Modernism in Visual Arts and Literature: Key Figures

Modernism in Visual Arts and Literature

Modernism is a movement that significantly impacted the visual arts (painting, sculpture, decoration, and architecture) and literature. Nicaraguan writer Rubén Darío (1867-1916) marked an important milestone in 20th-century Castilian poetry. His collection of short stories and poems, titled Blue (1888), initiated his modernist path under the influence of French poetry. This new aesthetic is emphasized in his verses in Profane Prose (1896), which features exotic, elegant, and sensual expression, colorful language, and rhythmic verse. Songs of Life and Hope (1905), his masterpiece, includes poems of great brilliance and a marked formal pace. However, it is more guarded in book form and more intimate and spiritually profound in many of its verses.

Manuel Machado (1874-1947), a member of the Royal Spanish Academy, wrote poems full of Andalusian modernist encouragement and inspiration. He is the author of Soul, Whims and Cante Hondo. These poems cover gallant and sensual love, history, evocative images of places, art, and religious prejudice. His writing is characterized by its plasticity, cheerful tone, and delicacy, and his texts are deeply suggestive. Machado is perhaps overshadowed by the fame of his brother Antonio; however, his lines are also of great poetic height.

The Generation of '98

The term 'Generation of '98' refers to the year of disaster due to the loss of the last colonies, as well as the new mentality that shaped the country's situation in writers and intellectuals such as Antonio Machado. His works include Solitudes, Galleries, and other poems. The verses are intimate and melancholy, using symbols such as galleries, sleep, and water to express feelings and memories and address universal themes like time, man, love, death, and God. Campos de Castilla is one of the most representative books of the Generation of '98. It is more restrained in poetic language and expressive. Some poems focus on the description of the lands of Soria, offering a critical reflection on Spain, as in the romance The Land of Alvargonzález. Later, the Castilian landscape gives way to Andalusia, and these compositions include the memory of Eleanor, his wife, who died shortly after their marriage. New Songs is a miscellaneous work.