1980), and the composer Arnold Schoenberg (1874–1951) who were expressionists rather than representatives of art nouveau.

The architects of the Vienna Sezession included Josef Hoffmann (1870–1956) and Otto Wagner (1841–1918). The designer Kolomann Moser (1868–1918), together with Hoffmann, founded the Wiener Werkstätte, or the Vienna Workshops for Handicrafts, in 1903, a direct offshoot of the Sezession movement. Also based on the concept of the Arts and Crafts movement in England, they turned out a great number of household accessories in the new, fashionable style.

the fauves

The fauves (French for "wild beasts") were the first subversive group of painters in Paris, although the fabric of traditional artistic expression was loosened up in every field and genre. The so-called fauve scandal broke out at the 1905 Paris Salon d'automne, an exhibition venue established for the more radical artists in 1903. Its vice president, Georges Desvallières (1861–1950), who was also in charge of hanging the pictures, hung already controversial works by Henri Matisse (1869–1954)—considered controversial because they were viewed as brutal and unfinished—in the same room with the equally highly colored works of his friends Maurice de Vlaminck (1876–1958), André Derain (1880–1954), Georges Rouault (1871–1958), Albert Marquet (1875–1947), Charles Camoin (1879–1965), and Henri Manguin (1874–1949), so that the new-style paintings appeared as a collective statement on boldly intense, pure colors and deliberate stylization. According to legend, the art critic Louis Vauxcelles spontaneously coined the name fauves upon entering this exhibition room. The original group was soon joined by the painters Édouard Vuillard (1868–1940), Raoul Dufy (1877–1953), and Othon Friesz (1879–1949), the Dutch artist Kees van Dongen (1877–1968), and the young Georges Braque (1882–1963).

The fauves had an intense desire for novelty and the direct expression of their emotions by using splashes of raw, strong color. Instead of using color to describe objects, they explored its expressive potential. Matisse's 1905 paintings Green Stripe (Madame Matisse), Open Window, and Woman with the Hat explode with color. Putting color first—as the visceral element in painting—appeals to the unconscious, and it entails a revolt against the traditional concept of balanced artistic composition. "What I seek above all is expression," Matisse said in the 25 December 1908 issue of La grande revue, "Composition is the art of arranging in a decorative manner the various elements which express the painter's feelings and ideas … Composition should aim at expression."

According to H. H. Arnason, "The Fauve revolt was the first violent explosion of twentieth century art" (Arnason, p. 104), but it did not last longer than two or three years. After 1908 the fauve painters adopted different idioms.

pre–world war i theater and ballet in paris

Vibrant theater life was an intense component of the pre–World War I Paris art scene. It was indeed on stage that bourgeois comformism was most violently challenged. The first rogue author was Alfred Jarry (1873–1907), who wrote the scandalous Ubu roi (King Ubu) at the age of fifteen, originally as a parody of his math teacher. Ubu roi, an absurd piece inspired by William Shakespeare's Macbeth, is about the cowardly Ubu whose ambitious wife urges him to murder the king of Poland and become king himself, terrorizing the country until being defeated by the Russian tsar. It was first performed at the Théâtre de l'Oeuvre in 1896. Its harsh language and bold statements on the nature of power—as well as the frequent use of the word merde (shit) for bourgeois culture—outraged the audience, but left an indelible memory. Jarry, who wrote two sequels to Ubu roi, Ubu enchaîné (1900; Ubu enchained) and Ubu sur la butte (1901; Ubu cuckolded), is considered the forerunner of Dada and surrealism.

Innovative changes in classical ballet were introduced by Sergei Diaghilev (1872–1929), the founder of the Russian Ballet, who moved to Paris in 1906 after a career in St. Petersburg that included artistic and art collecting/exhibition activities. Diaghilev's performances were based on the modern music of Claude Debussy, Maurice Ravel, Sergei Prokofiev, and Igor Stravinsky, among others, which inspired spectacular stage design and modernized choreography, which, in turn, attracted much wider audiences than the aristocratic style of classical ballet. But even this modern version of ballet was challenged by the widely popular American dancer Isadora Duncan (1877–1927) who moved to Paris in 1900 to champion danse moderne (modern dance) and made the radical statement that classical ballet was "ugly and against nature." Her bold art and extravagant lifestyle inspired many artists, among them Maurice Denis and Antoine Bourdelle who portrayed her in the reliefs and murals of the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées, which opened in 1913.

pre-1914 expressionism in germany

The fauves had a great impact on German expressionism, and the reasons why these tendencies are categorized separately are historical rather than aesthetic. All these artists were influenced by the expressive art of Vincent van Gogh (1853–1890) and, to a lesser extent, Gauguin.

