Modern Literature and Architecture - A Consequential Point of Contact in Chile
Vicente Huidobro (1893-1948) and Juan Emar (1893-1964)
History is woven through the intertwining of assemblages of collective alliances, sometimes propelled by individual initiatives and innovative ideas that manage to unleash crucial cultural developments. In the 1920s and 1930s, the modern architectural movement in Chile conceals interesting lineages with literature and the visual arts, specifically through two fundamental literary figures of the modern movement, Vicente Huidobro and Juan Emar. They contributed with their uncontested zeal to the exposure and promulgation of their vanguardist views in Chile in all areas of culture, including architecture.
Born of a wealthy family, Vicente Huidobro (1893-1948) was a Chilean poet and a pivotal figure of the early avant-garde literary movement in Latin America and the Spanish-speaking world. In addition to being a radically innovative poet, he was also a novelist, playwright, scriptwriter, politician, and polemicist. In the late 1910s and the1920s, he spent time in Paris and Madrid, leaving a recognized legacy as a creative force and theorist of modernism in literature. In 1925, he was welcomed by modern poets such as Pablo de Rokha, Rosamel del Valle, and Pablo Neruda when returning to Chile.
In Paris, he became acquainted with numerous preeminent literary and visual arts figures such as Guillaume Apollinaire, Louis Aragon, André Breton, Blaise Cendrars, Jean Cocteau, Paul Éluard, Max Ernst, Juan Gris, Joan Miró, Amedeo Modigliani, Francis Picabia, Pablo Picasso, Pierre Reverdy, Tristan Tzara and more. In Madrid, he met with Robert and Sonya Delaunay, his long-time collaborator Rafael Cansinos-Assens, and many other important figures. His ideas left in Spain a long-lasting imprint in the contemporary literary circles.
Huidobro also created and participated in countless critical cultural magazines in Chile, Spain, and France. Among them is his contribution to the publication on modernity L'Esprit Nouveau founded in 1920 by Le Corbusier and painter Amédée Ozenfant and edited by poet Paul Dermée. The periodical was active until 1925 when 28 issues were printed. It contained essays on experimental aesthetics, painting, sculpture, architecture, literature, music, film, theater, furniture, and more: in sum, articles about the new aesthetic of modern life, written by prominent personalities of the European avant-garde. The editors defined it as "the first magazine in the world devoted to the aesthetics of our time, in all its manifestations."[1] Le Corbusier wrote essays in every issue declaring his primordial ideas about architecture and urbanism and his vision of a modern constructed environment. Six of these articles were later part of his transcendental book Vers une Architecture, published in French in 1923 and English in 1927.
Huidobro's contribution to L'Esprit Nouveau magazine consisted of four articles published in issues 1, 7, 15, and 18. In issue number 1, he writes about contemporary Spanish-language literature in general; in number 18, about current literature in Spain; and in issues number 7 and 15, he elaborated on his ideas about the modern aesthetic. Around 1916 and 1918, he had coined his new aesthetic "creationism.” Theorizing around it, Huidobro expressed, “la vérité extérieure qui existe a priori est méprisable au point de vue de l'art. Il cherche seulement la vérité intérieure, celle à laquelle le créateur donne forme et vie et qui n'existerait pas sans lui...ainsi, il y a deux vérités; la vérité de la vie et la verité de l’art” (“The external truth that exists a priori is negligible from the point of view of art. [Creationism] seeks the inner truth, the one to which the creator gives form and life and that without him would not exist... Hence, there are two truths: the truth of life and the truth of art.)”[2] In this way, he argued for the artist's ability to create something entirely new, born of the imagination instead of mimicking the natural world. During that time, Huidobro had turned into a vital figure of a modern international network that united the Avant-guards of Chile, Spain, France, and Europe. In appreciation of Huidobro's work, Le Corbusier remarked, "mon Cher Huidobro [does] nothing descriptive, nothing anecdotal. He makes a poem like nature makes a tree,”[3] a commentary representing a testament to how much Le Corbusier appreciated his writings.
A contemporary of Huidobro, Juan Emar, was the son of a powerful lawyer, politician, and diplomat who lived off and on between Chile and Paris. Emar, née Álvaro Yáñez Bianchi (1893-1964), was an avant-garde novelist to a great extent ignored during his lifetime by the literary world in Chile for the audacity and novelty of his writings. His work began resurfacing after his death during the 1970s, and currently, he is considered one of the pioneering fiction writers in Latin America. His moniker derived from the French expression “j’en ai marre” (I am fed up; phonetically in French, “Jean Emar,” which in translation into Spanish resulted in Juan Emar.) In one of his prolonged stays in the French capital between 1919 and 1923, Emar attended the Académie de la Grande Chaumière, a modern art school free of academic rules, and traveled around Europe. In Paris, he was adamant about interacting with intellectuals and artists in cafes and studios around Montparnasse. That is how he met Vicente Huidobro and his notable Parisian entourage. Vicente Huidobro and Juan Emar were united by a friendship that lasted a lifetime, their firsthand knowledge of the avant-garde scene in Paris, and their shared beliefs about the new directions culture had to take. Once returning to Chile, they independently began rattling the cultural sphere with their forward-looking ideas. Their actions and influences opened the doors to the new territories that modernity was unveiling.
