Avant-garde

Avant-garde is a French word for the vanguard: the troops that march ahead of the rest of an army. It began to be used about art in France in the first half of the 19th century, and is usually credited to the thinker Henri de Saint-Simon, who saw artists, alongside scientists and industrialists, as leaders of a new society. For art, the story is generally said to start in the 1850s with Gustave Courbet's realism, followed by one modern movement after another, so the word has become nearly interchangeable with “modern.” Some movements, such as Cubism, concentrated on innovation in form; others, such as Futurism, De Stijl, or Surrealism, carried strong social programmes. Because it challenges established ideas, methods, and forms, avant-garde work often comes with controversy, and today the word still describes art that is radical or shows an original way of seeing. The National Museum of Korea describes its Kunsthaus Zürich exhibition, The Birth of Modern Art (모던 아트의 탄생), as tracing two centuries of European art, from before modern art properly began toward the avant-garde.

Find the work in the room that looks least like the others. What does it do differently: its material, the way it is shown, or its subject?