5.2: Spain in the first half of the 20th century

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The conflict between two models of nation—one monarchical and centralist as opposed to the other democratic and pluralistic— violently marked the first half of the 20th century in Spain. After the dictatorship of the “restoration”, the country experienced a brief left-wing republican era, and then faced a civil war that staged the confrontation of powers and ideologies soon after manifested in the Second World War. The harsh civil war culminated in 1939 one of the right-wing dictatorships that lasted thirty-five years, one of the longest in Europe. The painting on the right illustrates one of the experimental lines of aesthetics of this period, cubism, grouped under the name of “avant-garde” or “avant-garde movements”. As in this portrait by Juan Gris of Pablo Picasso, the sense of reality, identity and nation was fragmented and reconsidered, both in Spain and in Europe and the Americas, at a time of intense questioning of faith in science and progress, of the validity of models of social development and of the unity of the “I”, both personal and collective.

Portrait of Pablo Picasso (1912), by Juan Gris (Madrid, 1887- Ile de France, 1927). Juan Gris, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Sociopolitical life

challenge: challenge performance: performance, return coup d'etat: coup d'état union: terrible labor union: terrible inequality: inequality hit: blow resign: to resign avoid: to avoid secular: secular, nonreligious nonconformism: nonconformity, discomfort

From the end of the 19th century in Spain, working class movements presented serious challenges to traditional centralism and to a monarchy weakened by regional tensions, pressure from the bourgeoisie, loss of colonies and military power, low economic performance and political anachronism. The triumph of the Russian Revolution (1921) was also a motivator for radical left-wing sectors. In those years, serious revolts took place until, in 1923, General Miguel Primo de Rivera staged a coup d'etat. The dictatorship, with a language of protection of imperial traditions, suppressed political, journalistic and educational activity. But it was able to attract industrial progress and give an impression of labor justice. Following the example of Mussolini in Italy, a vertical union was created in the 1920s that made some concessions in salaries and benefits for workers. Migration to cities accelerated and unemployment declined. But working conditions remained terrible and many sectors continued to actively oppose authoritarianism and social inequality. The final blow to the regime was the global economic recession of 1929. In 1930, Primo de Rivera resigned, and in 1931 the pro-monarchist parties lost elections in the major cities. To avoid a civil war, King Alfonso XIII went into exile, and a democratic state was proclaimed in Spain. This “Second Republic” (there was a brief first republican period in 1873) governed until 1939 with a tense alliance between radical liberal, socialist, anarchist and Catalan and Basque nationalist political forces. The ambitious Constitution approved in 1931 proclaimed Spain as “a secular republic of workers of all classes” with equality before the law, civil marriage and divorce, separation between Church and State, voting for all citizens of both sexes over 23 years of age, and powers to redistribute property and nationalize public services. But there were deep internal divisions between left-wing groups, great nonconformism on the part of powerful sectors of the Church, the aristocracy and the army, and a rise in fascist ideologies.

a third: a third painful: painful to last side: side, faction back: to back in fact: in fact suspect: suspect syndicalists: labor union members eager to: anxious for kingdom: kingdom

In July 1936, a group of generals, from the Spanish possessions in Africa, staged a coup d'etat that could only control a third of the peninsular territory. Thus began the painful civil war that would last until 1939. The two sides facing territorial control were called the national and the republican. The former, associated with the right, generally had the support of Catholicism, landowners, part of foreign investors, and military forces from Portugal, Germany and Italy. The latter, associated with the left, defended the legal and partly anti-clerical government of the Popular Front and were supported by communist groups, by workers' movements, by regionalist sectors in Catalonia and the Basque Country, and by the revolutionary governments of the Soviet Union and Mexico. In this way, the Spanish Civil War staged the confrontation of powers and ideologies that would soon lead to the Second World War (1939-45). In fact, it was used by Hitler as a laboratory for his war capacity. Picasso's famous painting of the German air force's attack on the Basque town of Guernica, or the works of important authors such as the North American Ernest Hemingway, the British George Orwell, the Chilean Pablo Neruda, the Peruvian César Vallejo or the Cuban Nicolás Guillén, are testimony to the global dimension of the conflict. The bloodiest aspect of the civil war were the thousands of executions against those suspected of sympathizing with the enemy. Nationals persecuted trade unionists, politicians and intellectuals; republicans, fascists and members of the elite or clergy. The military superiority belonged to the nationals, who had at their service the army trained to maintain the domination of Morocco as well as Italian aviation. In April 1939, the head of the national forces, Generalissimo Francisco Franco, declared victory against the Republicans and assumed command of the government, which he would keep for more than thirty-five years. Large sectors of the elite and the people, eager for stability, saw in Franco a legitimate representative of the traditional armed forces who had “reconquered” Spain from atheistic barbarism to reunify it as the centralist and Catholic kingdom that it had been for more than four centuries.

