All Early Twentieth-Century Avant-Garde Movements

Movements of the first decades of the twentieth century built on a deliberate break with prior convention: imagism's precise, unornamented image, futurism's embrace of speed and technology, dadaism's rejection of reason and tradition after the first World War, surrealism's exploration of the unconscious, and German literary expressionism's distorted, emotionally heightened style. Belongs here: a movement whose active period runs from roughly 1910 to the 1930s and whose defining gesture is a break with prior form. Does not belong here: modernism itself, the broader movement these avant-gardes feed into, tracked under its own group below.