Free Unions: Avant-garde Gatherings

In homage to all those stars from a forgotten constellation who sang about daily life and urban advances during the long Silver Age.

“The modest and timid writers saw in that woman (La Chelito) a comrade in the struggles against a dark present. They would all break down the walls of boredom [...]”.

Ramón Gómez de la Serna, “The Globe and Discovery of La Chelito”, 1930

This drift retrieves the sounds, attitudes and different forms of city living that shared time and space with the bohemia of the Silver Age. Víctor Fuentes ensured that there were three native promotions of bohemians. The rehang of the Museo Reina Sofía Collection is traversed by the second, Holy Bohemia in Madrid, Paris and Barcelona, and the third, where poets from El movimiento V. P. emerged with incendiary words, mocking grins, nihilistic intentions, rebellious gestures and futurist brains. Thus, they journey through the exhibition rooms singing the cuplés that show the other side of the same reality with malice, cunning and implausible equilibrium, the worst ulterior motive and joking around: the predictable ending to the film La revoltosa (The Troublemaker, Florián Rey, 1924) contrasts with the lyrics of Guasa viva (Living Humour), a satire on marriage; those women who “lived the wrong life” — an allusion to the book by Constancio Bernaldo de Quirós from 1901 — demand their place in the pantheon of Madrid’s underworld, the coils of smoke from their cigarettes recalling a time of sensual pleasure and the right to sexual enjoyment; Paris arrives with its light and inspiration; Félix Limendoux, a holy bohemian, invents the term that gives meaning to a large part of the musical production from the time: “the sicalipsis”.

By way of cuplés and concerts that are part of the first programme, these gallant, frivolous and chic women, half epileptic, half syphilitic, gift Picasso a “frivolous queen” and Hermen Anglada Camarasa a Cocaine Tango. Exalted voluptuousness, impotent energies and intoxicated flowers lead to a renewed bohemia, where old young poets and young old poets write a manifesto, publish a magazine and try, unsuccessfully, to provoke a scandal. The voltaic eyes and telescopic legs of new female beauty announce the true “pure ultraism”, and the wonderful poetic dresses of Sonia Delaunay (Sofinka Modernuska) allow poems to be performed now and always.

In homage to the vibrationist-ultraist composer Carmen Barradas (1888–1963) and the centenary of her piano recital in the Ateneo de Madrid (1922–2022)

“This is my sister, a spiritual figure and an evasive Russian student, English feminist and Polish or Austrian Pianist”.
Rafael Barradas

This concert spotlights the music and sound poetry of outlying historical avant-garde movements, such as Vibrationism and Ultraism in Spain and Stridentism in Mexico, which reflect on sound and modernity and play a prominent role in the rearrangement of the Collection. From Vibrationism and Ultraism, the music of composer Carmen Barradas is performed, an artist who spent a long period in the shadow of her brother, the painter Rafael Barradas, and whose contribution to Spanish avant-garde art is only just being appreciated now. In 1920, the co-founder of Ultraism, Guillermo de Torre, pointed to her as a unique representative of the “musical ramification” of the movement. Consequently, the concert means to grant recognition and pay homage to the piano recital she performed in the Ateneo de Madrid in 1922. The music is accompanied by the recital of phonetic Ultraist poems released in the same era.

Ultraism also influenced other Latin American avant-garde movements, for instance Mexican Stridentism (1921–1927), the uniqueness of which was based on carrying out a political projection in social and cultural practice. This was made possible by the participation of Stridentists inside Heriberto Jara’s government in the State of Veracruz (1924–1927), rebaptising, among other initiations, the capital, Xalapa, as Stridentopolis. The concert is performed in the room sharing the same name — Room 202.03. Stridentopolis. An Urban Utopia, relating the texts from magazines and books displayed to the visual works exhibited. As an epilogue to the movement and concert, a total artwork joins a mask-megaphone sculpture by Stridentist Germán Cueto, the verbal music of Michel Seuphor and the noise sounds of Futurist Luigi Russolo, carried out inside the framework of the exhibition Cercle et Carré (1930) in Galerie 23 in Paris.