European Avant-Garde Movements: 1914-1945
Context
The years of World War I (1914-1918) and World War II (1939-1945) correspond to one of the most acute periods of cultural creation in Europe, which resulted in Modernist literature and art. The name avant-garde refers to a series of literary and artistic attitudes that had in common the desire to revolt against and reject the methods and criteria immediately consolidated by traditional precedent. This crisis was realized due to the impact of war, which extended to the political failure of the project championed by the bourgeoisie and liberalism. A series of literary and artistic movements, difficult to sort, were conceived. Most creators, after the initial break, were put back into traditional, classic, and conservative adventures. From rupture and revolt, a sediment of linguistic, aesthetic, and literary findings influenced literature.
The First Moderns
The start of the European avant-garde movements matches with Cubism and Futurism. The European avant-garde movements and expressions, more or less avant-garde, were measured with a certain relativism in Catalonia.
Avant-Garde and Modernism
The rejection of the bourgeois class and its life system, the valuation of risk and youth, modernity, and the longing for cosmopolitan forms are some of the matches between the two most important artistic movements of the 20th century.
Avant-Garde: The Tradition
The intellectual tradition of Noucentisme was not shaken by the attitudes, more or less avant-garde, of rebel Catalan artists. The avant-garde position that was revolutionary was minimal in Catalonia. The avant-garde movements of this first stage are Futurism and Cubism. In Catalonia, they can be analyzed from an environmental perspective and according to double production or individual action and even transition.
The Second Avant-Garde
The second Catalan avant-garde embraces the period from 1925 to the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936. The movements of Dadaism and Surrealism were confirmed as the most organized, systematic, and rigorous of all the European avant-garde. Three prominent activists of Surrealism, Salvador Dalí, Luis Buñuel, and Sebastián Gasch, agreed on initiatives that gave the most important revolution to cultural life in Catalonia. The avant-garde movements quickly evaporated once the episodic cause was consumed. They also had experiences with imatgisme and dove into the subconscious of Surrealism itself.
Futurism
Proclaims a complete break with the past and tradition, apologizes for war, struggle, and violence, exalts sport, speed, and the dynamism of technical and mechanical inventions, and expresses the cult of youth.
Cubism
A pictorial movement started in Paris proposing a three-dimensional painting with many faces, as many views as there are.
Dadaism
A movement that rejects reason, and defends spontaneity, chance, madness, etc.
Surrealism
The father of Surrealism, Sigmund Freud, is known for the interpretation of dreams. Literary dreams, the absurd, freedom, and irrationality result in literature.
André Breton
A French writer born in Tinchebray in 1896 and died in Paris in 1966. He is the author of the Surrealist movement’s manifestos.