The Parable of the Centaur: José León Pagano and Modernism

Abstract

In this paper we observe that Jose? Leo?n Pagano’s conception of art began to take shape in his youth, when he attended the Fine Arts Academy in the city of Milan. From this period, we highlight his contact with the work of artist Giovanni Segantini, whose mysticism and almost religious ecstasy towards nature Pagano so admired. Later, during his stay in the city of Florence, he consolidated his relationship with the Nicaraguan poet Rube?n Dari?o and reinforced his support of the symbolist aesthetics that was necessarily manifest in the artistic and literary production of this period –end of the 19th Century and beginning of the 20th. Finally, we would like to stress the trip he made to Spain in 1900. There, Pagano was fascinated by the Catalan modernist movement. This discovery of the Catalan writers was essential for the development of Pagano’s aesthetic ideas because he believed that an analogous rebirth might materialize in the artistic production in the Ri?o de la Plata. When Pagano came back to Buenos Aires in 1903, he had interpreted –and he confirmed that in situ when he interviewed, among others, the writer Santiago Rusin?ol–, the cultural conditions necessary for our arts to enter modernity victorious and flourishing. In this cultural wealth, acquired during his first two trips to Europe, Pagano found the critical tools to celebrate his first conference about the evolution and meaning of art in our country in the city of Rosario around 1917, triggering a series of writings meant to unravel the Argentine essence of our artistic expressions.