The Avant Garde
I have had to take art and art history classes in each stage of my educational journey: my general educational requirements and first degree major (mass communications), as general education in my new pursuit of studying fashion design, and a source material for that degree. In all of those years, I’ve never really seen the delineation of craftsman and artist that the Invention of the 19th-Century French Avant-Garde illuminated. In this essay, I see a clear marker when those Renaissance craftsmen doing technical work we now consider art were replaced with artists whose vision and message came before the technical achievement.