Generation of 1914

José Ortega and Gasset.

Generation of 1914 (or Generation of 14, or Novecentismo) is a historiographic label that designates an intermediate generational group of Spanish writers between the generations of 1898 and 1927. The term was coined by Lorenzo Luzuriaga, a teacher and member of the Political Education League, in a 1947 article where he reviewed the Complete Works of José Ortega y Gasset. He chose that year because it was the year in which Ortega's first important book appeared (Meditations on Quixote) who, also in the same year, confirmed himself as an intellectual with a great public presence thanks to his conference on Old and new politics. The indisputable prestige of the philosopher means that he is also called the Ortega generation.

It would include those born around 1880 and who began their literary activity as early as the XX century, reaching their maturity in the years close to 1914. Among them are, in addition to Ortega, Gabriel Miró, Ramón Pérez de Ayala, Gustavo Pittaluga, Manuel Azaña and Gregorio Marañón; and from different aesthetic approaches, but in certain comparable points, the poet Juan Ramón Jiménez and the unclassifiable avant-garde Ramón Gómez de la Serna. They are also known as noucentistas or generation of the nine hundred, due to their coincidence with the movement that Eugenio d'Ors, from Catalonia, defined as noucentisme. Characteristic in most of them is the choice of the essay and the newspaper article as an essential vehicle of expression and communication.

The most important event of 1914, the outbreak of the First World War (1914-1918), was especially significant for this generation, despite not marking it as decisively as the equivalent countries that did intervene militarily and that are not usually designated as generation of 1914, but with other terms such as lost generation, generation du feu. The neutrality of Spain in this conflict brought social, political and economic consequences (crisis of 1917) and on the intellectual level it triggered the division between the supporters of the Central Powers (Germanophiles) and those of their enemies (Francophiles and Anglophiles). This debate came to prolong the previous controversy between Spanishizing Europe or Europeanizing Spain maintained especially by Unamuno and Ortega and which is known by the Unamuno motto Let them invent!; and the one existing between regenerationism and traditionalism, with even older roots.

Features

To a large extent they are common to those of the noucentista group (see Noucentismo#Characteristics).

• Rationalism and systematization. In the face of the previous generation, of 98, self-taught and anarchist, and influenced by irrational or vitalist philosophical currents; the members of the 14th generation are characterized by their solid intellectual formation and the systematization of their proposals.
• In front of the ruralism of the generation of 1898 (which he sought in the landscape and landscapeespecially that of Castile, the essence of Spanish), attention turns to the city and urban values (civilians and civilizers).
• Europe and concept of Spain. They are attracted to European culture and analyze the problems of Spain from this new perspective. Its proposal is to modernize the country intellectually. From this point of view, his contributions to the so-called debate on the Spanish Being go in a sense different from that of the previous generation (generation of 1898), although there was no common generational position; not even among those who formed part of the Agrupación al Servicio de la República (Marañón, Pérez de Ayala and Ortega) with those involved in the government of this (Azaña), and especially after the Spanish civil war,
• Transformative activism and quest for power. Incorporation into active and official life to take advantage of the power springs in the country's transformation. They believe that their proposal for change cannot be limited to being exposed in their writings, but must be made from power. Hence they actively participate in the political and social life of Spain.
• Intellectualism. The rejection of sentimentality and personal exaltation leads them to the rational analysis of art, even in poetry.
• Staticism and dehumanization of art (expression coined by Ortega in the title of one of his essays, 1925). That one. dehumanized art that for Ortega is modern art does not refer precisely to the early century but to the vanguards of the inter-war period; a pure art or art for art that in literature produces the so-called pure poetry. That art should pursue as a unique purpose aesthetic pleasure was not a new idea, already finding itself in the French Parisianism of the centuryXIX.
• Classicism. The classic, Greek and Latin models are imposed again and serenity becomes a dominant aesthetic factor.
• Formalism (preoccupation with form). Its aesthetic has as its main objective the well-made work. That longing leads to the maximum depuration of language, to perfection in forms and to an art for minorities.
• Elitism, consequence of the above.
• Concept of aesthetic, intellectual and social avant-garde: change must come from abovefrom a minority (Juan Ramón Jiménez made his dedication famous the minority, always), which justifies the option by a literature difficult., for minorities, elitist and even evasive (i.e. a separation between life and literature that evades the artist of reality, closing him in a ivory tower- Juan Ramón himself sought to abstain from any external influence, even sensory, closing physically to create-); but he also produced another option: to project that aesthetic change in a transmutation of the sensibility of the majority, which improves the perception and access of the masses to culture and science. The relationship with the masses thus maintained a difficult dialectics, present in Ortega's work (The rebellion of the massesHis famous It's not this, it's not this.in the face of the non-concurrence of his illustrated projects and the reality of the Second Republic. The ideas were not strictly new, and came from krausism and the Free Institution of Teaching; and they did not restrict themselves to noucentisme or to the generation of 14. In fact, its effective realization corresponded to the young people of the following generations (the 27th, with the Pedagogical Missions and La Barraca, in the context of the Second Republic; and the 1936 generation, in the tragic context of the Civil War and the simultaneous social revolution -Miguel Hernández-). The post-war social poetry reversed the Julian motto and dedicated its work to the vast majority (Blas de Otero, 1955). If modernism had lived, above all, the ideological crisis, the men of the 14th generation will live the socio-political crisis.

