Avant-Garde Movements: Futurism, Cubism, Surrealism in Europe and Spain
Avant-Garde Movements in Art and Literature
Avant-garde reacted against the values, aesthetic production, and literary tradition of the bourgeoisie of the time.
General Features of Avant-Garde Movements
- Formation of trend groups, the statement of principles in manifestos, and the publication of works in literary magazines.
- Opposition to the previous cultural and artistic tradition and a desire to make a total change.
- Rejection of the imitation of reality, verisimilitude (anti-realism), and therefore, proscription from the story. The artwork was to create a new reality, which had value in itself rather than by similarity.
- Rejection of sentimentality and subjectivity in favor of vitalism and play. The playful desire, rejection of logic, and the expression of interiority through dreams and the unconscious led avant-garde poets to arbitrary, irrational associations.
- Poetic renewal and experimentation, expressed in the following features: a preference for metaphors and images that build up in a poem, no rhyme, syntactic links, or punctuation; the layout of the poem in a particular site in the search for visual and plastic effects; and the creation of plenty of neologisms.
European Avant-Garde Movements
- Futurism: Emphasized violence, speed, and the beauty of the new advances of modernity.
- Cubism: Broke the traditional notion of perspective, juxtaposed planes and points of view, and represented figures with geometric forms.
- Surrealism: Proposed a new way of conceiving the world and was a spiritual revolution. Focused on the world of the subconscious, expressed in dreams through automatic writing. Featured dreamlike and visionary images.
Avant-Garde Movements in Spain
Spanish poets traveled, especially to Paris, and came into contact with new European artists of various avant-garde movements in Barcelona and Madrid. There were also Cubist painting exhibitions.
A key figure in the avant-garde in Spain was Ramon Gomez de la Serna, who published in the journal Prometheus. Vicente Huidobro was also very important due to his great influence on the Ultraists and because he was the founder of Creationism.
Ramon Gomez de la Serna: A promoter and guide for many avant-garde poets. His greguerias are based on comparisons, metaphors, imagery, alliteration, paronomasia, parody of idioms, false etymologies, puns, and metonymy.
Key Avant-Garde Movements in Spain
Ultraism: Declared a desire for renewal and openness to all sides to express a new desire, integrating influences of Dadaism, Futurism, and Cubism. It rejected the sentimental, the logical, and the metric, and claimed the game, surprise, and humor. It is characterized by the importance of metaphor and juxtaposed images, fragmented perceptions, neologisms, the removal of punctuation, the special typographical arrangement of verses, and calligrams.
Creationism: Vicente Huidobro presented its main features: not the imitation of reality, not narrative or description. Gerardo Diego, one of the leading representatives, defined his concept of poetry in relation to music, nor did it imitate reality. It featured a juxtaposition of double or multiple images and illogical or puzzling associations.
Surrealism: The existence of Spanish Surrealism is a hotly debated issue. Unlike earlier avant-garde movements, there was no group leader, manifestos, or chief, and they rejected the technique of automatic writing.
Themes: Freedom, chance, the importance of the inner world of emotions, dreams, and instinct, the taste for the mysterious, unusual, and wonderful, and the desire to know and love.
Resources: Visionary, irrational, often violent and uncoordinated images that accumulate and overlap; a lack of textual coherence in some cases; a preference for spoken language and colloquial expressions; and the use of alliteration, puns, and repetitions. They used free verse.