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Avant-garde

In the arts and in literature, the term avant-garde (from French meaning advance guard and vanguard) identifies an experimental genre, or work of art, and the artist who created it; which usually is aesthetically innovative, whilst initially being ideologically unacceptable to the artistic establishment of the time.[2] The military metaphor of an advance guard identifies the artists and writers whose innovations in style, form, and subject-matter challenge the artistic and aesthetic validity of the established forms of art and the literary traditions of their time; thus, the artists who created the anti-novel and Surrealism were ahead of their times.[3]

For other uses, see Avant-garde (disambiguation).

As a stratum of the intelligentsia of a society, avant-garde artists promote progressive and radical politics and advocate for societal reform with and through works of art. In the essay "The Artist, the Scientist, and the Industrialist" (1825) Benjamin Olinde Rodrigues's political usage of vanguard identified the moral obligation of artists to "serve as [the] avant-garde" of the people, because "the power of the arts is, indeed, the most immediate and fastest way" to realise social, political, and economic reforms.[4]


In the realm of culture, the artistic experiments of the avant-garde push the aesthetic boundaries of societal norms, such as the disruptions of modernism in poetry, fiction, and drama, painting, music, and architecture, that occurred in the late 19th and in the early 20th centuries.[5] In art history the socio-cultural functions of avant-garde art trace from Dada (1915–1920s) through the Situationist International (1957–1972) to the postmodernism of the American Language poets (1960s–1970s).[6]

Theories[edit]

In The Theory of the Avant-Garde (Teoria dell'arte d'avanguardia, 1962), the academic Renato Poggioli provides an early analysis of the avant-garde as art and as artistic movement.[9] Surveying the historical and social, psychological and philosophical aspects of artistic vanguardism, Poggioli's examples of avant-garde art, poetry, and music, show that avant-garde artists share some values and ideals as contemporary bohemians.[10]


In Theory of the Avant-Garde (Theorie der Avantgarde, 1974), the literary critic Peter Bürger looks at The Establishment's embrace of socially critical works of art as capitalist co-optation of the artists and the genre of avant-garde art, because "art as an institution neutralizes the political content of the individual work [of art]".[11]


In Neo-avantgarde and Culture Industry: Essays on European and American Art from 1955 to 1975 (2000), Benjamin H. D. Buchloh argues for a dialectical approach to such political stances by avant-garde artists and the avant-garde genre of art.[12]

. "The Avant-Garde in Babel. Two or Three Notes on Four or Five Words", Action-Yes vol. 1, issue 8, Autumn 2008.

Robert Archambeau

(ed.), Centre-Periphery. The Avant-Garde and the Other, Nordlit. University of Tromsø, no. 21, 2007.

Bäckström, Per

. "One Earth, Four or Five Words. The Peripheral Concept of 'Avant-Garde'", Action-Yes vol. 1, issue 12, Winter 2010.

Bäckström, Per

& Bodil Børset (eds.), Norsk avantgarde (Norwegian Avant-Garde), Oslo: Novus, 2011.

Bäckström, Per

& Benedikt Hjartarson (eds.), Decentring the Avant-Garde, Amsterdam & New York: Rodopi, Avantgarde Critical Studies, 2014.

Bäckström, Per

and Benedikt Hjartarson. "Rethinking the Topography of the International Avant-Garde", in Decentring the Avant-Garde, Per Bäckström & Benedikt Hjartarson (eds.), Amsterdam & New York: Rodopi, Avantgarde Critical Studies, 2014.

Bäckström, Per

Barron, Stephanie, and Maurice Tuchman. 1980. The Avant-garde in Russia, 1910–1930: New Perspectives: Los Angeles County Museum of Art [and] and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D. C. Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art ISBN 0-87587-095-3 (pbk.); Cambridge, MA: Distributed by the MIT Press ISBN 0-262-20040-6 (pbk.)

