Two Opposing Visions of Art

José Ortega y Gasset and María Zambrano

Abstract

Art occupies a large place in the work of José Ortega y Gasset (1883–1955) and María Zambrano (1904–1991). Both philosophers devote a large part of their written reflections to it, but their ideological differences and their dissimilar conceptions of politics and the role that the intellectual should play in it lead them to think of it in opposite ways. The former admires the “new art” of the first two decades of the twentieth century for its ability to divide society between an elite capable of understanding it and a mass that abhors it, as well as for its return to what, for him, should constitute the essential principles of art — de-realisation, dehumanisation, autonomy, purity — which nineteenth-century art forgets. The latter, on the other hand, criticises the disappearance of the human and the destruction of the forms operated by avant-garde art and defends a rehumanisation that recovers the existential function that, for her, corresponds to all art: to serve as a mirror for human life to see itself. This article sets out to compare these two positions by means of a comparative analysis of La deshumanización del arte (1925), the fundamental essay for understanding Ortega's aesthetics, and “La destrucción de las formas” (1944), the essay in which Zambrano responds to the artistic questions posed by her mentor.