Concept

Avant-garde

Overview

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 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).

Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).

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It is strange, however, that the full scope and pregnancy of the imitative impulse in man has had to wait till the last dozen years to become adequately recognized. M. Tarde led the way in his admirably original work, "Les Lois de l'Imitation"; and in our own country Professors Royce and Baldwin have kept the ball rolling with all the energy that could be desired. Each of us is in fact what he is almost exclusively…
William James, Talks To Teachers On Psychology
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When we conceptualize, we cut out and fix, and exclude everything but what we have fixed. A concept means a _that-and-no-other_. Conceptually, time excludes space; motion and rest exclude each other; approach excludes contact; presence excludes absence; unity excludes plurality; independence excludes relativity; 'mine' excludes 'yours'; this connexion excludes that connexion--and so on indefinitely; whereas in the…
William James, A Pluralistic Universe
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Painting and sculpture, origin of, 20. Paleontology neither proves nor disproves development, 367, 376. Picturesque, meaning of, 433. Planetoids, origin of 289. Plato's model republic, central idea of, 388. Previsions and ordinary knowledge, 117; previsions known as science, 118; common and scientific, 123; when quantitative arose, 158; increase in precision, 171. Primary divisions of a germ and of a society…
Herbert Spencer, Illustrations of Universal Progress
Close in meaning to Avant-garde; the term itself is not named.
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Avant-garde

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