Towards 27. Poetry and Image in Colección by José Moreno Villa

Hacia el 27. Poesía e imagen en Colección de José Moreno Villa

Abstract

This article examines the drawings José Moreno Villa added to the copy of Colección (1924) dedicated to Federico García Lorca, first published in the 1987 facsimile edition and largely overlooked by scholarship. Through a joint reading of poems and images, it argues that these drawings constitute an early aesthetic laboratory in which the defining features of Moreno Villa’s later work already emerge: expressive purification, the stylization of reality, and the progressive intellectualization of poetic experience. The study also explores the connections between this poetics, Cubism, the influence of San Juan de la Cruz, and the context of the Spanish avant-garde, proposing an interpretation of Colección as a decisive work in the formation of Moreno Villa’s artistic aesthetics and as a precursor to his later illustrated books.