Portfolio Task 3 - Avant Garde

The Avant Garde is a term applied to schools of thought or works thought to be innovative and forward thinking, essentially things considered as avant garde could be considered as the "cutting edge" of a given movement. It is regularly thought about especially in relation to art, culture and politics and traced back to the Dada movement. The term avant garde essentially translates to "advancing guard" or vanguard" which would have been the most forward part of an advancing army, it would include highly skilled sodliers attempting to pave the way for the substantial movement behind them and so artistically this is the practitioners breaking boundaries and pushing things forward ahead of the initial crowd.

De Stijl, Dutch for "The Style" and sometimes known as neoplasticism, is an example of an avant garde movement. It is often focused around abstraction and a simplification returning to basics of form and colour. Though produced a long time after the De Stijl movement in the Netherlands the artwork for the White Stripes album of the same name echoes this style. As previously stated components of an image tend to be abstract and composed of bold colour and geometric lines, this is evidenced further in the text and imparticular the way the letter "E" has been simplified to three horizontal bars but is still recognised as the letter it portrays.


Another example is the constructivist movement often assosciated with Kasimir Malevic, a Constructivist working between the period of 1878 and 1935. Constructivism is often based around art and or architecture and is recognised for its simple and bold imagery however this is not to be confused with a lack of detail or though, but a considered collection of shapes and colour. The image below by Kasimir Malevic embodies an even more stripped down style of work reduced simply to shapes and colours that are unrecognisable as an actual form.