Inspirational Avant-Garde in the 21st Century?

Avant-Garde in the 21st Century?

Catherine Walworth

The term “avant-garde” summons an image of artists with pointy little beards and black turtlenecks, gesturing wildly through plumes of cigarette smoke while talking about art in cryptic ways. To say something is avant-garde often implies, “and that’s why you just don’t get it.” There is a reason why, though. It is actually a French military term meaning the advance guard that goes bravely ahead of the other troops to do reconnaissance or to lead into war. Avant-garde art, therefore, is ahead of the curve, radical even, created by experimenting outside the safety of traditional art. While there have been rule-breaking artists peppered throughout art history, and those are the ones we remember most today, the term came into specific use with modern European artists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. When the notion of the artistic avant-garde appeared in the 19th century, it described those who were in a pitched battle specifically with the Royal Academies. European countries like Italy, France, and England each had their own version of these ofcial state-sponsored schools that trained painters, sculptors, and architects and launched their careers through exclusive juried Salons. This support also meant adhering to a strict hierarchy of artistic themes, with history painting at the top and still life at the bottom.

The Big Trees Paul Cézanne Oil on canvas 31.8 x 25.5 in National Galleries of Scotland

Round-fleshed naturalism and realistic spatial perspective, developed by Renaissance artists after a millennium of mostly medieval flatness, was the only option. The most ambitious academic paintings were massive in scale, with piles of figures in grand historical scenes designed to win the artists medals, fame, and lucrative commissions from the Salon exhibitions.

After a few hundred years like this, there were rebels. In 1863, the Salon des Refusés took place in Paris, an exhibition of works that the ofcial Salon jurors had rejected. Visitors went and laughed at paintings that now hang in major museums, such as Édouard Manet's Luncheon on the Grass. Some artists were not satisfied with the same old artistic formulas, and if their new work was rejected by the ofcial Salon as sloppy, as happened with the burgeoning Impressionists in the 1870s, they held their own alternative exhibitions and created a new art movement. These experimental artists considered the Academy stifling to their imaginations and unyielding in its ability to recognize the worth of what was admittedly radical about their art.

Around the turn of the century, artists were concerned with diferent things — rather than Greek myths and Biblical stories — many were interested in emerging socialism and the lives of the poor; formal experiments that defied realism; and the realm of the spirit and mysticism. They looked to forms of global art, first with Japanese woodcuts, and later with African, Iberian, and Pacific Islander sculpture, along with other preClassical or indigenous arts that were more abstracted, often made for ritual, and a far cry from than the Academies’ familiar tropes. Several of these artists struggled for recognition in their own time, even from other artists.

The Bedroom (version 2) Vincent van Gogh, Oil on canvas, 29 x 36 5/8 in Helen Birch Bartlett Memorial Collection The Art Institute of Chicago

Vincent Van Gogh is a prime example. The opposite of an academically trained painter, his best, most colorful paintings vibrate with a tonal range that is on a diferent frequency than most other art of the time, except that of his peers such as Paul Gauguin and Émile Bernard. His inanimate chairs and landscapes have an undulating life force. Rather than hide his brushstrokes as academicians strived to do, he made them a subject of the painting, along with the poor and everyday people around him.

Riverbanks Paul Cézanne Oil on canvas, 25.6 x 31.9 in Private Collection

Likewise, Paul Cézanne’s fractured brushstrokes built a flickering scrim of sensation over his landscapes. Without his example, it is possible Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque may not have created Cubism, the most influential avant-garde movement of the 20th century. Taking café table still lifes as one of their main subjects, the duo also stood up abruptly and flipped the table on one-point perspective. Instead, their Analytical Cubist paintings have been compared to discussions of the fourth dimension.

They fractured space into a floating matrix of geometric shards that other avant-garde artists would then pass through and reinvent for themselves.

Thus emerged the Dutch painter Piet Mondrian’s floating grids with primary colors, black, white, and gray. However, this was not simply a formal rebellion. Mondrian, as with many of turn of the century avant-garde artists, was absorbing religious and metaphysical ideas and working toward a way to express them. He spent years dancing a partnered push and pull with verticals and horizontals. He first painted trees, seas, and still lifes until he broke through to pure nonobjectivity. He expressed, not how things looked, but how things nestled into the warp and weft of the fabric of the universe.

