The Avant-Garde movement has had a profound impact on art history, influencing subsequent generations of artists and shaping the course of modern art. It paved the way for new artistic movements and styles, such as abstract expressionism, pop art, and minimalism.

In an art historical context, the term avant-garde is most commonly applied to the modernist European art of the early 20th century. It was during this time that artists made a clean break with the past, creating an incredible variety of different art styles. These included Cubism, Fauvism, Expressionism, Rayonism, Surrealism, Dadaism, and more.

To summarize, Avant-Garde art is any art that proposes modern or innovative ideas through new forms or themes. Historically, the Avant-Garde challenged the boundaries of the status quo according to the arts and culture spheres and is often considered to be one of the most direct art movements that aided in the birth of Modernism.

However, the idea of ‘avant-garde’ is often associated with the beginning of modern art and considered by many to be exclusively related to modernism, therefore indicating all those art movements that, between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, went against the traditional way of looking at art and initiated a cultural revolution following a programmatic and ground-breaking set of aims.