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Glite Dictionary
🎨 A creative group 💡 Very innovative
avant-garde

avant-garde

14 8.2
A group of people who try new and unusual ideas in art, music, or writing
  • noun
  • /ˌævɑ̃ˈɡɑrd/
: vanguardia
  • Rather than being members of the avant-garde themselves, Barnes and Olsson served as interpreters for the masses.
  • avant-garde artists
  • avant-garde art
  • avant-garde film

Jean Renoir grew up in an atmosphere of avant-garde, almost avant-garde frenzy.

Examples

  • Like pinup girls flirting with the camera, the two avant-garde dancers preened and posed.

    Academic text (1999)

  • The avant-garde literature group met weekly to discuss innovative writing styles and experimental narratives.

  • So avant-garde cooking goes back to this very first day.

  • One was the already strong interest of avant-garde artists in African art.

    Academic text (1999)

  • In all kinds of alternative art spaces, avant-garde performance was also increasingly being presented simply as performance.

    Academic text (2017)

  • In essence, Club Fuck! was the avant-garde of nightclubs and a nursery for art in its time.

    Academic text (2013)

  • The problem, as Kramer notes, is that the avant-garde has become a casualty of its own success.

    Academic text (1997)

  • As a historical concept, modernism refers to the era of the avant-garde in the twentieth century.

    Academic text (1995)

  • Born as a child of Romanticism, the artistic avant-garde developed in a heady atmosphere of newfound freedom.

    Academic text (1997)

  • Emmanuel Radnitsky was a Jewish tailor son from Brooklyn, NY, who reinvented himself as the avant-garde artist Man Ray.

Synonyms

vanguard
vsavant-garde
18 7.2

People at the front leading a movement or new idea

focuses on creating new experimental ideas in arts often ahead of time
new wave
vsavant-garde
18 4.9

A group of artists or writers who introduce new ideas and styles

develops experimental ideas and methods seen as ahead of their time

Antonyms

conservative
∞ 4.6

Does not want big changes and likes traditional values

mainstream
75 3.4

The ideas and activities most people accept as normal

How Innovative

radical
79 6.3
avant-garde
14 8.2

Surface Forms

avant-garde singular
avant-gardes plural

Etymology

Avant-garde comes from French words avant 'before' and garde 'guard', meaning the soldiers who go in front. A helpful image is to think of the avant-garde as the 'front' group of artists who lead and try new ideas, like the English word vanguard.