Avant-Garde Art of the Early 20th Century

My Avant-Garde

The first three decades of twentieth century art gave rise to a wave of revolutionary movements and styles. First, came Fauvism (1905-8) whose colour 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 favour 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 practised 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 favour of a heady mixture of anarchism and hypermodern 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.
Source: http://www.visual-arts-cork.com/definitions/avant-garde-art.htm