Originally a French term, meaning in English vanguard or advance guard (the part of an army that goes forward ahead of the rest): it first appeared in reference to art in France in the first half of the nineteenth century, usually credited to the influential thinker Henri de Saint-Simon, one of the forerunners of socialism. He believed in the social power of the arts and saw artists, alongside scientists and industrialists, as the leaders of a new society. In 1825 he wrote:
'We artists will serve you as an avant-garde, the power of the arts is most immediate: when we want to spread new ideas we inscribe them on marble or canvas. What a magnificent destiny for the arts is that of exercising a positive power over society, a true priestly function and of marching in the van [i.e. vanguard] of all the intellectual faculties!'
Avant-garde art can be said to begin in the 1850s with the realism of Gustave Courbet, who was strongly influenced by early socialist ideas. This was followed by the successive movements of modern art, and the term avant-garde is more or less synonymous with modern. Some avant-grade movements such as cubism for example have focused mainly on innovations of form, others such as futurism, De Stijl or surrealism have had strong social programmes. The notion of the avant-garde enshrines the idea that art should be judged primarily on the quality and originality of the artists vision and ideas.
The model for this sculpture was a ballet student at the Paris Opéra, where Degas often drew and painted. Degas first made a reddish-brown wax sculpture of her in the nude. Then, aiming for a naturalistic effect, he dressed a three-quarter life-size wax sculpture of her in clothing made of real fabrics - cream-coloured silk for the bodice, tulle and gauze for the tutu, and fabric slippers. He also gave it real hair tied with a ribbon. When the wax sculpture was first exhibited, contemporaries were shocked by the unprecedented realism of the piece. But they were also moved by the work's representation of the pain and stress of ballet training endured by a barely adolescent girl.
In carrying out this reconstruction of The Large Glass, Richard Hamilton deliberately avoided making a copy that acknowledged its fifty years of ageing and deterioration. Instead he set out to make it as it was conceived, accepting that it would similarly change to some extent with the passage of time. Rather than simply working from photographs of the completed work, Hamilton used the notes and drawings of The Green Box to closely follow Duchamp’s original process of creation. By doing this, thirteen years of work were compressed into nearly as many months. As Hamilton recalled after finishing the project, ‘mental effort was exerted only in the direction of detective work, deductions from signs marking a path to be followed – the creative anguish was erased from the trail’. When Duchamp came to London for the opening of his exhibition in 1966, he agreed to sign the reconstruction and the four glass studies produced by Hamilton, inscribing on the back ‘pour copie conforme’ (‘for a faithful replica’).
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