Avant-Garde Movements: Futurism, Cubism, Dadaism & Surrealism

Avant-Garde Movements

Avant-garde movements provide in their manifestos a break with all previous aesthetics in an attempt to radically transform traditional conceptions of art and literature. Fundamentally developed in the period of the twentieth century between wars, major movements include:

Futurism

Futurism proposes to break with classical values and traditions, imposing a Nietzschean vitalism that exalts risk and violence, progress, and the modern world. It breaks with traditional literary language; the lexicon can be created on a whim, and punctuation is dismantled.

Cubism

Cubism emerges as a pictorial current, expressing intellectual reality through geometric figures. It decomposes literary reality and then remakes it through a collage technique, creating a visual literature with typographical games, removing discursive, descriptive links, and punctuation.

Dadaism

Dadaists revolt against rationality, logic, and all conventional moral, social, aesthetic, and literary rules. They deny previous aesthetic arts and break the coherence, logic, and meaning of language.

Surrealism

Surrealism focuses on the liberation of the subconscious, seeking the total liberation of the spirit and society. Free and subconscious expression is achieved through creative techniques, the free flow of thought, and its associations beyond reason and aesthetic standards.

The Avant-Garde in Spain

The avant-garde in Spain is manifested through magazines and literary gatherings. A more representative figure is Ramón Gómez de la Serna, who directed Prometheus and the gathering of Café Pombo.

He wrote several essays, offering a personal vision of modernism. He describes the creation of a true lateral view through the light of the imagination, ignited with the spark of genius, which becomes another reality. (metaphor + humor) He anticipates the surreal image and relates black humor to the avant-garde. In his novels, the characterization of characters and the narration of facts give the leading role to humorous situations and vital reactions. Reality disintegrates and becomes a reality in the service of purely verbal expression.

Ultraism

Aims:

• To go beyond current literary trends.
• To eliminate what they consider extra-literary: the sentimental, the anecdotal, and the logic of common sense.
• Symbols represent the modern world: plane, car, etc.
• Techniques include the juxtaposition of images, removing links, punctuation, and useless adjectives.

Creation

Take the reasons of life and transform them to create a new reality, a poem that has a life of its own. The life of poetry is based primarily on the juxtaposition of unexpected images and metaphors. Poetic language is sufficient unto itself, even stripped of its meaning.

Surrealism's Influence

Surrealism's reworked structure and surreal images, to make sense at all, exercised a great influence on significant achievements in poetry and poets in 1927.