Avant-garde
in French means front guard, advance guard, or vanguard. People often
use the term in French and English to refer to people or works that are
experimental or novel, particularly with respect to art, culture, and
politics. According to its champions, the avant-garde pushes the boundaries
of what is accepted as the norm within definitions of art/culture/reality.
The origin of the application of this French term to art can be fixed
at May 17, 1863, the opening of the Salon des Refusés in Paris, organised
by painters whose work was rejected for the annual Paris Salon of officially
sanctioned academic art. Salons des Refusés were held in 1874, 1875, and
1886.
The vanguard, a small troop of highly skilled soldiers, explores the terrain
ahead of a large advancing army and plots a course for the army to follow.
This concept is applied to the work done by small bands of intellectuals
and artists as they open pathways through new cultural or political terrain
for society to follow. Due to implied meanings stemming from the military
terminology, some people feel the avant-garde implies elitism, especially
when used to describe cultural movements. The term may also refer to the
promotion of radical social reforms, the aims of its various movements
presented in public declarations called manifestos. Over time, avant-garde
became associated with movements concerned with art for art's sake, focusing
primarily on expanding the frontiers of aesthetic experience, rather than
with wider social reform. In
our context the avantgarde will cover the avantgarde'ist movements of
the early 20th century that specifically focused on visual communication
design and/or implemented it as a modus operandi.
Constructivism
was an artistic and architectural movement in Russia from 1914 onward,
and a term often used in modern art today, which dismissed "pure"
art in favour of art used as an instrument for social purposes, namely,
the construction of the socialist system. The term Construction Art was
first used as a derisive term by Kazimir Malevich to describe the work
of Alexander Rodchenko in 1917. Constructivism first appears as a positive
term in Naum Gabo's Realistic Manifesto of 1920. Kazimir Malevich also
worked in the constructivist style, though he is better known for his
earlier suprematism and ran his own competing group in Vitebsk. The movement
was an important influence on new graphic design techniques championed
by El Lissitzky.
Paintings by Constructivist Kasimir Malevich (1878 - 1935)
As a part of the early Soviet youth movement, the constructivists took an artistic outlook aimed to encompass cognitive, material activity, and the whole of spirituality of mankind. The artists tried to create art that would take the viewer out of the traditional setting and make them an active viewer of the artwork. Most of the designs were a fusion of art and political commitment, and reflected the revolutionary times.
The Constructivist culture, from fashions to theater...
El
Lissitzky
El Lissitzky: Self portrait
Lazar Markovich Lissitzky (1890 – 1941), better known as El Lissitzky,
was a Russian artist, designer, photographer, teacher, typographer, and
architect. He was one of the most important figures of the Russian avant
garde, helping develop suprematism with his friend and mentor, Kazimir
Malevich.
El Lissitzky's extraordinary typographic work: page spreads for a
book of poems by Mayakovsky
"The story
of the little red square". Book design by El Lissitzky
The "Proun"s.
This was years befoe the invention of digital 3D...
Lissitzky's entire career was laced with the belief that the artist could be an agent for change. 4 A Jew, he began his career illustrating Yiddish children's books in an effort to promote Jewish culture in Russia, a country that was undergoing massive change at the time and had just repealed its anti-semitic laws. Starting at the age of 15, he began teaching; a duty he would stay with for the vast majority of his life. Over the years, he taught in a variety of positions, schools, and artistic mediums, spreading and exchanging ideas at a rapid pace. He took this ethic with him when he worked with Malevich in heading the suprematist art group UNOVIS, when he developed a variant suprematist series of his own, Proun, and further still in 1921, when he took up a job as the Russian cultural ambassador in Weimar Germany, working with and influencing important figures of the Bauhaus and De Stijl movements during his stay. In his remaining years he brought significant innovation and change to the fields of typography, exhibition design, photomontage, and book design, producing critically respected works and winning international acclaim for his exhibition design. This continued until his deathbed, where in 1941 he produced one of his last known works — a Soviet propaganda poster rallying the people to construct more tanks for the fight against Nazi Germany.
Alexander
Rodchenko
(1891 - 1956), was one of the most versatile Constructivist artist/designers
to emerge after the Russian Revolution. He worked as a painter and graphic
designer before turning to photomontage and photography. His photography
was socially engaged, formally innovative, and opposed to a painterly
aesthetic. Concerned with the need for analytical-documentary photo series,
he often shot his subjects from odd angles - usually high above or below
- to shock the viewer and to postpone recognition. He wrote: "One
has to take several different shots of a subject, from different points
of view and in different situations, as if one examined it in the round
rather than looked through the same key-hole again and again."
