Spanish Avant-Garde Movements and Literary Figures
León Felipe and Juan Ramón Jiménez
León Felipe is a special case for his stance, invariably outside the dehumanized war poetry. When reaching its tone, it becomes more heated, more intense, violent, and prophetic. Later, in exile, his voice is sorrowful, between cursing and praying. Juan Ramón Jiménez (JRJ) is related to Novecentismo. In Madrid, he is enriched with the mentality of the Free Institution of Education, meets the various intellectual movements of the time, and enhances his friendship with Ortega y Gasset. The key moment in his approach to Novecentismo is his book, Diary of a Newly Married Poet, which systematically addresses two key concepts: “nudity” and “totality.” His poetry is partly inspired by Rubén Darío, but then his work opens personal paths that exceed Darío’s influence. JRJ’s importance is extraordinary because he is a great discoverer of new expressive possibilities.
The Pioneers of the Avant-Garde
Main Features
In the early twentieth century, increasing instability was detected in the European socio-cultural panorama, resulting in a rapid succession of many aesthetic movements, called “isms” or “vanguards.” All were characterized by their violent and iconoclastic attitudes against bourgeois culture and the art of the moment.
They broke the principles of social order and traditional politics, and therefore, the dominant aesthetic ideas. This was driven by an excessive desire for experimentation and novelty. Industrialization, technological advances, and new forms of communication created a sense of dynamism and modernity that set new models in artistic production.
Rebellious attitudes and a break with established art and literature were produced:
- Attack on bourgeois literature with decimonónicas roots and logical principles of aesthetic creation.
- Destruction of rules, conventions, and logical principles of aesthetic creation.
- Cult of artistic and literary creation, protection from the dictates of the imagination, and release of the principles. Use of graphics and spelling.
- Conception of minority art, refusing bourgeois tastes and geared only to minorities.
Avant-Garde Movements in Spain: Stages
Cutting-edge resonances and contacts with avant-garde European movements are given in Spain as in the first decade of the twentieth century. Four stages can be distinguished in the development of the Spanish Avant-Garde:
- 1908 to 1918: First manifestations of the avant-garde, starring essentially by Ramón Gómez de la Serna.
- 1918 to 1925: Starts with the arrival in Spain of the Chilean poet Vicente Huidobro, driver of Creationism and Ultraísmo.
- 1925 to 1930: Dominant influence of Surrealism that starts with a “re-humanization” effect, accompanied by the “dehumanizing” of modern society.
- 1930 to 1936: The concerns of the moment lead to a “New Romanticism.”
Various European “isms” reached Spain:
- Futurism: It did not create a school, but traces of its themes can be found from 1927, rarely in poets such as Pedro Salinas.
- Creationism: Comes from the poet Vicente Huidobro. For Huidobro, “the poet is a little god” who creates a new world from nothing. Furthermore, it breaks the logic of conventional grammar and spelling: no punctuation, syntactic structures are distorted, and the lines limit the reality that concern.
- Ultraísmo: This is an eclectic movement, anti-Modernist and anti-Novecentista. “It will only find the new host and will fit all the trends without distinction.” It rejoices in influences of “Dada” and, above all, “Futurism,” from which it takes the zest for life and the urban. It propounds a dynamic and optimistic art. Ultraísmo stands out as the precursor of the Generation of ’27, although critics have generally given little attention to Ultraísmo’s input. Among those who became the Generation of ’27 can be cited: “the purist in the art, the intellectual poem — playfulness of creation and the optimistic view of reality.”
- Surrealism: It is the most important artistic revolution of the 20th century. It supposes a radical change in the conception of the role of art and the work of the artist. It pretends to be an “integral revolution,” which points to three directions:
- Liberation of the whole man.
- Freeing the creative power of man.
- Releasing the influence of language.
Influence of Surrealism
Two books should be considered basic: About Angels by poet Rafael Alberti, and Poet in New York by Lorca, and much of the work of Vicente Aleixandre. The emergence of Surrealism deflected the trajectory of the crisis of ’27. It signified the crisis of the ideal of “purity” and “dehumanization.”