Emerging in the mid-19th century, the avant-garde
received their name for their fighting spirit.
Avant-garde is French for ‘vanguard’;
a military term used to describe the front-line
of an army moving into battle.
Artists were
compared with these soldiers, as they were
often a group force, challenging long-established
concepts and ideas about art and fighting
an entrenched establishment.
Artists such as Courbet, Gauguin and Kirchner
were regarded with great hostility, because
they pushed accepted boundaries. As these
establishments denied the work public exposure,
the avant-garde fought this censorship of
their art.
Works like this by Ernst Kirchner convey freedom,
energy, feeling through their brush strokes
and vivid colours. This new approach marked
Kirchner as an avant-garde artist. Though
in his German homeland the Nazis considered
him a ‘degenerate’ artist. An unsettling term,
with unsettling implications. Do you
find this painting groundbreaking, challenging,
worthy of censorship?
Kirchener’s expressionism might have challenged
the prevailing styles and authority of the
time
but reads very differently to a contemporary eye.
Hannah Höch was another German artist breaking
new ground in the early twentieth century.
She was an early creator of photomontage art;
collages of pasted photographs. We see a tribal mask,
a baby's torso, an eye from a fashion
magazine; an eclectic selection. The figure
is mounted on little feet - as if on display;
representing treatment of women in Weimar
Germany - as inferior and infantile, yet put
on a pedestal. The geometric background is
almost a cage. Höch was a radical who blazed
a trail for photo collage, but was also a
pioneer for her gender.
Avant-garde artists challenge, and sometimes
provoke us through satire. Many would argue
that Picasso’s work remains radical.
In ‘Bottle and Glass on a Table’, the bottle
is a piece of newspaper, on which stencilled
letters spell “OLD J A R” - short for
Old Jamaica Rum. Writing the subject name
on the canvas rather than carefully copying
its physical form was revolutionary.
If newspaper can become a bottle, then what is reality?
[Mooing Cow]
Damien Hirst was a member of the YBA’s,
or ‘Young British Artists’; a more recent
group that embodied the avant-garde spirit.
Their work highlights the speed at which art
moves from disrupting the status quo to becoming
accepted into mainstream culture.
Hirst’s revolutionary ‘Natural History’
series takes animal bodies and suspends them
in formaldehyde. They appear alive and caught
in movement. The work examines life’s fragility
and the inevitability of death and disintegration.
The emotion of the work is heightened by how
banal the animals are. If it were a tiger
or a lion suspended at the point of death,
the work would read completely differently.
Like life, the avant-garde is fragile and
fleeting; a moment that risks being overtaken
almost as soon as it is experienced.
Rather than see it as a tragedy, let’s be excited
by the thought that today’s avant-garde
may be familiar, conventional or even cliché
tomorrow.