In 1905 four German students of architecture—Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (1880–1938), Erich Heckel (1883–1970), Karl Schmidt-Rottluff (1884–1976), and Fritz Bleyl (1880–1966)—formed a group in Dresden that they called Die Brücke (The Bridge), following their favorite philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche's line about man being "a bridge between the animal and the superman." In 1906 Kirchner carved their program in wood: "With faith in development, in a new generation whether creative contributors or recipients, we call together all youth who hold to the future. We want to gain elbow room and freedom of life against the well-established older forces. Everyone who with directness and authenticity conveys that which drives them to create—belongs to us."

The group adopted a highly stylized and colorful painterly idiom. Sensitive to the social inequalities in Germany, they expressed the suffering of the deprived in dramatic woodcuts, the rough-hewn texture of which was an adequate vehicle for their emotions. Several German expressionist sculptors, including Käthe Kollwitz (1867–1945), Ernst Barlach (1870–1938), Wilhelm Lehmbruck (1881–1919), and Gerhard Marcks (1889–1981), were also printmakers. In 1906 the leaders of Die Brücke invited the already established painter Emil Nolde (1867–1956) and Max Pechstein (1881–1955) to join the group. In 1910, when the works of Otto Mueller (1874–1930) were rejected by the Berlin Sezession, they quitted it and joined Die Brücke. In 1911 the Czech painter Bohumil Kubista (1884–1918) joined. Bold unmixed colors, posterlike stylization, representations of children, African masks, and artifacts in their paintings indicated their opposition to traditional artistic standards.

In 1911 the group moved to Berlin, where Kirchner painted street scenes, urban landscapes, and sinister cabaret scenes, and Nolde's paintings of similar subject matters also conveyed an anticipation of danger and catastrophe. In Berlin, however, Die Brücke failed to secure subscribers to its planned graphic portfolios, and the group soon dissolved.

The epicenter of expressionist art in Berlin was Der Sturm Gallery, opened in March 1912 by the musician and writer Herwarth Walden (1878–1941). Der Sturm Gallery carried the latest of the avant-garde art from Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider) to the futurists, showed an international array of works from Italy, France, Holland, Russia, and the Czech lands, and invited leading personalities of the avant-garde to give talks. Walden had already been publishing since 1910 a provocative avant-garde weekly, Der Sturm (The storm), as a forum for expressionist literature.

Modeled on the Paris Salon d'automne, the Erste Deutsche Herbstsalon (First German Autumn Salon), which Walden organized in Berlin in 1913, was the most important survey show of contemporary avant-garde art in Europe. It included a rich selection of French artists from postimpressionists to cubists and orphists, Italian futurists, Czechs, Russians, and most groups of German expressionists.

In Munich, the capital city of the southern German state of Bavaria, another group of expressionist artists, the Neue Künstlervereinigung (New Artists' Association), was organized in 1909 by the Russian painter Vasily Kandinsky (1866–1944), who moved to Munich in 1896 and became the student of Franz von Stuck (1863–1928). The group first met at tea parties hosted by the Russian émigré baroness and painter Marianne Werefkin (1860–1938). The original members included the German painters Gabriele Münter (1877–1962), Erma Bossi, and Paul Baum (1859–1932), and the Russian artists Alexei Jawlensky (1864–1941), Vladimir Bechtejeff (1878–1971), and Moissei Kogan (1879–1943). In 1910 the French artists Pierre Girieud (1876–1948) and Henri Le Fauconnier (1881–1946) joined. Paul Klee (1879–1940), who first met Kandinsky at Stuck's classes, also exhibited with the group. Typically for the avant-garde, both Kandinsky and Klee were involved with the Munich Artists' Theater (founded in 1908), which aimed at a total aesthetic experience by returning to the mystical-religious origins of the theater as a celebration of life.

The artistic concepts of the group were theorized by Kandinsky, later published in his book Über das Geistige in der Kunst (1912; Concerning the spiritual in art): artists have to listen only to their inner inspiration, and not pay attention to the visual appearance of things, which would reduce them to being mere "recording machines" like the impressionists. Kandinsky painted his first abstract painting in 1911. Abstraction divided the group: the German painter Franz Marc (1880–1916), another member of the association, agreed with Kandinsky that dematerialization and spiritualization were the most important pursuits of a painter, but the more conservative elements of the group, led by Alexander Kanoldt (1881–1939) and Adolph Erbsloh (1881–1947), insisted on mimetic representation. The group split in 1911, when the more radical members led by Kandinsky and Marc, and also joined by August Macke (1887–1914), founded the new group Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider), taking the name from the title of the almanac Kandinsky and Marc were working on (published in 1912). Der Blaue Reiter stood for the autonomy of the artist and his work. Nature was no longer reproduced, but expressed through autonomous combinations of colors and forms in a certain rhythm. The inner vision of the artist was accepted as the real truth, which proved to be a subversive idea in German culture. This idea had already been championed by the German art historian Wilhelm Worringer, considered the first theorist of expressionism, in his book Abstraktion und Einfühlung (1908; Abstraction and Empathy, 1953), where he proposed that the work of art is as autonomous an organism as any natural one.

