Avant-Garde Art Movements of the Early 20th Century

Avant-Garde Aesthetic Movements

Avant-garde refers to a set of artistic movements that developed in the early decades of the 20th century. These movements rebelled against the concept of art based on the imitation of reality, maintaining the exceptional taste and the strange legacy of symbolism.

Even from very different positions, they met a number of common characteristics that had a profound impact on art and literature:

• Anti-realism and autonomy of art
• Irrationality
• Desire for originality
• Aesthetic experimentation

Highlights Within the European Avant-Garde

• Futurism: Proclaimed its break with the past and praised the geometric splendor of the world, mechanical civilization, and technical achievements. Stylistically, it sought verbal dynamism and speed.
• Expressionism: Distinguished from the rest because it is not a radical negation of the earlier tradition. It is the accentuation of certain features already present in Naturalism and Impressionism.
• Cubism: Proposed to proceed with a break from reality to free compositions of concepts, images, or phrases. It added typographical arrangements of special lines and other artistic elements like collage.

Surrealism

Surrealism brought a radical change in the conception of art and the artist's work, intended as a comprehensive revolution. Its motto was to transform life. What is really subconscious appears in the images and metaphors.

Avant-Garde in Spain

In Spain, Ramon Gomez de la Serna was the biggest driver of the avant-garde. The most important movements were Creationism and Ultraism, which despised sentimental and subjective matter. They believed there is nothing of value in literature outside of itself.

• Creationism: Believed that art should not imitate reality but act like it, creating. It ignored punctuation and randomly juxtaposed images. Calligrams also appeared. Juan Larrea and Gerardo Diego are the most representative authors.
• Ultraism: Presented many points consistent with Creationism. The story disappeared, and irrational images and metaphors joined in free verse poetry and calligraphic typographical arrangements. Rafael Cansinos, Guillermo de la Torre, and Jorge Luis Borges stand out.