portfolio task 3 - avant-garde

 

noun (usu. the avant-garde)

new and unusual or experimental ideas, esp. in the arts, or the people introducing them : works by artists of the Russian avant-garde.

adjective

favoring or introducing such new ideas : a controversial avant-garde composer.

Avant-garde, derived from the word vanguard, which denotes the group of soldiers at the for-front of an attack, is a fitting term for the convention. Avant-garde artists were labeled as such due to their will to break from the mould set by society and their predecessors. Avant-garde artists were those at the for-front of controversial expression. Similar to different nations and religions having martial power, to define their strength, they would also have intellectual power, which to an extent was defined by their artists – the avant-garde. When thinking of how one would recognize an artist as avant-garde, they would have to compare them to their counterparts and predecessors, then evaluate whether they were creating original work that challenged current conventions.

Advanced guard before the avant-garde.

Dutch art; 1700,

The Dutch republic established at the end of the 16^th century was the first middle class democracy in Europe. The protestant economy was free from religious and political oppression from other ‘now-European’ countries. The economy was prosperous and for the most part middle-class. This meant that the Dutch artist of the time had an audience that could support them. Gerhard Du and Peter de Hook were popular artists of the time, famous for their vignettes of everyday life. When the Dutch economy crumbled due to its small population and combined British and French pressure. Dutch art was largely forgotten, until Napoleon conquered the Netherlands at the beginning of the 19^th century. He returned to Paris with many examples of the Dutch masters as cultural loot. The French artists of the time discovered these homage’s to everyday life while looking for a non-academic model, as a president for a new realism outside of the academy. This dutch art provided a refreshing counterpoint to the increasingly irrelevant French academic art. 

Gustav Courbet caught the eye of the French middle class by painting the feared and suspicious lower class, ‘becoming middleclass’. He presented a new class of people in the provinces. It was a class that was hard to place and for this reason, made the bourgeoisie uncomfortable, and intrigued.

Courbet’s avant-gardism was that he was an outsider who discarded the excepted system of representation, also his content – undesirable class mobility.

 

Corbet, G (1850) “Bauern von Flagey bei der Rückkehr vom Markt”

Corbet’s chief offence was to stirred up a class unease – there were no fixed boundaries to identify class status anymore.

 Courbet entered the battlefield of what to paint, but his predecessor Edouard Manet took one step further and explored ‘how to paint’. Manet combined scenes of unseemly social conduct with new ways of painting. This avant-garde approach that Manet had lead to him being marked as the beginning of a trajectory that would lead to contemporary painting.