Following the trail of an avant-garde Catholic aesthetic in Argentina: intersections between religion, literature and art

Abstract

This article aims to investigate the configuration of a Catholic avant-garde aesthetic that took place in the Argentine cultural field between the end of the twenties and the mid-forties. If, on the one hand, the revitalized Catholic thought needed the representatives of the avant-garde to intellectualize and modernize its movement, the young people of the new art were interested in an immutable language that appealed to order after the explosive experiences of the avant-garde. As hypothesis, we maintain that the importance that neo-Thomism or neo-scholasticism acquired as the ideological discourse of lay Catholic youth, and its postulation of an intellectual, hierarchical, and essentialist religiosity was in very good agreement with the post-rupturist stage that certain avant-gardists were going through in pursuit of of a non-representative art, with a classical interest and harmonically ordered.