1. Futurism in Spain

There is not a Futurist Movement in Spain like, for example, in Portugal, not an articulated group. Futurist Manifiest was translated into spanish in 1909 by Ramón Gómez de la Serna in Prometeo magazine. It´s was misunderstood and published by an anarchist Publisher.

When Marinetti was in London trying to spread Futurism, he meets Wyndham Lewis with a proposal on the table: Lewis will be the Captain of the British Futurists. It´s very famous Lewis´answer: “You wops insist too much on the machine. You plows always on about these driving belts, you plows always exploding about internal combustion. We’ve had machines in for England to donkey’s years, they’re nothing new to us”.

Maybe Lewis was the first to find out that Futurism would be successful just in countries with a low industrial development. Many years later, Richard M. Morse wrote “Ciudades periféricas como arenas culturales” (“Peripherical cities like cultural arenas”) PDF. Morse was writing about Russia, Austria and Latin America like hegemonic centers of avant-garde productions. Maybe because in this peripherical world Modernization is lived like a struggle, or in a non comfortable way because not in the center, not in the mainstream of the Modern World.

Spain as a peripherical country was put under tension in the own process of literary modernization. Futurism is only one more of the elements that give form to the first Spanish avant-garde movement: Ultraísmo. Inside the Ultraísmo the only one articulated group was the Creacionist one (cubist, constructivist): Gerardo Diego, Juan Larrea, disciples of Vicente Huidobro.

Impact of the Futurism: a new vision over reality. Icons of modernity as poetics themes: trains, planes, machines… The most important sentence in The Futurist Manifesto is: “a roaring motor car which seems to run on machine-gun fire, is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace”. Until the 60s with the Pop Movement we don´t find a cultural normalization of the objects, habits, etc. of the modern real life.

This is the case of Pedro Salinas, with poems like “35 Candle-Powers” dedicated to a bulb or “Underwood Girls” to a typewriter keys.

Modernity represents the incorporation (freedom) of women to the labor market, first as secretaries and telephonists. So the typewriter keys are “blondes and beautiful”. Typewriter is the substitution of the piano (women are no more beautiful flowers playing piano keys at home, but workforce living in a new igualitarian world taping a new dance in the office typewriter keys). This new role was been spreading by the Hollywood (Busby Berkeley) movies:

So Futurism has an impact in the process of Modernization of Spain: literature, arts, society… And the key is the struggle between Modernity and Tradition.

So we are going to see 3 moments (5 views) in this “percorso”: 1919, 1936, 1950.