The Blaue Reiter almanac demonstrated the equal importance of all creative fields—poetry, prose, music, dance, painting, sculpture, and printmaking by an international selection of artists. The "First Exhibition of the Editors of the Blue Rider" opened on 18 December 1911 and then toured Germany. It was the opening exhibition of the Sturm Gallery. Marc wrote in the almanac: "In this time of the great struggle for a new art we fight like disorganized 'savages' against an old, established power. The battle seems to be unequal, but spiritual matters [are decided] … only by the power of ideas…. New ideas kill better than steel and destroy what was thought to be indestructible" (Marc, p. 28).

German expressionism did not come to an end in 1914, but during and after World War I it was becoming intensely political, oppositional, and even revolutionary. At the same time, a religious-mystical version of expressionism gained new meaning in the postwar context.

cubism

Cubism was created in Paris by the Spanish painter Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) and the French painter Georges Braque (1882–1963) around 1907, under the influence of Paul Cézanne (1839–1906) and, indirectly, the changes in the worldview due to new scientific discoveries. The term cubism was coined by the same Louis Vauxcelles who coined the term fauves, inspired by Braque's 1908 painting Houses at L'Estaque, featuring a crowd of cubic forms. Early cubism was also influenced by African art, which Picasso studied during his many visits to Paris's ethnographic museum, the Musée Trocadéro. Picasso's Les demoiselles d'Avignon (1907) was declared the "first twentieth-century painting" by Alfred H. Barr Jr., founder and first director of New York's Museum of Modern Art. The first cubists were joined by further artists including Juan Gris (1887–1927), Jean Metzinger (1883–1956), and Albert Gleizes (1881–1953).

The early cubist paintings, made between 1908 and 1914, are labeled "analytic cubism" for the breaking up—"analysis"—of the objects into small, geometric, intersecting facets, which remained allusive of the original motive (as opposed to post–World War I "synthetic cubism," the synthesizing of originally abstract elements into an evocative composition). The cubists eliminated one-point perspective, interweaving the foreground, middle ground, and background of the painting and compressing a multitude of picture planes into one flat surface.

Around 1912, Picasso started to make his first collages out of fragments of images, textured papers, letters, and numbers. Cubism also influenced twentieth-century sculptors, including Alexander Archipenko (1887–1964), Raymond Duchamp-Villon (1876–1918), and Jacques Lipchitz (1891–1973).

orphism

Orphism was a version of cubism, the term having been coined in 1912 by the French poet Guillaume Apollinaire for the paintings of Robert Delaunay (1885–1941), which he related to Orpheus, the poet who also played music in Greek mythology. Delaunay, who was originally a cubist, painted colorful pictures that appear as if seen though a prism, which breaks down colors. His wife, Sonia Delaunay-Terk (1885–1979), and the Czech painter František Kupka (1871–1957) were also referred to as Orphist, or Orphic cubist, artists. This short-lived movement briefly included the Duchamp brothers—Marcel Duchamp (1887–1968), his brother Raymond Duchamp-Villon, and their half-brother, Jacques Villon (1875–1963)—and Roger de la Fresnaye (1885–1925). The Orphists' lyrical use of color aiming at color harmonies influenced Der Blaue Reiter as well as the American synchromists.

futurism

Caroline Tisdall and Angelo Bozzolla have argued that "Italian Futurism was the first cultural movement of the twentieth century to aim directly and deliberately at a mass audience" (Tisdall and Bozzolla, p. 7). The movement was single-handedly inaugurated by the poet and editor Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (1876–1944), who published "The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism" in the conservative Paris daily Le Figaro on 20 February 1909. He republished it in Italian in the same year in his own Milan-based journal Poesia (Poetry). The manifesto was a sweeping wake-up call to fellow Italian artists via the French print media to put their country and culture onto the fast track of history, practicing and celebrating the use of new, speedy vehicles, and new technologies. He calls for the destruction of the monuments of the past, such as museums, libraries, and academies, that he claims are standing in the way of progress; glorifies war as "the hygiene of mankind"; and expresses scorn for women. With "a sort of science fiction prescience" (Perloff, p. 3), Marinetti understood the way the media works, and to what extent the media is the message. He put through his message bluntly, ultimately aiming at changing the world rather than just the arts. He published a number of manifestos and pamphlets, including "Let's Murder the Moonshine" (1909), "Futurist Speech to the English" (1910), and "Futurist Synthesis of the War" (1914). Led by Marinetti, "the caffeine of Europe," futurism was the most radical attempt at destroying the religious and secular authorities and the fake ideals of European cultural tradition. His later fascination with Italian Fascism, however, puts him and his movement apart from the mostly left-leaning currents of the avant-garde.

