Breaking with the 'Bando de los Niños' : the child as a guide to an aesthetic rupture in avant-garde Spain

• Main Author: Mitchell, Charlotte Elizabeth May
• Published: Queen's University Belfast 2016
• Subjects: 394.25
• Online Access: http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.709836

In this thesis, I contend that an increasing cultural and pedagogical interest in the world of the child, and an apparent curiosity for child art in the 1920s in Spain can be used as an interpretive guide to a well-known falling-out that took place in the mid-1920s between three key figures of the Spanish avant-garde: the poet and playwright Federico Garda Lorca, and two of his close friends, the scandalous artist Salvador Dali and the Surrealist filmmaker Luis Bunuel. It is my belief that this notorious falling-out among the spirited young men, who during the 1920s resided in the prestigious Residencia de Estudiantes in Madrid, was in fact more than a mere personal quarrel; it was, in my view, indicative of a budding rupture in aesthetic values. By engaging with both canonical and largely overlooked works produced during the rise of the Spanish avant-garde, throughout this thesis I demonstrate how their unique perceptions of childhood can be profitably used as a means of better understanding their take on modernity, barbarism, and ignorance at a time of constant social, political and cultural change.