Spanish Avant-Garde Movements & Theater Before the Civil War

Spanish Avant-Garde Movements

During the first third of the twentieth century in Europe, there was a real burst of creativity, generating many aesthetic movements that followed one another, intersecting in a few years and at an accelerating rate. These are called Avant-Garde movements, and include Futurism, Cubism, Expressionism, Dadaism, and Surrealism. They are characterized by their experimental effort and willingness to break with the past. The Avant-Garde movements do not form a coherent system; they are very different, even contradictory and opposite.

In Spain, the founder of the avant-garde was Ramón Gómez de la Serna. He wrote novels, plays, and essays, but his fame is mainly due to his "greguerías": one-sentence compositions that combine metaphor, humor, and conceptual acuity, revealing a unique view of the world (e.g., "Water lets her hair down in the waterfalls," "Rain began to type in your typewriter").

Although the avant-garde reached its peak with the Generation of '27, from 1918, two avant-garde movements of Hispanic origin began to develop: Creationism and Ultraism.

• Creationism was a movement that originated in Chile. Its creator, Vicente Huidobro, intended to "create" new poems as objects independent of reality. Thus, the poem does not reflect the real world; it becomes another reality, created by the writer, who is considered a "little God." To carry out this program, the poet must look for new expressive means, breaking with techniques inherited from tradition.
• Ultraism integrated the avant-garde of those years. Its very name suggests a desire to "go beyond" to form a new aesthetic. Among its principles are the primacy of metaphor, the consideration of art as a game, the deletion of punctuation, and the taste for a particular typographical arrangement whose objective is to create "visual poems." Its main sponsor was Guillermo de la Torre, author of the work Hélices.

The abundance of manifestos, theoretical approaches, and intentions in the avant-garde movements led to a renewal of the artistic and literary climate and paved the way for the development of the great works of the Generation of '27 poets.

Theater Before the Civil War

In 1900, at the height of the "género chico" that dominated the scene, works by authors of the previous century, such as Galdós and Echegaray, were still being performed. But modernism finally stereotyped the theatrical aesthetic of a trend that would continue for some time: poetic drama, which claimed a return to the Spanish theatrical tradition and was inspired by Baroque comedies and romantic dramas. To this line belongs Eduardo Marquina with The Great Captain.

Within comic theater, the most prominent figure is Carlos Arniches, a prolific writer of comic sketches with a Madrid atmosphere, who created a peculiar "castizo" language that would later become popular in literary use.

The most important playwright, however, was Valle-Inclán, creator of an increasingly personal theater, far removed from the conventional Spanish scene of his time. Put simply, we can divide his dramatic output into two stages: the primitive stage and the stage of "esperpentos" (freaks).

• In the first stage, we can attribute the "Comedias Bárbaras" in which he presented violence, cruelty, barbarism, overflowing passions, as well as the rural world and its legends, myths, and superstitions.
• In the second stage, we can highlight Divinas Palabras, with a sordid and miserable world dominated by greed and lust.

But it is undoubtedly Luces de Bohemia (Bohemian Lights) that is the key work of his poetic production and a milestone in the history of contemporary theater. Throughout the play's 15 scenes, we follow the last hours of Max Estrella, a blind poet. Accompanied by the cynical Don Latino de Híspalis, Max travels during one night through "a nonsense, brilliant, and hungry Madrid" to die at the door of his own home.

A part of the Generation of '27, Lorca, and his plays. His most important works are three tragedies: Bodas de Sangre (Blood Wedding), Yerma, and La Casa de Bernarda Alba (The House of Bernarda Alba).