Characteristics and Traditions of Avant-Garde - Essay Example

An understanding of the characteristics of avant-garde art can be achieved by examining paintings such as “The Scream” by Edvard Munch; Henri Matisse’s “The Dance” and “The Dance II”; “Portrait of Ambroise Vollard,” “Three Dancers” and “Woman with Mandolin” by Pablo Picasso and “Woman in Blue” by Fernand Leger.

Expressionist artist Edvard Munch’s “The Scream” depicts an indistinct shape of a human whose face and mouth are shown as distorted in fear or anxiety. The figure seems to be unnerved by someone or something but may probably also be frightened by the bloodied sky overhead. In this painting from the Expressionist period, the artist portrayed the figure as an indistinct form to accentuate the raw emotion. The core of Expressionism was to paint and convey emotions through art therefore Munch exhibits in this painting the avant-garde way of addressing the principle of the art movement, which is to purely capture and express emotions through art without defining the form.

Henri Matisse’s first version of “The Dance” shows lightly-hued human figures dancing and floating in the plain green and blue background while “The Dance II” shows human figures in an intense shade of red dancing and floating in a more vivid blue and green. The two paintings each possess an avant-garde character, the first version discards the foreshortening technique of painting; Matisse employed colors instead to give the figures an impression of distance and movement thus creating an innovation in the use of colors for his artwork. “The Dance II” has the same innovative avant-garde character as the first version, however, the artist made another new approach for the second version by using colors in their unmodified or slightly modified value resulting in colors that are more vibrant and more defined impression of movement and spatial distance. “The Dance II” also marks the experimentation of Matisse with colors, which is another avant-garde feature, later paving the way for the formation of Fauvism.

The paintings “Portrait of Ambroise Vollard,” “Woman with Mandolin” and “Three Dancers” by Pablo Picasso have respective avant-garde attributes. “Portrait of Ambroise Vollard” and “Woman with Mandolin” both display the advancement that Picasso had achieved as a Cubist. This unusual geometric style of depicting subjects was Picasso’s major contribution to the development of Modern art thus making him one of the significant avant-garde artists during his time. On the other hand, being a truly avant-garde artist, Picasso did not stop in experimenting with his art. His later work “Three Dancers” evidently demonstrates the artist’s continuous exploration and experimentation with the limitless possibilities of art. “Three Dancers” is the result of Picasso’s avant-garde mind as he delves into expressionist distortion.

Relatively, “Woman in Blue” by Fernand Leger was the result of the artist’s experimentation with Cubism. Noticeably, Influenced by Picasso’s geometric representation of subjects, Leger in the process, added innovations to Cubism. Leger painted his subjects in tubes or cylinders instead of the standard “cubes” of Cubism that gave rise to Cubism. This innovative modification by Leger manifests the avant-garde trait of “Woman in Blue,” an artwork belonging to Leger’s art style, Cubism.