What is the meaning of the word avant-garde? If you are reading these lines now, we dare to assume that you are very interested in this question. To get a complete and detailed answer to it, we strongly recommend that you familiarize yourself with our publication, in which this topic is described in detail.
The original meaning of the word avant-garde
This may surprise someone, but the avant-garde is a foreign language word that came to us from France. Translated from French avent-garde means "advanced squad." Over time, this word has acquired new meanings, which we will talk about below.
What does the word avant-garde mean?
We will not beat around the bush, but right away we’ll say it as it is. According to Ozhegov’s dictionary, the term “avant-garde” has two meanings:
- The advanced, leading part of a particular social group or class.
- The part of the fleet or troops that is ahead of the main forces.
We could end our article on this, only the word “avant-garde” has one more meaning, which we will write in detail below.
Vanguard in art
When it comes to the meaning of the word “avant-garde”, one cannot but say about the cultural phenomenon of the same name of the last century. The avant-garde is a trend in the visual arts, the essence of which is the complete rejection of established traditions and experimenting with new images and forms. The current arose at the beginning of the last century and was directly related to modernism, which gave rise to a tendency to completely rethink classical traditions. The vivid representatives of the avant-garde include such trends in art as futurism, suprematism, cubism, expressionism, abstractionism, etc.
For the most part, the formation of the trend was associated with the rejection of positivism in aesthetics and realism in art, as well as with the active dissemination of radical political ideas like communism, anarchism, etc.
As a direction of art, the avant-garde cannot boast of stylistic unity. A sign of belonging of a certain creator to this direction is an unusual realization of their own creative ideas and a negative attitude to the formed stereotypes. The ideological avant-garde artist creates not just a work of art, but a bright and effective contrast with an open spirit in line with active polemics.
There is a point of view according to which the avant-garde is a typical phenomenon of the progressive century and the logical result of the development of civilization. This topic is described in more detail in the work “Sunset of Europe” by Oswald Spengler. According to the author, purely pragmatic values are replacing the ideas of humanism.
Despite the fact that the creative works of avant-garde far from always evoke positive emotions in the audience, many of them have long been considered masterpieces of world art. The brilliant creators of this trend include Salvador Dali, Pablo Picasso, Marc Chagall, Pete Mondrian, Vasily Kandinsky, Kazimir Malevich and many others.
Now you know the true meaning of the word avant-garde. We hope that the information presented in this article was useful to you.