Hirshhorn Museum

Bazin, Germain. 1969. The Avant-garde in Painting. New York: Simon and Schuster.  0-671-20422-X

ISBN

Berg, Hubert van den, and Walter Fähnders (eds.). 2009. Metzler Lexikon Avantgarde. Stuttgart: Metzler.  3-476-01866-0 (in German)

ISBN

Crane, Diana. 1987. The Transformation of the Avant-garde: The New York Art World, 1940–1985. Chicago: . ISBN 0-226-11789-8

University of Chicago Press

Daly, Selina, and Monica Insinga (eds.). 2013. . Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars. ISBN 978-1-4438-4054-5.

The European Avant-garde: Text and Image

Fernández-Medina, Nicolás, and Maria Truglio (eds.). . Routledge, 2016.

Modernism and the Avant-garde Body in Spain and Italy

Harding, James M., and John Rouse, eds. Not the Other Avant-Garde: The Transnational Foundations of Avant-Garde Performance. University of Michigan, 2006.

Hjartarson, Benedikt. 2013. Visionen des Neuen. Eine diskurshistorische Analyse des frühen avantgardistischen Manifests. Heidelberg: Winter.

Kostelanetz, Richard, and H. R. Brittain. 2000. A Dictionary of the Avant-Gardes, second edition. New York: Schirmer Books.  0-02-865379-3. Paperback edition 2001, New York: Routledge. ISBN 0-415-93764-7 (pbk.)

ISBN

Kramer, Hilton. 1973. The Age of the Avant-garde; An Art Chronicle of 19561972. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.  0-374-10238-4

ISBN

Léger, Marc James (ed.). 2014. The Idea of the Avant Garde—And What It Means Today. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press; Oakland: Left Curve.  978-0-7190-9691-4.

ISBN

Maerhofer, John W. 2009. Rethinking the Vanguard: Aesthetic and Political Positions in the Modernist Debate, 1917–1962. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Press.  1-4438-1135-1

ISBN

Mann, Paul. The Theory-Death of the Avant-Garde. Indiana University Press, 1991.  978-0-253-33672-9

ISBN

Novero, Cecilia. 2010. Antidiets of the Avant-Garde: From Futurist Cooking to Eat Art. (University of Minnesota Press)  978-0-8166-4601-2

ISBN

Pronko, Leonard Cabell. 1962. Avant-garde: The Experimental Theater in France. Berkeley: .

University of California Press

Roberts, John. 2015. Revolutionary Time and the Avant-Garde. London and New York: Verso.  978-1-78168-912-7 (cloth); ISBN 978-1-78168-913-4 (pbk).

ISBN

Schechner, Richard. "The Five Avant-Gardes or ... [and] ... or None?" The Twentieth-Century Performance Reader, 2nd ed., ed. Michael Huxley and Noel Witts (New York and London: Routledge, 2002).

Schmidt-Burkhardt, Astrit. 2005. Stammbäume der Kunst: Zur Genealogie der Avantgarde. Berlin . ISBN 3-05-004066-1 [online version is available]

Akademie Verlag

Sell, Mike. The Avant-Garde: Race, Religion, War. Seagull Books, 2011.

Shishanov, V. A. 2007. : istoriia sozdaniia i kollektsii (1918–1941). Minsk: Medisont. ISBN 978-985-6530-68-8 Online edition (in Russian)

Vitebskii muzei sovremennogo iskusstva

Historic Avant-Garde Periodicals for Digital Research, The Blue Mountain Project, Princeton University Library

Avant-garde and Modernist Magazines (Monoskop)

Archived 26 July 2020 at the Wayback Machine

Magazines in Bibliothèque Kandinsky, Centre Pompidou, Paris

Periodicals in Iowa Digital Library, University of Iowa Libraries

Digital Dada Library of International Dada Archive, University of Iowa Libraries

Magazines in Digital Collections of Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library

Avant-Garde Periodicals Meet Digital Archives, New York Public Library

Dada, Surrealism, and De Stijl Magazines on UbuWeb Historical

Archived 30 August 2016 at the Wayback Machine

Index of Modernist Magazines, Davidson College

Modernist Journal Project, Brown University and University of Tulsa

Archived 20 August 2016 at the Wayback Machine

Spanish and Italian Modernist Studies Forum, Pennsylvania State University

Collection: "Spanish Avant-Garde" from the University of Michigan Museum of Art