Key 20th-Century Avant-Garde Art Movements
Futurism
Futurism was founded by the Italian Marinetti, who published his first manifesto in Paris in 1909. It expressed a total rupture with the past, showing admiration for mechanical civilization and technical progress: machines, speed, and great inventions like the train and the airplane. A consequence of this was the disregard for human subjects and fundamentals. To achieve the ideal of “free words,” the text does not use punctuation, and adjectives are deleted.
Cubism
Cubism: was created by Apollinaire in 1913 as a derivation of Cubism (referring to Victorica’s clubs, perhaps). Its starting point is the decomposition of reality to recompose it freely through simultaneous collage. It emphasizes flat surfaces and places great importance on visual typography, as seen in Apollinaire’s famous calligrams, whose verses are drawn to resemble what they describe.
Expressionism
Expressionism: German in origin. Its basic assumptions are:
- The internal realities are more important than external ones; the artist does not seek to explain the world as they see it.
- Its purpose is to produce a strong impression on the public.
It developed especially in drama and poetry and had a major influence on cinema.
Dadaism
Dadaism: Founded in 1916 by the Romanian Tristan Tzara. It is the most destructive avant-garde movement. The name comes from a word given to infantile babbling, attempting to play on the concept. It represents an absolute negation of everything, including art and literature; its goal is more about destroying than creating. It defends mockery and corrosive humor, creating incoherent speech that reflects human contradictions. One way to express this is Tzara’s famous recipe for writing a poem: use scissors to cut words from a newspaper by chance and then glue them together.
Surrealism
Surrealism: This was the most important movement to appear in Paris in 1924, signed by André Breton. Surrealism meant renewing and changing life, which required accessing a reality residing in the subconscious, freeing the individual from acting under moral and social conventions. As a method to access the subconscious, it proposes automatic writing: writing dictated by thought without control by reason and without any aesthetic or moral concern. What results is a language charged with illogical suggestions, though it also uses visionary surrealist metaphor based not on logic but on the free association of ideas. One of the most frequent themes of Surrealism is the world of dreams. Surrealism influenced poets such as Alberti, Lorca, and Neruda.
Ultraism and Creationism
Ultraism and Creationism are two Spanish avant-garde movements that occurred between 1918 and 1923. They were characterized by the rejection of the sentimental, the tragic, and anything not intimate. It was no longer the era for singing about love, death, or God, or even man himself.
Creationism
Chilean poet Vicente Huidobro brought Creationism to Spain in 1918. Creationism posits that the literary work is independent of the world. The poet must create, not imitate nature, and eliminate all description and anecdotes. Most important authors include Juan Larrea and Gerardo Diego. Key features:
- Punctuation marks are removed.
- Juxtaposition of images without any connection between them.
- The poet must create the poem spontaneously, just as nature creates the tree.
Ultraism
Ultraism shared much in common with Creationism. Authors involved in its gestation included Guillermo de Torre, Adriano del Valle, and Eugenio Montes. The magazine Grecia published the first manifesto in 1919, relating Ultraism to Italian Futurism and Dadaism. Its main proponent was Guillermo de la Torre. Key features:
- Influence from Cubism, Futurism, and Dada.
- Striking images and metaphors drawn from the world of cinema, sports, and technical progress.
- Elimination of rhyme.
- New typographical arrangement of words, use of proparoxytone words, jargon, and neologisms.