2 - Ramón as Art-Collector and Visual Artist: Slum of Oddities

Summary

The complex personality of Ramón Gómez de la Serna and the enormous work he carried out was acknowledged by his contemporaries when they equated Ramón with the productivity and versatility of an entire generation (Amorós, 227). This characterisation acknowledges that such an incredible productivity was not limited to the strictly literary, but overflowed into other spheres: artistic practices connected to the visual arts. In doing so, he was being a part of and a contributor to a new cultural climate, alongside the members of the so-called ‘Generation of 1914’, led by the philosopher José Ortega y Gasset. As Pedro Cerezo Galán has pointed out, ‘the metaphysical-religious age in which the Generation of ‘98 was still tragically located is now succeeded by a secular, culturalist age to the extreme’ (Cerezo Galán, 231). Ortega's motto of ‘let us save ourselves in things! sums up this new situation well. In a 1916 text, ‘Verdad y perspectiva’ (‘Truth and perspective’), Ortega outlined this question around a key concept: the new:

We are entering a richer, more complex, healthier, nobler, more restless age […]. That seasoned age depends on us, on our generation. We have the duty to sense the new; let us also have the courage to affirm its values. Nothing requires so much purity and energy as this mission. (Ortega y Gasset, 22)

Years later, Ortega would publish La deshumanización del arte (1925), an essential book for understanding the period in which, as José-Carlos Mainer has pointed out, ‘Ortega was not mistaken when […] he does not use the term “Vanguardia” [Avant-Garde] but prefers to say “Arte Nuevo” [New Art] or “Arte joven” [Young Art]’ (Mainer, Historia de la literatura Española, 105). The ‘instinct of escape and evasion of the real’ are for Ortega the axes of a microscopic extreme realism that for the philosopher is exemplified in the figures of Marcel Proust, Ramón Gómez de la Serna and James Joyce. For Ortega, Ramón's procedure consists of ‘making the protagonist […] what we ordinarily neglect’. Expressing – as José María Herrera points out – ‘the inner reality, the intimate force of things’ (Herrera, 10).