ositive connotations are of forging ahead, breaking down barriers, and being innovative and challenging convention hence avant-gardism has come to represent an expansive category. Avant-gardism has become synonymous with the most adventurous manifestations of modern art including expressionism, cubism, pop art and conceptual art. Artists whom happen to be newsworthy and slightly scandalous at present time are identified as avant-garde. For example Vincent Van Gogh (1853-90), Pablo Picasso (1881-1973), Piet Mondrian (1872-1944), Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968) Salvador Dali (1904-89) and Andy Warhol (1928-87). The term has been used in many different ways in discussing the movement of modern art and in recent art histories it's negative sides have been stressed. The majority of avant-gardists have been men thus the gender imbalance has been noted as well as it is potential elitism. In rece!
             nt years the term has been critically scrutinised in specialised literary and art historical debate. 'The term continues to be used with little sense that its meaning can be contested' .
             At the end of the 19th Century Paris was the undisputed capital of modern art in Europe. Walter Benjamin dubbed Paris as 'the capital of the 19th century'. Niche wrote ' as an artist one has no home in Europe except Paris'. Developments in Paris set the standard for innovative and ambitious artists however the term avant-garde was not used in relation to art until its application to historians to late 19th century art.
             In 1914 after World War One broke out Paris became in competition with Berlin and Moscow for the title of First City of modernity. The early 20th century of the French avant-garde was dominated mainly by the aesthetic concerns with modernity and themes of the human condition were not forgotten. 'The litmus test of the avant-garde's seriousness, so to speak lay in its effects not its causes' .
             Despite this deeper understanding of the ...