Avant-garde

In the arts and literature, the term avant-garde (from French meaning 'advance guard' or '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. 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 regarded by some contemporaries as ahead of their times.

As a stratum of the intelligentsia of a society, some 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" (1824), Henri de Saint-Simon'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.

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, drama, painting, music, and architecture that occurred in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. 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).

History

The French military term avant-garde (advanced guard) identified a reconnaissance unit who scouted the terrain ahead of the main force of the army. In 19th-century French politics, the term avant-garde (vanguard) identified left-wing political reformists who agitated for radical political change in French society. By the mid-19th century, avant-garde referred to art that used aesthetic innovation as a means of political and social change. Since the 20th century, the art term avant-garde identifies a stratum of the intelligentsia that comprises novelists, writers, artists, architects, et al.