The Early Avant-Gardes, 1900–1945: Fauvism, Cubism, Dada, Surrealism

Avant-garde was a military term first: the unit that walks ahead of the main force. In the nineteenth century it became an art concept — deliberately getting ahead of the audience, and assuming the audience will initially refuse it.

The movements between 1900 and 1945 are dense because they share one premise: the rules of the picture inherited from the Renaissance — one viewpoint, one stable space, one legible story — no longer worked.

Five movements, five targets

Movement	Dates	Overturns	Result
Fauvism	1905	Colour must describe objects	Colour becomes structure
Cubism	1907–1914	A single fixed viewpoint	Several views at once
Futurism	1909	Static composition	Speed and simultaneity
Dada	1916	The institution of art itself	Readymades, collage, provocation
Surrealism	1924	Rational control of the image	The unconscious, juxtaposed

Fauvism: colour stops describing

At the 1905 Salon d’Automne, a critic saw a classical sculpture surrounded by flat, violent colour and called the painters les fauves — the wild beasts. The name stuck.

The point: colour no longer corresponds to the object. A face can be green if the green works structurally. Do not ask “why is the face green”; ask what that green is doing against its neighbours.

Cubism: multiple viewpoints, not abstraction

Between 1907 and 1914 Picasso and Braque cancelled the single-viewpoint agreement, putting front, side, and top of one object onto the same surface.

• Analytic Cubism (1908–1912). Form broken into facets; colour reduced to brown, grey, ochre.
• Synthetic Cubism (1912–1914). Reassembly with letters, wood grain, and newspaper collage.

Cubism is not abstraction. Abstraction refers to nothing; Cubism still paints cups, guitars, and faces, and merely refuses one viewpoint. The test: locate which plane is the nose and which is the profile.

Futurism: speed and politics

The Italian Futurists wanted movement, machinery, and the speed of the city on the canvas. It was also a political programme — which is why it later became entangled with fascism. Note the borrowing: Cubist devices carrying a different ideology.

Dada: attacking the institution

In 1916, at the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich, a group of exiled artists answered the First World War with nonsense, collage, and readymades. Dada proposed no style; it asked who decides what art is.

When Duchamp submitted a urinal to an exhibition, the object mattered less than the fact that the exhibition system had become the material.

Surrealism: juxtaposition

With Breton’s 1924 manifesto, Surrealism borrowed Freud’s unconscious and used the collision of unrelated objects to produce estrangement.

Do not just hunt for dream symbols. Watch the seams: how transitions between objects are handled, whether the light is consistent, whether the space is credible.

Case one: Les Demoiselles d’Avignon

In 1907 Picasso painted five figures and a table. The two faces on the right are rendered as mask-like geometry, drawn from Iberian sculpture and African masks he had seen.

It hangs in MoMA. It can be read as the start of Cubism, and as a concrete instance of what “avant-garde” means: even his own circle found it excessive.

Case two: Guernica

On 26 April 1937 the Basque town of Guernica was bombed. Picasso, commissioned by the Spanish Republic, made a monumental work for the Spanish pavilion at the Paris world’s fair.

The facts that matter:

• Roughly 3.5 × 7.8 m — a wall, not a picture.
• Black, white, and grey only. No blood colour.
• Symbolic figures: bull, horse, mother with dead child, figure holding a lamp.
• No event detail: no aircraft, no bombs, no identifiable location.

Those three choices explain its force: it does not depict the event, it depicts the structure of suffering. Painted realistically it would have become a news photograph; painted symbolically, it became a monument.

How to read work from this period

1. Read value, not hue. In the Cubist years colour is minimal; tone does the work.
2. Find the viewpoint clashes. Does the same object appear from different sides in different places?
3. Watch the edges. Lines often do not close; form is built from facet contrast.
4. Read the text and collage. Newspaper headlines, trademarks, letters are content, not decoration.
5. Separate manifesto from work. These movements produced manifestos faster than works, and manifestos are easier to understand — which is exactly why they mislead.

Common misreadings

• “Cubism is abstraction.” It still depicts objects.
• “Dada is a joke.” Its target is the institution, not beauty.
• “Surrealism paints dreams.” Its method is juxtaposition and untrustworthy seams.
• “Avant-garde means progress.” It contains politics and market strategy; Futurism is the counter-example.
• “Harder to understand means more advanced.” Difficulty is usually a by-product.

Where to see it

• MoMA. The core Cubist, Dada, and Surrealist holdings.
• Centre Pompidou. The European avant-gardes from an institutional angle.
• Tate Modern. The British line running alongside.
• Museu Picasso, Barcelona. Early training and teenage work — evidence that he could draw naturalistically.
• The Met’s open access collection and the National Gallery of Art. Prints and drawings for compositional development.

Guernica is held by the Museo Reina Sofía in Madrid; check that museum’s site before visiting.

What to do next

• On the timeline: Art movements: a timeline.
• The previous stop: How to read Impressionism.
• How composition gets dismantled: Composition.