Dehumanization of Art and Other Essays on Art, Culture, and Literature

A classic work on radical aesthetics by one of the great philosophers of the early twentieth century No work of philosopher and essayist Jose Ortega y Gasset has been more frequently cited, admired, or criticized than his response to modernism, &quote;The Dehumanization of Art.&quote; The essay, originally published in Spanish in 1925, grappled with the newness of nonrepresentational art and sought to make it more understandable to the public. Many embraced the essay as a manifesto extolling the virtues of vanguard artists and promoting efforts to abandon the realism and the romanticism of the nineteenth century. Others took it as a denunciation of everything that was radical about the avant-garde. This Princeton Classics edition makes this essential work, along with four of Ortega's other critical essays, available in English. A new foreword by Anthony J. Cascardi considers how Ortega's philosophy remains relevant and significant in the twenty-first century.