Catalan Modernisme and Avant-Garde Movements (1906-1925)

Noucentisme: 1906-1923 Catalan cultural and aesthetic movement. It sought to promote the dissemination of ideas and implement a common culture. Please generally read the essays.

Commands, landscapes, ordered cities, reason, institutions.

Carles Riba (1893-1959)

Born in Barcelona, Vilanova i la Geltrú. He was a scholar, translator and poet. Brussels.

Books

• Delicious Fruits: Les joventuts (1906)
• Aquarels and Ventalls: Urban life (1914)
• Heart Kit: Nostalgia (1925)

Avant-Garde Movements (Twentieth Century)

Innovation and abstract art.

• a) Cubism: Calligram, the search for structure; the interior of objects and figures.
• b) Futurism: Fascination with technological advances; literature with very vivid imagery.
• c) Surrealism: Rejection of the control of reason; the subconscious.

Joan Salvat-Papasseit (1894-1924)

Born in Barcelona, Vilassar de Mar. He was a worker in a textile factory and an active writer. Primarily an anarchist and nationalist, he died of tuberculosis.

Works

• Calligrames (poems, 1954)
• Mon Context Irradiador, The Seagulls and the Lighthouse (1921)
• Rosa de Xile (1923)

J.V. Foix (1893-1987)

Born in Sarrià, Barcelona. Innovative and known as a "non-noucentist".

Works

• Ed Mourning Sun (1947)
• Els Irrals Ómegus (1948)

Josep Maria de Sagarra (1894-1961)

Born in Barcelona into a bourgeois family, he is considered a modernist and vitalist.

• a) Lyric poetry: Songs of All the Gold (1925)
• b) Satirical poetry
• c) Epic poetry: L'Hàbit Aris (1928)

Modernism (c. XIX-XX)

Plastic arts, music and literature.

• Renovation of artistic materials and consciousness.
• Key artists and important events:
  • Universal Exhibition of Barcelona (1888)
  • Modernist Festivals of Sitges (1892)
  • Creation of the Catalan Studies Institute (1907)
  • Tragic Week (1909)
  • Joan Maragall's death (1911)

Want to contribute to cultural and artistic modernization.

• Esteticism or decadentism: Art detached from social transformation, since art is cultivated for its own sake.
• Regenerationism: Build a modern national culture.

Joan Maragall

Born in 1860 in Barcelona into a family devoted to the textile industry. He studied law, was a regenerationist and Catalanist, and lived through the Tragic Week. He died in 1911.

Works

• L'Hàbit Aris (the aristocratic and tragic style of the era, before 1900): egocentric and proud, abducted by Adelaida, the aristocracy dissolves and "soul" (1906): the aristocracy of the spirit.
• "The End of the Aris Mon" (1911): an individual alone, destined to save the world.

Modernism is characterized by disorder, natural landscapes, inspiration, anarchism and individualism.