Futurist Texts in the Madrilenian Review Prometeo, Directed by Ramón Gómez de la Serna

Abstract

This essay analyses the first phase of the infiltration of Futurism into Spain - approximately from 1909 to 1912 - and seeks to clarify the dates, titles and all those elements that even nowadays are still confusing the critics. Starting with the personal and professional relationship between Filippo Tommaso Marinetti and Ramon Gomez de la Serna, this contribution studies the Futurist programmatic texts published in the Madrilenian review Prometeo in order to compare them with Italian Futurist manifestos and to reveal the similarities and differences between them. Like their authors, these texts share a curious and interesting unity of codes and literary expression, but they also reveal variations, due to the dissimilar cultural, social and political situations in Italy and Spain. Thus, one can demonstrate that the importation of Futurism into Spain did not merely result in imitation, but led to ‘cultural adaptations’ that transformed Italian reality into an Iberian one and mixed typical traits of the Italian avantgarde (dynamism, technophilia, etc.) with specifically Spanish characteristics of a more traditionalist kind (bullfighting, clericalism, Carlism etc.).