Once in Santiago in 1923, Emar joined an influential newspaper called La Nación, owned by his father. There, Emar created the “Art Notes,” a periodical column he wrote between 1923 and 1925, and when he returned to France in 1925, they were followed by the “Notes from Paris” in 1926 and “La Nación in Paris” in 1927. In his writings, he explained the new modern ideas about the arts to the Chilean public, including painting, literature, music, architecture, and cinema. He advocated for a new aesthetic when the Chilean conservative culture was hegemonic and completely against innovation. His efforts bore fruit through his affiliation with young artists bent on an aesthetic more in keeping with the times. Around 1929 the overall art scene had morphed, allowing space for the avant-garde to be developed. However, he paid a high price for his revolutionary pursuits. Given his unrelenting critical stance toward the conservative Chilean artistic milieu, especially towards art criticism, Emar’s literary work was left with no diffusion nor appreciation during his lifetime.
Among the many topics Emar addressed in the “Art Notes,” there were occasional articles about modern architecture. In the first essay about the subject in 1924, he refers to Le Corbusier and his recently published book Vers une Architecture, introducing to the Chilean public the basic ideas about the new architecture that the French master of modernity was elaborating. In the article, Emar highlights the need to adopt Le Corbusier's new concepts to guide the architectural conception. These included the economy of means through a pure, rational aesthetic devoid of all gratuitous ornamentation, where beauty arises from the order and balance of different volumes and alluding to the scientific approach of the engineer.[4] In "Art Notes," "Notes from Paris," and "La Nación in Paris," he also reproduced some articles written by Le Corbusier and Amédée Ozenfant that had been initially first printed in L'Esprit Nouveau. Additionally, he also addressed on a few occasions modern urban planning, referencing the new problems of sprawling cities such as Santiago.
Despite their appreciation of the modern movement in all areas of culture, Juan Emar and Vicente Huidobro were especially absorbed by the visual arts and were behind two exhibitions deemed pioneering in the history of modern art in Chile. In 1923 Juan Emar supported a show of young Chilean avant-garde artists, among which was a group that had recently relocated to Santiago and whom he had met in Paris: the Montparnasse Group.[5] The exhibition also included a series of calligrams by Vicente Huidobro and some works by European artists such as Juan Gris, Léger, Lipchitz, Marcoussis, and Picasso. The show, called the June Salon of 1925, had been sponsored by the La Nación newspaper and Emar wrote several reviews to explain the meaning of the work to the larger public.
From early on, Vicente Huidobro, as a restless creator, was also interested in various artistic manifestations beyond the literary world. We can see it in his calligrams published as part of his book of poems Songs at Night in Chile in 1913, in his designs of "clothes poems" with Sonia Delaunay, in his collaboration with Edgar Varèse for a piece of music where he provided the texts. In addition, Huidobro was deeply interested in cinema which was a source of inspiration for some of his literary works, and participated in film collaborations. Like Juan Emar, Huidobro was motivated to influence the art scene to make space for the avant-garde. In December of 1933, Huidobro organized an important exhibition of visual artists he discovered in Santiago and whom he supported and admired: the Decembristas. The group was composed of María Valencia, Gabriela Rivadeneria, Jaime Dvor (Dvrosky) and Waldo Parraguez. Their work explored collage techniques, incorporating unusual materials, colors, and three-dimensional objects in the pictorial plane. Not surprisingly, this show took place on the second floor of the first suitably modern building made in Chile, the Oberpaur building, inaugurated in 1929.
This encounter between Huidobro and the Decembrists is relevant to Chile's visual arts and modern architecture. It is one of the fruits of Huidobro's efforts in advancing the avant-garde beyond literature. Two of the group's initial members were architecture students: Jaime Dvor (Dvrosky) and Waldo Parraguez. Parraguez became a rebellious and energetic figure in the academic and editorial architectural environment.
In 1935, Waldo Parraguez and Enrique Gebhart, two young architecture students, created and edited ARQuitectura, a magazine that became a catalyst for modern thought in the discipline. Additionally, Parraguez and Gebhart were at the genesis of the reform movement of the Faculty of Architecture of the University of Chile in 1946. They were crucial personalities in precipitating changes in the academic field, fighting for an architectural education more in tune with the new century.