The graphic design of Rodchenko
Futurism
The Futurists explored every medium of art, including painting, sculpture,
poetry, theatre, music, architecture and even gastronomy. The Italian
poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti was the first among them to produce a manifesto
of their artistic philosophy in his Manifesto of Futurism (1909), first
released in Milan and published in the French paper Le Figaro (February
20). Marinetti summed up the major principles of the Futurists, including
a passionate loathing of ideas from the past, especially political and
artistic traditions. He and others also espoused a love of speed, technology
and violence. The car, the plane, the industrial town were all legendary
for the Futurists, because they represented the technological triumph
of man over nature.
Futurist book design and typography
Marinetti's impassioned polemic immediately attracted the support of the young Milanese painters —Boccioni, Carrŕ, and Russolo—who wanted to extend Marinetti's ideas to the visual arts (Russolo was also a composer, and introduced Futurist ideas into his compositions). The painters Balla and Severini met Marinetti in 1910 and together these artists represented Futurism's first phase.
Futurism
influenced many other twentieth century art movements, including Art Deco,
Constructivism, Surrealism and Dada. Futurism as a coherent and organized
artistic movement is now regarded as extinct, having died out in the 1944
with the death of his leader Marinetti, and Futurism was, like science
fiction, in part overtaken by 'the future'. Nonetheless the ideals of
futurism remain as significant components of modern Western culture; the
emphasis on youth, speed, power and technology finding expression in much
of modern commercial cinema and culture. Ridley Scott consciously evoked
the designs of Sant'Elia in Blade Runner. Echoes of Marinetti's thought,
especially his "dreamt-of metallization of the human body",
are still strongly prevalent in Japanese culture, and surface in manga/anime
and the works of artists such as Shinya Tsukamoto, director of the "Tetsuo"
(lit. "Ironman") films.
Further reading
The
typographic revolution
Dada
or Dadaism is a cultural movement that began in neutral Zürich, Switzerland,
during World War I and peaked from 1916 to 1920. The movement primarily
involved visual arts, literature (poetry, art manifestoes, art theory),
theatre, and graphic design, which concentrated its anti war politic through
a rejection of the prevailing standards in art through anti-art cultural
works.
Dada periodicals.
Page layouts and typography: "391". Publisher and designer:
Francis Picabia
"Dada". Publisher and designer: Tristan Tzara
One of the most beautiful periodicals ever designed, Merz was published and designed by Kurt Schwitters:
Merz. Issue 1.
Merz. Issue 2.
Merz. Issue 4.
Merz. Issues 6 and 7.
Merz. Issue 8.
Merz. Issue 21: Das Veilchen (The Violet)
According to its proponents, Dada was not art — it was "anti-art". Dada sought to fight art with art. For everything that art stood for, Dada was to represent the opposite. Where art was concerned with aesthetics, Dada ignored aesthetics. If art were to have at least an implicit or latent message, Dada strove to have no meaning — interpretation of Dada is dependent entirely on the viewer. If art is to appeal to sensibilities, Dada is to offend. It is perhaps then ironic that Dada became an influential movement in modern art. Dada became a commentary on order and the carnage they believed it wreaked. Through this rejection of traditional culture and aesthetics they hoped to destroy traditional culture and aesthetics. Art historians have described Dada as being, in large part, "in reaction to what many of these artists saw as nothing more than an insane spectacle of collective homicide."Years later, Dada artists described the movement as "a phenomenon bursting forth in the midst of the postwar economic and moral crisis, a savior, a monster, which would lay waste to everything in its path. [It was] a systematic work of destruction and demoralization...In the end it became nothing but an act of sacrilege." Reason and logic had led people into the horrors of war; the only route to salvation was to reject logic and embrace anarchy and the irrational.
Raoul Hausmann (1886-1971)
John Heartfield / Helmut Herzfeld (1891-1968).
Further
reading
Dada.doc
Bauhaus
is the common term for the Staatliches Bauhaus, an art and architecture
school in Germany that operated from 1919 to 1933 and briefly in the United
States from 1937-1938 and for the approach to design that it developed
and taught. The most natural meaning for its name (related to the German
verb for "build") is Architecture House. Bauhaus style became
one of the most influential currents in Modernist architecture. The foundation
of the Bauhaus occurred at a time of crisis and turmoil in Europe as a
whole and particularly in Germany. Its establishment resulted from a confluence
of a diverse set of political, social, educational and artistic shifts
in the first two decades of the twentieth century. Art nouveau had broken
the preoccupation with revivalist historical styles that had characterised
the 19th century. In the first decade of the new century however, the
movement was receiving criticism; impelled by rationalist ideas requiring
practical justification for formal effects. Nonetheless, the movement
had opened up a language of abstraction which was to have a profound importance
during the 20th century.
