European Avant-Garde Movements: Futurism, Dada & Surrealism

European Avant-Garde Movements (1885–1930)

Futurism (Italy)

Futurism: Futurism emerged in Italy; it first appeared in literature and then spread to other arts. Its features are:

• An exaggerated patriotism exalted.
• Celebration of machinery and technological advances.
• It is characterized by modernity, promoting the value of machinery and speed.

Themes: speed, factories, locomotives and similar motifs are central. Representative figure: Filippo Tommaso Marinetti.

Expressionism (Germany)

Expression: Expressionism emerged in Germany around 1910. Expressionism is a way to protest and defend individual identity; after the First World War many refused to rejoin a society that had failed to protect ideals of peace.

Features:

• Prose and poetry that strongly express subjective emotion.
• A distorted depiction of reality that responds to inner torment.
• A particular vision of life and art focused on intensity and feeling.

Outstanding poets and writers: Franz Kafka and Bertolt Brecht.

Modernism and the Secession (1885–1930)

This movement developed between 1885 and 1930 in Scandinavia, France and Germany under the influence of Van Gogh, modernism and the Austrian Secession; it was an ideal reaction against traditional formal agreements.

Cubism (France)

Cubism: Cubism emerged in France in 1906, first in painting and later influencing literature. Its features:

• Its first major representative in painting is Pablo Picasso.
• In literary experiments, authors often rejected conventional punctuation.
• Multiple, combined perspectives and objective visions are used.
• Develops synthetic approaches and employs calligrams and other typographic experiments.

The term was coined by an art critic who, on seeing works of the early twentieth-century movement, stated that they appeared to reduce landscapes, figures and houses to geometric patterns, to cubes.

Dada (Zurich, Paris)

Dada: An avant-garde current that arose in Zurich and gained prominence in literature and later painting. It began in cabarets where poets gathered and coined the name "Dada."

Features:

• The avant-garde pursued total freedom and radical experimentation.
• They opposed prevailing social conventions and norms.
• Dadaists broke established rules of art and literature.
• Public performances could be absurd, emotional and contradictory—at times the poets laughed and cried together during readings.

Leading figure: Tristan Tzara. Dada was born in Switzerland and Germany during the First World War and, after the conflict, moved to Paris.

Surrealism (France)

SURREALISM: The most prestigious literary avant-garde, Surrealism originated first in literature and then in the other arts.

Features:

• The aim was to express pure thought and free associative logic.
• Surrealists sought to transform ways of feeling and conceiving the world.
• In poems, the key to inspiration is often the threshold of sleep, the subconscious and the beyond.

Surrealism emerged as a movement in 1924 with three major events: the publication of a manifesto, the foundation of a Bureau of Surrealist Research, and the appearance of a newspaper, "The Surrealist Revolution" (La Révolution surréaliste). Leading figure: André Breton.

Creationism / Creacionismo (Europe)

CREATIONS: Also known as Creationism (Creacionismo), this avant-garde current emerged in Europe primarily within literature.

Features:

• It aims to create new worlds through poetry; its poems often do not rhyme.
• It considers the poet as a small god who creates poetic realities.

Most outstanding poet: Vicente Huidobro.