por The Latin American avant-garde authors The most popular are César Abraham Vallejo Mendoza, Vicente Huidobro, Oliverio Girondo, Oswald de Andrade, Mário de Andrade, Jorge Luis Borges, Pablo Neruda, José Ortega y Gasset, Gonzalo Arango or Manuel Maples Arce.
Vanguard is a French term originally used to describe «the main body of an advancing army or naval force» (Oxford English Dictionary Online-vanguard), but has been appropriated to indicate «new and experimental ideas and methods in art» Oxford English Dictionary Online-avant-garde).
Latin American avant-garde art has a rich and colorful history that took place between the 19th and 20th centuries, and which often continues to be ignored by Western scholarship. It is characterized by an awareness of and reaction to the region’s turbulent and sometimes violent social and political history.
Avant-garde artists consider themselves to be at the forefront of the limits of artistic practice, experimenting before the public is able to catch up.
They are not bound by the strict rules of academic realism that were so popular in the past, and therefore have the luxury of depicting subjects that are not instantly recognizable.
Latin American avant-garde artists deserve the same level of acclaim accorded to Western artists.
A key element of Latin American culture, which in turn is represented in its art, is hybridization. A mix of ethnicities come together to bring different elements, creating a rich and unique culture.
You may be interested in 10 Very Representative Avant-garde Poems.
The main authors of avant-garde in Latin America
The large number of ethnicities, cultures and experiences negates the possibility of a universal artistic style, so all Latin American artists cannot limit themselves to a particular movement.
However, Latin American avant-garde managed to bring together a large part of the artists and playwrights of the time.
1- Cesar Vallejo
Peruvian poet who in exile became an important voice for social change in Latin American literature, being an important part of the Latin American avant-garde movement.
Although he only published a triumvirate of poetic works, he is esteemed as a great poetic inventor of the 20th century.
He was always one step ahead of literary currents, each of his books being different from the others and, in its own sense, revolutionary.
2- Vicente Huidobro
He was a Chilean poet, self-proclaimed father of the fleeting avant-garde movement known as Creationism.
Huidobro was a prominent figure in the post-World War I literary avant-garde. He worked both in Europe (Paris and Madrid) and in Chile, and made considerable efforts to introduce contemporary European, especially French, innovations to his compatriots in the form of poetry and images.
3- Oliver Girondo
He was an Argentine poet. He was born in Buenos Aires into a relatively wealthy family, which allowed him to travel to Europe from a very young age, where he studied both in Paris and in England.
He is perhaps the most famous Latin American avant-garde for his participation in the magazines Proa, Prisma and Martín Fierro, which marked the beginning of ultraism, the first of the avant-garde movements to settle in Argentina.
4- Oswald de Andrade
He was a Brazilian poet and polemicist. He was born and spent most of his life in São Paulo. Andrade was one of the founders of Brazilian modernism and a member of the Group of Five, along with Mário de Andrade, Anita Malfatti, Tarsila do Amaral and Menotti del Picchia. He participated in the Semana de Arte Moderna (Modern Art Week).
Andrade is also very important for his manifesto of critical Brazilian nationalism, Cannibal Manifestopublished in 1928.
His argument is that Brazil’s history of “cannibalizing” other cultures is its greatest strength, playing at the same time on the modernists’ primitivist interest in cannibalism as an alleged tribal rite.
Cannibalism becomes a way for Brazil to assert itself against European postcolonial cultural domination.
5- Mario de Andrade
He was a Brazilian poet, novelist, musicologist, historian, art critic and photographer. One of the founders of Brazilian modernism, he virtually created modern Brazilian poetry with the publication of his Paulicéia Desvairada in 1922.
Andrade was the central figure in the São Paulo avant-garde movement for twenty years.
Trained as a musician and best known as a poet and novelist, Andrade was personally involved in virtually every discipline related to São Paulo modernism, becoming Brazil’s national scholar.
6- Jorge Luis Borges
He was an Argentine writer, essayist, poet and translator, a key figure in Latin American literature. Borges’s works have contributed to philosophical literature and the fantasy genre.
His best-known books, Ficciones (Fictions) and El Aleph (Aleph), published in the 1940s, are collections of short stories interconnected by common themes, including dreams, mazes, libraries, mirrors, fictional writers, philosophy, and religion.
