avant-garde

The French compound avant-garde is composed of avant (before, in front of) and garde (guard, a body of soldiers), meaning literally 'advance guard,' 'vanguard,' or 'the troops who go before the main force.' Avant derives from the Latin ab ante (from before), itself from ab (from) + ante (before), from the Proto-Indo-European root *ant- (front, forehead), the same root that gives Latin 'ante' (before), English 'and' in a very remote sense, and Sanskrit ánta (end, border). Garde derives from Old French warder (to watch, to guard), from Frankish *wardōn, from the same Proto-Germanic root that gives English 'ward,' 'warden,' 'wardrobe,' 'guard,' and 'reward.' The compound avant-garde thus combines a Latinate 'before' with a Germanic 'guard,' and names the military unit that advances ahead of the main force to reconnoiter, clear obstacles, and probe enemy positions. The military usage was standard in French and English military writing from at least the fifteenth century — 'vanguard' is the English equivalent, from the Old French vaunt-garde, an earlier form of the same compound.

The transfer of avant-garde from military to artistic and political usage began in the early nineteenth century, in the context of the utopian socialist and republican political movements in France. The Saint-Simonian socialists, followers of Henri de Saint-Simon, used the term in political pamphlets of the 1820s to describe the role of artists and intellectuals as the advance guard of social progress — the figures who went ahead of the main body of society, whose work prepared the way for political transformation. The artist as avant-garde was not simply a rebel or an innovator but the forward scout of history, whose aesthetic experiments were understood as prefigurations of a transformed social order. This political-utopian sense of the avant-garde — as social vanguard as well as aesthetic innovator — was present from the beginning of the term's cultural life.

The concept of the artistic avant-garde was fully crystallized in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as successive movements — Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, Symbolism, Fauvism, Cubism, Futurism, Dada, Surrealism, Constructivism — claimed to be at the cutting edge of artistic development. The logic of the avant-garde required that art progress, that each generation move beyond the previous one, and that the most advanced work would necessarily be incomprehensible or shocking to contemporary audiences. This progressive logic was borrowed from political history — the idea that social history moved forward through revolutions that earlier historical stages could not have predicted — and applied to aesthetic history. The avant-garde artist was ahead of the audience, ahead of the critics, ahead of the institutions that would eventually recognize and canonize his work. The temporal claim — 'we are before you' — was the avant-garde's defining gesture.

The word entered English in the late nineteenth century as a borrowing from French art criticism and quickly became part of the standard vocabulary of modernism. 'Avant-garde' in English described any art, music, literature, or theatre that was formally experimental, deliberately difficult, and opposed to established aesthetic conventions. But the concept contained its own paradox, identified most sharply by the literary critic Renato Poggioli and later by Peter Bürger: the avant-garde's goal was always eventual incorporation into the mainstream, and each movement's success in achieving recognition was simultaneously its failure as avant-garde. An avant-garde absorbed into the academy, the museum, and the marketplace ceases to be avant-garde. This meant that the category required constant replenishment with new movements, each declaring the previous one spent. By the late twentieth century, 'avant-garde' had become a historical label for early modernist movements while 'experimental' or 'neo-avant-garde' served for contemporary work.