Payroll

Part of the generation of 1914 are the philosophers José Ortega y Gasset and Manuel García Morente; essayists such as Eugenio d'Ors, Manuel Azaña, Gregorio Marañón, Gustavo Pittaluga, Salvador de Madariaga, Américo Castro, Claudio Sánchez Albornoz, Rafael Cansinos Assens, Federico de Onís, Ricardo Gutiérrez Abascal, Ángel Sánchez Rivero, Lorenzo Luzuriaga, Corpus Barga, Fernando Vela and Pablo de Azcárate; the journalist Luis Araquistáin; novelists Gabriel Miró, Ramón Pérez de Ayala, Benjamín Jarnés, Wenceslao Fernández Flórez and Félix Urabayen; the playwrights Gregorio Martínez Sierra and Jacinto Grau; the poets Juan Ramón Jiménez and Josep Carner; the poet, as well as an essayist, Ramón de Basterra, the educator, essayist and secretary of the Board for Further Studies José Castillejo, who awarded scholarships to a whole generation of scientists to study abroad or the versatile Ramón Gómez de la Serna.

There is a notable presence of women in the generation, which included the first to have a university education, such as María Goyri (overshadowed by the figure of her husband, Ramón Menéndez Pidal), Zenobia Camprubí (with a similar fate, together with her partner Juan Ramón), the educator María de Maeztu or the paradoxically opposed feminists Clara Campoamor and Victoria Kent. Others would stand out among Ortega's disciples, especially María Zambrano; although Ortega himself, with a very significant expression, attributed to a woman from a previous generation, Matilde Padrón, the condition of being the most intelligent woman he had ever known .

The integration of many authors in one or another generation is not very evident. Some, like José Bergamín, are generationally closer to 27 but are sometimes classified within the essayists' generation; while others, like León Felipe, even being close in age to the 14 group, are sometimes classified within the generation of poets.

Plastic artists

While noucentisme, as defined by D'Ors, has an explicit manifestation in the plastic arts (the so-called Mediterraneanism); The generation of 14 does not define a group of artists with a specific identity, beyond a generic avant-garde or a certain eclecticism, manifested in the founding exhibition of the avant-garde movement in Spain: La de la Sociedad of Iberian Artists in 1925. Although by age it would be appropriate to include Pablo Ruiz Picasso (born in 1881) in this generation, his artistic career far exceeds any framing. The artistic panorama of the first two decades of the century was presided over by painters from the previous century (Ramón Casas, Anglada Camarasa, Sorolla and Zuloaga); Contemporaries of the 14th century writers were the painters Juan Gris, Daniel Vázquez Díaz and José Gutiérrez Solana (Julio Romero de Torres and Josep Maria Sert were a few years older, less avant-garde, but much more successful at the time), as well as the sculptors Josep Clarà, Julio González and Pablo Gargallo. Artists with the greatest projection will belong to the next generation, already influenced by surrealism (Dalí, Miró).