Meaning & use
avant-garde art
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Meanings
noununcountable
Art that is new, experimental, and ahead of its time, often challenging traditional ideas about beauty or technique.
Grammar: No plural and no article when you mean the general category: 'a museum of avant-garde art'. Use 'an avant-garde work' for a single piece.
Patterns
- avant-garde art of the 1920s
- an avant-garde art movement
- avant-garde art and design
The gallery devoted a whole floor to avant-garde art from the early twentieth century.
She studied avant-garde art in Paris, where painters were rejecting realistic styles.
Critics at first laughed at the avant-garde art, then later called it genius.
noununcountableformal
A style or movement of art that deliberately breaks with accepted conventions and is seen as advanced for its period.
Grammar: Often used with a time phrase or a place: 'the avant-garde art of postwar Japan'. Do not say 'an avant-garde art' for the movement as a whole.
Patterns
- the avant-garde art of a period
- a pioneer of avant-garde art
- avant-garde art and politics
The exhibition traced avant-garde art from cubism through to conceptual work.
His lectures explained how avant-garde art spread across Europe before the war.
Collectors began to pay serious money for avant-garde art in the 1960s.
Common combinations
- avant-garde art movement
- Dada was an avant-garde art movement that mocked reason itself.
- avant-garde art scene
- By 1913 the city had a lively avant-garde art scene.
- avant-garde art exhibition
- The avant-garde art exhibition attracted both praise and angry letters.
- a piece of avant-garde art
- The museum bought a puzzling piece of avant-garde art for its entrance hall.
- avant-garde art and literature
- The journal covered avant-garde art and literature together.
Synonyms and how they differ
- experimental art
- This stresses the testing of new methods; avant-garde art also suggests a political or cultural challenge to tradition.
- modernist art
- Modernist art is a broad historical category from roughly the 1890s to the 1960s; avant-garde art is narrower and emphasizes being ahead of its time.
- cutting-edge art
- Informal and approving, used for very new work today; avant-garde art is more formal and tied to historical movements.
Opposites
Word family
- avant-garde adjective
- Describing work or people that are experimental and ahead of their time.
- avant-gardism noun
- The quality or practice of being avant-garde.
- avant-gardist noun
- An artist or writer who works in an avant-garde style.
Commonly confused: avant-garde art or vanguard?
avant-garde art vs vanguard
Vanguard first meant the front part of an army and is now used figuratively for leaders of a movement; avant-garde comes from the same military idea but is fixed in art and culture.
Practice
Which sentence uses 'avant-garde art' correctly?
Choose one answer.
'Avant-garde art' is uncountable, so it needs no article: 'a large collection of avant-garde art'. Option 0 wrongly adds 'an', option 2 uses it as a comparative adjective, and option 3 treats the phrase as a verb.
Make it your own
Write a sentence using “avant-garde art”, then check it and compare it with the examples above.