Avant Garde Movements

Avant Garde began in France in 1850, and it means "advanced guard". Avant Garde work pushes the known boundaries of acceptable art sometimes with revolutionary, cultural, or political implications. The first avant garde artist was Courbet, he was the first to describe himself as part of the avant garde movement. The artist of this movement desired not only to challenge traditional art but also society as a whole. These artist aimed at tearing down the status quo.

Optical Art (or OP Art) became the most famous in America in the 1960s, it is comprised of illusions, and often appears to the human eye to be moving due to its precise, mathematically-based composition. Op Art takes a great deal of math, planning and technical skill.
Yaacov Agam, Frank Stella, and Kenneth Noland where some of the artist who influenced the Op Art movement.















The term Pop-Art was invented in Britain by Lawrence Alloway in 1955, to describe a new form of popular art. Pop Art emerged in New York and London during the mid-1950s and became the dominate avant-garde style until the late 1960s. It was one of the biggest art movements of the twentieth century and is characterized by themes and techniques drawn from popular mass culture, such as television, movies, advertising and comic books.

Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, and Roy Lichtenstien are some of the famous pop art artist of that time.