THE VERY concept of New Wave art became a semiotic outlook, bringing fabulous contributions from artists (and genres) past and present around the globe, which made it the most exciting, creative avant-garde to have worldwide participants since the late 20th Century. Identifying these artistic participants, whether as individuals or groups (as fragile as ‘groups’ go) is not simply an exercise in praise, but the opening of a Pandora’s Box whose magical contents can perhaps never be depleted, but continues to generate ‘new waves’ of art firmly aware of the scope of their universal origin.
It is no wonder that one of Antonioni’s most beautiful and brilliant last films in the New Wave mode is ‘IDENTIFICATION OF A WOMAN’ (1982), in which a drifting film director protagonist develops an interest in Outer Space, or a cosmic destiny attached to his creativity at the end of the film.
Earlier, with ‘BLOWUP’ (1966), his New Wave masterpiece about a London fashion photographer obsessed with his art, and art in general, Antonioni showed where truly great art actually drifts along, while looking intensely at the structure of things. Indeed, the renowned and prestigious British actress, Vanessa Redgrave, classically trained in theatre, remarked how shocked she was at first when Antonioni did not ask her, an experienced and intelligent actress, to really ‘act’ at all by typically interpreting her role; instead, all he wanted of her was that she pose, walk a certain way, stop, turn, wear certain clothes, or take them off, while his camera framed her. Later, when she saw her scenes, she realized how correct he was to make her ‘act’ that un-theatrical way. ‘Blowup’ ended up being one of her best films to date.
Similarly, Truffaut’s only so-called Science Fiction film, ‘FAHRENHEIT 451’ (1966), adapted from the Sci-Fi novel by the late Ray Bradbury, went against the usual didacticism of many Sci-Fi films, including Bradbury’s novelistic political connotations.
Instead, Truffaut made ‘Fahrenheit 451’ as an almost silent film in homage to the silent films of the 1920s he spent time seeing in the 1960s; and, wanting to upkeep the continuity of their reliance on visual language alone, constructed ‘Fahrenheit…’ simply on colour, fashion, and comic-book graphics, while keeping the novel’s theme that printed books and reading from becoming obsolete or outlawed in some electronically dictated future.
It is the film’s visual look, and not its narrative content about futuristic book-burning, which therefore becomes its foremost content. Its visual style is its true content, in true alliance to cinematic language. Such is the exemplary role of New Wave art which liberates us from the world’s ‘progressing’ nonsense by asserting art’s form or style as a self-sufficient model of instruction.
Again, Alain Resnais’s direction of the profoundly original screenplay of 1961’s  ‘LAST YEAR AT MARIENBAD’, written by Alain Robbe-Grillet and one of the most amazing films ever made, asserted another view that apart from this film’s monochromatic blankness of certain scenes, it is not the aristocratic mode of dress of its characters, or the classical and Baroque architecture and décor of its sets that are New Wave, but the entire film’s creative voice-over monologues, soliloquy, and delightful dialogue which go around in circles and are hilariously ambiguous, establishing nothing real except language, speech, and sites, where past, present, and future become one simple delightful experience of self-sufficient art, nothing more. The essence of New Wave art is therefore its lesson of contentment with art as form, which is synonymous with its content.
The advantage specific types of visual art maintain over various other art trends that come and go is its formal abstract strength, which resists being opportunistically used up as designs for commercial entertainment, or slavish utilitarian purposes, but remains, instead, vibrant, influential, structural ideas for emerging new painters, assemblage artists, filmmakers, and musicians of emerging New Wave modes.
One of the leading historical sources of such advanced visual art was the amazing Utopian-minded Russian Avant-Garde, which flourished from 1913 to 1922, and comprised some of the greatest modern artists of the 20th Century, such as Kandinsky, Chagall, Malevich, El Lissitsky, Gabo, Rodchenko, Tatlin, Larianov, and three amazing female artists, Nathalie Goncharova, Liubov Popova, and Alexandra Exter, whose stimulating architectonic abstract paintings are also in collections of both the Museum of Modern Art, and the Guggenheim Museum in New York.
The influence of the clean, monochromatic geometrically-cut and sewn fashion of Exter and Popova we can see in the austere, yet daring off-beat avant-garde fashion designs of Giorgio Armani, who, again and again, rides the crest of classic New Wave modern fashion.
In the late 1970s to early 80s, when New Wave fashion became the rage, Popova’s fashion designs were a major influence on some of the best young women designers. The Russian avant-garde artists, though championed by a wonderful official, A.V. Lunacharsky, put in charge of Art & Education during the Russian Revolution, saw all their dreams of beautifying the lives of the Russian people curtailed by hard-line Communist Party members who frustrated Lunacharsky’s energetic support of such art, and their work largely vanished from the public eye, only to be researched, revived and written about six decades later by a Greek-Russian diplomat, George Costakis, whose monumental book on such art became a precious document for leading abstract New Wave artists who emerged in cities like Toronto, Montreal, New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago since the 1980s.
The lessons such early 20th Century avant-garde art held for later serious and engaging New Wave art lay in its respect for painting as an object that signified rather than merely copied or mimicked ready-made realities of formats.