The Borgeses’ Ultraism: Negotiating Identity and Hybridity
Leticia Pérez Alonso
This paper explores the Borgeses’ Ultraism as a case of hybridized movement that incorporated disparate avant-garde tendencies—Cubism, Futurism, Dadaism, Expressionism—in order to negotiate its own identity when transported from Spain to Argentina. Although Ultra was displaced to the margins of European experimentalism, it took shape in the main metropolitan centers of Latin America—Buenos Aires, Montevideo, Caracas, Santiago—thanks to the transatlantic exchanges channeled by Jorge Luis Borges and Guillermo de Torre. During their stay in Switzerland and Spain, the Borgeses siblings contacted continental avant-garde culture, which allowed them to adapt the new formal experimentations to the local character of their native Argentina, and contest the Western aesthetic canon. This investigation firstly focuses on the Borgeses’ ultraísta stage in the Iberian Peninsula and their assimilation of European vanguardism. On another level, the reception of Ultra in Argentina will be explored through the collaboration of Norah and Jorge Luis Borges with different magazines and manifestos that helped negotiate the international identity of the movement. As a result of this large-scale network of relations, the ultraístas formulated their prism aesthetics as an alternative to photographic mimetism. The Borgeses siblings filtered this theory into their own artistic creations, which appealed to the cross-fertilizations between art and poetry. Just as Norah Borges translated her brother’s prism theory into plastic forms, Jorge Luis Borges wrote poems on his sister’s figurative compositions. Both of them engaged in prosperous artistic partnerships that left an indelible mark in early twentieth-century Argentine art and poetry.
The fall of 1918 was meant to be the year when Ultraism came to light. At that time, the Chilean poet Vicente Huidobro visited Madrid for the first time, bringing in...