Franco strengthened his authority with the suspension of civil rights, the elimination of political parties, the establishment of vertical unions controlled by the State, the strict censorship of information and the concentration of power. The army took over the functions of police, with strong repression against the “reds”. Thousands of Republicans were executed, imprisoned, or sentenced to forced labor on railroads, canals, and public works. Many escaped into exile, including a large number of intellectuals. Until the 1960s, the Franco dictatorship experienced, partly as a result of its own strategy and partly as a result of the reaction of other countries, a long period of ideological, political and economic isolation from the rest of Europe. Franco died in 1975, leaving power to King Juan Carlos I of Bourbon, who consolidated the process of democratization that began in the early 1970s, creating the open, stable and participatory political system that characterizes today's Spain.

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European avant-gardes

Although the sociopolitical events and aesthetic developments in Spain respond to their own circumstances, they are also closely connected to broader processes. Industrial expansion had produced profound changes in Western civilization, such as the increase in the size and influence of the working class, urban growth, the political strength of the bourgeoisie, the refinement of sciences, technical inventions, the economic-military hegemony of England and France, and the gradual emancipation of colonial territories. There was great enthusiasm for everything that science could achieve, and Western Europe thought of itself as the force of progress, freedom and justice par excellence. Cultural production was logically in dialogue with this expansion, and in particular with the awareness of innovation, self-criticism and individualism that accompanied this increasingly rapid industrial progress. Ideologues such as Karl Marx and Henri de Saint-Simon had proposed political programs and historical visions that sought to extend the benefits of industrialization to the entire population, and proposed substantial criticisms of capitalism. Important questions to reason and science also appeared in philosophy and in the new social disciplines, which disputed the benefits of capitalism and emphasized that the sources of arbitrariness, irrationality and violence were also present in Western Civilization. The aesthetics of modernism and of the '98 generation were a manifestation of this critical consciousness in Hispanic cultures—as were symbolism or impressionism in France—in search of new ways of artistically articulating the values and contradictions of modernization, and associated with urban and bohemian life, as antagonists of conventional bourgeois culture associated with imperialism, profit, positivism and faith in progress. Trust in the goodness of science suffered a severe blow in the First World War (1914-18), when many Europeans were able to see in their own land the horrors that technology allowed to produce (airplanes, gas attacks, etc.).

By the beginning of the 20th century, worker activism —in its Marxist version or in its nascent nationalist-fascist version—, as well as technological advances, had a strong impact on the value systems of the intellectual and urban world. They wanted to “be at the forefront”, to innovate, to protest, to fight for rights, to proclaim manifestos, to break with tradition, to be cosmopolitan, to shake up the bourgeois mentality. In artistic production, taking even further what the bohemians of the 19th century had begun, this impact was elaborated in very visible ways through movements that are grouped under the generic name of “the Vanguard” (avant-garde), an appropriately military and militant term that became fashionable in France to indicate this combative desire to be at the forefront of changes and participate in social transformation. Many groups of artists and poets drew up their manifestos or organized themselves into movements. Famous in Europe were Fovism (1905), Cubism (1907), Futurism (1909), Dadaism (1916), and Surrealism (1924). Each of these “-isms” defines its own aesthetic priorities, but in all of them, formal experimentation and a level of activism against the traditional or conventional predominate. Almost all of them seek a self-definition of the arts and an inquiry into the processes of representation: they seek to affect the public (reader, spectator), making them aware of how the medium (the word, painting, etc.) influences what is represented, and how social relations affect what is considered beautiful or artistic at a given moment. All are animated by the enthusiasm to propose new expressive possibilities that will accompany the rapid pace of sociocultural changes.

