Avant-garde
Movements that announced themselves in manifestos and set out to wreck the reigning idea of beauty, gathered from Paris and Moscow but also from Mexico and Prague.
Dictionary entry
- Constructivism 1910s–1930s / Style
Turns a message into motion with diagonals and hard contrast.
- Post-Modernism 1970s–1990s / Style
Doubts the single right answer and mixes quotation, irony and ornament as play. The answers per field stand as their own entries, with Memphis in furniture, Postmodern Architecture in building, and New Wave on the page.
- Deconstructivism 1980s– / Style
Dismantles an achieved order and makes tension and instability the new structure.
- Dada 1916–1920s / Style
Deliberately dislocates meaning and order, making authority itself the material of the joke.
- Italian Futurism 1909–1940s / Style
Converts speed, noise and shock into the size and trajectory of letters, setting the quiet page in motion.
- Fluxus early 1960s–late 1970s / Style
Values the act and the participation above the finished piece, working in scores, boxes, cheap multiples, performances and events until the border between art and daily life gives way.
- Expressionism 1905–1930s / Style
Painting what was felt rather than what was seen. Warped forms, violent brushwork and unnatural color moved the anxiety of the city and the age straight onto the surface.
- Surrealism 1924–1950s / Style
The movement that forced reality's objects into impossible meetings under the logic of dream and the unconscious. Dépaysement spread from painting into photography, film and advertising as the grammar of impossible adjacency.
- Vorticism 1914–1918 / Style
Britain's avant-garde detonated in the magazine BLAST: diagonal machine-cut lines, blunt heavy type and lists of blasts and blessings turning typography into a declaration of war.
- CoBrA 1948–1951 / Style
A postwar avant-garde that linked Copenhagen, Brussels and Amsterdam. Holding up the directness of children's drawings and folk art, it painted rough-brushed creatures in primary colors and turned distrust of refinement into an international style.
- Cubism 1907–1925 / Style
A pictorial revolution that freed the subject from a single viewpoint, reassembling facets seen from multiple angles on one flat plane. The fractured planes and muted palette of the Analytic phase, then the newspaper collage and lettering of the Synthetic phase, gave twentieth-century graphic design its founding premise: the picture is not a window onto reality but a field of construction.
- Fauvism 1904–1908 / Style
A short-lived movement that severed colour from the depiction of its subject, slamming pure hues onto the canvas as flat planes. The brushstroke itself carries the contour, and adjacent complementaries make the surface vibrate. It became the starting point for every later design that uses colour as a device of emotion.
- Rayonism 1912–1914 / Style
A Russian abstraction that declared its subject to be not objects themselves but the crossing of light rays reflected from them. Sharp diagonal bundles of lines intersect, dissolving the object into an interference pattern of light. It marked the point where Russian abstraction broke away from Cubism.
- Merz 1919–1948 / Style
A one-man movement flying as its banner a single word clipped from a bank advertisement, building compositions out of nothing but discards such as tickets, wrapping paper and torn type. Treating rubbish as structural material, and placing typographic fragments abstractly, it settled the vocabulary of collage and magazine design.
- Poetism 1923–1934 / Style
The programme of the Czech avant-garde group Devětsil, extending poetry onto the page and into life itself. Its 'picture poems' combining photomontage with type, its compositions of circles and diagonals, and its vivid two-colour printing turned poetry books, magazines and posters into one continuous field of experiment.
- Estridentismo 1921–1927 / Style
A Mexican avant-garde that shouted its praise of the post-revolutionary city, of radio waves and machines. Sharp woodcut lines, type running on the diagonal and imagery of cables and aerials erupted over a few years through magazines and handbills. The moment Latin American vanguardism found a speed of its own.
- Indigenismo 1920s–1950s / Style
A movement, centred on the Andean countries, that made the bodies, dress and land of indigenous people the subject of the nation. It took local frame and local colour as its standard in place of a European ideal, and spread through painting, printmaking, photography and architectural ornament. It shifted the question of what beauty is measured against.
- Der Blaue Reiter 1911–1914 / Style
The Munich-based Expressionist group that prioritized the spiritual resonance of color and form over natural description. Strong blue, yellow, and red, animals and riders, musical repetition, and color released from contour bridge figuration and abstraction.
- Die Brücke 1905–1913 / Style
The Dresden group that compressed the city, nude figure, nature, and nightlife into sharp contour, rough woodcut, and non-natural color. Unlike the Blue Rider's spiritual abstraction, it foregrounds the urgent material contact of bodies, streets, and collective making.
- Mail Art 1960s–present / Style
A network art practice that treats envelopes, postcards, stamps, rubber stamps, addresses, postmarks, and delivery time as compositional parts. The work is a system for reply, forwarding, addition, and arrival rather than one finished sheet.