josé ortega y gasset the dehumanization of art

An elitist to the bone, he firmly believed that humankind could be neatly divided into two sorts, the masses and the innovatives, and had nothing but scorn for the former. One reason why Ortega is attracted to this art is precisely because of its inaccessibility. He sees cubism and surrealism as inevitable products of art history, and thinks it imperative to attempt to understand the young artists. Somewhat older and rather conservative by temper, Ortega shows a surprising (to me) affinity for the new art. In the title essay of this collection, Ortega sets out to explain and defend the “new art.” He was writing at the high point of modernism, when the artists of the Generation of ’27 in Spain-a cadre that included Dalí, Buñuel, and Lorca-were embarking on new stylistic experiments. During his prolific career he made contributions to political theory, to philosophy, to literary criticism, and now I see to art criticism. The more I read of José Ortega y Gasset, the more I discover that he was one of the most complete intellectuals of the previous century. In my judgment, the characteristic feature of new art “from the sociological point of view” is that it divides the public into two categories: those that understand it, and those that don’t.

Princeton published the first English translation of the essay paired with another entitled 'Notes on the Novel.' Three essays were later added to make an expanded edition, published in 1968, under the title The Dehumanization of Art and Other Essays on Art, Culture and Literature.

His work has been compared to an iceberg because it hides the critical mass of its erudition beneath the surface, and because it is deceptive, appearing to be more spontaneous and informal than it really is. Ortega was an immensely gifted writer in the best belletristic tradition. Ortega championed what he saw as a new cultural politics with the goal of a total transformation of society. The 'dehumanization' of the title, which was meant descriptively rather than pejoratively, referred most literally to the absence of human forms in nonrepresentational art, but also to its insistent unpopularity, its indifference to the past, and its iconoclasm. Many embraced the essay as a manifesto extolling the virtues of vanguard artists and promoting their efforts to abandon the realism and the romanticism of the nineteenth century. No work of Spanish philosopher and essayist Jos Ortega y Gasset has been more frequently cited, admired, or criticized than his defense of modernism, 'The Dehumanization of Art.' In the essay, originally published in Spanish in 1925, Ortega grappled philosophically with the newness of nonrepresentational art and sought to make it more understandable to a public confused by it.

José ortega y gasset the dehumanization of art