 

Useless Science or The Alchemist (1955), by Remedios Varo. Astarmarket, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons Possibly the avant-garde movement that had the most impact and duration was surrealism. Inspired by the discovery of the unconscious that Sigmund Freud made famous in his Interpretation of Dreams (1900), surrealist aesthetics investigates non-rational subjectivity in evocative images, often associated with the dream world. The work of Remedios Varo (Spain 1908 - Mexico, 1963) is representative of this aesthetic movement. In the 1930s, Varo was part of the Logicophobista Group, a Catalan movement that sought a synthesis between spiritualism and surrealism. With the Spanish civil war, the artist settled in Paris and then, with the Nazi occupation, she went into exile in Mexico, where she remained for the rest of her life. The painting on the left illustrates several surrealist elements: questioning scientific validity, a dreamlike environment, the incorporation of varied symbologies, and challenges to perspective and perception. These strategies highlight a central concern of the avant-garde: opening the mind to the possibilities of generating alternative experiences of reality and thus impacting personal and collective experience.

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The literary avant-gardes in Spain

Many Spanish artists and writers participated in these innovations, although they were partly limited by the dictatorship and the more rural nature of their society. The socioeconomic dynamism of the 1920s generated an intellectual flourishing that has been called the “silver age” of Spanish cultural production, with such well-known figures as Ramón del Valle-Inclán (1866-1936) in theater, Luis Buñuel (1900-83) in cinema and Manuel de Falla (1876-1946) in music, among many others. Spanish painting played a leading role in two European avant-garde movements:

Cubism. In the analytical phase (1907-12), he sought to show the object from different perspectives, to explore the limits of realism, fragmenting and recomposing the image with paintings in which a geometric vision predominated. In the synthetic phase (1913-30), the forms were simplified; more vivid colors were used and the recreated object became more abstract. The main exponent of Cubism was the Spanish Pablo Picasso (1881-1973).

Surrealism. Influenced by the discoveries of psychoanalysis, surrealists are especially interested in free association, dreams, inner life, alternative understanding of reality and mythological perception of the world (archetypes). The Spanish painters Salvador Dalí (1904-1989) and Joan Miró (1893-1983), and the director Luis Buñuel (1900-1983), are some of its most influential representatives.

The questioning of realism and the “pitfalls” of representation had an important development in Spanish theater. The search for renewal promoted transformations in four fundamental areas: 1) expansion of the thematic universe to include issues of sexuality and social justice; 2) non-commercial programs and companies, funded by the State or by community subscription; 3) modernization of the scenarios with technological innovations (such as rotating platforms and lighting games) that opened up the possibilities of creativity and were in dialogue with the challenges of cinema; 4) the staging of avant-garde works, both Spanish and from other parts of Europe, who were experimenting with concepts of space, stage design and impactful strategies. Since 1905, the actress María Guerrero had started a campaign of “poetic theater” and in the years of the Republic (1932-36), the Spanish Municipal Theater in Madrid also promoted the dissemination of experimental works.

By the 1920s and 1930s, a considerable number of playwrights such as Jacinto Grau (1877-1958), Federico García Lorca (1898-1936) and Rafael Alberti (1902-1999) were producing avant-garde theater. Alberti's The Uninhabited Man (1931), for example, included monstrous masks to recreate the story of the creation of the Bible in an urban and modern place, where God is a malevolent night watchman of a building under construction. Innovation in theater is especially associated with the playwright, poet and storyteller Ramón del Valle-Inclán. Considered a key author of the 20th century, Valle-Inclán was an innovator and left-wing intellectual, initially heavily influenced by Spanish-American modernist aesthetics and later the creator of experimental, self-aware dramas and a profound critique of Western European civilization. His theater questions modern rationalism, showing the irrational, violent and dehumanizing face of Western mentality, as in the conjunction of historical parody, political condemnation and linguistic and spatial innovation in his “Barbarian Comedies” (a trilogy produced from 1907 to 1922) or of Divine Words (1920). He is also famous for the creation of “esperpentos” (grotesque figures), a type of parodic works that distort conventional perception to present hidden realities, humanizing objects or animals and objectifying or animalizing human beings, who often present themselves as puppets, as happens in Lights of Bohemia (1920-24) and Carnival Tuesday (1930).