7- Pablo Neruda
He was a Chilean poet, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1971. Most of his works have been translated into many other languages.
Neruda became known as a poet when he was 10 years old. Colombian novelist Gabriel García Márquez once called Neruda «the greatest poet of the 20th century in any language.»
Neruda wrote in a variety of styles, including surrealist poems, historical epics, overtly political manifestos, a prose autobiography, and passionate love poems such as those in his collection Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair (1924). ).
Neruda often wrote in green ink, which was his personal symbol for desire and hope.
8- Omar Cáceres
Considered a “cursed poet” due to his mysterious life and death in strange circumstances, Cáceres represents the least pompous Chilean avant-garde.
He was a literary critic in the press and many of his poems were published in anthologies of Chilean poetry. He also founded the magazine Vital / Ombligo together with Vicente Huidobro and Eduardo Anguita.
idol defense (1934) was his only published work, a series of poems that generated a lot of impact among the literati of the time. Curiously, it was a work on the verge of disappearing, since the author himself was in charge of collecting all the published copies and destroying them. The reason was that the publisher had made many editing errors.
9- Gonzalo Arango
He was a Colombian poet, journalist and philosopher. During a repressive phase of the government in the 1940s, he led a literary movement known as Nadaism (Nothing-ism).
He and other young Colombian thinkers of his generation in the movement were inspired by the Colombian philosopher Fernando González Ochoa.
10- Manuel Maples Arce
He was a Mexican poet, writer, art critic, lawyer and diplomat, especially known as the founder of stridentism. He is considered one of the most relevant Latin American avant-garde artists of the 20th century.
11- Juan Carlos Onetti
Onetti was a Uruguayan writer who spent most of his career in Argentina and Spain, where he died. With a rather dark and pessimistic style, his work is classified as Latin American avant-garde and existentialism.
the short life (1950), The Shipyard (1961), gather corpses (1964) or let the wind speak (1971) are some of the writings that have earned him such important distinctions as the Cervantes Prize (1980) or the National Prize for Literature of Uruguay (1985).
12- Luis Vidales
Vidales was one of the most notable authors that Colombia has had in the 20th century. Poet, critic and essayist, his most famous work is bells ring (1926), possibly the only representative of avant-garde in Colombia.
Although his style later led to other movements, the avant-garde is recognized in many of his pieces, and he is also a highly recognized writer by previously mentioned writers such as the Chilean Huidobro or the Argentine Borges.
13- Alberto Hidalgo
Alberto Hidalgo was one of the poets who soonest joined the Latin American avant-garde current. Although he is not as well known as other authors, his presence was vital to the development of this literary movement.
In fact, he participated together with Borges and Huidobro in the Index to New American Poetry (1926) and created the Oral Magazine, in which avant-garde animators met and orally developed a magazine.
His most important works include Simplism: invented poems (1925), The Toads and Other People (1927), or Lenin’s Location: Multi-Sided Poems (1926).
14- José Ortega y Gasset (Special Mention)
He was a philosopher and humanist who greatly influenced Spain’s cultural and literary renaissance in the 20th century. Although he was not Latin American, this eminence was a student of Latin American avant-garde, so his legacy deserves to be mentioned.
He was a professor at the University of Madrid and founder of various publications, including the western magazinewhich promoted the translation and commentary of key figures and trends in contemporary philosophy.
References
Merlin H. Forster, Kenneth David Jackson. (1990). Vanguardism in Latin American Literature: An Annotated Bibliographical Guide. Google Books: Greenwood Press.
González Viaña, Eduardo (2008). Vallejo in hell. Barcelona: Alfaqueque. ISBN 9788493627423.
Chad W. Post (April 14, 2014). “2014 Best Translated Book Awards: Poetry Finalists”. Three percent. Retrieved August 10, 2017.
Jauregui, Carlos, A. “Anthropophagy.” Dictionary of Latin American Cultural Studies. Edited by Robert McKee Irwin and Monica Szurmuk (eds.). Gainesville: The University Press of Florida (2012): 22-28.
Foster, David, “Some Formal Types in the Poetry of Mário de Andrade,” Luso-Brazilian Review 2,2 (1965), 75–95.
Borges, Jorge Luis, «Autobiographical Notes,» The New Yorker, September 19, 1970.
Pablo Neruda (1994). Late and posthumous poems, 1968–1974. Grove Press.