In the arts and in literature, the term avant-garde identifies an experimental genre, or work of art, and the artist who created it; which usually is aesthetically innovative, whilst initially being ideologically unacceptable to the artistic establishment of the time. The military metaphor of an advance guard identifies the artists and writers whose innovations in style, form, and subject-matter challenge the artistic and aesthetic validity of the established forms of art and the literary traditions of their time; thus, the artists who created the anti-novel and Surrealism were ahead of their times.
Avant-garde cinema: The Love of Zero (1928), a short film directed by the artist Robert Florey.
Political revolution has influenced both the topic and form in The Overthrow of the Autocracy, a Soviet avant-garde painting.
The cultural provocation of avant-garde art: Fountain (1917) by Marcel Duchamp. (Alfred Stieglitz)
In "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" (1935), Walter Benjamin addresses the artistic and cultural, social, economic, and political functions of art in a capitalist society.
Surrealism is an art and cultural movement that developed in Europe in the aftermath of World War I in which artists aimed to allow the unconscious mind to express itself, often resulting in the depiction of illogical or dreamlike scenes and ideas. Its intention was, according to leader André Breton, to "resolve the previously contradictory conditions of dream and reality into an absolute reality, a super-reality", or surreality. It produced works of painting, writing, theatre, filmmaking, photography, and other media as well.
The Treachery of Images, by René Magritte (1929), featuring the declaration "Ceci n'est pas une pipe" ("This is not a pipe")
Max Ernst, The Elephant Celebes, 1921
Cover of the first issue of La Révolution surréaliste, December 1924
Yvan Goll, Surréalisme, Manifeste du surréalisme, Volume 1, Number 1, October 1, 1924, cover by Robert Delaunay
