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 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.¶

The text above is adapted from the Wikipedia article “Avant-garde”, available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 licence.¶

avant-garde is works that are experimental or innovative, according to the structured record cited below. This entry was generated automatically from that record and has not yet been reviewed by a person familiar with the tradition.¹¶

The source record links this tradition to 44 external registers, which can be verified through the citation.¹¶