Marinetti pretended to speak in the name of a group that was nonexistent at the time of the writing of his pamphlet, but that came to being immediately after its publication, when he was joined by the painter and sculptor Umberto Boccioni (1882–1916) and the painters Giacomo Balla (1871–1958), Carlo Carrà (1881–1966), Gino Severini (1883–1966), and Luigi Russolo (1885–1947). The futurists hardly share a painterly style, but they were all fascinated by capturing moving objects within the static picture frame. The futurist architect Antonio Sant'Elia (1888–1916) designed utopian, multilevel metropolises, visions of the future with a never-ending flow of trains, cars, ships, and airplanes.

rayonism

Since the late nineteenth century, Russian art was increasingly interconnected with the art of western Europe, and some of the most radical avant-garde originated from Russia. Inspired by the revolutionary times following the Revolution of 1905, the Russian painters Mikhail Larionov (1881–1964) and Natalia Goncharova (1881–1962) launched the Blue Rose group in Moscow in December 1906. Between 1906 and 1909 they began published the avant-garde periodical Golden Fleece, the forum of the group, in which they wrote, "We intend to propagate Russian art beyond the country of its birth…in the very process of its development." They were strongly influenced by the primitivist currents of German expressionism, cubism, and futurism—resulting in a cubo-futurist painterly language in Russia, a language they adopted.

In 1911 they launched a new movement, rayonism, which was aesthetically based on the representation of fractured light and light reflections instead of the light-reflecting objects themselves. Painting the rays of light resulted in abstract paintings, but the rayonists also had a political and sociological agenda. Clearly inspired by Marinetti's manifesto, they emphasized the superiority of everyday technology over artistic achievements: "We declare; the genius of our days to be: trousers, jackets, shoes, tramways, buses, airplanes, railways, magnificent ships—what an enchantment—what a great epoch unrivaled in world history!" they wrote in their own manifesto. They also "translated" Marinetti's nationalism into the Russian context, shunning the West, which, they claimed, is "vulgarizing our Oriental forms." In 1913 Larionov, together with the futurist writer Ilya Zdanevich (1894–1975), also wrote "Why We Paint Ourselves: A Futurist Manifesto," a text quite similar to some of the Italian futurist manifestos.

Larionov and Goncharova worked for Diaghilev's Russian Ballet as set designers and happened to be staying in France at the outbreak of World War I. They never returned to Russia, so rayonism came to an end in 1914.

russian futurism and suprematism

Russian futurism, like its Italian counterpart, was as much a literary as an artistic movement. The short-lived ego-futurist group (1911–1913) was followed by the hylaens, who were interested in a synthesis of Italian futurism and French cubism. The graphic artist David Burliuk (1882–1967) organized the group, the members of which included the poets Velimir Khlebnikov (1885–1922), Alexei Kruchenykh (1886–1970), and Vladimir Mayakovsky (1893–1930). They closely cooperated with artists who designed their book covers and illustrated their volumes of poetry. The group's manifesto, A Slap in the Face of Public Taste, was published in Moscow in 1912.

Suprematism was the initiative of the Russian painter (of Polish and Ukrainian background) Kazimir Malevich (1878–1935). In 1913 Malevich, previously a postimpressionist, worked together with his futurist friends Kruchenykh, Khlebnikov, and the musician, artist, and theorist Mikhail Matyushin (1861–1934) on the theatrical performance of a futurist opera, Victory over the Sun. Malevich designed the stage settings and the geometric costumes for the play, which was set "in the tenth house of the future." Out of the black backdrop that he had designed for Act II, he developed a painting by 1915 titled Black Square on a White Ground. Out of this abstract picture he developed a body of abstract geometric work with a new sense of bottomless space—a cosmic void rather than the rationalized and illusory space of one-point perspective. He coined the term suprematism in reference to "the supremacy of pure sensation" claiming that these images belong to the future, and only the superior sensitivity of the artist can sense and transmit them into the present. He first showed these paintings in an exhibition in Petrograd called "0.10: The Last Futurist Exhibition" in December 1915, where he placed one of several versions of the Black Square, which he dubbed "The Zero Point of Painting," or a "Royal Infant," in an upper corner of the room, which is traditionally the shrine for religious icons in Russian Orthodox houses.

See alsoArt Nouveau; Cubism; Diaghilev, Sergei; Fauvism; Futurism; Jarry, Alfred; Kandinsky, Vasily; Klimt, Gustav; Matisse, Henri; Picasso, Pablo.

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Eva Forgacs