Women Artists and The Avant Garde

Avant garde is a stylistic art that owes its origin to Frenchman Saint Simonian Rodrigues. This man believed that the modern society would be heavily influenced by artists, industrialists, and scientists, hence the term avant-garde. Over the years, it grew to explore different societal themes among them socialism and modernism. This paper compares the role of European and American women artists in the growth of avant-garde.

In Europe, most of these artists addressed their social concerns through socialistic trends namely: the French Surrealism, which concentrated on the subconscious mind; Dadaism, which made a joke out of modernity; and Russian constructivism, focusing on art as a societal tool. Women here were not as educated and liberal as their American counterparts, so most of them owned salons in which they displayed their masterpieces.[1] For instance, Parisian Claude Cahun, Dorah Maar, and Germaine Dulac are among the first female surrealists through film, photography, and written work. Other notable examples who would later contribute to Dadaism and Constructivism include Hannah Hoch, Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Sonia Delaunay and Katarzyna Kobro. These are just but a few European artists who worked against all odds, no matter how tiny their contribution was, to promote avante-garde.

The United States, being capitalist, produced garde artists who embraced modernism and impressionism. Such trends showed how free this society was with artists positively dreaming about space, nature, for a better tomorrow. Abstractive works of Georgia O’Keeffe in charcoal making forms only nature knew reveal a kind of a reformation as opposed to the revolution Europe was painting.[2] If they were not participating artists, female artists let their voices heard by becoming collectors and critics. Born in Oakland, California, Gertrude Stein accompanied her brother Leo to Paris where she quickly familiarized herself with the Avant-garde scene and became an art collector. Such a tale reveals distinctive features that make it almost impossible to draw clear similarities between these two worlds. So we conclude by saying that American and European avant-garde artists share a common thought of using art as a tool that creates and shapes modern society.

Bibliography

Maerhofer, John W. Rethinking the Vanguard: Aesthetic and Political Positions in the Modernist Debate,    1917-1962. Newcastle : Cambridge Scholars Press, 2009.

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[1] John Maerhofer W. Rethinking the Vanguard: Aesthetic and Political Positions in the Modernist Debate, 1917-1962. (Newcastle : Cambridge Scholars Press, 2009.)

[2] John Maerhofer W. Rethinking the Vanguard: Aesthetic and Political Positions in the Modernist Debate, 1917-1962. (Newcastle : Cambridge Scholars Press, 2009.)

 -Lionel Savage