| Summary: | The avant-garde has gradually become the new criteria of excellence for twentieth century art. When analyzing the status of women in avant-garde movements, one discovers that they were mainly spouses and partners of the “great creators.” One thus needs to reconsider the articulation between the aesthetic and the sociological in order to raise the following questions: how does the avant-garde notion — which relies on the break with the past, with “fathers” and “masters,” with academic art — operate as a new way of marginalizing women at the very moment when they get a new status in society? Is such a paradox a founding element of the avant-garde considered as a research oriented towards the destruction of the image, of representation and of formal beauty? The avant-garde comes to disqualify women’s “creative feminine” in favor of a notion of creative energy that is by essence linked to virility.
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