Avant-garde

The avant-garde is not a single style but a broad movement of radical artistic renewal in the first third of the twentieth century that broke with academic tradition and proclaimed the artist's right to complete freedom of form and experiment. The term itself, borrowed from military vocabulary, means "advance guard": the avant-gardists saw themselves as heralds of a new vision, called to demolish habitual visual norms. The shared features of the avant-garde currents — Futurism, Cubo-Futurism, Suprematism, Constructivism, Dadaism — are the deformation or complete rejection of objecthood, the analysis of form, the cult of dynamism, the machine and the city, and a programmatic, manifesto-driven character. Artists actively introduced collage, montage, non-objective composition, sharp color contrasts and new materials. The Ukrainian avant-garde of the 1910s to 1930s became one of the movement's most powerful centers: Kazimir Malevich created Suprematism, Oleksandr Bohomazov developed a theory of "dynamic" pictorial form in his treatise Painting and Elements, Alexandra Exter fused Cubism with vivid colorism, while Vasyl Yermilov and Vadym Meller worked at the border of Constructivism and stage design. David Burliuk and the Boychukist school worked alongside them; most of the Boychukists were killed by the Stalinist regime and are counted among the "Executed Renaissance" generation of the 1920s–1930s. The avant-garde fundamentally changed the language of twentieth-century art, laying the foundations of abstraction, design and conceptual practice.