Lozenge Composition with Yellow, Black, Blue, Red, and Gray Piet Mondrian Oil on canvas, 23 5/8 × 23 5/8 in Gift of Edgar Kaufmann, Jr., The Art Institute of Chicago

In the years before World War I, the Italian Futurists eulogized the automobile, speed, and the mechanistic nature of war. Their fractured paintings were meant to capture the fast pace of modern life, and truly, the speed of technological change at the turn of the century has had no competitor. The Futurists screamed the need to burn down the museums and start all over. Be careful what you wish for, fellas, because the human nausea caused by the massive destruction of World War I led to the absurdity of Dada, which preferred chance as an artistic method – anything but the so-called rationalism that led to war machines.

Russian modernism gave birth to two factions of avant-garde artists – Constructivists and Suprematists. After working through the Russian combination of French Cubism and Italian Futurism (which they called Cubo-Futurism), Kazimir Malevich painted his “royal infant” – Black Square. Like Picasso and Mondrian, Malevich was not an inept painter. Rather, these artists were emptying out all illusionistic painting traditions, and for Malevich the result was as mystical and full as it was formal and stripped bare. How then, one hundred years after the heyday of Dada and the birth of its even more fantastical ofshoot Surrealism, do we define “avant-garde?” The further we get from the Academy and its powerfully tight grasp on ofcial rules and opportunities, the further we get from the bravery of those original free radicals that are a defining feature of modernism. Experimentation in art continues, however, and refreshes art for its own time, but today there are no rules and everything is an option.

Black Square Kazimir Malevich Oil on canvas 31.2 x 31.2 in The State Tretyakov Gallery Moscow, Russia

Encaustic, like other art forms besides photography and film, is an ancient medium with its own history, traditions, and naughty rule breakers. It belongs in a conversation about the historical avant-garde art because it was there at the artists’ disposal, including the Swiss abstractionist Paul Klee, who built up the surface of several of his paintings with encaustic. I would argue that after Abstract Expressionism of the 1940s and 1950s, there was no more avant-garde battling with entrenched academic tradition, and once-radical ideas were basically recycled into new movements and rebranded for the era. Encaustic made notable appearances, however, in art of later decades that are worth mentioning. In the late 1950s, Jasper Johns (whitney.org/exhibitions/jasper-johns) was a transitional bridge between Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art. He famously used encaustic so that his brushstrokes could be preserved in stasis, and the material gave an uncannily elegant finish to familiar images like the American flag. John Cage even claimed that when looking at Johns’ surfaces, he was in danger of falling in love. A radical artist coming up in the 1960s, Lynda Benglis (www.locksgallery.com/artists/lynda-benglis) in many ways responded to the sterile geometry of Minimalism by becoming its alter ego. As a sculptor, she used audacious materials, including encaustic, latex, and foam, in candy colors to create works that were often body-like in form or finish. Those soft, sensual surfaces in unexpected shapes, sometimes poured directly on the floor with a nod to Jackson Pollock, also helped to question gender stereotypes and inequities in the art world. And finally, encaustic remains a tool in the arsenal of artists today, and it is a coy shapeshifter in their experimental hands. The works in this issue attest to the fact that, while encaustic has signature characteristics, it is not the material so much as the one who shapes it to their own ends.

About the Author

In 2022, Catherine Walworth became the Jackye and Curtis Finch, Jr. Curator of Drawings at the Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts in Little Rock, AR. Previously, she was Curator at the Columbia Museum of Art in Columbia, SC, where she shared her of-the-cuf thoughts about artworks in storage in her Walworth Wednesday series. She received her Ph.D. in 2013 from the Ohio State University. Walworth loves modern art with everything she's got and she takes her humor seriously. She is the author of Soviet Salvage: Imperial Debris, Revolutionary Reuse, and Russian Constructivism (2017), so she can't help mentioning Malevich's Black Square whenever possible.