One of the main objectives of the Bauhaus was to unify art, craft, and technology. The machine was considered a positive element, and therefore industrial and product design were important components. Vorkurs ("initial course") was taught; this is the modern day Basic Design course that has become one of the key foundational courses offered in architectural schools across the globe. There was no teaching of history in the school because everything was supposed to be designed and created according to first principles rather than by following precedent.
Graphic Design and Typography of the Bauhaus school.
The Bauhaus had a major impact on art and architecture trends in Western Europe, the United States and Israel in the decades following its demise, as many of the artists involved fled or were exiled by the Nazi regime. Both Gropius and Breuer went to teach at the Harvard Graduate School of Design and worked together before their professional split in 1941. The Harvard School was enormously influential in the late 1940s and early 1950s, producing such students as Philip Johnson, I.M. Pei, Lawrence Halprin and Paul Rudolph, among many others.
Herbert
Bayer
(1900-1985) was an Austrian graphic designer, painter, photographer, and
architect. In the spirit of clean simplification, Bayer developed a crisp
visual style and adopted an all-lowercase and sans serif typeface for
all Bauhaus publications. Bayer is also credited with designing the custom
geometric sans-serif font, universal. In 1928, Bayer left the Bauhaus
to become art director of Vogue magazine's Berlin office. Ten years later,
he settled in New York City where he had a long and distinguished career
in nearly every aspect of the graphic arts.
László
Moholy-Nagy
(1895 – 1946) was a Hungarian painter and photographer as well as professor
in the Bauhaus school. He was highly influenced by constructivism. He
was a strong advocate of the integration of technology and industry into
the arts. In 1923, he replaced Johannes Itten as the instructor of the
preliminary course at the Bauhaus. This effectively marked the end of
the school's expressionistic leanings and moved it closer towards its
original aims as a school of design and industrial integration. The Bauhaus
became known for the versatility of its artist and Moholy-Nagy was no
exception. Throughout his career he became proficient and innovative in
the fields of photography, typography, sculpture, painting, and industrial
design. One of his main focuses was on photography. He coined the term
"the New Vision", for his belief that photography could create
a whole new way of seeing the outside world that the human eye could not.
His theory of art and teaching was summed up in the book The New Vision,
from Material to Architecture.
De
Stijl
also known as neoplasticism, was a Dutch artistic movement, founded in
1917. In a narrower sense, the term De Stijl is used to refer to a body
of work created by a group of Dutch artists, from 1917 to 1931. De Stijl
is also the name of a journal which was published by the painter and critic
Theo van Doesburg, propagating the group's theories. Next to Van Doesburg,
the group's principal members were the painters Piet Mondrian and Bart
van der Leck, and the architects Gerrit Rietveld and J.J.P. Oud. The artistic
philosophy that formed a basis for the group's work is known as neoplasticism
— the new plastic art. Proponents of De Stijl sought to express a new
utopian ideal of spiritual harmony and order. They advocated pure abstraction
and universality by a reduction to the essentials of form and colour —
they simplified visual compositions to the vertical and horizontal directions,
and used only primary colors along with black and white.
Posters and flyers by Paul Schuitema, 1920's
Paul Schuitema (1897 - 1973 ) was a Dutch graphic artist. He also designed furniture and expositions and worked as photographer, film director, painter and teacher for publicity design at the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague. Schuitema studied at the Academie voor Beeldende Kunsten in Rotterdam. In the 1920s, he began to work on graphic design,[1] applying the principles of De Stijl and constructivism to commercial advertising. Along with Gerard Kiljan and his famous colleague Piet Zwart, he followed ideas pioneered in the Soviet Union by El Lissitzky and Rodchenko, in Poland by Henryk Berlewi and in Germany by Kurt Schwitters.
During his employment at the NV Maatschappij Van Berkel Patent scale company in Rotterdam, Schuitema gained recognition for his original designs of stationery and publicity material, often using only the colors black, red and white and bold sans serif fonts. From 1926 on, he started working with photomontages, becoming one of the pioneers of this technique in the field of industrial design. Even though he was a convinced socialist and often designed leftist publications directed at industrial workers, Schuitema also worked for major companies, such as Philips.
References
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avantgarde
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructivism/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Lissitzky
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aleksandr_Rodchenko
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Futurism
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bauhaus
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herbert_Bayer
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laszlo_Moholy-Nagy