ARQuitectura magazine became a crucial precedent that marked the architectural community between 1935 and 1936. This short-lived controversial publication caused a commotion for the disruptive nature of its contents, exposing in Chile the latest discussions that occurred in the centers of international debate about architectural modernity. Of the six issues published by ARQuitectura, four of them managed to rattle the foundations of the dominant Beaux-Arts architectural thought of the moment. In those times, architecture in Chile served mainly the privileged class and copied the styles exhibited mostly in Paris, devoid of connection with the regional reality.
According to Horacio Torrent, in its first four issues, the publication appealed to urban planning as an organizer of collective life. It referred to the four essential functions of urbanism developed by the CIAM: dwelling, work, recreation, and transportation. They also addressed urban problems in Santiago, proposing a functional city, low-income housing, and the need to integrate various disciplines to come up with proper solutions. Most of the published writings had been presented at the CIAM in 1929 and 1930. Therefore, given the time we are addressing, these contents arrived in Chile with a certain diligence.
In the late nineteenth century, massive migration from the countryside to the cities was taking place. The problem of homelessness grew as the decades went by, and around the mid-1930s, it had become a crisis. That is presumably why, in the program of the publication, the editors link architecture, the city, urban planning, and social programs with the transformation of living conditions in the country.
Discussions about the new notions published created a division between those for and against the editors' convictions. What is particularly significant is that the editors selected their sources in correlation to the local contextuality.[6] They disseminated up-to-date writings and theories and reproduced texts by intellectuals central to modernism. The texts published included: Walter Gropius, "Sociological Premises for the Minimum Dwelling of Urban Industrial Populations" (CIAM 1929); Walter Gropius, "Houses, Walk-Ups or High-Rise Apartment Blocks?" (CIAM 1930); Walter Gropius, "Functional Architecture" (CIAM 1930); Letter Exchanges between Moisei Ginzburg and Le Corbusier about the city and green areas; Le Corbusier, "The Division of the Land of the Cities" (CIAM 1930); Le Corbusier, "Primitive Art and the modern House (Cahiers d'Arts 1930); the partial reproduction of the text and images of Le Corbusier's the Ville Radieuse, published in 1035; Sigfried Giedion on the organization of the CIAM, and the extract of the statutes with the graphics and organization charts; Sigfried Giedion, "Le Corbusier and Contemporary Architecture"; Theo Van Doesburg "The Fundamental Spirit of Contemporary Architecture." This glossary of published articles, which constituted essential reading at that time, provides evidence of the relevance of the editorial focus that these young students had undertaken to break with the traditional molds existing in the field of architecture at the time.
From early on within modern times, the writings of Juan Emar in "Notas de Arte" and the cultural endeavors of Vicente Huidobro permeated the Chilean cultural scene. Vicente Huidobro and Juan Emar's vision of a modern world in Chile paved the way for generations of visual artists and architects, besides, of course, poets and writers. They realigned the cultural field and developed the understructure from which the avant-garde set its roots, expanding the cultural sphere to include modernism in all the creative areas and impacting the course of history for decades to come. Their interaction in the cultural field of the late 1920s and early 1930s initiated a succession of vanguardist inclinations that reached the confines of architecture, setting off a domino effect whose implications emerged through the new positions acquired by architects of the young generations.
Endnotes
[1] L’Esprit Nouveau: Revue Internationale D’Esthétique n° 1, III. http://arti.sba.uniroma3.it/esprit/viewer/web/viewer.html?&file=Li4vLi4vcGRmL0VzcHJpdE5vdXZlYXUtRlRfMDEucGRm
[2] L’Esprit Nouveau: Revue Internationale D’Esthétique n° 1, III.
[3] Fundación Vicente Huidobro, “El oxígeno invisible, Huidobro visto por otros”, Altazor Revista Electrónica de Literatura, no1, Epoca/Año 3, (ago. 2021).
[4] Juan Emar, “Notas de Arte. Ideas sueltas sobre arquitectura”, Diario La Nación, 18 de junio de 1924.
[5] Los miembros del grupo Montparnasse eran Manuel y Julio Ortiz de Zárate, Luis Vargas Rosas, Henriette Petit y José Perotti.
[6] Horacio Torrent, “Otras Direcciones de la Vanguardia: La Revista ARQuitectura en Chile 1935-1936,” en Entre Puntos Cardinales: Debates sobre una Nueva Arquitectura (1920-1950), ed. Ana María Rigotti and Silvia Pampinella (Rosario, Argentina: Prohistoria Ediciones, 2012), 243.
