Exploring Avant-Garde Movements: A Comprehensive Analysis
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Avant-Garde Movements: These aesthetic movements, prevalent in Europe earlier this century, rejected the principles of the society in which they lived and existing literary models. The avant-gardes were based on this sense of rebellion. The following movements were key:
- Parnassianism: Originating in France, it called for formal perfection and aestheticism.
- Symbolism: It proposed capturing the essence of things, what they hide beneath their appearance.
- Impressionism: A fruitful movement in the pictorial arts, it played with the impression that reality causes in humans.
- Decadence: Associated with the decay at the end of the century, it showed a predilection for exquisite/refined environments.
Features of Avant-Garde Movements:
- Rejection of any rule, tradition, and all models.
- Search for new techniques and formal experimentation.
- Ideological framework of psychoanalysis, social upheavals, and technological advances.
- Predominantly minority art.
- Short duration of each "ism," appearing and disappearing in a short time.
- Exclusion of feeling in art.
- Expression of their principles through manifestos as a group.
Key Avant-Garde Movements
- Futurism: Based on mechanistic progress, speed, sports, scorning all things human and feelings. It sought to break syntax, suppress adjectives, stanzas, and verses, destroy punctuation, etc.
- Cubism: Based on dividing reality and then recomposing it, simultaneously performing planes and using collage. It rejected feeling and used humor.
- Expressionism: German in origin, the artist projects their problems and troubles onto reality, resulting in a distorted vision of the world.
- Dadaism: Defended the absurd in literature.
- Surrealism: The most important art movement, it glorified the irrational, fantastic, and dreams. Art must explore the unconscious and liberate human beings from their hideous repressed desires.
Avant-Garde in Spain
It began more as homework than in the rest of Europe, with less importance. Two new movements developed:
- Ultraism
- Creationism
- Creationism: Its idea was not to copy reality but to create new realities. The poem is rich in new images.
- Ultraism: Going beyond the aesthetic of the time, it was a mixture of several leading movements, taking the themes of Futurism, new images of Creationism and Cubism. Surrealism influenced its development in the Generation of '27.
- Ramón Gómez de la Serna: The most prominent Spanish avant-garde figure, and top promoter in Spain. His major contribution was through greguerías, which mixed humor and brief metaphorical sentences. He published several, but also wrote stories and novels, essays, biographies, theater, and autobiography.