Meditaciones de Ramón: la práctica y las ideas estéticas de Gómez de la Serna y José Ortega y Gasset en paralelo (1910-1914)

The work of Spanish avant-garde writer Ramón Gómez de la Serna (1888–1963) has always been studied in the context of the artistic and literary European ‘-isms’ that transformed the arts after WWI. In addition, his aesthetic proposal has been related, in the Spanish context, to José Ortega y Gasset’s notion of ‘deshumanización del arte’, dehumanization of art (1925). In this article, though, I propose to look at the barely studied early literary production of Gómez de la Serna as the source of a fragmentary yet original philosophical and aesthetic thinking developed in synchrony not only with the first theoretical works of the French cubist painters, in 1910–11, but also with the phenomenological turn in the philosophy and aesthetics of Ortega himself. The aim of the article is to contribute to the analysis of Ramón’s literary practice after 1914, when he published his first important book, El Rastro, as the result of a previous period of radical philosophical exploration.