Rafael Cansinos Assens and His Negative Criticism of Ultraism, 1922-1929

Abstract

Rafael Cansinos Assens played a key role in the foundation and launch of the Ultraist movement, and during its first years of existence he supported it enthusiastically. However, he gradually became disillusioned and distanced himself from the group, to the point that in 1921 he wrote the satirical novel El movimiento V.P. In his later writings for newspapers, from 1922 to 1929, he frequently returned to the topic of Ultraism, and here he manifests disparate attitudes, with occasional notes of nostalgia but mainly the neutrality of an objective historian or the negativity of a hostile critic. Analysis of this corpus demonstrates that there is no chronological correlation between the attitude adopted and the date of the column, leaving the reader with the impression of deep ambivalence in Cansinos’s outlook. Furthermore, he attempts to justify his own activity within the Spanish movement by insisting on the later achievements of “Argentinian Ultraism”.