11 characteristics of ULTRAISM in painting

He ultraism is considered as the first collective avant-garde movement in Spain, being a bridge to other artistic movements such as Futurism or Dadaism. A cultural movement that arose at the beginning of the 20th century and whose objective was to overcome the dominant modernism from 1880, assuming a renovating position in all aspects, from the artistic to the cultural, the political and the literary. In this article from unPROFESOR.com we tell you what were the characteristics of ultraism in painting.

He ultraism first appeared in the ultra manifesto of literary youth. A publication that appeared in the Cervantes magazine, dated 1918, and in which the poets were Pedro Iglesias Caballero, Xabier Bóveda and Rivas Panedas sponsored by Cansinos Asens, the founder of this style. Asens spread the movement in his magazine Cervantes, associating with this style other magazines such as Ultra (Madrid, 1921-1922), Reflector (Madrid), Horizon (Madrid), Cosmópolis, Grecia (Seville-Madrid, 1918-1920), Ronsel (Vigo), Afer (A Coruña) or Perseus, official dissemination bodies.

A European avant-garde movement that has affinities with cubism by being inspired in its beginnings by cubist poems and by Calligrams of Apollinare. An artistic composition in which words lose their grammatical meaning to build geometric shapes with them. The calligrams and the Marinetti free words are two of the influences of ultraism.

The words in freedom of the Italian futurist artist Filippo Tommaso Marinetti were creations in which the words were not organized into sentences, lacking grammatical links or syntactic. an authentic futuristic typography revolution (1912) that plays with the sonority of words and supposes a union between literature, music and visual art and that arrived in Spain at the hands of Vicente Huidobro (1893-1948), founder poet of the creationism, the first avant-garde movement of Spanish poetry. In addition to cubism and futurism, ultraism was inspired by the expressionism.

The ultraist manifesto received as its title "Ultra. A manifesto of literary youth” and it appeared in the Cervantes magazine and was reproduced some time later in the Grecia magazine. The writing was signed by the artists Xavier Bóveda, Guillermo de Torre, Fernando Iglesias, Edgar Eduardo, Pedro Iglesias Caballero, Pedro Garfias, J. Rivas Panedas and J. of Aroca.

In the manifesto the principles of the ultraist movement were exposed, concluding the writing with a sentence that summarizes the entire program:

"Young people, let's break our withdrawal once and for all and affirm our will to surpass the precursors."

Experts point out that there is no unified ultraist aesthetic since the authors linked to ultraism worked from freedom and creative independence. Thus, under this term a great variety of pictorial movements that arose in Spain since 1918 were grouped:

• the vibrationism of Barradas
• the planning of Celso Lagar
• the orphism of the Delaunys
• the quantifications of Vázquez Díaz
• the expressionism of Nora Borges

Between the main characteristics of ultraism in painting stand out:

1. It has points in common with the contemporary European currents of that time,
2. It was an inspiration for a young generation of painters such as Alberto Sánchez, Francisco Bores, García Maroto, Sáenz de Tejada, Pancho Cossío, etc., all united around the Manifesto of Spanish painters of 1925.
3. The painters of the movement exhibited their works in the halls of the Retiro as Society of Iberian Artists.
4. The ultraist movement spread between 1918 and 1923 and they achieved some diffusion outside of Spain, concentrating the artists in Madrid, Oviedo and Seville, although the artists from the Basque Country and Catalonia achieved more fame.
5. Tendency to Eliminate the personal and sentimental.
6. The ultraist painting was highly influenced by cubism and futurism.
7. Seville It was the epicenter of the ultraist pictorial movement.
8. the ultraists they defended freedom of expression and artistic exploration..
9. They searched for new means to overcome the limits between the different artistic genres.
10. They left aside the typical ornamentation of modernism, as well as the nineteenth-century reasons for betting on groundbreaking visions, making allusions to technology and its novelties.
11. Furthermore, the ultraists also introduced inharmonious and daring forms.