Avant-garde

PurplePrice Mag · October 26, 2026 · 3 min read

The word avant-garde refers to the artistic movements that, in the first decades of the twentieth century, broke radically with tradition. The term comes from military language: the avant-garde, or vanguard, is the unit that advances ahead of the army to scout the terrain. By the nineteenth century it had passed into politics and art, to describe those who move towards the future ahead of everyone else. The avant-gardes did not only change painting and sculpture: they brought a new way of looking at objects, the city and everyday life, from which much of modern design derives.

An explosion of movements

Within a few years, between 1905 and 1920, groups and manifestos sprang up one after another all over Europe. In Dresden in 1905 the group Die Brücke launched German Expressionism, which distorted colours and figures to express emotion. In Paris Picasso and Braque invented Cubism, which broke objects down into geometric planes and showed them from several viewpoints at once. In 1909 Filippo Tommaso Marinetti published the manifesto of Futurism, celebrating speed, the machine and the modern city. In Zurich in 1916, in the middle of the war, Hugo Ball and Emmy Hennings's Cabaret Voltaire became the cradle of Dada, which mocked every rule of art with nonsense and provocation.

Towards abstraction

The decisive step for design was abstraction: an art made only of shapes, lines and colours, no longer representing anything. In Russia Kazimir Malevich exhibited Black Square in 1915, the manifesto of Suprematism. Right after the 1917 revolution, the Constructivism of Tatlin, Rodchenko and El Lissitzky brought these forms into real life, with posters, furniture, textiles and architecture in the service of the new society, taught in the workshops of Vkhutemas and spread by the propaganda art of Agitprop. In the Netherlands in 1917 De Stijl was born, with Mondrian, Theo van Doesburg and Gerrit Rietveld, reducing everything to straight lines and primary colours, culminating in the famous Red and Blue Chair.

The avant-gardes and objects

Some movements grew up around objects themselves. In Prague, between 1912 and 1914, architects such as Pavel Janák and Josef Gočár designed Cubist houses, furniture and ceramics, with surfaces faceted like crystals: a case unique in the world. The Futurists designed furniture, clothes, toys and even kitchen utensils, convinced that art should "reconstruct the universe" and invade everyday life. The Russian Constructivists and the Dutch De Stijl artists designed chairs, lamps and typefaces as if they were abstract paintings to be lived in.

From the avant-garde to modern design

In 1919 the ideas of the avant-gardes came together in the Staatliches Bauhaus in Weimar, where artists such as Kandinsky, Klee and Moholy-Nagy taught young designers to create objects for industrial production. From there the Modern Movement was born. In the 1920s and 1930s Surrealism would instead bring dreams and the unconscious into design. The avant-gardes taught design that an object can be a work of art, and that art can change the way we live.