“The Dehumanization of Art”. A Manifesto of the Avant-Garde?

Abstract

In 1925, facing what is perceived as Western cultural crisis, José Ortega y Gasset questions the evolution of art forms toward a “new art” devoid of human form and dominated the game and the non-sens. The Dehumanization of Art explores the aesthetic and social consequences of this conflict between the avant-garde and bourgeois culture triumphant. But this last stage of modernity, post-Romantic and Symbolist era, is far from unique. So much so that one can ask how The Dehumanization of Art, testing done so much perplexed as questioning, was able to pass through a cutting edge show. One has the impression that complaint a danger that art has become material and inhuman, when Ortega recognizes all forms of new art who resigned to mimesis and realism to explore the secrets of a creative impulse devoid of autobiographical references but not sensitivity. The approach sometimes ambiguous Ortega explains that there never systematized his ideas on aesthetics, but can be drawn from his writings a theory of art that is not without interest to understand their intellectual journey, the national aesthetic debate and the evolution of European artistic production in general.