Artists started to wonder about the concept of art and what constitutes a work of art.

When
can somebody say that something is art and something is not? It was a valid question,
especially in the cruel context that Europeans were living at the beginning of the XX century:
the World War I.

Remember that the beginning of the past century was also marked by technological advance
and important social changes. As it was stated before, photography was invented in the XIX
century, and by the 1900 Kodak had created a camera called Brownie, that could be handled
by anybody that could afford it. In 1895 the Lumière brothers showed a short film with their
cinématographe, marking the born of the cinema.

To look at the beginnings of Avant-garde, it is important to mention Impressionism.

Impressionism can be considered as the first Avant-garde movement, or it preamble. In this
movement, artists, such as Vincent van Gogh or Claude Monet used vivid colors over the
lines (as some of the romantics did). Also, other cultures influenced artists, like Japanese
and African cultures.

he first thing that must be discussed in this topic is the meaning of the word Avant-garde. It
means vanguard in French. The word was, in its origins, referring to a military action:

The avant-garde générale, avant-garde stratégique, or avant-garde d'armée is a strong force

(one, two, or three army corps) pushed out to the front, immediately behind the cavalry
screen. Its mission is to engage the enemy wherever he is found, and, by binding him, to
ensure the liberty of action in time and space for the main army (Avant-garde, 2010).

The way in which artists approach the term was that the avant-garde was in the front of the
army, the same way they were in the front of new tendencies and explorations. Many of the
movements of this era disappeared in a short period of time, but there were others that are
still important nowadays.

Fauvism

The term fauvism comes from the French word fauve that means the wild beast. Some of the
most important characteristics of this movement, according to Fernandez-Madrid (2009) are
the following:

A great example is he painting of Matisse wife. It is called Madame Matisse (The Green
Line) (1905). It is a portrait painted with thick lines in which you can see a woman looking at
her right. Her hair is black with a tone of blue, and in the middle of her face, there is a green
line that divides his face into two colors: a greenish part, like if the women was a little sick,
and a creamy color, showing a normal skin. In the background, there is a flat surface with
pink, orange and green. The importance of this painting relays on the color: color shows a
very distinctive atmosphere that creates a unique tone.

Another important painting from Matisse is The Dance (1910). In the painting, you can look
at five naked women, holding hands together and making a circle like they were dancing.
The background is blue and the floor in which the women are dancing is green.

Cubism

There are two different Cubist movements: the “analytic cubism” and the “synthetic” cubism.
The analytic cubism was cultivated especially by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, from
1909 to 1912 (movements from the Avant-garde didn’t last for centuries or decades, as in
the past tendencies). As Gersh-Nesic (2014) state: “Picasso and Braque invented specific
shapes and characteristic details that would represent the whole object or person”. Figures,
as we normally see them, are going to be dissolved into geometrical shapes, so, for
example, a head can have the shape of a square or a series of circles overlapped.

You can look at a specific work by Picasso called The Young Ladies of Avignon or Les
Demoiselles d’Avignon. In this painting, you can look at five naked women; at the
background, there is an undefined structure with white, blue and brown colors. In the inferior
part of the painting you also can see some fruit. The part that makes this painting different
than everything else is the way the women are depicted: their body is composed of
geometrical figures: circles, lines, and triangles. Some of the women use masks, showing
the African influence that Picasso had. This reinterpretation of reality would be one of the
first manifestations of Cubism.

The synthetic cubism developed from 1912 to 1913 and, tried to show the essence of an
object with its important elements. The color is more intense than in the analytic period
(colors were usually brown tones) and is more associated with the use of the collage
technique.

Three Musicians (1921) by Pablo Picasso is representative of this phase. In a first glance, it
is notorious the different use of the color: it includes white, blue, yellow, red, black and
brown. Their tones are strong and determined. In the painting, you can observe three figures
(representing persons) playing instruments like a guitar and a clarinet. You can see again
geometrical figures: the beard of one of the characters is a rectangle and the cloth of
another is composed of triangles. The arms are also composed of rectangles.

Surrealism

Along with Cubism, surrealism is one of the most famous movements of the Avant-garde.
Paintings of Salvador Dali and Rene Magritte are now very recognized in our culture (in
movies, parodies and in the Internet) and people can recognize them even if they don’t know
anything about the authors or the artistic movements. Such a unique and fascinating
movement was influenced by the context, especially the work of Sigmund Freud. Now look
at some of its characteristics (Fernandez-Madrid, 2009, p. 324)::

● The search of the subconscious. The subconscious, according to the theories of

Freud, is the part of one's mind that are hidden to an individual. The surrealists tried
to liberate subconscious through painting.
● The elements of the painting are depicted in a magical way or like if the painting was
a dream: illogical in our way of perception but logical in a dream.
● Rationality had no place in Surrealism.
 ● In literature, Surrealism created “automatic writing”, in which authors wrote
words without thinking about them, liberating the conscience of the chains of logic
and grammatical structure.
● André Bretton wrote the Surrealist Manifesto in which he talked about the aims of the
surrealism movement: “the imagination is on the verge of recovering its rights. If the
depths of our minds conceal strange forces capable of augmenting or conquering
those on the surface, it is in our greatest interest to capture them” (Schneider, 2007).

In literature, the most common example of surrealism is the French poet André Breton
(1896-1966). He is distinguished for creating the bases and the theory of Surrealism. In his
“Surrealist Manifetso (1924)

But, if surrealism was all about destroying logic, how does art such as architecture, that
needs to be logic and structured, would look like? Although the work of artist Antoni Gaudí
(1852-1926) is considered most of the times modernist, it is clear that part of his work can be
considered as surrealist. You can look at this in his magnus opus, the Basilica of Holy
Family, which is actually unfinished. The architecture of Gaudí is distinguished because of
“its range of forms, textures, and polychromy and for the free, expressive way in which these
elements of his art seem to be composed” (Alexandrian, n.d.). Looking at some of the
Gaudí’s buildings is a great experience: like watching a recreation of something that seems
very familiar but it is not.