The artistic career of Joaquín Sorolla was developed at the same time as one of the most brilliant periods in the history of contemporary Spanish culture, the Silver Age. This name comes from being the second golden age of our letters after the one in which Cervantes, Quevedo, Góngora, Calderón de la Barca or Lope de Vega lived. A large number of writers, intellectuals and artists who lived an work between 1900 and 1936, are classified by historians into three major generations: the 98 or modernist, the 14 and the 27. The closest to Sorolla is, without any doubt, the one of 98. With the one of 14, in which Ortega y Gasset, Gregorio Marañón, Eugenio d’Ors or Ramón Pérez de Ayala belongs to, he shared very little; and with the 27 nothing, because the Valencian painter died in 1923, just the date in which Federico García Lorca, Luis Cernuda, Rafael Alberti, Jorge Guillén and Vicente Aleixandre began to stand out. From this point of view, to speak of Spanish literature in Sorolla’s time is necessarily to speak of the Generation of ’98, from whose canon he himself was excluded.
About the speaker: Francisco Fuster is a professor of Contemporary History at the University of Valencia, where he received his PhD in 2012 with a thesis on Pío Baroja. He has given tañlks and lectures in many seminars and conferences, both national and international, and published dozens of articles in scientific journals. He has been also fellow researcher at Department of Contemporary History of the Complutense University of Madrid (Spain), the Ortega y Gasset Foundation of Buenos Aires (Argentina), the École des Hautes Études in Social Sciences of Paris ( France) and the S. Daniel Abraham Center for International and Regional Studies, of the University of Tel Aviv (Israel). His reserach is focus on Spanish culture of the Silver Age and, in particular, the intellectuals and writers of the so-called “Generation of 98”, in whose study is a wellknown specialist. His latest book, published in 2018 by Cátedra publishing house, is entitled “Aire de familia: una historia de los Baroja”. His new book, an essay entitled “Baroja in Paris: Civil War and Exile (19036-1940)”, is about to be launched by the prestigious publishing house, Marcial Pons.
In Spanish with English translation.
