The Vanguard seen Through the Eyes of a Cuban journalist: Alejo Carpentier’s Parisian Chronicles, 1928-1939

Abstract

This work intends to explore the peculiar style of the chronicle exercised by Alejo Carpentier in his articles on art written in France and published in the Cuban magazines Socialand Carteles between 1928 and 1939. This work particularly researches the evaluations and critical observations that the subject makes about the ideo-aesthetic nucleus of historical vanguards. Part of the hypothesis proposes that, in his chronicles, the author systematizes a conceptual vision of modern art and new values as the ultimate expression of modernity. At the same time, it is established that, in these chronicles, a clear Latin-American perspective is presented, promoting a reconfiguration of modern art, based on extracts from native tradition and European instrumentation. With this objective in mind, we firstly allude that the necessary conditions for the surge of the Latin- American genre, can be found in the works of Ramos and Rotker, proposing a characterization of vanguards through the contributions of Bürger and other authors, then to point out some of the key Carpentierian principles. Notions and categorizations like the poetic one, meanwhile autonomous and superior reality, are constantly used in that interpretative construction.