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The Spanish Avant-Garde. By Derek Harris. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1995. 223 pages. The dust jacket of this attractive volume of essays on the Spanish avant-garde displays a Maruja Mallo painting in which a dizzying array of Spanish cultural elements-gypsies, nuns, peasants, donkeys, windmills, castles, and Christmas trees-are juxtaposed. Likewise, the essays are varied and suggestive, covering literature (poetry, theater, and fiction), painting, and film. The entire volume is presented in English (including titles of works), and is intended in part to introduce the Spanish vanguards to a non-Spanish-speaking audience. The Spanish avant-garde movement, as Derek Harris points out in his Introduction, was a mixture of homegrown initiatives and inspiration from abroad. Jaime Brihuega ("The Language of Avant-Garde Art in Spain: A Collage on the Margin") develops this theme by mapping the interaction of periphery and center in the formation of Spanish vanguard aesthetics.
Practitioners of the visual arts-especially painting and film-moved more freely between the national and international vanguard arenas, but as Harris indicates, the "activity and achievements of the Spanish literary avantgarde were muted in the European context" (2). Eugenio Carmona ("From Picasso to Dali: `Arte Nuevo' and the Spanish Masters of European AvantGarde Painting") explores...