European Avant-Garde Movements
Introduction
The European avant-garde, encompassing experimental art forms, broke violently with previous aesthetics, proposing radically different and original art. These movements presented themselves as youthful alternatives, defiant and provocative, enacting an anti-realist and anti-sentimental aesthetic revolution. Their greatest achievement was establishing total freedom for the artist—a legacy benefiting all 20th-century art. The most important avant-garde movements, arising around World War I and flourishing in the Roaring Twenties, include Futurism, Cubism, Dadaism, Expressionism, and Surrealism. Ortega y Gasset rigorously analyzed these movements in his essay “The Dehumanization of Art.”
Key Features of Avant-Garde Movements
- A break with previous aesthetics, namely Symbolism and Modernism.
- Anti-sentimentalism: the belief that art should be independent of human emotion.
- Anti-traditionalism in the conception of the work, breaking its usual structure.
- Provocation through play and humor.
- Admiration for technology, speed, and anything directly related to the modern world.
- Creation of new realities far from the usual, using unfamiliar images with no identifiable reference, intended to shock and awe.
- Total experimentation: mixing materials, incorporating new lexicon, using different fonts simultaneously, onomatopoeia, and special verse arrangements to create visual images.
- Universalism: avant-garde movements appeared simultaneously throughout Europe.
- Rapid succession: these movements emerged and disappeared within a short span of about fifteen years, fading near the end of the 1920s as social and political circumstances led to a more human-centered art.
Influential European Avant-Garde Movements in Spanish Literature
Futurism
Originating in Italy under Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Futurism proclaimed anti-passatismo—a radical break with the past—and praised the geometric splendor of the world, mechanical civilization, and technical achievements. It rejected Romanticism, banishing human feelings from art: “Human suffering is no more interesting than the suffering of an electric light bulb.” (Marinetti). Futurist writings explored themes like automobiles, aircraft, factories, cinema, sport, and violence. In language, they eliminated adjectives, punctuation, and syntax to achieve dynamism and speed.
Cubism
Primarily a pictorial movement, Cubism advocated complete artistic independence and reorganized reality through two-dimensional planes with no apparent relation. It incorporated collage techniques, mixing different elements. Literary Cubism, exemplified by Guillaume Apollinaire’s Calligrammes, arranged verses typographically to form visual images.
Dadaism
Perhaps the most radically destructive movement, Dadaism’s name, chosen randomly by opening a dictionary with a knife, reflects its meaninglessness. Founded during World War I, Dada opposed everything—reason, art, literature, even itself and its creations. It embraced free fantasy, incoherent speech, and the destruction of artistic standards, valuing inconsistency and unconscious intuition. After 1919, settling in Paris, the movement waned, but some members paved the way for Surrealism.
Expressionism
Distinct from other movements in character and duration, Expressionism developed in German-speaking countries as a pictorial current around 1905, later extending to literature. Expressionist literature reflected inner spiritual tensions and served as a weapon against society. Its writings were pessimistic, haunting, and rebellious, focusing on the sordid aspects of humanity and urban crowds.
Surrealism
The most revolutionary and wide-ranging avant-garde movement, Surrealism drew influence from Freudian psychoanalysis and Marxist theories. Its revolutionary character lay in its desire to change human life, believing true life was hidden and could only be discovered and enjoyed through absolute freedom. This involved releasing repressed subconscious impulses and breaking free from bourgeois societal constraints. Surrealist artistic creation, exemplified by automatic writing, aimed to transcribe uncensored thoughts, capturing the dream world and its suggestive, emotional, and illogical imagery. Surrealism enriched language with new illogical metaphors and revived excitement and passion, leaving a deep imprint on 20th-century art and influencing poets of the Generation of ’27.