In poetry, a specifically Spanish avant-garde movement was Ultraism (1918), focused on representing the essence of poetics in its primary element: the creation of images, freed from useless adjectives and outdated rules. This kind of “pure poetry” experimented with various typographic arrangements, with neologisms and technological terms, and with synthetic, shocking metaphors. Spanish poets who participated in this movement are Rafael Cansinos Assens (1882-1964) and Guillermo de Torre (1900-1971). Ramón Gómez de la Serna from Madrid (1888-1963) is also a significant figure of innovation in poetry, with very brief poems that he calls “Greguerias” (1917-35), such as: “The doors get angry with the wind” (Doors get angry with the wind).

The large group of poets that had been producing transformative lyrics since the 1910s was called the “Generation of 27” in reference to the fact that in that year they celebrated their literary renewal on the occasion of the anniversary of the poet Luis de Góngora (1561-1627), one of the symbols of the Spanish impact on Western aesthetics. Among the best-known names are: León Felipe (1884-1968), Pedro Salinas (1891-1951), Jorge Guillén (1893-1984), Gerardo Diego (1896-1987), García Lorca, Vicente Aleixandre (1898-1984), Concha Méndez (1898-1986), Dámaso Alonso (1898-1990), Luis Cernuda (1902-1963), Alberti, Ernestina de Champourcín (1905-1999), Manuel Altolaguirre (1905-1959), Josefina de la Torre (1907-2002). Most of them enthusiastically participated in the democratic transformation of the Second Republic (1931-36) and connected with the aesthetic debates of that time in Europe. They all claimed a new type of image, echoing the idea that “poetry is today the higher algebra of metaphors” (quoted in Gies 555) by the Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset (1883-1955), whose ideas had a great influence on this group of poets.

During the civil war (1936-39), poetry combined avant-garde concerns with traditional forms such as romance —in its only epic and lyrical contemporaneity— to inspire struggles, denounce crimes and encourage reflection in the face of that crucial moment for the nation. A group of younger poets who elaborated the process of internalization generated by situations of imprisonment, exile and repression during the war and the subsequent military government, were called the “Generation of 36” because in that year they celebrated the fourth centennial of Garcilaso de la Vega (c. 1498-1536), whose Renaissance aesthetic was a model for them. Poets such as Miguel Hernández (1910-1942) and Luis Rosales (1910-1992), among many others, resist the experimentalism of “pure poetry” and demand a more sober connection with immediate circumstances towards a reflection on the human condition.

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A dialogue between Picasso and García Lorca

A good way to illustrate the avant-garde movement in Spain is this interesting parallelism between the poem “The Guitar”, by Federico García Lorca, and the works of guitarists painted by Pablo Picasso, such as this “Old Guitarist” (1903). The poem proposes a surreal exploration, with associations similar to those experienced in dreams. The painting is part of Picasso's so-called “Blue Period”, when he began his aesthetic exploration that would take him from impressionism (modernist) to cubism (avant-garde). Both works capture a melancholy that can be associated with the identity breakdown of Spain in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and explore an iconic musical instrument for the Iberian Peninsula, which also arrived through the Arab presence (“sand of the hot south”), a distinctive aspect of Hispanic cultures in contrast to other areas of Europe. Both represent a fragmentation of perception, a willingness to propose alternative ways of thinking about reality and experience, both personal and collective.

 

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Fuentes

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• Blanco Aguinaga, Carlos, et al. Social history of Spanish literature. Akal, 2000.
• Carr, R. Spain 1808-1936. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982.
• Davies, Catherine, ed. The Companion to Hispanic Studies. Oxford University Press, 2002.
• Davis, Paul et al. The Bedford Anthology of World Literature. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2003.
• Gagen, Derek. “Twentieth-Century Spain.” The Companion to Hispanic Studies. London: Oxford U.P., 2002.
• Garcia de Cortázar, Fernando and José Manuel González Vesga. A brief history of Spain. Editorial Alliance, 2017.
• Gies, David, ed. The Cambridge History of Spanish Literature. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge U P, 2009.
• Kattan Ibarra, Juan. Cultural perspectives of Spain. NTC Publishing, 1990.
• Mendez-Faith, Teresa. Literary Panoramas: Spain. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2008.