3 - Innovation and the avant-garde, 1900–20

Summary

The first thing to grasp about artistic innovation and renewal is that it needn’t come from an avant-garde, which usually groups together artists who are just a bit more self-conscious about ‘progress’, and more theoretically aware of the nature of art (or at least of that which they don’t like). Nearly all the artists whose works still survive in the canon, however that may be institutionally or politically constituted, have made innovations, and even those who work within what is sometimes termed a ‘consensus practice’ will have been experimenting, more or less, with the boundaries of that consensus.

Indeed that is what a serious paradigm allows you to do. I am using ‘paradigm’ here in a loose sense, to mean the framework of ideas which help to define what is normal or usual in a practice. It was ‘normal’ for Georg Grosz to be taught the paradigms for realist biblical and historical narrative painting at his art school, as it was for musicians at the beginning of the century to understand and reproduce sonata form, with, as Hepokoski puts it, its ‘melodic simplicity, squarely period phrasing, frequent cadences and balanced resolutions, symmetrical recapitulations’, repetitions and so on. Such textbook paradigms have a certain summarizing cultural authority, and this tends to be a property of those works which are part of the traditional canon, whether imitated in the life class or the counterpoint class. They are what comes before innovation, the traditional practice that confronts the individual talent.